Juan Cruz and his life with the writers: “Borges played all the time, he sang, he was like a boy”

-How did they give you a commission and ended up in Madrid walking with Borges?

On the table of a bar, with the window of May, the Spanish journalist Juan Cruz Ruiz smiles with all his face. That, that of his walk with a happy Borges who sings Icelandic, is one of the great anecdotes of a book with great anecdotes. Secret and Passion of Literature -That this afternoon at the Book Fair with Claudia Piñeiro- is a tremendous tour of moments lived with the greatest writers of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Cruz was always there, as an interviewer, as an editor, as a witness.

Cruz was there with Borges, with Vargas Llosa, with Cortázar, with Javier Cercas -who just published the book of his trip with Pope Francis -with Leonardo Padura, with Juan Carlos Onetti, with Günter Grass, with Jorge Semprún, with Almudena Grandes and more and more and more.

Everyone speaks with passion and with respect. It can slide some “defect” -cortázar was vain- and some joke, as Onetti saying that if he impresses his unfortunate teeth … “I really have a perfect denture, but I have lent it to Mario Vargas Llosa.” But, in general, the tone is of love and closeness. Former Culture Chief of the newspaper El País, former General Editor of Alfaguara, Cruz is a soul journalist who will always see his notebook in his hand and scoring what happens around.

What is it, then, that ended up walking with Borges? “I have never said no,” he replies. And account:

-I was in a house of some friends and called me Javier Pradera, who was director and then was from Editorial Alliance. Pradera told me that the next day he would like me to take to dinner at Borges, not only to dinner, but then accompany him to the hotel, he picked him up at the hotel, accompanied him to the hotel the next day and then helped him close his suitcases. I did all that.

-Because María Kodama was traveling.

-Kodama was in Córdoba, from Spain. So Borges He received me in the room. I accompanied him down and we took him to dinner at a luxury restaurant in Madrid that was paid by Editorial Alliance. But we were my wife, my daughter, that we had no one to leave her and a friend who accompanied us and who accompanied us. Borges was going, it was a small car. I was singing, in Icelandic. And from time to time I asked us things.

-Like what?

-How was my mother’s name, what was the name of Pilar’s mother, how was the girl, whatever. And then he was very surprised that my mother was named Calzadilla, Juana Ruiz Calzadilla. Because his mother in I don’t know what instance of his life was named as my mother. Then my wife: his father was called Borges. For him all those things were magical. And it was very, very happy. Then we arrived at the restaurant and of course, he was a blind man. You had to teach everything and tell you everything. And one of the things that happened was that he asked the waiter to say what was to eat. And the waiter told him that “” we have this, we have this and we have Vichyssoise. “Do you know what the Vichyssoise?

-I had to search when I read the book: a soup.

-What about the Vichyssoise? You have to give it. Then I started giving him the Vichyssoise to Borges. Borges! Meanwhile, I asked questions and those questions had no other object than asking questions. And he answered me, and responded by playing. Everything was playing. Borges was playing all the time. He was not a solemn person, who would take things to chest. No, it was like a boy.

-And how did he continue?

-At the next day I went to the hotel, when I arrived I was dressed and Borges asked me to fix his suitcase. And he said: “Do me a favor, leave some slits to breathe the shirts.” He was always doing things, he was in charge.

-In the book you say it was dependent.

-Yes but directed everything. Years before, in Peru, he had asked Vargas Llosa to take him to the bathroom. “Now you will be my captain,” he said. Mine was much more modest, the one that fixed his shirt.

-But they continued together.

-Then he asked me to go with him to the dome of the Palace Hotal. He told me that it was the only place in the world where he could see the yellow color. I took it.

-I understood that Borges could see yellow, in general.

-That told me, but everything about Borges can be a thing and the opposite and the Aleph and I don’t know what.

-Then you talked about this with Kodama …

-At two years old died Borges and Kodama asked to see me. I think I didn’t know Kodama until then. Kodama and I quoted it next to the dome, precisely to take something. I told him that he had brought Borges to this site to see yellow. “You had gone to Córdoba …” And he says: “I never left Jorge Luis Borges alone” and I was not going to argue with her, because a journalist does not argue.

-But it was fixed.

-Then I must say that I was friends with her. In addition, he was a person who seemed very fragile and who was not the hard person that people said.

-In the book there is very close that Borges laughs.

-Borges was the most sympathetic person with whom I have been in the literary world. Singing and sang. That is, I am convinced that it would not be a deference to us.

-You were with huge, public and private writers. How are writers?

-Critors are people who when they consider themselves infallible begin to stop being good.

-For example?

-Carlos sources. He was a great writer and suddenly began to tell stories that he had not seen or lived. When a writer begins to invent, he is reaching an abyss that falls or throws back. Because a writer, always, seems to me, must be attentive to what happens to himself.

-Are you not supposed to invent?

-Look, there are a lot of things in The city and dogs They are invented. But would Vargas Llosa have written that book without the city and the dogs? Has Gabo written, without Aracataca, One hundred years of loneliness? Who wants to know what happened in Aracataca has to read One hundred years of loneliness.

-How what happened? It is fiction.

-Ok everything, one would have to go to Aracataca to see that everything that the novel tells, which is fiction and looks like fiction, was happening there. Las Piedras, the ice, the place where the ice was made, the huge ventarrón of Aracataca, the loneliness of Aracataca, the house where Gabo was born, the cradle where Gabo was born. Everything looks there and all that I say is seen there, it is not seen. But as soon as you get, something is guiding you that what you see, what you see, is the book. It is the first time in my life that I have seen a book reproduced in a piece of land.

When: This Thursday 1 at 17.30.

Where: Book Fair, La Rural. Alejandra Pizarnik, yellow pavilion.

Participan: Juan Cruz Ruiz and Claudia Piñeiro