Eight Years, Nine Circles
In August 1946 the Argentine Society of Writers gave a dinner for a municipal library clerk who had just resigned his post. He had prepared a short address. He did not read it himself; he was too frightened of the room, and a friend read it for him. Even here the record wobbles: more than one account names Pedro Henríquez Ureña as the reader, which cannot be true, since Henríquez Ureña had died that May on a commuter train to La Plata. The anecdote has been passed along so often, and polished so smooth, that nobody thought to check whether the man doing the reading was alive.
The text itself survives, and it is a strange little performance. Borges reported that he had been summoned to a municipal office and informed that his transfer — out of the Miguel Cané library and into some other branch of the city’s business — was punishment for having signed declarations in favor of the Allies. He said he took the news with proper interest, and then found himself distracted by a placard on the wall of the solemn office: rectangular, laconic, generously sized, bearing the words Dele Dele. He could not remember the face of the official or his name. He said he would remember that placard until the day he died.
He was right to fix on it. DLDL was a slogan and a badge, a strip of Nile-green ribbon left over from the last convulsion of the military government — dele, dele, mi general, give it to him, give Perón the Secretariat of Labor. It was the kind of object that a certain sort of writer recognizes instantly as evidence: a piece of political speech so degraded that it has stopped being language and become a noise. Borges, who spent his life arguing that literature is made of other people’s sentences, had walked into a government office and found a sentence he could use.
He used it well. He also, in the same address, said that he had worked at the library for nine years. He had worked there for eight. He entered the Biblioteca Municipal Miguel Cané on 8 January 1938 as a first assistant, and he left in 1946. The extra year is not a slip of memory; it is a piece of engineering. Nine is the number of the circles of Dante’s hell, and Borges had been reading the Commedia on the streetcar to work, in a bilingual edition, a canto each way. The years had to be nine because the shape of the sentence required nine. This is a small lie and a large one. It tells us that by 1946 Borges had already acquired the habit of converting his own life into quotable material — of editing biography until it could bear the weight of allusion.
Which brings us to the rabbits.
Everyone knows the story. It is the single best-known episode in Borges’s life, the anecdote that any reader can produce on demand: Perón came to power, and the regime, in a gesture of exquisite spite, removed the greatest writer in the Spanish language from his library and appointed him inspector of poultry and rabbits in the municipal markets. It appears in every biography. It was made into a comic book. It is a perfect story, and it has one weakness, which is that no document supports it. The last page of Borges’s personnel file at the Miguel Cané is silent. Alejandro Vaccaro, who has worked more closely with the Argentine archival record than any other biographer, states plainly that no paperwork attesting to such an appointment exists, though threats may well have been made. There is no decree, no transfer order, no signature.
What is documented is less theatrical and more interesting. In December 1945, the outgoing military president Edelmiro Farrell issued a decree forbidding public employees to take part in political activity, on pain of serious sanction. It was almost certainly a last maneuver against Perón, whose victory at the February elections was already visible on the horizon. On 8 January 1946 — the eighth anniversary, to the day, of his first morning at the library — Borges signed a public declaration supporting the Democratic Union ticket of Tamborini and Mosca. Within days the municipality’s disciplinary office opened an inquiry. Three months later a formal reprimand was entered in his file: a minor penalty, softened by the fact that he was well regarded at work. The entire process began before the election and concluded in April. Perón was not inaugurated until 4 June.
So the machinery that punished Borges was set in motion by the government Perón was about to replace, and the punishment was a written warning. The poultry appears for the first time a month after his resignation, in an unsigned squib in Democracia, a Peronist paper, and it was aimed not at Borges but at the mayor: does Dr. Siri suppose the nation will prosper if writers take up the care of hens and poultry-farmers take up the writing of novels? The joke was born on the other side. Borges took it, kept it, improved it, and told it for forty years, until in the autobiographical essay he composed in English in 1970 the poultry and the rabbits had hardened into fact and Perón himself had become the author of the insult.
It ...
