The Return of Eva Perón, With the Killings in Trinidad

by V. S. Naipaul

  It is a curiously colonial performance. His Argentine past is part of his distinction; he offers it as such; and he is after all a patriot. He honors the flag, an example of which flies from the balcony of his office in the National Library (he is the director). And he is moved by the country’s anthem. But at the same time he seems anxious to proclaim his separateness from Argentina. The performance might seem aimed at Bor-ges’s new Anglo-American campus audience, whom in so many ways it flatters. But the attitudes are old.

  In Buenos Aires it is still remembered that in 1955, just a few days after Perón was overthrown and that nine-year dictatorship was over, Borges gave a lecture on—of all subjects—Coleridge to the ladies of the Association for English Culture. Some of Coleridge’s lines, Borges said, were among the best in English poetry, “es decir la poesía”: “that is to say poetry.” And those four words, at a time of national rejoicing, were like a gratuitous assault on the Argentine soul.

  Norman di Giovanni tells a balancing story.

  In December 1969, we were at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. The man doing the introduction was an Argentine from Tucumán and he took advantage of the occasion to point out to the audience that the military repression had closed the university in Tucumán. Borges was totally oblivious of what the man had said until we were on our way to the airport. Then someone began to talk about it and Borges was suddenly very angry. “Did you hear what that man said? That they’d closed the university in Tucumán.” I questioned him about his rage, and he said, “That man was attacking my country. They can’t talk that way about my country.” I said, “Borges, what do you mean, ‘that man’? That man is an Argentine. And he comes from Tucumán. And what he says is true. The military have closed the university.”

  Borges is of medium height. His nearly sightless eyes and his stick add to the distinction of his appearance. He dresses carefully. He says he is a middle-class writer; and a middle-class writer shouldn’t be either a dandy or too affectedly casual. He is courtly: he thinks, with Sir Thomas Browne, that a gentleman is someone who tries to give the least amount of trouble. “But you should look that up in Religio Medici.” It might seem then that in his accessibility, his willingness to give lengthy interviews which repeat the other interviews he has given, Borges combines the middle-class ideal of self-effacement and the gentleman’s manners with the writer’s privacy, the writer’s need to save him-self for his work.

  There are hints of this privacy (in accessibility) in the way he likes to be addressed. Perhaps no more than half a dozen people have the privilege of calling him by his first name, Jorge, which they turn into “Georgie.” To everyone else he likes to be just “Borges,” without the Señor, which he considers Spanish and pompous. “Borges” is, of course, distancing.

  And even the fifty-page “Autobiographical Essay” doesn’t violate his privacy. It is like another interview. It says little that is new. His birth in Buenos Aires in 1899, the son of a lawyer; his military ancestors; the family’s seven-year sojourn in Europe from 1914 to 1921 (when the peso was valuable, and Europe was cheaper than Buenos Aires): all this is told again in outline, as in an interview. And the essay quickly becomes no more than a writer’s account of his writing life, of the books he read and the books he wrote, the literary groups he joined and^ the magazines he founded. The life is missing. There is the barest sketch of the crisis he must have gone through in his late thirties and early forties, when—the family money lost—^e was doing all kinds of journalism; when his father died, and he himself fell seriously ill and “feared for [his] mental integrity”; when he worked as an assistant in a municipal library, well-known as a writer outside the library, unknown inside it. “I remember a fellow employee’s once noting in an encyclopaedia the name of a certain Jorge Luis Borges—a fact that set him wondering at the coincidence of our identical names and birth dates.”

  “Nine years of solid unhappiness,” he says; but he gives the period only four pages. The privacy of Borges begins to appear a forbidding thing.

  Un dios me ha concedido

  Lo que es dado saber a los mortales.

  For todo el continente anda mi nombre;

  No he vivido. Quisiera ser otro hombre.

  Mark Strand translates:

  I have been allowed

  That which is given mortal man to know.

  The whole continent knows my name.

  I have not lived. I want to be someone else.

  This is Borges on Emerson; but it might be Borges on Borges. Life, in the “Autobiographical Essay,” is indeed missing. So that all that is important in the man has to be found in the work, which with Borges is essentially the poetry. And all the themes he has explored over a long life are contained, as he himself says, in his very first book of poems, published in 1923, a book printed in five days, three hundred copies, given away free.

  Here is the military ancestor dying in battle. Here, already, at the age of twenty-four, the contemplation of glory turns into a meditation on death and time and the “glass jewels” of the individual life:

  . . . cuando tú mismo eves la continación realizada

  de quienes no alcanzaron tu tiempo

  y otros serán (y son) tu inmortalidad en la tierra

  In W. S. Merwin’s translation:

  . . . when you yourself are the embodied continuance

  of those who did not live into your time

  and others will be (and are) your immortality on earth.

  Somewhere around that time life stopped; and all that has followed has been literature: a concern with words, an unending attempt to stay with, and not to betray, the emotions of that so particular past.

  I am myself and I am him today,

  The man who died, the man whose blood and name

  Are mine.

  This is Norman di Giovanni’s translation of a poem written forty-three years after that first book:

  Soy, pero soy también el otro, el muerto,

  El otro de mi sangre y de mi nombre.

  Since the writing of that first book nothing, except perhaps his discovery of Old English poetry, has provided Borges with matter for such intense meditation. Not even the bitter Perón years, when he was “ ‘promoted’ out of the library to the inspectorship of poultry and rabbits in the public markets,” and resigned. Nor his brief, unhappy marriage late in life, once the subject of magazine articles, and still a subject of gossip in Buenos Aires. Nor his continuing companionship with his mother, now aged ninety-six.

  “In 1910, the centenary of the Argentine Republic, we thought of Argentina as an honourable country and we had no doubt that the nations would come flocking in. Now the country is in a bad way. We are being threatened by the return of the horrible man.” This is how Borges speaks of Perón: he prefers not to use the name.

  I get any number of personal threats. Even my mother. They rang her up in the small hours—two or three in the morning—and somebody said to her in a very gruff kind of voice, the voice you associate with a Peronista, “I’ve got to kill you and your son.” My mother said, “Why?” “Because I am a Peronista.” My mother said, “As far as my son is concerned, he is over seventy and practically blind. But in my case I should advise you to waste no time because I am ninety-five and may die on your hands before you can kill me.” Next morning I told my mother I thought I had heard the telephone ringing in the night. “Did I dream that?” She said, “Just some fool.” She’s not only witty. But courageous. . . . I don’t see what I can do about it—the political situation. But I think I should do what I can, having military men in my family.

  Borges’ first book of poems was called Fervour of Buenos Aires. In it, he said in his preface, he was attempting to celebrate the new and expanding city in a special way. “Akin to the Romans, who would murmur the words ‘numen inest’ on passing through a wood, ‘Here dwells a god,’ my verses declare, stating the wonder of the streets. . . . Everyday places become, little by little
, holy.”

  But Borges has not hallowed Buenos Aires. The city the visitor sees is not the city of the poems, the way Simla (as new and artificial as Buenos Aires) remains, after all these years, the city of Kipling’s stories. Kipling looked hard at a real town. Borges’ Buenos Aires is private, a city of the imagination. And now the city itself is in decay. In Borges’s own South-side some old buildings survive, with their mighty front doors and their receding patios, each patio differently tiled. But more often the inner patios have been blocked up; and many of the old buildings have been pulled down. Elegance, if in this plebian immigrant city elegance really ever existed outside the vision of expatriate architects, has vanished; there is now only disorder.

  The white and pale blue Argentine flag that hangs out into Mexico Street from the balcony of Borges’s office in the National Library is dingy with dirt and fumes. And consider this building, perhaps the finest in the area, which was used as a hospital and a jail in the time of the gangster-dictator Rosas more than 120 years ago. There is beauty still in the spiked wall, the tall iron gates, the huge wooden doors. But inside, the walls peel; the windows in the central patio are broken; farther in, courtyard opening into courtyard, washing hangs in a corridor, steps are broken, and a metal spiral staircase is blocked with junk. This is a government office, a department of the Ministry of Labor: it speaks of an administration that has seized up, a city that is dying, a country that hasn’t really worked.

  Walls everywhere are scrawled with violent slogans; guerrillas operate in the streets; the peso falls; the city is full of hate. The bloody-minded slogan repeats: Rosas vuelve, Rosas is coming back. The country awaits a new terror.

  Numen inest, here dwells a god: the poet’s incantation hasn’t worked. The military ancestors died in battle, but those petty battles and wasteful deaths have led to nothing. Only in Borges’s poetry do those heroes inhabit “an epic universe, sitting tall in the saddle”: “alto . . . en su épico universo.” And this is his great creation: Argentina as a simple mythical land, a complete epic world, of “republics, cavalry and mornings”: “las republicas, los caballos y las mananas” of battles fought, the fatherland established, the great city created and the “streets with names recurring from the past in my blood.”

  That is the vision of art. And yet, out of this mythical Argentina of his creation, Borges reaches out, through his English grandmother, to his English ancestors and, through them, to their language “at its dawn.” “People tell me I look English now. When I was younger I didn’t look English. I was darker. I didn’t feel English. Not at all. Maybe feeling English came to me through reading.” And though Borges doesn’t acknowledge it, a recurring theme in the later stories is of Nordics growing degenerate in a desolate Argentine landscape. Scottish Guthries become mestizo Gutres and no longer even know the Bible; an English girl becomes an Indian savage; men called Nilsen forget their origins and live like animals with the bestial sex code of the macho whoremonger.

  Borges said at our first meeting, “I don’t write about degenerates.” But another time he said, “The country was enriched by men thinking essentially of Europe and the United States. Only the civilized people. The gauchos were very simple-minded. Barbarians.” When we talked of Argentine history he said, “There is a pattern. Not an obvious pattern. I myself can’t see the wood for the trees.” And later he added, “Those civil wars are now meaningless.”

  Perhaps, then, parallel with the vision of art, there has developed, in Borges, a subsidiary vision, however unacknowledged, of reality. And now, at any rate, the real world can no longer be denied.

  In the middle of May Borges went for a few days to Montevideo in Uruguay. Montevideo was one of the cities of his childhood, a city of “long, lazy holidays.” But now Uruguay, the most educated country in South America, was, in the words of an Argentine, “a caricature of a country,” bankrupt, like Argentina, after wartime wealth, and tearing itself to pieces. Montevideo was a city at war; guerrillas and soldiers fought in the streets. One day while Borges was there, four soldiers were shot and killed.

  I saw Borges when he came back. A pretty girl helped him down the steps at the Catholic University. He looked more frail; his hands shook more easily. He had shed his sprightly interview manner. He was full of the disaster of Montevideo; he was distressed. Montevideo was something else he had lost. In one poem, “mornings in Montevideo” are among the things for which he thanks “the divine labyrinth of causes and effects.” Now Montevideo, like Buenos Aires, like Argentina, was gracious only in his memory, and in his art.

  3 Kamikaze in Montevideo

  October—November 1973

  Interest rates went down in Uruguay this year. Last year, at the height of the Tupamaro crisis, you could borrow money at 60 percent. The interest, payable in advance, was immediately deducted from the loan; so that, having borrowed a million pesos, you left the bank with 400,000. And that was good business, with the peso losing half its value against the dollar during the year, and with inflation running at 92 percent.

  Now it is a little less frenzied. The Tupamaros—there were about five thousand of them, mainly townspeople from impoverished middle-class families—have been destroyed. The army—essentially rural, lower middle-class—is in control and rules by decree. Interest rates have dropped to around 42 percent, with the taxes; and inflation this year has been kept down to 60 percent. “Prices here don’t just rise every day,”

  the businessman said. “They also rise every night.” Yet until the other day, they tell you in Uruguay, road-workers could be seen grilling thfeir lunchtime steaks in the open air; and the Uruguay peso was known as the peso oro, the gold peso. In 1953 there were 3 pesos to the U.S. dollar; today there are 900.

  “My father bought a house in 1953 with a 6 percent loan from the Mortgage Bank. At the end, in 1968, he was still paying thirty pesos a month on his mortgage.” Thirty pesos: twelve cents, ten pence. “That may be funny to you. For us it is a tragedy. Our Parliament refused to revalue mortgage repayments—the politicians didn’t want to lose votes. So everybody had his house as a gift. But they condemned the future generations.”

  The law has now been changed. Interest rates, like salaries, are tied to the cost-of-living index; and the Mortgage Bank these days offers depositors 56 percent—7 percent true interest, 49 percent the inflationary “adjustment.”

  Mr. Palatnik, the advertising man who handles the Mortgage Bank campaign, has also been engaged by the military government to help calm the country down. And, to the disgust and alarm of Left and extreme Right, Mr. Palatnik doesn’t appear to be failing. He hasn’t so far made himself or the government absurd. Again and again on television, in the commercial breaks in the Argentine soap operas, after the talk of government plans, hope comes in the form of a challenge: “Tenga confianza en el país, y póngale el hombro al Uruguay.” Literally: “Have faith in the country, and put your shoulder to Uruguay.”

  But in Uruguay these days it is hard not to offend. New Dawn, the weekly newspaper of a new right-wing youth group (“Family, Tradition, Property”), published a strong attack on Mr. Palatnik, with a distinctly anti-Semitic cartoon. Mr. Palatnik, who is middle-aged, challenged the editor to a duel. He sent his padrinos to the New Dawn office, but the challenge wasn’t accepted. The New Dawn group isn’t important; but, like many businessmen in Montevideo, Mr. Palatnik now carries a gun.

  The precaution is excessive. The army at the moment is in control and on the offensive; it continues to arrest and interrogate; the days of guerrilla kidnap in Montevideo are over. Montevideo, so dangerous last year, is now safer than Buenos Aires; and some of the more ransomable American business executives in Argentina have moved across the Rio de la Plata to Montevideo, to the red-brick tower of the Victoria Plaza Hotel in the main square, with the equestrian statue of Artigas, the founder of the Uruguayan state, in the center.

  Government House is on one side of the square. There are sentries in nineteenth-centu
ry uniform, but also real soldiers with real guns. On another side of the square the Palace of Justice, begun six years ago, stands unfinished in the immense crater of its foundations. Grass, level and lush as if sown, grows from the concrete beams, and the concrete columns are stained with rust from the reinforcing steel rods.

  Montevideo is safe. But the money has run out in a country whose official buildings, in the days of wealth, were of marble, granite and bronze. All the extravagant woodwork in the Legislative Palace, all the marquetry that rises from floor to ceiling in the library, was made in Italy and shipped out, they say, in mahogany crates. And that was just fifty years ago. Now the palace is without a function, and soldiers, making small gestures with their guns, urge passers-by to keep their distance.

  Fifty years ago, before people built on the sea, the fashionable area was the Prado: great houses, some gothic follies, great gardens. The Prado park is now tended only in parts; the once-famous rose garden runs wild. Beyond the bridge with the tarnished Belle Epoque sphinxes, a long drive, shaded by eucalyptus, plane and fir, leads to the Prado Hotel, still apparently whole, with its green walks and balustraded terraces and a fountain that still plays. But the asphalt forecourt is cracked; the lamp standards and urns are empty; the great yellow building—Jules Knab arq 1911 incised halfway up—has been abandoned.