“He wanted to write a great book. George Bernard Shaw told him to use a lot of semicolons. Lawrence set out to be exhaustive, believing that if it was monumentally ponderous it would be regarded as great. But it’s dull, and there’s no humor in it. How can a book on the Arabs not be funny?”
“Huckleberry Finn is a great book,” said Borges. “And funny. But the ending is no good. Tom Sawyer appears and it becomes bad. And there’s Nigger Jim”—Borges had begun to search the air with his hands—“yes, we had a slave market here at Retiro. My family wasn’t very wealthy. We had only five or six slaves. But some families had thirty or forty.”
I had read that a quarter of Argentina’s population had once been black. There were no blacks in Argentina now. I asked Borges why this was so.
“It is a mystery. But I remember seeing many of them.” Borges looked so youthful that it was easy to forget that he was as old as the century. I could not vouch for his reliability, but he was the most articulate witness I had met on my trip. “They were cooks, gardeners, handymen,” he said. “I don’t know what happened to them.”
“People say they died of TB.”
“Why didn’t they die of TB in Montevideo? It’s just over there, eh? There is another story, equally silly, that they fought the Indians, and the Indians and the Negroes killed each other. That would have been in 1850 or so, but it isn’t true. In 1914, there were still many Negroes in Buenos Aires—they were very common. Perhaps I should say 1910, to be sure.” He laughed suddenly. “They didn’t work very hard. It was considered wonderful to have Indian blood, but black blood is not so good a thing, eh? There are some prominent families in Buenos Aires that have it—a touch of the tar brush, eh? My uncle used to tell me, ‘Jorge, you’re as lazy as a nigger after lunch.’ You see, they didn’t do much work in the afternoon. I don’t know why there are so few here, but in Uruguay or Brazil—in Brazil you might run into a white man now and then, eh? If you’re lucky, eh? Ha!”
Borges was laughing in a pitying, self-amused way. His face lit up.
“They thought they were natives! I overheard a black woman saying to an Argentine woman, ‘Well, at least we didn’t come here on a ship!’ She meant that she considered the Spanish to be immigrants. ‘At least we didn’t come here on a ship!’ ”
“When did you hear this?”
“So many years ago,” said Borges. “But the Negroes were good soldiers. They fought in the War of Independence.”
“So they did in the United States,” I said. “But a lot were on the British side. The British promised them their freedom for serving in the British infantry. One southern regiment was all black—Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopians, it was called. They ended up in Canada.”
“Our blacks won the Battle of Cerrito. They fought in the war against Brazil. They were very good infantrymen. The gauchos fought on horseback, the Negroes didn’t ride. There was a regiment—the Sixth. They called it, not the regiment of Mulattos and Blacks, but in Spanish ‘the Regiment of Brownies and Darkies.’ So as not to offend them. In Martin Fierro, they are called ‘men of humble color.’ … Well, enough, enough. Let’s read Arthur Gordon Pym.”
“Which chapter? How about the one where the ship approaches full of corpses and birds?”
“No, I want the last one. About the dark and the light.”
I read the last chapter, where the canoe drifts into the Antarctic, the water growing warmer and then very hot, the white fall of ashes, the vapor, the appearance of the white giant. Borges interrupted from time to time, saying in Spanish, “That is enchanting”; “That is lovely”; and “How beautiful!”
When I finished, he said, “Read the last chapter but one.”
I read Chapter 24: Pym’s escape from the island, the pursuit of the maddened savages, the vivid description of vertigo. That long terrifying passage delighted Borges, and he clapped his hands at the end.
Borges said, “Now how about some Kipling? Shall we puzzle out ‘Mrs. Bathurst’ and try to see if it is a good story?”
I said, “I must tell you that I don’t like ‘Mrs. Bathurst’ at all.”
“Fine. It must be bad. Plain Tales from the Hills then. Read ‘Beyond the Pale.’ ”
I read “Beyond the Pale,” and when I got to the part where Bisesa sings a love song to Trejago, her English lover, Borges interrupted, reciting,
Alone upon the housetops, to the North
I turn and watch the lightning in the sky,—
The glamour of thy footsteps in the North,
Come back to me, Beloved, or I die!
“My father used to recite that one,” said Borges. When I had finished the story, he said, “Now you choose one.”
I read him the opium smoker’s story, “The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows.”
“How sad that is,” said Borges. “It is terrible. The man can do nothing. But notice how Kipling repeats the same lines. It has no plot at all, but it is lovely.” He touched his suit jacket. “What time is it?” He drew out his pocket watch and touched the hands. “Nine-thirty—we should eat.”
As I was putting the Kipling book back into its place—Borges insisted that the books must be returned to their exact place—I said, “Do you ever reread your own work?”
“Never. I am not happy with my work. The critics have greatly exaggerated its importance. I would rather read”—he lunged at the bookshelves and made a gathering motion with his hands—“real writers. Ha!” He turned to me and said, “Do you reread my work?”
“Yes. ‘Pierre Menard’ …”
“That was the first story I ever wrote. I was thirty-six or thirty-seven at the time. My father said, ‘Read a lot, write a lot, and don’t rush into print’—those were his exact words. The best story I ever wrote was ‘The Intruder’ and ‘South’ is also good. It’s only a few pages. I’m lazy—a few pages and I’m finished. But ‘Pierre Menard’ is a joke, not a story.”
“I used to give my Chinese students ‘The Wall and the Books’ to read.”
“Chinese students? I suppose they thought it was full of howlers. I think it is. It is an unimportant piece, hardly worth reading. Let’s eat.”
He got his cane from the sofa in the parlor and we went out, down in the narrow elevator, and through the wroughtiron gates. The restaurant was around the corner—I could not see it, but Borges knew the way. So the blind man led me. Walking down this Buenos Aires street with Borges was like being led through Alexandria by Cavafy, or through Lahore by Kipling. The city belonged to him, and he had had a hand in inventing it.
The restaurant was full this Good Friday night, and it was extremely noisy. But as soon as Borges entered, tapping his cane, feeling his way through the tables he obviously knew well, a hush fell upon the diners. Borges was recognized, and at his entrance all talking and eating ceased. It was both a reverential and curious silence, and it was maintained until Borges took his seat and gave the waiter our order.
We had hearts of palm, and fish, and grapes. I drank wine, Borges stuck to water. He cocked his head sideways to eat, trying to spear the sections of palm with his fork. He tried a spoon next, and then despairingly used his fingers.
“Do you know the big mistake that people make when they try to film Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde?” he said. “They use the same actor for both men. They should use two different actors. That is what Stevenson intended. Jekyll was two men. And you don’t find out until the end that it is the same man. You should get that hammer stroke at the end. Another thing. Why do directors always make Hyde a womanizer? He was actually very cruel.”
I said, “Hyde tramples on a child and Stevenson describes the sound of the bones breaking.”
“Yes, Stevenson hated cruelty, but he had nothing against physical passion.”
“Do you read modern authors?”
“I never cease to read them. Anthony Burgess is good—a very generous man, by the way. We are the same—Borges, Burgess. It’s the same name.”
“Any others?”
> “Robert Browning,” said Borges, and I wondered if he was pulling my leg. “Now, he should have been a short story writer. If he had, he would have been greater than Henry James, and people would still read him.” Borges had started on his grapes. “The food is good in Buenos Aires, don’t you think?”
“In most ways, it seems a civilized place.”
He looked up. “That may be so, but there are bombs every day.”
“They don’t mention them in the paper.”
“They’re afraid to print the news.”
“How do you know there are bombs?”
“Easy. I hear them,” he said.
Indeed, three days later there was a fire that destroyed much of the new color television studio that had been built for the World Cup broadcasts. This was called “an electrical fault.” Five days later two trains were bombed in Lomas de Zamora and Bernal. A week later a government minister was murdered; his corpse was found in a Buenos Aires street, and pinned to it was a note reading, A gift from the Montoneros.
“But the government is not so bad,” said Borges. “Videla is a well-meaning military man.” Borges smiled and said slowly, “He is not very bright, but at least he is a gentleman.”
“What about Perón?”
“Perón was a scoundrel. My mother was in prison under Perón. My sister was in prison. My cousin. Perón was a bad leader and, also, I suspect, a coward. He looted the country. His wife was a prostitute.”
“Evita?”
“A common prostitute.”
We had coffee. Borges called the waiter and said in Spanish, “Help me to the toilet.” He said to me, “I have to go and shake the bishop’s hand. Ha!”
Walking back through the streets, he stopped at a hotel entrance and gave the metal awning posts two whacks with his cane. Perhaps he was not as blind as he pretended, perhaps it was a familiar landmark. He had not swung timidly. He said, “That’s for luck.”
As we turned the corner into Maipú, he said, “My father used to say, ‘What a rubbish story the Jesus story is. That this man was dying for the sins of the world. Who could believe that?’ Is it nonsense, isn’t it?”
I said, “That’s a timely thought for Good Friday.”
“I hadn’t thought of that! Oh, yes!” He laughed so hard he startled two passersby.
As he fished out his door key, I asked him about Patagonia.
“I have been there,” he said. “But I don’t know it well. I’ll tell you this, though. It’s a dreary place. A very dreary place.”
“I was planning to take the train tomorrow.”
“Don’t go tomorrow. Come and see me. I like your reading.”
“I suppose I can go to Patagonia next week.”
“It’s dreary,” said Borges. He had got the door open, and now he shuffled to the elevator and pulled open the metal gates. “The gate of the hundred sorrows,” he said, and entered chuckling.
In Patagonia
IT HAD BEEN MY INTENTION TO ARRIVE IN ESQUEL ON HOLY Saturday and to wake on Easter Sunday and watch the sunrise. But Easter had passed. This was no special date, and I had overslept. I got up and went outside. It was a sunny breezy day—the sort of weather that occurs every day of the year in that part of Patagonia.
I walked to the station. The engine that had taken me to Esquel looked derelict on the siding, as if it would never run again. But it had a hundred more years in it, I was sure. I walked beyond it, past the one-story houses to the one-roomed huts, to where the road turned into a dusty track. There was a rocky slope, some sheep, the rest bushes and weeds. If you looked closely you could see small pink and yellow flowers on these bushes. The wind stirred them. I went closer. They shook. But they were pretty. Behind my head was a great desert.
The Patagonian paradox was this: to be here, it helped to be a miniaturist, or else interested in enormous empty spaces. There was no intermediate zone of study. Either the vastness of the desert space, or the sight of a tiny flower. You had to choose between the tiny or the vast.
The paradox diverted me. My arrival did not matter. It was the journey that counted. And I would follow Johnson’s advice. Early in his career he had translated the book of a Portuguese traveler in Abyssinia. In his preface, Johnson wrote, “He has amused the reader with no romantick absurdity, or incredible fictions; whatever he relates, whether true or not, is at least probable, and he who tells nothing exceeding the bounds of probability, has a right to demand that they should believe him who cannot contradict him.”
The sheep saw me. The younger ones kicked their heels. When I looked again, they were gone, and I was an ant on a foreign anthill. It was impossible to verify the size of anything in this space. There was no path through the bushes, but I could look over them, over this ocean of thorns which looked so mild at a distance, so cruel nearby, so like misshapen nosegays close up. It was perfectly quiet and odorless.
I knew I was nowhere, but the most surprising thing of all was that I was still in the world after all this time, on a dot at the lower part of the map. The landscape had a gaunt expression, but I could not deny that it had readable features and that I existed in it. This was a discovery—the look of it. I thought: Nowhere is a place.
Down there the Patagonian valley deepened to gray rock, wearing its eons’ stripes and split by floods. Ahead, there was a succession of hills, whittled and fissured by the wind, which now sang in the bushes. The bushes shook with this song. They stiffened again and were silent. The sky was clear blue. A puff of cloud, white as a quince flower, carried a small shadow from town, or from the South Pole. I saw it approach. It rippled across the bushes and passed over me, a brief chill, and then went rucking east. There were no voices here. There was this, what I saw; and, though beyond it were mountains and glaciers and albatrosses and Indians, there was nothing here to speak of, nothing here to delay me further. Only the Patagonian paradox: the vast space, the very tiny blossoms of the sagebrush’s cousin. The nothingness itself, a beginning for some intrepid traveler, was an ending for me. I had arrived in Patagonia, and I laughed when I remembered I had come here from Boston, on the subway train that people took to work.
The Kingdom by the Sea
English Traits
ONCE, FROM BEHIND A CLOSED DOOR, I HEARD AN ENGLISHWOMAN exclaim with real pleasure, “They are funny, the Yanks!” And I crept away and laughed to think that an English person was saying such a thing. And I thought: They wallpaper their ceilings! They put little knitted bobble hats on their soft-boiled eggs to keep them warm! They don’t give you bags in supermarkets! They say sorry when you step on their toes! Their government makes them get a hundred-dollar license every year for watching television! They issue drivers’ licenses that are valid for thirty or forty years—mine expires in the year 2011! They charge you for matches when you buy cigarettes! They smoke on buses! They drive on the left! They spy for the Russians! They say “nigger” and “Jewboy” without flinching! They call their houses Holmleigh and Sparrow View! They sunbathe in their underwear! They don’t say “You’re welcome”! They still have milk bottles and milkmen, and junk dealers with horse-drawn wagons! They love candy and Lucozade and leftovers called bubble-and-squeak! They live in Barking and Dorking and Shellow Bowells! They have amazing names, like Mr. Eatwell and Lady Inkpen and Major Twaddle and Miss Tosh! And they think we’re funny?
The longer I lived in London, the more I came to see how much of Englishness was bluff and what wet blankets they could be. You told an Englishman you were planning a trip around Britain and he said, “It sounds about as much fun as chasing a mouse around a pisspot.” They could be deeply dismissive and self-critical. “We’re awful,” they said. “This country is hopeless. We’re never prepared for anything. Nothing works properly.” But being self-critical in this way was also a tactic for remaining ineffectual. It was surrender.
And when an English person said “we,” he did not mean himself—he meant the classes above and below him, the people he thought should be making decis
ions, and the people who should be following. “We” meant everyone else.
“Mustn’t grumble” was the most English of expressions. English patience was mingled inertia and despair. What was the use? But Americans did nothing but grumble! Americans also boasted. “I do some pretty incredible things” was not an English expression. “I’m fairly keen” was not American. Americans were show-offs—it was part of our innocence—we often fell on our faces; the English seldom showed off, so they seldom looked like fools. The English liked especially to mock the qualities in other people they admitted they didn’t have themselves. And sometimes they found us truly maddening. In America you were admired for getting ahead, elbowing forward, rising, pushing in. In England this behavior was hated—it was the way “wops” acted, it was “Chinese fire drill,” it was disorder. But making a quick buck was also a form of queue jumping, and getting ahead was a form of rudeness: A “bounder” was a person who had moved out of his class. It was not a question of forgiving such things; it was, simply, that they were never forgotten. The English had long, merciless memories.
Rambler
AS SOON AS I HAD LEFT DEAL I SAW A LOW, FLAT CLOUD, iron-gray and then blue, across the Channel, like a stubborn fogbank. The closer I got to Dover, the more clearly it was defined, now like a long battleship and now like a flotilla and now like an offshore island. I walked on and saw it was a series of headlands. It was France, looking like Brewster across Cape Cod Bay.
Ahead on the path a person was coming toward me, down a hill four hundred yards away; but whether it was a man or a woman I could not tell. Some minutes later I saw her scarf and her skirt, and for more minutes on those long slopes we strode toward each other under the big sky. We were the only people visible in the landscape—there was no one behind either of us. She was a real walker—arms swinging, flat shoes, no dog, no map. It was lovely, too: blue sky above, the sun in the southeast, and a cloudburst hanging like a broken bag in the west. I watched this woman, this fairly old woman, in her warm scarf and heavy coat, a bunch of flowers in her hand—I watched her come on, and I thought, I am not going to say hello until she does.