LA ISLA RADIO FM RADIO, ARGENTINA, 1985
TRANSLATED BY KIT MAUDE
GLORIA LÓPEZ LECUBE: In addition to writing and having your favorite books read to you, what do you feel compelled to do?
BORGES: I like to travel, I like to get a feeling for countries, and imagine them; very probably inaccurately because …
LÓPEZ LECUBE: So your companion describes them to you?
BORGES: Yes, I travel with María Kodama, she describes things to me and I imagine them, poorly of course.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Do you imagine them in color?
BORGES: Yes, usually, and I dream in color too, but when I dream in color the colors are too dazzling. In my waking hours, however, right now for instance, I’m surrounded by a fog, it’s bright, sometimes bluish, sometimes gray, and the shapes aren’t very well defined. The last color to stay with me was yellow. I wrote a book, The Gold of the Tigers, and in that book—it was a poem—I said, quite accurately I think, that the first color I ever saw was the yellow of a tiger’s fur. I used to spend hours and hours staring at the tigers at the zoo, and when I began to lose my sight the only color left to me was yellow, but now I’ve lost that too. The first colors I lost were black and red, which means that I am never in darkness. At first this was a little uncomfortable. Then I was left with the other colors; green, blue and yellow, but green and blue faded into brown and then the yellow disappeared. Now no colors are left, just light and movement.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: You once said that blindness was a gift bestowed upon you so that people would like you.
BORGES: Well, that’s how I try to think, but believe me …
LÓPEZ LECUBE: It didn’t make you angry?
BORGES: Believe me: the benefits of blindness have been greatly exaggerated. If I could see, I would never leave the house, I’d stay indoors reading the many books that surround me. Now they’re as far away from me as Iceland, although I’ve been to Iceland twice and I will never reach my books. And yet, at the same time, the fact that I can’t read obliges me …
LÓPEZ LECUBE: To connect with the world?
BORGES: No, not to connect with the world, no. It obliges me to dream and imagine. No, I get to know the world mainly through people.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: But it doesn’t make you angry? Doesn’t being blind make you feel impotent?
BORGES: No, well, privately it can, but my duty is to …
LÓPEZ LECUBE: When precisely do you feel that bronca3?
BORGES: No, bronca is too strong a word.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: You never feel bronca?
BORGES: I don’t know, bronca is lunfardo4 for anger isn’t it? I don’t know, no, not anger, sometimes I feel deflated, but that’s natural, and at my age … old age is a form of deflation too, but why be angry about it? It’s no one’s fault.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Do you remember what your face, body or hands look like?
BORGES: No.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Do you touch your face? With your hands?
BORGES: Well, of course, before or after shaving, but not much. Who knows what sort of old man is watching me through the mirror? I can’t see him, of course. I probably wouldn’t recognize him in the mirror (which I no longer have, of course); the last time I saw myself was around 1957. I fear that I’ve changed greatly; it’s a wrinkled landscape, no doubt.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: But wrinkles are also a sign of experience.
BORGES: Yes, for example, I used to have chestnut hair and now I suspect that I’m beyond baldness. [Laughs.]
LÓPEZ LECUBE: You have plenty of hair, you can’t complain.
BORGES: Yes, but it’s strange to be bald and have your hair messed up at the same time.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: You’re blind and yet when I speak to you I feel as though you’re looking at me, why would that be?
BORGES: Well, it’s a trick. As you describe it, it sounds like a facial lie.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: By me or you?
BORGES: No, as your voice is coming from over there, I have to look over there, and then you feel as though I’m looking at you. If you like, I can close my eyes, if that would make you feel more comfortable, I can’t tell the difference.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: No, I feel as though we were looking at each other.
BORGES: Well, if only that were true. Or maybe we are looking at each other; I think that our senses only detect so much.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: What do you feel when you’re walking down the street? Because you’re a kind of thermometer aren’t you? An aural thermometer, out among the people?
BORGES: I feel surrounded by friendship; generous, inexplicable friendship. People like me, I don’t know why. I can’t explain it; most people haven’t read what I’ve written. These friendships are mysterious but in a marvelous way, as though I were a relic. When I went to Texas, in ’61, with my mother, I found it strange that people took me seriously, I asked myself why that would be. I think that I’ve hit upon the answer; I thought, “Of course!” I was sixty-two, and people say that’s old, I don’t think I was really; to me I was young, but other people thought that I was. So, I was an old man, sixty-one years old, I was a poet, I was blind, and this made me something like a Milton, something like a Homer. And of course I was South American, which is exotic in Texas, to them I was a sort of Mexican, and these were all strong cards in my hand, cards in my favor, apart from what I’d written, which hadn’t yet been translated. So I felt confident in the fact that I was an old, blind, South American poet, but in Buenos Aires I hadn’t yet been noticed; they were very, very snobbish in Buenos Aires and only noticed me when they found out that I had been given a prize, the Formentor Prize, by European editors. So suddenly, they noticed that I was there. Up until then I had been Wells’s Invisible Man, which was more comfortable, but all of a sudden they started to pay attention to me.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: And what happened when they started to pay more attention to you? Especially given your characteristic shyness?
BORGES: My shyness has actually grown more acute over time, just like my terror of speaking in public: I was less afraid the first time than I am now because I’m a veteran, let’s say, of the panic.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Panic? How do you feel when you’re standing in front of an audience?
BORGES: Now, I’m terrified, but of course my blindness can be a defense: my friends will tell me that no one’s come, that the hall is empty, but I know they say this to ease my nerves. Then, sometimes, I’ll go out into the hall, hear the applause and realize that my friends have, generously, been lying to me and I start to feel that depression again.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: But you speak so easily …
BORGES: No, no, no, believe me, it’s so difficult, I find writing for myself especially difficult.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: How many canes do you have, Borges?
BORGES: Seven or eight; they’re quite rustic.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Are they gifts?
BORGES: Yes, they’re gifts.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: From people in the countries you visit or …?
BORGES: Well, some of them, and the rest are from María Kodama, they’re Arab shepherd’s crooks from nearby Canaan.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: And do you always dress like that, in a suit and tie?
BORGES: Yes, but I don’t know what color this suit is, because I’m blind.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Mmmm … I’m not going to tell you.
BORGES: You could tell me that it’s a harlequin costume and I could decide whether to believe you or not, but let’s hope not.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Actually it’s a bright red suit with a pink shirt and a pink tie …
BORGES: Really? A pink shirt? Isn’t that a little daring? I didn’t … I thought it was a white shirt.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: No, it’s not true, I’m joking; you’re dressed perfectly.
BORGES: Yes, I don’t think we have any pink shirts at home, I wouldn’t have allowed it.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: No, the shirt is beige, the suit is light brown and you’re wearing a beautiful Yves Saint Laurent beige an
d violet tie.
BORGES: Oh good, it sounded a little strange to me, but that’s fine.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Don’t worry.
BORGES: Violet?
LÓPEZ LECUBE: It’s lovely.
BORGES: How strange, I don’t like violet, but if the color looks good, I’m not … [Laughs.]
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Who dresses you, Fanny?
BORGES: No, María Kodama.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Oh, because you have a maid, a salteña5 woman, at home …
BORGES: Nooo …
LÓPEZ LECUBE: … who speaks to us journalists and says “The señor is sleeping” or “He’s sleeping.”
BORGES: That “salteña” is actually correntina.6
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Oh, I’m sorry, I thought she was from Salta.
BORGES: She’s from the province and speaks Guaraní, but I don’t understand a word of it …
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Borges, how do you imagine your death?
BORGES: Ah, I’m waiting for it very impatiently, I’m told that it will come but I feel as though it won’t, that I’m not going to die. Spinoza says that we all feel immortal, yes, but not as individuals, I assume, rather immortal in a pantheist way, in a divine way. When I get scared, when things aren’t going so well, I think to myself, “But why should I care what happens to a South American writer, from a lost country like the Republic of Argentina at the end of the twentieth century? What possible interest could that hold for me when I still have the adventure of death before me, which could be annihilation; that would be best, it could be oblivion …”
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Or it could be the start of an adventure …
BORGES: It could be, but I hope not. I hope it’s the end. You’re a pessimist. I was thinking about a story about precisely this, concerning a man who spends his whole life waiting hopefully to die and then it turns out that he continues living and he’s extremely disappointed. Eventually, however, he gets accustomed to his posthumous life, just as he got used to the previous one, which is invariably hard.
I don’t think that a day passes when we’re not both very happy and very unhappy, in that sense we’re like Joyce’s Ulysses. Ulysses, of course, takes place over twenty-four hours and over these twenty-four hours, everything that happened to Ulysses on his return to Ithaca occurs. That’s what the title Ulysses means. Read it because all of time fits inside that tunnel, that odyssey, and this is what happens to us every day. And at the moment, well, I feel quite happy talking to you, and it seems strange to me that what I’m saying is being recorded; the fact that people take me seriously is what surprises me the most. I don’t take myself seriously, but people do …
LÓPEZ LECUBE: To me, this image, this humility …
BORGES: No, no, it’s not humility, its lucidity. It’s not humility, I hate humility. I find false modesty horrible.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: You once said that you’d rather be someone else, not Jorge Luis Borges …
BORGES: Yes, that phrase is plagiarized; I found it in a book by Papini I read when I was young. It’s called El piloto ciego and says that he wanted to be someone else and of course he thinks that he’s the only one who wants to be someone else, but we all want to be other people.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: And you? Who do you want to be?
BORGES: [Pause.] No, I have to resign myself to being Borges, I can’t imagine any other destiny for myself.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: You can’t imagine being someone else?
BORGES: No, no. Or in another century either.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: In another country?
BORGES: In another country, yes. I’ve lived in Switzerland, I’d like to die in Switzerland, why not? I’m an alumnus of Geneva, my only degree is a baccalaureate from my school in Geneva, all the others are honorary; I was given those.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: And what profession in Switzerland?
BORGES: My only destiny is literary. I read a biography of Milton and another of Coleridge. It seems that they knew they were going to be writers right from the beginning.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: And when did you realize that?
BORGES: I think I have always known. Maybe because my father had an influence on me; I was raised in my father’s library, I went to school, but that hardly matters don’t you think? I was really raised in my father’s library. I always knew that that would be my destiny, being among books, reading them, but it would seem that I was influenced to write as well.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Have you ever tried to paint?
BORGES: No, not that I can remember. I’m very clumsy. I couldn’t.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: You don’t know how to do anything other than write?
BORGES: Well, at one point I knew how to swim, to ride a horse, use my body. Ride a bicycle [laughs] like everyone else. Apparently the height of aspiration in China right now is to own a wristwatch and a bicycle.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Which of your poems do you like the most? And why? The ones you remember as being most definitely yours? The ones in which you express yourself the most?
BORGES: No, I don’t like the ones about me. There’s a sonnet about Spinoza that I like. I wrote two sonnets about him: in one of them, a line I remember says “Someone …” no. “A man creates God in the darkness,”7 that man is Spinoza who engenders God, his God, made of an infinite substance whose tributes will be infinite. And I also wrote another sonnet about Spinoza. I remember two sonnets about me; one of them about the death of my grandfather Colonel Borges soon after Mitre’s surrender at La Verde.8 My grandfather killed himself after Mitre’s surrender. In 1874, the year my father was born, and Lugones,9 too; 1874–1938 …
LÓPEZ LECUBE: What a coincidence …
BORGES: Except that Lugones decided that he wanted to die; Lugones killed himself on an island in Tigre, as I’m sure you’ve been told. My father, well, my father had a hemiplegia, which was apparently incurable, and he said to me: “I’m not going to ask you to put a bullet through my head because you won’t do it, but I’ll manage.” Effectively, he refused to eat, except when he had a burning thirst and drank water. He refused all medication, didn’t let them give him injections, and after a few months he managed to die. So my father’s death was a kind of suicide too, but one that involved more suffering because my grandfather just advanced onto a line of rifles and well, two bullets from a Remington … My father, on the other hand had to wait several months refusing all food. The second form of suicide must have required more bravery.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: I get the feeling that you’re a kind of saint who doesn’t recognize his literary worth, saying that you’ve been given prizes for insignificant work …
BORGES: Yes, that’s true …
LÓPEZ LECUBE: But really you’re more …
BORGES: I’d like to be a saint, why not? [Laughs.] Why reject sainthood? I’ve tried to be an analytical man, which is enough isn’t it? No, I’m not a saint.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: But really …
BORGES: But actually, why not? If you see me as a saint right now, I have no problem with being a saint.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: For everything you’ve done for Argentine literature?
BORGES: Well, no, because that’s been minimal. I haven’t influenced anyone, and yet in contrast I owe so much to so many writers from the past.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: But how is it that you think you haven’t had any influence?
BORGES: No, I owe much to Groussac,10 I owe much to Lugones, I owe much to Capdevila,11 I owe much to Fernández Moreno,12 without a doubt. Almafuerte,13 I don’t know if I’m worthy of him. The only man of genius Argentina has produced is Almafuerte, the author of “El misionero,” Carriego could recite “El misionero” from memory. My first contact with pure literature was one Sunday night with Carriego, who was an unremarkable-looking man, at home, standing and reciting “El misionero” in quite a booming voice. I didn’t understand a word, but I felt that I had discovered something new, and that new thing was poetry.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: The power …
BORGES: Yes, it came to me from
Almafuerte, but through Carriego who recited him very well. I remember: “Yo deliré de hambre muchos días y no dormí de frío muchas noches, / para salvar a Dios de los reproches de su hambruna humana y sus noches frías.”14 That’s from the end of “El misionero.”
LÓPEZ LECUBE: If we were in your library right now, what poem would you ask me to read to you?
BORGES: The poem “Acquainted with the Night” by Robert Frost, or we could open the book La fiesta del mundo by Arturo Capdevila. I’d tell you to open it anywhere and just start reading to surprise me. Especially the poem “Aulo Gelio” which has some admirable verses that no one remembers any more: “(Si los Lacedemonios al combate, iban a son de lira o son de flauta, ¿en cuántas drachmas cotizó Corinto? La noche de la Laís la cortesana),”15 that’s by Capdevila, it’s admirable. And yet it seems that he’s been forgotten because people tend to forget easily, or they remember stupid things like a football match, for example, or the founding fathers. I’m a descendent of the founding fathers, but I don’t know if they’re worth much thought. We have a history, but I don’t know if it’s filled with men of ideas, equestrian social strata, rather.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Why shouldn’t you be described as a genius?
BORGES: There’s no reason why I should be. What have I written? Transcriptions of writing by other people.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: But it’s not just what you’ve written, it’s how you’ve exposed the Argentine being, describing what’s happening …
BORGES: No, not at all, I haven’t done anything …
LÓPEZ LECUBE: How you got involved with political events, how you spoke out about the military dictatorship.
BORGES: Well, because I was getting such sad news, and also I knew that I was in a fairly untouchable position. I could speak out against the military, against the war, without being in any danger.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: And you did.
BORGES: And I did.
LÓPEZ LECUBE: Another person might not have.
BORGES: But it was my duty, I did it for ethical reasons. I haven’t read a newspaper in my life; news reaches me indirectly but surely. For example the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo16 came to my house, maybe their children were terrorists, maybe they got what they deserved, but the tears of those women were sincere, they weren’t acting, they weren’t hysterical, and I saw this, and so I spoke out. It was my duty, many others did too … yes.