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.”