Clerk and Borges portrayed by Bioy
The circle of the sky measured my glory, the libraries of East dispute my verses, the emirates seeking to fill me gold mouth, the angels know my last memory zéjel. My work tools are humiliation and anguish, I wish I had been born dead.
Abulcasim the Hadrami, JLB, The Maker (1960)
By Harold Alvarado Tenorio
died
JLB in Geneva on June 14, 1986. Twenty years later, this explosive in October, an editorial Argentina has released a fat volume of 1700 pages, simply titled Borges, whose author, Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914-1999), spent the last two years of his life in the tuning perhaps best picture, intimate, one of the greatest men who ever lived. A blind man from Buenos Aires, a city eternal as water and air.
The book covers the years between 1931 and 1989, but the first fifteen are abridged in ten pages. Years of meeting, the joint drafting your first job: a booklet on the curd, the foundation of their ephemeral magazines and publishers, the marriage of Bioy and Silvina Ocampo. A diary, written night after night, for forty years when Borges dined several times a week after the extended desktop, constantly writing notes to flaps of books and stories, scripts for films and hand lines, where Adolfito plays the role of James Boswell (1740-1795), to a beloved Doctor Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), exerted by Borges. An ABC book that will achieve the immortality of his master, then if the work of JLB is now frequented by thousands of millions of readers in all languages, who want to know the being of flesh and blood, must resort to this inconceivable testimony to the lives of a group of locals, so great and gossips, and beauty of the women who accompanied them and the dark times, which as everyone at all times, we has chosen by chance.
gossip is one who embodies the entire volume. Bioy never tires of noting that Borges's coming to dinner, leaving it for granted that almost ate his pocket. It's amazing certify Bioy untiring will not pass details of what Borges tells him, he says, he transmits phone calls on the vast circle of friends of the wealthy heir of the Martona, the largest processor Dairy of Buenos Aires in the middle of last century. A circle of friends who presided another rich heiress, her sister, Victoria Ocampo, one of the most famous Argentinian, not for its beauty but for their intelligence and their contributions to the literature of our language, director of the magazine and the editorial Southern Ortega y Gasset friend, Neruda, Lorca, Tagore, Camus, etc..
ABC gossip ago, its most naked exercise, we will poison hemlock in the reading of his memories of Borges. Neither friendship nor prudence and respect for women and equal prevent that with astonishing ingenuity and purpose, Bioy be recording the clever phrase or hurtful, trial bias, stubbornness against whom malquiere or hate, misogyny, racism, superiority complexes Argentine anti-Peronism, anticommunism, and his skepticism both as Borges, as they create a work made mutilation, modification, spoofing and lies whose purpose is the creation, in flesh and spirit, "is testimony that this book, a factory immortal words.
Because no one is spared in this intense scrutiny and plunder the world, where Borges and Bioy = Biorg, dissect passages, verses and rhymes examine a verse, challenging phrases, sounds celebrate, laugh roughness and the absence of an author's taste, or rewrite poems by the mere pleasure of exercising the profession they know best: writing.
Faust of Goethe, "Do not you think," says Borges, is the biggest bluff of literature? ". Shakespeare is "the divine amateur, always use the" mot unfair "Surrealism," unlike other invasive ideologies of literature, Catholicism and Communism, ignores the purpose of achieving readable works "poems are Pizarnik "absurd cacografías" Ezra Pound "miglior fabbro Elil consider, but no one reads," "Thomas Mann was an idiot" "He got the Nobel Prize Juan Ramón ... First Gabriela Mistral Jiménez, Juan Ramón now. They are better at inventing dynamite, which to give awards ... Gabriela Mistral has not written a poem pretty good ... The prizes do not help anyone to posterity ... "" What do you know of anything a brute like Hegel? "( Oliverio Turning) "his work is nothing" ... "It was a Peronist unclean", "Neruda is like because sometimes cheesy without remorse", "Lorca wrote poems horrible," "They told me that the musicians had not heard. Piazzolla not read the verses, "" Sabato also disappear without a trace after death "" If you compare the death of Socrates and of Christ there is no doubt that Socrates was the largest of the two. Socrates and Christ was a gentleman politician, seeking compassion
[...]".
And if the gossip is bone marrow is the detraction that binds our friendship and makes cronyism. If Borges is a knife of ice, is the perfidy Bioy same and both are toxic and deadly. Bioy between the lines, is making it clear that Borges has a dislike of the Puritan themes of love and feels uncomfortable with literary allusions to life sexual, often justifying that the erotic is less than epic. But the height of the traps is reached when referring women who are often interested in romantically. Haydee Lange, the beautiful redhead libertine who was one of his (JLB) passions of maturity, who left him for Oliver Girondo and with the complicity of Lorca made love one night on a terrace with Neruda, said that "the idiotic lives alcohol "Estela Canto, to whom he dedicated The Aleph and gave the manuscript after it sold at public auction and to write a book about his relationship with Borges, he considers" this pillar of righteousness "Silvina Bullrich is a" fat Florez's district Ravioli "Susana Soca, Uruguay is a patron" a bid "and another local color by rivalries and jealousies between the beautiful and very elegant for Bombal Susana, Carmen Gandara, sisters Grondona, Wally Zenner, Marta Mosquera, Esther Torres or Pipina Zemborain Tell and Elvira de Alvear, who in his last madness and poverty, Borg inevitable end of every year.
Perhaps the memorable character among the ladies of high society of Buenos Aires is Bibi Bullrich, portrayed by Bioy from the fables of Borges with his fearless confidence, daring neologisms, and unforeseen and unfortunate interventions corny. "Just as you'd like to meet poets and writers," says Borges, I am interested in knowing rich people ", when exiting a modern dance recital exclaims," \u200b\u200bI I prefer the other dances, with orchestra and with people you know who drew to a dance "in the middle of a meal says:" I'm so smart, so cool that sometimes I can understand, "" I do not like but I'm so smart I've discovered that should be okay with the Peronist ", etc.
deserves a chapter of Borges's first marriage, when at age 68, decides to marry, with the possible disappearance his mother, with an old sweetheart, widowed Elsa Astete Millán de Albarracín, a being from another world, less than Borges. "I put my fate in the hands of a stranger," said Borges. "No appears to he confident he usually does, Leonor Acevedo-Bioy. I stay quiet: I think I will care. No longer young. It was nice, now, and see ... But he does not see. For it remains the one before. "" Old, "notes Bioy-gray skin, in an attitude of servant love, admiration prostrate before the idol potentially wayward [...]; determined to surround the man and persuade domestic care of household charms, prone to take offense and blinded by jealousy, mistrust, potion, loving, optimistic, expressive and given to pouting. "And later the jealousy of Elsa with his friends, his travels, his tributes, while old and blind poet ever richer is buying dresses, fur coats, apartments, or second-hand shoes.
the end, of course, is the turn of Maria Kodama, who married by proxy Borges 45 days before dying. Bioy kept in the strictest caution about it, perhaps not to offend the memory of his friend and teacher. And he notes: "Borges told me to die does not matter one site than another. And what a luxury to have a love, heartbreak and even at eighty-something." However: "Mary is a woman of strange idiosyncrasies, accusing Borges for any reason, punished him with silence (remember that was blind), so jealous (it was furious with the devotion of fans). Next to her lived fearing angry. "
The June 14, 1986, a stranger, in a newsstand near La Biela, Borges tells him dead." I kept my way, Bioy scores. I went to one of Callao and Quintana, feeling they were my first steps in a world without Borges. "Before he died, he says, someone taped a singing tangos Borges:" They say in this recording Borges laughs with laughter as usual. "