'Fine.'
'I have been reading your essay on Rudyard Kipling. It is very good.'
It was a book review, but a long one, which had appeared a few weeks before on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. I was surprised that Mr Naveiro had seen it -1 had not seen it myself; but, unlike Mr Naveiro, I did not have an air-mail subscription, and anyway I had been in Peru or Bolivia when it was published.
Mr Naveiro said, 'Do you know who would be interested in your views on Kipling? Borges.'
'Really? I've always wanted to meet him.'
'We publish him,' said Mr Naveiro. 'I'm sure it can be arranged.'
I did not hear from Mr Naveiro immediately. In the meantime, his publicity director sent a reporter to my hotel to interview me. The reporter was small, thin and anxious to know what I thought about Argentina. I hardly knew where to begin. Apart from the difficulty of expressing political complexities in Spanish (how did one say 'muddled aggression and seedy provincialism'?), there was the caution I had been usually scrupulous about observing: Don't criticize them — they hate to be criticized.
The reporter took my hesitation for timidity. He prompted me.
'Argentina is cultured, eh?' he said.
'Oh, yes, very cultured.'
He wrote this on his pad.
'Civilized — true?'
'Absolutely.'
He scribbled; he was very pleased.
'Good trains — English trains?'
'You said it.'
'Pretty girls?' he said, still smiling, still writing.
'Ravishing.'
'And Buenos Aires? It's like-'
'Paris,' I said.
'Of course,' he said, and screwed the cap back onto his pen. The interview was over.
That night I went to a party with the man who had translated my books into Spanish for the Argentine editions. He had earned my admiration by finding the source of a quotation I had mischievously left unattributed in the text of one. It was two lines from Thomas Moore's Intercepted Letters. But, then, Rolando Costa Picazo had taught in Ohio and Michigan, where such things were common knowledge. He too urged me to meet Borges.
'The question is not whether I want to meet Borges, but whether Borges wants to meet me.'
'He is reading your Kipling piece at the moment. If he likes it, he will want to meet you,' said Rolando. 'Now, here is someone you must meet,' he added, easing me towards an elderly gentleman.
The man smiled and shook my hand and said in Spanish, 'Delighted to meet you.'
Rolando said, 'He has translated Ezra Pound into Spanish.'
In English — the man was a translator after all — I said, 'It must be difficult to translate Pound into Spanish.'
The man smiled. He said nothing.
'The Cantos,' I said. 'They're difficult.' And I thought: difficult, if not complete bal der dash.
The man said, 'Yes. The Cantos.''
'Which ones do you like best?'
He shrugged. He smiled at Rolando now, but he was seeking help. And it was only after the longest time that I realized that this man, who had been recommended to me as an Argentine intellectual and translator, could not speak English. But how appropriate for a translator of Ezra Pound, I thought. Surely this ignorance was a great advantage, and I had no doubt that his versions were more felicitous than the originals.
Late the next afternoon, my phone rang.
'Borges wants to see you.'
'Wonderful,'I said.'When?'
'In fifteen minutes.'
20 THE BUENOS AIRES SUBTERRANEAN
Despite its eerie name, the Buenos Aires Subterranean is an efficient five-line network of subway trains. The same size as Boston's subway, it was built five years later, in 1913 (making it older than Chicago's or Moscow's), and as in Boston it quickly put the tram cars out of business. The apartment of Jorge Luis Borges was on Maipú, around the corner from Plaza General San Martin Station, on the Retiro-Constitucionline.
I had been eager to take the Subterranean ever since I heard of its existence; and I had greatly wished to talk to Borges. He was to me what Lady Hester Stanhope had been to Alexander Kinglake: 'in all society, the standing topic of interest', an eccentric genius, perhaps more than a prophet, hidden in the depths of an unholy country. In Eothen, one of my favourite travel books (' "Eothen" is, I hope, almost the only hard word to be found in the book,' says the author, 'and signifies. . "From the East" '), Kinglake devotes an entire chapter to his meeting with Lady Hester. I felt I could do no less with Borges. I entered the Subterranean and, after a short ride, easily found his house.
The brass plaque on the landing of the sixth floor said Borges. I rang the bell and was admitted by a child of about seven. When he saw me he sucked his finger in embarrassment. He was the maid's child. The maid was Paraguayan, a well-fleshed Indian, who invited me in, then left me in the foyer with a large white cat. There was one dim light burning in the foyer, but the rest of the apartment was dark. The darkness reminded me that Borges was blind.
Curiosity and unease led me into a small parlour. Though the curtains were drawn and the shutters closed, I could make out a candelabra, the family silver Borges mentions in one of his stories, some paintings, old photographs and books. There was little furniture — a sofa and two chairs by the window, a dining table pushed against one w^all, and a wall and a half of bookcases. Something brushed my legs. I switched on a lamp: the cat had followed me here.
There was no carpet on the floor to trip the blind man. no intrusive furniture he could barge into. The parquet floor gleamed; there was not a speck of dust anywhere. The paintings were amorphous, but the three steel engravings were precise. I recognized them as Piranesi's 'Views of Rome'. The most Borges-like one was 'The Pyramid of Ces-tius' and could have been an illustration from Borges' own Ficciones. Piranesi's biographer Bianconi called him 'the Rembrandt of the ruins'. 'I need to produce great ideas,' said Piranesi. 'I believe that were I given the planning of a new universe I would be mad enough to undertake it.' It was something Borges himself might have said.
The books were a mixed lot. One corner was mostly Everyman editions, the classics in English translation — Homer, Dante, Virgil. There were shelves of poetry in no particular order — Tennyson and E.E. Cum-mings, Byron, Poe, Wordsworth, Hardy. There were reference books, Harvey's English Literature, The Oxford Book of Quotations, various dictionaries — including Doctor Johnson's — and an old leatherbound encyclopaedia. They were not fine editions; the spines were worn, the cloth had faded; but they had the look of having been read. They were well-thumbed, they sprouted paper page-markers. Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.
There was a sound of scuffing in the corridor, and a distinct grunt. Borges emerged from the dimly-lighted foyer, feeling his way along the wall. He was dressed formally, in a dark blue suit and dark tie; his black shoes were loosely tied, and a watch chain depended from his pocket. He was taller than I had expected, and there was an English cast to his face, a pale seriousness in his jaw and forehead. His eyes were swollen, staring, and sightless. But for his faltering, and the slight tremble in his hands, he was in excellent health. He had the fussy precision of a chemist. His skin was clear — there were no age-blotches on his hands — and there was a firmness in his face. People had told me he was 'about eighty'. He was then in his seventy-ninth year, but he looked ten years younger. 'When you get to my age,' he tells his double in the story The Other', 'you will have lost your eyesight almost completely. You'll still make out the colour yellow and lights and shadows. Don't worry. Gradual blindness is not a tragedy. It's like a slow summer dusk.'