deep opposition to the Nazi and Peronist regimes; his rejection by a woman with whom he had fallen in love; his need to amuse and impress Bioy Casares. Any biographer has to take these into account, and Williamson does so. He gives, however, an extraordinary emphasis in his book to Borges’s relationship with a number of women, suggesting that these doomed and deeply unhappy relationships were fundamental to Borges’s work.
Borges, it is true, spent much of his life hanging out with women who would neither sleep with him nor marry him. The advantage for any biographer is that if you throw a stone in Buenos Aires you are likely to hit one of these women or their many descendants, or indeed their volumes of memoir.
The story begins in Geneva where, it is said, Borges Senior asked his son, then aged nineteen, if he had ever slept with a woman. When Borges said no, his father arranged ‘to help the youth negotiate the usual rites of passage to manhood’, as Williamson puts it, by giving him the address of a brothel and telling him that ‘a woman would be waiting there’ at an appointed time. It was, of course, a disaster. Borges Junior was shocked at the idea that he was sharing a woman with his father. Afterwards, according to Williamson, the adolescent Borges was taken to see a doctor who recommended a change of climate and fresh air and exercise. Williamson’s footnote for this points us to page 50 of Maria Esther Vazquez’s
Even had Vazquez written that Borges cried for merely two days and then rose on the third, I would not believe a word of it. Nor do I believe the account in James Woodall’s life of Borges, also published in 1996: ‘What happened is a matter for speculation. It seems probable that Georgie’s virginity ended with the predictable fumbling and rush of any inexperienced teenage male, though he was especially horrified at the loss of physical self- possession at the moment of climax.’ Woodall points then to a reference to this disastrous sexual initiation in Borges’s story ‘The Other’, published in 1975. Borges, in the story, meets his double and tells him: ‘Nor have I forgotten a certain afternoon in a second-floor apartment on the Plaza Dubourg.’ His double corrects him: ‘Dufour.’ And he accepts the correction. Woodall quotes an earlier biographer who has, in his wisdom, pinpointed the place of assignation nominated by Borges Senior as the rue General Dufour in Geneva.
It really is possible that all of this is rubbish, that, despite the breathless accounts by a number of his women friends who fell for the story, Borges’s father never sent him to a brothel at all and that something much less dramatic — his first reading of Whitman, for example — happened on the Plaza, or rue, Dufour. Or else Borges put the name in for no reason, just as he briefly allowed in the same story American bank-notes to carry a date.
We do have real evidence, however, that Borges went to brothels in Majorca in 1921. His literary group used to meet in a brothel, or what innocent young men might have thought was a brothel. Borges wrote to the writer Guillermo de Torre, who would marry Norah in 1928, about ‘feeling up the breasts or thighs of the smiling, uncomprehending girls’. And in a letter to Abramowicz, he wrote:
And then at roulette I enjoyed an unheard-of run of luck — at least for me — (60 pesetas with a capital of one peseta!) which allowed me to score three nights in a row at the brothel. A sumptuously filthy blonde, and a brunette we called ‘The Princess’ on whose humanity I took off as if flying a plane or riding a horse.
He also wrote about his love for a prostitute called Luz: ‘I tell you, I really loved that Luz: she was so playful with me and behaved with such ingenuous indecency. She was like a cathedral and also like a bitch.’
While it is possible that some of this is true, it reads more like boasting and is treated with caution by Williamson. Nonetheless, Borges himself, the arch-priest of pure invention trading as deep research, would surely have been appalled at the inability of Vazquez, Woodall, Williamson and many more who have not yet written their books to create at least the illusion of verisimilitude in their statements and assertions about his early sex life.
Williamson, however, follows every lead. Each intellectual woman who rejected Borges is given star treatment, and he cleverly finds clues in the poems and stories. Borges, during all this time, was living with his mother and going slowly blind. One evening, when he was out with one of his women friends, Estela Canto (who, in her book
By the late 1950s, Borges was blind. Dona Leonor became, Williamson writes, ‘her son’s secretary and business manager, his general guide and protector, and she had gathered about her a circle of well-bred ladies who fussed over Georgie and acted as an admiring chorus to his every success and distinction’. One visitor remembered the maid asking Dona Leonor if she should pour some wine for Borges and the mother answering: ‘El nino no toma vino’ (‘nino here can mean both ‘boy’ and ‘heir’). By this time Borges’s work was winning attention in Europe, and he was being invited to lecture at universities in the United States. Some of the time his mother, now almost ninety, accompanied him.
Borges dreamed of marriage, of getting away from her. She helped him by suggesting a woman whom he had known years earlier, now widowed. She was called Elsa Astete. While Borges’s mother liked her for her deference, nobody else did. She was not smart or high enough on the social scale for Bioy or his wife. Other friends of Borges thought her ‘frumpish, provincial and rather plain’. They were married in 1967. The marriage was not a success.
Once more, Borges was luckier in his friendships than in his loves. In 1967, in the United States, he met the translator and writer Norman Thomas di Giovanni, then in his mid-thirties. Over the next few years, having moved to Buenos Aires, di Giovanni co-ordinated the translation of Borges’s poetry into English, using some of the best contemporary poets and translators such as Alastair Reid, Richard Wilbur and John Hollander. He also worked with Borges on translating his prose works into English, and coaxed him into producing new stories and a long autobiographical piece for the
When Borges wanted to leave his wife, di Giovanni masterminded his departure. Since there was no divorce in Argentina in 1970, they had to move with care. Elsa had no clue that he was going to leave her. ‘That chill grey winter’s morning,’ di Giovanni wrote,
I lay in wait for Borges in the doorway of the National Library, and the moment he arrived I leaped into his taxi and off we sped for the intown airport. Borges, a trembling leaf and utterly exhausted after a sleepless night, confessed that his greatest fear had been that he might blurt the whole thing out to Elsa at any moment.
Elsa was at home making
In the early years of the twenty-first century, Jorge Luis Borges and Bioy Casares joined Marcel Proust and Lillian Hellman to become a distinguished band of writers whose maids wrote books about them. Bioy’s maid Jovina got in first; her book,
