“In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger – not the jaguar, that spotted 'tiger' that inhabits the floating islands of water hyacinths along the Parana and the tangled wilderness of the Amazon, but the true tiger, the striped Asian breed that can only be found by men of war, in a castle atop an elephant. I used to linger endlessly before one of the cages at the zoo; I judged vast encyclopedias and books of natural history by the splendor of their tigers… Childhood passed away, the tigers and my passion for them faded, but still they are in my dreams. In that underground sea of chaos they still endure. As I sleep, I am drawn into some dream or other, and suddenly I realize that it's a dream. In those moments, I often think: This is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; and since I have unlimited power, I am going to bring forth a tiger. Oh, incompetence! My dreams never seem to engender the creature I so hunger for. The tiger does appear, but it is all dried up, or it's flimsy-looking, or it has vagaries of shape or an unacceptable size, or it's altogether too ephemeral, or it looks more like a dog or bird than like a tiger…”

As he grew older, Borges' eyesight did cruelly abandon him, but never his faithful tigers. “And now that I am blind, one single color remains for me, and it is precisely the color of the tiger, the color yellow.”

Tigers, leaping out from the pages of books once read. Tigers, creeping from the mists of forgotten zoo-trip memories. Tigers, filling the mind of Borges:

“So interwoven is reading with the other habits of my days that I do not know if my first tiger was the tiger in a print or the one, now dead, whose stubborn come-and-go in its cage I followed as if in a spell on the other side of the iron bars. My father enjoyed encyclopedias; I judged them, I am certain, by the images of tigers they offered me… One will wonder quite reasonably why tigers and not leopards or jaguars? I can only respond that spots displease me and not stripes. If I were to write leopard in place of tiger the reader would immediately intuit that I was lying. To these tigers of sight and word I have joined another which was revealed to me by our friend Cuttini, in the curious zoological garden whose name is Animal World… This last tiger is of flesh and blood. With evident and terrified happiness I neared this tiger, whose tongue licked my face, whose indifferent or affectionate mitt lingered on my head, and which, unlike its precursors, possessed smell and weight. I will not say this tiger that amazed me is more real than the others, since an oak is not more real than the shapes of a dream, but I would like to thank here our friend, this tiger of flesh and blood my senses perceived that morning and whose image comes back as those tigers come back in books.”   

Jorge Luis Borges, consumed by tigers, is gone now. And of his days of walking among them he had only this to say:

“Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that tears me apart, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.”

Roy H Williams