Vladimir Nabokov said that on first reading Borges he thought he had come upon a new and marvellous portico, but that behind the facade he found nothing. I didn't know that after that dinner we would never meet again. In a brief poem written in the Fifties, he had observed that time doesn't like to reveal its endings: we don't know whose hand we've shaken for the last time, or what door we have closed for all eternity. It was never fully revised and should perhaps not have been published. Over dinner he told me the plot of the last fiction he was to write, 'Shakespeare's Memory', about a man who inherits the maze of Shakespeare's thoughts and recollections. He was once again writing short stories in the fantastic vein that he had made his own in Ficciones and The Aleph. He was enjoying a period of travel to places he had always wanted to visit and now talked about them incessantly: to Egypt, where he had pocketed a handful of sand to Iceland where, in a ruined church, he had recited 'Our Father' in Anglo-Saxon to Japan, where he had discussed Buddhism with a Shinto priest. T he last time I saw him was in Paris, in the small hotel on the Rue des Beaux Arts that now carries plaques with the names of its two most celebrated guests: Oscar Wilde and Jorge Luis Borges.
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