The British long dominated Argentina’s economy, and Borges’s grandmother on his father’s side was from the U.K. Looking around the Richmond you are reminded how British (alternating with the Italian feel) Argentina can be, if only for a certain upper-crust sort, and the Richmond— paintings of British ocean liners and busy British fox hunting on the walls—is very British during the tea hour, much more so than even the other trappings around B.A. I’ve seen so far (the polo-gear store, the British-style parks, Harrods), granting that the Falklands War dampened most overt Anglo enthusiasm. If there is no metaphysic oozing through the comfortably frigid air conditioning this late afternoon, there is for me a better understanding of Borges’s British side— how he loved the literature of Kipling and Stevenson and Chesterton throughout his life, how some members of the higher class like him, with British connections, supported the Allies in the Second World War, while many Argentines remained somewhere between neutral and openly backing the Axis powers of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.
The waiter brings the beer, golden and cold, and a sizable stainless-steel plate bearing the fancy canapés, the ones with chunks of fish in the puffed pastry the best. I take my time with it all. I decide I actually like it in here, the Café Richmond.
7. Did I Tell You I Saw Borges?
Which, of course, is a trick line. And, rest assured, I’m not going to announce something totally wacky. I’m not going to claim I had a vision of Borges reincarnated and strolling around—walking cane in hand, as he was often photographed when older—in the city those summer days of such hot, honey sunshine.
No, this happened when I was in college. Borges came to Harvard to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in Poetry in 1967. A sophomore English major, I wasn’t as sophisticated in matters literary as my roommate, Dan Sorensen, who enthusiastically told me that Borges was the new giant on the scene, easily as important as Beckett, and that I had to accompany him to see the man in Sanders Theatre. Not that Dan was absolutely sophisticated, and he had come to Cambridge from a high school in suburban Salt Lake City; that at least had the edge, I guess, on my education at an unknown private boys’ school in Rhode Island at the hands of, often literally, an order of black-robed Catholic brothers, the whole package quite medieval. I remember having dinner in the Quincy House dining room and then heading along the snow-shoveled sidewalks (the sidewalks of Cambridge frequently being snow-shoveled in my memory—or in my dreams) to one of the lectures. We filed into the Victorian teacup that is Sanders Theatre, to sit high up; we watched ushered onto the stage a partially blind (read “Homeric”) man in a black suit, grinning. Whatever he lectured about I am not sure today, to be frank, though the look alone of him in that black suit, grinning some more and speaking softly and somewhat unintelligible even with a microphone, his longish, thinning silver hair combed straight back, has always lingered in my mind as the image of the Poet as archetype, or “Ur-poet,” a figure representative of the full wisdom that literature, when it is great literature, truly can be. I read a lot of Borges after that, as everybody did in the sixties, the peak of his popularity, and then I came back to him later in life after writing for some time myself, with a new intensity, with a new appreciation, too, of the craft and vision of what he did in those fully innovative, dazzling short stories. More recently I read my way through the poetry, finding there a large body of work that can, surprisingly, hold its own with the stories. So I did once see Borges.
I suppose I have other Borges links as well. I live in Austin and teach at the university there now, and Borges came with his mother to University of Texas to teach in 1961-62 as a visiting professor, loving the town. I even think I have pretty good evidence that a late Borges short story, “The Bribe,” about an encounter between a young Turk of a scholar and an Old English professor in the professor’s office at UT, takes place in the very building where I work, Parlin Hall, home of the Department of English, though Borges doesn’t name it; Borges himself was in residence under the auspices of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese when at the university, so his own office must have been in their building.
Connections that are good to think about, probably meaning nothing and not especially strange. But what was strange was what happened when I set out on the trip, maybe nearly as weird as any actual sighting of Borges back in the flesh in B.A.
A creative writing grad student of mine gave me a lift to the airport in his maroon pickup. I had gotten out of the truck, was yanking my single small bag from the front seat (I’ve learned to travel supremely light), and he said:
“Pete, look.”
“What?”
“Look—that guy sitting there.”
In mid-afternoon, the drop-off/pick-up concourse in front of the sprawling new terminal was virtually empty, save for a college-age guy sitting on a concrete slab of a bench; a suitcase beside him, he was waiting for a taxi or bus, surely—and reading a copy of Borges’s Labyrinths, its distinctive black-and-white glossy cover showing a blurred photograph of superimposed abstract blocks, almost a maze. It was the only complete literary “text” I myself had packed in my own bag, along with a Lonely Planet travel guide and a Spanish dictionary, plus those photocopies of a couple dozen Borges poems. Or look at it this way—I was going to Buenos Aires to see if I could indeed savor some of Borges’s metaphysic, and sitting there as I was about to depart was a guy in a turtleneck reading a copy of Labyrinths, the book that contains a good chunk of his major work.
I mean, think of all the airports in the world. Think of all the books in the world. Think of all the different hours and minutes in all the different time zones in the world. A coincidence, perhaps, but, again, what are the sheer odds of a guy happening to be sitting there at that exact moment when I crossed paths with him and reading the book by Borges that I had brought for no other reason than I just wanted to feel what it was like to do some reading of the man in Argentina, “on the premises,” so to speak?
I like to think Borges would have loved it.
But to get back to my time in Buenos Aires.
8. The Worst Job in the World
I’m in the subway, going to a stop far out on this, the “E” line. I’m on my way to the Biblioteca Municipal Miguel Cané at the end of Calle Carlos Calvo, well beyond downtown.
It’s a Friday afternoon, hot enough on the street above and a bona fide inferno down in the subway, my shirt soaked with sweat. When Borges conceded that he had to bring in an income more steady than what his literary journalism (of which he turned out a sizable amount) provided him, he landed, through the help of friends, an appointment as an “assistant” at this small Buenos Aires neighborhood library in 1937. He was thirty-eight, rather old, admittedly, to find a first real job; he was there for nine years. The employment was painful, a long tram ride back then to a distant and bleak part of town for him. He himself writes in his “Autobiographical Essay” about it, and the biographers document the experience well. His fellow employees were mostly loafers who had gotten their jobs as political plums, guys who talked about soccer and women the entire day. When Borges worked a little too fast at the task of cataloguing all the books there according to the Dewey Decimal system, a major project underway, his coworkers called him aside and told him something along the lines of, “Whoa, Trigger”—if everybody did that much work every day, half of them would be canned before long because there would be nothing to do. Borges apparently became very upset, understandably, about a rape that occurred in the ladies’ room, off the main reading room, yet his coworkers told him that it was only inevitable, considering the way that somebody had foolishly, in their opinion, built the ladies’ room right next to the men’s room in the library (worse, I seem to recall reading that the prime suspect turned out to be a fellow librarian). In the honored tradition of many government employees, Borges soon learned to lose himself in personal projects on state time, carefully studying The Divine Comedy in Italian, writing his own work. Borges was a vocal critic of Colonel Juan Doming
o Perón and the latter’s rise to power after World War II, and when the man did assume the presidency in 1946, Borges received official word from the Peronista administration that while he would keep a government job, he was being transferred to a position as chief inspector of poultry and rabbits at the Calle Córdoba public marketplace (Borges’s own version of the incident). It was surely seen as a hilarious joke to be played on somebody they thought to have ties to the smug—and for them hated and overtly elitist—oligarchy. When faced with the poultry-inspecting job, Borges had no choice but resign. True, Borges often spoke about how distasteful working at the Biblioteca Municipal Miguel Cané was, qualifying it for any list of the most legendary bad jobs in literary history, ranked right up there with Dickens’s time as a child in the blacking factory. And, as I said, I’m on the subway now heading there, the heat in the un-air-conditioned car itself dead with that smell of vacuum cleaner innards that all subways possess.
Once above terra firma, I see a neighborhood of mostly new apartment buildings that today doesn’t seem that bad, and at least there flows a slight breeze. The Biblioteca Municipal Miguel Cané is a white two-story rise with the standard Neoclassical masonry decoration (grape leaves, bunting), looking quite like that house where Borges was born, and outside is another plaque, here giving the dates of Borges’s employment as a librarian. Inside, the first impression is that everything is more or less in a time buckle, that the place probably hasn’t changed much whatsoever since Borges served his sentence here. On the first floor there’s a reading room with dark-wood tables and chairs, a row of tall, dark-wood bookcases dividing it in two. The holdings appear to be what you would expect in a neighborhood library—some popular fiction (I notice John Grisham in translation), some encyclopedias, a hefty red-bound Merck Manual. In one of my Borges-territory guidebooks I have seen a snapshot that gives evidence that despite Borges’s own public proclamation of distaste for the place, there is now a little room they have set up for a display with apparently his desk and chair from his working days here; or, as the caption with the picture in the book would have it: “...un sillón y un pupitre utilizados por Borges cuando trabajada allí.” That is my target of sorts for today. A wiry guy in brown jeans and a short-sleeve beige shirt, rumpled, approaches me; his skin is leathery, his slicked-back black hair sparse, his mustache what they used to call pencil-thin. Fifty or so, gruff, he doesn’t strike you as your typical librarian, and when I spout off something about looking for “un sillón y un pupitre utilizados por Borges,” he appears to only pick up on the “Borges” part of it.
“Jorge Luis Borges?” he says, not excited about it.
“Sí, sí,” I say.
He leads me to a small bookcase in the rear of the room; here they have, alongside some ancient classics of Spanish literature in flaking calfskin bindings, a set of the blue bound complete works of Borges. He hands me the volume containing the poems, while he doesn’t say anything about where I might find “un sillón y un pupitre utilazados por Borges.” To be polite, I sit down at one of the long tables, thumb through the book. I also look around, the overhead fans churning through the degrees centigrade, and the heat here is just about the same as in the subway. Dirty pale green walls; high ceilings with embossing; up front a single, cheesy turned-off computer on a table, next to a small bookcase of videotapes—those two items attesting that things have at least changed some since Borges’s days at the library. And, of course, there in back are two doors side by side: “Damas” and “Caballeros,” the scene of the crime. The mustached guy is ignoring me, so I now try a woman at the front desk, forty-something with heavy lipstick, hennaed hair, and a red dress. I hate to say it, but she looks a lot more like a hooker than any of the authentic examples I eventually took notice of around the classy San Martín quarter downtown. I give her the line about my trying to find “un sillón y un pupitre utilaza-dos por Borges,” and she talks to me while sitting on a stool and thumbing through a stack of dog-eared index cards that are yellow-going-to-brown with age. She finally looks up, telling me to wait a minute, and after she walks off and disappears from the reading room to go to maybe the office of the head librarian in back, the mustached guy getting summoned in there, too, the mustached guy eventually comes out on his own, heading toward me up front and carrying a ring of keys; saying nothing, he just casually motions me to follow him upstairs. I do. We cross a gallery area up there, and he takes me to an addition in back. He unlocks the door to a closet-sized, windowless nook, where they have set up the display. I walk in, start taking some notes about the look of the desk (which really seems like just the same type of long table I saw in the reading room, with three upright dividing boards to make three small carrels, an attached reading lamp above each section) and the chair (a bentwood one with arms and a too-new, red leatherette cushion); there are some mounted newspaper clips about Borges on the desk and old schoolbook copies in Spanish of the stories of Oscar Wilde and Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb, yet I’m not sure exactly what they have to do with B., whether he contributed translations or if they were just his personal copies. There are some photographs of him when young. I take more notes, glance outside once.
In the corridor, the mustached guy has found a ledge to sit on, low and hunched over. His chin on one fist, he has lit up a cigarette and is puffing it slowly, flicking the ashes to the floor, then puffing it slowly some more. I suspect that he is thinking, “I wonder how long this crazy American bastard is going to be in there,” but maybe he is grateful for having to conduct the tour, getting the windfall of this unexpected smoking break. Also, I hate to say it, but he, too, could have been a leftover—very much so—from when Borges was employed here, one of those rowdy guys talking only of women and soccer. But he does finally smile, politely, when I finish and thank him for his time, his locking up again with the big ring of keys, and I feel foolish for thinking what I had about him.
Downstairs, I sit alone at the same table again, taking more notes. There are a couple of men there, senior citizens, reading books at other tables. A college-age girl in camouflage pants and black T-shirt appears to be doing an assignment. A woman with a baby cradled in one arm comes in and the librarian in the red dress helps her look up something. I’m really hot, hotter than when I was in the subway. I take still more notes. I notice the girl in camouflage pants get up and bounce toward the ladies’ room in back, and I can’t help but think again myself of the odious crime that once transpired right there. I’m really, really hot, the shirt glued to my back again, and looking out the old story-high front doors with glass panels and to the street, I see the leaves on a jacaranda rattling, so I know there remains somewhat of a breeze out there. I want to be out there, escape, and I tell myself, yeah, I am getting a taste of the experience of what it was like for Borges. I think of jobs I had when younger that I hated, clock-watching jobs and most of them involving what for me was the day-to-day, repetitive grind of city newspaper work, before I was downright lucky enough to find teaching positions in creative writing. I get up to leave. I thank the woman in the red dress at the front desk, and she also finally smiles, as I feel foolish for having thought ill of her, too.
I know I still have the Biblioteca Nacional to go to before I leave Buenos Aires.
In a fitting reversal of fortune right after Perón was deposed in 1955, Borges, who had been supporting himself with university teaching and editing since leaving the assistant’s post at the neighborhood library, was appointed by the new government the director of the national library, an institution that is the equivalent of our Library of Congress. It was a prestigious position that, from every report, he deeply loved for the almost twenty years he held it, until resigning in 1973, when an embalmed-looking Perón returned from exile in Spain for a brief final term in office before officially dying. By then B.’s worldwide notoriety (the French were the first to celebrate him abroad, as they have been in the cases of so many writers slighted in their homelands) led to constant internation
al travel with lucrative lecturing and major prizes, which, along with substantial book sales, rendered him financially independent. He accepted his increasing blindness, an inherited affliction.
9. Reading and Thinking at Night
Still dressed in chinos, a loose chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and comfortable Reeboks, I’m stretched out on my made bed at the Hotel Phoenix. I am reading an interesting little book I came across in a used bookstore, a tattered paperback history of the Argentine short story published in 1975. I have bought a couple of tallboy cans of Brahma beer at a corner kiosco (deli), drinking one now while reading, keeping the other cool by having wrapped it in a heavy white terrycloth bath towel. It’s ultimately interesting how in that two-hundred-page survey of the genre, Borges merits only a little more than two pages, and even then he is unceremoniously lumped together in a roundup for a chapter titled, “Cuentistas que no figuran en las antologías Argentinas del cuento,” or the writers who at that time hadn’t made it into the standard anthologies of the Argentine short story. The author, a certain Carlos Mastrángelo, talks of the difficulty of Borges’s stories, albeit respectfully, while most of the book is concerned with what he seems to believe is the country’s more noteworthy fare, much of it work in what could be called the “gaucho tradition,” by local-colorists, really. Nevertheless, I am drinking the Brahma in its sweating white-and-red tallboy can, wondering why Borges by 1975 didn’t get anthologized, unless ignoring him was possibly a political thing and Borges for some Argentine critics was simply out of the loop on that count, therefore afforded scant publicity. I get up to unwrap the second Brahma from the towel, and I feel it in my grip—it is still very cold.
The City at Three P.M. Page 3