A reader on reading - Alberto Manguel 2010

Borges in love
The lesson of the master

“Come back!” the Caterpillar called after her.

“I’ve something important to say!”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 5

Borges in love

“’Tis so,” said the Duchess: “and the moral of that is — ’Oh, ’tis love, ’tis love, that makes the world go round!’”

“Somebody said,” Alice whispered, “that it’s done by everybody minding their own business!”

“Ah, well! It means much the same thing,” said the Duchess.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 9

ONE AFTERNOON IN 1966, in Buenos Aires, I was asked to dinner at the flat of the writer Estela Canto. A woman of about fifty, a little deaf, with wonderful, artificially red hair and large, intensely myopic eyes (she coquettishly refused to wear glasses in public), she stumbled through the small, grimy kitchen putting together a meal of tinned peas and sausages, shouting bits of Keats and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. To her, Borges had dedicated one of his finest short stories, “The Aleph,” and she would let no one forget it. Borges, however, did not reciprocate the memory. At least when I mentioned her name and told him I would be seeing her, he said nothing: someone told me later that for Borges, silence was a form of courtesy.

By the time I met Canto, her books were no longer considered part of the Argentinean literary scene. In the wake of the so-called Latin American boom that had launched Manuel Puig’s generation, editors no longer wanted to publish her, and her novels now sold at remainder prices in stores as dusty as her kitchen. Long ago, in the forties, she had written essays in the style of William Hazlitt (whom she admired) for several of the literary periodicals of the time, from the Anales de Buenos Aires, which Borges edited for a while, to Sur. Her realistic stories, which echoed (she thought) Leonid Andreyev’s, had been published in the literary supplements of the newspapers La Nación and La Prensa, and her novels, which hesitated between psychology and symbolism, had been well reviewed, if not read, by the Buenos Aires intelligentsia. According to Canto, her downfall was caused by her being too clever. With her brother Patricio Canto, an excellent translator who discreetly encouraged rumors of sibling incest, she devised a plan to win a literary contest juried by Borges, the novelist Eduardo Mallea, and the short-story writer and critic Carmen Gándara. The two Cantos would write a novel with something to please everyone: a quotation from Dante for Borges, a philosophical discussion on art, literature, and morals for Mallea, a line by Gándara for Gándara. They hid behind the name of a literary woman in whose loyalty they believed and submitted the manuscript under the title Luz era su nombre (Light Was Her Name), which was unanimously awarded the first prize. Unfortunately, artistic friendships being what they are, the literary woman betrayed them, the plot was revealed, and the conspiring siblings were ostracized from every literary salon in Buenos Aires. Partly out of spite and partly out of a misguided fondness for Russian literature, the Cantos joined the Argentinean Communist Party (which, Ernesto Sábato once said, was indistinguishable from the Conservative Party because most of its senile members attended its meetings asleep). Communism, to Borges, who in his regretted youth had written a book of poems in praise of the Bolshevik Revolution, was anathema.

During the dinner, Canto asked me if I would like to see the manuscript of “The Aleph” (which twenty years later she would sell at Sotheby’s for more than twenty-seven thousand dollars). I said I would. From a grease-aureoled brown folder she pulled out seventeen pages meticulously composed “in the handwriting of a dwarf” (as Borges once described his minuscule, unattached letters), with a few minor corrections and alternative versions. She pointed to the dedication inscribed on the last page. Then she reached over the table, took my hand (I was eighteen and terrified), and put it to her cheek. “Feel these bones,” she ordered. “You can tell I was beautiful then.”

“Then” was 1944, the year Canto met Borges at the house of Adolfo Bioy Casares and his wife, Silvina Ocampo. Ocampo, a fine poet and better short-story writer, was the sister of Victoria Ocampo, the rich and aristocratic founder of the magazine Sur. Bioy, eight years younger than Silvina, was the heir to one of the largest dairy empires in Argentina. His mother’s name, Marta, became the dairy trademark La Martona; Borges and Bioy’s first collaboration had been a series of ads for La Martona yogurt.

Estela Canto’s first encounter with Borges was, from her point of view, far from a coup de foudre. “And yet,” she added with a nostalgic smile, “neither was Beatrice much impressed with Dante.”

As if to justify her reaction, Canto’s description of the forty-five-year-old Borges (later published in her memoir, Borges a contraluz) was deliberately unappealing. “He was plump, rather tall and straight-backed, with a pale and fleshy face, remarkably small feet and a hand that, when clasped, seemed boneless, limp, as if uncomfortable when having to bear the inevitable touch. The voice was shaky, it seemed to grope for words and seek permission.” I once had occasion to hear Borges use the shakiness of his voice to great effect, when a journalist asked him what he admired most in General San Martín, Argentina’s national hero, who had fought against the Spanish in the wars of independence. Borges answered, very slowly, “His bronze busts … that decorate … public offices … and school … playgrounds; his name … repeated … endlessly … in military … marches; his face … on the ten-peso … bill …” There was a long pause during which the journalist sat bewildered. Just as she was about to ask for an explanation of such a curious choice, Borges continued, “… have distanced me from the true image of the hero.”

After the night of her first meeting with Borges, Canto often had dinner at the Bioys’, dinners at which the conversation was lively, since Ocampo had the unsettling habit of springing questions on her guests, such as “How would you commit suicide, given the choice?” One summer evening, as he and Canto were, by chance, leaving together, Borges asked if he could walk her to the subway. At the station, Borges, stuttering, suggested that they might walk a little farther. An hour later they found themselves in a café on Avenida de Mayo. Obviously the talk turned to literature, and Canto mentioned her admiration for Candida, and quoted a section from the end of the play. Borges was enchanted and remarked that this was the first time he had met a woman who was fond of Bernard Shaw. Then, peering at Canto through his incipient blindness, he paid her a compliment in English: “A Gioconda smile and the movements of a chess knight.” They left as the café was closing and walked until three-thirty in the morning. The next day Borges deposited at her house, without asking to see her, a copy of Conrad’s Youth.

Borges’s courting of Estela Canto lasted a couple of years, during which, she said, “he loved me and I was fond of him.” They would go for long walks or for aimless tram rides across the southern neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. Borges was fond of trams: it was on the number 7 tram, on his way to and from his miserable job at a municipal library, that he taught himself Italian by reading a bilingual edition of Dante’s Commedia. “I started Hell in English; by the time I had left Purgatory I was able to follow him in the original,” he once said. When he wasn’t with Canto, he wrote to her, incessantly, and his correspondence, which she later included in Borges a contraluz, is quietly moving. One undated letter, apologizing for having left town without letting her know, “out of fear or courtesy, through the sad conviction that I was for you, essentially, nothing but an inconvenience or a duty,” goes on to confess: “Fate takes on shapes that keep repeating themselves, there are circling patterns; now this one appears again: again I’m in Mar del Plata, longing for you.”

In the summer of 1945 he told her that he wanted to write a story about a place that would be “all places in the world,” and that he wanted to dedicate the story to her. Two or three days later he brought to her house a small package which, he said, contained the Aleph. Canto opened it. Inside was a small kaleidoscope, which the maid’s four-year-old son immediately broke.

The story of the Aleph progressed along with Borges’s infatuation with Canto. He wrote to her, on a postcard, in English:

Thursday, about five.

I am in Buenos Aires. I shall see you tonight, I shall see you tomorrow, I know we shall be happy together (happy and drifting and sometimes speechless and most gloriously silly), and already I feel the bodily pang of being separated from you, torn asunder from you, by rivers, by cities, by tufts of grass, by circumstances, by days and nights.

These are, I promise, the last lines I shall allow myself in this strain; I shall abound no longer in self-pity. Dear love, I love you; I wish you all the happiness; a vast and complex and closewoven future of happiness lies ahead of us. I am writing like some horrible prose poet; I don’t dare to reread this regrettable postcard. Estela, Estela Canto, when you read this I shall be finishing the story I promised you, the first of a long series.

Yours,

Georgie

“The story of the place that is all places” (as Borges calls it in another postcard) begins with the summer of the death of the beautiful Buenos Aires aristocrat Beatriz Viterbo, with whom Borges, the narrator, is in love. Beatriz’s cousin, the pedantic and bombastic poet Carlos Argentine Daneri (it was rumored that Borges based the character on his brother-in-law, the writer Guillermo de Torre, who faithfully subscribed to the vocabulary recommended by the Royal Spanish Academy of Letters), is composing a huge epic poem that will include everything on earth and in Heaven; his source of inspiration is the Aleph, a place in which all existence has been assembled. This place, Daneri tells Borges, is under the nineteenth step down to Beatriz’s basement, and one must lie on the floor in a certain position in order to see it. Borges complies, and the Aleph is revealed to him. “The diameter of the Aleph would not have been more than two or three centimeters, but the entire cosmic space was there, undiminished in volume.” Everything appears before his astonished eyes in a Whitmanesque enumeration: “I saw the populous sea, I saw the dawn and the evening, I saw the crowds of America, a silvery spider’s web in the center of a black pyramid, I saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), I saw eyes very close to me, unending, observing their own reflection in me as if in a mirror …” The list continues for another page. Among the visions, Borges impossibly sees his own face and the faces of his readers — our faces — and “the atrocious remains of that which had deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo.’’ Also, to his mortification, he sees a number of “obscene, incredible, precise letters” that the unattainable Beatriz had written to Daneri. “I was dazed and I wept,” he concludes, “because my eyes had seen that secret and conjectural object whose name men usurp but that no man has ever seen: the inconceivable universe.”

Once the story was finished, Borges published it in Sur, in the issue of September 1945. Shortly afterward, he and Estela Canto had dinner at the Hotel Las Delicias in Adrogué, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. This was a place of great importance to Borges. Here, as a young man, he had spent a few happy summers with his family, reading; here, a desperately unhappy thirty-five-year-old man, he attempted suicide on 25 August 1934 (an attempt he commemorated in 1978, in a story set in the future called “25 August 1983”); here he set his metaphysical detective story, “Death and the Compass,” transforming Las Delicias into the beautifully named villa Triste-le-Roy. In the evening he and Canto walked through the darkened streets, and Borges recited, in Italian, Beatrice’s lines to Virgil, begging him to accompany Dante on his voyage through Hell. This is Dorothy L. Sayers’s translation:

O courteous Mantuan soul, whose skill in song

Keeps green on earth a fame that shall not end

While motion rolls the turning sphere along!

A friend of mine, who is not Fortune’s friend,

Is hard beset upon the shadowy coast.

Canto recalled the lines and told me that Borges had made fun of the flattery Beatrice used to get what she wanted. “Then Borges turned to me,” Canto said, “though he could barely make me out under the misty street lamp, and asked if I would marry him.”

Half amused, half serious, she told him that she might. “But Georgie, don’t forget that I’m a disciple of Bernard Shaw. We can’t get married unless we go to bed first.” To me, across the dinner table, she added, “I knew he’d never dare.”

Their relationship, such as it was, continued halfheartedly for another year. According to Canto, their breakup came about through Borges’s mother, who, as her son’s constant chaperone, had little regard for his women friends. Later, in 1967, after his mother had apparently consented to his marriage to Elsa Astete de Millan (“I think it will be all right for you to marry Elsa, because she’s a widow and she knows about life”), Canto commented, “She’s found him a replacement.” The marriage was, however, a disaster. Elsa, jealous of anyone for whom Borges felt affection, forbade him to visit his mother and never invited her to their flat. Elsa shared none of Borges’s literary interests. She read very little. Borges enjoyed telling his dreams every morning over coffee and toast; Elsa didn’t dream, or said she didn’t dream, which Borges found inconceivable. Instead she cared for the trappings that fame had brought Borges and which he so emphatically despised: medals, cocktails, meetings with celebrities. At Harvard, where Borges had been invited to lecture, she insisted that he be paid a higher fee and that they be given more luxurious accommodations. One night, one of the professors found Borges outside the residence, in slippers and pajamas. “My wife locked me out,” he explained, deeply embarrassed. The professor took Borges in for the night and the next morning confronted Elsa. “You’re not the one who has to see him under the sheets,” she answered. Another time, in their flat in Buenos Aires, where I had gone to visit him, Borges waited for Elsa to leave the room and then asked me, in a whisper: “Tell me, is Beppo here?” Beppo was Borges’s large white tomcat. I told him that he was, asleep in one of the armchairs. “Thank God,” Borges said, in a scene straight out of Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark. “She told me he’d run away. But I could hear him and I thought I was losing my mind.”

Borges’s escape from Elsa was decidedly inglorious. Since divorce did not exist in Argentina, his only recourse was a legal separation. On 7 July 1970, his American translator, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, picked him up in a taxi at the National Library (where Borges had his office) and secretly accompanied him to the airport, where they caught a plane for Córdoba. In the meantime, instructed by Borges under di Giovanni’s guidance, a lawyer and three removal men rang the doorbell at Elsa’s flat with a legal writ and the order to take away Borges’s books. The marriage had lasted just under four years.

Once again, Borges felt that it was not his destiny to be happy. Literature provided consolation, but never quite enough, since it also brought back memories of each loss or failure, as he knew when he wrote the last lines of the first sonnet in the diptych “1964”:

No one loses (you repeat in vain)

Except that which he doesn’t have and never

Had, but it isn’t enough to be brave

To learn the art of oblivion.

A symbol, a rose tears you apart

And a guitar can kill you.

Throughout his almost centenary life, Borges fell in love with patient regularity, and with patient regularity his hopes came to nothing. He envied the literary alliances we encountered in our readings: the British soldier John Holden and Ameera, his Indian wife, in Kipling’s “Without Benefit of Clergy” (“Since when hast thou been a slave, my queen?”), the chaste Sigurd and Brynhild from the Völsunga Saga (two lines of which are now engraved on his tombstone in Geneva), Stevenson and Fanny (whom Borges imagined happy), G. K. Chesterton and his wife (whom he imagined content). The long list of names of Borges’s beloveds can be culled from the dedications to his stories and poems: Estela Canto, Haydée Lange, María Esther Vázquez, Ulrike von Kuhlmann, Silvina Bullrich, Beatriz Bibiloni Webster de Bullrich, Sara Diehl de Moreno Hueyo, Margot Guerrero, Cecilia Ingenieros — “all unique,” as Bioy said, “and all irreplaceable.”

One evening, over the usual colorless pasta at the restaurant of the Hotel Dora, he told me that he believed, with literary faith, in what he called “the mystery of women and the heroic destiny of men.” He felt unable to re-create that mystery on the page: the few women in his short stories are cogs in the plot, not characters in their own right, except perhaps the avenging Emma Zunz, whose argument was given to him by a woman, Cecilia Ingenieros. The two rival women artists in “The Duel” (a story that properly acknowledges its debt to Henry James) are sexless except in name, and so is the old woman in “The Elderly Lady.” The shared woman in “The Intruder” is little more than a thing the rival brothers have to kill in order to remain faithful to each other. The strangest of Borges’s fictional women, Ulrica, in the eponymous story, is less a woman than a phantom: she, a young Norwegian student, gives herself to the elderly Colombian professor Javier Otarola, whom she calls Sigurd and who in turn calls her Brynhild. First she appears willing, then cold, and Otarola says to her, “Brynhild, you walk as if you wished a sword between the two of us.” The story ends: “There was no sword between us. Time drifted away like sand. Love flowed, secular in the shadows, and I possessed for the first and last time the image of Ulrica.”

Borges’s men, on the other hand, fulfill their heroic destinies with stoic determination, hardly ever knowing whether they have achieved anything, a few times aware that they have failed. The dreaming magus of “The Circular Ruins,” who realizes that he too is someone’s dream; the laborious novelist Herbert Quain, who admits that his work belongs “not to art, but to the mere history of art;” the metaphysical detective Erik Lönrrot, who goes willingly to his own death; the bull-faced prisoner in the labyrinth waiting patiently for his redeemer to slay him; the playwright Jaromir Hladík, for whom God performs a secret miracle to allow him to complete a play before dying; the sedentary Juan Dahlmann, who, in “The South,” is suddenly offered an epic death to crown his quiet life — all these were the men whose fate Borges felt he somehow shared. “Plato, who like all men, was unhappy …” began one of his lectures at the University of Buenos Aires. I think Borges felt this to be the inescapable truth.

Borges had wished for a simple, uncomplicated union; fate allotted him entanglements that seemed plotted by Henry James, whose arguments, though he much admired their invention, he found at times too psychologically convoluted. His last attempt at marriage, to María Kodama, apparently took place on 26 April 1986, less than two months before his death, through a license issued in absentia by the mayor of a small Paraguayan town. I say “apparently” because the procedures were shrouded in confusing secrecy, and since Borges’s marriage to Elsa had never been annulled, it would seem that in marrying María he might have been guilty of bigamy. María had been one of his students in the Anglo-Saxon courses and later, in the sixties, had begun to accompany him on his travels. Her marriage to Borges surprised most people and angered many who felt that she had deliberately distanced the old man from his friends. The truth is that Borges’s friends felt jealous of anyone for whom Borges showed affection or interest, and Borges, with the willfulness of Jehovah, allowed these jealousies to flourish.

Now, in his eighties, with María in charge, Borges no longer dined at the Bioys’, no longer met with many of his old acquaintances: all this was blamed on María, never on Borges’s mutability. No one recalled that over the years Borges had often erased a name from a poem’s dedication and replaced it, in a childlike switch of affections, with that of another, more recent recipient: the new erasures were attributed to María. Even the fact of his dying in Geneva, far from his eternal Buenos Aires, was blamed on María’s jealousy. A day or so before his death, Borges called Bioy from Geneva. Bioy said that he sounded infinitely sad. “What are you doing in Geneva? Come home,” Bioy said to him. “I can’t,” Borges answered. “And anyway, any place is good enough to die in.” Bioy said that in spite of their friendship, he felt, as a writer, hesitant to touch such a good exit line.

But there were those — Borges’s editor at Gallimard, Héctor Bianciotti, for instance, and Cortázar’s widow, Aurora Bernárdez — who saw María Kodama merely as a devoted and zealous companion. According to them, Borges had met at last his adamant, jealous, remote, protective Beatrice. To Bianciotti, Borges had said, “I’m dying of cancer of the liver, and I’d like to end my days in Japan. But I don’t speak Japanese, or only a few words, and I would like to be able to talk my last hours away.” From Geneva he asked Bianciotti to send him books never mentioned in his writings: the comedies of Molière, the poems of Lamartine, the works of Rémy de Gourmont. Then Bianciotti understood: they were the books Borges had told him he had read as an adolescent in Geneva. The last book he chose was Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, which he asked the German-speaking nurse to read to him throughout the long, painful wait. The day before he died, Bianciotti came to see him and sat by his bed throughout the night, holding the old man’s hand, until the next morning.

Borges died on 14 June 1986. Ten years later, rereading “The Aleph” for his memory’s sake, I wondered where it was that I’d come across the idea of the all-encompassing space in Borges’s work—Thomas Hobbes’s nunc-stans or hic-stans quoted as an epigraph to “The Aleph.” I looked through my two shelves of Borges: the tattered original Emecé editions, cluttered with typos; the two fat volumes of the incomplete Obras completas and Obras completas en colaboración, no less typo-ridden; the glossy and somewhat more prolix Alianza editions; the erratic English translations; the superb French Pléiade edition of his Oeuvres, so lovingly edited by Jean-Pierre Bernès that in my mind it almost supersedes the original Spanish. (Borges might not have minded: he once said of the English version of William Beckford’s Vathek, written in French, that “the original is unfaithful to the translation.”)

Roger Caillois, responsible for making Borges known in France (“I’m an invention of Caillois,” Borges said once), suggested that the master’s central theme was the labyrinth; as if to confirm this supposition, the best-known collection of somewhat clumsily translated Borges pieces in English bears that title in the plural. Astonishingly (at least for me, who thought myself quite familiar with Borges’s work), as I reread his books, I found that, far more than the labyrinth, it is the idea of an object, or a place or person or moment that is all objects, places, persons, and moments, that pervasively appears throughout his writing.

I made a list on the endpaper pages of my Pléiade volume, but I am sure it is far from exhaustive:

It is headed by the most obvious: “The Zahir,” companion piece to “The Aleph.” The zahir, which means “visible” in Arabic, is an object (a coin, but also a tiger, an astrolabe) that once seen cannot be forgotten. Quoting Tennyson’s line about the flower in the crannied wall, Borges says that “perhaps he meant that there is no event, however humble, that does not imply the history of the world and its infinite concatenation of effects and causes.” Then comes the celebrated Library of Babel, “which some call the Universe,” and that universe abridged into a single book of infinitely thin pages, mentioned in a note to the story and expanded in the late “Book of Sand.” The universal encyclopedia sought by the narrator in the long story “The Congress” is not impossible: it already exists and is the universe itself, like the map of the Nation of Cartographers (in Dreamtigers), which Lewis Carroll foresaw in Sylvie and Bruno and which, in Borges’s short fable, coincides with the country it sets out to map.

Characters too can be, like places and objects in Borges’s work, all-encompassing. Sir Thomas Browne, whom Borges loved, had said it for all time: “Every man is not only himself; there hath been many Diogenes, and as many Timons, though but few of that name: men are liv’d over again, the world is now as it was in Ages past; there was none then, but there hath been some one since that parallels him, and is, as it were, his revived self.” Borges rejoiced in the paragraph and asked me to read it to him several times. He approved of Browne’s seemingly naive “though but few of that name,” which “makes him dear to us, eh?” and chuckled without really expecting an answer. One of the earliest of these “revived selves” is Tom Castro, the unlikely impostor from A Universal History of Infamy, who, though a semi-idiot, tries to pass himself off as the aristocratic Tichborne heir, following the dictum that one man is in fact all men. Other versions of this protean character are the unforgetting and unforgettable Funes (in ’’Funes the Memorious”), whose memory is a rubbish heap of everything seen throughout his short life; the Arab philosopher Averroës (in “The Search of Averroës”), who tries, across the centuries, to understand Aristotle, much like Borges himself in search of Averroës and the reader in search of Borges; the man who has been Homer (in “The Immortal”) and who has also been a sampling of all men throughout our history and who created a man called Ulysses who calls himself Nobody: Pierre Menard who becomes Cervantes in order to write, once again but in our time, Don Quixote. In “Everything and Nothing” Shakespeare begs God to let him, who has been so many men, be one and himself. God confesses to Shakespeare that He too is nothing: “I dreamed the world [says God] as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms of my dream are you who like Myself is many and no one.” In “The Lottery of Babylon” every man has been a proconsul, every man has been a slave: that is to say, every man has been every man. My list also includes this note, with which Borges ends his review of Victor Fleming’s film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: “Beyond Stevenson’s dualist parable and close to the Assembly of the Birds composed in the twelfth century of our era by Farid ud-din Attar, we can imagine a pantheistic film whose many characters, in the end, resolve themselves into One, which is everlasting.” The idea became a script written with Bioy (The Others) and then a film directed by Hugo Santiago. Even in Borges’s everyday talk, the theme of all-in-one was constantly present. When I saw him, briefly, after the Malvinas War had been declared, we talked, as usual, about literature and touched on the theme of the double. Borges said to me sadly, “Why do you think no one’s noticed that General Galtieri and Mrs. Thatcher are one and the same person?”

But this multiplicity of beings and places, this invention of an eternal being and an eternal place, is not enough for happiness, which Borges considered a moral imperative. Four years before his death Borges published one more book, Nine Essays on Dante, composed of pieces written in the forties and fifties and revised much later. In the first paragraph of his introduction, Borges imagines an old engraving found in a fictional oriental library, in which everything in the world is arduously depicted. Borges suggests that Dante’s poem is like that all-encompassing engraving, the Commedia as the Aleph.

The essays are written in Borges’s slow, precise, asthmatic voice; as I turn the pages, I can hear his deliberate hesitations, the ironic questioning tone with which he liked to end his most original remarks, the solemn recitativo in which he would quote long passages from memory. His ninth essay on Dante, “Beatrice’s Last Smile,” begins with a statement that he would have made in conversation with disarming simplicity: “My purpose is to comment on the most moving verses ever achieved in literature. They are included in the thirty-first canto of Paradiso and, although they are famous, no one appears to have noticed the sorrow hidden in them, no one has heard them fully. It is true that the tragic substance they hold belongs less to the book than to the author of the book, less to Dante the protagonist than to Dante the writer or inventor.”

Borges then goes on to tell the story. High on the peak of Mount Purgatory, Dante loses sight of Virgil. Led by Beatrice, whose beauty increases as they cross each new heaven, he reaches the Empyrean. In this infinite region, things far removed are no less clearly visible than those close by (“as in a PreRaphaelite canvas,” Borges notes). Dante sees, high above, a river of light, flocks of angels, and the Rose made from the souls of the just, arranged in orderly rows. Dante turns to hear Beatrice speak of what he has seen, but his Lady has vanished. In her place, he sees the figure of a venerable old man. “And she? Where is she?” Dante cries. The old man instructs Dante to lift his eyes and there, crowned in glory, he sees her high above him, in one of the circles of the Rose, and offers her his prayer of thanks. The text then reads (in Barbara Reynolds’s translation):

Such was my prayer and she, so distant fled,

It seemed, did smile and look on me once more,

Then to the eternal fountain turned her head.

Borges (always the craftsman) noted that “seemed” refers to the faraway distance but horribly contaminates Beatrice’s smile as well.

How can we explain these verses, Borges asks. The allegorical annotators have seen Reason or the Intellect (Virgil) as an instrument for reaching faith, and Faith or Theology (Beatrice) as an instrument for reaching the divinity. Both disappear once the goal is reached. “This explanation,” Borges adds, “as the reader will have noticed, is no less irreproachable than it is frigid; these verses were never born from such a miserable equation.”

The critic Guido Vitali (whom Borges had read) suggested that Dante, creating Paradise, was moved by a desire to found a kingdom for his Lady. “But I’d go further,” Borges says. “I suspect that Dante constructed literature’s best book in order to insert a few meetings with the unrecapturable Beatrice. Or rather, the circles of punishment and the southern Purgatory and the nine concentric circles and Francesca and the Siren and the Gryphon and Bertrand de Born are inserts; a smile and a voice, which he knows are lost, are what is essential.”

Then Borges allows us the ghost of a confession: “That an unhappy man should imagine happiness is in no way extraordinary; all of us do so every single day. Dante too does it as we do, but something, always, allows us to glimpse the horror behind these happy fictions.” He continues, “The old man points to one of the circles of the lofty Rose. There, in a halo, is Beatrice; Beatrice whose eyes used to fill him with unbearable beatitude, Beatrice who used to dress in red gowns, Beatrice of whom he had thought so much that he was astonished to learn that certain pilgrims, whom he saw one morning in Florence, had never even heard of her, Beatrice who once cut him cold, Beatrice who died at the age of twenty-four, Beatrice de Folco Portinari who had married Bardi.” Dante sees her and prays to her as he would pray to God, but also as he would pray to a desired woman.

O thou in whom my hopes securely dwell,

And who, to bring my soul to Paradise,

Didst leave the imprint of thy steps in Hell.

Beatrice then casts her eyes on him for a single moment and smiles, and then turns forever towards the eternal fountain of light.

And Borges concludes, “Let us retain one indisputable fact, a single and

humble fact: that this scene was imagined by Dante. For us, it is very real; for him, it was less so. (Reality, for him, was the fact that first life and then death had snatched Beatrice away). Absent for ever from Beatrice, alone and perhaps humiliated, he imagined the scene in order to imagine himself with her. Unfortunately for him, fortunately for the centuries that would read him, his knowledge that the encounter was imaginary deformed the vision. That is why the atrocious circumstances take place — so much more infernal, of course, because they take place in the highest heaven, the Empyrean: Beatrice’s disappearance, the old man who takes her place, her sudden elevation to the Rose, the fleeting smile and glance, the everlasting turning away.”

I am wary of seeing in one man’s reading, however brilliant that reading might be, a reflection of his own self; as Borges would no doubt argue, in his defense of the reader’s freedom to choose and to reject, not every book serves as a mirror for every one of its readers. But in the case of the Nine Essays I think the inference is justified, and Borges’s reading of Dante’s destiny helps me read that of Borges. In a short essay published in La Prensa in 1926, Borges himself had stated: “I’ve always said that the lasting aim of literature is to display our destinies.”

Borges suggested that Dante wrote the Commedia in order to be, for a moment, with Beatrice. It is not impossible that in some way, in order to be with a woman, any woman of the many he desired, to be privy to her mystery, to be more than just a wordsmith, to be or to try to be a lover and be loved for his own sake and not for that of his inventions, Borges created the Aleph, again and again, throughout his work. In that imaginary all-encompassing place where everything possible and impossible is happening, or in the arms of the man who is all men, she, the unattainable, might be his, or if she still would not be his, she would at least not be his under circumstances less painful to bear because he himself had invented them.

But as Borges the master craftsman knew very well, the laws of invention won’t bend any more easily than those of the world called real. Teodelina Villar in “The Zahir,” Beatriz Viterbo in “The Aleph,” do not love the intellectual narrator, Borges, who loves them. For the sake of the story, these women are unworthy Beatrices—Teodelina is a snob, a slave to fashion, “less preoccupied with beauty than with perfection;” Beatriz is a society belle obscenely infatuated with her obnoxious cousin — because, for the fiction to work, the miracle (the revelation of the Aleph, or of the memorable zahir) must take place among blind and unworthy mortals, the narrator included.

Borges once remarked that the destiny of the modern hero is not to reach Ithaca or obtain the Holy Grail. Perhaps his sorrow, in the end, came from realizing that instead of granting him the much longed-for and sublime erotic encounter, his craft demanded that he fail: Beatriz was not to be Beatrice, he was not to be Dante, he was to be only Borges, a fumbling dream-lover, still unable, even in his own imagination, to conjure up the one fulfilling and almost perfect woman of his waking dreams.