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The Other Borges

Norman Thomas di Giovanni
Only a few weeks ago. I caught a programme on BBC's Radio 4 in which Borges's recorded voice told the world that when he and I sat down to translate his stories and poems we did not regard what we were doing as work but rather as fun. That must have been in 1970 or 1971. And he was right. Our work together was fun; he made it so. There was nothing stodgy about Jorge Luis Borges, nothing formidable or forbidding. He knew his work was a cosmic game and he never wanted to be seen taking it or himself too seriously.
That, of course, w as the public persona, and while it was perfectly true it was far from the whole story. Behind this man was the buttoned-up Borges no one ever glimpsed, the Borges he never allowed anyone to glimpse. But you do not work with a man day in and day out for years, in his native city; in his home, befriended by his family and his closest friends, often travelling with him on journeys halfway round the w’orld, without getting to see behind the protective wall that - in Borges's case -he has erected round himself and that keeps the private man in stultifying isolation.
Borges’s cocoon was a complicated affair, made up in part of his ancestry, which imbued him with English reserve and undemonstrativeness and what I can only surmise was a fear of displaying emotion. But another part of it can be attributed to his studies in Indian philosophy, Hindu and Buddhist, certain precepts of which he adopted in order to seal off his demons. One of those demons was self-disgust with an ageing and decaying body. Another was the fact of the mortifying failure he experienced in his sexual relations with women, which of course resulted in total suppression. What Borges made himself believe was that the world is an illusion.
Looking back now - not on the work but on the private experiences that circumstance forced me to share with Borges -1 see a desperately lonely and desperately sad man. The late marriage to Elsa* was a demeaning experience, and its break-up utterly humiliating. One day, shortly after his separation, Borges asked me to accompany him to the bank to check how much money was in their joint account. I stood beside him at the teller’s window. The clerk said there was no money in the account. So stricken was Borges with the news that he began to slip to the floor, and I had to prop him up. Then all the way back to his fiat, he kept repeating that it could not be, that there had to be some mistake. It turned out that as soon as we left the bank that day, the teller
’Referring to Elsa Astete Millan, a woman Borges married in 1967 after first meeting her in the 1920s. Alter the 1970 flight from the marriage alluded to in the article and subsequent separation. Borges married his long-time secretary Maria Kodama in I9B6, eight weeks before his death in Geneva. phoned Elsa to report that Borges had been there making inquiries. Full of glee, the vengeful wife threw it in his face that he had not been able to locate the money. In fact, she had transferred it to a new account in the same bank in her sole name.
We made our getaway out of Buenos Aires on the morning his lawyers and a crew of removal men went around to the marital flat to retrieve the only possessions that mattered to him - his books. Hidden away in another town, we had to buy Borges some new clothes, a suit, a pair of pajamas. When we'd done so, the clerk asked me what we wanted to do with Borges's old suit. I told him to wrap it up and we’d take it with us. Without a word he held the trousers up to the light and wiggled his finger in a hole in the seat that was the size of a two-pound coin. This was the way Elsa sent the poor man out into the street to his job at the National Library. Yet had he known he would not have lowered himself to grumble or complain. And this defenselessness, this trait of humility and resignation in him, I found cruelly sad.
Sometimes the responsibility he placed on me was unnerving. In London, in 1971, during a fortnight's stay in the maze and warren of Brown's Hotel, Borges asked me to lock him into his room at night and take the key away with me. Before I left him I would lay out his next day's clothes at the foot of his bed, and the following morning, on entering his room, draw his bath for him. There was something touching and childlike about his trust.
He never asked me to do anything for him except occasionally to read him a story by Kipling or Stevenson. So if something needed doing - a letter answered, someone spoken to on his behalf to get him out of something he did not want to do or into something he did want -1 volunteered. There was an
un-worldliness about him that was not calculated. I remember in his final years when we were at work together on some of his last poems, the moment 1 entered his flat he would ask straightaway if I were free for dinner that evening. I invariably was. But I could see at once, with the question settled, that he would relax and enjoy the task ahead, because the problem of a yawning, empty night alone had been resolved.
As I look back now, twenty-three years after his death, I see - or think I see - that to Borges the poet and storyteller I was both a colleague and a collaborator. But to the other Borges, who in my memories sits alone in arid darkness waiting for someone to come, I was a friend. Norman Thomas di Giovanni was the world-famous Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges's translator and amanuensis from the late 1960s till the 1980s. His book about his time with Borges titled The Lesson of Ihe Master: On Borges and His Work is being re-issued this autumn. He currently I ves in Southampton. UK. Giovanni came to Dhaka recently to attend a conference and gave seminar lectures at Jahangirnagar and Dhaka universities.