I've started a course on the short stories of Borges.  The course is being given by Martín Hadis, who read through two short stories last night - The Book of Sand and The South - giving parenthetical contextual explanations as he went, and then discussing briefly afterwards his interpretation of the story as a whole.

In The South, Borges basically presents two deaths.  The protagonist has a small accident which leads to an infection.  Feverish and derious, he's hospitalised and subjected to all manner of humiliating and diabolical treatments, and he comes to despise himself and his bodily needs.  Miraculously he's well again (although most likely, he's merely in a final delirium, dreaming a miraculous recovery) and travels to his countryside ranch to convalesce.  But before he arrives, he has to disembark from the train in an anonymous village in the middle of nowhere.  There, he's challenged to a knife fight by a thug, and dies in the street, feebly but valiantly defending himself. For Borges, going down fighting is much more preferable to, more romantic than, passing away in some hellish hospital bed.

When the session was over, I left the bookshop in which it was held, made a wrong turn, and found myself walking alone in the darkness beside the Palermo railway line, along Avenida Juan B Justo.  A guy approached me begging for spare change, and when denied having any, he pulled a knife and demanded all my money. 

So I had a sudden opportunity to consider my own position on Borges's idea. I have only limited experience with passing away nightmarishly in a bed, preluded by bodily necessities and erosion of dignity, but if Borges is on one hand claiming "better a fighting death by the blade of a street thug", I am on the opposite, saying "better not to be killed sordidly, alone in the darkness, beside some railway".  While I admit that my scene lacked certain picturesque elements that Borges's version had - ponchos, an ancient gaucho, marblesque clouds, etc. - I don't think that the addition of any of these would have transformed this death into something preferable.

Fortunately my particular thug lacked either conviction or experience, and when I deflected his wielding arm and dodged across the footpath, he had second thoughts, folded the knife away, and went back to plaintively asking for small change. I wanted to unleash a torrent of insults, but my Spanish failed me. I was left ridiculously reiterating my lack of coins, until a passing taxi gave me a quick getaway option.