existed. Uncertainty wasn’t an option. Magic, realistic or not, didn’t work. I hadn’t met Borges yet. I hadn’t fallen in love. In Daddy’s world, I wouldn’t. “It hurts me to look at you,” Daddy told me. “My life is miserable. You’re just like me. Your life will be miserable. But it will be worse. Everything is getting worse.” I guess he did believe in the theory of entropy. It hurt my father to look at me. But then, he didn’t ever see me, did he? He saw himself, not his little girl. Borges would have seen me except he couldn’t see at all. I was born in 1955, and by that time he was fifty-six years old and had already lost most of his eyesight. If he looked at me, there’s no telling what he’d see. In one of his stories, he wrote, Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply. I’ve taken that totally out of context, but I don’t care. Borges - that man I love – he understood. That he put into words what was my reality and thereby showed me its falsehood… Well. Daddy looked at me and saw a mirror of himself. Yes, that was abominable. And yes, that was multiplied over the years as he kept looking at and not seeing me. The more he looked, the less he saw. Many people think that Borges’ work is difficult, hard to understand. That it doesn’t even make sense. Yes, I answer. I’ve lived in a world where everything made sense. The possibility of a world where things don’t need to be understood, a world that can be confusing, lifts me out of that minefield. It shatters the mirror of my father’s perception. It gives me magic. Bewildering, confusing, nonsensical magic. How could I not be in love?
47