The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

20 THE BUENOS AIRES SUBTERRANEAN

Despite its eerie name, the Buenos Aires Subterranean is an efficient five-line network of subway trains. The same size as Boston's subway, it was built five years later, in 1913 (making it older than Chicago's or Moscow's), and as in Boston it quickly put the tram cars out of business. The apartment of Jorge Luis Borges was on Maipú, around the corner from Plaza General San Martin Station, on the Retiro-Constitucionline.

I had been eager to take the Subterranean ever since I heard of its existence; and I had greatly wished to talk to Borges. He was to me what Lady Hester Stanhope had been to Alexander Kinglake: 'in all society, the standing topic of interest', an eccentric genius, perhaps more than a prophet, hidden in the depths of an unholy country. In Eothen, one of my favourite travel books (' "Eothen" is, I hope, almost the only hard word to be found in the book,' says the author, 'and signifies. . "From the East" '), Kinglake devotes an entire chapter to his meeting with Lady Hester. I felt I could do no less with Borges. I entered the Subterranean and, after a short ride, easily found his house.

The brass plaque on the landing of the sixth floor said Borges. I rang the bell and was admitted by a child of about seven. When he saw me he sucked his finger in embarrassment. He was the maid's child. The maid was Paraguayan, a well-fleshed Indian, who invited me in, then left me in the foyer with a large white cat. There was one dim light burning in the foyer, but the rest of the apartment was dark. The darkness reminded me that Borges was blind.

Curiosity and unease led me into a small parlour. Though the curtains were drawn and the shutters closed, I could make out a candelabra, the family silver Borges mentions in one of his stories, some paintings, old photographs and books. There was little furniture — a sofa and two chairs by the window, a dining table pushed against one w^all, and a wall and a half of bookcases. Something brushed my legs. I switched on a lamp: the cat had followed me here.

There was no carpet on the floor to trip the blind man. no intrusive furniture he could barge into. The parquet floor gleamed; there was not a speck of dust anywhere. The paintings were amorphous, but the three steel engravings were precise. I recognized them as Piranesi's 'Views of Rome'. The most Borges-like one was 'The Pyramid of Ces-tius' and could have been an illustration from Borges' own Ficciones. Piranesi's biographer Bianconi called him 'the Rembrandt of the ruins'. 'I need to produce great ideas,' said Piranesi. 'I believe that were I given the planning of a new universe I would be mad enough to undertake it.' It was something Borges himself might have said.

The books were a mixed lot. One corner was mostly Everyman editions, the classics in English translation — Homer, Dante, Virgil. There were shelves of poetry in no particular order — Tennyson and E.E. Cum-mings, Byron, Poe, Wordsworth, Hardy. There were reference books, Harvey's English Literature, The Oxford Book of Quotations, various dictionaries — including Doctor Johnson's — and an old leatherbound encyclopaedia. They were not fine editions; the spines were worn, the cloth had faded; but they had the look of having been read. They were well-thumbed, they sprouted paper page-markers. Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

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 -1 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 1 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 stanza 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 oí The Thousand and O ne 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 long. 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 growing 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.'

As I was putting the Kipling book back into its place — Borges insisted that the books must be returned to their exact place — I said, 'Do you ever re-read your own work?'

'Never. I am not happy with my work. The critics have greatly exaggerated its importance. I would rather read' — he lunged at the bookshelves and made a gathering motion with his hands — ''real writers. Ha!' He turned to me and said, 'Do you re-read my work?'

'Yes. "Pierre Menard"-'

'That was the first story I ever wrote. I was thirty-six or thirty-seven at the time. My father said, "Read a lot, write a lot, and don't rush into print" — those were his exact words. The best story I ever wrote was "The Intruder". And "South" is also good. It's only a few pages. I'm lazy — a few pages and I'm finished. But "Pierre Menard" is a joke, not a story.'

'I used to give my Chinese students "The Wall and the Books" to read.'

'Chinese students? I suppose they thought it was full of howlers. I think it is. It is an unimportant piece, hardly worth reading. Let's eat.'

He got his stick from the sofa in the parlour and we went out, down in the narrow lift, and through the wrought-iron gates. The restaurant was around the corner -1 could not see it, but Borges knew the way. So the blind man led me. Walking down this Buenos Aires street with Borges was like being led through Alexandria by Cavafy, or through Lahore by Kipling. The city belonged to him, and he had had a hand in inventing it.

The restaurant was full this Good Friday night, and it was extremely noisy. But as soon as Borges entered, tapping his stick, feeling his way through the tables he obviously knew well, a hush fell upon the diners. Borges was recognized, and at his entrance all talking and eating ceased. It was both a reverential and curious silence, and it was maintained until Borges took his seat and gave the waiter our order.

We had hearts of palm, and fish, and grapes. I drank wine, Borges stuck to water. He cocked his head sideways to eat, trying to spear the sections of palm with his fork. He tried a spoon next, and then despairingly used his fingers.

'Do you know the big mistake that people make when they try to film Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde?’ he said. 'They use the same actor for both men. They should use two different actors. That is what Stevenson intended. Jekyll was two men. And you don't find out until the end that it is the same man. You should get that hammerstroke at the end. Another thing. Why do directors always make Hyde a womanizer? He was actually very cruel.'

I said, 'Hyde tramples on a child and Stevenson describes the sound of the bones breaking.'

'Yes, Stevenson hated cruelty, but he had nothing against physical passion.'

'Do you read modern authors?'

'I never cease to read them. Anthony Burgess is good — a very generous man, by the way. We are the same — Borges, Burgess. It's the same name.'

'Any others?'

'Robert Browning,' said Borges, and I wondered if he was pulling my leg. 'Now, he should have been a short story writer. If he had, he would have been greater than Henry James, and people would still read him.' Borges had started on his grapes. 'The food is good in Buenos Aires, don't you think?'

'In most ways, it seems a civilized place.'

He looked up. 'That may be so, but there are bombs every day.'

'They don't mention them in the paper.'

'They're afraid to print the news.'

'How do you know there are bombs?'

'Easy. I hear them,' he said.

Indeed, three days later there was a fire which destroyed much of the new colour television studio which had been built for the World Cup broadcasts. This was called 'an electrical fault'. Five days later two trains were bombed in Lomas de Zamora and Bernal. A week later a government minister was murdered; his corpse was found in a Buenos Aires street, and pinned to it was a note reading, A gift from the Montoneros.

'But the government is not so bad,' said Borges. 'Videla is a well-meaning military man.' Borges smiled and said slowly, 'He is not very bright, but at least he is a gentleman.'

'What about Perón?'

'Perón was a scoundrel. My mother was in prison under Perón. My sister was in prison. My cousin. Perón was a bad leader and, also, I suspect, a coward. He looted the country. His wife was a prostitute.'

'Evita?'

'A common prostitute.'

We had coffee. Borges called the waiter and said in Spanish, 'Help me to the toilet.' He said to me, 'I have to go and shake the bishop's hand. Ha!'

Walking back through the streets, he stopped at a hotel entrance and gave the metal awning posts two whacks with his stick. Perhaps he was not as blind as he pretended, perhaps it was a familiar landmark. He had not swung timidly. He said, 'That's for luck.'

As we turned the corner into Maipú he said, 'My father used to say, "What a rubbish story the Jesus story is. That this man was dying for the sins of the world. Who could believe that?" It is nonsense, isn't it?'

I said, 'That's a timely thought for Good Friday.'

'I hadn't thought ofthat! Oh, yes!' He laughed so hard he startled two passers-by.

As he fished out his door-key, I asked him about Patagonia.

'I have been there,' he said. 'But I don't know it well. I'll tell you this, though. It's a dreary place. A very dreary place.'

'I was planning to take the train tomorrow.'

'Don't go tomorrow. Come and see me. I like your reading.'

'I suppose I can go to Patagonia next week.'

'It's dreary,' said Borges. He had got the door open, and now he shuffled to the lift and pulled open its metal gates. The gate of the hundred sorrows,' he said, and entered, chuckling.

Borges was tireless. He urged me to visit him again and again. He stayed up late, eager to talk, eager to be read to; and he was good company. By degrees, he turned me into Boswell. Each morning when I woke I sat down and wrote the conversations that had taken place the night before; then I walked around the city, and at nightfall I boarded the Subterranean. Borges said that he seldom went out. 'I don't go to the embassies, I don't go to parties — I hate to stand around and drink.'

I had been warned that he could be severe or bad tempered. But what I saw was close to angelic. There was something of the charlatan in him — he had a way of speechifying, and I knew he was repeating something he had said a hundred times before. He had the beginnings of a stutter, but he calmed that with his hands. He was occasionally magisterial, but he could be the opposite, a kind of student, his face elfin with attentiveness, his fingers locked together. His face became aristocratic in repose, and when he bared his yellow teeth in the exaggerated grin he used to show pleasure — he laughed hard at his own jokes — his face came alight and he looked like a French actor who has realized that he has successfully stolen the show. ('Stolen the show!' Borges would say. 'You can't say that in Spanish. That's why Spanish literature is so dull.') His was the perfect face for a sage, and yet, working his features a certain way, he could look like a clown, but never a fool. He was the gentlest of men; there was no violence in his talk and none in his gestures.

'I don't understand revenge,' he said. 'I have never felt it. And I don't write about it.'

'What about "Emma Zunz"?'

'Yes, that's the only one. But the story was given to me and I don't even think it's very good.'

'So you don't approve of getting even — of taking revenge for something that was done to you?'

'Revenge does not alter what was done to you. Neither does forgiveness. Revenge and forgiveness are irrelevant.'

'What can you do?'

'Forget,' said Borges. 'That is all you can do. When something bad is done to me, I pretend that it happened a long time ago, to someone else.'

'Does that work?'

'More or less.' He showed his yellow teeth. 'Less rather than more.'

Talking about the futility of revenge, he reached and his hands trembled with a new subject, but a related one, the Second World War.

'When I was in Germany just after the war,' he said, 'I never heard a word spoken against Hitler. In Berlin, the Germans said to me' — now he spoke in German — ' "Well, what do you think of our ruins?" The Germans like to be pitied — isn't that horrible? They showed me their ruins. They wanted me to pity them. But why should I indulge them? I said' — he uttered the sentence in German — ' "I have seen London." '

We continued to talk about Europe; the conversation turned to the Scandinavian countries and, inevitably, the Nobel Prize. I did not say the obvious thing, that Borges himself had been mentioned as a possible candidate. But, quite off his own bat, he said, 'If I were offered it, I would rush up and grasp it in two hands. But which American writers have got it?'

'Steinbeck,' I said.

'No. I don't believe that.'

'It's true.'

'I can't believe that Steinbeck got it. And yet Tagore got it, and he was an atrocious writer. He wrote corny poems — moons, gardens. Kitsch poems.'

'Maybe they lose something when they're translated from Bengali into English.'

‘They could only gain by that. But they're corny.' He smiled, and his face became beatific — the more so because of his blindness. It frequently went this way: I could watch him studying a memory. He said, 'Tagore came to Buenos Aires.'

'Was this after he won the Nobel Prize?'

'It must have been. I can't imagine Vittoria Ocampo inviting him unless he had won it.' He cackled at that. 'And we quarrelled. Tagore and I.'

'What did you quarrel about?'

Borges had a mock-pompous voice. He reserved it for certain statements of freezing dismissiveness. Now he threw his head back and said in that voice, 'He uttered heresies about Kipling.'

We had met this evening to read the Kipling story, 'Dayspring Mishandled', but we never got to it. It had grown late, it was nearly dinnertime; we talked about Kipling's stories and then about horror stories ingenerai.

'"They" is a very fine story. I like Lovecraft's horror stories. His plots are very good, but his style is atrocious. I once dedicated a story to him. But it is not as good as "They" — that is very triste.'

'I think Kipling was writing about his own dead children. His daughter died in New York, his son was killed in the war. And he never went back to the States.'

'Well,' said Borges, 'he had that fight with his brother-in-law.'

I said, 'But they laughed him out of court.'

'"Laughed him out of court" — you can't say that in Spanish!' He was gleeful, then he pretended to be morose. 'You can't say anything in Spanish.'

We went out to eat. He asked me what I had been doing in South America. I said that I had given some lectures on American literature, and that twice in describing myself as a feminist to Spanish-speaking audiences I had been taken for a man confessing a kind of deviation. Borges said that I must remember that the Latin Americans were not very subtle on this point. I went on to say that I had spoken about Mark Twain, Faulkner, Poe, and Hemingway.

'What about Hemingway?' he asked.

'He had one great fault,' I said. 'I think it is a serious one. He admired bullies.'

Borges said, 'I could not agree more.'

It was a pleasant meal, and afterwards, walking back to his apartment house- again he whacked the awning posts at the hotel — he said, 'Yes, I think you and I agree on most things, don't we? Eh?'

'Maybe,' I said. 'But one of these days I have to go to Patagonia.'

'We don't say Patagonia,' said Borges. 'We say "Chubut" or "Santa Cruz". We never say Patagonia.'

'W H Hudson said Patagonia.'

'What did he know? Idle Days in Patagonia is not a bad book, but you notice there are no people in it — only birds and flowers. That's the way it is in Patugonia. There are no people there. The trouble with Hudson was that he lied all the time. That book is full of lies. But he believed his lies, and soon he couldn't tell the difference between what was true and what was false.' Borges thought a moment, then said, There is nothing in Patagonia. It's not the Sahara, but it's as close as you can get to it in Argentina. No, there is nothing in Patagonia.'

If so, I thought — if there is really nothing there — then it is the perfect place to end this book.