'What have you known of loss That makes you different from other men?'

• Gilgamesh.

When the desert refused my history, Refused to acknowledge that I had lived there, with you, among a vanished tribe,

two, three thousand years ago, you parted the dawn rain, its thickest monsoon curtains,

and beckoned me to the northern canyons. There, among the red rocks, you lived alone. I had still not learned the style of nomads:

to walk between the rain drops to keep dry. Wet and cold, I spoke like a poor man,

without irony. You showed me the relics of our former life, proof that we'd at last found each other, but in your arms I felt

singled out for loss. When you lit the fire and poured the wine, "I am going," I murmured, repeatedly, "going where no one has been and no one will be... Will you come with me?" You took my hand, and we walked through the streets

of an emptied world, vulnerable to our suddenly bare history in which I was,

but you said won't again be, singled out for loss in your arms, won't ever again be exiled, never again, from your arms.

Earlier today I discovered the few notes I took at the lecture Senor Llosa gave on Borges. And this made me transcribe the very same lecture Llosa had delivered many years earlier. So this is the first piece of that lectures

As a student I had a passion for Jean Paul Sartre and I firmly believed in his thesis that the writer’s commitment was to his own times, and to the society in which he lived, that words were actions and that though writing man might influence history. Today such ideas seem naïve and may even invite a yawn. We live in an age of smug skepticism about the power of literature as well as about history. But in the 1950s the notion that the world could be changed for the better and that literature should contribute to this effort struck many of us as both persuasive and exciting. By then Borges’s influence was beginning to be felt beyond the small circle of the magazine Sur and his Argentine admirers. In a number of Latin American cities, among the literary set, ardent followers fought over the scarcer editions of his books as if they were treasures and learned by heart the visionary random lists and catalogues that dot Borges’s pages, the particularly beautiful one from “El Aleph”, for instance, and helped themselves not only to his labyrinths, tigers, mirrors, masks, and knives but also to his strikingly original use of the adverbs and adjectives. In Lima, the first of these Borges enthusiasts I came across was a friend and contemporary of mine with whom I shared my books and my literary dreams. Borges was always an inexhaustible topic of discussion. In a clinically pure way he stood for everything Sartre had taught me to gate – the artist shrinking from the world around him to take refuge in a world of intellect, erudition and fantasy; the writer looking down on politics, history, and even reality and shamelessly displaying his skepticism and wry disdain for whatever did not stem from books; the intellectual who not only allowed himself to treat ironically the dogmas and the idealisms of the Left but who took his own iconoclasm to the extreme if joining the conservative party and haughtily justifying this decision by claiming that gentlemen prefer lost causes.

In our discussions I tried to show with all the Sartrean malice I could command that an intellectual who wrote, spoke and behaved the way Borges did, somehow shared responsibility for all the world’s social ills, that his stories and poems were little more than mere trinkets of high sounding emptiness, and that history, with its terrible sense of justice, which progressives wield as it suits them, like the executioner’s axe or the sharper’s marked card or the conjurer’s sleight of hand, would one day build him his just desserts. But once the arguments were over, in the discrete solitude of my room or the library, like the fanatical puritan of Somerset Maugham’s Rain who gives in to the temptation of the flesh he renounces, I found Borges’s spell irresistible. And I would read his stories, poems, and essays in utter amazement. Moreover, the adulterous feeling I had that I was betraying my mentor, Sartre, only increased my perverse pleasure.

I have been somewhat fickle in the literary passions of my adolescence. Nowadays, when I reread the writers who were once my models, I find they no longer hold me, Sartre included. But the secrete, sinful passion I harbored for Borges’s work has never faded; and rereading him, which I have done from time to time like someone performing a rituals, has always been a happy experiences. Only recently, in the preparation of this essay, I read all his books again one after another and once more marveled exactly as I had done the first time at the elegance and the straightforwardness of his prose, the refinement of his stories, and the perfection of his craftsmanship. I am quite aware how ephemeral literary assessments may prove, but I Borges’s case I do not consider it rash to acclaim him the most important thing to happen to imaginative writing in Spanish language in the modern times, and as one of the most memorable artists of our age. I also believe that the debt we who write in Spanish owe to Borges is enormous. That includes even those of us, like myself, who have never written a story of pure fantasy or even felt any particular affinity for ghosts or doppelgangers, the infinite, or the metaphysics of Schopenhauer.

Red wall, a ladder leaning against it, garlands of bluebells, marigolds and red peppers hanging from a rusty nail as they dry under the blue window

From which hangs a planter of geranium, bright red as pin pricks on the thumb pressed to a square piece of glass

How odd these thoughts for I am sitting under the sun only to remember walks by the hospital at nights, with its lights blazing

like those red skulls painted on a box of explosives, over the sallow faces of smokers gathered in tense knots talking in low voices as if the grim reaper would overhear

And all the while I kept listening for the low horns of freight trains that trundle under a bridge close by, To summon sunk thoughts

Which must have sunk back into the darkness that lies under the span of thinking Soon after

For I don't know I don't know what was I supposed to write down now Of then.