It was ironic of fate, though perhaps predictable, to allow Jorge Luis Borges to develop over a long life into his own Doppelgänger. In a 1922 essay entitled “The Nothingness of Personality,” Borges asserted that “the self does not exist.” Half-a-century later, an international personality laden with acclaim, he had to depend on wry, self-deprecating quips to safeguard his precious inner nullity. “Yo no soy yo” (“I am not I”), wrote Juan Ramón Jiménez; this was a proposition that Borges not only endorsed but also made a fundamental axiom of his oeuvre. In his story “The Zahir,” written in the 1940s, he could state, “I am still, albeit only partially, Borges,” and in “Limits,” a poem from the 1964 collection aptly entitled The Self and the Other, he ended with the line (as translated by Alastair Reid), “Space, time, and Borges now are leaving me.” By 1980, however, to an interviewer who said, “Everyone sitting in this audience wants to know Jorge Luis Borges,” he would reply, “I wish I did. I am sick and tired of him.” On the lecture circuit, Borges, playing Sancho Panza to his own Quixote, perfected the sardonic stratagems that would keep his huge prestige at bay. Not fortuitously perhaps, his renown grew as, after 1955, his final blindness deepened: fragile and vaguely Chaplinesque in his rumpled linen suit, he emanated a prophetic aura, a shy Tiresias enamored of the tango.

It had not always been thus. The prim and