* Gen. José de San Martín: As the note just above indicates, San Martin (1778-1850), an Argentine, was one of the two most important generals of the wars of independence, the other being Simón Bolivar, a Venezuelan. This story is subtly written from the Argentine point of view, because it deals with the reasons—psychological, perhaps, or perhaps military, or, indeed, perhaps other—for which San Martin, after winning extraordinary battles in his own country and in Peru (where he came to be called Protector of Peru), turned his entire army over to Bolivar so that Bolivar could go on to win the independence of the continent from Spain. The enigma of San Martin is one that absorbed the Argentine historical mind for decades, and perhaps still does, so any letters that might have even the slightest, or the most self-serving (if Argentines will forgive me that possible slur on the general's psyche), explanation for his actions would be of supreme importance to Argentine history. This story, then, is filled with those pulls and tugs between one sort of (or nationality of) history and another, one sort of "rationale" and another. Fishburn and Hughes note that the Masonic lodge mentioned in the story (p- 395) is the Logia Lautaro, of which San Martin was indeed a member. Masonic lodges were famed as centers of progressive, not to say revolutionary, thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Modern Freemasonry was founded in the seventeenth century.
* Calle Chile: It is Fishburn and Hughes's contention that the physical, geographical location of this street is not really important here, though they give that location as "in the southern part of Buenos Aires,... some ten blocks from Plaza Constitución"; their interesting view of this street's mention here is, rather, that it is a symbolic name, linking JLB (that library he had inhabited [see"Juan Muraña"in this volume], the house, and perhaps some of the objets de la gloire that JLB had inherited from his grandfather and other members of his family) with the narrator of "Guayaquil": "The narrator lives in a street called Chile, Borges lived in a street called Maipú and both names are associated in the Argentine mind, since San Martin's great victory in Chile was the battle of Maipú."
* Baltasar Espinosa: The Spanish reader will sooner or later associate the young man's surname, Espinosa ("thorny") with the Christian "crown of thorns" evoked at the end of this story.
* Ramos Mejia: "A part of Buenos Aires in which the rich had weekend houses containing an English colony; now an industrial suburb" (Fishburn and Hughes).
* A couple of chapters of [Don Segundo Sombra]: The next sentence is perhaps not altogether opaque, but both its sense and its humor are clearer if the reader knows the novel in question. Don Segundo Sombra deals with the life ofa gaucho (considerably romanticized by nostalgia) and the customs of life on the pampas. Therefore, Gutre père sees nothing in it for him; indeed, the gauchesco novel was an urban form, a manifestation perhaps of what Marie Antoinette's critics were wont to call nostalgie de la boue, or so "The Gospel According to Mark" would seem to imply. JLB himself makes reference to this "urban nostalgia" in the story titled "The Duel," above, on p. 384.
Brodie's Report
* Qzr: The English reader will not, probably, be able to perceive the fine irony here. Brodie has said that these barbarous people do not have vowels, so he will call them Yahoos. He then gives a few words in their language. Here, the word for "citadel," qzr, is the Spanish word for citadel, alcázar, with the vowels removed. But the Spanish derives from the Arabic, which does not have vowels; the vowels are sometimes marked, sometimes not; thus, qzr is a transliteration of a word that any Spanish speaker would recognize as being fully and legitimately Arabic. Thus the Yahoos are, or might be, Arabs. Here Borges'"traveler's satire" is acute: one can find "barbarism" even in the most refined and advanced of societies.
Notes to The Book of Sand
The Other
p. 413: Another Rosas in 1946, much like our kinsman in the first one: The second Rosas, of course, is Juan Domingo Perón, the Fascist military leader who in 1945 was asked to resign all his commissions and retire, and who did so, only (Napoleon-like) to return eight days later to address huge crowds of people and later, in 1946, to be elected president. All this information is from Rodriguez Monegal, who then adds: "he was Argentina's first king" (390-391). As for "our kinsman," the details are a bit blurry, but Borges seems to have been related, on his father's side, to Rosas. Fishburn and Hughes talk about a "relative of Borges's great-great-grandfather."Borges hated and despised both these men.
p. 416: "Whitman is incapable of falsehood": Daniel Balderston believes that he has identified this poem: "When I heard at the close of the day," in Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America), 1982, pp. 276-277. The essay in which Balderston identifies the poem referred to by the older"Borges"is "The 'Fecal Dialectic': Homosexual Panic and the Origin of Writing in Borges,"in ¿Entiendes?: Queer Readings, Hispanic Writing, ed. Emilie L. Bergmann and Paul Julian Smith (Durham/London: Duke University Press), 1995, pp. 29-45. While these notes are not intended to add "scholarly" information to the text of Borges, this remarkable identification, and the reading that accompanies it, in the translator's view warrants mention. The old man/young man motif, the public/private motif, the issue of "sex in the oeuvre o fBorges,"readings of a number of important stories, and, to a degree, the issue of violence in the fictions—all of these questions are impacted by Balderston's contentions in this essay.
The Congress
p. 423: The newspaper Ultima Hora:The title can be translated in two ways, The Eleventh Hour or The Latest News, depending on whether one wishes to give it an apocalyptic reading or a quotidian one.
p. 424: Confitería del Gas: This pastry shop (see also the note to p. 446,"Café Águila,"in the story "The Night of the Gifts" in this volume, for a further explanation of this sort of establishment) is located on Alsina between Bolivar and Defensa, about two blocks from the Casa de Gobierno (or as most Porteños know it, the Casa Rosada, or Pink House), at the River Plate end of the avenue that runs from the Casa de Gobiernoto the Plaza del Congreso. I have not been able to learn where this cafe's curious name came from, perhaps a gas-company office in the neighborhood; the problem with translating it into something such as Café Gasis, as the English-language reader will immediately perceive, the hint of indigestion that it (the translation and the name) leaves. Nor is it a truck stop. Clearly, in locating the confitería in this neighborhood, JLB is attempting to associate one "congress" with that of the institutionalized government in whose neighborhood it takes up residence. Porteños know this particular confitería as more of a pastry shop than a café perse;we are told that the meringues with crème de Chantilly are the house specialty.
p. 426: Rancher from the eastern province: Before Uruguay became a country, in 1828, it was a Spanish colony which, because it lay east of the Uruguay River, was called the Banda Oriental, or "eastern shore." (The Uruguay meets the Paranáto create the huge estuary system called the Río de la Plata, or River Plate; Montevideo is on the eastern bank of this river, Buenos Aires on the west.)"La Banda Oriental" is an old-fashioned name for the country, then, and "orientales," or "Easterners," is the equally old-fashioned name for those who live or were born there. Here, the narrator refers to "the eastern province" because for a very long time the shifting status of Uruguay— colony and protectorate of Spain, annex of Brazil and/or Argentina, etc.—led the nationalistic elements in Buenos Aires to consider it an "eastern province" of Argentina. Uruguay was founded on cattle raising.