Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

a single day. Because I was editor of a magazine, and there were three blank pages to be filled, there was no time. So I told the illustrator, I want you to work a picture more or less on these lines, and then I wrote the story. I wrote far into the night. And I thought that the whole point lay in the fact of the story being told by, in a sense, the same scheme as “The Form of the Sword,” but instead of a man you had a monster telling the story. And also I felt there might be something true in the idea of a monster wanting to be killed, needing to be killed, no? Knowing itself masterless. I mean, he knew all the time there was something awful about him, so he must have felt thankful to the hero who killed him.
    Now during the Second World War, I wrote many articles on the war, and in one of them I said that Hitler would be defeated because in his heart of hearts he really wanted defeat. He knew that the whole scheme of Nazism and world empire, all that was preposterous, or perhaps he might have felt that the tragic ending was a better ending than the other, because I don’t think that Hitler could have believed in all that stuff about the Germanic race and so on.

Favourite stories; insomnia; a changing picture;
Alice in Wonderland; Ulysses;
Robert Browning; Henry James and Kafka; Melville …
    BURGIN: You seem to disapprove of or criticize so much of your writing. Which of your stories, say, are you fond of?
    BORGES: “The South” and that new story I told you about, called “The Intruder.” I think that’s my best story. And then “Funes the Memorious” isn’t too bad. Yes, I think that’s quite a good story. And perhaps “Death and the Mariner’s Compass” is a good story.
    BURGIN: “The Aleph” isn’t one of your favourite stories?
    BORGES: “The Aleph,” yes, and “The Zahir.” “The Zahir” is about an unforgettable twenty-cent coin. I wonder if you remember it.
    BURGIN: Of course. I remember.
    BORGES: And I wrote that out of the word “unforgettable,”
inolvidable
, because I read somewhere, “You should hear so-and-so act or sing, he or she’s unforgettable.” And I thought, well what if there were really something unforgettable. Because I’m interested in words, as you may have noticed. I said, well, let’s suppose something really unforgettable, something that you couldn’t forget even for a split second. And then, after that, I invented the whole story. But it all came out of the word “unforgettable,”
inolvidable
.
    BURGIN: In a sense that’s a kind of variation on “Funes the Memorious” and even “The Immortal.”
    BORGES: Yes, but in this case it had to be one thing. And then, of course, that thing had to be something very plain, because if I speak of an unforgettable sphinx or an unforgettable sunset, that’s too easy. So I thought, well, I’ll take a coin because, I suppose, from the mint you get millions and millions of coins all alike, but let’s suppose that one of them is, in some hidden way, unforgettable, and the man sees that coin. He’s unable to forget it and then he goes mad. That will give the impression that the man was mad and that was why he thought the coin was unforgettable, no? So the story could be read in two slightly different ways. And then I said, “Well, we have to make the reader believe the story, or at least suspend his disbelief, as Coleridge said.” So if something had happened to him before he saw the coin, for example, if a woman he loved had died, that might make it easier for the reader and for myself. Because I can’t have the teller of the story buying a package of cigarettes and getting an unforgettable coin. I have to give him some circumstance, to justify what happened to him.
    BURGIN: And so you did.
    BORGES: Yes. But those stories go together. “Zahir” is one of the names of God, I think. I got it out of Lang’s
Modern Egyptians
, I think, or perhaps out of Burton.
    BURGIN: The story “Funes the Memorious” is, among other things, about insomnia.
    BORGES: About insomnia, yes. A kind of metaphor.
    BURGIN: I take it, then, you’ve had insomnia.
    BORGES: Oh, yes.
    BURGIN: I have also.
    BORGES: Do you?
    BURGIN: I don’t any more, but I have had it. It’s a terrible thing, isn’t it?
    BORGES: Yes. I think there’s something awful about sleeplessness.
    BURGIN: Because you think it will never end.
    BORGES: Yes, but one also thinks, or rather one feels, that it’s not merely a case of being sleepless, but that