There is no definitive account of the romance – early, middle, or late – between Georgie and Elsa. Dates are absent or contradictory, and the resulting picture is full of gaps and distortions. There are her versions of events but little from Borges’s side except for some brief remarks he once made to me about why he married her. (His explanation smacked at one and the same time as overly literary and foolishly romantic.)
Elsa recalled their initial meetings in a rosy and seemingly sincere way while she and Borges were married but after they separated her emphasis changed. She now glossed over those early days and spoke more of their life together. In her recollections of both times there are false notes and plain untruths, especially when she describes the latter years. Surprisingly, looking back on the marriage and her relationship with Borges in 1983, when she was seventy-two and Borges still had three years to live, she expressed neither bitterness nor resentment nor recriminations. In fact, she presented a blissful, storybook picture of their entire married life that had little to do with reality. For some unknown reason she was putting the best possible face on events that had not been pleasant for her.
So what we have is a series of fragments, many of them unreliable. In the maze and tangle of what really took place in the romance – somewhere – lies the irreducible truth. By now, however, that truth is elusive if not irretrievable.
The story begins, according to one Elsa version, which she recounts with girlish enthusiasm and hints of prophetic significance, when she was seventeen and Borges twenty-eight. That would have made it 1927. (Other accounts give their ages as twenty and thirty-one, but for a moment let’s follow Elsa’s lead.)
She grew up on the fringes of La Plata, then a pleasant university town and capital of the Province of Buenos Aires, an hour or so southeast of the city of Buenos Aires. The university was renowned for its distinguished faculty, its important library, and a celebrated Natural History Museum. Founded in 1882, La Plata was carefully laid out on a grid plan; it had intersecting diagonal avenues and it boasted impressive woodlands and parks and public buildings. Elsa remembered it sentimentally as ‘a beautiful, never-to-be-forgotten city, fragrant with its lindens.’
She described herself at the time as una jovencita vistosa – an attractive young woman. One day she accepted an invitation from Pedro Henríquez Ureña, an outstanding scholar and literary figure, to have tea that afternoon at his home. Some young writers from Buenos Aires had also been invited, among them – fatefully – Borges. ‘I say fatefully’, Elsa recounted, ‘because I did not want to accept the invitation. I no doubt had another engagement, which I did not want to break.’ She arrived at Henríquez Ureña’s in a bad mood and took her good time about entering the room where the others were gathered. She claimed that from the time she was a small girl she had been in the habit of not speaking when anything or anybody displeased her. (She noted that the habit was one she never lost.) So she took a seat in an armchair and did not utter a word. Georgie stared at her, he too speechless. Later he confessed to her that he had been terrified. She claims to have found him a kind, talented, good-looking young man. These last words were an obvious sop to Borges, who was present when Elsa spoke them. If on their first meeting both were tongue-tied, she could hardly have judged his kindness or his literary talent. As for his looks, Borges in the twenties was decidedly unprepossessing. At one point he wore thick spectacles that greatly magnified his eyes, and his right eyelid drooped. Later he began to put on weight and grew a beard. In all these stages he was extremely awkward in the presence of the opposite sex. Elsa had been upset on the day because she’d had to give up a date with some other man. Yet if there is any truth to her stories something must have been in the air, for she mentions that many pleasant afternoons were to follow, both in La Plata and in Buenos Aires, and she names the different tea shops she and Borges frequented.
Another version of events states that Henríquez Ureña had invited Elsa and her sister Alicia on a sort of blind date to a lecture at the Museum of Fine Arts. The speaker turned out to be Néstor Ibarra, who was one day to marry Alicia. The young man who’d accompanied him to La Plata was Borges. Elsa is quoted as saying that ‘after Henríquez Ureña introduced us we had tea at the Jockey Club, and the next week Alicia and I went to Buenos Aires, where we all met up. From then on Borges never left me alone. He pursued me night and day. It was on our first date that he swore his eternal love for me.’
For how long this went on we do not know. It has been claimed that they were sweethearts for two years and that there was even talk of marriage, but Elsa once remarked that she couldn’t remember if they were ever formally engaged. Interviewed in 1983, she spoke of having been Borges’s fiancée when she was twenty years old. ‘We had even exchanged rings,’ she said. ‘We were properly engaged.’
Again, taking the lead from Elsa, let us now say she was twenty. That would have made Borges thirty-one and the year 1930. She claimed that a besotted Borges journeyed to La Plata every Saturday to see his beloved. But what the beloved never revealed to him was that she had fallen in love with someone else, with whom she was carrying on a clandestine relationship. Borges, incredibly callow, was the last person to find out. One variant of the story quotes Elsa as saying that ‘A fortnight after I was married, Borges, who knew nothing about it, kept phoning my house. My mother did not know what to say to him, and I washed my hands of the matter. I told her it was her problem. Finally, being very correct, my mother answered one of his calls and said, “Look, Borges, pardon me, but I feel obliged to tell you something. Don’t phone any more; Elsa is married.”’ The mother reported that there was a short silence down the telephone and then Borges said, ‘Ah, caramba,’ and he hung up.
There is something amusing about this story, but it does Elsa no credit, while it makes an utter fool of Borges. Can things really have happened in this way? Was Elsa’s memory plainly unreliable or was she simply good at invention? When would these events have taken place? We know that Elsa was not married until 1937. Several years are unaccounted for here.
While there is no full or straightforward account of the romance there is no end of inconsequential variations. In one, María Millán, Elsa’s mother, ran a boarding house, where Borges stayed during his visits and where Henríquez Ureña was a lodger. It was here, not at the professor’s home nor at the Museum of Fine Arts, that Elsa first met Borges.
One thing only seems certain – that this was Borges’s first of several experiences of being deceived and jilted by a woman. What lesson did he derive from the Elsa misfortune?
In the whole fraught saga of his star-crossed relationship with Elsa, what happened next, early in 1944, must rank as one of the strangest turns in Borges’s life. By this time Elsa had been married since 1937 to one Ricardo Albarracín Sarmiento, by whom she had a son. In this seven-year interim she and Borges are not known to have been in contact. Under what circumstances then and by what plotting did he meet Elsa again? All we know is what he wrote to her in two love letters, both composed in the same week. These mysterious billets-doux, giving no hint of a before or an after, seem to have materialized out of nowhere, led nowhere, and ended nowhere.
The first of these impassioned letters, written on 31 January, reveals that Georgie and Elsa had met the day before, an encounter that unleashed a veritable Niagara of emotion in the normally buttoned-up Borges. Apart from his amatory outpourings, he says he would like to overwhelm her with a detailed description of his room, with his bookcase containing the Encyclopædia Britannica, his shelves of Chesterton’s works, and his various editions of the Arabian Nights. And he recommends that she read the anthology of fantastic literature that he had compiled a few years earlier with his friends Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo.
In the second letter, written on 4 February, he tells Elsa that two days earlier he had gone to Sur, the leading literary magazine of the period, to correct the proofs of his latest short story and to add a dedication. The dedication was one he had obviously promised her when they met. Indeed when the issue of Sur appeared his tale bore the inscription ‘To E.H.M.’, initials standing for Elsa Helena Millán. The missive goes on to say that the Sunday editions of both Buenos Aires papers, La Prensa and La Nación, are reviewing a book of his poems. We learn that the following week he is going to ‘undertake a pilgrimage to La Plata.’ And he