New Ways to Kill Your Mother (31 page)

The fact that his hero had been deserted by the people of Buenos Aires, who had ransacked Irigoyen’s house, helped Borges to get over his idealization of the city. In 1931 he wrote a savage attack on his country in an essay, ‘Our Inabilities’. He
attacked the ‘pompous self-valorisation of the place our country occupies among the other nations’ and ‘the unrestrainable delight in failure’. Finally, he wrote, ‘a poverty of imagination defines our place in death.’ The old world of the criollo, so longed for by Borges’s mother, could only be found, he said, in the northern provinces of Uruguay.

In 1934 Borges wrote the preface to a poem celebrating a failed armed uprising, which he called ‘a patriotic uprising’, by militant members of the Radical Party. Yet, while some of his friends supported the reduction of Argentina’s economic dependence on Britain, Borges understood that this would move them slowly towards a sort of Argentine nationalism bordering on fascism. His own views on what Argentina might become were outlined in 1928 and reiterated in a radio broadcast in 1936:

This is a confederacy without precedent: a generous adventure by men of different bloodlines whose aim is not to preserve their lineages but to forget those lineages in the end; these are bloodlines that seek the night. The criollo is one of the confederates. The criollo, who was responsible for creating the nation as such, has now chosen to be one among many.

In this speech, Borges wrote the death sentence for his family’s sense of power and entitlement in Argentina.

As the 1930s went on and writers took sides, Borges moved sideways. There is no evidence that he even attended the PEN International Congress in Buenos Aires in September 1936, in which political division was the main feature. Instead, Borges and Bioy set up a magazine called
Destiempo
, whose title indicated, Bioy said, ‘our wish to have nothing to do with the superstitions of the age’.

Borges felt a very deep attachment to an old and unsullied Argentina, but understood, as the 1930s went on, that such an
attachment could lead easily to a native fascism. He wrote a number of trenchant attacks on Hitler’s regime in Germany. He wrote in support of a cultural openness, an Argentine cosmopolitanism, but grew to believe, with some justification, that he and a few friends carried this banner alone. He ceased to believe in the city or its people, he believed that the pampas and the gauchos were sour jokes, he hated the government and he grew at times to distrust history, including his own. The way was open for him to write a fiction that would be distinguished by its pure determination to leave most things out.

The possibility that Borges would have a quiet life, writing his stories, seeing his women, pleasing and annoying his mother, supping with Bioy and working in the library, came to an end in February 1946 with the election of Perón, whom Borges had vehemently opposed. Borges’s name was on a list of 2,000 state employees who, for one reason or another, were to be dismissed. In his ‘Autobiographical Essay’, Borges wrote about what happened: ‘I was honoured with the news that I had been “promoted” out of the library to the inspectorship of poultry and rabbits in the public markets.’ When he asked why, he was told (he claims): ‘You were on the side of the Allies – what do you expect?’

Williamson rightly deals with Borges’s version of this story with suspicion. He argues convincingly that Perón himself would not have even known about such a low-level dismissal, that the job inspecting the ‘poultry and rabbits’ was probably invented by Borges. He writes that Borges’s being moved rather than completely dismissed was done as a favour to him, and that he was probably, in fact, appointed an inspector at the Department of Beekeeping: that is, apiculture rather than aviculture (poultry). But the latter job was too good a story even for the Peronist press, who gloated.

A crowded dinner was given in Borges’s honour by his supporters. His speech against Perón was read out: ‘Dictatorships
breed oppression; dictatorships breed servility; dictatorships breed cruelty; more loathsome still is the fact that they breed idiocy … Fighting these sad monotonies is one of the many duties of a writer. Need I remind readers of Martín Fierro … that individualism is an old Argentine virtue?’ One of the younger writers at the dinner recalled that Borges at this time was regarded ‘as a sort of anti-Perón’.

After a few months out of a job, Borges began to work as a teacher of literature, travelling through Argentina to give lectures:

At 47 I found a new and exciting life opening up for me. I travelled up and down Argentina and Uruguay, lecturing on Swedenborg, Blake, the Persian and Chinese mystics, Buddhism, gauchesco poetry, the Icelandic sagas, Heine, Dante, expressionism and Cervantes. Sometimes my mother or a friend accompanied me. Not only did I end up making far more money than at the library, but I enjoyed the work and felt that it justified me.

While Borges gave lectures, his mother, at the thought of Perón in the Casa Rosada, the president’s house, went mad. ‘The Peronist threat to the constitution,’ Williamson writes, ‘brought out a latent, ancestral heroism in this formidable woman.’ In September 1948, at the age of seventy-two, she joined a demonstration against Perón. When the police came, a few ladies, including Doña Leonor and her daughter, stood their ground and were arrested. They were sentenced to thirty days in jail; Leonor, because of her age, was allowed to spend a month under house arrest, but Norah spent a month in jail in the company of prostitutes.

In 1950, when Perón had effectively made himself president for life, Borges agreed reluctantly to become president of the Argentine Society of Writers. ‘I tried to think as little as possible about politics,’ he wrote.

All the same, just as a person who has toothache thinks about that toothache the moment he wakes up, or a man who has been left by a woman thinks about her the moment he opens his eyes, I used to say to myself every morning, ‘That man is in the Casa Rosada,’ and I would feel upset, and in a way, guilty too, because I thought of the fact of not doing anything or doing so little – but what could I do?

‘In every lecture I gave, I would always express my views against the government,’ Borges wrote. ‘Many distinguished men of letters did not dare set foot inside the doors of the Society of Writers.’ After the death of Eva Perón in 1952, when Borges refused to put up a portrait of Perón and his dead wife on the walls of the society’s premises, the society was closed.

After the fall of Perón in 1955, Borges wrote: ‘I remember the joy we felt; I remember that at that moment no one thought about themselves: their only thought was that the patria had been saved.’ Within weeks, with the help of Victoria Ocampo, among others, he was appointed director of the National Library. Doña Leonor was delighted; the family was being restored to a position of importance.

The fall of Perón represented a problem for his opponents. It was clear that in any free election he would win, with considerable support from the trade unions and the city’s poor. Nonetheless, he was a demagogue who behaved like a dictator. He was replaced by the military, themselves representatives of an old oligarchy. Borges supported the new regime wholeheartedly as they banned the Peronist party, including banners, symbols and music. When a further military coup, led by men who wished to allow free elections, was put down, the government, ignoring the sentences handed down by a military tribunal, executed thirty-two of the rebels by firing squad.

Elections were held, with Perón and his party banned. Perón ordered his supporters to return blank ballot papers and these
numbered more than the votes for the legal parties. Borges and Bioy drew up a manifesto to support the government. Borges wrote that Argentina was rapidly recovering its health, ‘but there still remain many recalcitrant patients who refuse to get better and who resist revolutionary therapy. We shall have to persist with the treatment, increasing the dose of democracy for the more rebellious to see if they can be cured once and for all.’ Borges, for his support, was rewarded with the Chair of English and American Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. In his ‘Autobiographical Essay’, he gives a funny, folksy version of the reason for his appointment: ‘Other candidates had sent in painstaking lists of their translations, papers, lectures and other achievements. I limited myself to the following statement: “Quite unwittingly, I have been qualifying myself for this position throughout my life.” My plain approach gained the day.’ This is rubbish. He got the job because of his support for the regime. His mother, who had conspired to get it for him, had thus further reason for joy.

Other writers, who were as anti-Peronist as Borges, were appalled by the new government and Borges’s blanket support for it. These included Ernesto Sabato. Borges’s predicament is put succinctly by Williamson: ‘How do you create a democracy when the largest sector of the electorate will elect a totalitarian leader who is ideologically opposed to liberal democracy?’ In 1963, as Perón increased his influence, and new elections were called, Borges left the Radical Party and joined the Conservatives, believing them to have better anti-Peronist credentials. He allowed them to hold a reception to announce his membership, at which he made a speech.

The spectre of Perón continued to haunt Argentina. In 1973 his party, once more legalized, won the election, which paved the way for his return. Borges told an Italian newspaper that those who voted for Perón were ‘six million idiots’. He was now too
famous to be fired from his job and was told that he could remain without interference. He resigned, however, in October 1973. Nine months later, Perón died, to be replaced by his widow, Isabelita.

Borges had lost his arch-enemy. He had no one now to denounce except the people. ‘Our country,’ he said in 1975, ‘is going through a moral crisis. We have taken to worshipping luxury, money and other myths and dogmas. I think ours is a venal country.’ Around this time Naipaul came to Argentina to cast his cold eye on Borges and his country. He made many sweeping statements, including the following two marvellous sentences: ‘There is no history in Argentina. There are no archives; there are only graffiti, polemics and school lessons.’ Perón, Borges told Naipaul, ‘represented the scum of the earth’.

‘For the contemplation of his country’s history,’ Naipaul wrote, ‘Borges substitutes ancestor worship.’ But in the second half of the 1970s, as the Peronists developed a terrorist army, a new breed of army general emerged in control of the country. The myth of a military splendour that had created Argentina, and the sense of glamorous lone knife-fighters, both of which had nourished Borges’s work, became a pale parody of what was really happening in the streets of his city. ‘Perhaps, then,’ Naipaul wrote, ‘parallel with the vision of art, there has developed, in Borges, a subsidiary vision, however unacknowledged, of reality. And now, at any rate, the real world can no longer be denied.’

The real world came to Borges in the guise of the young men who visited his apartment to read to him. Buenos Aires is now full of them. The best account of that experience is by Alberto Manguel in
A History of Reading
(1996) and
With Borges
(2004):

In that sitting-room, under a Piranesi engraving of circular Roman ruins, I read Kipling, Stevenson, Henry James, several entries of the Brockhaus German encyclopedia, verses of Marino, of Enrique Banchs, of Heine (but these last ones he knew by heart, so I would barely have begun my reading when his hesitant voice picked up and recited from memory; the hesitation was only in the cadence, not in the words themselves, which he remembered unerringly) … I was the driver, but the landscape, the unfurling space, belonged to the one being driven … Borges chose the book, Borges stopped me or asked me to continue, Borges interrupted to comment, Borges allowed the words to come to him. I was invisible.

Paul Theroux in
The Old Patagonian Express
(1979) remembered reading Kipling ballads to the blind old man, being stopped after every few stanzas as Borges exclaimed how beautiful they were, his favourite being ‘The Ballad of East and West’. Evita, he told Theroux, was ‘a common prostitute’, as the writer, taking a more benign view than Naipaul, went back to see him again and again.

He stayed up late, eager to talk, eager to be read to; and he was good company. By degrees, he turned me into Boswell … There was something of the charlatan in him – he had a way of speechifying, and I knew he was repeating something he had said a hundred times before. He had the beginnings of a stutter, but he calmed that with his hands. He was occasionally magisterial, but he could be the opposite, a kind of student, his face elfin with attentiveness, his fingers locked together. His face became aristocratic in repose, and when he bared his yellow teeth in the exaggerated grin he used to show pleasure – he laughed hard at his own jokes – his face came alight and he looked like a French actor who has realized that he has successfully stolen the show.

In 1976 Isabelita Perón’s government was replaced by a military dictatorship, the most murderous regime in Argentine history. As in 1955, Borges was so pleased at the end of the Peronist regime
that he was happy to support the new one. He had lunch with General Videla and thanked him ‘for what he had done for the patria, having saved it from chaos, from the abject state we were in, and, above all, from idiocy’. This support was noted by Chile; Pinochet offered him an Order of Merit, which he accepted. He then agreed, against the advice of his friends, to visit Chile to accept an honorary doctorate. He attended a private dinner with Pinochet. He made a mad speech praising the sword of his ancestors and the sword that was ‘drawing the Argentine republic out of the quagmire’. This would not have helped him to win the Nobel Prize for which he was heavily tipped that year.

Nor would his remarks on a visit to Spain in 1976 have done him much good. He called Videla’s regime ‘a government of soldiers, of gentlemen, of decent people’. He declared his admiration for what General Franco had done in Spain. He then, sounding like Salvador Dalí, made rude remarks about Lorca: