The Congress
—Una Imagen Cautivadora, Oscura
La secta del pollo y del conejo
It’s really like a form of literature. ‘Inadmissible’ or minor literature perhaps (Derrida, Post Card, 9). Like postcards. Vestigial, often authorless, loose, haphazardly picked up from a Left Bank bouquiniste for a few francs. Especially ones whose origins, as is the case here, are lost, scattered like so many dust motes and fly specks that blur the provenance of the image.
Similar images can be found:
—With Jacques Derrida
A 1985 snap of the French writer visiting Borges at his home in Buenos Aires, smiling. Derrida too is smiling, but his gaze is unequivocally directed towards Borges. Borges, in turn, squarely focuses his countenance on Derrida.
—With Bianca Jagger in New York in 1983.
The fixity of Borges’ inner vision is confirmed by his closed eyes and the considered tilt of his posture towards the equally attentive model.
—With J. G. Ballard in 1972.
Borges sits opposite the English writer with eyes open, apparently in mid sentence as his conversant sits comfortably with a glass of wine.
But what is it about this image (see below), whose studium, as celebrity portrait of two great hommes des lettres, is completely subsumed into its beguiling punctum? The entire image as punctum. Calvino’s apparent rapture. Borges’ diffidence. Or is he detained momentarily in some deep recess of his memory? Neither seems to be attentive to the other, though they seem to be in the midst of a conversation. But with whom and about what?
Yesterday I considered the image in a different light. Perhaps several conversations are going on at once? Both writers transversally facing unseen interlocutors. And how many people are actually present, out of shot? The photographer’s framing of the scene is already cropped, already edited to capture the aura of this meeting, partitioning Calvino and Borges as its exclusive mise en scène.
But looking at it again, it does appear that Calvino is looking beyond Borges to an Other of self-evident stature and significance. Perhaps Borges’ long-time friend Bioy Casares? John Barth or Herbert Quain? And what of the photographer? We see no Van Eyck reflection in the mirror behind Borges of unseen others privy to their conversation, if it is indeed a mirror. The reflection on the table at which both writers sit offers no insight in this respect either, though the light it does shed absorbs both Calvino and the two cups and saucers into the most obvious mise en abyme that the photograph insinuates.
Why do we presume that he would be looking at Borges? Is it that his head tilts in the direction of Calvino? Or perhaps Borges is indeed listening to or eavesdropping on a conversation between Calvino and an other, perhaps the Other of the fiction of the same name; a conversation ‘which makes of anyone both a spectator and an actor’ (Borges, ‘Other’, 92).
What does the scene tell us? Calvino is clearly in the process of speaking or just having spoken; Borges is clearly listening intently or considering a response. Borges’ famous countenance has been described many times in anecdotes and biographical accounts of his life. It suggests the respectful and patient vigil for a question just posed, typical of the kind frequently encountered by the sixteen year old Alberto Manguel who crossed the threshold of number 994 Calle Maipú many times too numerous to mention: ‘Well, shall we read Kipling tonight?’ Perhaps Calvino has responded emphatically in the affirmative and the image catches that expectant interval between his response and Borges’ recognition. But there is mischief in Calvino’s grin. The emboldened lean of his left shoulder in Borges’ direction suggests an ergonomics of daring which the blind man, Calvino knows, cannot apprehend. An involuntary, unselfconscious gesture of the body—signified in the clutch of the arm of the chair—of intense anticipation, of one eager to surprise and garner respect: ‘Perhaps this time Chesterton, Signor?’ At the bleed of the frame Borges’ left hand seems slightly elevated in a gesture of polite affirmation, in deference to his friend’s boldness, as if signifying, ‘well, just this once’. But a gesture nonetheless tempered and compromised by the assured and unmoving grip of the right hand on his cane.
The time before that, as I think I conveyed to you, I saw the corners of the picture opening up to reveal all sorts of mysterious spaces, occupied by any number of shadowy figures, memento mori, and such like. I couldn’t see this, couldn’t find those spaces again, this time.
Last night I saw Calvino telling some kind of fabulous story, or delivering the punch line to an elaborate joke. What was that story, that joke? Borges received this denouement not as an invitation to laugh, but to think. It was a prompt of sorts—one that set in train his own mental line of flight into an elaborate and far off virtual world of his own. What did this look like? What did it contain? Where was it?
Coniglio al marsala
After a minute of silent reverie, Calvino leant forward to speak. ‘Maestro’, he began, ‘on your return, when this event is over and you stop over in Rome, you must promise me you will visit a small ristorante I know and love. They make an exquisite little peasant dish you will appreciate: Coniglio al marsala’. Calvino lingered on these last words, pronouncing each with a mischievous smile.
Borges sat, hands on cane, face angled upwards towards the ceiling. He was prepared to humour his honoured friend, and permit him this culinary indulgence. Borges cocked his head to the left, the slightest of smiles playing at the corners of his mouth—just enough of a gesture of encouragement to permit Calvino to proceed.
‘Guiseppe, the maestro del hotel, has entrusted me with the recipe. This is how you prepare it. You divide a rabbit into six or eight pieces. In a cast iron braising pan put a generous piece of butter and some prosciutto or bacon, cut into small chunks, along with a small stick of celery cut into shortish lengths, then the pieces of rabbit. Let them brown.’ Calvino leant forward, his right hand raised high above the table, palm facing downwards and parallel with the table top. He moved his hand down a notch in space as he detailed each step in the preparation. ‘Add four chopped tomatoes, crushing them with a wooden spoon as they start to cook. Stir in a chopped clove of garlic, some fresh marjoram, salt, and black pepper. Now pour in a small glassful of Marsala—or, if you prefer a more robust final flavour, a glass of your Mendoza Malbec—and let it simmer until it is reduced by half. Add hot water or stock, enough, like the soil of the pampas, to barely cover the pieces of rabbit; cover the pan and simmer slowly. Then, halfway through the process, add a small melanzana, unpeeled and cut into rough squares, pre-salted naturally. A little before the rabbit is ready—around dieci minuti—add a green pimento, cut into strips. The sauce of this dish should be thickish, sufficient, but not too copious—much like the bravado of a compadrito—and the pimento still a little bit al dente. The whole dish should take about un’ora to prepare, providing the rabbit is a reasonably tender one.’
Calvino concludes his culinary parlour game by leaning further forward and adding, his smile growing wider, ‘of course, a chicken can be cooked in the same way, but if it is a boiling fowl from the market, it will need a lot of slow cooking’. At which point he slapped his knees, and exploded into laughter.
Once the laughter had subsided, Borges, in a quiet voice and with the smile still tolerantly evident at the corners of his mouth, uttered the following: ‘You have had your fun. But, I ask you, following Juvenal: ‘Semper ego auditor tantum! Numquamne reponam?’ I remind you of the Jade Rabbit of the Buddhist Tao whose image, rather than that of a man, can be seen in the moon. Standing under an acacia tree, whose smoking bark appeases the gods, it forever mixes in a mortar the elixir of life. Humility is one of the three jewels of the Tao. Consider this image the next time you visit the market in search of poultry, rabbits or bees.’
Calvino is chastened by this reproach. ‘Mi dispiace. If I may be permitted to begin again?’ Borges tacitly acquiesces with a polite, conciliatory nod. Calvino pauses then resumes. ‘For a long time I’ve entertained the idea of producing the following conceit. Permesso. The story involves a missing, crucial episode within the longer history of Tlön. This tale involves the approach to and recruitment of Charles Darwin during his South American travels by certain individuals associated with Orbis Tertius—including, perhaps, a certain General Rolor and the Governor of Buenos Aires. Fugitive and, at face value, spurious documents are found among Darwin’s personal papers that contribute to the available knowledge of Uqbar, and, startlingly, Tlön. My addendum involves the Beagle acting as a vector (or, should I say, vessel) in the secret global dissemination of this knowledge. It all makes sense and corroborative evidence can be found in the historical record. The first journey of HMS Beagle to Argentina is a tour de force of geological and paleontological sophistry. Its catalogue of native fauna and flora on the second journey from Rio de la Plata Estuary in July 1832 is sufficient to evidence the encyclopaedic, or as you put it, “rigorously strange” attention to detail: Partridges, deer, capybara, Molothrus, tyrant flycatcher, mocking-bird, carrion hawks, tubes formed by lightning, absence of trees, salt-lakes, flamingos, Negro Lieutenant, Patagonian hare, sand dunes, saline incrustations, Siberian fossils, armadillos, habits of Sea-Pen, hail storm, long-legged plover, thistle beds, saline streams, little owl, tooth of extinct horse, two species of ostrich, jaguar, kingfisher, perforated pebbles, phosphorescence of the sea, condor, natural enclosures in the Sierra Tapalguen, boulders of great size, fire made of bones, streams of stones, eggs of Doris, geese, immense streams of basaltic lava, flocks of butterflies.
Darwin finally arrives in Buenos Aires on October 20, 1832, only to find a great disturbance that threatens his safety, that of others and the safe passage of the Beagle. Escorted by local gauchos he travels on horseback to Santa Fé, following the Paraná River. Clearly the dramatic scaling up in operations of Orbis Tertius that was to follow Darwin’s entry into this order was not greeted lightly by those opposed to it. He seeks and finds refuge with the Governor. The Governor grants him and facilitates his subsequent safe (and secret) passage to Montevideo. The rest, peradventure, is history. Three subsequent field trips to Argentina in 1833, 1834 and 1835 provided Darwin with further opportunity to fabulate evidence that would find its way into his Great Patagonian Tertiary Formation (its title an unwitting cipher of the society into whose mission he had recently been enlisted). The eminent naturalist and conchologist G.B. Sowerby reinforced this enchantment by rigour in his 1846 Descriptions of the Tertiary fossil shells from South America. In the Bahia Blanca alone he catalogued fragments of Mytilus eduliformis, Solen Caribaeus, beds of living Mytilus, Venus sinuosa, Azara labiate, Cytheraea, Buccinum, Buccinanops globulosum, Olivancillaria auricularia, Venus flexuosa, Voluta colocynthis, Paludestrina australis, Fusus Magellanicus and Patella deaurita Mytilus Magellanicus.’
The unfolding of Calvino’s extensive scenario has wearied Borges. As Calvino orders more coffee he drifts into sleep.
it’s nice to have not only such an eminent poet and writer, but a poultry inspector on the program Cavett speaks with the timbre of William Weaver in an awkward farrago of Southern drawl and Midwestern twang could you explain it sounds like something out of S.J. Perelman I had a small job in a library in Buenos Aires then I was given the order to go and inspect the sale of poultry and eggs in markets your mother got a phone call one night that was ominous yes a phone call in the small hours then the morning after I asked her did I dream a phone call
Presto maestro a focussed spot light shines on Cavett in Fez and magician’s Djellaba a small red pail bleeds on to a warm beach trowel its dorsal fin spangled with porphyry Cavett speaks directly to camera beaming Eel larvae and frogfish from the Sargasso Sea a nautilus from the Adriatic volcanic sand from the Galapagos phosphorescent plankton from the Outer Hebrides crimson hermaphrodite sea hares from gelid North Atlantic depths a languid ribbon of Monkfish spawn from the Canary Islands the fossilised tooth of a Coelacanth still sweet with the warm kiss of Madagascar waters
Cavett holds both arms up in triumph
riches of the Gulf Stream Poseidon Old Norse god AEgir the Seafarer ofer hwæles eþel hweorfeð Sweet’s capable translation over the whale’s path my spirit soars widely
Cavett pours out the contents of a Syrian amphora a stillborn hippocampus languid and sudden shimmers
Signore, più Etruscan che Hellenistic no
applause
grazie
sì zucchero grazie
The decisive moment
This image has taken hold of me; it has come to enter me, to obsess me, to occupy my days and sleepless nights. In the delirium of this reverie, a tantalising possibility has taken root and refuses to let go. Could it be so? Might it be true that this image is indeed the work of his eye, his hand? Was this very scene in fact viewed through the celebrated Leica lens by the eye of none other than Henri Cartier-Bresson? Certain factors perhaps mitigate against this being so—not least the fact that Cartier-Bresson reputedly retired from photography in the early 1970s to pursue the ‘finer arts’ of drawing and painting.
But there are other factors at play here that keep alive the prospect that it could indeed have been him. To begin with, and this may seem a matter of mere semantics, the description of his ‘retirement’ carries the following caveat: it reads, he ‘no longer took pictures other than an occasional private portrait’. Of any such commission, surely this one would pique his interest, would entice him to make the long journey south. How could he turn down the chance to be present at and to capture the very first—and, as it happened, only—meeting between two of the greatest literary minds of the twentieth century? And then there is the evidence presented by the image itself. Of all the publicly available images of Borges (and of Calvino, for that matter), few (if any) hold the same dynamism and élan, the same clarity and vitality, and sense of the moment, as this one. This is, in short, no mere snapshot—at least, that is, not in the ordinary sense. The careful composition, the precise gestures, the capture of light, limbs and bodily expressions are all strongly suggestive of Cartier-Bresson’s guiding modus operandi, which he drew from the seventeenth century Cardinal de Retz: Il n’y a rien dans ce monde qui n’ait un moment decisif (‘There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment’). We must also not neglect the prior connection linking the photographer with the blind poet. This extraordinary association is told by Pablo Cabado in the following (perhaps apocryphal, but too strange to be fictional) tale, which is reproduced here in full:
One day Cartier-Bresson received a telephone call from the writer JL Borges, who wished to know whether he would be willing to accept a prize for which Borges wanted to nominate him. The prize was offered by a rich woman who lived in Sicily. It was for artists of all kinds. What distinguished this prize from most others was that it was the previous winner who nominated, after two years, the next one. And today Borges wanted to give the prize to Cartier-Bresson. ‘Why me?’ he asked. ‘Because I am blind,’ said Borges, ‘and I want to give it to you in recognition of your eyes.’ Cartier-Bresson felt he could not refuse Borges and so he traveled to Palermo for the award ceremony. There he was put up in a highly reputed old hotel. Its name, or something about it, seemed familiar to him. Finally he found out why. It was the hotel his parents had gone to on their honeymoon. He was born nine months later. In this same hotel, where he was lodged because his eyes had won a prize, he had been conceived (‘Gift’, 135).
It is an hôtel of an entirely different repute, perhaps, that Cartier-Bresson was alluding to in the structuring of the present image and, in particular, in the space that is opened up in the mirror over and behind Borges’ right shoulder. Mirrors, as we all know, are never innocent. To adapt Borges’ own words, ‘mirrors are not more wrapt in silences’. Rather, you, Borges, in the reflected light of the mirror, ‘are that panther figure which we can only spy at a distance’ (Borges, ‘Cat’, 135). The mirror image, then, serves here as a figurative memento mori, reminding us of ‘the little death’ that lies behind it.
The forensic aesthetic
Guiding this pictorial investigation is a commitment to what Ralph Rugoff terms the ‘forensic aesthetic’. Rugoff develops this notion as a counter to the idea that the content of a photograph (or any art object for that matter) can be captured on first viewing, that it might be grasped in its entirety and with no remainder. Rather, for Rugoff the process is more one where we treat art, cultural artefacts and practices in the manner of a crime scene investigation. By necessity, Rugoff suggests, we ‘function like detectives or forensic technicians, attempting to reconstruct the activities and ambiguous motivations congealed in physical artefacts’ (‘Eye’, 61), such as the photograph that is before us.
The ‘forensic aesthetic’, as Rugoff presents it, is built around the following understandings: an art object is not so much a thing as an event (63), a locus or site ‘where something happened’ (62); as an event, each art object leaves traces that are both open to and necessitate interpretation; these traces are ‘inextricably linked to an unseen history’, and embody a ‘fractured relationship to time’ (62); and, thus, we must examine these traces and marks, ‘reading them as clues’(62) in order to begin to ‘speculatively piece together histories that remain largely invisible to the eye’ (62). In line with this reasoning, what we encounter when we confront this image are a ‘diffuse field of clues’ (61) that we must interpret, much as a forensic anthropologist or scientist would do.
As part of this forensic examination of the image before us—or, as part of our emerging ‘archive of misunderstanding’, if you will—questions abound concerning the issue of boundaries and frames (Derrida, Copy, 19).
In a wonderful meditation on the treatment of space and time in Gaston Bachelard’s L’intuition de l’instant, the American philosopher Edward S. Casey offers the following valuable insights on boundaries. ‘Boundaries are permeable’, he writes, ‘they are porous, full of holes; they allow, indeed often invite, movement across them’ (Bachelard, 8). Even so, Casey adds, ‘boundaries remain edges of a certain definite sort: they are found at the limits of things and more particularly on their surfaces’ (ibid.).
Similar concerns are also taken up and explored at length in the work of Jacques Derrida. In The Truth in Painting, for instance, Derrida explores the idea of the parergon in relation to two passages in separate texts by Kant. This Greek word literally means ‘outside the work’’ as par means ‘past’ or ‘beyond’, and ergon means ‘work’. Contrary to the suggestion of clear separation, however, the implication is that there is a close and mutually influencing proximity between ergon and parergon. In this way, the parergon ‘does not fall to one side’ of the ergon, rather ‘it touches and cooperates, from a certain outside’ which is ‘neither simply outside nor simply inside’ (Derrida, Truth, 54). As Derrida goes on to explain: the parergon ‘comes to play, abut onto, brush against, rub, press against the limit itself and intervene in the inside only to the extent that the inside is lacking’ (56). This is the case insofar as the inside—the ‘work’—‘is not complete, exhausted’; rather, ‘it needs this supplement [the parergon] to finish it’ (Mella, ‘Detour’, 40).
In working through the implications of this relationship between ergon and parergon, Derrida explores three examples: the status of clothing on statuary, the role of columns on buildings, and frames for paintings and other artwork. In the present context, it is the last of these that is most instructive for approaching the image to hand. According to Derrida, in an art context, a picture’s frame as parergon serves two vital yet seemingly contradictory and simultaneous operations. On the one hand, its precise function is to stand out ‘like a figure on a ground’, both from ‘the ergon (the work)’ and also from ‘the milieu’ (which in the case of displayed art, includes both the immediate surrounding of the gallery wall, and a wider art context) (Truth, 61). This it does in order to ‘delimit’ the content of any given work. On the other hand, and at the same time, ‘the parergon is a form which has as its traditional determination not that it stands out but that it disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy’ (ibid.). As an investigative tool of the forensic aesthetic, this understanding of the frame as parergon is most instructive for thinking through the image before us.
This image of Calvino and Borges fulfils the above parergonal functions by both delimiting what is in the image as well as through the porosity of the boundary, with the ‘milieu’ beyond it crucially brought into play. This occurs in two ways. First, this image is ‘framed’ by its relationship to others, as part of a particular genre, or studium as previously noted—that of the celebrity/feted writer (in this case Borges) with celebrity philosopher, writer, socialite, etc. From this late period of his life (when he became, in the words of one commentator, an ‘international institution’ constantly travelling the world—Woodall, Borges, 259), photographs can be found of Borges alongside a diverse cavalcade of intellectuals and celebrities, including everyone from Derrida, to J.G. Ballard and Bianca Jagger. What sets the Calvino image apart from these others—and thus ‘frames’ it in a way that delimits or distinguishes it—is its beguiling nature; this particular image, unlike some of the others that circulate, is fugitive in the strict forensic sense by which its ‘content’ eludes encapsulation and immediate sense-making.
The second more restricted, but potentially richer, sense of what is occurring at the boundary/edge of this ‘framed’ photographic composition concerns the issue of what is not immediately visible. We can approach this issue from two theoretical directions: (a) that which points to what is missing from the image; and (b) that which points to what the image opens up by way of avenues for further exploration. On what is missing, Rugoff duly acknowledges the significant contribution that Roland Barthes has made in making us aware of how all photographs are ‘haunted by absence and loss; each confronts us with the traces of an irretrievably vanished human moment’ (‘Eye’, 91). However, for Rugoff, the ‘absence’ that structures the forensic aesthetic is ‘of a different order’: it is a ‘framing silence’ (ibid.). One key ‘silence’ of this image is the question of who else may be present outside the ‘frame’ but in the same interior space. Who is on the other side of the camera, for instance? Given this depicts only one quarter-segment of a circular table, who else may be seated there? Could it be a dignitary from the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo? Perhaps the novelist Gonzalo Torrente Ballester? Presumably Maria Kodama was present. Moreover, in terms of material clues or traces, what is outside the window behind Calvino’s right shoulder? How does the window/mirror/doorway behind Borges’ left shoulder speak to us, and of what? We are simply faced with a scene, an unknowable scene of unseen people and motivations. It resembles the visual analogue of a mise en scene sampled from a nouveau roman, a theatre of objects and things which simply ‘are there’, as Alain Robbe-Grillet would have it (‘Novel’, 19).
A Portrait of Two Gentlemen of Letters in a Hotel in Seville (1984)
In a potentially explosive contribution to scholarship on Vermeer, Philip Steadman develops the hypothesis that Vermeer’s paintings in fact consist of traced projected camera images at full size. Drawing from an earlier project of Steadman’s, which saw him oversee the reconstruction of Vermeer’s room for a 1989 BBC documentary, Steadman furnishes the following evidence as support for this theory:
Those parts of the room that are visible in each painting are contained within a ‘visual pyramid’ whose apex is at the viewpoint. If the sloping lines that form the edges of this pyramid are carried back through the viewpoint to meet the back wall of the room behind the painter, they define a rectangular area on that wall. In each of the six cases in question (and maybe more) this rectangle is the precise size of the respective painting. My explanation for this extraordinary geometrical coincidence is that Vermeer had a cubicle-type camera obscura at the back of the room with a lens that could be moved to each painting’s viewpoint […] (‘Vermeer’, 140).
If Vermeer’s The Music Lesson (c. 1662-1664) was, so to speak, painted with a photographic eye, then what is striking about the present image before us is that it is the inverse of this: it is an image photographed with a painterly eye.
One of the most remarkable features of this photograph is the parallels between it and Dutch interior paintings of the seventeenth century. In broad brushstrokes, we can say that the conventional format of these Delft School paintings included two key elements. First, they ‘featured a room with a window, or at least the indication of a light source, along the side wall’ (Hollander, ‘Entrance’, 2). In the work of Maes, this might take the form of an open window which offers a view of Dordrecht, for example (ibid.). In the present image, what is incorporated is a glimpse through quartered glass of the ornate facades of the upper streetscape of Seville. Second, the ‘back wall was parallel to the picture plane’ (ibid.). While the back wall is not, strictly speaking, parallel to the picture plane, the composition nonetheless works to create this effect. In Dutch paintings, this back wall/picture plane relationship ‘could be punctuated by one or more objects such as windows, pictures, or maps, along with doorways framing views of other rooms’ (ibid.), with the last of these particularly evident in the paintings of Hendrik Sorgh, Adriaen van Gaesbeeck, and especially Pieter de Hooch.
To add further detail to this outline, in compositional terms both of the above elements combine in these Dutch paintings in ways that render their interior spaces, and the manifold detail contained within them, ‘compact, variegated, invitational’ (ibid.). As Martha Hollander notes, ‘the theorist and painter Karel van Mander, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, described the technique of urging the viewer’s eyes to enter deep into a picture by creating small pockets of space, rich in exquisite detail’ (‘Entrance’, 2). One key way that this is achieved is via the inclusion of ‘internal vignettes’ that ‘enlarges the sense of compelling spaciousness in these pictures’ by, among other things, creating ‘two or more areas for their figures to inhabit, featuring smaller secondary scenes within the larger ones’ (ibid.).
In the Calvino-Borges photograph this occurs in a figurative way. What we see in this image is a certain sense of space opening up to the right: above Borges’ left shoulder is a vertical panel containing a rectangular and an oval motif; a fluted pattern runs horizontally above and to the right of these (both of which look more painted than a part of the architecture). The effect of these is to frame what appears to be either reflected light off a mirror or a passage through to another interior space. It is in this very precise ‘pocket of detail’ that we can, arguably, divine what Benjamin means when he writes that ‘there is something inexplicably familiar about these spots’ insofar as they open up to us ‘crucial experiences of the past’ (‘Diary’, 3).
Hollander, in her detailed study of Dutch interior paintings, points out that, characteristic of these works, ‘was the potential for ambiguity’ and double-coding. So, for instance, she writes how, ‘in courtship scenes by Vermeer and de Hooch, men and women drink or play music while erotic, biblical, or mythological pictures on the walls, unseen by the revellers, comment in various ways on their behaviour’ (‘Entrance’, 3). Might we isolate in the reflected glass or glimpsed passageway of our photograph a subtle allusion to a notorious event in Borges’ life that took place in Geneva?
In his short story, ‘The Other’, Borges sits on a park bench in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in February 1969. Beside him is a younger version of himself, who is simultaneously present there in Cambridge and on another park bench many years earlier in Geneva, Switzerland. To prove that they are one and the same and that ‘I’m not lying’, the older of the two furnishes a list of ‘things a stranger couldn’t possibly know’ (‘Other’, 4); the final item on his list, which comes after his recollection of a book ‘about sexual customs in the Balkans’, is an enigmatic reference to ‘one evening on a certain second floor of the Place Dubourg’ (4). The younger Borges corrects his elder self: he means Place Dufour, not Place Dobourg (5).
This is no innocent error (no error ever is in Borges) in that, when reflecting back on his time in Geneva in ‘An Autobiographical Essay’, Borges is quite clear about his geographical knowledge and memory of the streets of Geneva: ‘I still know Geneva far better than I know Buenos Aires, which is easily explained by the fact that in Geneva no two streetcorners are alike and one quickly learns the differences’ (‘Essay’, 215). For it was in a brothel in the Place Dufour that Borges’ father sent his seventeen year old son to have him inducted into the world of carnality with his own mistress.1 As James Woodall has described this most infamous of Borges esoterica, ‘Jorge Borges realised he had to do the right paternal thing, and introduce his son to a prostitute… He handed his son an address, at which he should report at such and such an hour, and there he would be looked after’ (Borges, 32). It is not clear, as if the ignominy and distress of this was not enough for the young Georgie, whether the young initiate was wearing the Etonian school uniform he was forced by his father to wear in Buenos Aires. It is well known in the robust world of Borges studies that this obscure vignette in ‘The Other’ is the most revealing that Borges ever comes to remembering this event in his writing. Perhaps another lesser-known reference is to be found in ‘The Congress’, also published in the 1975 collection The Book of Sand. Having fallen nondescriptly into the inner circle of an emerging secret society known as the Congress, the narrator describes how one night it is suggested that they visit a brothel. He reveals to the reader that although the ‘plan did not attract’ him he goes along so as not to be ‘the butt’ of jokes.2 One can only wonder if Georgie succumbed to such pressure when he ascended those two flights of stairs in the Place Bourg du Four.3
Might, then, this photograph have been taken in Geneva? Could it be possible that Calvino is summoning the nerve to raise the matter with Borges who, in this reading, is clutching his cane intuitively in readiness for an imminent impertinence or faux pas? Or is he steeling himself to confront his demons, exorcising from his prodigious memory once and for all the horror of this event?
As there seems to be no credible information as to the provenance of the image in question we must invert Calvino’s assessment on photography that it can only be an image ‘if it exhausts all possible meanings’ (‘Adventure’, 234). This image then would seem to be, with a nod to Borges, the total photograph.
Postscript
Speaking at a conference on Italo Calvino at the University of California (Davis Campus) in 1997, John Barth observed that ‘Only once, to my knowledge, did these two splendid writers happen to meet (in Rome, near the end of Borges’s life)’ (Barth, ‘Parallels!’). Barth’s qualification of the provisional nature of this information (‘to my knowledge’) is telling. Further forensic research reveals that Calvino and Borges did not meet in Rome but in Seville. Barth is correct, however, in that it was the only time the two writers did in fact meet. The context was propitious. Both were invited speakers at ‘a cycle of conferences on fantastical literature’ in Seville in late September 1984.4 The location of the conference was the Seville campus of Menéndez Pelayo International University. We know that the conference was ‘inaugurated’ on the 24th of September with a colloquium between Borges and Santiago Roldán, Dean of the University. We know that on the afternoon of the 27th of September Calvino delivered a lecture in Spanish on ‘Fantastical Literature and Italian Letters’ and that he closed the conference proceedings on the 28th with a colloquium with Gonzalo Torrente Ballester. Other speakers at the conference included Antonio Rodriguez Almodóvar, Luis Alberto de Cuenca and Juan Antonio Ramírez. We know that, although invited, Bioy Casares did not attend.
What we do not know is precisely where in Seville the photograph of Borges and Calvino was taken and by whom. We are still troubled by the stroke of chance that made us aware of a potential second corroborative portrait of Borges in Seville (source unknown), indeed in the very room in which he and Calvino were photographed.
It is impossible to say if it is anterior or posterior to the image taken with Calvino. Taken from a different angle, Borges is glimpsed from the side about to take a sip from a cup. There is a suggestion of steam rising from it as he carefully lifts it to his mouth. The cane he holds in his right hand is identical to the one he clasps in the Calvino portrait, its tessellated carving clearly visible.5 So too is the crockery, with its distinctive, decorative motif. The plant next to Calvino’s right arm is also seen, despite very bright light coming in from the window, which saturates it into a silhouette. The table and chairs at which the two men sit are also visible. And then a curious detail. Next to the saucer there is a piece of paper. Borges’ countenance suggests that he may have just had the contents read to him of what may be a note and is parsing it in his mind. A line of verse perhaps. Or maybe he has just finished dictating something to an unseen amanuensis? Alberto Manguel may be present. His slightly creased forehead suggests measured and serious reflection. Perhaps it is a draft or a proposition given him by Calvino. Or to be given to Calvino. If the latter, it possibly explains, or at least offers another interpretation of, the enigmatic aura of the fugitive image under discussion here. Borges sits reflecting with resigned satisfaction as Calvino beams, barely able to contain his rapture and remain seated at the same time.
Notes
1. It is perhaps worth noting here that Borges’ ‘The Other’ was published in Playboy magazine in May 1977. It was rendered into English in the authoritative hand of Norman Thomas di Giovanni. In relation to the dialogue between Borges and his younger self in that fiction, it is also worth considering the consequences of two Platonic aphorisms offered in a footnote in ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’: ‘All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare’ (12). The slippage between the two is a metaphysical precept that may have comforted the older Jorge Luis thinking back on Georgie’s experience. #back
2. Furthermore, the narrator confesses to the President of the Congress (Don Alejandro Glencoe) how, on completing a report for the Congress while in London, he ‘stayed on and on in England, throwing away your money on a woman’. This disclosure is subsequent to a throwaway aphorism of Don Alejandro’s designed to prompt the narrator to make such a confession: ‘The Congress is that worthless boy who squanders my substance on whores’. Jorge-Luis Borges, ‘The Congress’, in The Book of Sand, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1979), 32. #back
3. As Woodall suggests in a footnote to this very point, Borges ‘has deliberately and doubly misremembered the real name of the Genevan square.’ (Boges, 286) #back
4. The proceedings of the conference, which includes the presentations of both Borges and Calvino, was published in 1985 as Literatura Fantastica, Madrid, Ediciones Siruela. Information we have garnered about the proceedings is from a translation of the Introduction, ‘A Journey to Wherever You May Please’ by Andres Vaccari. #back
5. ‘… and he usually held his hands locked together over the head of his cane’ (Borges, ‘Congress’, 18). #back
References
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