Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

hours and over these twenty-four hours, everything that happened to Ulysses on his return to Ithaca occurs. That’s what the title
Ulysses
means. Read it because all of time fits inside that tunnel, that odyssey, and this is what happens to us every day. And at the moment, well, I feel quite happy talking to you, and it seems strange to me that what I’m saying is being recorded; the fact that people take me seriously is what surprises me the most. I don’t take myself seriously, but people do …
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: To me, this image, this humility …
    BORGES: No, no, it’s not humility, its lucidity. It’s not humility, I hate humility. I find false modesty horrible.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: You once said that you’d rather be someone else, not Jorge Luis Borges …
    BORGES: Yes, that phrase is plagiarized; I found it in a book by Papini I read when I was young. It’s called
El piloto ciego
and says that he wanted to be someone else and of course he thinks that he’s the only one who wants to be someone else, but we all want to be other people.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: And you? Who do you want to be?
    BORGES: [
Pause
.] No, I have to resign myself to being Borges, I can’t imagine any other destiny for myself.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: You can’t imagine being someone else?
    BORGES: No, no. Or in another century either.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: In another country?
    BORGES: In another country, yes. I’ve lived in Switzerland, I’d like to die in Switzerland, why not? I’m an alumnus of Geneva, my only degree is a baccalaureate from my school in Geneva, all the others are honorary; I was given those.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: And what profession in Switzerland?
    BORGES: My only destiny is literary. I read a biography of Milton and another of Coleridge. It seems that they knew they were going to be writers right from the beginning.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: And when did you realize that?
    BORGES: I think I have always known. Maybe because my father had an influence on me; I was raised in my father’s library, I went to school, but that hardly matters don’t you think? I was really raised in my father’s library. I always knew that that would be my destiny, being among books, reading them, but it would seem that I was influenced to write as well.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: Have you ever tried to paint?
    BORGES: No, not that I can remember. I’m very clumsy. I couldn’t.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: You don’t know how to do anything other than write?
    BORGES: Well, at one point I knew how to swim, to ride a horse, use my body. Ride a bicycle [
laughs
] like everyone else. Apparently the height of aspiration in China right now is to own a wristwatch and a bicycle.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: Which of your poems do you like the most? And why? The ones you remember as being most definitely yours? The ones in which you express yourself the most?
    BORGES: No, I don’t like the ones about me. There’s a sonnet about Spinoza that I like. I wrote two sonnets about him: in one of them, a line I remember says “Someone …” no. “A man creates God in the darkness,” 7 that man is Spinoza who engenders God, his God, made of an infinite substance whose tributes will be infinite. And I also wrote another sonnet about Spinoza. I remember two sonnets about me; one of them about the death of my grandfather Colonel Borges soon after Mitre’s surrender at La Verde. 8 My grandfather killed himself after Mitre’s surrender. In 1874, the year my father was born, and Lugones, 9 too; 1874–1938 …
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: What a coincidence …
    BORGES: Except that Lugones decided that he wanted to die; Lugones killed himself on an island in Tigre, as I’m sure you’ve been told. My father, well, my father had a hemiplegia, which was apparently incurable, and he said to me: “I’m not going to ask you to put a bullet through my head because you won’t do it, but I’ll manage.” Effectively, he refused to eat, except when he had a burning thirst and drank water. He refused all medication, didn’t let them give him injections, and after a few months he managed to die. So my father’s death was a kind of suicide too, but one that involved more suffering because my grandfather just advanced onto a line of rifles and well, two bullets from a Remington … My father, on the other hand had to wait several months refusing all food. The second form of suicide must have required more bravery.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: I get the feeling that you’re a kind of saint who doesn’t recognize his literary worth, saying that