Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

yellow, but now I’ve lost that too. The first colors I lost were black and red, which means that I am never in darkness. At first this was a little uncomfortable. Then I was left with the other colors; green, blue and yellow, but green and blue faded into brown and then the yellow disappeared. Now no colors are left, just light and movement.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: You once said that blindness was a gift bestowed upon you so that people would like you.
    BORGES: Well, that’s how I try to think, but believe me …
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: It didn’t make you angry?
    BORGES: Believe me: the benefits of blindness have been greatly exaggerated. If I could see, I would never leave the house, I’d stay indoors reading the many books that surround me. Now they’re as far away from me as Iceland, although I’ve been to Iceland twice and I will never reach my books. And yet, at the same time, the fact that I can’t read obliges me …
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: To connect with the world?
    BORGES: No, not to connect with the world, no. It obliges me to dream and imagine. No, I get to know the world mainly through people.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: But it doesn’t make you angry? Doesn’t being blind make you feel impotent?
    BORGES: No, well, privately it can, but my duty is to …
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: When precisely do you feel that
bronca
3 ?
    BORGES: No,
bronca
is too strong a word.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: You never feel
bronca
?
    BORGES: I don’t know,
bronca
is
lunfardo
4 for anger isn’t it? I don’t know, no, not anger, sometimes I feel deflated, but that’s natural, and at my age … old age is a form of deflation too, but why be angry about it? It’s no one’s fault.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: Do you remember what your face, body or hands look like?
    BORGES: No.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: Do you touch your face? With your hands?
    BORGES: Well, of course, before or after shaving, but not much. Who knows what sort of old man is watching me through the mirror? I can’t see him, of course. I probably wouldn’t recognize him in the mirror (which I no longer have, of course); the last time I saw myself was around 1957. I fear that I’ve changed greatly; it’s a wrinkled landscape, no doubt.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: But wrinkles are also a sign of experience.
    BORGES: Yes, for example, I used to have chestnut hair and now I suspect that I’m beyond baldness. [
Laughs
.]
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: You have plenty of hair, you can’t complain.
    BORGES: Yes, but it’s strange to be bald and have your hair messed up at the same time.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: You’re blind and yet when I speak to you I feel as though you’re looking at me, why would that be?
    BORGES: Well, it’s a trick. As you describe it, it sounds like a facial lie.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: By me or you?
    BORGES: No, as your voice is coming from over there, I have to look over there, and then you feel as though I’m looking at you. If you like, I can close my eyes, if that would make you feel more comfortable, I can’t tell the difference.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: No, I feel as though we were looking at each other.
    BORGES: Well, if only that were true. Or maybe we are looking at each other; I think that our senses only detect so much.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: What do you feel when you’re walking down the street? Because you’re a kind of thermometer aren’t you? An aural thermometer, out among the people?
    BORGES: I feel surrounded by friendship; generous, inexplicable friendship. People like me, I don’t know why. I can’t explain it; most people haven’t read what I’ve written. These friendships are mysterious but in a marvelous way, as though I were a relic. When I went to Texas, in ’61, with my mother, I found it strange that people took me seriously, I asked myself why that would be. I think that I’ve hit upon the answer; I thought, “Of course!” I was sixty-two, and people say that’s old, I don’t think I was really; to me I was young, but other people thought that I was. So, I was an old man, sixty-one years old, I was a poet, I was blind, and this made me something like a Milton, something like a Homer. And of course I was South American, which is exotic in Texas, to them I was a sort of Mexican, and these were all strong cards in my hand, cards in my favor, apart from what I’d written, which hadn’t yet been translated. So I felt confident in the fact that I was an old, blind, South American poet, but in Buenos Aires I hadn’t yet been noticed; they were very, very snobbish in Buenos Aires and only noticed me when they found out