Jorge Luis Borges - Borges at Eighty: Conversations

On Christmas night in 1975 in Buenos Aires, in an atmosphere of civil tension, Borges and I shared a Christmas dinner. Borges was very grave. We ate the good food, drank good wine and talked, but the underlying national gloom was in our minds. Finally, it was time to go. Since there was a bus and taxi strike, we had to walk, and, being a gentleman, Borges insisted on first accompanying his companion Mara Kodama home, although she lived at the far end of the large city. But this was not a burden to the blind seventy-five year old poet, for he loved to walk, especially at night, and it gave him an excuse for conversation. In that windy, alert half-light, we slowly crossed the city. As the hours passed Borges seemed to be more and more awake to every oddity in the streets, to the architecture which his blind eyes somehow knew, to the few passersby. Suddenly a bus appeared and Mara hopped on it, and we headed back to Borges flat.

Now that Mara was, we hoped, safely on her way home, there was no way of hurrying Borges. At first I thought he might not know his way, for he stopped every few steps when he made some important point and circled about as if we were lost. But no, he wanted to talk about his sister Nora and their childhood, about the black man he saw shot on the Brazil-Uruguay border some forty years earlier, and about his military ancestors who fought in the civil wars of the nineteenth century. Often his cane would hit against a hole or small ditch in the broken pavement, and each small event offered him the chance to pause, to stretch his cane and to extend his arms and legs in the posture of an actor. As always, I felt that Borges character and personal talk were at least as profound and witty as his writing and because of this confirmedat least for methe writing itself. By dawn we reached his building. Another long night of conversation was over.

The following afternoon we went together to the Saint James Caf and for three hours spoke of nothing but Dante and Milton. By the time evening came, I began to feel a curious melancholy. We were now leaving his apartment to go to the restaurant Maxines for supper. I said to him: Borges, I will always remember vaguely your words, my animation, but really none of the words. Borges took me by the arm and, in typical paradoxical consolation, said: Remember what Swedenborg wrote, that God gave us a brain so that we would have the capacity to forget.

It is impossible for me to remember the words of so many hours on planes, in cars, in streets, in restaurants, and in living rooms, but, at least in this slightly more formal way, his amazing candor, bewilderment, and intelligence are recorded for us all. In my experience nobodys conversation has held such Socratic qualities, the profound and amusing meditation and retort. How lucky we are to have a record of his thought, of a few hours of the conversations which he has shared with others throughout his life in his much esteemed art of friendship.

For three days in 1976 Jorge Luis Borges was at Indiana University in order to participate in a series of public conversations on his life and writings. For a month in the spring of 1980 he returned to Indiana University as a Patten Professor under the joint auspices of the William T. Patten foundation, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the Office of Latino Affairs.

Also during his 1980 visit, Borges traveled to Chicago, New York, and Boston for other talks. He spoke to a large group at the University of Chicago. At the PEN American Center, he was interviewed by Alastair Reid and John Coleman. He appeared on the Dick Cavett show. In the Butler Library at Columbia University he addressed a vast, alert audience. There he said: a crowd is an illusion. No such thing exists. I am talking to you personally. From New York Borges went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he participated in a discussion sponsored by Boston University, Harvard University, and MIT. This was Borges first visit to Cambridge since 1967, when he had been the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard.

The photographs of Borges included in this volume were taken in Buenos Aires, 197576.

W ILLIS B ARNSTONE