SOURCE: “Letter from … Barcelona,” in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 5019, June 11, 1999, p. 15.

In the following column, one of Borges's biographers sketches a portrait of the writer.

This was the first Spanish city Jorge Luis Borges ever knew. He and his family, holed up in Switzerland during the First World War, made the best of the peace in 1918 by embracing the old country; before returning to Buenos Aires in 1921, they lived in Mallorca, Seville and Madrid. Barcelona was a mere port of call, before Mallorca. There was, wrote the teenage Jorge Luis to his Genevan friend Maurice Abramowicz, a strange absence of “loving couples in the streets”, compared with Geneva. Witnessing his first bullfight, Borges saw six bulls killed—“and three horses killed by one bull in succession!” “Some of the bullfighters”, he continued, “were no doubt brave, but the public?” Barcelona was, finally, “a big city—sonorous, dirty...