Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

somebody’s
doing
that to you.
    BURGIN: A kind of cosmic paranoia.
    BORGES: Cosmic paranoia, or some fiendish foe, no? You don’t feel it’s an accident. You feel that somebody is trying to kill you in a sense, or to hurt you, no?
    BURGIN: How long did you have it?
    BORGES: Oh, about a year. In Buenos Aires, of course, it’s worse than having it here. Because it goes with the long summer nights, with the mosquitoes, with the fact of tossing about in your bed, having to turn your pillow over and over again. In the cold country I think it’s easier, no?
    BURGIN: No sleeping pills there?
    BORGES: Oh yes, I had sleeping pills also, but after a time they did me no good. And then there was a clock. It worried me very much. Because without a clock you may doze off, and then you may try to humbug yourself into thinking that you’ve slept a long time. If you have a clock, then it will give you the time in the face every quarter of the hour, and then you say, “Well, now it’s two o’clock, now it’s a quarter past, now half past two, now quarter to three, now the three strokes,” and then you go on and on … it’s awful. Because you know you haven’t missed any of the strokes.
    BURGIN: What finally got you over the insomnia?
    BORGES: I can hardly remember it, because I had sleeping pills and I also went to another house where there were no clocks, and then I could humbug myself into the belief that I had slept. And finally, I did sleep. But then I saw a doctor; he was very intelligent about it. He told me, “You don’t have to worry about sleeplessness because even if you are not sleeping you are resting, because the mere fact of resting, of being in bed, of the darkness, all those things are good for you. So that even if you can’t sleep, you don’t have to worry.” I wonder if it’s a true argument, but, of course, that’s hardly the point; the fact is that I did my best to believe in it, and then, once I got over that, that after all a sleepless night meant nothing, I went to sleep quite easily. After a time, of course, as one tends to forget one’s painful experiences, I can’t tell you what the details were of that period. Is there another tale or poem you want to talk about?
    BURGIN: What about the story “The South”? Now you’ve said that story is your personal favourite. Do you still feel that way?
    BORGES: But I think I’ve written a better story called “La intrusa” (“The Intruder”) and you’ll find that story in the last edition of
El Aleph
or of
A Personal Anthology
. I think that’s better than the other. I think that’s the best story I ever wrote. There’s nothing personal about it; it’s the story of two hoodlums. The intruder is the woman who comes into the lives of two brothers who are hoodlums. It isn’t a trick story. Because if you read it as a trick story, then, of course, you’ll find that you know what’s going to happen at the end of the page or so, but it isn’t meant to be a trick story. On the contrary. What I was trying to do was to tell an inevitable story so that the end shouldn’t come as a surprise.
    BURGIN: That’s sort of like “The South,” though. The sense of inevitability in the story.
    BORGES: Yes, yes. But, I think that “La intrusa” is better, because it’s simpler.
    BURGIN: When did you write it?
    BORGES: I wrote it about a year or so ago, and I dedicated it to my mother. She thought that the story was a very unpleasant one. She thought it awful. But when it came to the end there was a moment when one of the characters had to say something, then my mother found the words. And if you read the story, there’s a fact I would like you to notice. There are three characters and there is only one character who speaks. The others, well, the others say things and we’re told about them. But only one of the characters speaks directly, and he’s the one who’s the leader of the story. I mean, he’s behind all the facts of the story. He makes the final decision, he works out the whole thing, and in order to make that plainer, he’s the only character whose voice we hear, throughout the story.
    BURGIN: Is it a very short story?
    BORGES: Yes, five pages. I think it’s the best thing I’ve done. Because, for example, in “Hombre de la esquina rosada,” I rather overdid the local colour and I spoiled it. But here I think you find, well, I won’t say local colour, but you feel that the whole thing happened in the slums around Buenos