A Reader on Reading

ONE AFTERNOON IN 1966, in Buenos Aires, I was asked to dinner at the flat of the writer Estela Canto. A woman of about fifty, a little deaf, with wonderful, artificially red hair and large, intensely myopic eyes (she coquettishly refused to wear glasses in public), she stumbled through the small, grimy kitchen putting together a meal of tinned peas and sausages, shouting bits of Keats and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. To her, Borges had dedicated one of his finest short stories, “The Aleph,” and she would let no one forget it. Borges, however, did not reciprocate the memory. At least when I mentioned her name and told him I would be seeing her, he said nothing: someone told me later that for Borges, silence was a form of courtesy.

By the time I met Canto, her books were no longer considered part of the Argentinean literary scene. In the wake of the so-called Latin American boom that had launched Manuel Puig’s generation, editors no longer wanted to publish her, and her novels now sold at remainder prices in stores as dusty as her kitchen. Long ago, in the forties, she had written essays in the style of William Hazlitt (whom she admired) for several of the literary periodicals of the time, from the Anales de Buenos Aires, which Borges edited for a while, to Sur. Her realistic stories, which echoed (she thought) Leonid Andreyev’s, had been published in the literary supplements of the newspapers La Nación and La Prensa, and her novels, which hesitated between psychology and symbolism, had been well reviewed, if not read, by the Buenos Aires intelligentsia. According to Canto, her downfall was caused by her being too clever. With her brother Patricio Canto, an excellent translator who discreetly encouraged rumors of sibling incest, she devised a plan to win a literary contest juried by Borges, the novelist Eduardo Mallea, and the short-story writer and critic Carmen Gándara. The two Cantos would write a novel with something to please everyone: a quotation from Dante for Borges, a philosophical discussion on art, literature, and morals for Mallea, a line by Gándara for Gándara. They hid behind the name of a literary woman in whose loyalty they believed and submitted the manuscript under the title Luz era su nombre (Light Was Her Name), which was unanimously awarded the first prize. Unfortunately, artistic friendships being what they are, the literary woman betrayed them, the plot was revealed, and the conspiring siblings were ostracized from every literary salon in Buenos Aires. Partly out of spite and partly out of a misguided fondness for Russian literature, the Cantos joined the Argentinean Communist Party (which, Ernesto Sábato once said, was indistinguishable from the Conservative Party because most of its senile members attended its meetings asleep). Communism, to Borges, who in his regretted youth had written a book of poems in praise of the Bolshevik Revolution, was anathema.

During the dinner, Canto asked me if I would like to see the manuscript of “The Aleph” (which twenty years later she would sell at Sotheby’s for more than twenty-seven thousand dollars). I said I would. From a grease-aureoled brown folder she pulled out seventeen pages meticulously composed “in the handwriting of a dwarf” (as Borges once described his minuscule, unattached letters), with a few minor corrections and alternative versions. She pointed to the dedication inscribed on the last page. Then she reached over the table, took my hand (I was eighteen and terrified), and put it to her cheek. “Feel these bones,” she ordered. “You can tell I was beautiful then.”

“Then” was 1944, the year Canto met Borges at the house of Adolfo Bioy Casares and his wife, Silvina Ocampo. Ocampo, a fine poet and better short-story writer, was the sister of Victoria Ocampo, the rich and aristocratic founder of the magazine Sur. Bioy, eight years younger than Silvina, was the heir to one of the largest dairy empires in Argentina. His mother’s name, Marta, became the dairy trademark La Martona; Borges and Bioy’s first collaboration had been a series of ads for La Martona yogurt.

Estela Canto’s first encounter with Borges was, from her point of view, far from a coup de foudre. “And yet,” she added with a nostalgic smile, “neither was Beatrice much impressed with Dante.”