Almanac This year, 1999, if they were alive, some personages that had a very important role in literature, cinema and music will be a hundred year old: the writer Ernest Hemingway; the director Alfred Hitchcock, dead in 1980, a maestro without equal of the thriller; the dancer and actor Fred Astaire, dead in 1987; Duke Ellington, dead in 1974, pianist, compositor and conductor, one of the mainstays of the history of jazz. But none of theses personages will have the wideness of the memory foreseen for Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine poet, prose writer and essayist, dead in 1986. For him, President Menem has proclaimed 1999 as “the centenary year of Borges”. A great travelling exposition, departed from Venice, will go around the world till June 2000 and will end in Geneva where the Argentine maestro dead when he was 87 years old. Who was Borges? Who was this man, became blind that considered literature more real than any reality? Why his books (“Fictions”, The Aleph”, “Eulogy of the shadows “...) go on to make him unique, near and present?
I've had the luck to meet and interview Borges a day on April 1977, during a brief stopover in Milan. Borges was a person I have been waiting for. Now he was there in front of me, a grey afternoon that could seem to him alike any other one. As I've already said, Borges could not see, his eyes that moved following the sound of voices were fissures opened over the nothing. Before the meeting, I've read again some poems, and I tried to make him talk about one in particular. The poem, entitled “Things “, seemed a list that could go on endlessly: “The indecipherable dust Shakespeare was ...the changes in cloud...the reverse of the prolix globe...the light spider web of the pyramid...the steel Odin stuck in the tree...the reverse of the tapestry “. Why did these “things”, and not others, keep safe inside the dark of blindness? Borges listened to me and smiled. Then, more than giving me an answer, he enounced to me his faith acts: “For a poet - he said - every moment in life, every fact, must be poetical, since, in depth, it's magic. This phrase of mine is neither less clear nor less mysterious than universe: we swim in mystery and ignorance”. I started-off from the line of another poem to ask Borges if, in his blindness, it has remained the utmost trace of some colours.
“The only colour that left for me - the answer was - is the yellow. Unlike it could seem blind persons miss the black, the darkness and the red because the black, the darkness and the red belong to persons that can see. Yellow is the colour dying the last. I keep it inside me, it's alike a strange fog.
- You have born and you live in a sunny country as Argentine is. From where does it come the appeal that languages constantly have for you, as well as the symbols, the myths, the northern lands myths?
“Do not forget that by basic culture has been English, since my mother was English. For example I studied Dante in English, rummaging my father's library. And then I'm bored with sun. Sun has only a merit: gives the pleasure of shade “.
- Some years ago you said: “If some way I'm rich, I'm more of perplexity than certainties “. Would you state the same again?
“I keep unchanged this rich treasure of uncertainty. If it has changed something it is of another nature. When I was young I wanted to be unhappy as Hamlet. Now I do not love unhappiness anymore. I wish and I search with assiduity a quite happiness. Sometimes happiness has reasons hard to express. Sometimes to be happy it's enough to cross the street and feel a puff of fresh air”.
- You are famous all over the world for some symbols that are present all over your works: the labyrinth and the mirrors. Wouldn't you ever move away from them?
“The labyrinth is the symbol of perplexity, and so it has its endlessness. That of the mirrors concerns the matter of personal identity and the troubles to find it: looking at yourself in a mirror you do not know if you are yourself or another.
- The infinity concept too is often present in your pages. How do you represent it? “When I think about infinite, I do not think about space, but to the infinitive divisibility of things.
- Are you afraid when you think about dead? “It would be horrible being immortal “.

I saw Borges again four years later, an evening in July 1981 the same at Milan, as a visitor of an exhibition about labyrinths. It was unavoidable bringing about a sad question: what could he see? But the answer was in Borges himself. Before becoming blind, he did never linger in the pleasures of memory. Darkness compelled him to go down it and memory appeared to him bottomless. So he went that evening to the Milanese exhibition. Hearing, touching and imagining Borges acknowledged labyrinths, he saw them as we did, he moved along them as the ancient Theseus. Nothing could be taught or explained or revealed to Borges, if it is true that darkness is the admirable place of dream and that literature (Borges himself said it) is the form of the 'living labyrinth'.

 

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