The Old Patagonian Express

by Paul Theroux

  There was a sound of scuffing in the corridor, and a distinct grunt. Borges emerged from the dimly-lighted foyer, feeling his way along the wall. He was dressed formally, in a dark blue suit and dark tie; his black shoes were loosely tied, and a watch chain depended from his pocket. He was taller than I had expected, and there was an English cast to his face, a pale seriousness in his jaw and forehead. His eyes were swollen, staring, and sightless. But for his faltering, and the slight tremble in his hands, he was in excellent health. He had the fussy precision of a chemist. His skin was clear – there were no age-blotches on his hands –and there was a firmness in his face. People had told me he was ‘about eighty’. He was then in his seventy-ninth year, but he looked ten years younger. ‘When you get to my age,’ he tells his double in the story ‘The Other’, ‘you will have lost your eyesight almost completely. You’ll still make out the colour yellow and lights and shadows. Don’t worry. Gradual blindness is not a tragedy. It’s like a slow summer dusk.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, groping for my hand. Squeezing it, he guided me to a chair. ‘Please sit down. There’s a chair here somewhere. Please make yourself at home.’

  He spoke so rapidly that I was not aware of an accent until he had finished speaking. He seemed breathless. He spoke in bursts, but without hesitation, except when starting a new subject. Then, stuttering, he raised his trembling hands and seemed to claw the subject out of the air and shake ideas from it as he went on.

  ‘You’re from New England,’ he said. ‘That’s wonderful. That’s the best place to be from. It all began there – Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Longfellow. They started it. If it weren’t for them there would be nothing. I was there – it was beautiful.’

  ‘I’ve read your poem about it,’ I said. Borges’ ‘New England 1967’ begins, ‘They have changed the shapes of my dream …’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ he said. He moved his hands impatiently, like a man shaking dice. He would not talk about his work; he was almost dismissive. ‘I was lecturing at Harvard. I hate lecturing – I love teaching. I enjoyed the States – New England. And Texas is something special. I was there with my mother. She was old, over eighty. We went to see the Alamo.’ Borges’ mother had died not long before, at the great age of ninety-nine. Her room is as she left it in death. ‘Do you know Austin?’

  I said I had taken the train from Boston to Fort Worth and that I had not thought much of Fort Worth.

  ‘You should have gone to Austin,’ said Borges. ‘The rest of it is nothing to me – the mid-West, Ohio, Chicago. Sandburg is the poet of Chicago, but what is he? He’s just noisy – he got it all from Whitman. Whitman was great, Sandburg is nothing. And the rest of it,’ he said, shaking his fingers at an imaginary map of North America. ‘Canada? Tell me, what has Canada produced? Nothing. But the South is interesting. What a pity they lost the Civil War – don’t you think it is a pity, eh?’

  I said I thought defeat had been inevitable for the South. They had been backward-looking and complacent, and now they were the only people in the States who ever talked about the Civil War. People in the North never spoke of it. If the South had won, we might have been spared some of these Confederate reminiscences.

  ‘Of course they talk about it,’ said Borges. ‘It was a terrible defeat for them. Yet they had to lose. They were agrarian. But I wonder – is defeat so bad? In The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, doesn’t he say something about “the shamefulness of victory“? The Southerners were courageous, but perhaps a man of courage does not make a good soldier. What do you think?’

  Courage alone could not make you a good soldier, I said, not any more than patience alone could make you a good fisherman. Courage might make a man blind to risk, and an excess of courage, without caution, could be fatal.

  ‘But people respect soldiers,’ said Borges. ‘That’s why no one really thinks much of the Americans. If America were a military power instead of a commercial empire, people would look up to it. Who respects businessmen? No one. People look at America and all they see are travelling salesmen. So they laugh.’

  He fluttered his hands, snatched with them, and changed the subject. ‘How did you come to Argentina?’

  ‘After Texas, I took the train to Mexico.’

  ‘What do you think of Mexico?’

  ‘Ramshackle, but pleasant.’

  Borges said, ‘I dislike Mexico and the Mexicans. They are so nationalistic. And they hate the Spanish. What can happen to them if they feel that way? And they have nothing. They are just playing – playing at being nationalistic. But what they like especially is playing at being Red Indians. They like to play. They have nothing at all. And they can’t fight, eh? They are very poor soldiers – they always lose. Look what a few American soldiers could do in Mexico! No, I don’t like Mexico at all.’

  He paused and leaned forward. His eyes bulged. He found my knee and tapped it for emphasis.

  ‘I don’t have this complex,’ he said. ‘I don’t hate the Spanish. Although I much prefer the English. After I lost my sight in 1955 I decided to do something altogether new. So I learned Anglo-Saxon. Listen –’

  He recited the entire Lord’s Prayer in Anglo-Saxon.

  ‘That was the Lord’s Prayer. Now this – do you know this?’

  He recited the opening lines of The Seafarer.

  ‘The Seafarer,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? I am partly English. My grandmother came from Northumberland, and there are other relatives from Staffordshire. “Saxon and Celt and Dane” – isn’t that how it goes? We always spoke English at home. My father spoke to me in English. Perhaps I’m partly Norwegian – the Vikings were in Northumberland. And York – York is a beautiful city, eh? My ancestors were there, too.’

  ‘Robinson Crusoe was from York,’ I said.

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘ “I was born in the year something-something, in the city of York, of a good family …” ’

  ‘Yes, yes, I had forgotten that.’

  I said there were Norse names all over the north of England, and gave as an example the name Thorpe. It was a place-name and a surname.

  Borges said, ‘Like the German dorf.’

  ‘Or Dutch dorp.’

  ‘This is strange. I will tell you something. I am writing a story in which the main character’s name is Thorpe.’

  ‘That’s your Northumberland ancestry stirring.’

  ‘Perhaps. The English are wonderful people. But timid. They didn’t want an empire. It was forced upon them by the French and the Spanish. And so they had their empire. It was a great thing, eh? They left so much behind. Look what they gave India – Kipling! One of the greatest writers.’

  I said that sometimes a Kipling story was only a plot, or an exercise in Irish dialect, or a howling gaffe, like the climax of ‘At the End of the Passage’, where a man photographs the bogeyman on a dead man’s retina and then burns the pictures because they are so frightening. But how did the bogeyman get there?

  ‘It doesn’t matter – he’s always good. My favourite is “The Church that was at Antioch.” What a marvellous story that is. And what a great poet. I know you agree with me – I read your piece in the New York Times. What I want you to do is read me some of Kipling’s poems. Come with me,’ he said, getting to his feet and leading me to a bookshelf. ‘On that shelf – you see all the Kipling books? Now on the left is the Collected Poems. It’s a big book.’

  He was conjuring with his hands as I ran my eye across the Elephant Head Edition of Kipling. I found the book and carried it back to the sofa.

  Borges said, ‘Read me “Harp Song of the Dane Women”.’

  I did as I was told.

  What is a woman that you forsake her,

  And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,

  To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

  ‘ “The old grey Widow-maker,” ’ he said. ‘That is so good. You can’t say things like that in Spanish. But I’m interrupting go on.’

  I began again, but at the third st
anza he stopped me. ‘ “the ten-times fingering weed to hold you” – how beautiful!’ I went on reading this reproach to a traveller – just the reading of it made me feel homesick – and every few stanzas Borges exclaimed how perfect a particular phrase was. He was quite in awe of these English compounds. Such locutions were impossible in Spanish. A simple poetic phrase such as ‘world-weary flesh’ must be rendered in Spanish as ‘this flesh made weary by the world’. The ambiguity and delicacy is lost in Spanish, and Borges was infuriated that he could not attempt lines like Kipling’s.

  Borges said, ‘Now for my next favourite, “The Ballad of East and West”.’

  There proved to be even more interruption-fodder in this ballad than there had been in ‘The Harp Song’, but though it had never been one of my favourites, Borges drew my attention to the good lines, chimed in on several couplets and continued to say, ‘You can’t do that in Spanish.’

  ‘Read me another one,’ he said.

  ‘How about “The Way Through the Woods”?’ I said, and read it and got goose pimples.

  Borges said, ‘It’s like Hardy. Hardy was a great poet, but I can’t read his novels. He should have stuck to poetry.’

  ‘He did, in the end. He gave up writing novels.’

  ‘He should never have started,’ said Borges. ‘Want to see something interesting?’ He took me back to the shelves and showed me his Encyclopaedia Britannica. It was the rare eleventh edition, not a book of facts but a work of literature. He told me to look at India and to examine the signature on the illustrated plates. It was that of Lockwood Kipling. ‘Rudyard Kipling’s father – you see?’

  We went on a tour through his bookshelves. He was especially proud of his copy of Johnson’s Dictionary (‘It was sent to me from Sing-Sing Prison, by an anonymous person’), his Moby Dick, his translation by Sir Richard Burton of The Thousand and One Nights. He scrabbled at the shelves and pulled out more books; he led me to his study and showed me his set of Thomas De Quincey, his Beowulf – touching it, he began to quote – his Icelandic sagas.

  ‘This is the best collection of Anglo-Saxon books in Buenos Aires,’ he said.

  ‘If not in South America.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  We went back to the parlour library. He had forgotten to show me his edition of Poe. I said that I had recently read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

  ‘I was talking about Pym just last night to Bioy Casares,’ said Borges. Bioy Casares had been a collaborator on a sequence of stories. ‘The ending of that book is so strange – the dark and the light.’

  ‘And the ship with the corpses on it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Borges a bit uncertainly. ‘I read it so long ago, before I lost my sight. It is Poe’s greatest book.’

  ‘I’d be glad to read it to you.’

  ‘Come tomorrow night,’ said Borges. ‘Come at seven-thirty. You can read me some chapters of Pym and then we’ll have dinner.’

  I got my jacket from the chair. The white cat had been chewing the sleeve. The sleeve was wet, but now the cat was asleep. It slept on its back, as if it wanted its belly scratched. Its eyes were tightly shut.

  It was Good Friday. All over Latin America there were sombre processions, people carrying images of Christ, lugging crosses up volcanic mountains, wearing black shrouds, flagellating themselves, saying the Stations of the Cross on their knees, parading with skulls. But in Buenos Aires there was little of this penitential activity to be seen. Devotion, in this secular city, took the form of movie-going. Julia, which had won a number of Oscars, opened on Good Friday, but the theatre was empty. Across the street, at the Electric, The Ten Commandments – the Fifties Bible-epic – was showing. The box-office line was two blocks away. And there was such a crowd at Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth that theatre-goers, five hundred or more, were standing piously in the rain.

  I had spent the day transcribing the notes I had made on my lap the night before. Borges’ blindness had enabled me to write unselfconsciously as he spoke. Again I boarded the Buenos Aires Subterranean to keep our appointment.

  This time, the lights in Borges’ apartment were on. His loose shuffling shoes announced him and he appeared as over-dressed in the humid night heat as he had the previous evening.

  ‘Time for Poe,’ he said. ‘Please take a seat.’

  The Poe volume was on the seat of a nearby chair. I picked it up and found Pym, but before I could begin, Borges said, ‘I’ve been thinking about The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Every page of it is very fine, and yet it is a dull book. I wonder why.’

  ‘He wanted to write a great book. George Bernard Shaw told him to use a lot of semi-colons. Lawrence set out to be exhaustive, believing that if it was monumentally ponderous it would be regarded as great. But it’s dull, and there’s no humour in it. How can a book on the Arabs not be funny?’

  ‘Huckleberry Finn is a great book,’ said Borges. ‘And funny. But the ending is no good. Tom Sawyer appears and it becomes bad. And there’s Nigger Jim’ – Borges had begun to search the air with his hands – ‘yes, we had a slave market here at Retiro. My family wasn’t very wealthy. We had only five or six slaves. But some families had thirty or forty.’

  I had read that a quarter of Argentina’s population had once been black. There were no blacks in Argentina now. I asked Borges why this was so.

  ‘It is a mystery. But I remember seeing many of them.’ Borges looked so youthful that it was easy to forget that he was as old as the century. I could not vouch for his reliability, but he was the most articulate witness I had met on my trip. ‘They were cooks, gardeners, handymen,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what happened to them.’

  ‘People say they died of TB.’

  ‘Why didn’t they die of TB in Montevideo? It’s just over there, eh? There is another story, equally silly, that they fought the Indians, and the Indians and the Negroes killed each other. That would have been in 1850 or so, but it isn’t true. In 1914, there were still many Negroes in Buenos Aires – they were very common. Perhaps I should say 1910, to be sure.’ He laughed suddenly. ‘They didn’t work very hard. It was considered wonderful to have Indian blood, but black blood is not so good a thing, eh? There are some prominent families in Buenos Aires that have it – a touch of the tar-brush, eh? My uncle used to tell me, “Jorge, you’re as lazy as a nigger after lunch.” You see, they didn’t do much work in the afternoon. I don’t know why there are so few here, but in Uruguay, or Brazil – in Brazil you might run into a white man now and then, eh? If you’re lucky, eh? Ha!’

  Borges was laughing in a pitying, self-amused way. His face lit up.

  ‘They thought they were natives! I overheard a black woman saying to an Argentine woman, “Well, at least we didn’t come here on a ship!” She meant that she considered the Spanish to be immigrants. “At least we didn’t come here on a ship!” ’

  ‘When did you hear this?’

  ‘So many years ago,’ said Borges. ‘But the Negroes were good soldiers. They fought in the War of Independence.’

  ‘So they did in the United States,’ I said. ‘But a lot were on the British side. The British promised them their freedom for serving in the British infantry. One Southern regiment was all black – Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopians, it was called. They ended up in Canada.’

  ‘Our blacks won the Battle of Cerrito. They fought in the war against Brazil. They were very good infantrymen. The gauchos fought on horseback, the Negroes didn’t ride. There was a regiment – the Sixth. They called it – not the Regiment of Mulattoes and Blacks, but in Spanish “the Regiment of Brownies and Darkies”. So as not to offend them. In Martin Fierro, they are called “men of humble colour” … well, enough, enough. Let’s read Arthur Gordon Pym.’

  ‘Which chapter? How about the one where the ship approaches full of corpses and birds?’

  ‘No, I want the last one. About the dark and the light.’

  I read the last chapter, where the canoe drifts into the Antarctic, the water g
rowing warmer and then very hot, the white fall of ashes, the vapour, the appearance of the white giant. Borges interrupted from time to time, saying in Spanish, ‘That is enchanting,’ ‘That is lovely’ and ‘How beautiful!’

  When I finished, he said, ‘Read the last chapter but one.’

  I read Chapter 24, Pym’s escape from the island, the pursuit of the maddened savages, the vivid description of vertigo. That long terrifying passage delighted Borges, and he clapped his hands at the end.

  Borges said, ‘Now how about some Kipling? Shall we puzzle out “Mrs Bathurst” and try to see if it is a good story?’

  I said, ‘I must tell you that I don’t like “Mrs Bathurst” at all.’

  ‘Fine. It must be bad. Plain Tales from the Hills then. Read “Beyond the Pale”.’

  I read ‘Beyond the Pale’, and when I got to the part where Bisesa sings a love song to Trejago, her English lover, Borges interrupted, reciting,

  ‘Alone upon the housetops, to the North

  I turn and watch the lightning in the sky, –

  The glamour of thy footsteps in the North,

  Come back to me, Beloved, or I die!’

  ‘My father used to recite that one,’ said Borges. When I had finished the story, he said, ‘Now you choose one.’

  I read him the opium-smoker’s story, ‘The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows’.

  ‘How sad that is,’ said Borges. ‘It is terrible. The man can do nothing. But notice how Kipling repeats the same lines. It has no plot at all, but it is lovely.’ He touched ‘his suit jacket. ‘What time is it?’ He drew out his pocket watch and touched the hands. ‘Nine-thirty – we should eat.’