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
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
Estela Canto’s first encounter with Borges was, from her point of view, far from a