Testimonio sobre Borges. Un documental que expone ideas y anticipa la llegada de Ben.

Testimonio sobre Borges. Clarin, September 15, 2000

The clipping is stamped Clarín, 15 September 2000. It reviews Harto The Borges — my second documentary, declared of cultural interest by the Secretaría de Cultura de la Nación. The review is generous. It calls the film un buen cine de ideas, valioso y provocativo — a good cinema of ideas, valuable and provocative. It lists the people I traveled to Europe to record: Martín Caparrós, Christian Ferrer, Horacio González, Osvaldo Bayer, Alejandro Horowicz, Ariel Dorfman, Luis Sepúlveda, Paolo Collo, and Franco Lucentini.

It quotes me, faithfully, on what the film was trying not to be. I had no interest in the labyrinths, the minotaurs, the darkness, the loves. I did not intend to climb into Borges's bed or his library. The film was an audiovisual essay on the way his thought had modified our reality. That was all.

But the column does not end with the film. Near the foot of the third column, almost in passing, the reviewer notes that I was happy because in early November I would become the father of a boy who would be called Thomas Benjamín — conceived the previous February 7 in Pompey, Italy, during the shoot.

That sentence has outlasted everything else. The premier at the legendary Cosmos theatre, the Secretaría that issued the declaration has cycled through many ministers since. Some of the people interviewed in the film are gone. Thomas Benjamín is not. Soledad and I still very much in love.

It seems right, reading this now on the way to Valencia twenty-six years later, that the column did not separate the two announcements. Film and son were made in the same season, in the same country, by the same hand. The archive does not distinguish between a work and a life. It collects them together and waits.