A Reader on Reading

Borges suggested that Dante wrote the Commedia in order to be, for a moment, with Beatrice. It is not impossible that in some way, in order to be with a woman, any woman of the many he desired, to be privy to her mystery, to be more than just a wordsmith, to be or to try to be a lover and be loved for his own sake and not for that of his inventions, Borges created the Aleph, again and again, throughout his work. In that imaginary all-encompassing place where everything possible and impossible is happening, or in the arms of the man who is all men, she, the unattainable, might be his, or if she still would not be his, she would at least not be his under circumstances less painful to bear because he himself had invented them.

But as Borges the master craftsman knew very well, the laws of invention won’t bend any more easily than those of the world called real. Teodelina Villar in “The Zahir,” Beatriz Viterbo in “The Aleph,” do not love the intellectual narrator, Borges, who loves them. For the sake of the story, these women are unworthy Beatrices—Teodelina is a snob, a slave to fashion, “less preoccupied with beauty than with perfection;” Beatriz is a society belle obscenely infatuated with her obnoxious cousin — because, for the fiction to work, the miracle (the revelation of the Aleph, or of the memorable zahir) must take place among blind and unworthy mortals, the narrator included.

Borges once remarked that the destiny of the modern hero is not to reach Ithaca or obtain the Holy Grail. Perhaps his sorrow, in the end, came from realizing that instead of granting him the much longed-for and sublime erotic encounter, his craft demanded that he fail: Beatriz was not to be Beatrice, he was not to be Dante, he was to be only Borges, a fumbling dream-lover, still unable, even in his own imagination, to conjure up the one fulfilling and almost perfect woman of his waking dreams.

Borges and the

Longed-For Jew

“Well! What are you?” said the Pigeon. “I can see

you’re trying to invent something!”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 5

IN 1944, AGENTS OF HIMMLER’S secret service began arriving in Madrid to set up an escape route out of Germany for the defeated Nazis. Two years later, for reasons of security, the operation was moved to Buenos Aires, where it established itself inside the Presidential Palace, with the accord of the recently elected president, Juan Domingo Perón. Argentina had remained neutral during World War II, but most of its military had supported Hitler and Mussolini. The rich upper classes, noted for their antisemitism, though they opposed Perón in almost everything else, remained silent about his pro-Nazi activities. In the meantime, rumors of what was taking place began to circulate within the Jewish community. In 1948, to stifle the incipient protests of the Argentinean Jews, Perón decided to appoint an ambassador to the newly created state of Israel and chose my father, Pablo Manguel, for the post. Because my father was Jewish (the family had arrived from Europe and settled in one of Baron Hirsch’s colonies in the Argentinean interior), there was much opposition to his nomination, especially from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, traditionally staffed by Catholic nationalists. A Vatican-approved candidate was proposed, but Perón, who realized how much he needed the Jewish support, held firm. In later years, and in spite of the (still) growing documentary evidence, Perón would deny ever having helped the Nazi cause and held up my father’s nomination as proof of his Jewish sympathies. Today we know that among Perón’s most notorious protégés were Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele.