Forty Years Without Borges: The Last Night in Geneva and the Writer Who Still Haunts Us
On Saturday, June 14, 1986, around noon, the loudspeakers at the Madrid Book Fair announced the death of Jorge Luis Borges. Attendees rushed to the book stalls to buy his works. It wasn't panic — it was recognition, that instinctive impulse to hold on to someone when you are told they are gone.
Tomorrow marks forty years. Borges died in Geneva, in his apartment at Grand Rue 28, at eight in the morning, from pulmonary emphysema. He had arrived in Switzerland on November 28 of the previous year, against all medical advice. He had bronchitis. European winters are not gentle. But Borges was not known for being easily persuaded.
The night before his death, he fell into a coma. Héctor Bianciotti, an Argentine writer living in Paris, came with María Kodama to keep watch. They sat with him through the night. There is something in that image that stops me: the blind writer, who had built labyrinths of language, accompanied in silence by others who loved words. Like something from his own fictions.
I came to Borges late, I admit. I was twenty, studying in Bogotá, when a classmate lent me a battered copy of Ficciones. I opened it not knowing what I was getting into. “The Garden of Forking Paths” took me two readings to understand and four to begin to enjoy. That progression — confusion, suspicion, wonder — is one of the most pleasurable I can recall as a reader.
Forty years on, Borges remains a name that divides. His political positions, his attitude toward Peronism, his relationship with power: all of that exists and deserves to be examined directly. But this also exists: that he was the first living Latin American author admitted to the Pléiade collection — French publishing's equivalent of Olympus. That his stories changed what Western literature could imagine was possible. That at two in the morning, when you cannot sleep, certain paragraphs of his seem written specifically for that moment of insomnia and vertigo.
Borges doesn't need our tributes. But we still need to read him. Not as a relic — as a conversation partner. His labyrinths have no exit because they were not designed for one. They were designed for getting lost inside, and discovering something about time, about yourself, about the impossibility of pinning down meaning.
If you haven't yet read Ficciones, now is the moment. If you have, open it again. Borges is not the same book twice.
