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3ae798f
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"I was extremely shy of approaching my hero but he, as I found out, was sorely in need of company. By then almost completely blind, he was claustrated and even a little confused and this may help explain the rather shocking attitude that he took to the blunt trauma that was being inflicted in the streets and squares around him. ' ' he intoned to me when the topic first came up, as it had to: ' ' This couplet he claimed (I have never been able to locate it) was from Edmund Blunden, whose gnarled hand I had been so excited to shake all those years ago, but it was not the Videla that Borges meant by the allusion. It was the pre-existing rule of Juan Peron, which he felt had depraved and corrupted Argentine society. I didn't disagree with this at all--and Peron had victimized Borges's mother and sister as well as having Borges himself fired from his job at the National Library--but it was nonetheless sad to hear the old man saying that he heartily preferred the new uniformed regime, as being one of 'gentlemen' as opposed to 'pimps.' This was a touch like listening to Evelyn Waugh at his most liverish and bufferish. (It was also partly redeemed by a piece of learned philology or etymology concerning the Buenos Aires dockside slang for pimp: . 'A , you see,' said Borges with perfect composure, 'is a pussy or more exactly a cunt. So a is a trafficker in cunt: in Anglo-Saxon we might say a 'cunter."' Had not the very itself been evolved in a brothel in 1880? Borges could talk indefinitely about this sort of thing, perhaps in revenge for having had an oversolicitous mother who tyrannized him all his life.)"
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bawd
edmund-blunden
evelyn-waugh
jorge-rafael-videla
juan-peron
lingustics
jorge-luis-borges
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Christopher Hitchens |