Yesterday morning, for the first time in many months, I flipped through the first Spanish book I bought, back before I knew how to conjugate the verbs in Spanish for be. It was a collection of “stories” by Jorge Luis Borges. I put “stories” in quotes because it doesn’t seem like the right word. They are short, yes, and they are fictional, yes, but they read more like essays from an alternative reality.
The first story I read was La loterĂa en Babilonia, a kind of reminiscence of a narrator who lives in a world where everyone plays a lottery whose consequences are all-consuming. Among others, “For one lunar year, I was declared invisible: I screamed and no one responded, I stole bread and they didn’t decapitate me.” In other pieces, Borges reviews works by non-existent authors and invents other fictional worlds.
These kinds of conceits could be terribly cutesy in another author, but Borges is really good at tossing off little lines that seem to say so much. “It is enough for a book to be possible for it to exist,” he writes in a story about an infinite library. And that’s in a footnote.
These kinds of perfectly crafted little epigrams are why I don't mind all the looking-up and the confusion. When I tell people that I started reading Spanish with Borges, they usually tell me I’m crazy, but I think they don't realize how patient I can be with a text if I think there's some reason to get there. Admittedly, though, I don't know if I could summon this kind of patience again: