I argued that there would be no one at this hour. It was shortly before midnight.
“We’ll try, shall we?” said the other officer.
He tried and someone answered who obviously only spoke Spanish. The other officer handed me the phone.
“Ask him whether he knows your father and will vouch for you.” I asked, in Spanish, whom was I speaking to. “This is José,” said the voice.
“José,” I said. “Whoever you are, will you please tell the officer that you know my father, ex-ambassador Manguel?” “Sure,” said José.
I silently blessed the Argentinean sense of camaraderie and passed the phone back to the other officer. “He’ll tell you,” I said.
The other officer listened to Jose’s declaration in Spanish.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying. Can you try repeating it in English? Aha. Yes. And what is your position at the embassy, sir? I see. Thank you.”
He put down the phone.
“I’m afraid that the janitor’s vouching for you isn’t sufficient,” he said.
In the meantime, Peter was going through my rucksack with keen interest. He opened my tube of toothpaste, squeezed some out, and tasted it. He flicked through my copy of Siddhartha. He sniffed at my joss sticks. Finally he found my address book. He disappeared with it inside the office. When he reemerged, he had a smile on his face, like that of Lawrence after the capture of Khartoum.
“It seems that you failed to tell us you were sharing a house in London. One of your friends there told me that you work selling knickknacks on Carnaby Street. I assume you haven’t got a work permit? Now why would the ambassador’s son do that?”
I was taken to a small white room with a cot and told that I’d have to wait there until the first train back to Paris. All night long I thought about what I was about to lose: my room, the books I had collected, my artistic career, which had received the blessing of Mick Jagger. Ever since I had started to read, London had been in my mind a sort of Garden of Eden. The stories I liked best took place there; Chesterton and Dickens had made it familiar to me; it was what to others are the North Pole or Samarkand. And now, because of two pesky, prissy officials, it had become just as remote and unattainable. Bureaucracy, unfair immigration laws, power given to blue-eyed employees who are allowed to squeeze other people’s toothpaste seemed to me then (and now) despicable abominations. France, on the other hand, was the land of Freedom, Fraternity, Equality, though perhaps not in that order. I thought fondly of Robespierre.
And that is how, in November 1970, I became a moderate anarchist.
Homage to Proteus
“Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 2
MY LIBRARY TELLS ME THAT the problem is an ancient one.
Legend has it that Proteus was not only king of Egypt but also a sea god, shepherd of the water flocks, capable of seeing the future and of constantly changing his appearance. Dante imagined this versatility as a punishment: in the eighth circle of his Hell, he dreamt that thieves and robbers, who during their mortal life lay hands on what doesn’t belong to them, are condemned after death to not even being able to possess the shape of their earthly bodies and endlessly turn into something else, “never again being that which they once were.”
All of us must one day be confronted with the terrible question that the Caterpillar asks Alice in Wonderland: “Who are you?” Indeed: Who are we? The answers that we try to give throughout our unfolding lives are never utterly convincing. We are the face in the mirror, the name and nationality given to us, the sex that our cultures steadfastly define, the reflection in the eye of those we look at, the fantasy of the one who loves us and the nightmare of the one who hates us, the incipient body in the cradle and the motionless body in the winding sheet. We are all these things, and also their contrary, our self in the shadows. We are the secret traits missing in our supposed faithful likeness, in the description of us meant to be exact. We are someone about to come into being, and also someone who has been, long ago. Our identity, and the time and place in which we exist, are fluid and transient, like water.
There is another scene in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that perfectly illustrates the heroine’s many identities, but also those of her readers, and it take place in one of the first chapters of the book. After falling down the rabbit hole, Alice feels she’s no longer herself, and wonders who it is that has taken her place. Instead of despairing, she decides to wait until someone looks down to call her, saying: “Come up again, dear!” And then she’ll ask: “Who am I, then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up: if not, I’ll stay down here till I’m somebody else.”
The many faces (all our own) that await our inquisitorial eye in dreams and in books and in everyday life end up, alas, becoming real. At first their appearances may amuse us or befuddle us; after a time they cling like masks of flesh to our skin and bones. Proteus could change his shape but only until someone grabbed him and held him secure: then the god would allow himself to be seen as he really was, as a blending of all his metamorphoses. So it is with our myriad identities. They change and dissolve in our eye and the eyes of others, until the moment when we are suddenly able to pronounce the word I. Then they cease to be illusions, hallucinations, guesswork and become, with astonishing conviction, an epiphany.
PART TWO
The Lesson of the Master
“Come back!” the Caterpillar called after her.
“I’ve something important to say!”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 5
Borges in Love
“’Tis so,” said the Duchess: “and the moral of that is — ‘Oh, ’tis love, ’tis love, that makes the world go round!’”
“Somebody said,” Alice whispered, “that it’s done by everybody minding their own business!”
“Ah, well! It means much the same thing,” said the Duchess.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 9
ONE AFTERNOON IN 1966, in Buenos Aires, I was asked to dinner at the flat of the writer Estela Canto. A woman of about fifty, a little deaf, with wonderful, artificially red hair and large, intensely myopic eyes (she coquettishly refused to wear glasses in public), she stumbled through the small, grimy kitchen putting together a meal of tinned peas and sausages, shouting bits of Keats and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. To her, Borges had dedicated one of his finest short stories, “The Aleph,” and she would let no one forget it. Borges, however, did not reciprocate the memory. At least when I mentioned her name and told him I would be seeing her, he said nothing: someone told me later that for Borges, silence was a form of courtesy.
By the time I met Canto, her books were no longer considered part of the Argentinean literary scene. In the wake of the so-called Latin American boom that had launched Manuel Puig’s generation, editors no longer wanted to publish her, and her novels now sold at remainder prices in stores as dusty as her kitchen. Long ago, in the forties, she had written essays in the style of William Hazlitt (whom she admired) for several of the literary periodicals of the time, from the Anales de Buenos Aires, which Borges edited for a while, to Sur. Her realistic stories, which echoed (she thought) Leonid Andreyev’s, had been published in the literary supplements of the newspapers La Nación and La Prensa, and her novels, which hesitated between psychology and symbolism, had been well reviewed, if not read, by the Buenos Aires intelligentsia. According to Canto, her downfall was caused by her being too clever. With her brother Patricio Canto, an excellent translator who discreetly encouraged rumors of sibling incest, she devised a plan to win a literary contest juried by Borges, the novelist Eduardo Mallea, and the short-story writer and critic Carmen Gándara. The two Cantos would write a novel with something to please everyone: a quotation from Dante for Borges, a philosophical discussion on art, literature, and morals for Mallea, a line by Gándara for Gándara. They hid behind the name of a literary woman in whose loyalty they believed and submitted the manuscript under the title Luz era su nombre (Light Was Her Name), which was unanimously awarded the first prize. Unfortunately, artistic friendships being what they are, the literary woman betrayed them, the plot was revealed, and the conspiring siblings were ostracized from every literary salon in Buenos Aires. Partly out of spite and partly out of a misguided fondness for Russian literature, the Cantos joined the Argentinean Communist Party (which, Ernesto Sábato once said, was indistinguishable from the Conservative Party because most of its senile members attended its meetings asleep). Communism, to Borges, who in his regretted youth had written a book of poems in praise of the Bolshevik Revolution, was anathema.