A Reader on Reading

One evening, over the usual colorless pasta at the restaurant of the Hotel Dora, he told me that he believed, with literary faith, in what he called “the mystery of women and the heroic destiny of men.” He felt unable to re-create that mystery on the page: the few women in his short stories are cogs in the plot, not characters in their own right, except perhaps the avenging Emma Zunz, whose argument was given to him by a woman, Cecilia Ingenieros. The two rival women artists in “The Duel” (a story that properly acknowledges its debt to Henry James) are sexless except in name, and so is the old woman in “The Elderly Lady.” The shared woman in “The Intruder” is little more than a thing the rival brothers have to kill in order to remain faithful to each other. The strangest of Borges’s fictional women, Ulrica, in the eponymous story, is less a woman than a phantom: she, a young Norwegian student, gives herself to the elderly Colombian professor Javier Otarola, whom she calls Sigurd and who in turn calls her Brynhild. First she appears willing, then cold, and Otarola says to her, “Brynhild, you walk as if you wished a sword between the two of us.” The story ends: “There was no sword between us. Time drifted away like sand. Love flowed, secular in the shadows, and I possessed for the first and last time the image of Ulrica.”

Borges’s men, on the other hand, fulfill their heroic destinies with stoic determination, hardly ever knowing whether they have achieved anything, a few times aware that they have failed. The dreaming magus of “The Circular Ruins,” who realizes that he too is someone’s dream; the laborious novelist Herbert Quain, who admits that his work belongs “not to art, but to the mere history of art;” the metaphysical detective Erik Lönrrot, who goes willingly to his own death; the bull-faced prisoner in the labyrinth waiting patiently for his redeemer to slay him; the playwright Jaromir Hladík, for whom God performs a secret miracle to allow him to complete a play before dying; the sedentary Juan Dahlmann, who, in “The South,” is suddenly offered an epic death to crown his quiet life — all these were the men whose fate Borges felt he somehow shared. “Plato, who like all men, was unhappy …” began one of his lectures at the University of Buenos Aires. I think Borges felt this to be the inescapable truth.

Borges had wished for a simple, uncomplicated union; fate allotted him entanglements that seemed plotted by Henry James, whose arguments, though he much admired their invention, he found at times too psychologically convoluted. His last attempt at marriage, to María Kodama, apparently took place on 26 April 1986, less than two months before his death, through a license issued in absentia by the mayor of a small Paraguayan town. I say “apparently” because the procedures were shrouded in confusing secrecy, and since Borges’s marriage to Elsa had never been annulled, it would seem that in marrying María he might have been guilty of bigamy. María had been one of his students in the Anglo-Saxon courses and later, in the sixties, had begun to accompany him on his travels. Her marriage to Borges surprised most people and angered many who felt that she had deliberately distanced the old man from his friends. The truth is that Borges’s friends felt jealous of anyone for whom Borges showed affection or interest, and Borges, with the willfulness of Jehovah, allowed these jealousies to flourish.

Now, in his eighties, with María in charge, Borges no longer dined at the Bioys’, no longer met with many of his old acquaintances: all this was blamed on María, never on Borges’s mutability. No one recalled that over the years Borges had often erased a name from a poem’s dedication and replaced it, in a childlike switch of affections, with that of another, more recent recipient: the new erasures were attributed to María. Even the fact of his dying in Geneva, far from his eternal Buenos Aires, was blamed on María’s jealousy. A day or so before his death, Borges called Bioy from Geneva. Bioy said that he sounded infinitely sad. “What are you doing in Geneva? Come home,” Bioy said to him. “I can’t,” Borges answered. “And anyway, any place is good enough to die in.” Bioy said that in spite of their friendship, he felt, as a writer, hesitant to touch such a good exit line.