Jorge Luis Borges - The Last Interview

after all, I suppose my time will come and then in a sense we’ll be contemporaries, no? I think it’s quite good, eh? Besides, I think it’s good because one feels that it is written with emotion, at least I hope so. I mean you don’t think of it as an exercise, no?”
    I answered by saying that I understood and admired his idea, but that in my book I wanted a clear picture of Borges and did not want to confuse him with anyone. I added that as he says in “The Aleph,” “Our minds are porous with forgetfulness,” and I was already becoming conscious of falsifying through my memory all that he had said to me. Then I asked him if I could tape record our conversations. “Yes, you can if you want to, only don’t make me too conscious of it, eh?”
    For the next six months I worked on this book, taping our conversations whenever possible, and as we progressed a pattern began to appear, certain themes and motifs kept recurring. Of course, the book involved more than merely conducting the interviews. I reread Borges, I attended his class on Argentine Literature at Harvard when I could and his series of six Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Sanders Theatre. The lectures were well attended and very well received. Borges had created genuine excitement in the Cambridge intellectual community. I know this meant a great deal to him. “The kind of cheering I got and what I felt behind it is new to me; I’ve lectured in Europe and South America, but nothing like this has ever happened to me. To have a new experience when you are seventy is quite a thing.”
    In the middle of December, around the time of her birthday, Flo, who had seen Borges several times on her own, decided to have a dinner party for him and his wife, to be held in my sister’s Cambridge apartment. Borges came with his wife and his personal secretary, John Murchison, a Harvard graduate student. Except for the guests of honor, everyone at the party was under twenty-five. This made no difference to Borges, who has always had a marvelous rapport with the young. Later a hippie unexpectedly dropped in on us, but no one, least of all Borges, was upset. “I wonder what the root word of the hippie is?” he said. His wife thought the young man’s appearance was fascinating. Flo had fixed a delicious, authentic Brazilian dinner, complete with the guitar music of Villa-Lobos in the background, and Borges thoroughly enjoyed it. On the way back to his apartment he told me he thought Cambridge was “a very lovable city.”
    After his successful poetry reading at Harvard (where Robert Lowell introduced him, saying, “It would be impertinent for me to praise him. For many years I’ve thought he should have won the Nobel Prize”), I decided that I simply had to arrange a similar affair at Brandeis. With the help of Professor Lida of the Spanish department, who is a friend and devoted admirer of Borges, we set a date for April 1. When I told Borges he said, “Well, I hope it’s not all a huge practical joke.” Then he asked me if I thought twenty or thirty people might show up. It turned out that over five hundred attended (about a fourth of the school’s population) and every seat in one of the university’s biggest auditoriums was filled twenty minutes before the programme began.
    Downstairs, below the auditorium, Borges was nervously going over what he wanted to say about each poem. This in turn made me nervous, but once he sensed my nervousness, he began joking with me, quite spontaneous jokes really, until we had both calmed down. I had the honour of introducing him, and Mr. Murchison and one of Borges’s translators, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, read the poems in translation, after which Borges would comment for two or three minutes about each poem. As I led him onstage, I thought how terrifying it must be for a blind person to face and talk to such a large audience. But once he was onstage, Borges’s nervousness vanished. He spoke with a fluency that constantly rose to eloquence. The audience was overwhelmed. When I called him the next day and congratulated him again, he seemed upset and cross with himself. “I always make such a fool of myself.”
    “But how can you say that?” I said. “Everybody loved it.”
    “Because I feel it, I feel that I acted like a fool.”
    By the time of his last lecture at Harvard, Borges was the literary hero of Cambridge. I understand that wherever he went in the country, giving his lectures and poetry readings,