In April 1976, the second world convention of Shakespearean scholars met in Washington, D.C. The high point of the congress was to be a lecture on Shakespeare by Jorge Luis Borges entitled “The Riddle of Shakespeare,” and thousands of scholars fought like rock-band groupies for the privilege of occupying one of the seats in the largest hall available at the Hilton Hotel. Among the attendants was the theater director Jan Kott, who, like the others, struggled to get a seat from which to hear the master reveal the answer to the riddle. Two men helped Borges to the podium and positioned him in front of the microphone. Kott describes the scene in The Essence of Theatre:
Everyone in the hall stood up, the ovation lasted many minutes. Borges did not move. Finally the clapping stopped. Borges started moving his lips. Only a vague humming noise was heard from the speakers. From this monotonous humming one could distinguish only with the greatest pains a single word which kept returning like a repeated cry from a faraway ship, drowned out by the sea: “Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare …” The microphone was placed too high. But no one in the room had the courage to walk up and lower the microphone in front of the old blind writer. Borges spoke for an hour, and for an hour only this one repeated word — Shakespeare—would reach the listeners. During this hour no one got up or left the room. After Borges finished, everyone got up and it seemed that this final ovation would never end.
No doubt Kott, like the other listeners, lent the inaudible text his own reading and heard in the repeated word—“Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shake-speare”—the answer to the riddle. Perhaps there was nothing else to say. With a little help from ailing technology, the master faker had achieved his purpose. He had turned his own text into a resonant fake composed by an audience full of Pierre Menards.
PART THREE
Memoranda
“The horror of that moment,” the King went on, “I shall never, never forget!”
“You will, though,” the Queen said, “if you don’t make a memorandum of it.”
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 1
The Death of Che Guevara
“Supposing it couldn’t find any?” she suggested.
“Then it would die, of course.”
“But that must happen very often,” Alice remarked thoughtfully.
“It always happens,” said the Gnat.
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 3
CAN WE READ POLITICS AS literature? Perhaps, sometimes, in certain cases. For example: on 8 October 1967, a small battalion of Bolivian army rangers trapped a group of guerrilleros in a scrubby gully in the wilderness east of Sucre, near the village of La Higuera. Two were captured alive: a Bolivian fighter, known simply as Willy, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, hero of the Cuban Revolution, leader of what Bolivia’s president, General René Barrientos, called “the foreign invasion of agents of Castro-Communism.” Lieutenant Colonel Andrés Selich, hearing the news, scrambled into a helicopter and flew to La Higuera. In the ramshackle schoolhouse, Selich held a forty-five-minute dialogue with his captive. Until the late 1990s, little was known of Che’s last hours; after a silence of twenty-nine years, Selich’s widow finally allowed the American journalist Jon Lee Anderson to consult Selich’s notes of that extraordinary conversation. Beyond their importance as a historical document, there is something poignant about the fact that a man’s last words were respectfully recorded by his enemy.
“Comandante, I find you somewhat depressed,” Selich said. “Can you explain the reasons why I get this impression?”
“I’ve failed,” Che replied. “It’s all over, and that’s the reason why you see me in this state.”
“Are you Cuban or Argentinean?” asked Selich.
“I am Cuban, Argentinean, Bolivian, Peruvian, Ecuadorian, etc…. You understand.”
“What made you decide to operate in our country?”
“Can’t you see the state in which the peasants live?” asked Che. “They are almost like savages, living in a state of poverty that depresses the heart, having only one room in which to sleep and cook and no clothing to wear, abandoned like animals …”
“But the same thing happens in Cuba,” retorted Selich.
“No, that’s not true” Che fired back. “I don’t deny that in Cuba poverty exists, but [at least] the peasants there have an illusion of progress, whereas the Bolivian lives without hope. Just as he is born, he dies, without ever seeing improvements in his human condition.”
The CIA wanted Che alive, but perhaps their orders never reached the Cuban-born CIA agent Félix Rodríguez, in charge of supervising the operation. Che was executed the next day. To make it appear that their captive had been killed in battle, the executioner fired at his arms and legs. Then, as Che was writhing on the ground, “apparently biting one of his wrists in an effort to avoid crying out,” one last bullet entered his chest and filled his lungs with blood. Che’s body was flown to Vallegrande, where it lay on view for a couple of days, observed by officials, journalists, and townspeople. Selich and other officers stood at the head, posing for the photographer, before having the corpse “disappear” into a secret grave near the Vallegrande airstrip. The photographs of the dead Che, with their inevitable echo of the dead Christ (the half-naked lean body, the bearded, suffering face), became one of the essential icons of my generation, a generation that was barely ten years old when the Cuban Revolution took place in 1959.
The news of the death of Che Guevara reached me towards the end of my first and only year of university in Buenos Aires. It was a warm October (summer had started early in 1967), and my friends and I were making plans to travel south and camp in the Patagonian Andes. It was an area we knew well. We had trekked in Patagonia most summers throughout high school, led by enthusiastic left-wing monitors whose political credos ran from conservatist Stalinism to free-thinking anarchism, from melancholic Trotskyism to the Argentinean-style socialism of Alfredo Palacios, and whose book bags, which we rifled as we sat around the campfire, included the poems of Mao Tse-tung (in the old-fashioned spelling), of Blas de Otero and Pablo Neruda, the stories of Saki and Juan Rulfo, the novels of Alejo Carpentier and Robert Louis Stevenson. A story by Julio Cortázar that had as its epigraph a line from Che’s diaries led us to discuss the ideals of the Cuban Revolution. We sang songs from the Spanish Civil War and the Italian Resistance, the rousing “Dirge of the Volga Boatmen” and the scabrous rumba “My Puchunguita Has Ample Thighs,” various tangos, and numerous Argentinean zambas. We were nothing if not eclectic.
Camping down south was not just an exercise in tourism. Our Patagonia was not Bruce Chatwin’s. With youthful fervor, our monitors wanted to show us the hidden side of Argentinean society—a side that we, from our comfortable Buenos Aires homes, never got to see. We had a vague idea of the slums that surrounded our prosperous neighborhoods — villas miseria as we called them, or “misery villages” — but we knew nothing of the slavelike conditions, such as those described by Che to Selich, that still existed for many of the peasants on our country’s vast estates, nor of the systematic genocide of the native people that had been officially conducted by the military until well into the thirties. With more or less earnest intentions, our monitors wanted us to see “the real Argentina.”
One afternoon, near the town of Esquel, our monitors led us into a high and rocky canyon. We walked in single file, wondering where this dusty, unappealing stone corridor would lead us, when up in the canyon’s walls we began to see openings, like the entrances to caves, and in the openings the gaunt, sickly faces of men, women, and children. The monitors walked us through the canyon and back, never saying a word, but when we set up camp for the night they told us something of the lives of the people we had seen, who made their home in the rocks like animals, eking out a living as occasional farmhands, and whose children rarely lived beyond the age of seven. Next morning, two of my classmates asked their monitor how they could join the Communist Party. Others took a less sedate path. Several became fighters in the seventies war against the military dictatorship; one, Mario Firmenich, became the bloodthirsty capo of the Montoneros guerrilla movement and for years held the dubious celebrity of heading the military’s most-wanted list.