Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

same idea, no? But when Shakespeare says it, it’s lovely and in the other case, I mean if the thought were plainly expressed, it would give you the idea of a very clumsy kind of person, no? Don’t you think so?
    BURGIN: Yes, I do.
    BORGES: I dislike that kind of thing. And another thing I dislike is if people ask me, for example, “Do you admire Shaw?” “Yes.” “Do you admire Chesterton?” “Yes.” “And if you had to choose between them?” “But I don’t.” They stand for different moods, don’t you think so? I mean, you might say that Chesterton as a weaver of tales was cleverer than Shaw, but that on the whole I think of Shaw as a wiser man than Chesterton. But I’m not thinking of a kind of duel between them. Why not have both?
    BURGIN: Things get back to a duel again. Everyone seems to have to prove he’s the best.
    BORGES: Well, that’s a kind of football mind, no? Or they live a boxing match.
    BURGIN: I don’t like boxing. Do you?
    BORGES: Yes. At least, when I had sight, I enjoyed seeing a boxing match … but as to football, I know so little about it that I could never tell who was who or who was winning or who was losing. The whole thing seemed meaningless to me, and besides, it’s so ugly, the spectacle. While a cockfight—you’ve seen cockfights, no?
    BURGIN: No, I haven’t. They’re banned in America.
    BORGES: Well, they’re banned also in my country, but you see them. Besides, a cockfight is a fair fight because both cocks are thoroughly enjoying it, enjoying it, of course, in their own hellish way. I’ve seen bullfights, also. But to an Argentine, there’s something very unfair about a bullfight.
    The Spaniards told me that no one thought of danger in a bullfight, because no bullfighters ever run any dangers. They thought of it as sheer technique, and things had to be done in a very elegant way, and that a bullfighter had to be very skillful about it. But that nobody ever thought of a man risking his life, or of a bull being killed, or of the horses being murdered, that those things were not seen. That it was really a game of skill. I said, “Yes, but it’s not very skillful to have a bull and some ten or twelve people killing him.” “Yes,” they said, “because you’re thinking of the idea of a fair fight, but the idea of a fight isn’t there at all. What is really important is that things should be done in a very deft way; it’s a kind of dance.” And they said, “I see you don’t understand anything about bullfighting if you are thinking of it as a dangerous sport or if you’re thinking of a man risking his life.”
    BURGIN: I think we’re constantly trying to block out our distant animal past, and a bullfight is one of the many forms of that idea.
    BORGES: It might be that, but not a very fair form. When my father was a boy, he knew a man, or rather, he knew several men whose job it was to kill jaguars. They were called
tigreros
because a jaguar is called a tiger, no? Even though it’s smaller. The same thing might be found in Venezuela or in Colombia or in southern Brazil. This was in Buenos Aires, I think.
    Well, the man’s job was to kill jaguars. He had a pack of dogs with him, he had a poncho (a cloak with a hole in it) and a long knife. The dogs would make the jaguar come from his den. Then the man would hold up the poncho in his left hand, moving it up and down. The jaguar would spring, because the jaguar was a kind of machine; it always did the same thing. The jaguar was the same jaguar over and over again, an everlasting jaguar, no? Then he would jump, and as the poncho could hardly defend the man’s hands, his hands were scratched by the claws of the jaguar, but at that moment the jaguar laid himself bare to the man’s knife and the man killed him with an upward thrust.
    I asked my father if the
tigreros
were especially admired and he said no, they did that job even as other men might be cattle drovers or might break in horses or might do any other job, but it was the one thing they did. And they did it skillfully; after all, there were not too many jaguars and sometimes they led a very lazy kind of life. And then men would find out that the sheep or the cattle had been killed by jaguars and they would call the
tigrero
. The
tigrero
would perform that particular job and go on to his own quiet life again. But nobody thought of him as a hero. He was a man who, well, as you might think of a skillful carpenter, or weaver, or sailor. He was a