To the Ends of the Earth

“How about ‘The Way Through the Woods’?” I said, and read it and got goose pimples.

Borges said, “It’s like Hardy. Hardy was a great poet, but I can’t read his novels. He should have stuck to poetry.”

“He did, in the end. He gave up writing novels.”

“He should never have started,” said Borges. “Want to see something interesting?” He took me back to the shelves and showed me his Encyclopaedia Britannica. It was the rare eleventh edition, not a book of facts but a work of literature. He told me to look at “India” and to examine the signature on the illustrated plates. It was that of Lockwood Kipling. “Rudyard Kipling’s father—you see?”

We went on a tour through his bookshelves. He was especially proud of his copy of Johnson’s Dictionary (“It was sent to me from Sing-Sing Prison, by an anonymous person”), his Moby-Dick, his translation by Sir Richard Burton of The Thousand and One Nights. He scrabbled at the shelves and pulled out more books; he led me to his study and showed me his set of Thomas De Quincey, his Beowulf—touching it, he began to quote—and his Icelandic sagas.

“This is the best collection of Anglo-Saxon books in Buenos Aires,” he said.

“If not in South America.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

We went back to the parlor library. He had forgotten to show me his edition of Poe. I said that I had recently read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

“I was talking about Pym just last night to Bioy Casares,” said Borges. Bioy Casares had been a collaborator on a sequence of stories. “The ending of that book is so strange—the dark and the light.”

“And the ship with the corpses on it.”

“Yes,” said Borges a bit uncertainly. “I read it so long ago, before I lost my sight. It is Poe’s greatest book.”

“I’d be glad to read it to you.”

“Come tomorrow night,” said Borges. “Come at seven-thirty. You can read me some chapters of Pym and then we’ll have dinner.”

I got my jacket from the chair. The white cat had been chewing the sleeve. The sleeve was wet, but now the cat was asleep. It slept on its back, as if it wanted its belly scratched. Its eyes were tightly shut.

IT WAS GOOD FRIDAY. ALL OVER LATIN AMERICA THERE WERE somber processions, people carrying images of Christ, lugging crosses up volcanic mountains, wearing black shrouds, flagellating themselves, saying the Stations of the Cross on their knees, parading with skulls. But in Buenos Aires there was little of this penitential activity to be seen. Devotion, in this secular city, took the form of moviegoing. Julia, which had won a number of Oscars, opened on Good Friday, but the theater was empty. Across the street, at the Electric, The Ten Commandments—the fifties Bible epic—was showing. The box-office line was two blocks long. And there was such a crowd at Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth that theatergoers, five hundred or more, were standing piously in the rain.

I had spent the day transcribing the notes I had made on my lap the night before. Borges’s blindness had enabled me to write unselfconsciously as he spoke. Again I boarded the Buenos Aires Subterranean to keep our appointment.

This time, the lights in Borges’s apartment were on. His loose shuffling shoes announced him and he appeared, as overdressed in the humid night heat as he had been the previous evening.

“Time for Poe,” he said. “Please take a seat.”

The Poe volume was on the seat of a nearby chair. I picked it up and found Pym, but before I could begin, Borges said, “I’ve been thinking about The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Every page of it is very fine, and yet it is a dull book. I wonder why.”

“He wanted to write a great book. George Bernard Shaw told him to use a lot of semicolons. Lawrence set out to be exhaustive, believing that if it was monumentally ponderous it would be regarded as great. But it’s dull, and there’s no humor in it. How can a book on the Arabs not be funny?”

“Huckleberry Finn is a great book,” said Borges. “And funny. But the ending is no good. Tom Sawyer appears and it becomes bad. And there’s Nigger Jim”—Borges had begun to search the air with his hands—“yes, we had a slave market here at Retiro. My family wasn’t very wealthy. We had only five or six slaves. But some families had thirty or forty.”

I had read that a quarter of Argentina’s population had once been black. There were no blacks in Argentina now. I asked Borges why this was so.

“It is a mystery. But I remember seeing many of them.” Borges looked so youthful that it was easy to forget that he was as old as the century. I could not vouch for his reliability, but he was the most articulate witness I had met on my trip. “They were cooks, gardeners, handymen,” he said. “I don’t know what happened to them.”

“People say they died of TB.”