'There Was No One There Anymore'

Jorge Luis Borges published his final story collection, Shakespeare’s Memory, in 1983, three years before his death. The first story in the volume is “August 25, 1983.” The narrator is Borges or at least one version of Borges. He enters a hotel and sees his own name signed in the register. In his room he meets himself:

 
“In the pitiless light, I came face to face with myself. There, in the narrow iron bed—older, withered, and very pale—lay I, on my back, my eyes turned up vacantly toward the high plaster moldings of the ceiling.”
 
The speaker, in effect, confronts a ghost of himself from the future. As usual with Borges, the tone is dry and matter-of-fact. No shivers, no melodrama. The premise and theme will be familiar to readers of his better-known story, “Borges and I,” which concludes: “I’m not sure which of us it is that’s writing this page.” The old Borges tells the young Borges that “we are two yet we are one.” We coexist with other versions of ourselves. We contain multitudes, as one of Borges' favorites, Walt Whitman, put it.
 
I remember in the sixties when the Argentine writer was first being translated and discovered by English-speaking readers. He was marketed, on occasion, as a science fiction or fantasy writer, a sort of Philip K. Dick who could actually write. I’m told his Spanish is masterful. In English his prose is cool and precise, with few pyrotechnics. Borges reserved the pyrotechnics for his themes. Others, especially academics, treated him like a south-of-the-border postmodernist, which seriously underrates him. His stories often blur into essays and his essays into stories.
 
Think how tiresome the situation in “August 25, 1983” would read in the hands of a tacky conventional writer. Borges is above all a masterful storyteller, a descendent of Stevenson, Kipling and Chesterton.
 
Old Borges tell his younger self, “‘You will write our best poem—an elegy.’”
 
“‘On the death of . . .’ I began. I could not bring myself to say the name.”
 
“‘No. She will outlive you.’”    
 
Pure romance. And brave for a man already eighty-three years old. In the third-to-last paragraph, young Borges writes of his old self: “He stopped talking; I realized that he had died. In a way, I died with him—in grief I leaned over his pillow, but there was no one there anymore.”
 
Borges died on August 24, 1986.
 
[I’m using Andrew Hurley’s translation of “Veinticinco de agosto, 1983” in Collected Fictions (Viking, 1998).]