I shoulder my way through the crowds on Calle Florida, I enter the newly-built Galería del Este, I come out on the other side and cross Calle Maipú and, leaning on the red marble façade of No 94, I press the button marked “6B”. I enter the cool hall of the building and climb the six flights of stairs. I ring the bell and the maid opens the door, but almost before she can let me in Borges appears from behind a heavy curtain, holding himself very straight, his grey suit buttoned up, his white collar and striped yellow tie slightly lopsided, shuffling a little as he comes towards me. Blind since his late fifties, he moves hesitantly even in a space he knows as well as this. His right hand reaches out and he welcomes me with a distracted boneless grip. There are no further formalities. He turns and leads the way into the living room and sits erect on the couch facing the entrance. I take a seat in the armchair to his right and he asks (but his questions are almost always rhetorical): “Well, shall we read Kipling tonight?”
FOR SEVERAL YEARS, FROM 1964 to 1968, I was fortunate enough to be among the many who read to Jorge Luis Borges. I worked after school in Pygmalion, an Anglo- German bookstore in Buenos Aires. Borges came to Pygmalion in the late afternoons, on his way back from his job as director of the National Library. One day, after picking up a couple of titles, he asked me, if I had nothing else to do, whether I would come and read to him in the evenings since his mother, already in her nineties, became easily tired. Borges would ask almost anyone: students, journalists who came to interview him, other writers. There exists a vast group of those who once read out loud to Borges, minor Boswells whose identities are rarely known to one another but who collectively hold the memory of one of the world’s great readers. I didn’t know about them then. I was 16 years old. I accepted, and three or four times a week would visit in the small apartment he shared with his mother and with Fany, the maid.
I remember the apartment as a muffled, warm, soft-scented place (due to the maid’s insistence on keeping the heating up and on sprinkling eau de cologne on Borges’s handkerchief before tucking it away, corners visible, into his jacket’s breast pocket). It was fairly dark as well, and all these were features that seemed to suit the old man’s blindness, creating a sense of happy isolation.
His was a particular kind of blindness, grown on him gradually since the age of 30 and settled in for good after his 58th birthday. Borges often talked about his own blindness, mainly with literary interest: famously, as a demonstration of the “irony of God” who had given him “books and the night”; historically, recalling celebrated blind poets such as Homer and Milton; superstitiously, since he was the third director of the National Library to be struck with blindness; with almost scientific interest, lamenting not to be able to see any longer the colour black in the grey mist that surrounded him, and rejoicing in yellow, the only colour left to his eyes, the colour of his beloved tigers and of the roses he preferred, a fancy that caused friends to buy him loud yellow ties for every birthday and Borges to quote Oscar Wilde: “Only a deaf man could wear a tie like that”; in an elegiac mood, saying that blindness and old age were different ways of being alone. Blindness forced him into a solitary cell in which he composed his later works, building up lines in his head until they were ready to be dictated to whoever was at hand.
“Can you write this down?” He means the words he has just composed and which he has learned by heart. He dictates them one by one, intoning the cadences he loves and speaking out the punctuation marks. He recites the new poem line by line, following not the sense on to the next verse, but breaking instead at the end of each line. Then he asks that it be read back to him, once, twice, five times. He apologises for the request, but then asks again, listening to the words, turning them visibly in his mind. Then he adds another line, and another. The poem or the paragraph (because sometimes he takes the risk of writing prose again) takes shape on the paper as it has in his imagination. It is strange to think that the newborn composition appears for the first time in a handwriting that is not the author’s. The poem is finished (a text in prose requires several days). Borges takes the piece of paper, folds it, places it in his wallet or inside a book.
Curiously, he does the same with money. He takes a bill, folds it into a strip and places it inside one of the volumes in his library. Then, when he needs to pay for something, he pulls out a book and (sometimes, not always) finds the treasure.
His world was wholly verbal: music, colour and form rarely entered it. Borges confessed many times that, as far as painting was concerned, he had always been blind. He also seemed deaf to music. He said he admired Brahms (one of his best stories is called Deutsches Requiem) but he rarely listened to his music. He remembered the music that accompanied certain films, but less for the music itself than for the way in which it assisted the story, as in the case of Bernard Herrmann's score for Psycho, a film he very much admired as “another version of the doppelgänger, in which the murderer becomes his mother, the person he has murdered”. He found this notion mysteriously appealing.
He asks me if I will go with him to a film, a musical, West Side Story. He has sat through it several times and never seems to tire of it. On the way, he hums Maria and remarks on how true the fact that the name of the beloved changes from a simple name to a divine utterance: Beatrice, Juliet, Lesbia, Laura. “Afterwards, everything is contaminated by that name,” he says. “Of course, perhaps it wouldn’t have the same effect if the name of the girl were Gumersinda, eh? Or Bustefrieda. Or Bertha-aux-grands-pieds, eh?” he chuckles. We sit in the cinema as the lights go down. It is easier to sit with Borges watching a film he has already seen, because there is less to describe. From time to time, he pretends he can see what is happening on the screen, probably because someone has described it to him on a previous sitting. He comments on the epic quality of the rivalry between the gangs, on the role of the women, on the use of the colour red. Afterwards, as I walk him home, he talks of cities which are themselves literary characters: Troy, Carthage, London, Berlin. He could have added Buenos Aires, to which he has lent that kind of bookish immortality. He loves walking down the streets of Buenos Aires; at first, those of the southern districts; later, through the crowded downtown where, like Kant in Königsberg, he has become almost a feature of the landscape.
Edited extract from With Borges by Alberto Manguel, published by Telegram on April 21, £6.99, 77pp, offer £6.64 from 0870 1608080
