Jorge Luis Borges - Collected Fictions Part 17

Another memory, in which there was also a night and the foretaste of adventure, sprouted from that first one. A woman, the first woman the G.o.ds had given him, had awaited him in the darkness of a subterranean crypt, and he searched for her through galleries that were like labyrinths of stone and down slopes that descended into darkness. Why had those memories come to him, and why did they come without bitterness, like some mere foreshadowing of the present?

With grave wonder, he understood. In this night of his mortal eyes into which he was descending, love and adventure were also awaiting him. Ares and Aphrodite-because now he began to sense (because now he began to be surrounded by) a rumor of glory and hexameters, a rumor of men who defend a temple that the G.o.ds will not save, a rumor of black ships that set sail in search of a beloved isle, the rumor of theOdysseys andIliads that it was his fate to sing and to leave echoing in the cupped hands of human memory. These things we know, but not those that he felt as he descended into his last darkness.

Dreamtigers*

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 theParanaand the tangled wilderness of the Amazon, but the true tiger, the striped Asian breed that can be faced only by men of war, in a castle atop an elephant. I would stand for hours on end before one of the cages at the zoo; I would rank vast encyclopedias and natural history books by the splendor of their tigers. (I still remember those pictures, I who cannot recall without error a woman's brow or smile.) My childhood outgrown, the tigers and my pa.s.sion for them faded, but they are still in my dreams. In that under- ground sea or chaos, they still endure. As I sleep I am drawn into some dream or other, and suddenly I realize that it's a dream. At those moments, I often think: This is a dream, a pure diversion of my will, and since I have un- limited power, I am going to bring forth a tiger.

Oh, incompetence! My dreams never seen 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 impure vagaries of shape or an unacceptable size, or it's al- together too ephemeral, or it looks more like a dog or bird than like a tiger.

A Dialog About a Dialog

A: Absorbed in our discussion of immortality, we had let night fall without lighting the lamp, and we couldn't see each other's faces. With an off-handedness or gentleness more convincing than pa.s.sion would have been,MacedonieFernandez'voice said once more that the soul is im- mortal. He a.s.sured me that the death of the body is altogether insignifi- cant, and that dying has to be the most unimportant thing that can happen to a man. I was playing with Macedonio's pocketknife, opening and closing it. A nearby accordion was infinitely dispatchingLa Com-parsita, that dismaying trifle that so many people likebecause it's been misrepresented to them as being old-----I suggested toMacedoniethat we kill ourselves, so we might have our discussion without all that racket.

Z: (mockingly) But I suspect that at the last moment you reconsidered.

A: (now deep in mysticism) Quite frankly, I don't remember whether we committed suicide that night or not.

Toenails

Gentle socks pamper them by day, and shoes cobbled of leather fortify them, but my toes hardly notice.

All they're interested in is turning out toenails-semitransparent,flexible sheets of a hornlike material, as defense against-whom7.Brutish, distrustful as only they can be, my toes labor ceaselessly at manufacturing that frail armament. They turn their backs on the universe and its ecstasies in order to spin out, endlessly, those ten point- less projectile heads, which are cut away time and again by the sudden snips ofa Solingen.By the ninetieth twilit day of their prenatal confinement, my toes had cranked up that extraordinary factory. And when I am tucked away inRecoleta,*in an ash-colored house bedecked with dry flowers and amu- lets, they will still be at their stubborn work, until corruption at last slows them- them and the beard upon my cheeks.

Covered Mirrors

Islam tells us that on the unappealable Day of Judgment, all who have per- petrated images of living things will reawaken with their works, and will be ordered to blow life into them, and they will fail, and they and their works will be cast into the fires of punishment. As a child, I knew that horror of the spectral duplication or multiplication of reality, but mine would come as I stood before large mirrors. As soon as it began to grow dark outside, the constant, infallible functioning of mirrors, the way they followed my every movement, their cosmic pantomime, would seem eerie to me. One of my insistent pleas to G.o.d and my guardian angel was that I not dream of mir- rors; I recall clearly that I would keep one eye on them uneasily. I feared sometimes that they would begin to veer off from reality; other times, that I would see my face in them disfigured by strange misfortunes. I have learned that this horror is monstrously abroad in the world again. The story is quite simple, and terribly unpleasant.

In 1927,1 met a grave young woman, first by telephone (because Julia began as a voice without a name or face) and then on a corner at nightfall. Her eyes were alarmingly large, her hair jet black and straight, her figure se- vere. She was the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Federalists, as I was the grandson and great-grandson of Unitarians,* but that ancient dis- cord between our lineages was, for us, a bond, a fuller possession of our homeland. She lived with her family in a big run-down high-ceiling'd house, in the resentment and savorlessness of genteel poverty. In the afternoons- only very rarely at night-we would go out walking through her neighbor- hood, which was Balvanera.* We would stroll along beside the high blank wall of the railway yard; once we walked downSarmientoall the way to the cleared grounds of theParque Centenario.*Between us there was neitherlove itself nor the fiction of love; I sensed in her an intensity that was utterly unlike the intensity of eroticism, and I feared it. In order to forge an inti- macy with women, one often tells them about true or apocryphal things that happened in one's youth; I must have told her at some point about my horror of mirrors, and so in 1928 I must have planted the hallucination that was to flower in 1931. Now I have just learned that she has gone insane, and that in her room all the mirrors are covered, because she sees my reflection in them-usurping her own-and she trembles and cannot speak, and says that I am magically following her, watching her,stalking her.

What dreadful bondage, the bondage of my face-or one of my former faces. Its odious fate makesme odious as well, but I don't care anymore.

Argumentum Ornithologic.u.m

I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision lasts a second, or perhaps less; I am not sure how many birds I saw. Was the number of birds definite or indefinite? The problem involves the existence of G.o.d. If G.o.d exists, the number is definite, because G.o.d knows how many birds I saw. If G.o.d does not exist, the number is indefinite, because no one can have counted. In this case I saw fewer than ten birds (let us say) and more than one, but did not see nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, or two birds. I saw a number be- tween ten and one, which was not nine, eight, seven, six, five, etc. That integer- not-nine, not-eight, not-seven, not-six, not-five, etc.-is incon- ceivable.Ergo, G.o.d exists.

The Captive

In Junin orTapalquen,they tell the story. A young boy disappeared in an Indian raid; people said the Indians had kidnapped him. His parents searched for him without success. Many years went by, and a soldier coming into town from the interior told them about an Indian with sky blue eyes who might well be their son. They finally managed to find this Indian (the story has lost many of its details, and I don't want to invent what I don't know) and thought they recognized him. Shaped by the wilderness and his barbaric life, the man could no longer understand the words of his mother tongue, but he allowed himself to be led-indifferently, docilely-back to the house. There, he stopped (perhaps because the others stopped). He looked at the door, almost uncomprehendingly. Then suddenly he bowed his head, gave an odd cry, rushed down the entryway and through the two long patios, and ran into the kitchen. He thrust his arm unhesitatingly up into the blackened chimney of the stove and took out the little horn-handled knife he had hidden there when he was a boy. His eyes gleamed with happiness and his parents wept, because they had found their son.

That memory may have been followed by others, but the Indian could not live a life that was hemmed about by walls, and one day he went off in search of his wilderness. I would like to know what he felt in that moment of vertigo when past and present intermingled; I would like to know whether the lost son was reborn and died in that ecstatic moment, and whether he ever managed to recognize, even as little as a baby or a dog might, his parents and the house.

The Mountebank

One day in July, 1952, the man dressed in mourning weeds appeared in that little village on theChacoRiver.* He was a tall, thin man with vaguely In- dian features and the inexpressive face of a half-wit or a mask. The towns- folk treated him with some deference, not because of who he was but because of the personage he was portraying or had by now become. He chose a house near the river; with the help of some neighbor women he laid a board across two sawhorses, and on it he set a pasteboard coffin with a blond-haired mannequin inside. In addition, they lighted four candles in tall candleholders and put flowers all around. The townsfolk soon began to gather. Old ladies bereft of hope, dumbstruck wide-eyed boys, peons who respectfully took off their pith hats-they filed past the coffin and said:My condolences, General. The man in mourning sat sorrowfully at the head of the coffin, his hands crossed over his belly like a pregnant woman. He would extend his right hand to shake the hand extended to him and answer with courage and resignation:It was fate. Everything humanly possible was done. A tin collection box received the two-peso price of admission, and many could notcontent themselves with a single visit.

What kind of man, I ask myself, thought up and then acted out that fu- nereal farce-a fanatic? a grief-stricken mourner? a madman? a cynical im- postor? Did he, in acting out his mournful role as the macabre widower, believe himself to bePeron?It is an incredible story, but it actually happened-and perhaps not once but many times, with different actors and local variants. In it, one can see the perfect symbol of an unreal time, and it is like the reflection of a dream or like that play within a play inHam- let.

The man in mourning was notPeronand the blond-haired mannequin was not the woman EvaDuarte,but thenPeronwas notPeron,either, norwas Eva, Eva-they were unknown or anonymous persons (whose secret name and true face we shall never know) who acted out, for the credulous love of the working cla.s.s, a cra.s.s and ign.o.ble mythology.

Delia Elena San Marco

We said good-bye on one of the corners of the Plaza del Once.*

From the sidewalk on the other side of the street I turned and looked back; you had turned, and you waved good-bye.

A river of vehicles and people ran between us; it was five o'clock on no particular afternoon. How was I to know that that river was the sad Acheron, which no one may cross twice?

Then we lost sight of each other, and a year later you were dead.

And now I search out that memory and gaze at it and think that it was false, that under the trivial farewell there lay an infinite separation.

Last night I did not go out after dinner. To try to understand these things, I reread the last lesson that Plato put in his teacher's mouth. I read that the soul can flee when the flesh dies.

And now I am not sure whether the truth lies in the ominous later in- terpretation or in the innocent farewell.

Because if the soul doesn't die, we are right to lay no stress on our good-byes.

To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to sayToday we play at going our own ways, but we'll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells be- cause they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.

One day we will pick up this uncertain conversation again, Delia-on the bank of what river?-and we will ask ourselves whether we were once, in a city that vanished into the plains,Borgesand Delia.

A Dialog Between Dead Men

The man arrived from the south of England early one winter morning in 1877. As he was a ruddy, athletic, overweight man, it was inevitable that al- most everyone should think that he was English, and indeed he looked re- markably like the archetypical John Bull. He wore a bowler hat and a curious wool cape with an opening in the center. A group of men, women, and babes were waiting for him anxiously; many of them had a red line scored across their throats, others were headless and walked with hesitant, fearful steps, as though groping through the dark. Little by little, they encir- cled the stranger, and from the back of the crowd someone shouted out a curse, but an ancient terror stopped them, and they dared go no further. From out of their midst stepped a sallow-skinned soldier with eyes like glowing coals; his long tangled hair and lugubrious beard seemed to con- sume his face; ten or twelve mortal wounds furrowed his body, like the stripes on a tiger's skin. When the newcomer saw him, he paled, but then he stepped forward and put out his hand.

"How grievous it is to see such a distinguished soldier brought low by the instruments of perfidy!" he said, grandiloquently. "And yet what deep satisfaction to have ordered that the torturers and a.s.sa.s.sinsatone for their crimes on the scaffold in the Plazade laVictoria!"

"If it's SantosPerezand theReinafebrothers you're referring to, be as- sured that I have already thanked them,"' the b.l.o.o.d.y man said with slow solemnity.

The other man looked at him as though smelling a gibe or a threat, but Quiroga* went on: "You never understood me, Rosas.* But how could you understand me, if our lives were so utterly different? Your fate was to govern in a city that looks out toward Europe and that one day will be one of the most famous cities in the world; mine was to wage war across the solitudes of the Americas, in an impoverished land inhabited by impoverishedgauchos.My empire was one of spears and shouts and sandy wastelands and virtually secret victories in G.o.dforsaken places. What sort of claim to fame is that?

I live in people's memory-and will go on living there for many years-because I was mur- dered in a stagecoach in a place called BarrancaYacoby a gang of men with swords and horses. I owe to you that gift of a valiant death, which I cannot say I was grateful for at the time but which subsequent generations have been loath to forget. You are surely familiar with certain primitive lithographs and that interesting literary work penned by a worthy from San Juan?"

Rosas, who had recovered his composure, looked at the other man contemptuously.

"You are a romantic," he said with a sneer." The flattery of posterity isworth very little more than the flattery of one's contemporaries, which is not worth anything, and can be bought with a pocketful of loose change."'

"I know how you think," replied Quiroga. " In 1852, fate, which is generous, or which wanted to plumb you to the very depths, offered you a man's death, in battle. You showed yourself unworthy of that gift, because fighting, bloodshed, frightened you."

"Frightened me?" Rosas repeated. "Me, who've tamed horses in theSouth and then tamed an entire country?"

For the first time, Quiroga smiled.

"I know," he slowly said, "from the impartial testimony of your peons and seconds-in-command, that you did more than one pretty turn onhorseback, but back in those days, across the Americas-and on horseback,too-other pretty turns were done in places named Chacabuco and JuninandPalma RedondoandCaseros."

Rosas listened expressionlessly, and then replied.

'"I had no need to be brave. One of those pretty turns of mine, as you put it, was to manage to convince braver men than I to fight and die for me. SantosPerez,for example, who was more than a match foryou.

Bravery is amatter of bearing up; some men bear up better than others, but sooner or later, every man caves in."

"That may be," Quiroga said, "but I have lived and I have died, and to this day I don't know what fear is.

And now I am going to the place where I will be given a new face and a new destiny, because history is tired of violent men. I don't know who the next man may be, what will be done with me, but I know I won't be afraid."

"I'm content to be who I am," said Rosas, "and I have no wish to be any- body else."

"Stones want to go on being stones, too, forever and ever," Quiroga replied. "And for centuries they are stones-until they crumble into dust. When I first entered into death, I thought the way you do, but I've learned many things here since. If you notice, we're both already changing."

But Rosas paid him no attention; he merely went on, as though think- ing out loud: "Maybe I'm not cut out to be dead, but this place and this conversation seem like a dream to me, and not a dream that /am dreaming, either. More like a dream dreamed by somebody else, somebody that's not born yet."

Then their conversation ended, because just then Someone called them.

The Plot To make his horror perfect, Caesar, hemmed about at the foot of a statue by his friends' impatient knives, discovers among the faces and the blades the face of Marcus Junius Brutus, his ward, perhaps his very son-and so Caesar stops defending himself, and cries outEt tu,Brute? Shakespeare and Quevedo record that pathetic cry.

Fate is partial to repet.i.tions, variations, symmetries. Nineteen centuries later, in the southern part of the province of Buenos Aires,a gauchois set upon by othergauchos,and as he falls he recognizes a G.o.dson of his, and says to him in gentle remonstrance and slow surprise (these words must be heard, not read): Pero, che!Hedies, but he does not know that he has died so that a scene can be played out again.

A Problem

Let us imagine that a piece of paper with a text in Arabic on it is discovered in Toledo, and that paleographers declare the text to have been written by that same Cide Hamete Benengeli from whom Cervantes derivedDon Quixote. In it, we read that the hero (who, as everyone knows, wandered the roads of Spain armed with a lance and sword, challenging anyone for any reason) discovers, after one of his many combats, that he has killed a man. At that point the fragment breaks off; the problem is to guess, or hypothe- size, how don Quixote reacts.

So far as I can see, there are three possibilities. The first is a negative one: Nothing in particular happens, because in the hallucinatory world of don Quixote, death is no more uncommon than magic, and there is no rea- son that killing a mere man should disturb one who does battle, or thinks he does battle, with fabled beasts and sorcerers. The second is pathetic: Don Quixote never truly managed to forget that he was a creation, a projection, ofAlonso Quijano,reader of fabulous tales. The sight of death, the realiza- tion that a delusion has led him to commit the sin of Cain, awakens him from his willful madness, perhaps forever. The third is perhaps the most plausible: Having killed the man, donQuixote cannot allow himself to think that the terrible act is the work of a delirium; the reality of the effect makes him a.s.sume a like reality of cause, and don Quixote never emerges from his madness.

But there is yet another hypothesis, which is alien to the Spanish mind (even to the Western mind) and which requires a more ancient, more com- plex, and more timeworn setting. Don Quixote-who is no longer don Quixote but a king of the cycles of Hindustan-senses, as he stands before the body of his enemy, that killing and engendering are acts of G.o.d or of magic, which everyone knows transcend the human condition. He knows that death is illusory, as are the b.l.o.o.d.y sword that lies heavy in his hand, he himself and his entire past life, and the vast G.o.ds and the universe.

The Yellow Rose

It was neither that afternoon nor the next thatGiambattistaMarino died- that ill.u.s.trious man proclaimed by the unanimous mouths of Fame (to use an image that was dear to him) as the new Homer or the new Dante-and yet the motionless and silent act that took place that afternoon was, in fact, the last thing that happened in his life. His brow laureled with years and glory, the man died in a vast Spanish bed with carven pillars. It costs us nothing to picture a serene balcony a few steps away, looking out toward the west, and, below, marbles and laurels and a garden whose terraced steps are mirrored in a rectangular pool. In a goblet, a woman has set a yellow rose; the man murmurs the inevitable lines of poetry that even he, to tell the truth, is a bit tired of by now: Porpora de'giardin, pompa de'prato,Gemmadi primavera, occhio d'aprile.. .*

Then the revelation occurred. Marinosaw the rose, as Adam had seen it in Paradise, and he realized that it lay within its own eternity, not within his words, and that we might speak about the rose, allude to it, but never truly express it, and that the tall, haughty volumes that made a golden dimness in the corner ofhis room were not (as his vanity had dreamed them) a mirror of the world, but just another thing added to the world's contents.