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?”