Saturday, August 24

Borges is over for dinner. We read seventy poems for the contest.

Borges tells me that according to his father children would never play anything if they didn't start playing something: "We're going to play this or that," they would say, and everything would remain a plan. Afterwards he adds, "Your father was so generous that once he let me win a hand of cards."

Guillermo de Torre,
Borges' brother-in-law

Maria Kodama

BORGES: "What a man Guillermo is. He's always irritated. That's a fact: equally irritated with everyone. You would never believe he's indifferent. Nothing escapes him. He shows up at home and if something is new, he asks what it is, what is it doing there. This line of questioning gives him a reason for being irritated. The kids don't answer him. They have the right idea. How are you going to argue with someone like that? Maria Kodama had sent me some very pretty flowers, arranged in the Japanese style. Right away Guillermo noticed them and asked who had sent them. Mother told him: 'Maria Kodama, an anglosaxon.' Guillermo said that couldn't be: the students who study Literature in the College of Philosophy and Letters are poor and these flowers were obviously expensive. Well, Mother told him she was sorry, but there were the flowers, and Maria Kodama had sent them and Maria Kodama wasn't poor. Then Guillermo told her that couldn't be because all the students in Letters are poor and have to work, while the rich study Sociology, etcetera. He asked how the contest was going and right away explained that he was very disillusioned with such contests because the jury never reads the original submissions. 'Well,' I answered, 'In this contest you have Bioy and me, who are reading every submission; and I think that Carmen Gandara and Mallea are also reading everything.' Then, upset, he replied there was no point in reading everything, because the level of this contest was low, and that La Nacion was sponsoring this contest for propaganda purposes, but that, between us, as propaganda goes it was very counterproductive. I told him that these reflections did not concern him and that he wasn't a stockholder in La Nacion. He said that he only took part in one contest, but that he did it because one of the judges was his friend and he knew at the outset that he would be given the prize. 'The only decorous way in which one can enter such a contest,' he concluded. 'Better that you don't say that,' replied Mother, 'And who knows if decorous is the right word.' He's against all contests except that one."

Borges is talking about a variety of horrible feelings. To feel, in bed, at night, that everything is horrible, repeated, incomprehensible. "To see, suddenly, that life is a succession of trivial cycles and repetitions. You go to the window, then inevitably move back a little; you throw down some food, then go to the bathroom and expel it; you say, 'Good morning, how are you?'; you get dressed, you get undressed; you lie down on the bed, you cover yourself in blankets, you uncover yourself, you get up....Kipling describes the sensation very well in several short stories. I think this desolate vision is delivered abruptly in 'The House Surgeon'." Another awful sensation: to feel suddenly the horror of being inside your head, to emit arms and legs, to be unable ever to leave that prison that is your body.