The Writer and the World

by V. S. Naipaul

  “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.

  Por 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 the meditation on death and time and the “glass jewels” of the individual life:

  … cuando tú mismo eres la continuación 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 been 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’s 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’s 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 plebeian 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 Labour: 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 repúblicas, los caballos y las mañanas],” 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 it
self 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 per cent. 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 per cent.

  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 per cent, with the taxes; and inflation this year has been kept down to 60 per cent. “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, roadworkers could be seen grilling their lunchtime steaks in the open air; and the Uruguay peso was known as the peso oro, the gold peso. In 1953 there were three pesos to the U.S. dollar; today there are nine hundred.

  “My father bought a house in 1953 with a 6 per cent 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 per cent—7 per cent true interest, 49 per cent 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 Río 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 centre.

  Government House is on one side of the square. There are sentries in nineteenth-century 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 Époque 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.

  Montevideo is in parts a ghost city, its nouveau riche splendour still new. It is a city full of statues—copies of the David, the Colleoni statue in Venice, elaborate historical tableaux in bronze. But letters have dropped off inscriptions and have not been replaced; and the public clocks on street corners have everywhere stopped. The plane trees in the centre are not old; tall carved doors still open on to marble halls with fine ceilings that still look new. But the shops have little to offer; the pavements are broken; the streets are too full of people selling chocolate and sweets and other little things. The three or four fair restaurants that survive—in a city of more than a million—do not always have meat; and the bread is made partly of sorghum.

  Even without the slogans on the walls—STOP TORTURING SASSANO, THE MILITARY ARE TORTURING SERENY, DEATH TO THE DICTATORSHIP, TUPAMAROS RENEGADES THIEVES SWINE, PUTAMAROS [puta, a whore]—the visitor would know that he is in a city where, as in a fairy story, a hidden calamity has occurred. A fabulous city, created all at once, and struck down almost as soon as it had been created.

  “The country has grown sad,” the artist said. He survives by living to himself, doing his work, and pretending that Uruguay is somewhere else. He doesn’t listen to the radio or watch television or read the newspapers. What—apart from the football—had he missed in that morning’s El País? A plane hijacked to Bolivia; five hundred secondary-school students suspended; five “extremists,” three of them university students, indicted by the military court for “conspiring against the Constitution.”

  When Uruguay was rich, politics were a matter of personalities and the army hardly existed. Now the money has run out, and the little country—almost as big as Britain, but with less than three million people—tears itself apart.

  “The army came for me at four in the morning. In the jail—they play pop music in the torture cells—I was made to stand with my feet together for ten hours. Then I was given the ‘submarine.’ I was winded by a heavy blow in the stomach and my head was held underwater. They’re expert now. But they’ve had accidents. Then I was made to stand again. When I collapsed I was prodded between the legs with a bayonet.” The “submarine” is “soft” torture. People who have been burned by the electric prod don’t talk about their experiences.

  EVERYONE in Uruguay, whether on the Right or Left, knows now—sixty years too late—where the trouble started. It started with the president called Batlle (pronounced Bajhay); it started with the welfare state Batlle, after a visit to Switzerland, began to impose on Uruguay just before the First World War.

  Uruguay had the money. Her export
s of meat and wool made her rich; the peso was on a par with the dollar. “In those days,” the banker says, “out of every dollar we earned abroad, eighty cents was pure surplus. A surplus provided by the land—the rain, the climate, the earth.” The land might be said to be Indian land, but the Indians had been exterminated in the nineteenth century. A monument in the Prado park commemorates Uruguay’s last four Charrua Indians, who were sent as exhibits to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, where they died.

  Pensions, every kind of worker’s benefit, women’s rights: month after month Batlle handed down the liberal laws to an astonished pastoral people. And suddenly Uruguay was modern, the best-educated country in South America, with the most liberal laws; and Montevideo was a metropolis, full of statues.

  Sábat, the cartoonist, who left Uruguay eight years ago and now works in Buenos Aires, says: “Uruguay is a big estancia. Only a megalomaniac like Batlle could think that it was a country. It remains a big estancia with a city, Montevideo, that is crystallized on the 1930s. Creativity stopped then. The country was developing intellectually. After Batlle everything was crystallized.”

  The socialist teacher, more romantic, grieves for the gaucho past. “Batlle should not have been born in a bucolic country. He went to Europe and got all those lovely ideas and then looked around for a country where he could apply them. And as the country didn’t exist he invented it. He invented the industrial worker, bringing in people from the country to the town. People used to drinking maté, watching sheep, sitting under the ombú tree—which wasn’t bad, you know: it was beautiful: the twentieth century doesn’t want us to live like that. He invented the workers and then he invented the social laws and then the bureaucracy—which was terrible. I am not certain why this should have led to corruption and venality, but it did.”