A Reader on Reading

“Like the Druzes, like the moon, like death, like next week, the distant past forms part of those things that can be enriched by ignorance,” Borges had written in “I, a Jew.” In such a state, in which good and evil are swept away with the same indifference, the events of the past will be reinvented and a false memory will be set up as truth. This is what happens in one of his later stories, “Utopia of a Man Who Is Tired.” Here Borges describes a nightmare set in the future, in which he is led by a guide who helpfully explains to him the brave new world. At one point Borges sees a domed tower. “That is the crematorium,” his guide points out. “Inside is the lethal chamber. They say it was invented by a philanthropist whose name, I believe, was Adolf Hitler.”

A dignified, self-effacing, intellectually honest man, Borges wished not to be remembered; he hoped that a few of his writings would survive, but to his own fame he was indifferent. He longed for personal oblivion (“to be forever but not to have been,” he says in a poem) and yet feared the capricious memory of History, or, rather, the capriciousness with which we tend to rewrite the facts of History to suit our meanest, basest impulses. That is why he despised politics (“the vilest of all human activities”) and believed in the truth of fiction and in our ability to tell true stories.

Faking It

“Please your Majesty,” said the Knave. “I didn’t write it, and

they can’t prove that I did: there’s no name signed at the end.”

“If you didn’t sign it,” said the King, “that only makes the

matter worse. You must have meant some mischief, or else you’d

have signed your name like an honest man.”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 12

ON 29 OCTOBER 1932, THE Buenos Aires newspaper Crítica printed the following announcement in the abominable style to which its readers were accustomed:

“Crítica will publish the most thrilling detective novel. Its plot is based on events that took place in Buenos Aires. From a real-life occurrence that some time ago deeply shook the public of this city, the author has constructed a moving story in which the mystery becomes denser and denser with every page of El enigma de la calle Arcos [The Riddle of Arcos Street]. Who killed the wife of Galván, the chess player? Or was it a strange form of suicide? How did the criminal vanish after committing the deed? How did the criminal leave the victim’s room without forcing a single lock? The pilgrimage of a chestful of jewelry. Beginning tomorrow, Sunday, in all our editions.”

The success of the serial, which appeared under the impossible name of Sauli Lostal, led to its publication in book form a year later. On 4 November 1933, an advertisement in the same paper announced that El enigma de la calle Arcos was now available for sale. “The first great Argentinean detective novel. It stands apart completely from the old models of the genre, grisly and lacking verisimilitude. Full of emotion and realism, of spine-tingling and interest, it is a true accomplishment. A thick volume with illustrations. And only 95 cents.” The book, published by the Am-Bass press, numbered 245 pages. The illustrator was Pedro Rojas, whose style, to judge from the cover, matched that of the writing.

It is very difficult to give an English-speaking reader a sense of the atrocious style. Let me try:

Moments later in the chamber adjacent to the guards’ office, Oscar Lara and Suárez Lerma—the latter enjoying still a few sips of mate — were conversing about the motive that had led there, on such an unsettled night, the journalist. It did not take long for the assistant to convey to him the facts that the other was jotting down with special care. They had just finished this task when the tinkle of the telephone bell was heard. The assistant Lara approached the instrument, unhooked the receiver, pressed it against his ear and between the police official and the person who had called there commenced the following dialogue, later reconstructed by the speakers themselves.

Thirty years after the appearance of the novel, in the magazine Filología, the critic Enrique Anderson Imbert published an article titled “A New Contribution to the Study of Borges’s Sources.” In it, Anderson Imbert suggested that Borges had used El enigma de la calle Arcos as the model for his “El acercamiento a Almotásim” (The Approach to al-Mu’tasim”), a fiction that purports to be the review of a detective novel of that name, written by the Indian lawyer Mir Bahadur Ali. According to Borges, the illustrated original was published in Bombay in 1932 and reprinted by Victor Gollancz in London two years later, with an introduction by Dorothy L. Sayers and the omission (“perhaps charitable” says Borges) of the illustrations.