Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

to perfect our appearance; the thousands of wet leaves on the footpaths. I remember stopping at the wrong address, ringing the doorbell, then apologizing hastily when a young woman answered who had never heard of Borges. I remember how we turned away and ran almost a block laughing—a dreamlike kind of laughter of dizziness, anxiety and an intoxicating kind of happiness.
    Then through the glass of a door we saw him, holding a cane and being helped to a lift by a man with crutches. We ran into the building, introduced ourselves, and helped both of them into the lift. The other man, in his early thirties perhaps and a physicist from MIT, was helping Borges in his study of Persian literature. Borges was dressed in a conservative but elegant grey suit with a pale blue necktie. The small apartment he shared with his wife seemed peculiarly empty. There were some ten or fifteen books on his bookshelf, a twelve-inch TV in the living room and a few magazines on a table. He seemed nervous or ill at ease at first, particularly when we gave him our presents. His wife was out with some friends, so Flo happily assumed the role of woman of the house. She went to the kitchen to fill a vase with water for the roses.
    “Don’t worry where you sit,” he said to me. “I can’t see anything.” I went to sit down on a couch, but Borges was up again in a start. “Do you want anything to drink? Wine, Scotch, or water?” I declined, but Flo decided to fix everybody a drink. Borges was back in front of me again. “Did you come just to chat or did you have something special to ask me?” If I had known a day or a week before that he would ask this question I wouldn’t have known what to say. Now the words came out of their own accord.
    “I’m going to write a book about you and I thought I might ask you some questions.”
    And so we began to talk. Within fifteen minutes we were talking about Faulkner, Whitman, Melville, Kafka, Henry James, Dostoevsky and Schopenhauer. Every five minutes or so he would interrupt the flow of his conversation by saying, “Am I boring you? Am I disappointing you?” Then he said something that moved me very deeply. “I am nearly seventy and I could disguise myself as a young man, but then I would not be myself and you would see through it.”
    He is, perhaps above all other things, honest—so honest that your first reaction is to doubt him. But as I was to find out, he means everything he says, and when he is joking, somehow he makes sure you know it. Towards the end of our conversation he made some remarks about time. “After two or three chapters of
The Trial
you know he will never be judged, you see through the method. It’s the same thing in
The Castle
, which is more or less unreadable. I imitated Kafka once, but next time I hope to imitate a better writer. Sometimes great writers are not recognized. Who knows, there may be a young man or an old man writing now who
is
great. I should say a writer should have another lifetime to see if he’s appreciated.” Later he would say to me: “… I have uttered the wish that if I am born again I will have no personal memories of my other life. I mean to say, I don’t want to go on being Jorge Luis Borges, I want to forget all about him.”
    That first conversation ended when he said, with the sincerity of a child, “You may win your heart’s desire, but in the end you’re cheated of it by death.” Then he told us he was expected somewhere. He saw Flo and me and the professor to the door and said he hoped I’d call and see him again about the book. He even offered to phone me. “I don’t see why it has to end with one meeting,” he said.
    Three nights later I was back in the same apartment, this time with a tape recorder. Borges began to reminisce about the Argentine poet Lugones. “Lugones was a very fine craftsman, eh? He was the most important literary man of his country. He boasted of being the most faithful husband in South America, then he fell in love with a mistress and his mistress fell in love with his friend.” I mentioned that he had dedicated his book
El hacedor
(translated with the title
Dreamtigers
) to Lugones.
    “I think that’s the best thing I’ve done, eh? I mean the idea that I’m speaking to Lugones and then suddenly the reader is made aware that Lugones is dead, that the library is not my library but Lugones’s library. And then, after I have created and destroyed that, then I rebuild it again by saying that,