Lúcia Bettencourt – Borges's Secretary

Lúcia Bettencourt – Borges's Secretary

Borges's Secretary opens during the twilight of Jorge Luis Borges's career, when his eyesight was failing and he had come to the realisation that the stories left to him were derivations of his previous works. He still works in the great library of Argentine; his connection to literature remains so strong that he needs merely to stroke the spines of books to know their contents – the “cathedrals” of Proust, the “serious demeanour” of Dante, the “guitar strumming and the hearty laugh” of Cervantes' Quixote.

I also knew the philosophy volumes that gave off a mixed scent of logic and lunacy.  Nietzsche always seemed accompanied by drums and cymbals, in a pagan ritual that went on forever.  Spinoza, Sartre, Plato, they all had their own traits that enabled me to recognize them from afar, from the other end of the shelves where they sat but never slept.  No books rest less than philosophical ones.  From the most obscure to the most celebrated, from the most popular to the most erudite, I could recognize them all without mistake.

But there's a problem: Borges can no longer write. Or he can, but he recognises that his talent has faded along with his eyesight. His secretary, a nameless women who has worked with him for many years, begins to edit Borges's stories, refining metaphors, shifting references, and adding allusions. Borges writes with pen and paper, hands it to his secretary and then, in the morning, receives freshly typed pages. He notices the discrepancy, but thinks to himself – I am Borges! - and perhaps those enhancements were there all along, his blind hand writing the texts he knows he should have written, but, it seems, did not.

Little by little, she made herself part of my system.

The helpful additions begins quite genially – an unimportant letter written by the secretary instead of Borges – but soon becomes more serious. He abrogates his literary responsibilities, first the correspondences, and then, subtly and insidiously, individual words in stories. A slight register shift here, and certain enhancement of simile there, and soon Borges becomes dependent on her changes, relying on them to deepen the metaphors he wishes he could write, to extend the themes he used to be capable of elaborating upon, but no longer.

She trained me well.  I no longer felt her to be an unfamiliar presence; she was simply part of the system, comparable to the ink for my pen.  Essential, but of no intrinsic importance.  She completed her tasks, and I trusted her.  The first slip probably occurred without my even noticing.  An innocuous word, exchanged for a synonym.  “Word” scratched out and “term” written in.  Any difference?  At first not even I noticed: she was always judicious and had undeniably good taste.  And she would never have made a change that would have disrupted the music of my composition.  The rhythm was always kept; what started changing, without my even realizing it, at first, was a certain nuance.

At first it's a game – a very Borgesian game. Neither the secretary nor Borges mentions the changes. They hang suspended in the air between them, unspoken but known. It's a game, a charade of mutual deception, where they each spend their time waiting, waiting. Borges, of course, is Borges, with all the baggage of literary reputation that comes with it. He knows who he is, and knows the absurdity of being a writer who can no longer write, and has become dependent upon his secretary to refine his work from merely ordinary to – yes – the quality of a Borges piece.

Instead of the mangled phrase, however, there was a graceful, flowing sentence—sheer perfection—in its place.  My breathing faltered; she noted my surprise, but kept her calm and waited for me to react. A coward, I kept quiet.

Bettencourt understands Borges. She uses a similar tone of voice for her narration – a serious, intelligent, literary, witty voice – and she accurately mimics Borges's predilection for authors and their texts, and his penchant for referencing obscure and esoteric literary texts. Perhaps more importantly, Borges was obsessed with games, puzzles, and the machinations of detective investigations, and here, Bettencourt follows accordingly. Her story is believable as a confession from Borges, and much of this authenticity stems from her ability to touch on the integral aspects of his literature.

Consider the following two paragraphs which, to my reading, accurately mimic the tone and themes of Borges at his finest:

That was when the real game began.  With increased audacity, the secretary changed my main idea.  Once, twice, every time.  Like a whimsical god, she began to revoke my dictates and parried the blows with which I intended to wound my characters.  Or she would subject them to blows not planned by me.  If I condemned them to death, she would save them, even if it was to allow them to compose an entire epic in frozen time, at the end of which the bullet fired by me would fatally reach the heart of the condemned.  If I saved them, she would turn them sterile and dry, mute. 

The work of composition ceased to be the product of my will to become the work of two opposing minds, preoccupied with surpassing one another.  The text became a chessboard, where each of us tried to anticipate the possible moves of the other.  I would close a door, she would open a passageway.  If I followed a path, she would introduce a fork, and I realized that, now, all my work was oriented toward escaping the labyrinths she created for me, and that my texts had never been so intricately simple.  Jealous, I realized that the quality of what I produced no longer depended on me, but on the game in which I found myself trapped.  Irritated, I stopped dictating.  I couldn’t tolerate the idea of her challenging me to a duel; I wanted to silence her, defeat her.  Except that silencing her, I defeated myself too. 

The entanglement of the two begins in earnest, and here Bettencourt begins to play with the concept of literature and its creation. She has, in effect, layered over the top of Borges life, a Borges story. In this, we are reminded of his story, The other, in which an ageing Borges seats himself upon a park bench in Cambridge, only to engage in conversation with a younger version of himself, in Geneva. The younger Borges cannot believe he talking to the older, though the older knows, because he knows - he has lived this life, and seen all that it has to offer. Similarly, Bettencourt's story touches on the art of falsity and the irresolution of truth. Who is Borges, his first draft, or his second? Does an editor – for that is what, in some ways, the secretary is for him – become the author? At what stage is creativity, the gestation or the maturity?

Lúcia Bettencourt has clearly read Borges intimately and deeply – she knows his literature well, and understands his limitations as much as his successes. Borges is a tremendous author, almost unparalleled in his ability to merge the literary with the esoteric with the ordinary with the provocation and seduction of intellectual endeavour and the sweetness and anticipation of a murder mystery, but he had his flaws, and his weaknesses. He could not create characters, but he could write archetypes; he couldn't handle dialogue, but he was able to marry the obscure with the ordinary to create the bizarre, magic and wondrous; he couldn't extend himself to the long form of a novel but he excelled in writing short stories, cramming them with encyclopaedias real and fictional, musing over topics more varied in five pages than a “regular” author could manage in five hundred. Bettencourt knows this, and she courts it, playing with it, massaging his reputation and making games of his nigh-untouchable legacy in Argentinean and world literature. Imagine, Borges, a fraud! A fake! A phony! A front for a secretary! An accessory to a lie so huge it could only be, even in the telling, a lie. The truth could not be the truth, but what if it was?

Of course, Bettencourt's fiction is a fiction, but its mystery, its suggestive qualities, and its willingness to face a giant with clear eyes and drawn swords, confronts Borges in a manner purely Borgesian. It is a story for lovers of the man's writing, but it also stands on its own. Astonishing, literary, a guilty pleasure, referential – it's Borges, even though it isn't. A triumph.

Borges's Secretary by Lúcia Bettencourt is a short story from Words Without Borders' October 2010 edition, Beyond Borges: Argentina Now issue. All of the work reviewed is freely available online.

See Also

Other stories from the Words Without Borders October 2010 edition, Beyond Borges: Argentina Now issue include:
---Bizzio, Sergio - Magic!
---Brau, Edgar - The Key
---Delaney, Juan José - The Two Coins
---Giardinelli, Mempo - God's Punishment
---Martínez, Guillermo - The “I Ching” and the Man of Papers
---Schewblin, Samanta - Preserves
---Shua, Ana María - Octavio the Invader

Also of interest: Index of short stories under review