Borges’s love life was always a cerebral business.

In 1967, Jorge Luis Borges, 68 years old and almost entirely blind, stunned his family and friends by marrying a 57-year-old widow, Elsa Astete Millan. The sudden impulse yielded consequences as bizarre as anything in Borges’s fictional oeuvre. Elsa had been one of Georgie’s early loves—they probably met sometime around 1927 when she was 17—and Borges remained infatuated with her for years. Finally, after phoning her house for months, her mother revealed to Borges that Elsa was married. The man who would become the most influential fictionalist of the last half of the 20th century cried, “Ah, caramba!” and hung up.   continue