The Lesson of the Master. Литагент HarperCollins USD

a piece of cake.

      On the fourth day, there was a flood of visitors to see Borges at the library and he had a lecture to give at seven o’clock. ‘No work done,’ says the diary entry. The following week started with permission coming from Grove Press to allow us to make new translations of two vital stories, so we immediately tackled them, since it would permit Macrae to send a good portion of the typescript to the printer while Borges and I worked on. But alas! it was not to be so simple. What with the two translations to get out, a steady stream of visitors from abroad plaguing me, and Borges giving lectures on what seemed every other night, we got not one jot further on the story of his life until 16 May. That day we were down to three and a half pages, and it was not much good.

      The fact of the matter was that Borges’s mind was on something else. It was at this point that he said to me, ‘I’ve committed what seems to me now an unaccountable mistake, a huge mistake. A quite unexplainable and mysterious mistake.’

      He was, of course, referring to his rocky marriage to Elsa, and he was in a pit of despair. It was significant that 16 May was a Saturday. We hadn’t worked together on weekends for a very long time, yet here we were once more at the National Library. And it was not because of our deadline with Macrae – it was because Borges could no longer bear life at home. The marriage was not three years old. My diary records that on two days that week Borges had been too distraught for us even to attempt any work. What he needed was to talk about his private life, a thing that was so completely unlike him it only drove home to me the depths of his misery. Most of what he told me I already knew. He poured it out; I listened.

      That Saturday was another turning point, for in the afternoon I invited a friend of ours, a lawyer from Córdoba who was in town that week, to tea at the Molino, the big old-fashioned confitería by the Congress that he was fond of. Two days later, he and I and Borges went to consult a friend of mine, a local lawyer. Between these two legal minds a bleak picture was painted. For starters, there was no divorce as such under Argentine law – only a form of legal separation that everyone referred to as divorce and that was as effective as any divorce but that did not allow for remarriage.

      The next six weeks were an agony. As far as I could, I carried on with the autobiography by myself, typing up whatever dictation we had completed, doing the necessary background research, and checking facts and dates. One Saturday we actually managed to revise half the first chapter. But the next was devoted to drawing up a list of Borges’s marital grievances for the Córdoba lawyer. It was not until 28 May that the opening chapter was finished; not until 9 June that we had rewritten the second. We had begun working Sundays now too. But the trouble was that in addition to the delicate, surreptitious work on the legal front – endless meetings with a team of lawyers, countless errands and researching on their behalf – at one and the same time we had too many other matters clamouring for our attention. There were the proofsheets of El informe de Brodie to read. That stole three or so days’ time, and on the heels of that four more days were lost when we had to produce, in English, a thousand-word introduction to an encyclopaedia article for Grolier, the New York publisher, which was at least a year overdue. Macrae, getting understandably nervous, wanted to publish the stories without any of the new material, but I lied through my teeth and wrote to him that all was coming along fine. It was. What I failed to say was fine – but at a snail’s pace.

      Meanwhile, I sent the first chapter of the autobiography to Henderson at the New Yorker, asking whether he thought they might be able to use it. He replied at once to say that if the rest were as good, yes. The entire week of 15 June is blank in my diary with only an explanatory scribble, ‘no work on auto. essay this week. Spent most of time preparing the divorce.’ The next month started out with blank pages as well.

      D-Day was 7 July 1970. Only it was not an invasion but a getaway. That chill, grey winter’s morning – as part of our elaborately hatched plan – I lay in wait for Borges in the doorway of the National Library, and the moment he arrived I leapt into his taxi and off we sped for the intown airport. Borges, a trembling leaf and utterly exhausted after a sleepless night, confessed that his greatest fear had been that he might blurt the whole thing out to Elsa at any moment. Hugo Santiago, the film-maker, who was in on the plot, and my wife were there at the flight counter with a pair of single tickets to Córdoba for Borges and me, where the lawyer had booked us into a hotel only we two knew the name of. Like good conspirators, we allowed no one knowledge of the whole plan. That way, no lies needed to be told, nor could anything be given away. Doña Leonor, Borges’s ninety-four-year-old mother, who was punctilious in her rectitude, feared that Elsa would be quick to ring her for information, and while Leonor wanted to be able to say in truth that she did not know her son’s whereabouts, still she was anxious to be able to reach him if necessary. That was easy. I gave her a telephone number on a slip of paper in a sealed envelope and had her watch me secrete it in a drawer of her desk.

      Bad weather delayed our flight, and a jittery Borges thought the jig was up. Santiago and I did our best to put him at ease, laughing at our own feeble attempts at gallows humour, but it was nervous laughter and both of us, I know, were quaking in our boots. Eventually, by twelve o’clock, our plane took off.

      We holed up for a whole week, first in Córdoba, then in Coronel Pringles, where, after a daylong drive across the pampa, we barely arrived in time for a lecture Borges was to deliver on the subject of the Indian raids and the conquest of the desert – meaning the conquest of the Indians – of the previous century. Borges put on a brave face, stubbornly insisting that he was fit to travel these enormous distances, fit to engage in public speaking, but he was on the edge of nervous collapse. The next day his spirits picked up when he could show me the town of Coronel Suárez, some seventy-five kilometres away, named after his great-grandfather. We drove there in caravan with the mayor and other town officials of Pringles, to be met by their counterparts in Suárez, where a splendid midday banquet was laid on for us all. I sat next to the priest, a jolly fellow who, when I told him my religion was nada, nothing, made a rather good pun, retorting, ‘Nada, nada y nunca se ahoga’ – swim, swim, and never drown. Borges, who hated puns, pronounced this one first-rate.

      Eventually, we got to our destination, Pardo, where we stayed in the old dusky-rose house belonging to Bioy Casares, the one that figures in the opening of Borges’s story ‘The South’. Eventually, we got back to the autobiography too. In fact, by sheer coincidence, it was at Pardo that we reached the point in his life when Borges met Bioy, and we wrote those pages of the story before crackling eucalyptus fires laid on by Bioy’s steward. Eventually, we finished the autobiography, not there, nor back in Buenos Aires even, but in the town of Tres Arroyos, again in the far south of the province. Borges had been invited to lecture on the poet Almafuerte. It was 29 July. In a room in the Parque Hotel, Borges lay stretched out on a single bed while I sat on the edge of another, a cleared bedside table between us as my desk, taking down the last words of his dictation. They were not the fine words that come at the end of the finished essay but emendations and additions to the conclusion of the previous paragraph, in which he speaks of longing to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against himself. ‘Ah, the unvarnished truths I harbour!’

      The next week, back home, galley proofs of The Aleph and Other Stories arrived; the week after, the New Yorker’s cable saying they were taking the autobiography as a Profile. That same day, 12 August, Borges finished the final draft of his long story ‘El Congreso’, and together we finished the last two commentaries and our foreword to the book for Macrae. In my diary, there is no mention that the next day I posted the material off, but I must have. Instead, my mind was already on something else. The abstemious entry reads only, ‘Errands for Brazil trip.’ For it was just then, when he needed it, that the highly remunerative Matarazzo prize had been awarded to Borges for his life’s work.

      ‘Here in Argentina,’ Borges had told me on my very first morning in Buenos Aires, ‘friendship is perhaps more important than love.’

II

      Borges and His Interpreters

      For the most part, explanations of Jorge Luis Borges’s work have been more complicated than Borges’s work itself. Employing unpronounceable terminology, sometimes even inventing it, these interpretations usually map out elaborate systems whose outline the author,