The Lesson of the Master. Литагент HarperCollins USD

jotting in the peace calendar for this year tells that on 11 June Borges and I had worked on Foreword to the First Edition of his 1951 short story ‘Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth’, and that that evening we took a taxi out to his publishers in the two thousand block of Alsina to turn in the last poem of his new book Elogio de la sombra – In Praise of Darkness. An emendation added later in brackets records that ‘more material was turned in after this date.’ This was his fifth book of poems, he was to write in his foreword to the volume later that month, and to ‘the mirrors, mazes, and swords which my resigned reader already foresees, two new themes have been added: old age and ethics.’ As it turned out, there was something else in the book too – a grain of sand that would make a pearl. This was a story, not a prose poem, no more than three or four pages long about a man who hides out in a cellar for nine years.

      Borges’s lament about not being able to write down short stories that he was forever working out in his head did not end after our Palermo excursion. Over the next months these stories became a more and more frequent topic of conversation on our walks to and from the library. At some point – but this was much later on – I began keeping track of them; by then the list I drew up numbered eight. That autumn (it was the southern hemisphere) I no longer just lent a silent ear but began a subtle campaign of egging him on, shoring up his confidence, and proving to him that his writing days were far from over. I had two arrows in my quiver. One was the five-page story ‘The Intruder’ that he had dictated to his ancient mother three years earlier; the other was the recent ‘Pedro Salvadores’, the man in the cellar.

      ‘Sure you can,’ I’d point out. ‘After all, the difference in length between “The Intruder” and any of your other stories is a bare page or two.’

      This was a slight exaggeration, perhaps, but he never opposed the argument. On the contrary, my persuasiveness made him open up, and he began using me as a sounding board for yet another tale whose plot he now wove aloud to me. And he’d ask my opinion of specific elements – should he add another incident? Were the main characters different enough?

      I never tried to supply answers but would raise more questions. ‘What are the alternatives?’ I kept wanting him to tell me.

      He’d ponder, come up with an idea, and we’d kick it around. I knew he was girding himself and working up to something; and I was determined to feed his mood whilst not letting him off the hook.

      Then, at his doorstep: ‘No, I fear it’s too late in the day; I don’t think I could manage it.’

      ‘Tommyrot,’ I’d say. His Edwardian slang, as I called it, was one of our pet jokes. ‘Why not try? It’s a good story. It’s only a matter of writing “Pedro Salvadores” twice. Eight pages. You can do it.’

      And on and on it went for several weeks. One day, in the midst of this, Manuel Peyrou rang from La Prensa, where he worked as an editor, to tell Borges that the paper was celebrating its centenary later in the year and was inviting every Argentine writer of note to contribute to a succession of special Sunday supplements. Here was another turning point. Not long after this, Borges took a poem around to them. But the next day, rather than feeling good about it, he was actually glum.

      ‘I don’t think a poem’s what they had in mind,’ he said.

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘I think they’d like a story.’

      ‘Of course they’d like a story. We’d all like a story. Why not write them one?’

      I never for a moment believed La Prensa was unhappy with his poem; certainly Peyrou knew that Borges had more or less given up writing stories since 1953. This was Borges having a pang of conscience. La Prensa had offered him the same fee whether they got a poem or a story out of him, and he felt he had cheated them. Whatever the truth of the matter, the mysterious strands were coming together fast now.

      It became an open secret at the library that Borges was dictating a full-length short story; he knew I knew, but superstitiously he refused to breathe a word of it to me. He didn’t have to, as the team of secretaries gave me daily reports. It went through two or three drafts and took him two or three weeks to write. He finally came clean when he’d finished, but he made no offer to show me the result. I bided my time.

      A few days later I lied and told him I was short of money. Reaching for the billfold he kept in his inside breast pocket, he asked how much I needed. No, I laughed, what I had in mind was the new story, which I wanted to translate and sell to the New Yorker, where our work had been appearing. This took place on a Monday. All right, he said, but not that day. I would have to wait until Friday.

      There was no earthly reason for his not handing me the story then and there, except that as the remote possibility did exist that Friday might never come round he could actually trick himself into believing he would escape having to stand judgement. It was complicated; it was capricious; it was Borges.

      But that Friday did come round – according to my diary it was 16 May – and the delivery could be put off no longer. After our afternoon’s ration of Imaginary Beings and just before we knocked off, he put the typescript in my hands, saying, ‘Don’t read it until Monday; we’ll talk about it then.’ I suppose it was one last desperate try; maybe he thought he’d have better luck and Monday would never happen.

      The story was ‘The Meeting’, a marvellous tale set back in 1910 about two well-off young men who quarrel over cards and fight a duel with knives in which one of them dies. At the same time, on the fantastic side, the story is about the secret life of the weapons the men had chosen. I found it remarkably polished, and the draft contained only a couple of minor flaws. One was that in the dark, in a house without electric light, two characters begin studying a cabinet that houses a collection of old knives.

      ‘That’s easy,’ Borges said as we worked out the translation. ‘We’ll have one of them light a lamp.’ And on the spot, in English, he dictated a line to correct the lapse. My diary entries record that on 3 June I worked very late typing up ‘The Meeting’ for the New Yorker, and that at the library the next evening Borges and I translated the bits of new material into Spanish and inserted them into a set of galley proofs that we then delivered to La Prensa, where Peyrou gave each of us a copy of his latest novel El hijo rechazado.

      Within three weeks we heard from Robert Henderson at the New Yorker that they were taking ‘The Meeting’, and the news had a dramatic effect on Borges. In fact, nothing could have done more just then to send his confidence soaring. In July, on the seventeenth and eighteenth, I read page proofs of Elogio de la sombra to him, then read through them a second time alone. I corrected fresh proofs on the twenty-eighth. The book was published to great acclaim in August, on Borges’s seventieth birthday. Two days earlier, on the evening of the twenty-second, Emecé gave the book an extravagant send-off on a stage in the Galería Van Riel, where one Dr E. Molina Mascías (whoever he was) spoke at some length, and the ‘primera actriz’ (whatever that means) María Rosa Gallo and the ‘primeros actores’ (ditto) Enrique Fava and Luis Medina Castro read a large number of the poems. The place was packed out and a bit of a circus. On the copy of the book he gave me the day before, Borges had written, ‘Al colaborador, al amigo, al promesso sposo’, for in a few days’ time I was to be married. On the Sunday, his birthday, Elsa threw a little party at home with a cake iced in blue and white in the shape and colours of the book itself. You could even read the title on it. It was not at all Borges’s style, but he was nonetheless radiant. The next day was the wedding, with Elsa and Borges as the official witnesses at the registry office, and with her sister Alicia Ibarra and cousin Olga and Teddy Paz as extras. Poor Elsa, she was obliged to throw a second party in two days – this one for the promessi sposi. Silvina Ocampo and Manuel Puig were there; so was Elogio de la sombra – not the book but the cake, or, rather, what was left of it. Plus the wedding cake. By then, though, quite sensibly, Borges had had enough and did not attend. Instead, he went to work at the library.

      After that, it all became a whirlwind. In October, two days before ‘El encuentro’ appeared in La Prensa, Borges finished another new story, the one called ‘Rosendo’s Tale’ in English; the day we