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, Peron 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.’ Peron, 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
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
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 Peron’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 Dali, made rude remarks about Lorca:
Neither he nor his poetry have ever interested me. I think he’s a minor poet, a picturesque poet, a sort of professional Andalusian… The circumstances of his death were rather favourable to him; it’s convenient for a poet to die in that fashion and, what’s more, his death provided Antonio Machado with the opportunity to write a marvellous poem.
Like a good number of Argentines, Borges discovered the truth of what was happening when he was outside Argentina. In Spain in 1980, where he received the Cervantes Prize, the highest honour that can be given to a writer in the Spanish language, he indicated a change of heart about the regime. While he had refused to support the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who were the first to protest openly about the disappearances, he soon began to relent. Later, in Argentina, he was visited by a woman from an old Buenos Aires family who told him that her daughter had disappeared. He told her ‘he lived a very insulated life because he was blind and could not read the newspapers’, but that he believed her story. When she brought a friend whose daughter had also disappeared, Borges decided to sign a petition calling on the government to provide information on the fate of the disappeared. He persuaded Bioy to sign also. In a dispute between Argentina and Chile over islands in the Beagle Channel, he supported Chile. Nonetheless, Borges’s new dislike of the regime was not unequivocal. Even by the end of 1981 he would say: ‘I think this government is a necessary evil because democracy would give us another Frondizi’ — one of the leaders of the Radical Party in the 1950s — ‘or at worst another Peron.’
Once the Falklands War was over — he had described it as ‘two bald men fighting over a comb’ — he could no longer maintain the view that the military government was a necessary evil. He revised his position.
It is true we have had dictators… but they had popular support. These are gangsters. This is a country of madmen. No, this is a country of wise but desperate people in the hands of madmen… I believe our only hope is democracy. Our only way out is an election… If elections are held the Peronists will win… and if they aren’t held we shall continue to be governed by people who are equally discredited.
In the end, when the election was won by Raul Alfonsin of the Radical Party in 1983, Borges said: ‘We had emerged from a nightmare, and that collective act of faith was what could save us all.’
For 1984 and 1985, however, Argentina was forced to relive the nightmare, first through the commission of inquiry into the disappearances chaired by Ernesto Sabato, which reported in December 1984, and then by the trial of the generals, with evidence given by the relatives of the disappeared and by those who were tortured. Borges attended this trial in July 1985 and heard evidence of torture. He expressed his horror to reporters afterwards and in an open letter to a newspaper.
It must have occurred to him that his own earlier support for the generals was well remembered. As Alfonsin’s position slowly weakened in 1985, Borges realized that one or other of the parties he now hated — the Peronists or the military — would retake power in Argentina. On 16 October, in an interview with a Swiss journalist, he expressed the wish to become a Swiss citizen and to die in Switzerland. In the new will in which he disinherited Fanny, he also left his sister his share in the family tomb in the Recoleta cemetery where his mother was buried.
His final journey to Europe with Maria Kodama would become controversial in Argentina. Fanny insisted he did not wish to leave: ‘Of one thing I am sure: Senor Borges did not want to go, but he did not have sufficient energy to oppose whoever brought him. He said to me in a half-broken voice: “Fanny, I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go.”’
This, considering the evidence, seems unlikely. His going alone to Europe with Kodama knowing that he would not return to Argentina seems to have been a deliberate act. In a late poem, ‘The Web’, he began:
