Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

tawdry, I thought, “Well, I’ll never write that play, but I’ll work that idea of the play into a tale of mine.” Of course, I couldn’t say that Hladík had thought out a drama or a work of art and say nothing whatever about it. Because then, of course, that would fall flat, I had to make it convincing. So, I wove. I interwove those two ideas … Now that story has been one of my lucky ones. I’m not especially fond of it, but many people are. And it has even been published in popular magazines in Buenos Aires.
    BURGIN: Maybe they think of it as a more optimistic story of yours, in a way … It ties in with your ideas on time, your “New Refutation of Time.”
    BORGES: Yes, yes, and the idea of different times, no? Of different time schemes. Psychological time.
    BURGIN: Another story that I would think of in relation to “The Secret Miracle” is “The Other Death”—I mean in the sense that in both tales the hero tries to extend the properties of time, in one by increasing the amount of experience given to man within a unit of time and in the other by reversing time or a man’s life in time.
    BORGES: Ah! That’s one of my best stories, I think. But first I thought of it as a kind of trick story. I felt that I had read about a theologian called Damian, or some such name, and that he thought that all things were possible to God except to undo the past, and then Oscar Wilde said that Christianity made that possible because if a man forgave another he
was
undoing the past. I mean, if you have acted wrongly and that act is forgiven you, then the deed is undone. But I thought I had read a story about a past thing being undone.
    My first idea was very trivial. I thought of having chessmen inside a box, or pebbles, and of their position being changed by a man thinking about it. Then I thought this is too arid, I don’t think anybody could be convinced by it, and then I thought, well, I’ll take a cue from Conrad and the idea of
Lord Jim
, Lord Jim who had been a coward and who wanted to be a brave man, but I’ll do it in a magical way.
    In my story, you have an Argentine gaucho, among Uruguayan gauchos, who’s a coward and feels he should redeem himself, and then he goes back to the Argentine, he lives in a lonely way and he becomes a brave man to himself. And in the end he had undone the past. Instead of running away from that earlier battle in one of the civil wars in Uruguay, he undoes the past, and the people who knew him after the battle, after he had been a coward, forget all about his cowardice, and the teller of the story meets a colonel who had fought in that war and remembers him dying as a brave man should. And the colonel also remembers an unreal detail that is worked in on purpose—he remembers that the man got a bullet wound through the chest. Now, of course, if he had been wounded and fallen off his horse, the other wouldn’t have seen where he was wounded.
    BURGIN: This feeling of wanting to undo something or to change something in the past also gets into “The Waiting.”
    BORGES: Well, that happened. No, because the story, well, of course, I can’t remember what the man felt at the end, but the idea of a man who went into hiding and was found out after a long time, this happened. It happened, I think it was a Turk and his enemies were also Turks. But I thought that if I worked in Turks, the reader would feel, after all, that I knew little about them. So I turned him into an Italian, because in Buenos Aires everybody is more or less Italian, or is supposed to know a lot about them. Besides, as there are Italian secret societies, the story was essentially the same. But if I’d given it the real Turkish-Egyptian setting, then the reader would have been rather suspicious of me, no? He would have said, “Here is Borges writing about Turks, and he knows little or nothing about them.” But if I write about Italians, I’m talking about my next-door neighbours. Yes, as everybody in Buenos Aires is more or less Italian; it makes me feel I’m not really Argentine because I have no Italian blood. That makes me a bit of a foreigner.
    BURGIN: But what I meant was this idea of regret, which is essentially a metaphysical regret that we feel against an inevitable destiny, I mean, that feeling is in a lot of your stories. For example, “The South” or “The House of Asterion.” Speaking of “The House of Asterion,” I understand you wrote that in a single day.
    BORGES: Yes. I wrote that in