So much for the letters’ factual information. It is almost unbelievable that Borges would seek to impress or attempt to attract a young married woman with no literary interests whatsoever by reciting to her the contents of his library shelves or the trivia of his proofreading, editing, or writing activities. The dedication, yes, may have proved momentarily flattering, but the rest in a man of forty-four is more like the hopeful but clumsy groping and fumbling of an adolescent.
More revealing are the overblown expressions of love. ‘To have witnessed the birth and death of your slow smile, to have heard the precious modulations of your voice, to have recaptured for a few hours the intricate delight of your company …’ He then tells Elsa she is not just a miracle but is also indispensable, and he begs her not to go out of his life. On it goes; each bit of his soul-baring, each of his declarations, more embarrassing than the last. ‘Those who suffer the misfortune of not being Helena Astete Millán have no reality for me …’
What on earth could have provoked these pathetic effusions – pleading with Elsa to deliver him from his loneliness and the pointlessness of his existence, admitting to a fear that while he remembers her he may no longer exist in her memory? All so uncharacteristic of the Borges he allowed the public to see.
For anyone else this isolated episode might have been a simple aberration. But for Borges it was part of a recurring pattern. As ever with him, we must look for an explanation in the ongoing frustrations and failures of his love life, in the string of rejections he suffered at the successive hands of women he fell in love with, or imagined he was in love with, but who in time either spurned him outright or strung him along or simply failed to respond to his style of literary advances. Borges’s love life was always a cerebral business.
What seems to have triggered the 1944 letters to Elsa was a reaction. Borges had endured a long-running obsession with Norah Lange, a captivating redhead, a poet whose first book he had assiduously promoted in 1925 and to whom he soon became romantically attached. She was Nordic, tall, good-looking, and with flaming hair – by his standards everything a woman should be. By 1931, however, Norah was conducting a secretive on-and-off affair with another poet, Oliverio Girondo. This was a blow to Borges, but when Oliverio departed for Paris, Borges’s hopes began to wax again. Then, when his rival returned, the hopes – always a private intellectual exercise – once more waned. Norah and Oliverio lived together for nearly a decade and in June 1943 were quietly married. Meanwhile, Haydée Lange, Norah’s sister, had an unstable boyfriend who was convinced that Borges was carrying on with his fiancée. He spied on Haydée, trying to catch Borges. At the end of 1943 the young man was found drowned in the harbour.
It was at this time that Borges’s mind seemed to snap and he reacted by trying to revive his old relationship with Elsa. What we don’t know is how the earlier connection with Elsa fit in chronologically with Borges’s ongoing love of Norah Lange, which in fact he never got over.
Elsa, who was the most jealous of women, admitted in her last years that Borges was always in love, that he needed love (‘even if perhaps this is not quite the right word for it’), that he needed a woman by his side. When his feelings for one were over, he soon found a replacement. ‘But for some unknown reason,’ Elsa went on, ‘he never managed to make anything permanent with any woman.’ Was she being coy in this last remark or was it some sort of cryptic cover-up?
With regard to the love letters of 1944, as mysteriously and unexpectedly as the isolated episode had risen it simply faded or went underground. There were no repercussions at the time, and the event appeared to vanish from Borges’s life. When in 1944 he published in book form the story dedicated with fanfare to Elsa twelve months before, oddly the dedication was shifted to another of the collection’s stories, which was dated 1942. As for the fate of the two letters, in 1986 Elsa unsuccessfully offered them for auction at Sothebys in New York, but the suggested price of $4,000-6,000 had apparently been deemed by the public as too high. Also oddly, when asked in 1983 whether Borges ever dedicated a book to her, Elsa remembered a book and a poem. She was wrong about the book, right about the poem, but all memory of the story seemed to have slipped her mind. The omission of the name Astete from the dedication, by the way, may have been a nicety on Borges’s part. He once told me that Elsa hated the name, since as a schoolgirl she had been teased for it by the other children. In Spanish the last two syllables, tete, are close to meaning ‘tit’.
The third and final phase of Borges’s infatuation with Elsa is as fragmentary and hard to pin down as the first two. We have few hard facts or solid documentation, but reams of gossip and much partisan speculation by a parade of busybodies. Commentators and biographers, long after the event, have resorted to interviews with some of Borges’s friends and members of his and his mother’s social set. None of this gleaned information has been closely scrutinized or sifted for the truth. The recordists appear to have taken at face value whatever they were told. What has been recorded of Elsa’s point of view is banal and evasive.
The question of who engineered the marriage – was it doña Leonor? was it Borges? – is still ambiguous. Doña Leonor swore to me that her son was adamant about marrying Elsa. Borges swore to me that his mother was adamant that he marry Elsa. His testimony must be questioned. Whenever Borges found himself in a tight or embarrassing corner he was notorious for exculpating himself and falling back on lies. The grossest example of this was the blame he laid on his mother for his marriage to Elsa.
In 1965, when he was offered the Harvard lectureship, a decision had to be made about who would accompany him to Massachusetts. His mother, who had previously fulfilled the role of travelling companion, was approaching her nineties. A suitable person was deemed necessary. Up to this time Borges had been enjoying the company of María Esther Vázquez, a young writer and journalist nearly forty years his junior, who in 1964 had accompanied him on a long meandering European journey. It is said that on his return their relationship – as was inevitable with Borges – had become closer, much to doña Leonor’s disapproval. She did not want to see him in the position of Professor Rath with Lola-Lola of the Blue Angel. Any younger woman, she feared, would take advantage of her son; in short, Georgie needed someone older. María Esther accompanied him to Peru early in 1965, but by this time her intentions had been made clear. To Borges’s distress she had married the poet Horacio Armani. Once more Georgie’s romantic fortunes were repeating themselves. (It is worth noting that several months after he and Elsa married – this was at the time I first knew them in Cambridge – it was María Esther he often spoke to me about with a poignant nostalgia when out of Elsa’s earshot. He also spoke to me this same way, but to a lesser extent, of one of his students, Vlady Kociancich, on whom it was plain to me that he had a crush.)
One version of Elsa’s reappearance on the matrimonial scene tells that Borges’s mother learned that Elsa was now a widow and urged her son to contact her. A meeting was arranged via Elsa’s sister Alicia. Elsa showed Borges a ring he had given her years before; he was moved that she had kept it. Borges later showed Elsa a photograph of her that he had kept between the leaves of a book; doña Leonor told Elsa that for years he looked at it every night before going to bed. All this is too pat and smacks too much of a fairy tale to ring true.
Exactly when these events were supposed to be taking place we do not know. There was some mention of Elsa’s qualifications, as she knew no English. A second version of the story is that another of Borges’s old flames, Margarita Guerrero, was mooted as a possible wife. This too seems to me an absurdity. Margot, as she was known, was a striking beauty, tall, elegant, and worldly. All the things Elsa was not. Was Margot one more of Borges’s – or his mother’s – preposterous fancies?
Eventually Borges chose Elsa, proposed to her, and she accepted. Again there are no dates for any of this. Plans were made for the registry and the church ceremonies. Now it was time for Elsa – unknown in Buenos Aires literary or social circles – to be paraded for inspection. As was to be expected, doña Leonor’s circle of upper-class women, snobs to the last one, sniffed and probed and found Elsa wanting. It was an ocular inquisition. She proved frumpish,