Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

but he was proudly Unitarian. 22 They died within a few months of each other in Montevideo, which was under siege from Oribe’s Blancos 23 at the time. The government gave them a pretty ugly tomb that reads “ TO COLONELS SUÁREZ AND OLAVARRÍA AND THEIR DESCENDANTS ,” and they might bury me there, but I’d prefer, well, to be cremated, there’s no … I find the idea of being buried horrible, the corruption of the body is an awful concept.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: And facing the bars of Recoleta …
    BORGES: It’s a little depressing, how odd that people decided to do that.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: So your mother asked you to make her bedroom into your study. What would you do? What will happen to your house when you die?
    BORGES: It’s not important. When you’re dead, you’re not there. Now, what I hope is that I will be forgotten because it’s all a mistake, these superficial honors, people taking me seriously all over the place. They made me a Doctor Honoris Causa in a university in Rome this year, the University of Cambridge too; I’m not seduced by those honors or by any other. I have recently been named something rather curious: I am “Rector Emeritus of the University of Caracas.” What does “Rector Emeritus” mean? No one knows!
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: Not even they know.
    BORGES: No, they only know that it sounds good phonetically. Like Doctor Honoris Causa, what is that? And yet one gets excited. When I received my first doctorate, I got very excited. It happened in ’55, ’56. From the University of Cuyo.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: Was that when you went blind?
    BORGES: Yes. So I travelled with my mother and we got on the train at dawn in Retiro. 24 People didn’t travel by plane in those days. And we made our way across the dusty pampas, all day and all night, arriving in Mendoza a little before dawn. I was honored that same day, and I was very excited. And now I’ve received honors from the Sorbonne, Harvard, Oxford, Rome, Cambridge, Turin …
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: When you’re given a prize do you get the same feeling you used to get when you went up on stage to get a prize at primary school?
    BORGES: Well, maybe not so vivid, but you do feel something, because children are more impressed by life. My memories of childhood are very vivid.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: But do you still get excited by awards? Do they still have an effect on you?
    BORGES: Yes.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: Or are you tired of prizes?
    BORGES: No, no. I think “
¡Caramba! Another group of people, another group of generous, mistaken people …
”
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: Remember Borges.
    BORGES: Yes, remember me.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: And yet you say you’d like to be forgotten. Why do you want to be forgotten by us. By me? I was born and you already existed …
    BORGES: Well, maybe there are already enough memories, don’t you think? There’s no doubt that too many books have been written, we’ve almost certainly got enough with just one of the different literatures, maybe too much. I taught English literature for twenty years, at the School of Philosophy and Letters, and I always said: “I can’t teach you an infinite literature I know very little of, but I can teach you love, not for the literature I don’t know, but for some writers, no, perhaps that’s too much, some books maybe, perhaps the odd verse.” And that’s plenty for me. A few months ago, a lovely thing happened to me, one of the best experiences of my life: I was walking down calle Maipú.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: Alone?
    BORGES: No.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: With María? With María? With María, then.
    BORGES: No, it wasn’t María. Well, “X.” I don’t remember who it was, but it wasn’t María. And I was stopped by a stranger, who said to me: “I’d like to thank you for something, Borges,” and I said: “What would you like to thank me for, sir?” And he said, “You introduced me to Robert Louis Stevenson.” “Ah, well,” I said to him, “in that case I feel that I haven’t lived in vain. If I’ve introduced you to such an admirable writer …” I didn’t ask him who he was, because it’s perfect like that. Whoever he was, that was enough. Knowing who he was would be redundant, useless, I was already congratulating myself without knowing who the boy I taught around 1960 and introduced to Stevenson’s work was. I thought: “Well, now, after that, I am justified.” The books I’ve written don’t matter. They’re the least important thing.
    LÓPEZ LECUBE: But why do you say that you’d like us to