Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero believe, as warned Luis Garcia Montero, that “being a Borges reader is, first, a way of being a reader, and then, a way of being”. De Borges learned that there is a time in life in which one looks for “sunsets, suburbs and misery”, and that later, with a biological whip, one is left with “mornings, downtown and serenity”.
De Borges adored the verb “refute”. With Borges, he assumed, like the author himself, that the ultimate goal of literature is to achieve moments of happiness for those who read and for those who write. De Borges underlined “the days and none were the first”, or “the ordered paradise”, or “the incalculable dust that was armies.” With Borges he stopped and savored, for Borges he applauded with his eyes.
Borges with his dust, with his time, with his dreams and agonies; Borges confusing himself with a fantastic story; Borges “suspended in the history of literature, leaning on his cane, surrounded by tigers and roses, yellow of course”. Borges with his “understandable vanity.” Also with his faith in the “ability of men and women to reason with imagination and beauty.” Borges blunt, sour, moody, skeptical, enlightened, Borges being for Zapatero “the master of intelligent doubt” and “the great dialectic of life’s concerns”, which, however, “at the same time generates a certain serenity”.
For all that, Zapatero loves Borges: because he is his most important writer, because he is the great avant-garde for him, the great renovator of Castilian. The man of myth and symbol. The man who played. The man who challenged because he could. All these feelings, these affections, let’s say, are collected by the president in I will not betray Borges (Huso Editorial), a little book of just under one hundred pages where he tries to pay tribute to the Argentine genius and not present an academic work.
He has read and admired him for more than four decades. He does not want to get intellectual muscle: this is an intimate and sentimental memory of his texts. How he met them. From what he extracted by chewing them. Of the constellations of words that today have been engraved in stone.
Love and the universe
Start the tome celebrating The Aleph, “Borges’s best story for me”, and refers to the author’s love for Beatriz Viterbo as “an undoubted love, a private mythology”. “The Aleph is a love story. Borges spills words so intense, so deep, so heartfelt about Beatriz Viterbo that It is logical to think that Beatriz Viterbo was someone real, we do not know if Estela Canto, to whom she dedicates the story, or another woman”, Interprets.
“What I do want to highlight is that the Aleph was at Beatriz’s house -” it’s me, it’s Borges “-. Borges saw an infinite universe, but after a few sleepless nights he quickly forgot about it. The last word in the story is Beatriz. The Aleph was Beatrice. Beatriz Viterbo. Only love can impose itself on the Universe ”, he concludes.
Borges ‘insult’
At another time Zapatero dedicates himself to praising Borges’ luster as a tireless scratch, as a professional insulter, as a guerrilla of the letter. “He exhibits his pen turned into a sword (…) Nobody would like to duel Borges, whose irony and verbal weapons led to the arena even heavyweights of literature”. Let them tell if not Gómez de la Serna, of whom he said that his greguerías were nothing more than “the stupidity of thinking in bubbles.” He criticized Guy de Maupassant himself – in Paris! -, assuring that he was a writer “who was born stupid and died crazy.”
Distributed wax to Carlos Gardel (“creates misery, sentimentality … it is one of the forms of decadence of this country”), to Antonio Machado (“I didn’t know that Manuel had a brother”) and even the untouchable Garcia Lorca, whom he called “professional Andalusian”: “” He was an unbearable exhibitionist, “he used to say about him.” It tried to be visual, but it is full of picturesqueness. It seems made as a joke. “
Against the Academies, for the mystery
Better to get along with Jorge Luis: that is clear. Better to read the bull from the sidelines. Zapatero likes that the writer always questioned the logic of the prizes – “including the Nobel, of course” -. He likes me to fuck the Academies. He likes me to say that his literature was baked in his father’s library: “The truth is that I have never left it, as Alonso Quijano never left hers.”
He likes his eagerness for spells that float in the air. “There is not a single thing in the world that is not mysterious, but that mystery is more evident in certain things than in others. In the sea, in the color yellow, in the eyes of the elderly and in music”. This is how Borges wrote it, this is how Zapatero cites it today.
Borges political (and dictatorial)
The former president gets wet even with the political issue, because it would be easy to think from the outside that Borges and he were antagonistic on ideological issues. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. He feels compelled to tackle this chapter, but expresses his wish that it be forgotten as soon as possible. “In any case, I think Borges was much more interested in human beings and their dreams than in their government,” he says. He remembers the anti-Peronist Borges, the “quarrelsome” Borges, the Borges addicted to intellectual brawl and even to “haughty and scathing provocation”. It recalls the methodological individualist Borges, who believed that “only the individual exists: society, the people, the community, are mere abstractions.”
He acknowledges that Borges comes to question representation, the foundation of democracy, and that “from that coherence, he ends up refuting the State and reviling politics.” It underlines him as an anarchist and a conservative at the same time. Conservative, perhaps, because of his attachment to tradition, to the glory of his elders, men of arms and honors. He puts the mike on it: “I joined the Conservative Party. It is for honest men to opt for lost causes (…) Currently, I would define myself as a harmless anarchist; that is to say, a man who wants a minimum of government and a maximum of individual ”. Quite the opposite, in truth, than Zapatero himself, who from his spirit as a man of the left has always opted for the path of the collective, of the public.
“It is surprising to rescue a young Borges admirer of the Russian Revolution, whose drift he considered had led to a return to tsarism. It puzzles and uncomfortable, of course, his support for the Pinochet dictatorship and the Argentine dictatorship itself, when it had, however, unequivocally spoken in favor of the allies and against Nazism in World War II. Perhaps his unredeemed anti-Peronism also led him to that controversial decision, which would, however, be nuanced over time, since he signed in support of the disappeared of the Videla regime, ”Zapatero writes.
Borgian gifts
However, the politician of the writer stands out who always tended more to beauty than to justice or injustice. He always tended to pure art, to art without compromise. “He disbelieved in luxury and wealth, he was active in the middle class,” he defends. And Borges also highlighted the incessant dialogue as an attitude and doctrine in the face of challenges, the incomprehensible and the differences, like Zapatero himself.
From him he also learned the value of brevity. And, why not, of the subjective, or, rather, of the search for the truth through one’s own eyes, without unanimous anxiety: “My story will be faithful to reality, or, in any case, to my memory personal reality, which is the same ”, said Borges. “What we say does not always resemble us”. The world is only what you can think of. What else is there?
Borges, for Zapatero, managed to get closer to a “transcendent stage”, to a “desperate search for the sublime”. Borges dialogued with the enigmas of the universe and of existence. Borges said “fruition” and said “perplexities” and said “archetypes” and said “course” and said “vain” and said “yesterdays” and said “conjecture”. Borges said “reckless hospitality”, or “intolerable universe”, or “graceful clumsiness”, or “spiteful admiration” or “tenacious musings” or “suspicious clarity”. Borges said it all. And Zapatero hugged him.
Follow the topics that interest you
Reference-www.elespanol.com