that gave a glimpse of a picturesque garden with a big fig tree ripening in the middle of it. I couldn’t resist. In I strolled, utterly captivated. Immediately a man dashed out of a house, a stern look on his face, to halt me in my tracks.
‘Lo felicito,’ I said in my most winning Spanish, trying to disarm him. ‘I congratulate you; your garden is a jewel.’
He drew up to me, tall, handsome, almost sneering, an obvious porteño. Then the belligerence drained from his look.
‘Yo te conozco a vos,’ he said straight out, launching into the familiar. ‘I saw you walking down Calle Florida in 1969 or 1970 with Borges on your arm.’
There are jottings in a series of diaries, the old War Resisters League peace calendars I was partial to at the time, in which I chronicled those first teeming weeks in Buenos Aires after I arrived there in the middle of November 1968. Borges was tireless in showing me the same hospitality in his country that he had thanked me for showing him in mine, when we had parted in Cambridge, Massachusetts, seven months before.
He and Elsa met my plane at Ezeiza on the night I got there and whisked me straight to the modest hotel she had found for me in the Avenida de Mayo, a short walk from their flat. The next day, after lunch with them, Borges could barely wait to show me the National Library and a few spots nearby, on the old south side of the city, that he both worshipped and had turned into myth. A house from the previous century; a grilled archway; a long street of low houses; a dusty park. ‘After all, these places mean a great deal to me; they’re my past.’ It was touching the way he apologized for the absence of grandeur or glamour he thought that I, as a Bostonian, had a right to expect. But that was politeness. Beneath the courtesy, you were aware of his intense personal pride.
We began work at the library the next morning, a Saturday, when the library was closed, for that had been the pact. I would not come as a tourist; I would only come if we could continue what we had begun at Harvard during the months we had known each other there. The diary for 1968 records that we busied ourselves on his poem ‘Heraclitus’.
That same day he introduced me to a student of his, María Kodama, whom he was to marry seventeen and a half years later, only weeks before his death. And that night, my second full evening in Argentina, he took me to dine at the home of Adolfo Bioy Casares, where I was presented to some of Borges’s closest friends. This was an event I had been looking forward to for months; from the warmth of the reception I received from Bioy and his wife, Silvina Ocampo, I realized Borges had talked to them about me. Bioy and Silvina were both writers – he of novels and stories, she of stories and poems (she was also an accomplished artist who had studied with de Chirico) – and together they and Borges had collaborated on a variety of literary projects. Manuel Peyrou, the novelist, was also there, and towards the end of the meal Teddy Paz, one of the younger literati, ambled in. That evening, that dinner, was truly auspicious, but not just for me, because it marked the start of four enduring new friendships. Bioy got his car out and drove us home at one a.m. By then something had happened to make it one of the most important evenings in Borges’s life.
During those final weeks of his stay in Cambridge, where he had been delivering the 1967–8 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures and we had been preparing an English edition of his selected poems, we had read together and chosen and made literal drafts of dozen upon dozen of Borges’s sonnets, a form he increasingly favoured, since he could easily write them in his head. I knew that. But it did not keep me from wearying of those same fourteen hendecasyllabic lines, the inevitability of those seven pairs of rhymes. The very constriction, in fact, was giving me claustrophobia. I told him so – not that it would alter the shape of our project in any way. I told him simply because I saw no one else come forward, even once, and tell him the truth. Every poem, tale, or essay he had ever written was hailed a masterpiece; each of his utterances, on whatever subject, seemed to have cast a spell over academics the length and breadth of America. To me, he confessed his fears, his inadequacies. He felt he would never write again; so did America. Borges’s isolation was cruel, crippling, and complete. He was high up on a pedestal, a monument.
He listened and explained, by rote, that sonnets were all he could now manage. He was not vehement, nor was I. I simply reminded him by their titles of some fine poems written during his blindness that were not sonnets, and no more was said. But within a month or two of his return to Buenos Aires, Elsa began posting me at regular intervals a series of poems that were new and fresh – and not a sonnet among them. By the time I reached Buenos Aires, I was in possession of seventeen uncollected poems.
‘Are these all recent poems, or is this work you found in some bottom drawer?’ I asked him on the morning we tackled ‘Heraclitus’.
‘Why?’ he said in a panic. ‘Don’t you like them?’
‘They’re marvellous.’
‘Ah, that’s a relief,’ Borges said. ‘You see, I was doing what you told me to do back in Cambridge.’
‘Yes, and it means you have half a new book here.’
‘No, no!’ he protested, flying into a rage. ‘I won’t publish another book. I haven’t published a new book in eight years and I won’t be judged by this stuff.’
He was beside himself in a way I had never seen before. It was a hot potato, and I let it drop.
But over dinner the next night at Bioy’s he blurted out aggressively, ‘Di Giovanni has a crazy idea. He wants me to publish a new book of poems.’ It was the manner he used, I was to learn, when he found himself on unsure ground but wanted to give the opposite impression.
‘But, Georgie,’ Bioy immediately chimed in, chuckling his infectious little chuckle. ‘That seems to me a splendid idea.’
Silvina agreed; Peyrou agreed. I had no need to add a word.
One day the next week, there was an unexpected phone call from Borges, with a hint of mystery in his voice, saying he had an errand to run that morning and would I meet him at the library a bit later on. When around midday we eventually got together again, he was jubilant. ‘I’ve been to see Frías,’ he said. Carlos Frías was his editor at Emecé. ‘I told him, “Frías, I want to publish a new book of poems.”’ Again the aggressive tone.
‘Let me guess his decision,’ I said, playing the straight man. ‘He accepted.’
Borges was stunned and momentarily deflated. ‘Yes. How did you know?’
That did it. His mind was made up. He was writing a new book and he wanted everyone to know he was writing a new book. ‘Thirty-four poems, eh? You think that’s about right, do you? That’s the figure I gave Frías. Now you’re sure we have seventeen. Let’s go over that list of yours once again.’
We went over the list, which he learned by heart, ticking each title off on his fingers. What this meant, I told him, was that from then on we would work together only in the afternoons. He must devote his mornings to dictating new work. Borges offered no demur.
That was a skirmish. The real battle loomed ahead – the bits of evidence are there in the diary jottings – but I would not be aware of this for another six months. The entry for 4 December 1968 relates that in the evening we went out to Palermo, the neighbourhood of Buenos Aires where Borges had grown up, and we walked around the streets before going around the corner to eat empanadas at the home of Elsa’s cousin Olga.
‘Don’t expect anything now,’ Borges had prefaced the journey in his characteristic way.
It was a year and a day since we had first met. We stopped
