^A  Borges made me into a reader and a writer at the same time. Before experiencing him I was a different kind of reader, one who floundered in a country with very few readers, and without any living writers (those who were alive were exiled at the end of the ‘70s and the beginning of the ‘80s). I read and reread Borges in those years, which is to say in my adolescence and young adulthood. I feel that, among many other things, Borges is an ideal author to come to in late adolescence. Apart from serving as a kind of literary road map, he directs us toward the best that is in us – this was what I discovered in Borges as a serious adolescent who wanted to be a poet or a mathematician. The itching to give one’s intellect free reign, this is something that Borges can transmit. Reading him produces what might be called a longing for knowledge – and, why not, a longing for eternity – combined with a pessimism or nihilism that is very Latin American, very Argentine. In Borges’s prose there is a mix of cerebral control and physical despair. This sort of a mixture is something that can be very appealing to an adolescent. After all, who is more easily influenced than a teenager? ‘What is important is the elated, and tranquil, and happy work of the mind,’ writes a character in Bioy’s A Plan of Escape, which Bioy himself wrote under the influence of Borges. I would endorse that statement.