(From Madrid) Outside, the sun is splendid, and that beautiful park that is El Retiro, a relief of green and water in the center of Madrid. Outside, on the other side of the glass, right there, in the middle of the park, the Madrid Book Fair, its booths, its energy. Outside, all of that, it must be said, competes with what is happening inside, which is very powerful: at the Eugenio Trías Library, an exhibition of manuscripts by Jorge Luis Borges opens, and to inaugurate it, here is the family of Mario Vargas Llosa, there is Alejandro Roemmers, owner of the collection from which these manuscripts come, there is Alejandro Vaccaro, who put together that collection over 50 years, and there is Roberto Alifano, who was Borges‘s secretary.
There are Madrid authorities: here is Marta Rivera de la Cruz, Delegate of the Government Area of Culture, Tourism, and Sports of the City Council. And there is even Raúl Tola, director of the Vargas Llosa Chair, who acts as master of ceremonies and opens without hesitation by saying that the beginning of the short story The Circular Ruins has “the best-placed adjective in the history of literature.” He speaks of the word “unanimous”: “No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night”.
Outside there is sun, people rowing in small boats, tens of thousands of books. Inside, a moved audience and moved speakers, who will also present the book Borges. The Collection, the book based on that collection of 30,000 objects, including manuscripts, images.
Of course, what is exhibited in that library are not originals—which are well guarded in Buenos Aires—but very faithful copies, in which the writer’s minuscule handwriting can be seen. Display cases containing The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim, published in 1936, The Circular Ruins, The Lottery in Babylon, and Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, among others. All of this will be celebrated in Madrid. The exhibition is called Years of Literary Splendor.
Alejandro Roemmers at the opening of the exhibition held in Madrid based on his collection.
“Here the human being and the genius are mixed,” says the Madrid official. “Borges led an outwardly routine life. A life ordered like a library. But literarily he was a revolutionary who made universal themes his own.”
Vargas Llosa and Borges’s Nobel
Patricia Llosa and her children Álvaro and Morgana are here, in part, because the prologue to the book about the collection is by the Peruvian Nobel laureate.
“It is also very moving to see how in those texts, which seem written by a teenager or a child, in tiny handwriting, the emergence of a new literature was taking shape. A literature that was made of extraordinary mixtures that only Borges could have instilled, could have created: the Bible, English literature, Nordic literature, a very well learned Spanish that came to illuminate entirely… it is very moving in this exhibition to see how the confidence with which he wrote those small texts that would later become great texts that will allow us to remember him, to visit him from memory,” writes Vargas Llosa.
A curiosity: that prologue was not written but spoken by the author, in a precursor to this exhibition that took place in Rosario in 2022. The curation was by Marisa Galvagni, who, when the writer began speaking on stage, turned on the recorder on her phone and captured those words. And here we are.
So Álvaro Vargas Llosa speaks and tells what happened with his father at the Swedish Academy when they went, in December 2010, to collect the Nobel Prize: “My father, with that knack for being a bull in a china shop, said to the permanent secretary of the Academy: ‘Mr. Permanent Secretary, I have a question.’ And he surely looked at him thinking he would ask a question about that hall. He asked him: ‘Why was Jorge Luis Borges never awarded the Nobel Prize?’”
Yes, an awkward moment. And a response like an arrow: “The Swede was quite bewildered, and this was reflected on his face in an extremely clear and visible way. He swallowed hard and said to him: ‘Mr. Vargas Llosa, I must confess that within the academy we have three decisions of which we are ashamed. That was one of them.’ He never told us what the other two were.”
But, Álvaro Vargas Llosa said, Borges did not need any Nobel Prize for people to talk about him. And the proof was that very moment, that act, that exhibition for which he thanked Alejandro Roemmers and Alejandro Vaccaro. An exhibition, he said, that covers the author’s years of splendor, when he published, for example, The Circular Ruins. And he returns to that beginning. And recites, from memory, the first paragraph. And they applaud him.
Roemmers: “Collecting is not an act of possession”
Alejandro Roemmers started by thanking the Madrid City Council for the space, a city where he lived in his youth. “Few venues could be more appropriate than a library to host this exhibition,” he said. Because a library is “the temple of books where the past converses with the present and where memory is carried into the future”.
He also emphasized that it was in Madrid “a city that not only unites the two shores of our language, but has always known how to be the ideal welcoming port for masters who defy time”.
What matters, said Vaccaro, is that Borges’ legacy remains alive. Therefore, “collecting, when understood from humanism, is not an act of possession, it is an act of rescue”.
And he added: “Each document that you will contemplate today constitutes an unrepeatable trace of Borges’ creative process. Not only written pages, but also doubts, corrections, and moments of inspiration. We find, ultimately, the human trail behind an immortal work. And each manuscript, with its tiny handwriting, is a piece of our history”.
Roemmers thanked Vaccaro for his work and said that “these treasures could not remain in trunks and fall into oblivion. We want them to belong to the world, to be open to researchers, students, academics, readers, and to all those who find in literature a way to better understand the world.”
Borges, Roemmers recalled, took pride in the books he had read, more than in those he had written. “In the face of his modesty, we proudly claim to have rescued these pages so that they continue to be read, dreamed, and discovered,” he said. And he read three of his poems, dedicated to Borges. One began: “Of these words that in passing I write/ there will be one (I know not which) that aged/, by difficult, vulgar or faded/, perhaps I will not repeat while I live.”
Alejandro Vaccaro: for the Borges Museum
Alejandro Vaccaro gave a clue as to why a manuscript with strikethroughs, with corrections, serves to think about a work: “Borges used to say that doubt is one of the names of intelligence,” noted the collector, who is also the president of the Argentine Society of Writers. “This collection certainly began fifty years ago, at first a bit involuntarily,” he recalled. But “then we realized that we were facing something that could be significant.” And collecting, he said, has something of an addiction. “The collector seeks perfection, having everything, which fortunately is impossible and always allows us to remain hopeful in finding something new.”
How does this collection come to exist and to be in Madrid? “It all started when, more than twenty years ago, fate crossed my path with Alejandro Roemmers and I proposed this adventure to him,” he said. “So he said yes to me and also contributed other aspects, which have to do with the intelligence of the objects that we had to add to the Borges collection. And finally, four years ago we started working on how we transmit this, how to show thirty thousand pieces.”
And then, casually, he spoke of his dream, the next adventure: a documentation center, the Borges Museum that the duo has been talking about for a few years and for which he has already been negotiating with some governments, including the current one. There is talk of the possibility of placing it in the Palais de Glace, currently under renovation. Roemmers really likes that idea – the Palais was an ice skating rink, it’s round.
Meanwhile, outside the sun is getting increasingly intense, and inside many heads lean over the display cases to decipher the handwriting of a writer who died 40 years ago and has tremendous vitality.
(Photos: Luis Horcajada)
