Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature
Date: 2013-07-31 09:44:05+00:00
Keywords: Books About Books; Spanish Literature; Literary Criticism; Essays; English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh; Criticism; History; Literature; Modern; Non Fiction; Literary Fiction; 20th Century; Latin American;
Description: In English at last, Borges’s erudite and entertaining lectures on English literature from Beowulf to Oscar Wilde Writing for Harper’s Magazine, Edgardo Krebs describes Professor Borges:“A compilation of the twenty-five lectures Borges gave in 1966 at the University of Buenos Aires, where he taught English literature. Starting with the Vikings’ kennings and Beowulf and ending with Stevenson and Oscar Wilde, the book traverses a landscape of ‘precursors,’cross-cultural borrowings, and genres of expression, all connected by Borges into a vast interpretive web. This is the most surprising and usef
Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges — The Giovanni Translations (and others)

Jorge Luis Borges

—Table of Contents—

The Aleph & Other Stories

Preface

The Aleph

Streetcorner Man

The Approach to al-Mu’tasim

The Circular Ruins

Death and the Compass

The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874)

The Two Kings and their Two Labyrinths

The Dead Man

The Other Death

Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth

The Man on the Threshold

The Challenge

The Captive

Borges and Myself

The Maker

The Immortals

The Meeting

Pedro Salvadores

Rosendo’s Tale

An Autobiographical Essay

Commentaries

A Universal History of Infamy

Preface to the 1954 Edition

Preface to the First Edition

A Universal History of Infamy

The Dread Redeemer Lazarus Morell

Tom Castro, the Implausible Impostor

The Widow Ching, Lady Pirate

Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities

The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan

The Insulting Master of Etiquette Kôtsuké no Suké

The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv

Etcetera

A Theologian in Death

The Chamber of Statues

Tale of the Two Dreamers

The Wizard Postponed

The Mirror of Ink

A Double for Mohammed

The Generous Enemy

Of Exactitude in Science

The Book of Sand

Author's Note

The Other

Ulrike

The Congress

There Are More Things

The Sect of the Thirty

The Night of the Gifts

The Mirror and the Mask

Undr

Utopia of a Tired Man

The Bribe

Avelino Arredondo

The Disk

The Book of Sand

Afterword

In Praise of Darkness

The Anthropologist

Legend

A Prayer

His End and His Beginning

Doctor Brodie's Report

Foreword

Preface to the First Edition

The Gospel According to Mark

The Unworthy Friend

The Duel

The End of the Duel

The Intruder

Juan Muraña

The Elder Lady

Guayaquil

Doctor Brodie’s Report

Afterword

The Garden of Branching Paths

Prologue

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote

The Lottery in Babylon

A Glimpse Into the Work of Herbert Quain

The Library of Babel

The Garden of Branching Paths

Other Fictions
(translations by Anthony Kerrigan)

Three Versions of Judas

Funes, The Memorious

The Form of the Sword

Theme of the Traitor and Hero

The Secret Miracle

The End

The Sect of the Phoenix

The South

The Book of Imaginary Beings

Preface

Preface to the 1967 edition

Preface to the 1957 edition

A Bao A Qu

Abtu and Anet

The Amphisbaena

An Animal Imagined by Kafka

An Animal Imagined by C. S. Lewis

The Animal Imagined by Poe

Animals in the Form of Spheres

Antelopes with Six Legs

The Ass with Three Legs

Bahamut

Baldanders

The Banshee

The Barometz

The Basilisk

Behemoth

The Brownies

Burak

The Carbuncle

The Catoblepas

The Celestial Stag

The Centaur

Cerberus

The Cheshire Cat and the Kilkenny Cats

The Chimera

The Chinese Dragon

The Chinese Fox

The Chinese Phoenix

Chronos or Hercules

A Creature Imagined by C. S. Lewis

The Crocotta and the Leucrocotta

A Crossbreed

The Double

The Eastern Dragon

The Eater of the Dead

The Eight-Forked Serpent

The Elephant That Foretold the Birth of the Buddha

The Eloi and the Morlocks

The Elves

An Experimental Account of What Was Known, Seen, and Met by Mrs. Jane Lead in London in 1694

The Fairies

Fastitocalon

Fauna of Chile

Fauna of China

Fauna of Mirrors

Fauna of the United States

Garuda

The Gnomes

The Golem

The Griffon

Haniel, Kafziel, Azriel, and Aniel

Haokah, the Thunder God

Harpies

The Heavenly Cock

The Hippogriff

Hochigan

Humbaba

The Hundred-Heads

The Hydra of Lerna

Ichthyocentaurs

Jewish Demons

The Jinn

The Kami

A King of Fire and His Steed

The Kraken

Kujata

The Lamed Wufniks

The Lamias

Laudatores Temporis Acti

The Lemures

The Leveller

Lilith

The Lunar Hare

The Mandrake

The Manticore

The Mermecolion

The Minotaur

The Monkey of the Inkpot

The Monster Acheron

The Mother of Tortoises

The Nagas

The Nasnas

The Norns

The Nymphs

The Odradek

An Offspring of Leviathan

One-Eyed Beings

The Panther

The Pelican

The Peryton

The Phoenix

The Pygmies

The Rain Bird

The Remora

The Rukh

The Salamander

The Satyrs

Scylla

The Sea Horse

The Shaggy Beast of La Ferté-Bernard

The Simurgh

Sirens

The Sow Harnessed with Chains and Other Argentine Fauna

The Sphinx

The Squonk

Swedenborg's Angels

Swedenborg’s Devils

The Sylphs

Talos

The T’ao T’ieh

Thermal Beings

The Tigers of Annam

The Trolls

Two Metaphysical Beings

The Unicorn

The Unicorn of China

The Uroboros

The Valkyries

The Western Dragon

Youwarkee
The Zaratan

Preface

Since my fame rests on my short stories, it is only natural that we should want to include a selection of them among the several volumes of my writings we are translating for E. P. Dutton. At the same time, one of our aims here has been to make available in English all my previously untranslated older stories, as well as to offer a sampling from my latest work in this form.

Perhaps the chief justification of this book is the translation itself, which we have undertaken in what may be a new way. Working closely together in daily sessions, we have tried to make these stories read as though they had been written in English. We do not consider English and Spanish as compounded of sets of easily interchangeable synonyms; they are two quite different ways of looking at the world, each with a nature of its own. English, for example, is far more physical than Spanish. We have therefore shunned the dictionary as much as possible and done our best to rethink every sentence in English words. This tampered with the original, though in certain cases we have supplied the American reader with those things—geographical, topographical, and historical—taken for granted by any Argentine.

We would have preferred a broader selection that might have included such stories as “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” “El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan,” “Funes el memorioso,” “La secta del Fénix,” and “El Sur” from Ficciones, and “Los teólogos,” “Deutsches Requiem,” “La busca de Averroes,” and “El Zahir” from El Aleph. However, rights to make our own translations of these stories were denied us, despite the unselfish and unswerving efforts of Dr. Donald Yates on our behalf.

The autobiographical essay and commentaries, prepared especially for this volume, were written directly in English.

J.L.B.

N.T. di G.

Buenos Aires, August 12,1970

The Aleph

To Estela Canto

(1945)

O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a King of infinite space. . . .

Hamlet, II, 2

But they will teach us that Eternity is the Standing still of the Present Time, a Nunc-stans (as the Schools call it); which neither they, nor any else understand, no more than they would a Hic-stans for an Infinite greatness of Place.

Leviathan,
IV, 46

On the burning February morning Beatriz Viterbo died, after braving an agony that never for a single moment gave way to self-pity or fear, I noticed that the sidewalk billboards around Constitution Plaza were advertising some new brand or other of American cigarettes. The fact pained me, for I realized that the wide and ceaseless universe was already slipping away from her and that this slight change was the first of an endless series. The universe may change but not me, I thought with a certain sad vanity. I knew that at times my fruitless devotion had annoyed her; now that she was dead, I could devote myself to her memory, without hope but also without humiliation. I recalled that the thirtieth of April was her birthday; on that day to visit her house on Garay Street and pay my respects to her father and to Carlos Argentino Daneri, her first cousin, would be an irreproachable and perhaps unavoidable act of politeness. Once again I would wait in the twilight of the small, cluttered drawing room, once again I would study the details of her many photographs: Beatriz Viterbo in profile and in full color; Beatriz wearing a mask, during the Carnival of 1921; Beatriz at her First Communion; Beatriz on the day of her wedding to Roberto Alessandri; Beatriz soon after her divorce, at a luncheon at the Turf Club; Beatriz at a seaside resort in Quilmes with Delia San Marco Porcel and Carlos Argentino; Beatriz with the Pekinese lapdog given her by Villegas Haedo; Beatriz, front and three-quarter views, smiling, hand on her chin. . . . I would not be forced, as in the past, to justify my presence with modest offerings of books—books whose pages I finally learned to cut beforehand, so as not to find out, months later, that they lay around unopened.

Beatriz Viterbo died in 1929. From that time on, I never let a thirtieth of April go by without a visit to her house. I used to make my appearance at seven-fifteen sharp and stay on for some twenty-five minutes. Each year, I arrived a little later and stayed a little longer. In 1933, a torrential downpour coming to my aid, they were obliged to ask me to dinner. Naturally, I took advantage of that lucky precedent. In 1934, I arrived, just after eight, with one of those large Santa Fe sugared cakes, and quite matter-of factly I stayed to dinner. It was in this way, on these melancholy and vainly erotic anniversaries, that I came into the gradual confidences of Carlos Argentino Daneri Beatriz had been tall, frail, slightly stooped; in her walk there was (if the oxymoron may be allowed) a kind of uncertain grace, a hint of expectancy. Carlos Argentino was pink-faced, overweight, gray-haired, fine-featured. He held a minor position in an unreadable library out on the edge of the Southside of Buenos Aires. He was authoritarian but also unimpressive. Until only recently, he took advantage of his nights and holidays to stay at home. At a remove of two generations, the Italian “S” and demonstrative Italian gestures still survived in him. His mental activity was continuous, deeply felt, far-reaching, and—all in all— meaningless. He dealt in pointless analogies and in trivial scruples. He had (as did Beatriz) large, beautiful, finely shaped hands. For several months he seemed to be obsessed with Paul Fort—less with his ballads than with the idea of a towering reputation. “He is the Prince of poets,” Daneri would repeat fatuously. “You will belittle him in vain—but no, not even the most venomous of your shafts will graze him.”

On the thirtieth of April, 1941, along with the sugared cake I allowed myself to add a bottle of Argentine cognac. Carlos Argentino tasted it, pronounced it “interesting,” and, after a few drinks, launched into a glorification of modern man.

“I view him,” he said with a certain unaccountable excitement, “in his inner sanctum, as though in his castle tower, supplied with telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, wireless sets, motion-picture screens, slide projectors, glossaries, timetables, handbooks, bulletins. . . .”

He remarked that for a man so equipped, actual travel was superfluous. Our twentieth century had inverted the story of Mohammed and the mountain; nowadays, the mountain came to the modern Mohammed.

So foolish did his ideas seem to me, so pompous and so drawn out his exposition, that I linked them at once to literature and asked him why he didn’t write them down. As might be foreseen, he answered that he had already done so—that these ideas, and others no less striking, had found their place in the Proem, or Augural Canto, or, more simply, the Prologue Canto of the poem on which he had been working for many years now, alone, without publicity, without fanfare, supported only by those twin staffs universally known as work and solitude. First, he said, he opened the floodgates of his fancy; then, taking up hand tools, he resorted to the file. The poem was entitled The Earth; it consisted of a description of the planet, and, of course, lacked no amount of picturesque digressions and bold apostrophes.

I asked him to read me a passage, if only a short one. He opened a drawer of his writing table, drew out a thick stack of papers—sheets of a large pad imprinted with the letterhead of the Juan Crisóstomo Lafinur Library—and, with ringing satisfaction, declaimed:

Mine eyes, as did the Greek’s, have known men’s towns and fame,

The works, the days in light that fades to amber;

I do not change a fact or falsify a name—

The voyage I set down is . . . autour de ma chambre.

“From any angle, a greatly interesting stanza,” he said, giving his verdict. “The opening line wins the applause of the professor, the academician, and the Hellenist—to say nothing of the would-be scholar, a considerable sector of the public. The second flows from Homer to Hesiod (generous homage, at the very outset, to the father of didactic poetry), not without rejuvenating a process whose roots go back to Scripture—enumeration, congeries, conglomeration. The third—baroque? decadent? example of the cult of pure form?—consists of two equal hemistichs. The fourth, frankly bilingual, assures me the unstinted backing of all minds sensitive to the pleasures of sheer fun. I should, in all fairness, speak of the novel rhyme in lines two and four, and of the erudition that allows me—without a hint of pedantry!—to cram into four lines three learned allusions covering thirty centuries packed with literature—first to the Odyssey, second to Works and Days, and third to the immortal bagatelle bequeathed us by the frolicking pen of the Savoyard, Xavier de Maistre. Once more I’ve come to realize that modern art demands the balm of laughter, the scherzo. Decidedly, Goldoni holds the stage!”

He read me many other stanzas, each of which also won his own approval and elicited his lengthy explications. There was nothing remarkable about them. I did not even find them any worse than the first one. Application, resignation, and chance had gone into the writing; I saw, however, that Daneri’s real work lay not in the poetry but in his invention of reasons why the poetry should be admired. Of course, this second phase of his effort modified the writing in his eyes, though not in the eyes of others. Daneri’s style of delivery was extravagant, but the deadly drone of his metric regularity tended to tone down and to dull that extravagance.*

Only once in my life have I had occasion to look into the fifteen thousand alexandrines of the Polyolbion, that topographical epic in which Michael Drayton recorded the flora, fauna, hydrography, orography, military and monastic history of England. I am sure, however, that this limited but bulky production is less boring than Carlos Argentino’s similar vast undertaking. Daneri had in mind to set to verse the entire face of the planet, and, by 1941, had already displaced a number of acres of the State of Queensland, nearly a mile of the course run by the River Ob, a gasworks to the north of Veracruz, the leading shops in the Buenos Aires parish of Concepción, the villa of Mariana Cambaceres de Alvear in the Belgrano section of the Argentine capital, and a Turkish baths establishment not far from the well-known Brighton Aquarium. He read me certain long-winded passages from his Australian section, and at one point praised a word of his own coining, the color “celestewhite,” which he felt “actually suggests the sky, an element of utmost importance in the landscape of the continent Down Under.” But these sprawling, lifeless hexameters lacked even the relative excitement of the socalled Augural Canto. Along about midnight, I left.

Two Sundays later, Daneri rang me up—perhaps for the first time in his life. He suggested we get together at four o’clock “for cocktails in the salon-bar next door, which the forward-looking Zunino and Zungri—my landlords, as you doubtless recall—are throwing open to the public. It’s a place you’ll really want to get to know.”

More in resignation than in pleasure, I accepted. Once there, it was hard to find a table. The “salon-bar,” ruthlessly modern, was only barely less ugly than what I had expected; at the nearby tables, the excited customers spoke breathlessly of the sums Zunino and Zungri had invested in furnishings without a second thought to cost. Carlos Argentino pretended to be astonished by some feature or other of the lighting arrangement (with which, I felt, he was already familiar), and he said to me with a certain severity, “Grudgingly, you’ll have to admit to the fact that these premises hold their own with many others far more in the public eye.”

He then reread me four or five different fragments of the poem. He had revised them following his pet principle of verbal ostentation: where at first “blue” had been good enough, he now wallowed in “azures,” “ceruleans,” and “ultramarines.” The word “milky” was too easy for him; in the course of an impassioned description of a shed where wool was washed, he chose such words as “lacteal,” “lactescent,” and even made one up—“lactinacious.” After that, straight out, he condemned our modern mania for having books prefaced, “a practice already held up to scorn by the Prince of Wits in his own graceful preface to the Quixote.” He admitted, however, that for the opening of his new work an attention-getting foreword might prove valuable—“an accolade signed by a literary hand of renown.” He next went on to say that he considered publishing the initial cantos of his poem. I then began to understand the unexpected telephone call; Daneri was going to ask me to contribute a foreword to his pedantic hodgepodge. My fear turned out unfounded; Carlos Argentino remarked, with admiration and envy, that surely he could not be far wrong in qualifying with the epithet “solid” the prestige enjoyed in every circle by Álvaro Melián Lafinur, a man of letters, who would, if I insisted on it, be only too glad to dash off some charming opening words to the poem. In order to avoid ignominy and failure, he suggested I make myself spokesman for two of the book’s undeniable virtues—formal perfection and scientific rigor—“inasmuch as this wide garden of metaphors, of figures of speech, of elegances, is inhospitable to the least detail not strictly upholding of truth.” He added that Beatriz had always been taken with Álvaro.

I agreed—agreed profusely—and explained for the sake of credibility that I would not speak to Álvaro the next day, Monday, but would wait until Thursday, when we got together for the informal dinner that follows every meeting of the Writers’ Club. (No such dinners are ever held, but it is an established fact that the meetings do take place on Thursdays, a point which Carlos Argentino Daneri could verify in the daily papers, and which lent a certain reality to my promise.) Half in prophecy, half in cunning, I said that before taking up the question of a preface I would outline the unusual plan of the work. We then said goodbye.

Turning the corner of Bernardo de Irigoyen, I reviewed as impartially as possible the alternatives before me. They were: a) to speak to Álvaro, telling him this first cousin of Beatriz’ (the explanatory euphemism would allow me to mention her name) had concocted a poem that seemed to draw out into infinity the possibilities of cacophony and chaos: b) not to say a word to Álvaro. I clearly foresaw that my indolence would opt for b.

But first thing Friday morning, I began worrying about the telephone. It offended me that that device, which had once produced the irrecoverable voice of Beatriz, could now sink so low as to become a mere receptacle for the futile and perhaps angry remonstrances of that deluded Carlos Argentino Daneri. Luckily, nothing happened—except the inevitable spite touched off in me by this man, who had asked me to fulfill a delicate mission for him and then had let me drop.

Gradually, the phone came to lose its terrors, but one day toward the end of October it rang, and Carlos Argentino was on the line. He was deeply disturbed, so much so that at the outset I did not recognize his voice. Sadly but angrily he stammered that the now unrestrainable Zunino and Zungri, under the pretext of enlarging their already outsized “salon-bar,” were about to take over and tear down his house.

“My home, my ancestral home, my old and inveterate Garay Street home!” he kept repeating, seeming to forget his woe in the music of his words.

It was not hard for me to share his distress. After the age of fifty, all change becomes a hateful symbol of the passing of time. Besides, the scheme concerned a house that for me would always stand for Beatriz. I tried explaining this delicate scruple of regret, but Daneri seemed not to hear me. He said that if Zunino and Zungri persisted in this outrage, Doctor Zunni, his lawyer, would sue ipso facto and make them pay some fifty thousand dollars in damages.

Zunni’s name impressed me; his firm, although at the unlikely address of Caseros and Tacuarí, was nonetheless known as an old and reliable one. I asked him whether Zunni had already been hired for the case. Daneri said he would phone him that very afternoon. He hesitated, then with that level, impersonal voice we reserve for confiding something intimate, he said that to finish the poem he could not get along without the house because down in the cellar there was an Aleph. He explained that an Aleph is one of the points in space that contains all other points.

“It’s in the cellar under the dining room,” he went on, so overcome by his worries now that he forgot to be pompous. “It’s mine—mine. I discovered it when I was a child, all by myself. The cellar stairway is so steep that my aunt and uncle forbade my using it, but I’d heard someone say there was a world down there. I found out later they meant an old-fashioned globe of the world, but at the time I thought they were referring to the world itself. One day when no one was home I started down in secret, but I stumbled and fell. When I opened my eyes, I saw the Aleph.”

“The Aleph?” I repeated.

“Yes, the only place on earth where all places are—seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending. I kept the discovery to myself and went back every chance I got. As a child, I did not foresee that this privilege was granted me so that later I could write the poem. Zunino and Zungri will not strip me of what’s mine—no, and a thousand times no! Legal code in hand, Doctor Zunni will prove that my Aleph is inalienable.”

I tried to reason with him. “But isn’t the cellar very dark?” I said.

“Truth cannot penetrate a closed mind. If all places in the universe are in the Aleph, then all stars, all lamps, all sources of light are in it, too.”

“You wait there. I’ll be right over to see it.”

I hung up before he could say no. The full knowledge of a fact sometimes enables you to see all at once many supporting but previously unsuspected things. It amazed me not to have suspected until that moment that Carlos Argentino was a madman. As were all the Viterbos, when you came down to it. Beatriz (I myself often say it) was a woman, a child, with almost uncanny powers of clairvoyance, but forgetfulness, distractions, contempt, and a streak of cruelty were also in her, and perhaps these called for a pathological explanation. Carlos Argentino’s madness filled me with spiteful elation. Deep down, we had always detested each other.

On Garay Street, the maid asked me kindly to wait. The master was, as usual, in the cellar developing pictures. On the unplayed piano, beside a large vase that held no flowers, smiled (more timeless than belonging to the past) the large photograph of Beatriz, in gaudy colors. Nobody could see us; in a seizure of tenderness, I drew close to the portrait and said to it, “Beatriz, Beatriz Elena, Beatriz Elena Viterbo, darling Beatriz, Beatriz now gone forever, it’s me, it’s Borges.”

Moments later, Carlos came in. He spoke dryly. I could see he was thinking of nothing else but the loss of the Aleph.

“First a glass of pseudo-cognac,” he ordered, “and then down you dive into the cellar. Let me warn yon, you’ll have to lie flat on your back. Total darkness, total immobility, and a certain ocular adjustment will also be necessary. From the floor, you must focus your eyes on the nineteenth step. Once I leave you, I’ll lower the trapdoor and you’ll be quite alone. You needn’t fear the rodents very much— though I know you will. In a minute or two, you’ll see the Aleph—the microcosm of the alchemists and Kabbalists, our true proverbial friend, the multum in parvo!”

Once we were in the dining room, he added, “Of course, if you don’t see it, your incapacity will not invalidate what I have experienced. Now, down you go. In a short while you can babble with all of Beatriz’ images.”

Tired of his inane words, I quickly made my way. The cellar, barely wider than the stairway itself, was something of a pit. My eyes searched the dark, looking in vain for the globe Carlos Argentino had spoken of. Some cases of empty bottles and some canvas sacks cluttered one corner. Carlos picked up a sack, folded it in two, and at a fixed spot spread it out.

“As a pillow,” he said, “this is quite threadbare, but if it’s padded even a half-inch higher, you won’t see a thing, and there you’ll lie, feeling ashamed and ridiculous. All right now, sprawl that hulk of yours there on the floor and count off nineteen steps.”

I went through with his absurd requirements, and at last he went away. The trapdoor was carefully shut. The blackness, in spite of a chink that I later made out, seemed to me absolute. For the first time, I realized the danger I was in: I’d let myself be locked in a cellar by a lunatic, after gulping down a glassful of poison! I knew that back of Carlos’ transparent boasting lay a deep fear that I might not see the promised wonder. To keep his madness undetected, to keep from admitting that he was mad, Carlos had to kill me. I felt a shock of panic, which I tried to pin to my uncomfortable position and not to the effect of a drug. I shut my eyes—I opened them. Then I saw the Aleph.

I arrive now at the ineffable core of my story. And here begins my despair as a writer. All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south. (Not in vain do I recall these inconceivable analogies; they bear some relation to the Aleph.) Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction. Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them amazed me more than the fact that all of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive. Nonetheless, I’ll try to recollect what I can.

On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realized that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I’d seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny—Philemon Holland’s—and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshiped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon—the unimaginable universe.

I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.

“Feeling pretty cockeyed, are you, after so much spying into places where you have no business?” said a hated and jovial voice. “Even if you were to rack your brains, you couldn’t pay me back in a hundred years for this revelation. One hell of an observatory, eh, Borges?”

Carlos Argentino’s feet were planted on the topmost step. In the sudden dim light, I managed to pick myself up and utter, “One hell of a—yes, one hell of a.”

The matter-of-factness of my voice surprised me. Anxiously, Carlos Argentino went on.

“Did you see everything—really clear, in colors?”

At that very moment I found my revenge. Kindly, openly pitying him, distraught, evasive, I thanked Carlos Argentino Daneri for the hospitality of his cellar and urged him to make the most of the demolition to get away from the pernicious metropolis, which spares no one—believe me, I told him, no one! Quietly and forcefully, I refused to discuss the Aleph. On saying goodbye, I embraced him and repeated that the country, that fresh air and quiet were the great physicians.

Out on the street, going down the stairways inside Constitution Station, riding the subway, every one of the faces seemed familiar to me. I was afraid that not a single thing on earth would ever again surprise me; I was afraid I would never again be free of all I had seen. Happily, after a few sleepless nights, I was visited once more by oblivion.

Postscript of March first, 1943—Some six months after the pulling down of a certain building on Garay Street, Procrustes & Co., the publishers, not put off by the considerable length of Daneri’s poem, brought out a selection of its “Argentine sections.” It is redundant now to repeat what happened. Carlos Argentino Daneri won the Second National Prize for Literature.**

First Prize went to Dr. Aita; Third Prize, to Dr. Mario Bonfanti. Unbelievably, my own book
The Sharper’s Cards did not get a single vote. Once again dullness and envy had their triumph! It’s been some time now that I’ve been trying to see Daneri; the gossip is that a second selection of the poem is about to be published. His felicitous pen (no longer cluttered by the Aleph) has now set itself the task of writing an epic on our national hero, General San Martín.

I want to add two final observations: one, on the nature of the Aleph; the other, on its name. As is well known, the Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Its use for the strange sphere in my story may not be accidental. For the Kabbalah, that letter stands for the En Soph, the pure and boundless godhead; it is also said that it takes the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth, in order to show that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher; for Cantor’s Mengenlehre, it is the symbol of transfinite numbers, of which any part is as great as the whole. I would like to know whether Carlos Argentino chose that name or whether he read it—applied to another point where all points converge—in one of the numberless texts that the Aleph in his cellar revealed to him. Incredible as it may seem, I believe that the Aleph of Garay Street was a false Aleph.

Here are my reasons. Around 1867, Captain Burton held the post of British Consul in Brazil. In July, 1942, Pedro Henríquez Ureña came across a manuscript of Burton’s, in a library at Santos, dealing with the mirror which the Oriental world attributes to Iskander Zu al-Karnayn, or Alexander Bicornis of Macedonia. In its crystal the whole world was reflected. Burton mentions other similar devices— the sevenfold cup of Kai Kosru; the mirror that Tariq ibn-Ziyad found in a tower (Thousand and One Nights, 272); the mirror that Lucian of Samosata examined on the moon (True History, I, 26); the mirrorlike spear that the first book of Capella’s Satyricon attributes to Jupiter; Merlin’s universal mirror, which was “round and hollow . . . and seem’d a world of glas” (The Faerie Queene, III, 2, 19)— and adds this curious statement: “But the aforesaid objects (besides the disadvantage of not existing) are mere optical instruments. The Faithful who gather at the mosque of Amr, in Cairo, are acquainted with the fact that the entire universe lies inside one of the stone pillars that ring its central court. . . . No one, of course, can actually see it, but those who lay an ear against the surface tell that after some short while they perceive its busy hum. . . . The mosque dates from the seventh century; the pillars come from other temples of pre-Islamic religions, since, as ibn-Khaldun has written: ‘In nations founded by nomads, the aid of foreigners is essential in all concerning masonry.’ ”

Does this Aleph exist in the heart of a stone? Did I see it there in the cellar when I saw all things, and have I now forgotten it? Our minds are porous and forgetfulness seeps in; I myself am distorting and losing, under the wearing away of the years, the face of Beatriz.

* Among my memories are also some lines of a satire in which he lashed out unsparingly at bad poets. After accusing them of dressing their poems in the warlike armor of erudition, and of flapping in vain their unavailing wings, he concluded with this verse:

But they forget, alas, one foremost fact—beauty!

Only the fear of creating an army of implacable and powerful enemies dissuaded him (he told me) from fearlessly publishing this poem.

** “I received your pained congratulations,” he wrote me. “You rage, my poor friend, with envy, but you must confess—even if it chokes you!—that this time I have crowned my cap with the reddest of feathers; my turban with the most caliph of rubies.”

Streetcorner Man

To Enrique Amorim

(1933)

Fancy your coming out and asking me, of all people, about the late Francisco Real. Sure, I knew him, even though he wasn’t from around here. He was a big shot on the Northside—that whole stretch from the Guadalupe pond to the old Artillery Barracks. I never laid eyes on the guy above three times and these three times were all the same night. But nights like that you don’t forget. It was when La Lujanera got it in her head to come around to my shack and bed down with me, and Rosendo Juárez took off from the Maldonado for good. Of course, you’re not the kind that name would mean much to. But around Villa Santa Rita, Rosendo Juárez—the Slasher we called him—had a reputation for being pretty tough. He was one of don Nicolás Paredes’ boys, the same as Paredes was one of Morel’s gang, and he’d earned respect for the way he handled a knife. Sharp dresser too. Always rode up to the whorehouse on a dark horse, his riding gear decked out with silver. There wasn’t a man or dog around didn’t hold him in regard—and that goes for the women as well. Everybody knew he had at least a couple of killings to his name. He’d have on one of those soft hats with a narrow brim and tall crown, and it would sit there kind of cocky on his long thick hair he wore slicked straight back. Lady luck smiled on him, like they say, and around Villa all us younger guys used to ape him even to the way he spit. But then one night we got a good look at what this Rosendo was made of.

All this might seem made-up, but the story of what happened that particular night starts when this flashy red-wheeled buggy—jamful of men—comes barreling its way down those hard-packed dirt roads out between the brick kilns and the empty lots. Two guys in black were making a big racket twanging away on guitars, and the driver kept cracking his whip at the stray dogs snapping at the legs of the horse. Sitting all quiet in the middle was one guy wrapped in a poncho. This was the famous Butcher—he’d picked that name up working in the stockyards—and he was out for a good fight and maybe a killing. The night was cool and welcome. A couple of them sat up on the folded hood just like they were parading along some downtown avenue in Carnival. A lot more things happened that night, but it was only later on we got wind of this first part. Our gang was there at Julia’s pretty early. This dance hall of hers, between the Gauna road and the river, was really just a big shed made out of sheets of corrugated iron. You could spot the place from two or three blocks off either by the red lamp hanging out front or by the rumpus. Julia, even though she was a darkle, took trouble to run things right — there was always plenty of fiddlers and good booze and dancing partners ready to go all night But La Lujanera — she was Rosendo’s woman — had the others all beat by a mile. She’s dead now, and I can tell you years go by when I don’t give her a thought anymore. But in her day you ought to have seen her—what eyes she had! One look at her was enough to make a man lose sleep.

The rum, the music, the women, Rosendo with that rough talk pouring out of his mouth and a slap on the back for each of us that I tried to take for a sign of real friendship—the thing is, I was happy as they come. I was lucky too. I had me a partner who could follow my steps just like she knew ahead of time which way I was going to turn. The tango took hold of us, driving us along and then splitting us up and then bringing us back together again. There we were in the middle of all this fun, like in some kind of dream, when all of a sudden I feel the music sort of getting louder. Turns out it was those two guitar pickers riding in the buggy, coming closer and closer, their music getting mixed up with ours. Then the breeze shifted, you couldn’t hear them anymore, and my mind went back to my own steps and my partner’s, and to the ins and outs of the dance. A good half hour later there was this pounding on the door and a big voice calling out like it could have been the cops. Everything went silent. Then somebody out there starts shouldering the door and the next thing we know a guy busts in. Funny thing is he looked exactly like his voice.

To us he wasn’t Francisco Real—not yet—but just some big hefty guy. He was all in black from head to toe, except for this reddish-brown scarf draped over one shoulder. I remember his face. There was something Indian and kind of angular about it.

When the door come flying in it smacked right into me. Before I even knew what I was doing I was on top of the guy, throwing him a left square in the teeth while my right goes inside my vest for my knife. But I never got a chance. Steadying himself, he puts his arms out and shoves me aside like he’s brushing something out of the way. There I was down on my ass—back of him now—my hand still inside the jacket grabbing for the knife. And him wading forward like nothing happened. Just wading forward, a whole head taller than all these guys he’s pushing his way through—and acting like he never even saw them. The first of our guys— bunch of gaping wops—just back out of his way, scared as hell. But only the first. In the next bunch the Redhead was waiting for him, and before the newcomer could lay a hand on his shoulder, Red’s knife was out and he let him have one across the face with the flat of the blade. Soon as they saw that they all jumped the guy. The hall was pretty long, maybe more than nine or ten yards, and they drove him from one end almost to the other—like Christ in one of the Stations—roughing him up, hooting at him, spitting all over him. First they let him have it with their fists, then, seeing he didn’t bother shielding the blows, they started slapping him openhanded and flicking the fringes of their scarves at him, mocking him. At the same time they were saving him for Rosendo, who all this time was standing with his back against the far wall and not moving a muscle, not saying a word. All he did was puff on his cigarette, a little worried looking, like he already knew what came clear to the rest of us only later on. The Butcher, who was hanging on but was beginning to bleed here and there—that whole hooting pack behind him—got pushed closer and closer to Rosendo. Laughed at, lashed at, spit on, he only started talking when the two of them came face to face. Then he looked at Rosendo and, wiping his face on his sleeve, said something like this:

“I’m Francisco Real and I come from the Northside. People call me the Butcher. I let all these punks lay their hands on me just now because what I’m looking for is a man. Word’s going around there’s someone out in these lousy mudflats supposed to be pretty good with a knife. They call him the Slasher and they say he’s pretty tough. I’d like to meet up with the guy. Maybe he can teach a nobody like me how a man with guts handles himself.”

He had his say looking straight at Rosendo, and all at once this big knife he must have had up his sleeve was flashing in his hand. Instead of pressing in, now everyone starts opening up space for a fight—at the same time staring at the two of them in dead silence. Even the thick lips of the blind nigger playing the fiddle were turned that way. Right then I hear this commotion behind me and in the frame of the door I get me a glimpse of six or seven men who must have been the Butcher’s gang. The oldest, a leathery-faced guy with a big gray moustache, who looked like a hick, comes in a few steps and, going all goggle-eyed at the women and the lights, takes off his hat, respectful. The rest of them kept their eyes peeled, ready to swing into action if anything underhanded went on.

What was the matter with Rosendo all this time, not bouncing that loudmouth the hell out? He was still keeping quiet, not even raising his eyes. I don’t know if he spit his cigarette out or if it fell from his mouth. Finally he manages to come up with a couple of words, but so low the rest of us at the other end of the dance floor didn’t get what he said. Francisco Real challenged him again, and again Rosendo refused. At this point, the youngest of the newcomers lets out a whistle. La Lujanera gave the guy a look that went right through him. Then, her hair swinging down over her shoulders, she wedged her way through the crowd and, going up to her man, slips his knife out and hands it to him.

“Rosendo,” she says to him, “I think you’re going to need this.”

Way up under the roof was this kind of long window that opened out over the river. Rosendo took the knife in his two hands and turned it over like he never laid eyes on it before. Then all of a sudden he raises his arms up over his head and flips the knife behind him out the window into the Maldonado. I felt a chill go through me.

“The only reason I don’t carve you up is cause you sicken me,” the Butcher says then, making to let Rosendo have it. That split second La Lujanera threw her arms around the Butcher’s neck, giving him one of those looks of hers, and says to him, mad as hell, “Let the bastard alone— making us think he was a man.”

For a minute Francisco Real couldn’t figure it out. Then wrapping his arms around her like it was forever, he calls to the musicians to play loud and strong and orders the rest of us to dance. The music went like wildfire from one end of the hall to the other. Real danced sort of stiff but held his partner up tight, and in nothing flat he had her charmed. When they got near the door he shouted, “Make way, boys, she’s all mine now!” and out they went, cheek to cheek, like the tango was floating them off.I must have turned a little red with shame. I took a couple of turns with some woman, then dropped her cold.

On account of the heat and the jam, I told her, then edged my way around the room toward the door. It was a nice night out—but for who? There was their buggy at the corner of the alley with two guitars standing straight up on the seat like men. Boy, it galled me seeing that—it was as much as saying we weren’t even good enough to clip a lousy guitar. The thought that we were a bunch of nobodies really had me burned up, and I snatched the carnation from behind my ear and threw it in a puddle. I stood there a while staring at it, trying to take my mind off things. I wished it was already tomorrow—I wished that night were over. Then the next thing I knew there’s this elbow shoving me aside and it almost came like a relief. It was Rosendo— all by himself, slinking off.

“You’re always getting in the way, kid,” he says to me half snarling. I couldn’t tell if he was just getting something off his chest or what. He disappeared in the dark toward the Maldonado. I never laid eyes on him again.

I stood there looking at the things I’d seen all my life—the big wide sky, the river going on down there in its own blind way, a horse half asleep, the dirt roads, the kilns—and it came to me that in the middle of this ragweed and all these dump heaps and this whole stinking place, I’d grown up just another weed myself. What else was going to come out of this crap but us—lots of lip but soft inside, all talk but no standing up to anyone? Then I thought no, the worse the neighborhood the tougher it had to be. Crap? Back toward the dance hall the music was still going strong, and on the breeze came a smell of honeysuckle. Nice night, but so what? There were so many stars, some right on top of others, it made you dizzy just looking at them. I tried hard to tell myself that what happened meant nothing to me, but I just couldn’t get over Rosendo’s yellow streak and the newcomer’s plain guts. Real even managed to get hold of a woman for the night—for that night and a lot of nights and maybe forever, I thought, because La Lujanera was really something. God knows which way they headed. They couldn’t have wandered very far. By then the two of them were probably going at it in some ditch.

When I got back, the dance was in full swing. I slipped into the crowd, quiet as I could, noticing that some of our boys had taken off and that the Northside bunch were dancing along with everyone else. There was no shoving, no rough stuff. Everybody was watching out and on good behavior. The music sounded sleepy, and the girls tangoing away with the outsiders didn’t have much to say.

I was on the lookout for something, but not for what happened. Outside there were sounds of a woman crying and then that voice we all knew by then—but real low, almost too low, like somehow it didn’t belong to anyone anymore.

“Go on in, you slut,” it was telling her—then more tears. After that the voice sounded desperate.

“Open the door, you understand me? Open it, you lousy tramp. Open it, bitch.”

At that point the shaky door opens and in comes La Lujanera, all alone. Just like someone’s herding her.

“Must be a ghost out there behind her,” said the Redhead.

“A dead man, friend.” It was the Butcher, and he staggers in, his face like a drunk’s, and in the space we opened up for him he takes a couple of reeling steps—tall, hardly seeing—then all at once goes down like a log. One of his friends rolled him over and fixed him a pillow with his scarf, but all this fussing only got him smeared with blood. We could see there was a big gash in his chest. The blood was welling up and blackening a bright red neckerchief I hadn’t noticed before because his scarf covered it. For first aid one of the women brought rum and some scorched rags. The man was in no shape to explain. La Lujanera looked at him in a daze, her arms hanging by her sides.

There was one question on everyone’s face and finally she got out an answer. She said after leaving with the Butcher they went to a little field and at that point someone she didn’t know turned up and challenged him to fight and then gave him this stab. She swore she didn’t know who it was, but that it wasn’t Rosendo. Was anyone going to believe that?

The man at our feet was dying. It looked to me like the hand that done the job done it well. Just the same, the man hung on. When he knocked that second time Julia was brewing some matés. The cup went clear around the circle and back to me before he died. When the end came, he said in a low voice, “Cover my face.” All he had left was pride and he didn’t want us gaping at him while his face went through its agony. Someone put his hat over him and that’s how he died—without a sound—under that high black crown. It was only when his chest stopped heaving they dared uncover him. He had that worn-out look dead men have. In his day, from the Artillery Barracks all the way to the Southside, he was one of the scrappiest men around. When I knew he was dead and couldn’t talk, I stopped hating him.

“All it takes to die is being alive,” says one of the girls in the crowd. And in the same way another one says, “A man’s so full of pride and now look—all he’s good for is gathering flies.”

Right then the Northside gang starts talking to each other in low voices. Then two of them come out together saying, “The woman killed him.” After that, in a real loud voice, one of them threw the accusation in her face, and they all swarmed in around her. Forgetting I had to be careful, I was on them like a light. I don’t know what kept me from reaching for my knife. There were a lot of eyes watching—maybe everybody’s—and I said, putting them down, “Look at this woman’s hands. How could she get the strength of the nerve to knife a man?”

Then, kind of offhand, I added, “Whoever would have dreamed the deceased, who—like they say—was a pretty tough guy in his own neck of the woods, would end up this way? And in a place sleepy as this, where nothing ever happens till some outsider comes around trying to show us a little fun and for all his pains only gets himself spit on?”

Nobody offered his hide for a whipping.

Right then, in the dead silence, you could make out the approach of riders. It was the law. Everybody—some more, some less—had his own good reason for staying clear of the police. The best thing was to dump the body in the Maldonado. You remember that long window the knife went flying out of? Well, that’s where the man in black went. A bunch of guys lifted him up. There were hands stripping him of every cent and trinket he had, and someone even hacked off one of his fingers to steal his ring. They helped themselves, all right—real daring bunch with a poor defenseless stiff once a better guy already straightened him out. One good heave and the current did the rest. To keep him from floating, they maybe even tore out his guts. I don’t know—I didn’t want to look. The old-timer with the gray moustache never took his eyes off me. Making the best of all the commotion, La Lujanera slipped away.

When the lawmen came in for a look, the dance was going good again. That blind fiddler could really scrape some lively numbers on that violin of his—the kind of thing you never hear anymore. It was beginning to get light outside. The fence posts on a nearby slope seemed to stand alone, the strands of wire still invisible in the early dawn. Nice and easy, I walked the two or three blocks back to my shack. A candle was burning in the window, then all at once went out. Let me tell you, I hurried when I saw that. Then, Borges, I put my hand inside my vest—here by the left armpit where I always carry it—and took my knife out again. I turned the blade over, real slow. It was as good as new, innocent-looking, and you couldn’t see the slightest trace of blood on it.

The Approach to al-Mu’tasim

(1935)

Philip Guedalla informs us that the novel The Approach to al-Mu’tasim by the Bombay barrister Mir Bahadur Ali “is a rather uneasy combination of those Islamic allegories which never fail to impress their own translators, and of that brand of detective stories which inevitably outdoes even Dr. Watson and heightens the horror of human life as it is found in the most respectable boardinghouses of Brighton.” Before him, Mr. Cecil Roberts had blasted Bahadur’s book for “its unaccountable double influence of Wilkie Collins and of the famed twelfth-century Persian, Ferid Eddin Attar”—a simple enough observation which Guedalla merely parrots, though in a more angry jargon. Essentially, both reviewers are in agreement, pointing out the book’s detective-story mechanism and its undercurrent of mysticism. This hybridization may lead us to suspect a certain kinship with Chesterton; we shall presently find out, however, that no such affinity exists.

The first edition of The Approach to al-Mu’tasim appeared in Bombay toward the end of 1932. The paper on which the volume was issued, I am told, was almost newsprint; the jacket announced to the purchaser that the book was the first detective novel to be written by a native of Bombay City. Within a few months, four printings of a thousand copies each were sold out. The Bombay Quarterly Review, the Bombay Gazette, the Calcutta Review, the Hindustani Review (of Allahabad), and the Calcutta Englishman all sang its praises. Bahadur then brought out an illustrated edition, which he retitled The Conversation with the Man Called al-Mu’tasim and rather beautifully subtitled A Game with Shifting Mirrors. This is the edition which Victor Gollancz has just reissued in London, with a foreword by Dorothy L. Sayers and the omission—perhaps merciful—of the illustrations. It is this edition that I have at hand; I have not been able to obtain a copy of the earlier one, which I surmise may be a better book. I am led to this suspicion by an appendix summarizing the differences between the 1932 and the 1934 editions. Before attempting a discussion of the novel, it might be well to give some idea of the general plot.

Its central figure—whose name we are never told—is a law student in Bombay. Blasphemously, he disbelieves in the Islamic faith of his fathers, but on the tenth night of the moon of Muharram, he finds himself in the midst of a civil disorder between Muslims and Hindus. It is a night of drums and prayers. Among the mob of the heathen, the great paper canopies of the Muslim procession force their way. A hail of Hindu bricks flies down from a roof terrace. A knife is sunk into a belly. Someone—Muslim? Hindu?— dies and is trampled on. Three thousand men are fighting— stick against revolver, obscenity against curse, God the Indivisible against the many Gods.

Instinctively, the student freethinker joins in the fighting. With his bare hands, he kills (or thinks he has killed) a Hindu. The Government police—mounted, thunderous, and barely awake—intervene, dealing impartial whiplashes. The student flees, almost under the legs of the horses, heading for the farthest ends of town. He crosses two sets of railroad tracks, or the same tracks twice. He scales the wall of an unkempt garden at one corner of which rises a circular tower. “A lean and evil mob of mooncoloured hounds” lunges at him from the black rosebushes. Pursued, he seeks refuge in the tower. He climbs an iron ladder—two or three rungs are missing—and on the fiat roof, which has a blackish pit in the middle, comes upon a squalid man in a squatting position, urinating vigorously by the light of the moon. The man confides to him that his profession is stealing gold teeth from the white-shrouded corpses that the Parsis leave on the roof of the tower. He says a number of other vile things and mentions, in passing, that fourteen nights have lapsed since he last cleansed himself with buffalo dung. He speaks with obvious anger of a band of horse thieves from Gujarat, “eaters of dogs and lizards—men, in short, as abominable as the two of us.” Day is dawning. In the air there is a low flight of well-fed vultures. The student, in utter exhaustion, lies down to sleep. When he wakes up, the sun is high overhead and the thief is gone. Gone also are a couple of Trichinopoly cigars and a few silver rupees. Threatened by the events of the night before, the student decides to lose himself somewhere within the bounds of India. He knows he has shown himself capable of killing an infidel, but not of knowing with certainty whether the Muslim is more justified in his beliefs than the infidel. The name of Gujarat haunts him, and also the name of a malka-sansi (a woman belonging to a caste of thieves) from Palanpur, many times favored by the curses and hatred of the despoiler of corpses. He reasons that the anger of a man so thoroughly vile is in itself a kind of praise. He resolves—though rather hopelessly—to find her. He prays and sets out slowly and deliberately on his long journey. So ends the novel’s second chapter.

It is hardly possible to outline here the involved adventures that befall him in the remaining nineteen. There is a baffling pullulation of dramatis personae, to say nothing of a biography that seems to exhaust the range of the human spirit (running from infamy to mathematical speculation) or of a pilgrimage that covers the vast geography of India. The story begun in Bombay moves on into the lowlands of Palanpur, lingers for an evening and a night before the stone gates of Bikaner, tells of the death of a blind astrologer in a sewer of Benares; the hero takes part in a conspiracy in a mazelike palace in Katmandu, prays and fornicates in the pestilential stench of the Machua Bazaar in Calcutta, sees the day born out of the sea from a law office in Madras, sees evenings die in the sea from a balcony in the state of Travancore, falters and kills in Indapur. The adventure closes its orbit of miles and years back in Bombay itself, only steps away from the garden of the “mooncoloured hounds.” The underlying plot is this: a man, the fugitive student freethinker we already know, falls among the lowest class of people and, in a kind of contest of evildoing, takes up their ways. All at once, with the wonder and terror of Robinson Crusoe upon discovering the footprint of a man in the sand, he becomes aware of a brief and sudden change in that world of ruthlessness—a certain tenderness, a moment of happiness, a forgiving silence in one of his loathsome companions. “It was as though a stranger, a third and more subtle person, had entered into the conversation.” The hero knows that the scoundrel with whom he is talking is quite incapable of this sudden turn; from this, he guesses that the man is echoing someone else, a friend, or the friend of a friend. Rethinking the problem, he arrives at the mysterious conclusion that “somewhere on the face of the earth is a man from whom this light has emanated; somewhere on the face of the earth there exists a man who is equal to this light.” The student decides to spend his life in search of him.

The story’s outline is now plain: the untiring search for a human soul through the barely perceptible reflections cast by this soul in others—in the beginning, the faint trace of a smile or a single word; in the end, the differing and branching splendors of reason, of the imagination, and of righteousness. The nearer to al-Mu’tasim the men he examines are, the greater is their share of the divine, though it is understood that they are but mirrors. A mathematical analogy may be helpful here. Bahadur’s populous novel is an ascendant progression whose last term is the foreshadowed “man called al-Mu’tasim.” Al-Mu’tasim’s immediate predecessor is a Persian bookseller of striking happiness and politeness; the man before the bookseller, a saint. Finally, after many years, the student comes to a corridor “at whose end is a door and a cheap beaded curtain, and behind the curtain a shining light.” The student claps his hands once or twice and asks for al-Mu’tasim. A man’s voice—the unimaginable voice of al-Mu’tasim—prays him to enter. The student parts the curtain and steps forward. At this point the novel comes to its end.

If I am not mistaken, the proper handling of such a plot places the writer under two obligations. One, to abound richly in prophetic touches; the other, to make us feel that the person foreshadowed by these touches is more than a mere convention or phantom. Bahadur fulfills the first; how far he achieves the second, I wonder. In other words, the unheard and unseen al-Mu’tasim should leave us with the impression of a real character, not of a clutter of insipid superlatives. In the 1932 version, there are but few supernatural traces; “the man called al-Mu’tasim” is obviously a symbol, though certain personal traits are not lacking. Unfortunately, this literary good conduct did not last. In the 1934 version—the one I have read—the novel declines into allegory. Al-Mu’tasim is God and the hero’s various wanderings are in some way the journey of a soul on its ascending steps toward the divine union. There are a few regrettable details: a black Jew from Cochin speaks of al-Mu’tasim as having dark skin; a Christian describes him standing on a height with his arms spread open; a Red lama recalls him seated “like that image of yak butter that I modeled and worshiped in the monastery of Tachilhunpo.” These statements seem to suggest a single God who reconciles himself to the many varieties of mankind. In my opinion, the idea is not greatly exciting. I will not say the same of another idea—the hint that the Almighty is also in search of Someone, and that Someone of Someone above him (or Someone simply indispensable and equal), and so on to the End (or rather, Endlessness) of Time, or perhaps cyclically. Al-Mu’tasim (the name of that eighth Abbasid caliph who was victorious in eight battles, fathered eight sons and eight daughters, left eight thousand slaves, and ruled for a period of eight years, eight moons, and eight days) means etymologically “The Seeker after Help.” In the 1932 version, the fact that the object of the pilgrimage was himself a pilgrim justified well enough the difficulty of finding him. The later version gives way to the quaint theology I have just spoken of. In the twentieth chapter, words attributed by the Persian bookseller to al-Mu’tasim are, perhaps, the mere heightening of others spoken by the hero; this and other hidden analogies may stand for the identity of the Seeker with the Sought. They may also stand for an influence of Man on the Divinity. Another chapter hints that al-Mu’tasim is the Hindu the student believes he has killed. Mir Bahadur Ali, as we have seen, cannot refrain from the grossest temptation of art—that of being a genius.

On reading over these pages, I fear I have not called sufficient attention to the book’s many virtues. It includes a number of fine distinctions. For example, a conversation in chapter nineteen in which one of the speakers, who is a friend of al-Mu’tasim, avoids pointing out the other man’s sophisms “in order not to be obviously in the right.” It is considered admirable nowadays for a modern book to have its roots in an ancient one, since nobody (as Dr. Johnson said) likes owing anything to his contemporaries. The many but superficial contacts between Joyce’s Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey go on receiving—I shall never know why—the harebrained admiration of critics. The points of contact between Bahadur’s novel and the celebrated Parliament of Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar, have awakened the no less mysterious approval of London, and even of Allahabad and Calcutta. As far as I can judge, the points of contact between the two works are not many. Other sources are present. Some inquisitor has listed certain analogies between the novel’s opening scene and Kipling’s story “On the City Wall.” Bahadur admits this, but argues that it would be highly abnormal if two descriptions of the tenth night of Muharram were quite unlike each other. Eliot, more to the point, is reminded of the seventy cantos of the unfinished allegory The Faerie Queene, in which the heroine, Gloriana, does not appear even once—a fault previously noted by Richard William Church (Spenser, 1879). With due humility, I suggest a distant and possible forerunner, the Jerusalem Kabbalist Isaac Luria, who in the sixteenth century advanced the notion that the soul of an ancestor or a master may, in order to comfort or instruct him, enter into the soul of someone who has suffered misfortune. Ibbür is the name given to this variety of metempsychosis.*

* In the course of this review, I have referred to the Mantiq ut-Tair (Parliament of Birds) by the Persian mystic Farid al-Din Abu Talib Mohammad ibn-Ibraham Attar, who was killed by the soldiers of Tului, one of Genghis Khan’s sons, during the sack of Nishapur. Perhaps it would be useful to summarize the poem. The distant king of birds, the Simurgh, drops one of his splendid feathers somewhere in the middle of China; on learning of this, the other birds, tired of their age-old anarchy, decide to seek him. They know that the king’s name means “thirty birds”; they know that his castle lies in the Kaf, the range of mountains that ring the earth. Setting out on the almost endless adventure, they cross seven valleys or seas, the next to last bearing the name Bewilderment, the last, the name Annihilation. Many of the pilgrims desert; the journey takes its toll among the rest. Thirty, made pure by their sufferings, reach the great peak of the Simurgh. At last they behold him; they realize that they are the Simurgh and that the Simurgh is each of them and all of them. (Plotinus [Enneads, V, 8, 4] also states a divine extension of the principle of identity: “All things in the intelligible heavens are in all places. Any one thing is all other things. The sun is all the stars, and each star is all the other stars and the sun.”) The Mantiq ut-Tair has been translated into French by Garcin de Tassy; parts of it into English by Edward FitzGerald. For this footnote, I have consulted the tenth volume of Burton’s Arabian Nights and Margaret Smith’s study The Persian Mystics: Attar (1932).

The Circular Ruins

(1940)

And if he left off dreaming about you. . . .

Through the Looking-Glass,
IV

Nobody saw him come ashore in the encompassing night, nobody saw the bamboo craft run aground in the sacred mud, but within a few days everyone knew that the quiet man had come from the south and that his home was among the numberless villages upstream on the steep slopes of the mountain, where the Zend language is barely tainted by Greek and where lepers are rare. The fact is that the gray man pressed his lips to the mud, scrambled up the bank without parting (perhaps without feeling) the brushy thorns that tore his flesh, and dragged himself, faint and bleeding, to the circular opening watched over by a stone tiger, or horse, which once was the color of fire and is now the color of ash. This opening is a temple which was destroyed ages ago by flames, which the swampy wilderness later desecrated, and whose god no longer receives the reverence of men. The stranger laid himself down at the foot of the image.

Wakened by the sun high overhead, he noticed—somehow without amazement—that his wounds had healed. He shut his pale eyes and slept again, not because of weariness but because he willed it. He knew that this temple was the place he needed for his unswerving purpose; he knew that downstream the encroaching trees had also failed to choke the ruins of another auspicious temple with its own fire-ravaged, dead gods; he knew that his first duty was to sleep. Along about midnight, he was awakened by the forlorn call of a bird. Footprints, some figs, and a water jug told him that men who lived nearby had looked on his sleep with a kind of awe and either sought his protection or else were in dread of his witchcraft. He felt the chill of fear and searched the crumbling walls for a burial niche, where he covered himself over with leaves he had never seen before.

His guiding purpose, though it was supernatural, was not impossible. He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him down to the last detail and project him into the world of reality. This mystical aim had taxed the whole range of his mind. Had anyone asked him his own name or anything about his life before then, he would not have known what to answer. This forsaken, broken temple suited him because it held few visible things, and also because the neighboring villagers would look after his frugal needs. The rice and fruit of their offerings were nourishment enough for his body, whose one task was to sleep and to dream.

At the outset, his dreams were chaotic; later on, they were of a dialectic nature. The stranger dreamed himself at the center of a circular amphitheater which in some way was also the burnt-out temple. Crowds of silent disciples exhausted the tiers of seats; the faces of the farthest of them hung centuries away from him and at a height of the stars, but their features were clear and exact. The man lectured on anatomy, cosmography, and witchcraft. The faces listened, bright and eager, and did their best to answer sensibly, as if they felt the importance of his questions, which would raise one of them out of an existence as a shadow and place him in the real world. Whether asleep or awake, the man pondered the answers of his phantoms and, not letting himself be misled by impostors, divined in certain of their quandaries a growing intelligence. He was in search of a soul worthy of taking a place in the world.

After nine or ten nights he realized, feeling bitter over it, that nothing could be expected from those pupils who passively accepted his teaching, but that he might, however, hold hopes for those who from time to time hazarded reasonable doubts about what he taught. The former, although they deserved love and affection, could never become real; the latter, in their dim way, were already real. One evening (now his evenings were also given over to sleeping, now he was only awake for an hour or two at dawn) he dismissed his vast dream-school forever and kept a single disciple. He was a quiet, sallow, and at times rebellious young man with sharp features akin to those of his dreamer. The sudden disappearance of his fellow pupils did not disturb him for very long, and his progress, at the end of a few private lessons, amazed his teacher. Nonetheless, a catastrophe intervened. One day, the man emerged from his sleep as from a sticky wasteland, glanced up at the faint evening light, which at first he confused with the dawn, and realized that he had not been dreaming. All that night and the next day, the hideous lucidity of insomnia weighed down on him. To tire himself out he tried to explore the surrounding forest, but all he managed, there in a thicket of hemlocks, were some snatches of broken sleep, fleetingly tinged with visions of a crude and worthless nature. He tried to reassemble his school, and barely had he uttered a few brief words of counsel when the whole class went awry and vanished. In his almost endless wakefulness, tears of anger stung his old eyes.

He realized that, though he may penetrate all the riddles of the higher and lower orders, the task of shaping the senseless and dizzying stuff of dreams is the hardest that a man can attempt—much harder than weaving a rope of sand or of coining the faceless wind. He realized that an initial failure was to be expected. He then swore he would forget the populous vision which in the beginning had led him astray, and he sought another method. Before attempting it, he spent a month rebuilding the strength his fever had consumed. He gave up all thoughts of dreaming and almost at once managed to sleep a reasonable part of the day. The few times he dreamed during this period he did not dwell on his dreams. Before taking up his task again, he waited until the moon was a perfect circle. Then, in the evening, he cleansed himself in the waters of the river, worshiped the gods of the planets, uttered the prescribed syllables of an all-powerful name, and slept. Almost at once, he had a dream of a beating heart.

He dreamed it throbbing, warm, secret. It was the size of a closed fist, a darkish red in the dimness of a human body still without a face or sex. With anxious love he dreamed it for fourteen lucid nights. Each night he perceived it more clearly. He did not touch it, but limited himself to witnessing it, to observing it, to correcting it now and then with a look. He felt it, he lived it from different distances and from many angles. On the fourteenth night he touched the pulmonary artery with a finger and then the whole heart, inside and out. The examination satisfied him. For one night he deliberately did not dream; after that he went back to the heart again, invoked the name of a planet, and set out to envision another of the principal organs. Before a year was over he came to the skeleton, the eyelids. The countless strands of hair were perhaps the hardest task of all. He dreamed a whole man, a young man, but the young man could not stand up or speak, nor could he open his eyes. Night after night, the man dreamed him asleep.

In the cosmogonies of the Gnostics, the demiurges mold a red Adam who is unable to stand on his feet; as clumsy and crude and elementary as that Adam of dust was the Adam of dreams wrought by the nights of the magician. One evening the man was at the point of destroying all his handiwork (it would have been better for him had he done so), but in the end he restrained himself. Having exhausted his prayers to the gods of the earth and river, he threw himself down at the feet of the stone image that may have been a tiger or a stallion, and asked for its blind aid. That same evening he dreamed of the image. He dreamed it alive, quivering; it was no unnatural cross between tiger and stallion but at one and the same time both these violent creatures and also a bull, a rose, a thunderstorm. This manifold god revealed to him that its earthly name was Fire, that there in the circular temple (and in others like it) sacrifices had once been made to it, that it had been worshiped, and that through its magic the phantom of the man’s dreams would be wakened to life in such a way that—except for Fire itself and the dreamer—every being in the world would accept him as a man of flesh and blood. The god ordered that, once instructed in the rites, the disciple should be sent downstream to the other ruined temple, whose pyramids still survived, so that in that abandoned place some human voice might exalt him. In the dreamer’s dream, the dreamed one awoke.

The magician carried out these orders. He devoted a period of time (which finally spanned two years) to initiating his principle into the riddles of the universe and the worship of Fire. Deep inside, it pained him to say goodbye to his creature. Under the pretext of teaching him more fully, each day he drew out the hours set aside for sleep. Also, he reshaped the somewhat faulty right shoulder. From time to time, he was troubled by the feeling that all this had already happened, but for the most part his days were happy. On closing his eyes he would think, “Now I will be with my son.” Or, less frequently, “The son I have begotten awaits me and he will not exist if I do not go to him.”

Little by little, he was training the young man for reality. On one occasion he commanded him to set up a flag on a distant peak. The next day, there on the peak, a fiery pennant shone. He tried other, similar exercises, each bolder than the one before. He realized with a certain bitterness that his son was ready—and perhaps impatient—to be born. That night he kissed him for the first time and sent him down the river to the other temple, whose whitened ruins were still to be glimpsed over miles and miles of impenetrable forest and swamp. At the very end (so that the boy would never know he was a phantom, so that he would think himself a man like all men), the magician imbued his disciple with total oblivion of his long years of apprenticeship.

His triumph and his peace were blemished by a touch of weariness. In the morning and evening dusk, he prostrated himself before the stone idol, perhaps imagining that his unreal son was performing the same rites farther down the river in other circular ruins. At night he no longer dreamed, or else he dreamed the way all men dream. He now perceived with a certain vagueness the sounds and shapes of the world, for his absent son was taking nourishment from the magician’s decreasing consciousness. His life’s purpose was fulfilled; the man lived on in a kind of ecstasy. After a length of time that certain tellers of the story count in years and others in half-decades, he was awakened one midnight by two rowers. He could not see their faces, but they spoke to him about a magic man in a temple up north who walked on fire without being burned. The magician suddenly remembered the god’s words. He remembered that of all the creatures in the world, Fire was the only one who knew his son was a phantom. This recollection, comforting at first, ended by tormenting him. He feared that his son might wonder at this strange privilege and in some way discover his condition as a mere appearance. Not to be a man but to be the projection of another man’s dreams—what an unparalleled humiliation, how bewildering! Every father cares for the child he has begotten—he has allowed—in some moment of confusion or happiness. It is understandable, then, that the magician should fear for the future of a son thought out organ by organ and feature by feature over the course of a thousand and one secret nights.

The end of these anxieties came suddenly, but certain signs foretold it. First (after a long drought), a far-off cloud on a hilltop, as light as a bird; next, toward the south, the sky, which took on the rosy hue of a leopard’s gums; then, the pillars of smoke that turned the metal of the nights to rust; finally, the headlong panic of the forest animals. For what had happened many centuries ago was happening again. The ruins of the fire god’s shrine were destroyed by fire. In a birdless dawn the magician saw the circling sheets of flame closing in on him. For a moment, he thought of taking refuge in the river, but then he realized that death was coming to crown his years and to release him from his labors. He walked into the leaping pennants of flame. They did not bite into his flesh, but caressed him and flooded him without heat or burning. In relief, in humiliation, in terror, he understood that he, too, was an appearance, that someone else was dreaming him.

Death and the Compass

To Mandie Molina Vedia

(1942)

Of the many problems ever to tax Erik Lönnrot’s rash mind, none was so strange—so methodically strange, let us say—as the intermittent series of murders which came to a culmination amid the incessant odor of eucalyptus trees at the villa Triste-le-Roy. It is true that Lönnrot failed to prevent the last of the murders, but it is undeniable that he foresaw it. Neither did he guess the identity of Yarmolinsky’s ill-starred killer, but he did guess the secret shape of the evil series of events and the possible role played in those events by Red Scharlach, also nicknamed Scharlach the Dandy. The gangster (like so many others of his ilk) had sworn on his honor to get Erik Lönnrot, but Lönnrot was not intimidated. Lönnrot thought of himself as a pure logician, a kind of Auguste Dupin, but there was also a streak of the adventurer and even of the gambler in him.

The first murder took place in the Hôtel du Nord—that tall prism which overlooks the estuary whose broad waters are the color of sand. To that tower (which, as everyone knows, brings together the hateful blank white walls of a hospital, the numbered chambers of a cell block, and the overall appearance of a brothel) there arrived on the third of December Rabbi Marcel Yarmolinsky, a gray-bearded, gray-eyed man, who was a delegate from Podolsk to the Third Talmudic Congress. We shall never know whether the Hôtel du Nord actually pleased him or not, since he accepted it with the ageless resignation that had made it possible for him to survive three years of war in the Carpathians and three thousand years of oppression and pogroms. He was given a room on floor R, across from the suite occupied—not without splendor—by the Tetrarch of Galilee.

Yarmolinsky had dinner, put off until the next day a tour of the unfamiliar city, arranged in a closet his many books and his few suits of clothes, and before midnight turned off his bed lamp. (So said the Tetrarch’s chauffeur, who slept in the room next door.) On the fourth of December, at three minutes past eleven in the morning, an editor of the Jüdische Zeitung called him by telephone. Rabbi Yarmolinsky did not answer; soon after, he was found in his room, his face already discolored, almost naked under a great old-fashioned cape. He lay not far from the hall door. A deep knife wound had opened his chest. A couple of hours later, in the same room, in the throng of reporters, photographers, and policemen, Inspector Treviranus and Lönnrot quietly discussed the case.

“We needn’t lose any time here looking for three-legged cats,” Treviranus said, brandishing an imperious cigar. “Everyone knows the Tetrarch of Galilee owns the world’s finest sapphires. Somebody out to steal them probably found his way in here by mistake. Yarmolinsky woke up and the thief was forced to kill him. What do you make of it?”

“Possible, but not very interesting,” Lönnrot answered. “You’ll say reality is under no obligation to be interesting. To which I’d reply that reality may disregard the obligation but that we may not. In your hypothesis, chance plays a large part. Here’s a dead rabbi. I’d much prefer a purely rabbinical explanation, not the imagined mistakes of an imagined jewel thief.”

“I’m not interested in rabbinical explanations,” Treviranus replied in bad humor; “I’m interested in apprehending the man who murdered this unknown party.”

“Not so unknown,” corrected Lönnrot. “There are his complete works.” He pointed to a row of tall books on a shelf in the closet. There were a Vindication of the Kabbalah, a Study of the Philosophy of Robert Fludd, a literal translation of the Sefer Yeçirah, a Biography of the Baal Shem, a History of the Hasidic Sect, a treatise (in German) on the Tetragrammaton, and another on the names of God in the Pentateuch. The Inspector stared at them in fear, almost in disgust. Then he burst into laughter.

“I’m only a poor Christian,” he said. “You may cart off every last tome if you feel like it. I have no time to waste on Jewish superstitions.”

“Maybe this crime belongs to the history of Jewish superstitions,” Lönnrot grumbled.

“Like Christianity,” the editor from the Jüdische Zeitung made bold to add. He was nearsighted, an atheist, and very shy.

Nobody took any notice of him. One of the police detectives had found in Yarmolinsky’s small typewriter a sheet of paper on which these cryptic words were written:

The first letter of the Name has been uttered

Lönnrot restrained himself from smiling. Suddenly turning bibliophile and Hebraic scholar, he ordered a package made of the dead man’s books and he brought them to his apartment. There, with complete disregard for the police investigation, he began studying them. One royal-octavo volume revealed to him the teachings of Israel Baal Shem Tobh, founder of the sect of the Pious; another, the magic and the terror of the Tetragrammaton, which is God’s unspeakable name; a third, the doctrine that God has a secret name in which (as in the crystal sphere that the Persians attribute to Alexander of Macedonia) His ninth attribute, Eternity, may be found—that is to say, the immediate knowledge of everything under the sun that will be, that is, and that was. Tradition lists ninety-nine names of God; Hebrew scholars explain that imperfect cipher by a mystic fear of even numbers; the Hasidim argue that the missing term stands for a hundredth name—the Absolute Name.

It was out of this bookworming that Lönnrot was distracted a few days later by the appearance of the editor from the Jüdische Zeitung, who wanted to speak about the murder. Lönnrot, however, chose to speak of the many names of the Lord. The following day, in three columns, the journalist stated that Chief Detective Erik Lönnrot had taken up the study of the names of God in order to find out the name of the murderer. Lönnrot, familiar with the simplifications of journalism, was not surprised. It also seemed that one of those tradesmen who have discovered that any man is willing to buy any book was peddling a cheap edition of Yarmolinsky’s History of the Hasidic Sect.

The second murder took place on the night of January 3rd out in the most forsaken and empty of the city’s western reaches. Along about daybreak, one of the police who patrol this lonely area on horseback noticed on the doorstep of a dilapidated paint and hardware store a man in a poncho laid out flat. A deep knife wound had ripped open his chest, and his hard features looked as though they were masked in blood. On the wall, on the shop’s conventional red and yellow diamond shapes, were some words scrawled in chalk. The policeman read them letter by letter. That evening, Treviranus and Lönnrot made their way across town to the remote scene of the crime. To the left and right of their car the city fell away in shambles; the sky grew wider and houses were of much less account than brick kilns or an occasional poplar. They reached their forlorn destination, an unpaved back alley with rose-colored walls that in some way seemed to reflect the garish sunset. The dead man had already been identified. He turned out to be Daniel Simon Azevedo, a man with a fair reputation in the old northern outskirts of town who had risen from teamster to electioneering thug and later degenerated into a thief and an informer. (The unusual manner of his death seemed to them fitting, for Azevedo was the last example of a generation of criminals who knew how to handle a knife but not a revolver.) The words chalked up on the wall were these:

The second letter of the Name has been uttered

The third murder took place on the night of February third. A little before one o’clock, the telephone rang in the office of Inspector Treviranus. With pointed secrecy, a man speaking in a guttural voice said his name was Ginzberg (or Ginsburg) and that he was ready—for a reasonable consideration—to shed light on the facts surrounding the double sacrifice of Azevedo and Yarmolinsky. A racket of whistles and tin horns drowned out the informer’s voice. Then the line went dead. Without discounting the possibility of a practical joke (they were, after all, at the height of Carnival), Treviranus checked and found that he had been phoned from a sailors’ tavern called Liverpool House on the Rue de Toulon—that arcaded waterfront street in which we find side by side the wax museum and the dairy bar, the brothel and the Bible seller. Treviranus called the owner back. The man (Black Finnegan by name, a reformed Irish criminal concerned about and almost weighed down by respectability) told him that the last person to have used the telephone was one of his roomers, a certain Gryphius, who had only minutes before gone out with some friends. At once Treviranus set out for Liverpool House. There the owner told him the following story:

Eight days earlier, Gryphius had taken a small room above the bar. He was a sharp-featured man with a misty gray beard, shabbily dressed in black. Finnegan (who used that room for a purpose Treviranus immediately guessed) had asked the roomer for a rent that was obviously steep, and Gryphius paid the stipulated sum on the spot. Hardly ever going out, he took lunch and supper in his room; in fact, his face was hardly known in the bar. That night he had come down to use the telephone in Finnegan’s office. A coupé had drawn up outside. The coachman had stayed on his seat; some customers recalled that he wore the mask of a bear. Two harlequins got out of the carriage. They were very short men and nobody could help noticing that they were very drunk. Bleating their horns, they burst into Finnegan’s office, throwing their arms around Gryphius, who seemed to know them but who did not warm to their company. The three exchanged a few words in Yiddish—he in a low, guttural voice, they in a piping falsetto—and they climbed the stairs up to his room. In a quarter of an hour they came down again, very happy. Gryphius, staggering, seemed as drunk as the others. He walked in the middle, tall and dizzy, between the two masked harlequins. (One of the women in the bar remembered their costumes of red, green, and yellow lozenges.) Twice he stumbled; twice the harlequins held him up. Then the trio climbed into the coupé and, heading for the nearby docks (which enclosed a string of rectangular bodies of water), were soon out of sight. Out front, from the running board, the last harlequin had scrawled an obscene drawing and certain words on one of the market slates hung from a pillar of the arcade.

Treviranus stepped outside for a look. Almost predictably, the phrase read:

The last letter of the Name has been uttered

He next examined Gryphius-Ginzberg’s tiny room. On the floor was a star-shaped spatter of blood; in the corners, cigarette butts of a Hungarian brand; in the wardrobe, a book in Latin—a 1739 edition of Leusden’s Philologus Hebraeo-Graecus—with a number of annotations written in by hand. Treviranus gave it an indignant look and sent for Lönnrot. While the Inspector questioned the contradictory witnesses to the possible kidnapping, Lönnrot, not even bothering to take off his hat, began reading. At four o’clock they left. In the twisted Rue de Toulon, as they were stepping over last night’s tangle of streamers and confetti,” Treviranus remarked, “And if tonight’s events were a put-up job?”

Erik Lönnrot smiled and read to him with perfect gravity an underlined passage from the thirty-third chapter of the Philologus: “ ‘Dies Judaeorum incipit a solis occasu usque ad solis occasum diei sequentis.’ Meaning,” he added, “ ‘the Jewish day begins at sundown and ends the following sundown.’ ”

The other man attempted a bit of irony. “Is that the most valuable clue you’ve picked up tonight?” he said.

“No. Far more valuable is one of the words Ginzberg used to you on the phone.”

The evening papers made a great deal of these recurrent disappearances. La Croix de l’Épée contrasted the present acts of violence with the admirable discipline and order observed by the last Congress of Hermits. Ernst Palast, in The Martyr, condemned “the unbearable pace of this unauthorized and stinting pogrom, which has required three months for the liquidation of three Jews.” The Jüdische Zeitung rejected the ominous suggestion of an anti-Semitic plot, “despite the fact that many penetrating minds admit of no other solution to the threefold mystery.” The leading gunman of the city’s Southside, Dandy Red Scharlach, swore that in his part of town crimes of that sort would never happen, and he accused Inspector Franz Treviranus of criminal negligence.

On the night of March first, Inspector Treviranus received a great sealed envelope. Opening it, he found it contained a letter signed by one “Baruch Spinoza” and, evidently torn out of a Baedeker, a detailed plan of the city. The letter predicted that on the third of March there would not be a fourth crime because the paint and hardware store on the Westside, the Rue de Toulon tavern, and the Hôtel du Nord formed “the perfect sides of an equilateral and mystical triangle.” In red ink the map demonstrated that the three sides of the figure were exactly the same length. Treviranus read this Euclidean reasoning with a certain weariness and sent the letter and map to Erik Lönnrot—the man, beyond dispute, most deserving of such cranky notions.

Lönnrot studied them. The three points were, in fact, equidistant. There was symmetry in time (December third, January third, February third); now there was symmetry in space as well. All at once he felt he was on the verge of solving the riddle. A pair of dividers and a compass completed his sudden intuition. He smiled, pronounced the word Tetragrammaton (of recent acquisition) and called the Inspector on the phone.

“Thanks for the equilateral triangle you sent me last night,” he told him. “It has helped me unravel our mystery. Tomorrow, Friday, the murderers will be safely behind bars; we can rest quite easy.”

“Then they aren’t planning a fourth crime?”

“Precisely because they are planning a fourth crime we can rest quite easy.”

Lönnrot hung up the receiver. An hour later, he was traveling on a car of the Southern Railways on his way to the deserted villa Triste-le-Roy. To the south of the city of my story flows a dark muddy river, polluted by the waste of tanneries and sewers. On the opposite bank is a factory suburb where, under the patronage of a notorious political boss, many gunmen thrive. Lönnrot smiled to himself, thinking that the best-known of them—Red Scharlach—would have given anything to know about this sudden excursion of his. Azevedo had been a henchman of Scharlach’s. Lönnrot considered the remote possibility that the fourth victim might be Scharlach himself. Then he dismissed it. He had practically solved the puzzle; the mere circumstances— reality (names, arrests, faces, legal and criminal proceedings)—barely held his interest now. He wanted to get away, to relax after three months of desk work and of snail-pace investigation. He reflected that the solution of the killings lay in an anonymously sent triangle and in a dusty Greek word. The mystery seemed almost crystal clear. He felt ashamed for having spent close to a hundred days on it.

The train came to a stop at a deserted loading platform. Lönnrot got off. It was one of those forlorn evenings that seem as empty as dawn. The air off the darkening prairies was damp and cold. Lönnrot struck out across the fields. He saw dogs, he saw a flatcar on a siding, he saw the line of the horizon, he saw a pale horse drinking stagnant water out of a ditch. Night was falling when he saw the rectangular mirador of the villa Triste-le-Roy, almost as tall as the surrounding black eucalyptus trees. He thought that only one more dawn and one more dusk (an ancient light in the east and another in the west) were all that separated him from the hour appointed by the seekers of the Name.

A rusted iron fence bounded the villa’s irregular perimeter. The main gate was shut. Lönnrot, without much hope of getting in, walked completely around the place. Before the barred gate once again, he stuck a hand through the palings—almost mechanically—and found the bolt. The squeal of rusted iron surprised him. With clumsy obedience, the whole gate swung open. Lönnrot moved forward among the eucalyptus trees, stepping on the layered generations of fallen leaves. Seen from up close, the house was a clutter of meaningless symmetries and almost insane repetitions: one icy Diana in a gloomy niche matched another Diana in a second niche; one balcony appeared to reflect another; double outer staircases crossed at each landing. A two-faced Hermes cast a monstrous shadow. Lönnrot made his way around the house as he had made his way around the grounds. He went over every detail; below the level of the terrace he noticed a narrow shutter.

He pushed it open. A few marble steps went down into a cellar. Lönnrot, who by now anticipated the architect’s whims, guessed that in the opposite wall he would find a similar sets of steps. He did. Climbing them, he lifted his hands and raised a trapdoor.

A stain of light led him to a window. He opened it. A round yellow moon outlined two clogged fountains in the unkempt garden. Lönnrot explored the house. Through serving pantries and along corridors he came to identical courtyards and several times to the same courtyard. He climbed dusty stairways to circular anterooms, where he was multiplied to infinity in facing mirrors. He grew weary of opening or of peeping through windows that revealed, outside, the same desolate garden seen from various heights and various angles; and indoors he grew weary of the rooms of furniture, each draped in yellowing slipcovers, and the crystal chandeliers wrapped in tarlatan. A bedroom caught his attention—in it, a single flower in a porcelain vase. At a touch, the ancient petals crumbled to dust. On the third floor, the last floor, the house seemed endless and growing. The house is not so large, he thought. This dim light, the sameness, the mirrors, the many years, my unfamiliarity, the loneliness are what make it large.

By a winding staircase he reached the mirador. That evening’s moon streamed in through the diamond-shaped panes; they were red, green, and yellow. He was stopped by an awesome, dizzying recollection.

Two short men, brutal and stocky, threw themselves on him and disarmed him: another, very tall, greeted him solemnly and told him, “You are very kind. You’ve saved us a night and a day.”

It was Red Scharlach. The men bound Lönnrot’s wrists. After some seconds, Lönnrot at last heard himself saying, “Scharlach, are you after the Secret Name?”

Scharlach remained standing, aloof. He had taken no part in the brief struggle and had barely held out his hand for Lönnrot’s revolver. He spoke. Lönnrot heard in his voice the weariness of final triumph, a hatred the size of the universe, a sadness as great as that hatred.

“No,” said Scharlach. “I’m after something more ephemeral, more frail. I’m after Erik Lönnrot. Three years ago, in a gambling dive on the Rue de Toulon, you yourself arrested my brother and got him put away. My men managed to get me into a coupé before the shooting was over, but I had a cop’s bullet in my guts. Nine days and nine nights I went through hell, here in this deserted villa, racked with fever. The hateful two-faced Janus that looks on the sunsets and the dawns filled both my sleep and my wakefulness with its horror. I came to loathe my body, I came to feel that two eyes, two hands, two lungs, are as monstrous as two faces. An Irishman, trying to convert me to the faith of Jesus, kept repeating to me the saying of the goyim—All roads lead to Rome. At night, my fever fed on that metaphor. I felt the world was a maze from which escape was impossible since all roads, though they seemed to be leading north or south, were really leading to Rome, which at the same time was the square cell where my brother lay dying and also this villa, Triste-le-Roy. During those nights, I swore by the god who looks with two faces and by all the gods of fever and of mirrors that I would weave a maze around the man who sent my brother to prison. Well, I have woven it and it’s tight. Its materials are a dead rabbi, a compass, an eighteenth-century sect, a Greek word, a dagger, and the diamond-shaped patterns on a paint-store wall.” Lönnrot was in a chair now, with the two short men at his side.

“The first term of the series came to me by pure chance,” Scharlach went on. “With some associates of mine—among them Daniel Azevedo—I’d planned the theft of the Tetrarch’s sapphires. Azevedo betrayed us. He got drunk on the money we advanced him and tried to pull the job a day earlier. But there in the hotel he got mixed up and around two in the morning blundered into Yarmolinsky’s room. The rabbi, unable to sleep, had decided to do some writing. In all likelihood, he was preparing notes or a paper on the Name of God and had already typed out the words ‘The first letter of the Name has been uttered.’ Azevedo warned him not to move. Yarmolinsky reached his hand toward the buzzer that would have wakened all the hotel staff; Azevedo struck him a single blow with his knife. It was probably a reflex action. Fifty years of violence had taught him that the easiest and surest way is to kill. Ten days later, I found out through the Jüdische Zeitung that you were looking for the key to Yarmolinsky’s death in his writings. I read his
History of the Hasidic Sect. I learned that the holy fear of uttering God’s Name had given rise to the idea that that Name is secret and all-powerful. I learned that some of the Hasidim, in search of that secret Name, had gone as far as to commit human sacrifices. The minute I realized you were guessing that the Hasidim had sacrificed the rabbi, I did my best to justify that guess. Yarmolinsky died the night of December third. For the second Sacrifice’ I chose the night of January third. The rabbi had died on the Northside; for the second
‘sacrifice’ we wanted a spot on the Westside. Daniel Azevedo was the victim we needed. He deserved death—he was impulsive, a traitor. If he’d been picked up, it would have wiped out our whole plan. One of my men stabbed him; in order to link his corpse with the previous one, I scrawled on the diamonds of the paint-store wall ‘The second letter of the Name has been uttered.’ ”

Scharlach looked his victim straight in the face, then continued. “The third ‘crime’ was staged on the third of February. It was, as Treviranus guessed, only a plant. Gryphius-Ginzberg-Ginsburg was me. I spent an interminable week (rigged up in a false beard) in that flea-ridden cubicle on the Rue de Toulon until my friends came to kidnap me. From the running board of the carriage, one of them wrote on the pillar, ‘The last letter of the Name has been uttered.’ That message suggested that the series of crimes was threefold. That was how the public understood it. I, however, threw in repeated clues so that you, Erik Lönnrot the reasoner, might puzzle out that the crime was fourfold. A murder in the north, others in the east and west, demanded a fourth murder in the south. The Tetragrammaton—the Name of God, JHVH—is made up of four letters; the harlequins and the symbol on the paint store also suggest four terms. I underlined a certain passage in Leusden’s handbook. That passage makes it clear that the Jews reckoned the day from sunset to sunset; that passage makes it understood that the deaths occurred on the fourth of each month. I was the one who sent the triangle to Treviranus, knowing in advance that you would supply the missing point—the point that determines the perfect rhombus, the point that fixes the spot where death is expecting you. I planned the whole thing, Erik Lönnrot, so as to lure you to the loneliness of Triste-le-Roy.”

Lönnrot avoided Scharlach’s eyes. He looked off at the trees and the sky broken into dark diamonds of red, green, and yellow. He felt a chill and an impersonal, almost anonymous sadness. It was night now; from down in the abandoned garden came the unavailing cry of a bird. Lönnrot, for one last time, reflected on the problem of the patterned, intermittent deaths.“In your maze there are three lines too many,” he said at last. “I know of a Greek maze that is a single straight line. Along this line so many thinkers have lost their way that a mere detective may very well lose his way. Scharlach, when in another incarnation you hunt me down, stage (or commit) a murder at A, then a second murder at B, eight miles from A, then a third murder at C, four miles from A and B, halfway between the two. Lay in wait for me then at D, two miles from A and C, again halfway between them. Kill me at D, the way you are going to kill me here at Triste-leRoy.”

“The next time I kill you,” said Scharlach, “I promise you such a maze, which is made up of a single straight line and which is invisible and unending.”

He moved back a few steps. Then, taking careful aim, he fired.

The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874)

(1944)

I’m looking for the face I had

Before the world was made.

Yeats,
A Woman Young and Old

On the sixth of February, 1829, a troop of gaucho militia, harried all day by Lavalle on their march north to join the army under the command of López, made a halt some nine or ten miles from Pergamino at a ranch whose name they did not know. Along about dawn, one of the men had a haunting nightmare and, in the dim shadows of a shed where he lay sleeping, his confused outcry woke the woman who shared his bed. Nobody ever knew what he dreamed, for around four o’clock that afternoon the gauchos were routed by a detachment of Suárez’ cavalry in a chase that went on for over twenty miles and ended, in thickening twilight, in tall swamp grasses, where the man died in a ditch, his skull split by a saber that had seen service in the Peruvian and Brazilian wars. The woman’s name was Isidora Cruz. The son born to her was given the name Tadeo Isidoro.

My aim here is not to recount his whole personal history.

Of the many days and nights that make up his life, only a single night concerns me; as to the rest, I shall tell only what is necessary to that night’s full understanding. The episode belongs to a famous poem—that is to say, to a poem which has come to mean “all things to all men” (I Corinthians 9:22), since almost endless variations, versions, and perversions have been read into its pages. Those who have theorized about Tadeo Isidoro’s story—and they are many—lay stress upon the influence of the wide-open plains on his character, but gauchos exactly like him were born and died along the wooded banks of the Paraná and in the hilly back country of Uruguay. He lived, it must be admitted, in a world of unrelieved barbarism. When he died, in 1874, in an outbreak of smallpox, he had never laid eyes on a mountain or a gas jet or a windmill pump. Nor on a city. In 1849, he went to Buenos Aires on a cattle drive from the ranch of Francisco Xavier Acevedo. The other drovers went into town on a spending spree; Cruz, somewhat wary, did not stray far from a shabby inn in the neighborhood of the stockyards. There he spent several days, by himself, sleeping on the ground, brewing his maté, getting up at daybreak, and going to bed at dusk. He realized (beyond words and even beyond understanding) that he could not cope with the city. One of the drovers, having drunk too much, began poking fun at him. Cruz ignored him, but several times on the way home, at night around the campfire, the other man kept on with his gibes, and Cruz (who up till then had shown neither anger nor annoyance) laid him out with his knife.

On the run, Cruz was forced to hide out in a marshy thicket. A few nights later, the cries of a startled plover warned him he had been ringed in by the police. He tested his knife in a thick clump of grass and, to keep from entangling his feet, took off his spurs. Choosing to fight it out rather than be taken, he got himself wounded in the forearm, in the shoulder, and in the left hand. When he felt the blood dripping between his fingers; he fought harder than ever, badly wounding the toughest members of the search party. Toward daybreak, weak with loss of blood, he was disarmed. The army in those days acted as a kind of penal institution; Cruz was sent off to serve in an outpost on the northern frontier. As a common soldier, he took part in the civil wars, sometimes fighting for the province of his birth, sometimes against. On the twenty-third of January, 1856, in the Cardoso marshes, he was one of thirty white men who, led by Sergeant Major Eusebio Laprida, fought against two hundred Indians. In this action he was wounded by a spear.

The dim and hardy story of his life is full of gaps. Around 1868, we hear of him once more in Pergamino, married or living with a woman, father of a son, and owner of a small holding of land. In 1869, he was appointed sergeant of the local police. He had made up for his past and, in those days, may have thought of himself as a happy man, though deep down he wasn’t. (What lay in wait for him, hidden in the future, was a night of stark illumination— the night in which at last he glimpsed his own face, the night in which at last he heard his name. Fully understood, that night exhausts his story; or rather, one moment in that night, one deed, since deeds are our symbols.) Any life, no matter how long or complex it may be, is made up essentially of a single moment—the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is. It has been said that Alexander the Great saw his iron future in the fabled story of Achilles, and Charles XII of Sweden, his in the story of Alexander. To Tadeo Isidoro Cruz, who did not know how to read, this revelation was not given by a book; it was in a manhunt and in the man he was hunting that he learned who he was. The thing happened in this way:

During the last days of the month of June, 1870, he received orders to capture an outlaw who had killed two men. The man was a deserter from the forces of Colonel Benito Machado on the southern frontier; he had killed a Negro in a drunken brawl in a whorehouse and, in another brawl, a man from the district of Rojas. The report added that he had last been seen near the Laguna Colorada. This was the same place where the troop of gaucho militia had gathered, some forty years earlier, before starting out on the misadventure that gave their flesh to the vultures and dogs. Out of this spot had come Manuel Mesa, who was later made to stand before a firing squad in the central square of Buenos Aires while the drums rolled in order to drown out his last words; out of this spot had come the unknown man who fathered Cruz and died in a ditch, his skull split by a saber that had seen action on the battlefields of Peru and Brazil. Cruz had forgotten the name of the place. Now, after a vague and puzzling uneasiness, it came to him.

Pursued by the soldiers and shuttling back and forth on horseback, the hunted man had woven a long maze, but nonetheless, on the night of July twelfth, the troops tracked him down. He had taken shelter in a growth of tall reeds. The darkness was nearly impenetrable; Cruz and his men, stealthily and on foot, advanced toward the clumps in whose swaying center the hidden man lay in wait or asleep. A startled plover let out a cry. Tadeo Isidoro Cruz had the feeling of having lived this moment before. The hunted man came out of his hiding place to fight them in the open. Cruz made out the hideous figure—his overgrown hair and gray beard seemed to eat away his face. An obvious reason keeps me from describing the fight that followed. Let me simply point out that the deserter badly wounded or killed several of Cruz’s men. Cruz, while he fought in the dark (while his body fought in the dark), began to understand. He understood that one destiny is no better than another, but that every man must obey what is within him. He understood that his shoulder braid and his uniform were now in his way. He understood that his real destiny was as a lone wolf, not a gregarious dog. He understood that the other man was himself. Day dawned over the boundless plain. Cruz threw down his kepi, called out that he would not be party to the crime of killing a brave man, and began fighting against his own soldiers, shoulder to shoulder with Martín Fierro, the deserter.

The Two Kings and Their Two Labyrinths

(1946)

[This is the story the Reverend Allaby tells from the pulpit in “Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth.”
See here]

Chroniclers worthy of trust have recorded (but only Allah is All-Knowing) that in former times there was a king of the isles of Babylon who called together his architects and his wizards and set them to build him a labyrinth so intricate that no wise man would dare enter inside, and so subtle that those who did would lose their way. This undertaking was a blasphemy, for confusion and marvels belong to God alone and not to man. With the passage of time there came to his court a king of the Arabs, and the king of Babylon (wishing to mock his guest’s simplicity) allowed him to set foot in his labyrinth, where he wandered in humiliation and bewilderment until the coming of night. It was then that the second king implored the help of God and soon after came upon the door. He suffered his lips to utter no complaint, but he told the king of Babylon that he, too, had a labyrinth in his land and that, God willing, he would one day take pleasure in showing it to his host. Then he returned to Arabia, gathered his captains and his armies, and overran the realms of Babylon with so fair a fortune that he ravaged its castles, broke its peoples, and took captive the king himself. He bound him onto a swift camel and brought him into the desert. Three days they rode, and then the captor said, “O king of time and crown of the century! In Babylon you lured me into a labyrinth of brass cluttered with many stairways, doors, and walls; now the Almighty has brought it to pass that I show you mine, which has no stairways to climb, nor doors to force, nor unending galleries to wear one down, nor walls to block one’s way.”

He then loosened the bonds of the first king and left him in the heart of the desert to die of thirst and hunger. Glory be to the Living, who dieth not.

The Dead Man

(1946)

That a man from the outlying slums of a city like Buenos Aires, that a sorry hoodlum with little else to his credit than a passion for recklessness, should find his way into that wild stretch of horse country between Brazil and Uruguay and become the leader of a band of smugglers, seems on the face of it unbelievable. To those who think so, I’d like to give an account of what happened to Benjamín Otálora, of whom perhaps not a single memory lingers in the neighborhood where he grew up, and who died a fitting death, struck down by a bullet, somewhere on the border of Rio Grande do Sul. Of the details of his adventures I know little; should I ever be given the facts, I shall correct and expand these pages. For the time being, this outline may prove of some use.

Benjamín Otálora, along about 1891, is a strapping young man of nineteen. He has a low forehead, candid blue eyes, and that country-boy appearance that goes with Basque ancestry. A lucky blow with a knife has made clear to him that he is also brave; his opponent’s death causes him no concern, nor does his need to flee the country. The political boss of the district gives him a letter of introduction to a certain Azevedo Bandeira, in Uruguay. Otálora books passage; the crossing is stormy and the ship pitches and creaks. The next day, he wanders the length and breadth of Montevideo, with unacknowledged or perhaps unsuspected homesickness. He does not find Azevedo Bandeira. Getting on toward midnight, in a small saloon out on the northern edge of town, he witnesses a brawl between some cattle drovers. A knife flashes. Otálora has no idea who is in the right or wrong, but the sheer taste of danger lures him, just as cards or music lure other men. In the confusion, he blocks a lunging knife thrust that one off the gauchos aims at a man wearing a rough countryman’s poncho and, oddly, the dark derby of a townsman. The man turns out to be Azevedo Bandeira. (As soon as he finds this out, Otálora destroys the letter, preferring to be under no one’s obligation.) Azevedo Bandeira, though of stocky build, gives the unaccountable impression of being somehow misshapen. In his large face, which seems always to be too close, are the Jew, the Negro, and the Indian; in his bearing, the tiger and the ape. The scar that cuts across his cheek is one ornament more, like his bristling black moustache.

A fantasy or a mistake born of drunkenness, the fight ends as quickly as it broke out. Otálora takes a drink with the drovers and then goes along with them to an all-night party and after that—the sun high in the sky by now—to a rambling house in the Old Town. Inside, on the bare ground of the last patio, the men lay out their sheepskin saddle blankets to sleep. Dimly, Otálora compares this past night with the night before; here he is, on solid ground now, among friends. A pang of remorse for not missing his Buenos Aires nags at him, however. He sleeps until nightfall, when he is wakened by the same gaucho who, blind drunk, had tried to knife Bandeira. (Otálora recalls that the man has shared the high-spirited night with the rest ofthem, and that Bandeira had seated him at his right hand and forced him to go on drinking.) The man says the boss has sent for him. In a kind of office opening into the entrance passage (Otálora has never before seen an entrance with doors opening into it from the sides), Azevedo Bandeira, in the company of an aloof and showy red-haired woman, is waiting for him. Bandeira praises him up and down, offers him a shot of rum, tells him he has the makings of a man of guts, suggests that he go up north with the others to bring back a large cattle herd. Otálora agrees; toward dawn they are on the road, heading for Tacuarembó.

For Otálora a new kind of life opens up, a life of far-flung sunrises and long days in the saddle, reeking of horses. It is an untried and at times unbearable life, but it’s already in his blood, for just as the men of certain countries worship and feel the call of the sea, we Argentines in turn (including the man who weaves these symbols) yearn for the boundless plains that ring under a horse’s hooves. Otálora has grown up in a neighborhood of teamsters and liverymen. In under a year, he makes himself into a gaucho. He learns to handle a horse, to round up and slaughter cattle, to throw a rope for holding an animal fast or bolas for bringing it down, to fight off sleep, to weather storms and frosts and sun, to drive a herd with whistles and hoots. Only once during this whole apprenticeship does he set eyes on Azevedo Bandeira, but he has him always in mind because to be one of Bandeira’s men is to be looked up to and feared, and because after any feat or hard job the gauchos always say Bandeira does it better. Somebody has it that Bandeira was born on the Brazilian side of the Cuareim, in Rio Grande do Sul; this, which should lower him in Otálora’s eyes, somehow—with its suggestion of dense forests and of marshes and of inextricable and almost endless distances—only adds to him. Little by little, Otálora comes to realize that Bandeira’s interests are many and that chief among them is smuggling. To be a cattle drover is to be a servant; Otálora decides to work himself up to the level of smuggler. One night, as two of his companions are about to go over the border to bring back a consignment of rum, Otálora picks a fight with one of them, wounds him, and takes his place. He is driven by ambition and also by a dim sense of loyalty. The man (he thinks) will come to find out that I’m worth more than all his Uruguayans put together. Another year goes by before Otálora sees Montevideo again. They come riding through the outskirts and into the city (which to Otálora now seems enormous); reaching the boss’s house, the men prepare to bed down in the last patio. The days pass, and Otálora still has not laid eyes on Bandeira. It is said, in fear, that he is ailing; every afternoon a Negro goes up to Bandeira’s room with a kettle and maté. One evening, the job is assigned to Otálora. He feels vaguely humiliated, but at the same time gratified.

The bedroom is bare and dark. There’s a balcony that faces the sunset, there’s a long table with a shining disarray of riding crops, bullwhips, cartridge belts, firearms, and knives. On the far wall there’s a mirror and the glass is faded. Bandeira lies face up, dreaming and muttering in his sleep; the sun’s last rays outline his features. The big white bed seems to make him smaller, darker. Otálora notes his graying hair, his exhaustion, his weakness, the deep wrinkles of his years. It angers him being mastered by this old man. He thinks that a single blow would be enough to finish him. At this moment, he glimpses in the mirror that someone has come in. It’s the woman with the red hair; she is barefoot and only half-dressed, and looks at him with cold curiosity. Bandeira sits up in bed; while he speaks of business affairs of the past two years and drinks maté after maté, his fingers toy with the woman’s braided hair. In the end, he gives Otálora permission to leave.

A few days later, they get orders to head north again. There, in a place that might be anywhere on the face of the endless plains, they come to a forlorn ranch. Not a single tree or a brook. The sun’s first and last rays beat down on it. There are stone fences for the lean longhorn cattle. This rundown set of buildings is called “The Last Sigh.”

Sitting around the fire with the ranch hands, Otálora hears that Bandeira will soon be on his way from Montevideo. He asks what for, and someone explains that there’s an outsider turned gaucho among them who’s giving too many orders. Otálora takes this as a friendly joke and is flattered that the joke can be made. Later on, he finds out that Bandeira has had a falling out with one of the political bosses, who has withdrawn his support. Otálora likes this bit of news.

Crates of rifles arrive; a pitcher and washbasin, both of silver, arrive for the woman’s bedroom; intricately figured damask draperies arrive; one morning, from out of the hills, a horseman arrives—a sullen man with a full beard and a poncho. His name is Ulpiano Suárez and he is Azevedo Bandeira’s strong-arm man, or bodyguard. He speaks very little and with a thick Brazilian accent. Otálora does not know whether to put down his reserve to unfriendliness, or to contempt, or to mere backwoods manners. He realizes, however, that to carry out the scheme he is hatching he must win the other man’s friendship.

Next into Benjamín Otálora’s story comes a black-legged bay horse that Azevedo Bandeira brings from the south, and that carries a fine saddle worked with silver and a saddle blanket trimmed with a jaguar skin. This spirited horse is a token of Bandeira’s authority and for this reason is coveted by the young man, who comes also—with a desire bordering on spite—to hunger for the woman with the shining hair. The woman, the saddle, and the big bay are attributes or trappings of a man he aspires to bring down.

At this point the story takes another turn. Azevedo Bandeira is skilled in the art of slow intimidation, in the diabolical trickery of leading a man on, step by step, shifting from sincerity to mockery. Otálora decides to apply this ambiguous method to the hard task before him. He decides to replace Azevedo Bandeira, but to take his time over it. During days of shared danger, he gains Suárez’ friendship. He confides his plan to him; Suárez pledges to help. Then a number of things begin happening of which I know only a few. Otálora disobeys Bandeira’s orders; he takes to overlooking them, changing them, defying them. The whole world seems to conspire with him, hastening events. One noontime, somewhere around Tacuarembó, there is an exchange of gunfire with a gang from Brazil; Otálora takes Bandeira’s place and shouts out orders to the Uruguayans. A bullet hits him in the shoulder, but that afternoon Otálora rides back to “The Last Sigh” on the boss’s horse, and that evening some drops of his blood stain the jaguar skin, and that night he sleeps with the woman with the shining hair. Other accounts change the order of these events, denying they happened all in the same day.

Bandeira, nevertheless, remains nominally the boss. He goes on giving orders which are not carried out. Benjamín Otálora leaves him alone, out of mixed reasons of habit and pity. The closing scene of the story coincides with the commotion of the closing night of the year 1894. On this night, the men of “The Last Sigh” eat freshly slaughtered meat and fall into quarreling over their liquor; someone picks out on the guitar, over and over again, a milonga that gives him a lot of trouble. At the head of the table, Otálora, feeling his drink, piles exultation upon exultation, boast upon boast; this dizzying tower is a symbol of his irresistible destiny. Bandeira, silent amid the shouting, lets the night flow noisily on. When the clock strikes twelve, he gets up like a man just remembering he has something to do. He gets up and softly knacks at the woman’s door. She opens at once, as though waiting to be called. She steps out barefoot and half-dressed. In an almost feminine, soft-spoken drawl, Bandeira gives her an order.

“Since you and the Argentine care so much for each other,” he says, “you’re going to kiss him right now in front of everyone.”

He adds an obscene detail. The woman tries to resist, but two men have taken her by the arms and fling her upon Otálora. Brought to tears, she kisses his face and chest, Ulpiano Suárez has his revolver out. Otálora realizes, before dying, that he has been betrayed from the start, that he has been sentenced to death—that love and command and triumph have been accorded him because his companions already thought of him as a dead man, because to Bandeira he already was a dead man.

Suárez, almost in contempt, fires the shot.

The Other Death

(1948)

I have mislaid the letter, but a couple of years or so ago Gannon wrote me from his ranch up in Gualeguaychú saying he would send me a translation, perhaps the very first into Spanish, of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem “The Past,” and adding in a P.S. that don Pedro Damián, whom I might recall, had died of a lung ailment a few nights earlier. The man (Gannon went on), wasted by fever, had in his delirium relived the long ordeal of the battle of Masoller. It seemed to me there was nothing unreasonable or out of the ordinary about this news since don Pedro, when he was nineteen or twenty, had been a follower of the banners of Aparicio Saravia. Pedro Damián had been working as a hand up north on a ranch in Río Negro or Paysandú when the 1904 revolution broke out. Although he was from Gualeguaychú, in the province of Entre Ríos, he went along with his friends and, being as cocky and ignorant as they were, joined the rebel army. He fought in one or two skirmishes and in the final battle. Returned home in 1905, Damián, with a kind of humble stubbornness, once more took up his work as a cowhand. For all I know, he never left his native province again. He spent his last thirty years living in a small lonely cabin eight or ten miles from Ñancay. It was in that out-of-the-way place that I spoke with him one evening (that Í tried to speak with him one evening) back around 1942; he was a man of few words, and not very bright. Masoller, it turned out, was the whole of his personal history. And so I was not surprised to find out that he had lived the sound and fury of that battle over again at the hour of his death. When I knew I would never see Damián another time, I wanted to remember him, but so poor is my memory for faces that all I could recall was the snapshot Gannon had taken of him. There is nothing unusual in this fact, considering that I saw the man only once at the beginning of 1942, but had looked at his picture many times. Gannon sent me the photograph and it, too, has been misplaced. I think now that if I were to come across it, I would feel afraid.

The second episode took place in Montevideo, months later. Don Pedro’s fever and his agony gave me the idea for a tale of fantasy based on the defeat at Masoller; Emir Rodríguez Monegal, to whom I had told the plot, wrote me an introduction to Colonel Dionisio Tabares, who had fought in that campaign. The Colonel received me one evening after dinner. From a rocking chair out in the side yard, he recalled the old days with great feeling but at the same time with a faulty sense of chronology. He spoke of ammunition that never reached him and of reserves of horses that arrived worn out, of sleepy dust-covered men weaving labyrinths of marches, of Saravia, who might have ridden into Montevideo but who passed it by “because the gaucho has a fear of towns,” of throats hacked from ear to ear, of a civil war that seemed to me less a military operation than the dream of a cattle thief or an outlaw. Names of battles kept coming up: Illescas, Tupambaé, Masoller. The Colonel’s pauses were so effective and his manner so vivid that I realized he had told and retold these same things many times before, and I feared that behind his words almost no true memories remained. When he stopped for a breath, I managed to get in Damián’s name.

“Damián? Pedro Damián?” said the Colonel. “He served with me. A little half-breed. I remember the boys used to call him Daymán—after the river.” The Colonel let out a burst of loud laughter, then cut it off all at once. I could not tell whether his discomfort was real or put on.

In another voice, he stated that war, like women, served as a test of men, and that nobody knew who he really was until he had been under fire. A man might think himself a coward and actually be brave. And the other way around, too, as had happened to that poor Damián, who bragged his way in and out of saloons with his white ribbon marking him as a Blanco, and later on lost his nerve at Masoller. In one exchange of gunfire with the regulars, he handled himself like a man, but then it was something else again when the two armies met face to face and the artillery began pounding away and every man felt as though there were five thousand other men out there grouping to kill him. That poor kid. He’d spent his life on a farm dipping sheep, and then all of a sudden he gets himself dragged along and mixed up in the grim reality of war. . . .

For some absurd reason Tabares’ version of the story made me uncomfortable. I would have preferred things to have happened differently. Without being aware of it, I had made a kind of idol out of old Damián—a man I had seen only once on a single evening many years earlier. Tabares’ story destroyed everything. Suddenly the reasons for Damián’s aloofness and his stubborn insistence on keeping to himself were clear to me. They had not sprung from modesty but from shame. In vain, I told myself that a man pursued by an act of cowardice is more complex and more interesting than one who is merely courageous. The gaucho Martín Fierro, I thought, is less memorable than Lord Jim or Razumov. Yes, but Damián, as a gaucho, should have been Martín Fierro—especially in the presence of Uruguayan gauchos. In what Tabares left unsaid, I felt his assumption (perhaps undeniable) that Uruguay is more primitive than Argentina and therefore physically braver. I remember we said goodbye to each other that night with a cordiality that was a bit marked.

During the winter, the need of one or two details for my story (which somehow was slow in taking shape) sent me back to Colonel Tabares again. I found him with another man of his own age, a Dr. Juan Francisco Amaro from Paysandú, who had also fought in Saravia’s revolution. They spoke, naturally, of Masoller.

Amaro told a few anecdotes, then slowly added, in the manner of someone who is thinking aloud, “We camped for the night at Santa Irene, I recall, and some of the men from around there joined us. Among them a French veterinarian, who died the night before the battle, and a boy, a sheepshearer from Entre Ríos. Pedro Damián was his name.”

I cut him off sharply. “Yes, I know,” I said. “The Argentine who couldn’t face the bullets.”

I stopped. The two of them were looking at me, puzzled. “You are mistaken, sir,” Amaro said after a while.

“Pedro Damián died as any man might wish to die. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. The regular troops had dug themselves in on the top of a hill and our men charged them with lances. Damián rode at the head, shouting, and a bullet struck him square in the chest. He stood up in his stirrups, finished his shout, and then rolled to the ground, where he lay under the horses’ hooves. He was dead, and the whole last charge of Masoller trampled over him. So fearless, and barely twenty.”

He was speaking, doubtless, of another Damián, but something made me ask what it was the boy had shouted.

“Filth,” said the Colonel. “That’s what men shout in action.”

“Maybe,” said Amaro, “but he also cried out, ‘Long live Urquiza!’ ”

We were silent. Finally the Colonel murmured, “Not as if we were fighting at Masoller, but at Cagancha or India Muerta a hundred years ago.” He added, genuinely bewildered, “I commanded those troops, and I could swear it’s the first time I’ve ever heard of this Damián.”

We had no luck in getting the Colonel to remember him. Back in Buenos Aires, the amazement that his forgetfulness produced in me repeated itself. Browsing through the eleven pleasurable volumes of Emerson’s works in the basement of Mitchell’s, the English bookstore, I met Patricio Gannon one afternoon. I asked him for his translation of “The Past.” He told me that he had no translation of it in mind, and that, besides, Spanish literature was so boring it made Emerson quite superfluous. I reminded him that he had promised me the translation in the same letter in which he wrote me of Damián’s death. He asked me who was Damián. I told him in vain. With rising terror, I noticed that he was listening to me very strangely, and I took refuge in a literary discussion on the detractors of Emerson, a poet far more complex, far more skilled, and truly more extraordinary than the unfortunate Poe. I must put down some additional facts. In April, I had a letter from Colonel Dionisio Tabares; his mind was no longer vague and now he remembered quite well the boy from Entre Ríos who spearheaded the charge at Masoller and whom his men buried that night in a grave at the foot of the hill. In July, I passed through Gualeguaychú; I did not come across Damián’s cabin, and nobody there seemed to remember him now. I wanted to question the foreman Diego Abaroa, who saw Damián die, but Abaroa had passed away himself at the beginning of the winter. I tried to call to mind Damián’s features; months later, leafing through some old albums, I found that the dark face I had attempted to evoke really belonged to the famous tenor Tamberlik, playing the role of Othello.

Now I move on to conjectures. The easiest, but at the same time the least satisfactory, assumes two Damiáns: the coward who died in Entre Ríos around 1946, and the man of courage who died at Masoller in 1904. But this falls apart in its inability to explain what are really the puzzles:

the strange fluctuations of Colonel Tabares’ memory, for one, and the general forgetfulness, which in so short a time could blot out the image and even the name of the man who came back. (I cannot accept, I do not want to accept, a simpler possibility—that of my having dreamed the first man.) Stranger still is the supernatural conjecture thought up by Ulrike von Kühlmann. Pedro Damián, said Ulrike, was killed in the battle and at the hour of his death asked God to carry him back to Entre Ríos. God hesitated a moment before granting the request, but by then the man was already dead and had been seen by others to have fallen. God, who cannot unmake the past but can affect its images, altered the image of Damián’s violent death into one of falling into a faint. And so it was the boy’s ghost that came back to his native province. Came back, but we must not forget that it did so as a ghost. It lived in isolation without a woman and without friends; it loved and possessed everything, but from a distance, as from the other side of a mirror; ultimately it “died” and its frail image just disappeared, like water in water. This conjecture is faulty, but it may have been responsible for pointing out to me the true one (the one I now believe to be true), which is at the same time simpler and more unprecedented. In a mysterious way I discovered it in the treatise De Omnipotentia by Pier Damiani, after having been referred to him by two lines in Canto XXI of the Paradiso, in which the problem of Damiani’s identity is brought up. In the fifth chapter of that treatise, Pier Damiani asserts—against Aristotle and against Fredegarius de Tours—that it is within God’s power to make what once was into something that has never been. Reading those old theological discussions, I began to understand don Pedro Damián’s tragic story.

This is my solution. Damián handled himself like a coward on the battlefield at Masoller and spent the rest of his life setting right that shameful weakness. He returned to Entre Ríos; he never lifted a hand against another man, he never cut anyone up, he never sought fame as a man of courage. Instead, living out there in the hill country of Ñancay and struggling with the backwoods and with wild cattle, he made himself tough, hard. Probably without realizing it, he was preparing the way for the miracle. He thought from his innermost self, If destiny brings me another battle, I’ll be ready for it. For forty years he waited and waited, with an inarticulate hope, and then, in the end, at the hour of his death, fate brought him his battle. It came in the form of delirium, for, as the Greeks knew, we are all shadows of a dream. In his final agony he lived his battle over again, conducted himself as a man, and in heading the last charge he was struck by a bullet in the middle of the chest. And so, in 1946, through the working out of a long, slow-burning passion, Pedro Damián died in the defeat at Masoller, which took place between winter and spring in 1904.

In the Summa Theologiae, it is denied that God can unmake the past, but nothing is said of the complicated concatenation of causes and effects which is so vast and so intimate that perhaps it might prove impossible to annul a single remote fact, insignificant as it may seem, without invalidating the present. To modify the past is not to modify a single fact; it is to annul the consequences of that fact, which tend to be infinite. In other words, it involves the creation of two universal histories. In the first, let us say, Pedro Damián died in Entre Ríos in 1946; in the second, at Masoller in 1904. It is this second history that we are living now, but the suppression of the first was not immediate and produced the odd contradictions that I have related. It was in Colonel Dionisio Tabares that the different stages took place. At first, he remembered that Damián acted as a coward; next, he forgot him entirely; then he remembered Damián’s fearless death. No less illuminating is the case of the foreman Abaroa; he had to die, as I understand it, because he held too many memories of don Pedro Damián.

As for myself, I do not think I am running a similar risk. I have guessed at and set down a process beyond man’s understanding, a kind of exposure of reason; but there are certain circumstances that lessen the dangers of this privilege of mine. For the present, I am not sure of having always written the truth. I suspect that in my story there are a few false memories. It is my suspicion that Pedro Damián (if he ever existed) was not called Pedro Damián and that I remember him by that name so as to believe someday that the whole story was suggested to me by Pier Damiani’s thesis. Something similar happens with the poem I mentioned in the first paragraph, which centers around the irrevocability of the past. A few years from now, I shall believe I made up a fantastic tale, and I will actually have recorded an event that was real, just as some two thousand years ago in all innocence Virgil believed he was setting down the birth of a man and foretold the birth of Christ.

Poor Damián! Death carried him off at the age of twenty in a local battle of a sad and little-known war, but in the end he got what he longed for in his heart, and he was a long time getting it, and perhaps there is no greater happiness.

Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth

(1949)

. . . like the spider, which builds itself a feeble house.

The Koran, xxix, 40

“This,” said Dunraven with a sweeping gesture that did not fail to embrace the misty stars while it took in the bleak moor, the sea, the dunes, and an imposing, tumbledown building that somehow suggested a stable long since fallen into disrepair, “this is the land of my forebears.”

Unwin, his companion, drew the pipe out of his mouth and made some faint sounds of approval. It was the first summer evening of 1914; weary of a world that lacked the dignity of danger, the two friends set great value on these far reaches of Cornwall. Dunraven cultivated a dark beard and thought of himself as the author of a substantial epic, which his contemporaries would barely be able to scan and whose subject had not yet been revealed to him; Unwin had published a paper on the theory supposed to have been written by Fermat in the margin of a page of Diophantus. Both men—need it be said?—were young, dreamy, and passionate.

“It’s about a quarter of a century ago now,” said Dunraven, “that Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, chief or king of I don’t know what Nilotic tribe, died in the central room of this house at the hands of his cousin Zaid. After all these years, the facts surrounding his death are still unclear.”

Unwin, as was expected of him, asked why.

“For several reasons,” was the answer. “In the first place, this house is a labyrinth. In the second place, it was watched over by a slave and a lion. In the third place, a hidden treasure vanished. In the fourth place, the murderer was dead when the murder happened. In the fifth place—”

Tired out, Unwin stopped him.

“Don’t go on multiplying the mysteries,” he said. “They should be kept simple. Bear in mind Poe’s purloined letter, bear in mind Zangwill’s locked room.”

“Or made complex,” replied Dunraven. “Bear in mind the universe.”

Climbing the steep dunes, they had reached the labyrinth. It seemed to them, up close, a straight and almost endless wall of unplastered brick, barely higher than a man’s head. Dunraven said that the building had the shape of a circle, but so wide was this circle that its curve was almost invisible. Unwin recollected Nicholas of Cusa, to whom a straight line was the arc of an infinite circle. They walked on and on, and along about midnight discovered a narrow opening that led into a blind, unsafe passage. Dunraven said that inside the house were many branching ways but that, by turning always to the left, they would reach the very center of the network in little more than an hour. Unwin assented. Their cautious footsteps resounded off the stone-paved floor; the corridor branched into other, narrower corridors. The roof was very low, making the house seem to want to imprison them, and they had to walk one behind the other through the complex dark. Unwin went ahead, forced to slacken the pace because of the rough masonry and the many turns. The unseen wall flowed on by his hand, endlessly. Unwin, slow in the blackness, heard from his friend’s lips the tale of the death of Ibn Hakkan.

“Perhaps the oldest of my memories,” Dunraven said, “is the one of Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari in the port of Pentreath. At his heels followed a black man with a lion— unquestionably they were the first black man and the first lion my eyes had ever seen, outside of engravings from the Bible. I was a boy then, but the beast the color of the sun and the man the color of night impressed me less than Ibn Hakkan himself. To me, he seemed very tall; he was a man with sallow skin, half-shut black eyes, an insolent nose, fleshy lips, a saffron-colored beard, a powerful chest, and a way of walking that was self-assured and silent. At home, I said, ‘A king has come on a ship.’ Later, when the bricklayers were at work here, I broadened his title and dubbed him King of Babel.

“The news that this stranger would settle in Pentreath was received with welcome, but the scale and shape of his house aroused disapproval and bewilderment. It was not right that a house should consist of a single room and of miles and miles of corridors. ‘Among foreigners such houses might be common,’ people said, ‘but hardly here in England.’ Our rector, Mr. Allaby, a man with out-of-the-way reading habits, exhumed an Eastern story of a king whom the Divinity had punished for having built a labyrinth, and he told this story from the pulpit. The very next day, Ibn Hakkan paid a visit to the rectory; the circumstances of the brief interview were not known at the time, but no further sermon alluded to the sin of pride, and the Moor was able to go on contracting masons. Years afterward, when Ibn Hakkan was dead, Allaby stated to the authorities the substance of their conversation.

“Ibn Hakkan, refusing a chair, had told him these or similar words: ‘No man can place judgment upon what I am doing now. My sins are such that were I to invoke for hundreds upon hundreds of years the Ultimate Name of God, this would be powerless to set aside the least of my torments; my sins are such that were I to kill you, Reverend Allaby, with these very hands, my act would not increase even slightly the torments that Infinite Justice holds in store for me. There is no land on earth where my name is unknown. I am Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, and in my day I ruled over the tribes of the desert with a rod of iron. For years and years, with the help of my cousin Zaid, I trampled them underfoot until God heard their outcry and suffered them to rebel against me. My armies were broken and put to the sword; I succeeded in escaping with the wealth I had accumulated during my reign of plunder. Zaid led me to the tomb of a holy man, at the foot of a stone hill. I ordered my slave to watch the face of the desert. Zaid and I went inside with our chest of gold coins and slept, utterly worn out. That night, I believed that a tangle of snakes had trapped me. I woke up in horror. By my side, in the dawn, Zaid lay asleep; a spider web against my flesh had made me dream that dream. It pained me that Zaid, who was a coward, should be sleeping so restfully. I reflected that the wealth was not infinite and that Zaid might wish to claim part of it for himself. In my belt was my silver-handled dagger; I slipped it from its sheath and pierced his throat with it. In his agony, he muttered words I could not make out. I looked at him. He was dead, but, fearing that he might rise up, I ordered my slave to obliterate the dead man’s face with a heavy rock. Then we wandered under the sun, and one day we spied a sea. Very tall ships plowed a course through it. I thought that a dead man would be unable to make his way over such waters, and I decided to seek other lands. The first night after we sailed, I dreamed that I killed Zaid. Everything was exactly the same, but this time I understood his words. He said: “As you now kill me, I shall one day kill you, wherever you may hide.” I have sworn to avert that threat. I shall bury myself in the heart of a labyrinth so that Zaid?s ghost will lose its way.’

“After having said this, he went away. Allaby did his best to think that the Moor was mad and that his absurd labyrinth was a symbol and a clear mark of his madness. Then he reflected that this explanation agreed with the extravagant building and with the extravagant story but not with the strong impression left by the man Ibn Hakkan.

Who knew whether such tales might not be common in the sand wastes of Egypt, who knew whether such queer things corresponded (like Pliny’s dragons) less to a person than to a culture? On a visit to London, Allaby combed back numbers of the Times; he verified the fact of the uprising and of the subsequent downfall of al-Bokhari and of his vizier, whose cowardice was well known.

“Al-Bokhari, as soon as the bricklayers had finished, installed himself in the center of the labyrinth. He was not seen again in the town; at times, Allaby feared that Zaid had caught up with the king and killed him. At night, the wind carried to us the growling of the lion, and the sheep in their pens pressed together with an ancient fear.

“It was customary for ships from Eastern ports, bound for Cardiff or Bristol, to anchor in the little bay. The slave used to go down from the labyrinth (which at that time, I remember, was not its present rose color but was crimson) and exchanged guttural-sounding words with the ships’ crews, and he seemed to be looking among the men for the vizier’s ghost. It was no secret that these vessels carried cargoes of contraband, and if of alcohol or of forbidden ivories, why not of dead men as well?

“Some three years after the house was finished, the Rose of Sharon anchored one October morning just under the bluffs. I was not among those who saw this sailing ship, and perhaps the image of it I hold in my mind is influenced by forgotten prints of Aboukir or of Trafalgar, but I believe it was among that class of ships so minutely detailed that they seem less the work of a shipbuilder than of a carpenter, and less of a carpenter than of a cabinetmaker. It was (if not in reality, at least in my dreams) polished, dark, fast, and silent, and its crew was made up of Arabs and Malayans.

“It anchored at dawn, and in the late afternoon of that same day Ibn Hakkan burst into the rectory to see Allaby. He was dominated—completely dominated—by a passion of fear, and was scarcely able to make it clear that Zaid had entered the labyrinth and that his slave and his lion had already been killed. He asked in all seriousness whether the authorities might be able to help him. Before Allaby could say a word, al-Bokhari was gone—as if torn away by the same terror that had brought him for the second and last time to the rectory. Alone in his library, Allaby reflected in amazement that this fear-ridden man had kept down Sudanese tribes by the knife, knew what a battle was, and knew what it was to kill. Allaby found out the next day that the boat had already set sail (bound for the Red Sea port of Suakin, he later learned). Feeling it was his duty to verify the death of the slave, he made his way up to the labyrinth. Al-Bokhari’s breathless tale seemed to him utterly fantastic, but at one turn of the corridor he came upon the lion, and the lion was dead, and at another turn there was the slave, who was also dead, and in the central room he found al-Bokhari—with his face obliterated. At the man’s feet was a small chest inlaid with mother-of-pearl; the lock had been forced, and not a single coin was left.”

Dunraven’s final sentences, underlined by rhetorical pauses, were meant to be impressive; Unwin guessed that his friend had gone over them many times before, always with the same confidence—and with the same flatness of effect. He asked, in order to feign interest, “How were the lion and the slave killed?”

The relentless voice went on with a kind of gloomy satisfaction, “Their faces were also bashed in.”

A muffled sound of rain was now added to the sound of the men’s steps. Unwin realized that they would have to spend the night in the labyrinth, in the central chamber, but that in time this uncomfortable experience could be looked back on as an adventure. He kept silent. Dunraven could not restrain himself, and asked, in the manner of one who wants to squeeze the last drop, “Can this story be explained?”

Unwin answered, as though thinking aloud, “I have no idea whether it can be explained or not. I only know it’s a lie.”

Dunraven broke out in a torrent of strongly flavored language and said that all the population of Pentreath could bear witness to the truth of what he had told and that if he had to make up a story, he was a writer after all and could easily have invented a far better one. No less astonished than Dunraven, Unwin apologized. Time in the darkness seemed more drawn out; both men began to fear they had gone astray, and were feeling their tiredness when a faint gleam of light from overhead revealed the lower steps of a narrow staircase. They climbed up and came to a round room that lay in ruin. Two things were left that attested to the fear of the ill-starred king: a slit of a window that looked out onto the moors and the sea, and a trapdoor in the floor that opened above the curve of the stairway. The room, though spacious, had about it something of a prison cell.

Less because of the rain than because of a wish to have a ready anecdote for friends, the two men spent the night in the labyrinth. The mathematician slept soundly; not so the poet, who was hounded by verses that his judgment knew to be worthless:

Faceless the sultry and overpowering lion, Faceless the stricken slave, faceless the king.

Unwin felt that the story of al-Bokhari’s death had left him indifferent, but he woke up with the conviction of having unraveled it. All that day, he was preoccupied and unsociable, trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together, and two nights later he met Dunraven in a pub back in London and said to him these or similar words: “In Cornwall, I said your story was a lie. The facts were true, or could be thought of as true, but told the way you told them they were obviously lies. I will begin with the greatest lie of all—with the unbelievable labyrinth. A fugitive does not hide himself in a maze. He does not build himself a labyrinth on a bluff overlooking the sea, a crimson labyrinth that can be sighted from afar by any ship’s crew. He has no need to erect a labyrinth when the whole world already is one.

For anyone who really wants to hide away, London is a better labyrinth than a lookout tower to which all the corridors of a building lead. The simple observation I have just propounded to you came to me the night before last while we were listening to the rain on the roof and were waiting for sleep to fall upon us. Under its influence, I chose to put aside your absurdities and to think about something sensible.”

“About the theory of series, say, or about a fourth dimension of space?” asked Dunraven.

“No,” said Unwin, serious. “I thought about the labyrinth of Crete. The labyrinth whose center was a man with the head of a bull.”

Dunraven, steeped in detective stories, thought that the solution of a mystery is always less impressive than the mystery itself. Mystery has something of the supernatural about it, and even of the divine; its solution, however, is always tainted by sleight of hand. He said, to put off the inevitable, “On coins and in sculpture the Minotaur has a bull’s head. Dante imagined it as having the body of a bull and a man’s head.”

“That version also fits my solution,” Unwin agreed.

“What matters is that both the dwelling and the dweller be monstrous. The Minotaur amply justifies its maze. The same can hardly be said of a threat uttered in a dream. The Minotaur’s image once evoked (unavoidably, of course, in a mystery in which there is a labyrinth), the problem was virtually solved. Nonetheless, I confess I did not fully understand that this ancient image held the key, but in your story I found a detail I could use—the spider web.”

“The spider web?” repeated Dunraven, baffled.

“Yes. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the spider web (the Platonic spider web—let’s keep this straight) may have suggested to the murderer (for there is a murderer) his crime. You remember that al-Bokhari, in the tomb, dreamed about a tangle of snakes, and upon waking found that a spider web had prompted his dream. Let us go back to that night in which al-Bokhari had that dream. The defeated king and the vizier and the slave are escaping over the desert with treasure. They take shelter for the night in a tomb. The vizier, whom we know to be a coward, sleeps; the king, whom we know to be a brave man, does not sleep. In order not to share the treasure, the king knifes the vizier. Several nights later, the vizier’s ghost threatens the king in a dream. All this is unconvincing. To my understanding, the events took place in another way. That night, the king, the brave man, slept, and Zaid, the coward, lay awake. To sleep is to forget all things, and this particular forgetfulness is not easy when you know you are being hunted down with drawn swords. Zaid, greedy, bent over the sleeping figure of his king. He thought about killing him (maybe he even played with his dagger), but he did not dare. He woke the napping slave, they buried part of the treasure in the tomb, and they fled to Suakin and to England. Not to hide themselves from al-Bokhari but to lure him and to kill him, they built—like the spider its web—the crimson labyrinth on the high dunes in sight of the sea. The vizier knew that ships would carry to Nubian ports the tale of the red-bearded man, of the slave, and of the lion, and that sooner or later al-Bokhari would come in search of them in their labyrinth. In the last passageway of the maze, the trap lay waiting. Al-Bokhari had always underrated Zaid, and now did not lower himself to take the slightest precaution. At last, the wished-for day came; Ibn Hakkan landed in England, went directly to the door of the maze, made his way into its blind corridors, and perhaps had already set foot on the first steps when his vizier killed him—I don’t know whether with a bullet—from the trapdoor in the ceiling. The slave would finish off the lion and another bullet would finish off the slave. Then Zaid crushed the three faces with a rock. He had to do it that way; one dead man with his face bashed in would have suggested a problem of identity, but the beast, the black man, and the king formed a series, and, given the first two terms, the last one would seem natural. It is not to be wondered at that he was driven by fear when he spoke to Allaby; he had just finished his awful job and was about to flee England and unearth the treasure.”

A thoughtful silence, or disbelief, followed Unwin’s words. Dunraven asked for another tankard before giving his judgment.

“I admit,” he said, “that my Ibn Hakkan could have been Zaid. Such metamorphoses are classic rules of the game, are accepted conventions demanded by the reader. What I am unwilling to admit is your conjecture that a part of the treasure remained in the Sudan. Remember that Zaid fled from the king and from the king’s enemies both; it is easier to picture him stealing the whole hoard than taking the time to bury a portion of it. At the very end, perhaps no coins were found in the chest because no coins were left. The bricklayers would have eaten up a fortune that, unlike the red gold of the Nibelungs, was not inexhaustible. And so we have Ibn Hakkan crossing the seas in order to recover a treasure already squandered.”

“I shouldn’t say squandered,” Unwin said. “The vizier invested it, putting together on an island of infidels a great circular trap made of brick and destined not only to lure a king but to be his grave. Zaid, if your guess is correct, acted out of hate and fear, and not out of greed. He stole the treasure, and only later found that he was really after something else. He really wanted to see Ibn Hakkan dead. He pretended to be Ibn Hakkan, he killed Ibn Hakkan, and in the end he became Ibn Hakkan.”

“Yes,” agreed Dunraven. “He was a good-for-nothing who, before becoming a nobody in death, wanted one day to look back on having been a king or having been taken for a king.”

The Man on the Threshold

(1952)

Bioy-Casares brought back with him from London a strange dagger with a triangular blade and a hilt in the shape of an H; a friend of ours, Christopher Dewey of the British Council, told us that such weapons were commonly used in India. This statement prompted him to mention that he had held a job in that country between the two wars. (“Ultra Auroram et Gangen,” I recall his saying in Latin, misquoting a line from Juvenal.) Of the stories he entertained us with that night, I venture to set down the one that follows. My account will be faithful; may Allah deliver me from the temptation of adding any circumstantial details or of weighing down the tale’s Oriental character with interpolations from Kipling. It should be remarked that the story has a certain ancient simplicity that it would be a pity to lose—something perhaps straight out of the Arabian Nights.

The precise geography [Dewey said] of the events I am going to relate is of little importance. Besides, what would the names of Amritsar or Oudh mean in Buenos Aires? Let me only say, then, that in those years there were disturbances in a Muslim city and that the central government sent out one of their best people to restore order. He was a Scotsman from an illustrious clan of warriors, and in his blood he bore a tradition of violence. Only once did I lay eyes on him, but I shall not forget his deep black hair, the prominent cheekbones, the somehow avid nose and mouth, the broad shoulders, the powerful set of a Viking. David Alexander Glencairn is what he’ll be called in my story tonight; the names are fitting, since they belonged to kings who ruled with an iron scepter. David Alexander Glencairn (as I shall have to get used to calling him) was, I suspect, a man who was feared; the mere news of his coming was enough to quell the city. This did not deter him from putting into effect a number of forceful measures. A few years passed. The city and the outlying district were at peace; Sikhs and Muslims had laid aside their ancient enmities, and suddenly Glencairn disappeared. Naturally enough, there was no lack of rumors that he had been kidnapped or murdered.

These things I learned from my superior, for the censorship was strict and the newspapers made no comment on (nor did they even record, for all I recall) Glencairn’s disappearance. There’s a saying that India is larger than the world; Glencairn, who may have been all powerful in the city to which he was destined by a signature scrawled across the bottom of some document, was no more than a cog in the administration of Empire. The inquiries of the local police turned up nothing; my superior felt that a civilian might rouse less suspicion and achieve greater results. Three or four days later (distances in India are generous), I was appointed to my mission and was working my way without hope of success through the streets of the commonplace city that had somehow whisked away a man.

I felt, almost at once, the invisible presence of a conspiracy to keep Glencairn’s fate hidden. There’s not a soul in this city (I suspected) who is not in on the secret and who is not sworn to keep it. Upon being questioned, most people professed an unbounded ignorance; they did not know who Glencairn was, had never seen him, had never heard anyone speak of him. Others, instead, had caught a glimpse of him only a quarter of an hour before talking to So-and-So, and they even accompanied me to the house the two had entered and in which nothing was known of them, or which they had just that moment left. Some of those meticulous liars I went so far as to knock down. Witnesses approved my outbursts, and made up other lies. I did not believe them, but neither did I dare ignore them. One afternoon, I was handed an envelope containing a slip of paper on which there was an address.

The sun had gone down when I got there. The quarter was poor but not rowdy; the house was quite low; from the street I caught a glimpse of a succession of unpaved inner courtyards, and somewhere at the far end an opening. There, some kind of Muslim ceremony was being held; a blind man entered with a lute made of a reddish wood.

At my feet, motionless as an object, an old, old man squatted on the threshold. I’ll tell what he was like, for he is an essential part of the story. His many years had worn him down and polished him as smooth as water polishes a stone, or as the generations of men polish a sentence. Long rags covered him, or so it seemed to me, and the cloth he wore wound around his head was one rag more. In the dusk, he lifted a dark face and a white beard. I began speaking to him without preamble, for by now I had given up all hope of ever finding David Alexander Glencairn. The old man did not understand me (perhaps he did not hear me), and I had to explain that Glencairn was a judge and that I was looking for him. I felt, on speaking these words, the pointlessness of questioning this old man for whom the present was hardly more than a dim rumor. This man might give me news of the Mutiny or of Akbar (I thought) but not of Glencairn. What he told me confirmed this suspicion.

“A judge!” he cried with weak surprise. “A judge who has got himself lost and is being searched for. That happened when I was a boy. I have no memory for dates, but Nikal Seyn (Nicholson) had not yet been killed before the wall of Delhi. Time that has passed stays on in memory; I may be able to summon back what happened then. God, in his wrath, had allowed people to fall into corruption; the mouths of men were full of blasphemy and of deceit and of fraud. Yet not all were evil, and when it was known that the queen was about to send a man who would carry out in this land the law of England, those who were less evil were cheered, for they felt that law is better than disorder. The Christian came to us, but it was not long before he too was deceiving and oppressing us, concealing abominable crimes, and selling decisions. We did not blame him in the beginning; the English justice he administered was not familiar to anyone, and the apparent excesses of the new judge may have obeyed certain valid arcane reasoning. Everything must have a justification in his book, we wished to think, but his kinship with all evil judges the world over was too obvious to be overlooked, and at last we were forced to admit that he was simply a wicked man. He turned out to be a tyrant, and the unfortunate people (in order to avenge themselves for the false hopes they had once placed in him) began to toy with the idea of kidnapping him and submitting him to judgment. To talk was not enough; from plans they had to move to action. Nobody, perhaps, save the very foolish or the very young, believed that that rash scheme could be carried out, but thousands of Sikhs and Muslims kept their word and one day they executed—incredulous—what to each of them had seemed impossible. They sequestered the judge and held him prisoner in a farmhouse beyond the outskirts of the town. Then they called together all those who had been wronged by him, or, in some cases, orphans and widows, for during those years the executioner’s sword had not rested. In the end—this was perhaps the most difficult— they sought and named a judge to judge the judge.”

At this point, the old man was interrupted by some women who were entering the house. Then he went on, slowly.

“It is well known that there is no generation that does not include in it four upright men who are the secret pillars of the world and who justify it before the Lord: one of these men would have made the perfect judge. But where are they to be found if they themselves wander the world lost and nameless, and do not know each other when they meet, and are unaware of the high destiny that is theirs? Someone then reasoned that if fate forbade us wise men, we should seek out the witless. This opinion prevailed. Students of the Koran, doctors of law, Sikhs who bear the name of lions and who worship one God, Hindus who worship a multitude of gods, Mahavira monks who teach that the shape of the universe is that of a man with his legs spread apart, worshipers of fire, and black Jews made up the court, but the final ruling was entrusted to a madman.”

Here he was interrupted by people who were leaving the ceremony.

“To a madman,” he repeated, “so that God’s wisdom might speak through his mouth and shame human pride. His name has been forgotten, or was never known, but he went naked through the streets, or was clothed in rags, counting his fingers with a thumb and mocking at the trees.”

My common sense rebelled. I said that to hand over the verdict to a madman was to nullify the trial.

“The defendant accepted the judge,” was his answer, “seeing, perhaps, that because of the risk the conspirators would run if they set him free, only from a man who was mad might he not expect a sentence of death. I heard that he laughed when he was told who the judge was. The trial lasted many days and nights, drawn out by the swelling of the number of witnesses.”

The old man stopped. Something was troubling him. In order to bridge the lapse, I asked him how many days.

“At least nineteen,” he replied.

People who were leaving the ceremony interrupted him again; wine is forbidden to Muslims, but the faces and voices were those of drunkards. One, on passing, shouted something to the old man.

“Nineteen days—exactly,” he said, setting matters straight. “The faithless dog heard sentence passed, and the knife feasted on his throat.”

He had spoken fiercely, joyfully. With a different voice now he brought the story to an end. “He died without fear; In the most vile of men there is some virtue.”

“Where did all this happen?” I asked him, “In a farmhouse?”

For the first time, he looked into my eyes. Then he made things clear, slowly, measuring his words. “I said that he had been confined in a farmhouse, not that he was tried there. He was tried in this city, in a house like any other, like this one. One house differs little from another; what is important to know is whether the house is built in hell or in heaven.”

I asked him about the fate of the conspirators.

“I don’t know,” he told me patiently. “These things took place and were forgotten many years ago now. Maybe what they did was condemned by men, but not by the Lord.”

Having said this, he got up. I felt his words as a dismissal, and from that moment I no longer existed for him. Men and women from all the corners of the Punjab swarmed over us, praying and intoning, and nearly swept us away. I wondered how, from courtyards so narrow they were little more than long passageways, so many persons could be pouring out. Others were coming from the neighboring houses; it seems they had leaped over the walls. By shoving and cursing, I forced my way inside. At the heart of the innermost courtyard I came upon a naked man, crowned with yellow flowers, whom everyone kissed and caressed, with a sword in his hand. The sword was stained, for it had dealt Glencairn his death. I found his mutilated body in the stables out back.

The Challenge

(1952)

All over the Argentine runs a story that may belong to legend or to history or (which may be just another way of saying it belongs to legend) to both things at once. Its best recorded versions are to be found in the unjustly forgotten novels about outlaws and desperadoes written in the last century by Eduardo Gutiérrez; among its oral versions, the first one I heard came from a neighborhood of Buenos Aires bounded by a penitentiary, a river, and a cemetery, and nicknamed Tierra del Fuego. The hero of this version was Juan Muraña, a wagon driver and knife fighter to whom are attributed all the stories of daring that still survive in what were once the outskirts of the city’s Northside. That first version was quite simple. A man from the Stockyards or from Barracas, knowing about Muraña’s reputation (but never having laid eyes on him), sets out all the way across town from the Southside to take him on. He picks the fight in a corner saloon, and the two move into the street to have it out. Each is wounded, but in the end Muraña slashes the other man’s face and tells him, “I’m letting you live so you’ll come back looking for me again.”

What impressed itself in my mind about the duel was that it had no ulterior motive. In conversation thereafter (my friends know this only too well), I grew fond of retelling the anecdote. Around 1927, I wrote it down, giving it the deliberately laconic title “Men Fought.” Years later, this same anecdote helped me work out a lucky story—though hardly a good one—called “Streetcorner Man.” Then, in 1950, Adolfo Bioy-Casares and I made use of it again to plot a film script that the producers turned down and that would have been called On the Outer Edge. It was about hard-bitten men like Muraña who lived on the outskirts of Buenos Aires before the turn of the century. I thought, after such extensive labors, that I had said farewell to the story of the disinterested duel. Then, this year, out in Chivilcoy, I came across a far better version. I hope this is the true one, although since fate seems to take pleasure in a thing’s happening many times over, both may very well be authentic. Two quite bad stories and a script that I still think of as good came out of the poorer first version; out of the second, which is complete and perfect, nothing can come. Without working in metaphors or details of local color, I shall tell it now as it was told to me. The story took place to the west, in the district of Chivilcoy, sometime back in the 1870’s.

The hero’s name is Wenceslao Suárez. He earns his wages braiding ropes and making harnesses, and lives in a small adobe hut. Forty or fifty years old, he’s a man who has won a reputation for courage, and it is quite likely (given the facts of the story) that he has a killing or two to his credit. But these killings, because they were in fair fights, neither trouble his conscience nor tarnish his good name. One evening, something out of the ordinary happens in the routine life of this man: at a crossroads saloon, he is told that a letter has come for him. Don Wenceslao does not know how to read; the saloonkeeper puzzles out word by word an epistle certainly not written by the man who sent it. In the name of certain friends, who value dexterity and true composure, an unknown correspondent sends his compliments to don Wenceslao, whose renown has crossed over the Arroyo del Medio into the Province of Santa Fe, and extends him the hospitality of his humble home in a town of the said province. Wenceslao Suárez dictates a reply to the saloonkeeper. Thanking the other man for his expression of friendship, and explaining that he dare not leave his mother—who is well along in years—alone, he invites the other man to his own place in Chivilcoy, where a barbecue and a bottle or so of wine may be looked forward to. The months drag by, and one day a man riding a horse harnessed and saddled in a style unknown in the area inquires at the saloon for the way to Suárez’ house. Suárez, who has come to the saloon to buy meat, overhears the question and tells the man who he is. The stranger reminds him of the letters they exchanged some time back. Suárez shows his pleasure that the other man has gone to the trouble of making the journey; then the two of them go off into a nearby field and Suárez prepares the barbecue. They eat and drink and talk at length. About what? I suspect about subjects involving blood and cruelty—but with each man on his guard, wary.

They have eaten, and the oppressive afternoon heat weighs over the land when the stranger invites don Wenceslao to join in a bit of harmless knife play. To say no would dishonor the host. They fence, and at first they only play at fighting, but it’s not long before Wenceslao feels that the stranger is out to kill him. Realizing at last what lay behind the ceremonious letter, Wenceslao regrets having eaten and drunk so much. He knows he will tire before the other man, on whom he has a good nine or ten years. Out of scorn or politeness, the stranger offers him a short rest. Don Wenceslao agrees and, as soon as they take up their dueling again, he allows the other man to wound him on the left hand, in which he holds his rolled poncho.*

The knife slices through his wrist, the hand dangles loose. Suárez, springing back, lays the bleeding hand on the ground, clamps it down under his boot, tears it off, feints a thrust at the amazed stranger’s chest, then rips open his belly with a solid stab. So the story ends, except that, according to one teller, the man from Santa Fe is left lifeless, while to another (who withholds from him the dignity of death) he rides back to his own province. In this latter version, Suárez gives him first aid with the rum remaining from their lunch.

In this feat of Manco (One Hand) Wenceslao—as Suárez is now known to fame—certain touches of mildness or politeness (his trade as harness and rope maker, his qualms about leaving his mother alone, the exchange of flowery letters, the two men’s leisurely conversation, the lunch) happily tone down and make the barbarous tale more effective. These touches lend it an epic and even chivalrous quality that we hardly find, for example—unless we have made up our minds to do so—in the drunken brawls of Martín Fierro or in the closely related but poorer story of Juan Muraña and the man from the Southside. A trait common to the two may, perhaps, be significant. In both of them, the challenger is defeated. This may be due to the mere and unfortunate necessity for the local champion to triumph, but also (and this is preferable) to a tacit disapproval of aggression, or (which would be best of all) to the dark and tragic suspicion that man is the worker of his own downfall, like Ulysses in Canto XXVI of the Inferno or like that other doomed captain in Moby Dick.

Something fundamental in the brutal story just told saves it from falling into unalloyed barbarousness—an episode out of La Terre or Hemingway. I speak of a religious core. “His beliefs,” said the poet Lugones of the gaucho, “could be reduced to a few superstitions, which had no great bearing on his everyday life.” He then adds, “The one thing he respected was courage, which he cultivated with a chivalrous passion.” I would say that the gaucho, without realizing it, forged a religion—the hard and blind religion of courage—and that this faith (like all others) had its ethic, its mythology, and its martyrs. On the plains and out on the raw edges of the city, men who led extremely elementary lives—herders, stockyard workers, drovers, outlaws, and pimps—rediscovered in their own way the age-old cult of the gods of iron. In a thirteenth-century saga, we read:

“Tell me, what do you believe in?” said the earl. “I believe in my own strength,” said Sigmund.

Wenceslao Suárez and his nameless antagonist, and many others whom myth has forgotten or has absorbed in these two, doubtless held this manly faith, and in all likelihood it was no mere form of vanity but rather an awareness that God may be found in any man.

* Montaigne (Essays, I, 49) says that this manner of fighting with cloak and dagger is very old, and quotes Caesar’s finding, “Sinistras sagis involvunt, gladiosque distringunt”—“They wrapped their cloaks around their left arms and drew their swords” (Civil War, I, 75). Lugones, in El payador (1916), quotes these verses from a sixteenth-century romance of Bernardo del Carpio:

Revolviendo el manto al brazo, la espada fuera a sacar.

[Wrapping the cape round his arm, he drew his sword.]

The Captive

(1956)

This story is told out in one of the old frontier towns—either Junín or Tapalquén. A boy was missing after an Indian raid; it was said that the marauders had carried him away. The boy’s parents searched for him without any luck; years later, a soldier just back from Indian territory told them about a blue-eyed savage who may have been their son. At long last they traced him (the circumstances of the search have not come down to us and I dare not invent what I don’t know) and they thought they recognized him. The man, marked by the wilderness and by primitive life, no longer understood the words of the language he spoke in childhood, but he let himself be led, uncurious and willing, to his old house. There he stopped—maybe because the others stopped. He stared at the door as though not understanding what it was. All of a sudden, ducking his head, he let out a cry, cut through the entranceway and the two long patios on the run, and burst into the kitchen. Without a second’s pause, he buried his arm in the soot-blackened oven chimney and drew out the small knife with the horn handle that he had hidden there as a boy. His eyes lit up with joy and his parents wept because they had found their lost child.

Maybe other memories followed upon this one, but the Indian could not live indoors and one day he left to go back to his open spaces. I would like to know what he felt in that first bewildering moment in which past and present merged; I would like to know whether in that dizzying instant the lost son was born again and died, or whether he managed to recognize, as a child or a dog might, his people and his home.

Borges and Myself

(1956)

It’s to the other man, to Borges, that things happen. I walk along the streets of Buenos Aires, stopping now and then— perhaps out of habit—to look at the arch of an old entranceway or a grillwork gate; of Borges I get news through the mail and glimpse his name among a committee of professors or in a dictionary of biography. I have a taste for hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the roots of words, the smell of coffee, and Stevenson’s prose; the other man shares these likes, but in a showy way that turns them into stagy mannerisms. It would be an exaggeration to say that we are on bad terms; I live, I let myself live, so that Borges can weave his tales and poems, and those tales and poems are my justification. It is not hard for me to admit that he has managed to write a few worthwhile pages, but these pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good no longer belongs to anyone—not even the other man—but rather to speech or tradition. In any case, I am fated to become lost once and for all, and only some moment of myself will survive in the other man. Little by little, I have been surrendering everything to him, even though I have evidence of his stubborn habit of falsification and exaggerating. Spinoza held that all things try to keep on being themselves; a stone wants to be a stone and the tiger, a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is so that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in those of others or than in the laborious tuning of a guitar. Years ago, I tried ridding myself of him and I went from myths of the outlying slums of the city to games with time and infinity, but those games are now part of Borges and I will have to turn to other things. And so, my life is a running away, and I lose everything and everything is left to oblivion or to the other man.

Which of us is writing this page I don’t know.

The Maker

(1958)

Until then, he had never dwelled on the pleasures of memory. Impressions had always washed over him, fleeting and vivid. A potter’s design in vermilion; the vault of heaven clustered with stars that were also gods; the moon, from which a lion had fallen; the smoothness of marble under one’s lingering fingertips; the taste of boar meat, which he liked to strip with quick flashing bites; a Phoenician word; the black shadow cast by a spear on yellow sand; the nearness of the sea or of women; the heavy wine whose roughness he cut with honey—any of these could wholly encompass the range of his mind. He was acquainted with fear as well as with anger and courage, and once he was the first to scale an enemy wall. Eager, curious, unquestioning, following no other law than to enjoy things and forget them, he wandered over many lands and, on. one side or the other of the sea, looked on the cities of men and their palaces. In bustling marketplaces or at the foot of a mountain whose hidden peak may have sheltered satyrs, he had heard entangled stories, which he accepted as he accepted reality, without attempting to find out whether they were true or imaginary.

Little by little, the beautiful world began to leave him; a persistent mist erased the lines of his hand, the night lost Its multitude of stars, the ground became uncertain beneath his steps. Everything grew distant and blurred. When he knew he was going blind, he cried out; stoic fortitude had not yet been invented, and Hector could flee from Achilles without dishonor. I shall no longer look upon the sky and its mythological dread (he felt), nor this face which the years will transform. Days and nights passed over these fears of his body, but one morning he awoke, looked (without astonishment now) at the dim things around him, and unexplainably felt—the way one recognizes a strain of music or a voice—that all this had already happened to him and that he had faced it with fear, but also with joy, hope, and curiosity. Then he went deep into his past, which seemed to him bottomless, and managed to draw out of that dizzying descent the lost memory that now shone like a coin under the rain, maybe because he had never recalled it before except in some dream.

This was the memory. Another boy had wronged him and he had gone to his father and told him the story. His father, letting him speak, appeared not to listen or understand, and took down from the wall a bronze dagger, beautiful and charged with power, which in secret the boy had coveted. Now it lay in his hands and the suddenness of possession wiped out the injury he had suffered, but his father’s voice was telling him, “Let them know you’re a man,” and in that voice was a command. Night blinded the paths. Clasping the dagger, in which he felt a magic power, he scrambled down the steep hillside that surrounded the house and ran to the edge of the sea, thinking of himself as Ajax and Perseus, and peopling with wounds and battles the dark salt air. The exact taste of that moment was what he now sought. The rest mattered little to him—the insults leading to the challenge, the clumsy fight, the way home with the blade dripping blood.

Another memory, also involving night and an expectation of adventure, sprang out of that one. A woman, the first to be given him by the gods, had waited for him in the shadow of a crypt until he reached her through galleries that were like nets of stone and down slopes that sank into darkness. Why did these memories come back to him and why without bitterness, as if foretelling of things about to happen?

With slow amazement he understood. In this nighttime of his mortal eyes into which he was now descending, love and danger were also in wait for him—Ares and Aphrodite— because he already divined (because he was already ringed in by) a rumor of hexameters and glory, a rumor of men defending a shrine which the gods would not save and of black ships roaming the seas in search of a loved island, the rumor of the Odysseys and the Iliads it was his destiny to sing and to leave resounding forever in mankind’s hollow memory. These things we know, but not what he felt when he went down into his final darkness.

The Immortals

With Adolfo Bioy-Casares

(1966)

And see, no longer blinded by our eyes.

Rupert Brooke

Whoever could have foreseen, way back in that innocent summer of 1923, that the novelette The Chosen One by Camilo N. Huergo, presented to me by the author with his personal inscription on the flyleaf (which I had the decorum to tear out before offering the volume for sale to successive men of the book trade), hid under the thin varnish of fiction a prophetic truth. Huergo’s photograph, in an oval frame, adorns the cover. Each time I look at it, I have the impression that the snapshot is about to cough, a victim of that lung disease which nipped in the bud a promising career. Tuberculosis, in short, denied him the happiness of acknowledging the letter I wrote him in one of my characteristic outbursts of generosity.

The epigraph prefixed to this thoughtful essay has been taken from the aforementioned novelette; I requested Dr. Montenegro, of the Academy, to render it into Spanish, but the results were negative. To give the unprepared reader the gist of the matter, I shall now sketch, in condensed form, an outline of Huergo’s narrative, as follows:

The storyteller pays a visit, far to the south in Chubut, to the English rancher don Guillermo Blake, who devotes his energies not only to the breeding of sheep but also to the ramblings of the world-famous Plato and to the latest and more freakish experiments in the field of surgical medicine. On the basis of his reading, don Guillermo concludes that the five senses obstruct or deform the apprehension of reality and that, could we free ourselves of them, we would see the world as it is—endless and timeless. He comes to think that the eternal models of things lie in the depths of the soul and that the organs of perception with which the Creator has endowed us are, grosso modo, hindrances. They are no better than dark spectacles that blind us to what exists outside, diverting our attention at the same time from the splendor we carry within us.

Blake begets a son by one of the farm girls so that the boy may one day become acquainted with reality. To anesthetize him for life, to make him blind and deaf and dumb, to emancipate him from the senses of smell and taste, were the father’s first concerns. He took, in the same way, all possible measures to make the chosen one unaware of his own body. As to the rest, this was arranged with contrivances designed to take over respiration, circulation, nourishment, digestion, and elimination. It was a pity that the boy, fully liberated, was cut off from all human contact.

Owing to the press of practical matters, the narrator goes away. After ten years, he returns. Don Guillermo has died; his son goes on living after his fashion, with natural breathing, heart regular, in a dusty shack cluttered with mechanical devices. The narrator, about to leave for good, drops a cigarette butt that sets fire to the shack and he never quite knows whether this act was done on purpose or by pure chance. So ends Huergo’s story, strange enough for its time but now, of course, more than outstripped by the rockets and astronauts of our men of science.

Having dashed off this disinterested compendium of the tale of a now dead and forgotten author—from whom I have nothing to gain—I steer back to the heart of the matter. Memory restores to me a Saturday morning in 1964 when I had an appointment with the eminent gerontologist Dr. Raúl Narbondo. The sad truth is that we young bloods of yesteryear are getting on; the thick mop begins to thin, one or another ear stops up, the wrinkles collect grime, molars grow hollow, a cough takes root, the backbone hunches up, the foot trips on a pebble, and, to put it plainly, the paterfamilias falters and withers. There was no doubt about it, the moment had come to see Dr. Narbondo for a general checkup, particularly considering the fact that he specialized in the replacement of malfunctioning organs.

Sick at heart because that afternoon the Palermo Juniors and the Spanish Sports were playing a return match and maybe I could not occupy my place in the front row to bolster my team, I betook myself to the clinic on Corrientes Avenue near Pasteur. The clinic, as its fame betrays, occupies the fifteenth floor of the Adamant Building. I went up by elevator (manufactured by the Electra Company). Eye to eye with Narbondo’s brass shingle, I pressed the bell, and at long last, taking my courage in both hands, I slipped through the partly open door and entered into the waiting room proper. There, alone with the latest issues of the Ladies’ Companion and Jumbo, I whiled away the passing hours until a cuckoo clock struck twelve and sent me leaping from my armchair. At once, I asked myself, What happened? Planning my every move now like a sleuth, I took a step or two toward the next room, peeped in, ready, admittedly, to fly the coop at the slightest sound. From the streets far below came the noise of horns and traffic, the cry of a newspaper hawker, the squeal of brakes sparing some pedestrian, but, all around me, a reign of silence. I crossed a kind of laboratory, or pharmaceutical back room, furnished with instruments and flasks of all sorts. Stimulated by the aim of reaching the men’s room, I pushed open a door at the far end of the lab.

Inside, I saw something that my eyes did not understand.

The small enclosure was circular, painted white, with a low ceiling and neon lighting, and without a single window to relieve the sense of claustrophobia. The room was inhabited by four personages, or pieces of furniture. Their color was the same as the walls, their material wood, their form cubic. On each cube was another small cube with a latticed opening and below it a slot as in a mailbox. Carefully scrutinizing the grilled opening, you noted with alarm that from the interior you were being watched by something like eyes. The slots emitted, from time to time, a chorus of sighs or whisperings that the good Lord himself could not have made head or tail of. The placement of these cubes was such that they faced each other in the form of a square, composing a kind of conclave. I don’t know how many minutes lapsed. At this point, the doctor came in and said to me, “My pardon, Bustos, for having kept you waiting. I was just out getting myself an advance ticket for today’s match between the Palermo Juniors and the Spanish Sports.” He went on, indicating the cubes, “Let me introduce you to Santiago Silberman, to retired clerk-of-court Ludueña, to Aquiles Molinari, and to Miss Bugard.”

Out of the furniture came faint rumbling sounds. I quickly reached out a hand and, without the pleasure of shaking theirs, withdrew in good order, a frozen smile on my lips. Reaching the vestibule as best I could, I managed to stammer, “A drink. A stiff drink.”

Narbondo came out of the lab with a graduated beaker filled with water and dissolved some effervescent drops into it. Blessed concoction—the wretched taste brought me to my senses. Then, the door to the small room closed and locked tight, came the explanation:

‘I’m glad to see, my dear Bustos, that my immortals have made quite an impact on you. Whoever would have thought that Homo sapiens, Darwin’s barely human ape, could achieve such perfection? This, my house, I assure you, is the only one in all Indo-America where Dr. Eric Stapledon’s methodology has been fully applied. You recall, no doubt, the consternation that the death of the late lamented doctor, which took place in New Zealand, occasioned in scientific circles. I flatter myself, furthermore, for having implemented his precursory labors with a few Argentinean touches. In itself, the thesis—Newton’s apple all over again—is fairly simple. The death of the body is a result, always, of the failure of some organ or other, call it the kidney, lungs, heart, or what you like. With the replacement of the organism’s various components, in themselves perishable, with other corresponding stainless or polyethylene parts, there is no earthly reason whatever why the soul, why you yourself—Bustos Domecq—should not be immortal. None of your philosophical niceties here; the body can be vulcanized and from time to time recaulked, and so the mind keeps going. Surgery brings immortality to mankind. Life’s essential aim has been attained—the mind lives on without fear of cessation. Each of our immortals is comforted by the certainty, backed by our firm’s guarantee, of being a witness in aeternum. The brain, refreshed night and day by a system of electrical charges, is the last organic bulwark in which ball bearings and cells collaborate. The rest is Formica, steel, plastics. Respiration, alimentation, generation, mobility—elimination itself!—belong to the past. Our immortal is real estate. One or two minor touches are still missing, it’s true. Oral articulation, dialogue, may still be improved. As for the cost, you need not worry yourself. By means of a procedure that circumvents legal red tape, the candidate transfers his property to us, and the Narbondo Company, Inc.—I, my son, his descendants—guarantees your upkeep, in statu quo, to the end of time. And, I might add, a money-back guarantee.”

It was then that he laid a friendly hand on my shoulder. I felt his will taking power over me. “Ha-ha! I see I’ve whetted your appetite, I’ve tempted you, dear Bustos. You’ll need a couple of months or so to get your affairs in order and to have your stock portfolio signed over to us. As far as the operation goes, naturally, as a friend, I want to save you a little something. Instead of our usual fee of ten thousand dollars, for you, ninety-five hundred—in cash, of course. The rest is yours. It goes to pay your lodging, care, and service. The medical procedure in itself is painless. No more than a question of amputation and replacement. Nothing to worry about. On the eve, just keep yourself calm, untroubled. Avoid heavy meals, tobacco, and alcohol, apart from your accustomed and imported, I hope, Scotch or two. Above all, refrain from impatience.”

“Why two months?” I asked him. “One’s enough, and then some. I come out of the anesthesia and I’m one more of your cubes. You have my address and phone number. We’ll keep in touch. I’ll be back next Friday at the latest.”

At the escape hatch he handed me the card of Nemirovski, Nemirovski, & Nemirovski, Counsellors at Law, who would put themselves at my disposal for all the details of drawing up the will. With perfect composure I walked to the subway entrance, then took the stairs at a run. I lost no time. That same night, without leaving the slightest trace behind, I moved to the New Impartial, in whose register I figure under the assumed name of Aquiles Silberman. Here, in my bedroom at the far rear of this modest hotel, wearing a false beard and dark spectacles, I am setting down this account of the facts.

The Meeting

To Susana Bombal

(1969)

Anyone leafing his way through the morning paper does so either to escape his surroundings or to provide himself with small talk for later in the day, so it is not to be wondered at that no one any longer remembers—or else remembers as in a dream—the famous and once widely discussed case of Maneco Uriarte and of Duncan. The event took place, furthermore, back around 1910, the year of the comet and the Centennial, and since then we have had and have lost so many things. Both protagonists are now dead; those who witnessed the episode solemnly swore silence. I, too, raised my hand for the oath, feeling the importance of the ritual with all the romantic seriousness of my nine or ten years. I do not know whether the others noticed that I had given my word; I do not know whether they kept theirs. Anyway, here is the story, with all the inevitable variations brought about by time and by good or bad writing. My cousin Lafinur took me to a barbecue that evening at a country house called The Laurels, which belonged to some friends of his. I cannot fix its exact location; let us take any of those suburban towns lying just to the north, shaded and quiet, that slope down to the river and that have nothing in common with sprawling Buenos Aires and its surrounding prairie. The journey by train lasted long enough to seem endless to me, but time for children—as is well known—flows slowly. It was already dark when we passed through the villa’s main gate. Here, I felt, were all the ancient, elemental things: the smell of meat cooking golden brown, the trees, the dogs, the kindling wood, and the fire that brings men together.

The guests numbered about a dozen; all were grown-ups. The eldest, I learned later, was not yet thirty. They were also—this I was soon to find out—well versed in matters about which I am still somewhat backward: race horses, the right tailors, motorcars, and notoriously expensive women. No one ruffled my shyness, no one paid any attention to me. The lamb, slowly and skillfully prepared by one of the hired men, kept us a long time in the big dining room. The dates of vintages were argued back and forth. There was a guitar; my cousin, if I remember correctly, sang a couple of Elías Regules’ ballads about gauchos in the back country of Uruguay and some verses in dialect, in the incipient lunfardo of those days, about a knife fight in a brothel on Junín Street. Coffee and Havana cigars were brought in. Not a word about getting back. I felt (in the words of the poet Lugones) the fear of what is suddenly too late. I dared not look at the clock. In order to disguise my boyish loneliness among grown-ups, I put away—not really liking it—a glass or two of wine. Uriarte, in a loud voice, proposed to Duncan a two-handed game of poker. Someone objected that that kind of play made for a poor game and suggested a hand of four. Duncan agreed, but Uriarte, with a stubbornness that I did not understand and that I did not try to understand, insisted on the first scheme. Outside of truco—a game whose real aim is to pass time with mischief and verses—and of the modest mazes of solitaire, I never enjoyed cards. I slipped away without anyone’s noticing. A rambling old house, unfamiliar and dark (only in the dining room was there light), means more to a boy than a new country means to a traveler. Step by step, I explored the rooms; I recall a billiard room, a long gallery with rectangular and diamond-shaped panes, a couple of rocking chairs, and a window from which you could just make out a summerhouse. In the darkness I lost my way; the owner of the house, whose name, as I recall after all these years, may have been Acevedo or Acebal, finally came across me somehow. Out of kindness or perhaps out of a collector’s vanity, he led me to a display cabinet. On lighting a lamp, I saw the glint of steel. It was a collection of knives that had once been in the hands of famous fighters. He told me that he had a bit of land somewhere to the north around Pergamino, and that he had been picking up these things on his travels back and forth across the province. He opened the cabinet and, without looking at what was written on the tags, he began giving me accounts of each item; they were more or less the same except for dates and place names. I asked him whether among the weapons he might have the dagger of Juan Moreira, who was in that day the archetype of the gaucho, as later Martín Fierro and Don Segundo Sombra would be. He had to confess that he hadn’t but that he could show me one like it, with a U-shaped crosspiece in the hilt. He was interrupted by the sound of angry voices. At once he shut the cabinet and turned to leave; I followed him.

Uriarte was shouting that his opponent had tried to cheat him. All the others stood around the two players. Duncan, I remember, was a taller man than the rest of the company, and was well built, though somewhat round-shouldered; his face was expressionless, and his hair was so light it was almost white. Maneco Uriarte was nervous, dark, with perhaps a touch of Indian blood, and wore a skimpy, petulant moustache. It was obvious that everybody was drunk; I do not know whether there were two or three emptied bottles on the floor or whether an excess of movies suggests this false memory to me. Uriarte’s insults did not let up; at first sharp, they now grew obscene. Duncan appeared not to hear, but finally, as though weary, he got up and threw a punch. From the floor, Uriarte snarled that he was not going to take this outrage, and he challenged Duncan to fight.

Duncan said no, and added, as though to explain, “The trouble is I’m afraid of you.” Everybody howled with laughter.

Uriarte, picking himself up, answered, “I’m going to have it out with you, and right now.”

Someone—may he be forgiven for it—remarked that weapons were not lacking.

I do not know who went and opened the glass cabinet.

Maneco Uriarte picked out the showiest and longest dagger, the one with the U-shaped crosspiece; Duncan, almost absentmindedly, picked a wooden-handled knife with the stamp of a tiny tree on the blade. Someone else said it was just like Maneco to play it safe, to choose a sword. It astonished no one that his hand began shaking; what was astonishing is that the same thing happened with Duncan.

Tradition demands that men about to fight should respect the house in which they are guests, and step outside. Half on a spree, half seriously, we all went out into the damp night. I was not drunk—at least, not on wine—but I was reeling with adventure; I wished very hard that someone would be killed, so that later I could tell about it and always remember it. Maybe at that moment the others were no more adult than I was, I also had the feeling that an overpowering current was dragging us on and would drown us. Nobody believed the least bit in Maneco’s accusation; everyone saw it as the fruit of an old rivalry, exacerbated by the wine.

We pushed our way through a clump of trees, leaving behind the summerhouse. Uriarte and Duncan led the way, wary of each other. The rest of us strung ourselves out around the edge of an opening of lawn. Duncan had stopped there in the moonlight and said, with mild authority, “This looks like the right place.”

The two men stood in the center, not quite knowing what to do. A voice rang out: “Let go of all that hardware and use your hands!”

But the men were already fighting. They began clumsily, almost as if they were afraid of hurting each other; they began by watching the blades, but later their eyes were on one another. Uriarte had laid aside his anger, Duncan his contempt or aloofness. Danger, in some way, had transfigured them; these were now two men fighting, not boys. I had imagined the fight as a chaos of steel; instead, I was able to follow it, or almost follow it, as though it were a game of chess. The intervening years may, of course, have exaggerated or blurred what I saw. I do not know how long it lasted; there are events that fall outside the common measure of time.

Without ponchos to act as shields, they used their forearms to block each lunge of the knife. Their sleeves, soon hanging in shreds, grew black with blood. I thought that we had gone wrong in supposing that they knew nothing about this kind of fencing. I noticed right off that they handled themselves in different ways. Their weapons were unequal. Duncan, in order to make up for his disadvantage, tried to stay in close to the other man; Uriarte kept stepping back to be able to lunge out with long, low thrusts. The same voice that had called attention to the display cabinet shouted out now: “They’re killing each other! Stop them!”

But no one dared break it up. Uriarte had lost ground; Duncan charged him. They were almost body to body now. Uriarte’s weapon sought Duncan’s face. Suddenly the blade seemed shorter, for it was piercing the taller man’s chest. Duncan lay stretched out on the grass. It was at this point that he said, his voice very low, “How strange. All this is like a dream.”He did not shut his eyes, he did not move, and I had seen a man kill another man.

Maneco Uriarte bent over the body, sobbing openly, and begged to be forgiven. The thing he had just done was beyond him. I know now that he regretted less having committed a crime than having carried out a senseless act.

I did not want to look anymore. What I had wished for so much had happened, and it left me shaken. Lafinur told me later that they had had to struggle hard to pull out the weapon. A makeshift council was formed. They decided to lie as little as possible and to elevate this duel with knives to a duel with swords. Four of them volunteered as seconds, among them Acebal. In Buenos Aires anything can be fixed; someone always has a friend.

On top of the mahogany table where the men had been playing, a pack of English cards and a pile of bills lay in a jumble that nobody wanted to look at or to touch.

In the years that followed, I often considered revealing the story to some friend, but always I felt that there was a greater pleasure in being the keeper of a secret than in telling it. However, around 1929, a chance conversation suddenly moved me one day to break my long silence. The retired police captain, don José Olave, was recalling stories about men from the tough riverside neighborhood of the Retiro who had been handy with their knives; he remarked that when they were out to kill their man, scum of this kind had no use for the rules of the game, and that before all the fancy playing with daggers that you saw now on the stage, knife fights were few and far between. I said I had witnessed one, and gave him an account of what had happened nearly twenty years earlier.

He listened to me with professional attention, then said, “Are you sure Uriarte and What’s-His-Name never handled a knife before? Maybe they had picked up a thing or two around their fathers’ ranches.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Everybody there that night knew one another pretty well, and I can tell you they were all amazed at the way the two men fought.”

Olave went on in his quiet manner, as if thinking aloud, “One of the weapons had a U-shaped crosspiece in the handle. There were two daggers of that kind which becamequite famous—Moreira’s and Juan Almada’s. Almada was from down south, in Tapalquén.”

Something seemed to come awake in my memory. Olave continued. “You also mentioned a knife with a wooden handle, one with the Little Tree brand. There are thousands of them, but there was one—”

He broke off for a moment, then said, “Señor Acevedo had a big property up around Pergamino. There was another of these famous tough, from up that way—Juan Almanza was his name. This was along about the turn of the century. When he was fourteen, he killed his first man with one of these knives. From then on, for luck, he stuck to the same one. Juan Almanza and Juan Almada had it in for each other, jealous of the fact that many people confused the two. For a long time they searched high and low for one another, but they never met. Juan Almanza was killed by a stray bullet during some election brawl or other. The other man, I think, died a natural death in a hospital bed in Las Flores.”

Nothing more was said. Each of us was left with his own conclusions.

Nine or ten men, none of whom is any longer living, saw what my eyes saw—that sudden stab and the body under the night sky—but perhaps what we were really seeing was the end of another story, an older story. I began to wonder whether it was Maneco Uriarte who killed Duncan or whether in some uncanny way it could have been the weapons, not the men, which fought. I still remember how Uriarte’s hand shook when he first gripped his knife, and the same with Duncan, as though the knives were coming awake after a long sleep side by side in the cabinet. Even after their gauchos were dust, the knives—the knives, not their tools, the men—knew how to fight. And that night they fought well.

Things last longer than people; who knows whether these knives will meet again, who knows whether the story ends here.

Pedro Salvadores

To Juan Murchison

(1969)

I want to leave a written record (perhaps the first to be attempted) of one of the strangest and grimmest happenings in Argentine history. To meddle as little as possible in the telling, to abstain from picturesque details or personal conjectures is, it seems to me, the only way to do this.

A man, a woman, and the overpowering shadow of a dictator are the three characters. The man’s name was Pedro Salvadores; my grandfather Acevedo saw him days or weeks after the dictator’s downfall in the battle of Caseros. Pedro Salvadores may have been no different from anyone else, but the years and his fate set him apart. He was a gentleman like many other gentlemen of his day. He owned (let us suppose) a ranch in the country and, opposed to the tyranny, was on the Unitarian side. His wife’s family name was Planes; they lived together on Suipacha Street near the corner of Temple in what is now the heart of Buenos Aires. The house in which the event took place was much like any other, with its street door, long arched entranceway, inner grillwork gate, its rooms, its row of two or three patios. The dictator, of course, was Rosas.

One night, around 1842, Salvadores and his wife heard the growing, muffled sound of horses’ hooves out on the unpaved street and the riders shouting their drunken vivas and their threats. This time Rosas’ henchmen did not ride on. After the shouts came repeated knocks at the door; while the men began forcing it, Salvadores was able to pull the dining-room table aside, lift the rug, and hide himself down in the cellar. His wife dragged the table back in place. The mazorca broke into the house; they had come to take Salvadores. The woman said her husband had run away to Montevideo. The men did not believe her; they flogged her, they smashed all the blue chinaware (blue was the Unitarian color), they searched the whole house, but they never thought of lifting the rug. At midnight they rode away, swearing that they would soon be back.

Here is the true beginning of Pedro Salvadores’ story. He lived nine years in the cellar. For all we may tell ourselves that years are made of days and days of hours and that nine years is an abstract term and an impossible sum, the story is nonetheless gruesome. I suppose that in the darkness, which his eyes somehow learned to decipher, he had no particular thoughts, not even of his hatred or his danger. He was simply there—in the cellar—with echoes of the world he was cut off from sometimes reaching him from overhead: his wife’s footsteps, the bucket clanging against the lip of the well, a heavy rainfall in the patio. Every day of his imprisonment, for all he knew, could have been the last.

His wife let go all the servants, who could possibly have informed against them, and told her family that Salvadores was in Uruguay. Meanwhile, she earned a living for them both sewing uniforms for the army. In the course of time, she gave birth to two children; her family turned from her, thinking she had a lover. After the tyrant’s fall, they got down on their knees and begged to be forgiven.

What was Pedro Salvadores? Who was he? Was it his fear, his love, the unseen presence of Buenos Aires, or—in the long run—habit that held him prisoner? In order to keep him with her, his wife would make up news to tell him about whispered plots and rumored victories. Maybe he was a coward and she loyally hid it from him that she knew. I picture him in his cellar perhaps without a candle, without a book. Darkness probably sank him into sleep. His dreams, at the outset, were probably of that sudden night when the blade sought his throat, of the streets he knew so well, of the open plains. As the years went on, he would have been unable to escape even in his sleep; whatever he dreamed would have taken place in the cellar. At first, he may have been a man hunted down, a man in danger of his life; later (we will never know for certain), an animal at peace in its burrow or a sort of dim god.

All this went on until that summer day of 1852 when Rosas fled the country. It was only then that the secret man came out into the light of day; my grandfather spoke with him. Flabby, overweight, Salvadores was the color of wax and could not speak above a low voice. He never got back his confiscated lands; I think he died in poverty.

As with so many things, the fate of Pedro Salvadores strikes us as a symbol of something we are about to understand, but never quite do.

Rosendo’s Tale

(1969)

It was about eleven o’clock at night; I had entered the old grocery store-bar (which today is just a plain bar) at the corner of Bolívar and Venezuela. From off on one side a man signaled me with a “psst.” There must have been something forceful in his manner because I heeded him at once. He was seated at one of the small tables in front of an empty glass, and I somehow felt he had been sitting there for a long time. Neither short nor tall, he had the appearance of a common working man or maybe an old farmhand. His thin moustache was graying. Fearful of his health, like most people in Buenos Aires, he had not taken off the scarf that draped his shoulders. He asked me to have a drink with him. I sat down and we chatted. All this took place sometime back in the early thirties. This is what the man told me.

You don’t know me except maybe by reputation, but I know who you are. I’m Rosendo Juárez. The late Paredes must have told you about me. The old man could pull the wool over people’s eyes and liked to stretch a point—not to cheat anybody, mind you, but just in fun. Well, seeing you and I have nothing better to do, I’m going to tell you exactly what happened that night. The night the Butcher got killed. You put all that down in a storybook, which I’m not equipped to pass judgment on, but I want you to know the truth about all that trumped-up stuff.

Things happen to you and it’s only years later you begin understanding them. What happened to me that night really had its start a long time back. I grew up in the neighborhood of the Maldonado, way out past Floresta. The Maldonado was just a ditch then, a kind of sewer, and it’s a good thing they’ve covered it over now. I’ve always been of the opinion that the march of progress can’t be held back—not by anybody. Anyway, a man’s born where he’s born. It never entered my head to find out who my father was. Clementina Juárez—that was my mother—was a decent woman who earned a living doing laundry. As far as I know, she was from Entre Ríos or Uruguay; anyhow, she always talked about her relatives from Concepción del Uruguay. I grew up like a weed. I first learned to handle a knife the way everyone else did, fencing with a charred stick. If you jabbed your man, it left a mark. Soccer hadn’t taken us over yet—it was still in the hands of the English.

One night at the corner bar a young guy named Garmendia began taunting me, trying to pick a fight. I played deaf, but this other guy, who’d had a few, kept it up. We stepped out. Then from the sidewalk he swung open the door and said back inside to the people, “Don’t anybody worry, I’ll be right back.”

I somehow got hold of a knife. We went off toward the brook, slow, our eyes on each other, He had a few years on me. We’d played at that fencing game a number of times together, and I had the feeling he was going to cut me up in ribbons. I went down the right-hand side of the road and he went down the left. He stumbled on some dry clods of mud. That moment was all I needed. I got the jump on him, almost without thinking, and opened a slice in his face. We got locked in a clinch, there was a minute when anything might have happened, and in the end I got my knife in and it was all over. Only later on did I find out I’d been cut up, too. But only a few scratches. That night I saw how easy it was to kill a man or to get killed. The water in the brook was pretty low; stalling for time, I half hid him behind one of the brick kilns. Fool that I was, I went and slipped off that fancy ring of his that he always wore with the nice stone in it. I put it on, I straightened my hat, and I went back to the bar. I walked in nonchalant, saying to them, “Looks like the one who came back was me.”

I asked for a shot of rum and, to tell the truth, I needed it bad. It was then somebody noticed the blood on my sleeve.

I spent that whole night tossing and turning on my cot, and it was almost light outside before I dropped off and slept. Late the next day two cops came looking for me. My mother (may she rest in peace) began shrieking. They herded me along just like I was some kind of criminal. Two nights and two days I had to wait there in the cooler. Nobody came to see me, either, outside of Luis Irala—a real friend—only they wouldn’t let him in. Then the third morning the police captain sent for me. He sat there in his chair, not even looking at me, and said, “So you’re the one who took care of Garmendia, are you?”

“If that’s what you say,” I answered.

“You call me sir. And don’t get funny or try beating around the bush. Here are the sworn statements of witnesses and the ring that was found in your house. Just sign this confession and get it over with.”

He dipped the pen in the inkwell and handed it to me. “Let me do some thinking, Captain sir,” I came out with. “I’ll give you twenty-four hours where you can do some hard thinking—in the cooler. I’m not going to rush you. If you don’t care to see reason, you can get used to the idea of a little vacation up on Las Heras—the penitentiary.”

As you can probably imagine, I didn’t understand.

“Look,” he said, “if you come around, all you’ll get is a few days. Then I’ll let you go, and don Nicolás Paredes has already given me his word he’ll straighten things out for you.”

Actually, it was ten days. Then at last they remembered me. I signed what they wanted, and one of the two cops took me around to Paredes’ house on Cabrera Street.

Horses were tied to the hitching post, and in the entranceway and inside the place there were more people than around a whorehouse. It looked to me like the party headquarters. Don Nicolás, who was sipping his maté, finally got around to me. Taking his good time, he told me he was sending me out to Morón, where they were getting ready for the elections. He was putting me in touch with Mr. Laferrer, who would try me out. He had the letter written by some kid all dressed in black, who, from what I heard, made up poems about tenements and filth—stuff that no refined public would dream of reading. I thanked Paredes for the favor and left. When I got to the corner, the cop wasn’t tailing me any more.

Providence knows what it’s up to; everything had turned out for the best. Garmendia’s death, which at first had caused me a lot of worry, now opened things up for me. Of course, the law had me in the palm of their hands. If I was no use to the party they’d clap me back inside, but I felt pretty good and was counting on myself.

Mr. Laferrer warned me I was going to have to walk the straight and narrow with him, and said if I did I might even become his bodyguard. I came through with what was expected of me. In Morón, and later on in my part of town, I earned the trust of my bosses. The cops and the party kept on building up my reputation as a tough guy. I turned out to be pretty good at organizing the vote around the polls here in the capital and out in the province. I won’t take up your time going into details about brawls and bloodletting, but let me tell you, in those days elections were lively affairs. I could never stand the Radicals, who down to this day are still hanging onto the beard of their chief Alem. There wasn’t a soul around who didn’t hold me in respect. I got hold of a woman, La Lujanera, and a finelooking sorrel. For years I tried to live up to the part of the outlaw Moreira, who, in his time—the way I figure it—was probably trying to play the part of some other gaucho outlaw. I took to cards and absinthe.

An old man has a way of rambling on and on, but now I’m coming to the part I want you to hear. I wonder if I’ve already mentioned Luis Irala. The kind of friend you don’t find every day. Irala was a man already well along in years. He never was afraid of work, and he took a liking to me. In his whole life he never had anything to do with politics. He was a carpenter by trade. He never caused anyone trouble and never allowed anyone to cause him trouble. One morning he came to see me and he said, “Of course, you’ve heard by now that Casilda’s left me. Rufino Aguilera took her away from me.”

I’d known that customer around Morón. I answered, “Yes, I know all about him. Of all the Aguileras, he’s the least rotten.”

“Rotten or not, now he’ll have to reckon with me.”

I thought that over for a while and told him, “Nobody takes anything away from anybody. If Casilda left you, it’s because she cares for Rufino and you mean nothing to her.”

“And what are people going to say? That I’m a coward?”

“My advice is don’t get yourself mixed up in gossip about what people might say or about a woman who has no use for you.”

“It’s not her I’m worried about. A man who thinks five minutes straight about a woman is no man, he’s a queer. Casilda has no heart. The last night we spent together she told me I wasn’t as young as I used to be.”

“Maybe she was telling you the truth.”

“That’s what hurts. What matters to me now is Rufino.”

“Be careful there. I’ve seen Rufino in action around the polls in Merlo. He’s a flash with a knife.”

“You think I’m afraid of him?”

“I know you’re not afraid of him, but think it over. One of two things—if you kill him, you get put away; if he kills you, you go six feet under.”

“Maybe so. What would you do in my shoes?”

“I don’t know, but my own life isn’t exactly a model. I’m only a guy who became a party strong-arm man trying to cheat a jail sentence.”

“I’m not going to the strong-arm guy for any party, I’m only out to settle a debt.”

“So you’re going to risk your peace and quiet for a man you don’t know and a woman you don’t love any more?”

He wouldn’t hear me out. He just left. The next day the news came that he challenged Rufino in a saloon in Morón, and Rufino killed him. He was out to kill, and he got killed—but a fair fight, man to man. I’d given him my honest advice as a friend, but somehow I felt guilty just the same.

A few days after the wake, I went to a cockfight. I’d never been very big on cockfights, and that Sunday, to tell the truth, I had all I could do to stomach the thing. What is it in these animals, I kept thinking, that makes them gouge each other’s eyes like that?

The night of my story, the night of the end of my story, I had told the boys I’d show up at Blackie’s for the dance. So many years ago now, and that dress with the flowers my woman was wearing still comes back to me. The party was out in the backyard. Of course, there was the usual drunk or two trying to raise hell, but I took good care to see that things went off the way they ought to. It wasn’t twelve yet when these strangers put in an appearance. One of them— the one they called the Butcher and who got himself stabbed in the back that same night—stood us all to a round of drinks. The odd thing was that the two of us looked a lot alike. Something was in the air; he drew up to me and began praising me up and down. He said he was from the Northside, where he’d heard a thing or two about me. I let him go on, but I was already sizing him up. He wasn’t letting the gin alone, either, maybe to work up his courage, and finally he came out and asked me to fight. Then something happened that nobody ever understood. In that big loudmouth I saw myself, the same as in a mirror, and it made me feel ashamed. I wasn’t scared; maybe if I’d been scared I’d have fought with him. I just stood there as if nothing happened. This other guy, with his face just inches away from mine, began shouting so everyone could hear, “The trouble is you’re nothing but a coward.”

“Maybe so,” I said. “I’m not afraid of being taken for a coward. If it makes you feel good, why don’t you say you’ve called me a son of a bitch, too, and that I’ve let you spit all over me. Now—are you any happier?”

La Lujanera took out the knife I always carried in my vest lining and, burning up inside, she shoved it into my hand. To clinch it, she said, “Rosendo, I think you’re going to need this.” I let it drop and walked out, but not hurrying. The boys made way for me. They were stunned. What did it matter to me what they thought.

To make a clean break with that life, I took off for Uruguay, where I found myself work as a teamster. Since coming back to Buenos Aires I’ve settled around here. San Telmo always was a respectable neighborhood.

An Autobiographical Essay

— With Norman Thomas di Giovanni

Family and Childhood

I cannot tell whether my first memories go back to the eastern or to the western bank of the muddy, slow-moving Río de la Plata—to Montevideo, where we spent long, lazy holidays in the villa of my uncle Francisco Haedo, or to Buenos Aires. I was born there, in the very heart of that city, in 1899, on Tucumán Street, between Suipacha and Esmeralda, in a small, unassuming house belonging to my maternal grandparents. Like most of the houses of that day, it had a flat roof; a long, arched entranceway, called a zaguán; a cistern, where we got our water; and two patios. We must have moved out to the suburb of Palermo quite soon, because there I have my first memories of another house with two patios, a garden with a tall windmill pump, and, on the other side of the garden, an empty lot. Palermo at that time—the Palermo where we lived, Serrano and Guatemala—was on the shabby northern outskirts of town, and many people, ashamed of saying they lived there, spoke in a dim way of living on the Northside. We lived in one of the few two-story homes on our street; the rest of the neighborhood was made up of low houses and vacant lots. I have often spoken of this area as a slum, but I do not quite mean that in the American sense of the word. In Palermo lived shabby, genteel people as well as more undesirable sorts. There was also a Palermo of hoodlums, called compadritos, famed for their knife fights, but this Palermo was only later to capture my imagination, since we did our best—our successful best—to ignore it. Unlike our neighbor Evaristo Carriego, however, who was the first Argentine poet to explore the literary possibilities that lay there at hand. As for myself, I was hardly aware of the existence of compadritos, since I lived essentially indoors.

My father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, worked as a lawyer. He was a philosophical anarchist—a disciple of Spencer— and also a teacher of psychology at the Normal School for Modern Languages, where he gave his course in English, using as his text William James’s shorter book of psychology. My father’s English came from the fact that his mother, Frances Haslam, was born in Staffordshire of Northumbrian stock. A rather unlikely set of circumstances brought her to South America. Fanny Haslam’s elder sister married an Italian-Jewish engineer named Jorge Suárez, who brought the first horse-drawn tramcars to Argentina, where he and his wife settled and sent for Fanny. I remember an anecdote concerning this venture. Suárez was a guest at General Urquiza’s “palace” in Entre Ríos, and very improvidently won his first game of cards with the General, who was the stern dictator of that province and not above throat-cutting. When the game was over, Suárez was told by alarmed fellow-guests that if he wanted the license to run his tramcars in the province, it was expected of him to lose a certain amount of gold coins each night. Urquiza was such a poor player that Suárez had a great deal of trouble losing the appointed sums.

It was in Paraná, the capital city of Entre Ríos, that Fanny Haslam met Colonel Francisco Borges. This was in 1870 or 1871, during the siege of the city by the montoneros, or gaucho militia, of Ricardo López Jordán. Borges, riding at the head of his regiment, commanded the troops defending the city. Fanny Haslam saw him from the flat roof of her house; that very night a ball was given to celebrate the arrival of the government relief forces. Fanny and the Colonel met, danced, fell in love, and eventually married.

My father was the younger of two sons. He had been born in Entre Ríos and used to explain to my grandmother, a respectable English lady, that he wasn’t really an Entrerriano, since “I was begotten on the pampa.” My grandmother would say, with English reserve, “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.” My father’s words, of course, were true, since my grandfather was, in the early 1870’s, Commander-in-Chief of the northern and western frontiers of the Province of Buenos Aires. As a child, I heard many stories from Fanny Haslam about frontier life in those days. One of these I set down in my “Story of the Warrior and the Captive.” My grandmother had spoken with a number of Indian chieftains, whose rather uncouth names were, I think, Simón Coliqueo, Catriel, Pincén, and Namuncurá. In 1874, during one of our civil wars, my grandfather, Colonel Borges, met his death. He was fortyone at the time. In the complicated circumstances surrounding his defeat at the battle of La Verde, he rode out slowly on horseback, wearing a white poncho and followed by ten or twelve of his men, toward the enemy lines, where he was struck by two Remington bullets. This was the first time Remington rifles were used in the Argentine, and it tickles my fancy to think that the firm that shaves me every morning bears the same name as the one that killed my grandfather.

Fanny Haslam was a great reader. When she was over eighty, people used to say, in order to be nice to her, that nowadays there were no writers who could vie with Dickens and Thackeray. My grandmother would answer, “On the whole, I rather prefer Arnold Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells.” When she died, at the age of ninety, in 1935, she called us to her side and said, in English (her Spanish was fluent but poor), in her thin voice, “I am only an old woman dying very, very slowly. There is nothing remarkable or interesting about this.” She could see no reason whatever why the whole household should be upset, and she apologized for taking so long to die.

My father was very intelligent and, like all intelligent men, very kind. Once, he told me that I should take a good look at soldiers, uniforms, barracks, flags, churches, priests, and butcher shops, since all these things were about to disappear, and I could tell my children that I had actually seen them. The prophecy has not yet come true, unfortunately. My father was such a modest man that he would have liked being invisible. Though he was very proud of his English ancestry, he used to joke about it, saying with feigned perplexity, “After all, what are the English? Just a pack of German agricultural laborers.” His idols were Shelley, Keats, and Swinburne. As a reader, he had two interests. First, books on metaphysics and psychology (Berkeley, Hume, Royce, and William James). Second, literature and books about the East (Lane, Burton, and Payne). It was he who revealed the power of poetry to me—the fact that words are not only a means of communication but also magic symbols and music. When I recite poetry in English now, my mother tells me I take on his very voice. He also, without my being aware of it, gave me my first lessons in philosophy. When I was still quite young, he showed me, with the aid of a chessboard, the paradoxes of Zeno— Achilles and the tortoise, the unmoving flight of the arrow, the impossibility of motion. Later, without mentioning Berkeley’s name, he did his best to teach me the rudiments of idealism.

My mother, Leonor Acevedo de Borges, comes of old Argentine and Uruguayan stock, and at ninety-four is still hale and hearty and a good Catholic. When I was growing up, religion belonged to women and children; most men in Buenos Aires were freethinkers—though, had they been asked, they might have called themselves Catholics. I think I inherited from my mother her quality of thinking the best of people and also her strong sense of friendship. My mother has always had a hospitable mind. From the time she learned English, through my father, she has done most of her reading in that language. After my father’s death, finding that she was unable to keep her mind on the printed page, she tried her hand at translating William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy in order to compel herself to concentrate. The translation found its way into print, and she was honored for this by a society of Buenos Aires Armenians. Later on, she translated some of Hawthorne’s stories and one of Herbert Read’s books on art, and she also produced some of the translations of Melville, Virginia Woolf, and Faulkner that are considered mine. She has always been a companion to me—especially in later years, when I went blind—and an understanding and forgiving friend. For years, until recently, she handled all my secretarial work, answering letters, reading to me, taking down my dictation, and also traveling with me on many occasions both at home and abroad. It was she, though I never gave a thought to it at the time, who quietly and effectively fostered my literary career.

Her grandfather was Colonel Isidoro Suárez, who, in 1824, at the age of twenty-four, led a famous charge of Peruvian and Colombian cavalry, which turned the tide of the battle of Junín, in Peru. This was the next to last battle of the South American War of Independence. Although Suárez was a second cousin to Juan Manuel de Rosas, who ruled as dictator in Argentina from 1835 to 1852, he preferred exile and poverty in Montevideo to living under a tyranny in Buenos Aires. His lands were, of course, confiscated, and one of his brothers was executed. Another member of my mother’s family was Francisco de Laprida, who, in 1816, in Tucumán, where he presided over the Congress, declared the independence of the Argentine Confederation, and was killed in 1829 in a civil war. My mother’s father, Isidoro Acevedo, though a civilian, took part in the fighting of yet other civil wars in the 1860’s and 1880’s. So, on both sides of my family, I have military forebears; this may account for my yearning after that epic destiny which my gods denied me, no doubt wisely.

I have already said that I spent a great deal of my boyhood indoors. Having no childhood friends, my sister and I invented two imaginary companions, named, for some reason or other, Quilos and The Windmill. (When they finally bored us, we told our mother that they had died.) I was always very nearsighted and wore glasses, and I was rather frail. As most of my people had been soldiers—even my father’s brother had been a naval officer—and I knew I would never be, I felt ashamed, quite early, to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of action. Throughout my boyhood, I thought that to be loved would have amounted to an injustice. I did not feel I deserved any particular love, and I remember my birthdays filled me with shame, because everyone heaped gifts on me when I thought that I had done nothing to deserve them—that I was a kind of fake. After the age of thirty or so, I got over the feeling.At home, both English and Spanish were commonly used. If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father’s library. In fact, I sometimes think I have never strayed outside that library. I can still picture it. It was in a room of its own, with glass-fronted shelves, and must have contained several thousand volumes. Being so nearsighted, I have forgotten most of the faces of that time (perhaps even when I think of my grandfather Acevedo I am thinking of his photograph), and yet I vividly remember so many of the steel engravings in Chambers’s Encyclopædia and in the Britannica. The first novel I ever read through was Huckleberry Finn. Next came Roughing It and Flush Days in California. I also read books by Captain Marryat, Wells’s First Men in the Moon, Poe, a one-volume edition of Longfellow, Treasure Island, Dickens, Don Quixote, Tom Brown’s School Days, Grimms’
Fairy Tales, Lewis Carroll,
The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green
(a now forgotten book), Burton’s
A Thousand Nights and a Night. The Burton, filled with what was then considered obscenity, was forbidden, and I had to read it in hiding up on the roof. But at the time, I was so carried away with the magic that I took no notice whatever of the objectionable parts, reading the tales unaware of any other significance. All the foregoing books I read in English. When later I read
Don Quixote in the original, it sounded like a bad translation to me. I still remember those red volumes with the gold lettering of the Garnier edition. At some point, my father’s library was broken up, and when I read the
Quixote in another edition I had the feeling that it wasn’t the real
Quixote. Later, I had a friend get me the Gamier, with the same steel engravings, the same footnotes, and also the same errata. All those things form part of the book for me; this I consider the real
Quixote.

In Spanish, I also read many of the books by Eduardo Gutiérrez about Argentine outlaws and desperadoes—Juan Moreira foremost among them—as well as his Siluetas militares, which contains a forceful account of Colonel Borges’ death. My mother forbade the reading of Martín Fierro, since that was a book fit only for hoodlums and schoolboys and, besides, was not about real gauchos at all. This too I read on the sly. Her feelings were based on the fact that Hernández had been an upholder of Rosas and therefore an enemy to our Unitarian ancestors, I read also Sarmiento’s Facundo, many books on Greek mythology, and later Norse. Poetry came to me through English—Shelley, Keats, FitzGerald, and Swinburne, those great favorites of my father, who could quote them voluminously, and often did.

A tradition of literature ran through my father’s family. His great-uncle Juan Crisóstomo Lafinur was one of the first Argentine poets, and he wrote an ode on the death of his friend General Manuel Belgrano, in 1820. One of my father’s cousins, Álvaro Melián Lafinur, whom I knew from childhood, was a leading minor poet and later found his way into the Argentine Academy of Letters. My father’s maternal grandfather, Edward Young Haslam, edited one of the first English papers in Argentina, the Southern Cross, and was a Doctor of Philosophy or Letters, I’m not sure which, of the University of Heidelberg. Haslam could not afford Oxford or Cambridge, so he made his way to Germany, where he got his degree, going through the whole course in Latin. Eventually, he died in Paraná. My father wrote a novel, which he published in Majorca in 1921, about the history of Entre Ríos. It was called The Caudillo. He also wrote (and destroyed) a book of essays, and published a translation of FitzGerald’s Omar Khayyám in the same meter as the original. He destroyed a book of Oriental stories—in the manner of the Arabian Nights—and a drama, Hacia la nada (Toward Nothingness), about a man’s disappointment in his son. He published some fine sonnets after the style of the Argentine poet Enrique Banchs. From the time I was a boy, when blindness came to him, it was tacitly understood that I had to fulfill the literary destiny that circumstances had denied my father. This was something that was taken for granted (and such things are far more important than things that are merely said). I was expected to be a writer.

I first started writing when I was six or seven. I tried to imitate classic writers of Spanish—Miguel de Cervantes, for example. I had set down in quite bad English a kind of handbook on Greek mythology, no doubt cribbed from Lemprière. This may have been my first literary venture. My first story was a rather nonsensical piece after the manner of Cervantes, an old-fashioned romance called “La visera fatal” (The Fatal Helmet). I very neatly wrote these things into copybooks. My father never interfered. He wanted me to commit all my own mistakes, and once said, “Children educate their parents, not the other way around.” When I was nine or so, I translated Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” into Spanish, and it was published in one of the Buenos Aires dailies, El País. Since it was signed merely “Jorge Borges,” people naturally assumed the translation was my father’s.

I take no pleasure whatever in recalling my early schooldays. To begin with, I did not start school until I was nine. This was because my father, as an anarchist, distrusted all enterprises run by the State. As I wore spectacles and dressed in an Eton collar and tie, I was jeered at and bullied by most of my schoolmates, who were amateur hooligans. I cannot remember the name of the school but recall that it was on Thames Street. My father used to say that Argentine history had taken the place of the catechism, so we were expected to worship all things Argentine. We were taught Argentine history, for example, before we were allowed any knowledge of the many lands and many centuries that went into its making. As far as Spanish composition goes, I was taught to write in a flowery way: Aquellos que lucharon por una patria libre, independiente, gloriosa . . . (Those who struggled for a free, independent, and glorious nation . . .). Later on, in Geneva, I was to be told that such writing was meaningless and that I must see things through my own eyes. My sister Norah, who was born in 1901, of course attended a girls’ school.

During all these years, we usually spent our summers out in Adrogué, some ten or fifteen miles to the south of Buenos Aires, where we had a place of our own—a large one-story house with grounds, two summerhouses, a windmill, and a shaggy brown sheepdog. Adrogué then was a lost and undisturbed maze of summer homes surrounded by iron fences with masonry planters on the gateposts, of parks, of streets that radiated out of the many plazas, and of the ubiquitous smell of eucalyptus trees. We continued to visit Adrogué for decades.My first real experience of the pampa came around 1909, on a trip we took to a place belonging to relatives near San Nicolás, to the northwest of Buenos Aires. I remember that the nearest house was a kind of blur on the horizon. This endless distance, I found out, was called the pampa, and when I learned that the farmhands were gauchos, like the characters in Eduardo Gutiérrez, that gave them a certain glamor. I have always come to things after coming to books.

Once, I was allowed to accompany them on horseback, taking cattle to the river early one morning. The men were small and darkish and wore bombachas, a kind of wide, baggy trousers. When I asked them if they knew how to swim, they replied, “Water is meant for cattle.” My mother gave a doll, in a large cardboard box, to the foreman’s daughter. The next year, we went back and asked after the little girl. “What a delight the doll has been to her!” they told us. And we were shown it, still in its box, nailed to the wall like an image. Of course, the girl was allowed only to look at it, not to touch it, for it might have been soiled or broken. There it was, high up out of harm’s way, worshiped from afar. Lugones has written that in Córdoba, before magazines came in, he had many times seen a playing card used as a picture and nailed to the wall in gauchos’ shacks. The four of copas, with its small lion and two towers, was particularly coveted. I think I began writing a poem about gauchos, probably under the influence of the poet Ascasubi, before I went to Geneva. I recall trying to work in as many gaucho words as I could, but the technical difficulties were beyond me. I never got past a few stanzas.

Europe

In 1914, we moved to Europe. My father’s eyesight had begun to fail and I remember his saying, “How on earth can I sign my name to legal papers when I am unable to read them?” Forced into early retirement, he planned our trip in exactly ten days. The world was unsuspicious then; there were no passports or other red tape. We first spent some weeks in Paris, a city that neither then nor since has particularly charmed me, as it does every other good Argentine. Perhaps, without knowing it, I was always a bit of a Britisher; in fact, I always think of Waterloo as a victory. The idea of the trip was for my sister and me to go to school in Geneva; we were to live with my maternal grandmother, who traveled with us and eventually died there, while my parents toured the Continent. At the same time, my father was to be treated by a famous Genevan eye doctor. Europe in those days was cheaper than Buenos Aires, and Argentine money then stood for something. We were so ignorant of history, however, that we had no idea that the First World War would break out in August. My mother and father were in Germany when it happened, but managed to get back to us in Geneva. A year or so later, despite the war, we were able to journey across the Alps into northern Italy. I have vivid memories of Verona and Venice. In the vast and empty amphitheater of Verona I recited, loud and bold, several gaucho verses from Ascasubi.

That first fall—1914—I started school at the College of Geneva, founded by John Calvin. It was a day school. In my class there were some forty of us; a good half were foreigners. The chief subject was Latin, and I soon found out that one could let other studies slide a bit as long as one’s Latin was good. All these other courses, however—algebra, chemistry, physics, mineralogy, botany, zoology—were studied in French. That year, I passed all my exams successfully, except for French itself. Without a word to me, my fellow-schoolmates sent a petition around to the headmaster, which they had all signed. They pointed out that I had had to study all of the different subjects in French, a language I also had to learn. They asked the headmaster to take this into account, and he very kindly did so. At first, I had not even understood when a teacher was calling on me, because my name was pronounced in the French manner, in a single syllable (rhyming roughly with “forge”), while we pronounce it with two syllables, the “g” sounding like a strong Scottish “h.” Every time I had to answer, my schoolmates would nudge me.

We lived in a flat on the southern, or old, side of town. I still know Geneva far better than I know Buenos Aires, which is easily explained by the fact that in Geneva no two streetcorners are alike and one quickly learns the differences. Every day, I walked along that green and icy river, the Rhone, which runs through the very heart of the city, spanned by seven quite different-looking bridges. The Swiss are rather proud and standoffish. My two bosom friends were of Polish-Jewish origin—Simon Jichlinski and Maurice Abramowicz. One became a lawyer and the other a physician. I taught them to play truco, and they learned so well and fast that at the end of our first game they left me without a cent. I became a good Latin scholar, while I did most of my private reading in English. At home, we spoke Spanish, but my sister’s French soon became so good she even dreamed in it. I remember my mother’s coming home one day and finding Norah hidden behind a red plush curtain, crying out in fear, “Une mouche, une mouche!” It seems she had adopted the French notion that flies are dangerous. “You come out of there,” my mother told her, somewhat unpatriotically. “You were born and bred among flies!” As a result of the war—apart from the Italian trip and journeys inside Switzerland—we did no traveling. Later on, braving German submarines and in the company of only four or five other passengers, my English grandmother joined us.

On my own, outside of school, I took up the study of German. I was sent on this adventure by Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Retailored), which dazzled and also bewildered me. The hero, Diogenes Devil’sdung, is a German professor of idealism. In German literature I was looking for something Germanic, akin to Tacitus, but I was only later to find this in Old English and in Old Norse. German literature turned out to be romantic and sickly. At first, I tried Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason but was defeated by it, as most people—including most Germans—are. Then I thought verse would be easier, because of its brevity. So I got hold of a copy of Heine’s early poems, the Lyrisches Intermezzo, and a German-English dictionary. Little by little, owing to Heine’s simple vocabulary, I found I could do without the dictionary. Soon I had worked my way into the loveliness of the language. I also managed to read Meyrink’s novel Der Golem. (In 1969, when I was in Israel, I talked over the Bohemian legend of the Golem with Gershom Scholem, a leading scholar of Jewish mysticism, whose name I had twice used as the only possible rhyming word in a poem of my own on the Golem.) I tried to be interested in Jean-Paul Richter, for Carlyle’s and De Quincey’s sake—this was around 1917—but I soon discovered that I was very bored by the reading. Richter, in spite of his two British champions, seemed to me very longwinded and perhaps a passionless writer. I became, however, very interested in German expressionism and still think of it as beyond other contemporary schools, such as imagism, cubism, futurism, surrealism, and so on. A few years later, in Madrid, I was to attempt some of the first, and perhaps the only, translations of a number of expressionist poets into Spanish.

At some point while in Switzerland, I began reading Schopenhauer. Today, were I to choose a single philosopher, I would choose him. If the riddle of the universe can be stated in words, I think these words would be in his writings. I have read him many times over, both in German and, with my father and his close friend Macedonio Fernández, in translation. I still think of German as being a beautiful language—perhaps more beautiful than the literature it has produced. French, rather paradoxically, has a fine literature despite its fondness for schools and movements, but the language itself is, I think, rather ugly. Things tend to sound trivial when they are said in French. In fact, I even think of Spanish as being the better of the two languages, though Spanish words are far too long and cumbersome. As an Argentine writer, I have to cope with Spanish and so am only too aware of its shortcomings. I remember that Goethe wrote that he had to deal with the worst language in the world—German. I suppose most writers think along these lines concerning the language they have to struggle with. As for Italian, I have read and reread The Divine Comedy in more than a dozen different editions. I’ve also read Ariosto, Tasso, Croce, and Gentile, but I am quite unable to speak Italian or to follow an Italian play or film.

It was also in Geneva that I first met Walt Whitman, through a German translation by Johannes Schlaf (“Als ich in Alabama meinen Morgengang machte”—“As I have walk’d in Alabama my morning walk”). Of course, I was struck by the absurdity of reading an American poet in German, so I ordered a copy of
Leaves of Grass from London. I remember it still—bound in green. For a time, I thought of Whitman not only as a great poet but as the only poet. In fact, I thought that all poets the world over had been merely leading up to Whitman until 1855, and that not to imitate him was a proof of ignorance. This feeling had already come over me with Carlyle’s prose, which is now unbearable to me, and with the poetry of Swinburne. These were phases I went through. Later on, I was to go through similar experiences of being overwhelmed by some particular writer.

We remained in Switzerland until 1919. After three or four years in Geneva, we spent a year in Lugano. I had my bachelor’s degree by then, and it was now understood that I should devote myself to writing. I wanted to show my manuscripts to my father, but he told me he didn’t believe in advice and that I must work my way all by myself through trial and error. I had been writing sonnets in English and in French. The English sonnets were poor imitations of Wordsworth, and the French, in their own watery way, were imitative of symbolist poetry. I still recall one line of my French experiments: “Petite boîte noire pour le violon casse.” The whole piece was titled “Poeme pour être recité avec un accent russe.” As I knew I wrote a foreigner’s French, I thought a Russian accent better than an Argentine one. In my English experiments, I affected some eighteenth-century mannerisms, such as “o’er” instead of “over” and, for the sake of metrical ease, “doth sing” instead of “sings.” I knew, however, that Spanish would be my unavoidable destiny.

We decided to go home, but to spend a year or so in Spain first. Spain at that time was slowly being discovered by Argentines. Until then, even eminent writers like Leopoldo Lugones and Ricardo Güiraldes deliberately left Spain out of their European travels. This was no whim. In Buenos Aires, Spaniards always held menial jobs—as domestic servants, waiters, and laborers—or were small tradesmen, and we Argentines never thought of ourselves as Spanish. We had, in fact, left off being Spaniards in 1816, when we declared our independence from Spain. When, as a boy, I read Prescott’s Conquest of Peru, it amazed me to find that he portrayed the conquistadors in a romantic way. To me, descended from certain of these officials, they were an uninteresting lot. Through French eyes, however, Latin Americans saw the Spaniards as picturesque, thinking of them in terms of the stock in trade of García Lorca— gypsies, bullfights, and Moorish architecture. But though Spanish was our language and we came mostly of Spanish and Portuguese blood, my own family never thought of our trip in terms of going back to Spain after an absence of some three centuries.

We went to Majorca because it was cheap, beautiful, and had hardly any tourists but ourselves. We lived there nearly a whole year, in Palma and in Valldemosa, a village high up in the hills. I went on studying Latin, this time under the tutelage of a priest, who told me that since the innate was sufficient to his needs, he had never attempted reading a novel. We went over Virgil, of whom I still think highly. I remember I astonished the natives by my fine swimming, for I had learned in swift rivers, such as the Uruguay and the Rhone, while Majorcans were used only to a quiet, tideless sea. My father was writing his novel, which harked back to old times during the civil war of the 1870’s in his native Entre Ríos. I recall giving him some quite bad metaphors, borrowed from the German expressionists, which he accepted out of resignation. He had some five hundred copies of the book printed, and brought them back to Buenos Aires, where he gave them away to friends. Every time the word “Paraná”—his home town—had come up in the manuscript, the printers changed it to “Panamá,” thinking they were correcting a mistake. Not to give them trouble, and also seeing it was funnier that way, my father let this pass. Now I repent my youthful intrusions into his book. Seventeen years later, before he died, he told me that he would very much like me to rewrite the novel in a straightforward way, with all the fine writing and purple patches left out. I myself in those days wrote a story about a werewolf and sent it to a popular magazine in Madrid,
La Esfera, whose editors very wisely turned it down.

The winter of 1919-20 we spent in Seville, where I saw my first poem into print. It was titled “Hymn to the Sea” and appeared in the magazine Grecia, in its issue of December 31, 1919.

In the poem, I tried my hardest to be Walt Whitman:

O sea! O myth! O sun! O wide resting place!

I know why 1 love you. I know that we are both very old,
that we have known each other for centuries. . . .

O Protean, I have been born of you—
both of us chained and wandering, both of us hungering for stars,
both of us with hopes and disappointments. . . !

Today, I hardly think of the sea, or even of myself, as hungering for stars. Years after, when I came across Arnold Bennett’s phrase “the third-rate grandiose,” I understood at once what he meant. And yet when I arrived in Madrid a few months later, as this was the only poem I had ever printed, people there thought of me as a singer of the sea.

In Seville, I fell in with the literary group formed around
Grecia. This group, who called themselves ultraists, had set out to renew literature, a branch of the arts of which they knew nothing whatever. One of them once told me his whole reading had been the Bible, Cervantes, Darío, and one or two of the books of the Master, Rafael Cansinos-Assens. It baffled my Argentine mind to learn that they had no French and no inkling at all that such a thing as English literature existed. I was even introduced to a local worthy popularly known as “the Humanist” and was not long in discovering that his Latin was far smaller than mine. As for Grecia itself, the editor, Isaac del Vando Villar, had the whole corpus of his poetry written for him by one or another of his assistants. I remember one of them telling me one day, “I’m very busy—Isaac is writing a poem.”

Next, we went to Madrid, and there the great event to me was my friendship with Rafael Cansinos-Assens. I still like to think of myself as his disciple. He had come from Seville, where he had studied for the priesthood, but, having found the name Cansinos in the archives of the Inquisition, he decided he was a Jew. This led him to the study of Hebrew, and later on he even had himself circumcised. Literary friends from Andalusia took me to meet him. I timidly congratulated him on a poem he had written about the sea. “Yes,” he said, “and how I’d like to see it before I die.” He was a tall man with the Andalusian contempt for all things Castilian. The most remarkable fact about Cansinos was that he lived completely for literature, without regard for money or fame. He was a fine poet and wrote a book of psalms—chiefly erotic—called El candelabro de los siete brazos, which was published in 1914. He also wrote novels, stories, and essays, and, when I knew him, presided over a literary circle.

Every Saturday I would go to the Café Colonial, where we met at midnight, and the conversation lasted until daybreak. Sometimes there were as many as twenty or thirty of us. The group despised all Spanish local color— cante jongo and bullfights. They admired American jazz, and were more interested in being Europeans than Spaniards. Cansinos would propose a subject—The Metaphor, Free Verse, The Traditional Forms of Poetry, Narrative Poetry, The Adjective, The Verb. In his own quiet way, he was a dictator, allowing no unfriendly allusions to contemporary writers and trying to keep the talk on a high plane.

Cansinos was a wide reader. He had translated De Quincey’s Opium-Eater, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius from the Greek, novels of Barbusse, and Schwob’s
Vies imaginaires.

Later, he was to undertake complete translations of Goethe and Dostoevski. He also made the first Spanish version of the Arabian Nights, which is very free compared to Burton’s or Lane’s, but which makes, I think, for more pleasurable reading. Once, I went to see him and he took me into his library. Or, rather, I should say his whole house was a library. It was like making your way through a woods. He was too poor to have shelves, and the books were piled one on top of the other from floor to ceiling, forcing you to thread your way among the vertical columns. Cansinos seemed to me as if he were all the past of that Europe I was leaving behind—something like the symbol of all culture, Western and Eastern. But he had a perversity that made him fail to get on with his leading contemporaries. It lay in writing books that lavishly praised second or third-rate writers. At the time, Ortega y Gasset was at the height of his fame, but Cansinos thought of him as a bad philosopher and a bad writer. What I got from him, chiefly, was the pleasure of literary conversation. Also, I was stimulated by him to far-flung reading. In writing, I began aping him. He wrote long and flowing sentences with an un-Spanish and strongly Hebrew flavor to them.

Oddly, it was Cansinos who, in 1919, invented the term “ultraism.” He thought Spanish literature had always been behind the times. Under the pen name of Juan Las, he wrote some short, laconic ultraist pieces. The whole thing—I see now—was done in a spirit of mockery. But we youngsters took it very seriously. Another of the earnest followers was Guillermo de Torre, whom I met in Madrid that spring and who married my sister Norah nine years later.

In Madrid at this time, there was another group gathered around Ramón Gómez de la Serna. I went there once and didn’t like the way they behaved. They had a buffoon who wore a bracelet with a rattle attached. He would be made to shake hands with people and the rattle would rattle and Gómez de la Serna would invariably say, “Where’s the snake?” That was supposed to be funny. Once, he turned to me proudly and remarked, “You’ve never seen this kind of thing in Buenos Aires, have you?” I owned, thank God, that I hadn’t.

In Spain, I wrote two books. One was a series of essays called, I now wonder why, Los naipes del tahur (The Sharper’s Cards). They were literary and political essays (I was still an anarchist and a freethinker and in favor of pacifism), written under the influence of Pío Baroja. Their aim was to be bitter and relentless, but they were, as a matter of fact, quite tame. I went in for using such words as “fools,” “harlots,” “liars.” Failing to find a publisher, I destroyed the manuscript on my return to Buenos Aires. The second book was titled either The Red Psalms or The Red Rhythms. It was a collection of poems—perhaps some twenty in all—in free verse and in praise of the Russian Revolution, the brotherhood of man, and pacifism. Three or four of them found their way into magazines—“Bolshevik Epic,” “Trenches,” “Russia.” This book I destroyed in Spain on the eve of our departure. I was then ready to go home.

Buenos Aires

We returned to Buenos Aires on the Reina Victoria Eugenia toward the end of March, 1921. It came to me as a surprise, after living in so many European cities—after so many memories of Geneva, Zurich, Nîmes, Córdoba, and Lisbon—to find that my native town had grown, and that it was now a very large, sprawling, and almost endless city of low buildings with flat roofs, stretching west toward what geographers and literary hands call the pampa. It was more than a homecoming; it was a rediscovery. I was able to see Buenos Aires keenly and eagerly because I had been away from it for a long time. Had I never gone abroad, I wonder whether I would ever have seen it with the peculiar shock and glow that it now gave me. The city—not the whole city, of course, but a few places in it that became emotionally significant to me—inspired the poems of my first published book, Fervor de Buenos Aires.

I wrote these poems in 1921 and 1922, and the volume came out early in 1923. The book was actually printed in five days; the printing had to be rushed, because it was necessary for us to return to Europe. (My father wanted to consult his Genevan doctor about his sight.) I had bargained for sixty-four pages, but the manuscript ran too long and at the last minute five poems had to be left out—mercifully. I can’t remember a single thing about them. The book was produced in a somewhat boyish spirit. No proofreading was done, no table of contents was provided, and the pages were unnumbered. My sister made a woodcut for the cover, and three hundred copies were printed. In those days, publishing a book was something of a private venture. I never thought of sending copies to the booksellers or out for review. Most of them I just gave away. I recall one of my methods of distribution. Having noticed that many people who went to the offices of Nosotros—one of the older, more solid literary magazines of the time—left their overcoats hanging in the cloak room, I brought fifty or a hundred copies to Alfredo Bianchi, one of the editors. Bianchi stared at me in amazement and said, “Do you expect me to sell these books for you?”

“No,” I answered. “Although I’ve written them, I’m not altogether a lunatic. I thought I might ask you to slip some of these books into the pockets of those coats hanging out there.” He generously did so. When I came back after a year’s absence, I found that some of the inhabitants of the overcoats had read my poems, and a few had even written about them. As a matter of fact, in this way I got myself a small reputation as a poet.

The book was essentially romantic, though it was written in a rather lean style and abounded in laconic metaphors. It celebrated sunsets, solitary places, and unfamiliar corners; it ventured into Berkeleyan metaphysics and family history; it recorded early loves. At the same time, I also mimicked the Spanish seventeenth century and cited Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici in my preface. I’m afraid the book was a plum pudding—there was just too much in it. And yet, looking back on it now, I think I have never strayed beyond that book. I feel that all my subsequent writing has only developed themes first taken up there; I feel that all during my lifetime I have been rewriting that one book.

Were the poems in Fervor de Buenos Aires ultraist poetry? When I came back from Europe in 1921, I came bearing the banners of ultraism. I am still known to literary historians as “the father of Argentine ultraism.” When I talked things over at the time with fellow-poets Eduardo González Lanuza, Norah Lange, Francisco Piñero, my cousin Guillermo Juan (Borges), and Roberto Ortelli, we came to the conclusion that Spanish ultraism was overburdened— after the manner of futurism—with modernity and gadgets. We were unimpressed by railway trains, by propellers, by airplanes, and by electric fans. While in our manifestos we still upheld the primacy of the metaphor and the elimination of transitions and decorative adjectives, what we wanted to write was essential poetry—poems beyond the here and now, free of local color and contemporary circumstances. I think the poem “Plainness” sufficiently illustrates what I personally was after:

The garden’s grillwork gate opens with the ease of a page in a much thumbed book, and, once inside, our eyes have no need to dwell on objects already fixed and exact in memory. Here habits and minds and the private language all families invent are everyday things to me.What necessity is there to speak or pretend to be someone else? The whole house knows me, they’re aware of my worries and weakness. This is the best that can happen—what Heaven perhaps will grant us: not to be wondered at or required to succeed but simply to be let in as part of an undeniable Reality, like stones of the road, like trees.

I think this is a far cry from the timid extravagances of my earlier Spanish ultraist exercises, when I saw a trolley car as a man shouldering a gun, or the sunrise as a shout, or the setting sun as being crucified in the west. A sane friend to whom I later recited such absurdities remarked, “Ah, I see you held the view that poetry’s chief aim is to startle.” As to whether the poems in Fervor are ultraist or not, the answer—for me—was given by my friend and French translator Néstor Ibarra, who said, “Borges left off being an ultraist poet with the first ultraist poem he wrote.” I can now only regret my early ultraist excesses. After nearly a half century, I find myself still striving to live down that awkward period of my life.

Perhaps the major event of my return was Macedonio Fernández. Of all the people I have met in my life—and I have met some quite remarkable men—no one has ever made so deep and so lasting an impression on me as Macedonio. A tiny figure in a black bowler hat, he was waiting for us on the Dársena Norte when we landed, and I came to inherit his friendship from my father. Both men had been born in 1874. Paradoxically, Macedonio was an outstanding conversationalist and at the same time a man of long silences and few words. We met on Saturday evening at a café—the Perla, in the Plaza del Once. There we would talk till daybreak, Macedonio presiding. As in Madrid Cansinos had stood for all learning, Macedonio now stood for pure thinking. At the time, I was a great reader and went out very seldom (almost every night after dinner, I used to go to bed and read), but my whole week was lit up with the expectation that on Saturday I’d be seeing and hearing Macedonio. He lived quite near us and I could have seen him whenever I wanted, but I somehow felt that I had no right to that privilege and that in order to give Macedonio’s Saturday its full value I had to forgo him throughout the week. At these meetings, Macedonio would speak perhaps three or four times, risking only a few quiet observations, which were addressed—seemingly—to his neighbor alone. These remarks were never affirmative. Macedonio was very courteous and soft-spoken and would say, for example, “Well, I suppose you’ve noticed . . .” And thereupon he would let loose some striking, highly original thought. But, invariably, he attributed his remark to the hearer.

He was a frail, gray man with the kind of ash-colored hair and moustache that made him look like Mark Twain.

The resemblance pleased him, but when he was reminded that he also looked like Paul Valéry, he resented it, since he had little use for Frenchmen. He always wore that black bowler, and for all I know may even have slept in it. He never undressed to go to bed, and at night, to fend off drafts that he thought might cause him toothache, he draped a towel around his head. This made him look like an Arab. Among his other eccentricities were his nationalism (he admired one Argentine president after another for the sufficient reason that the Argentine electorate could not be wrong), his fear of dentistry (this led him to tugging at his teeth, in public, behind a hand, so as to stave off the dentist’s pliers), and a habit of falling sentimentally in love with streetwalkers.

As a writer, Macedonio published several rather unusual volumes, and papers of his are still being collected close to twenty years after his death. His first book, published in 1928, was called No toda es vigilia la de los ojos abiertos (We’re Not Always Awake When Our Eyes Are Open). It was an extended essay on idealism, written in a deliberately tangled and crabbed style, in order, I suppose, to match the tangledness of reality. The next year, a miscellany of his writings appeared—Papeles de Recienvenido (Newcomer’s Papers)—in which I myself took a hand, collecting and ordering the chapters. This was a sort of miscellany of jokes within jokes. Macedonio also wrote novels and poems, all of them startling but hardly readable. One novel of twenty chapters is prefaced by fifty-six different forewords. For all his brilliance, I don’t think Macedonio is to be found in his writings at all. The real Macedonio was in his conversation.

Macedonio lived modestly in boardinghouses, which he seemed to change with frequency. This was because he was always skipping out on the rent. Every time he would move, he’d leave behind piles and piles of manuscripts. Once, his friends scolded him about this, telling him it was a shame all that work should be lost. He said to us, “Do you really think I’m rich enough to lose anything?”

Readers of Hume and Schopenhauer may find little that is new in Macedonio, but the remarkable thing about him is that he arrived at his conclusions by himself. Later on, he actually read Hume, Schopenhauer, Berkeley, and William James, but I suspect he had not done much other reading, and he always quoted the same authors. He considered Sir Walter Scott the greatest of novelists, maybe just out of loyalty to a boyhood enthusiasm. He had once exchanged letters with William James, whom he had written in a medley of English, German, and French, explaining that it was because “I knew so little in any one of these languages that I had constantly to shift tongues.” I think of Macedonio as reading a page or so and then being spurred into thought. He not only argued that we are such stuff as dreams are made on, but he really believed that we are all living in a dream world. Macedonio doubted whether truth was communicable. He thought that certain philosophers had discovered it but that they had failed to communicate it completely. However, he also believed that the discovery of truth was quite easy. He once told me that if he could lie out on the pampa, forgetting the world, himself, and his quest, truth might suddenly reveal itself to him. He added that, of course, it might be impossible to put that sudden wisdom into words.

Macedonio was fond of compiling small oral catalogs of people of genius, and in one of them I was amazed to find the name of a very lovable lady of our acquaintance, Quica González Acha de Tomkinson Alvear. I stared at him open-mouthed. I somehow did not think Quica ranked with Hume and Schopenhauer. But Macedonio said, “Philosophers have had to try and explain the universe, while Quica simply feels and understands it” He would turn to her and ask, “Quica, what is Being?” Quica would answer, “I don’t know what you mean, Macedonio.” “You see,” he would say to me, “she understands so perfectly that she cannot even grasp the fact that we are puzzled.” This was his proof of Quica’s being a woman of genius. When I later told him he might say the same of a child or a cat, Macedonio took it angrily.

Before Macedonio, I had always been a credulous reader. His chief gift to me was to make me read skeptically. At the outset, I plagiarized him devotedly, picking up certain stylistic mannerisms of his that I later came to regret. I look back on him now, however, as an Adam bewildered by the Garden of Eden. His genius survives in but a few of his pages; his influence was of a Socratic nature. I truly loved the man, on this side idolatry, as much as any.

This period, from 1921 to 1930, was one of great activity, but much of it was perhaps reckless and even pointless. I wrote and published no less than seven books— four of them essays and three of them verse. I also founded three magazines and contributed with fair frequency to nearly a dozen other periodicals, among them La Prensa, Nosostros, Inicial, Criterio, and Síntesis. This productivity now amazes me as much as the fact that I feel only the remotest kinship with the work of these years. Three of the four essay collections—whose names are best forgotten—I have never allowed to be reprinted. In fact, when in 1953 my present publisher—Emecé—proposed to bring out my “complete writings,” the only reason I accepted was that it would allow me to keep those preposterous volumes suppressed. This reminds me of Mark Twain’s suggestion that a fine library could be started by leaving out the works of Jane Austen, and that even if that library contained no other books it would still be a fine library, since her books were left out.

In the first of these reckless compilations, there was a quite bad essay on Sir Thomas Browne, which may have been the first ever attempted on him in the Spanish language. There was another essay that set out to classify metaphors as though other poetic elements, such as rhythm and music, could be safely ignored. There was a longish essay on the nonexistence of the ego, cribbed from Bradley or the Buddha or Macedonio Fernández. When I wrote these pieces, I was trying to play the sedulous ape to two Spanish baroque seventeenth-century writers, Quevedo and Saavedra Fajardo, who stood in their own stiff, arid, Spanish way for the same kind of writing as Sir Thomas Browne in “Urne-Buriall.” I was doing my best to write Latin in Spanish, and the book collapses under the sheer weight of its involutions and sententious judgments. The next of these failures was a kind of reaction. I went to the other extreme—I tried to be as Argentine as I could. I got hold of Segovia’s dictionary of Argentinisms and worked in so many local words that many of my countrymen could hardly understand it. Since I have mislaid the dictionary, I’m not sure I would any longer understand the book myself, and so have given it up as utterly hopeless. The third of these unmentionables stands for a kind of partial redemption. I was creeping out of the second book’s style and slowly going back to sanity, to writing with some attempt at logic and at making things easy for the reader rather than dazzling him with purple passages. One such experiment, of dubious value, was “Hombres pelearon” (Men Fought), my first venture into the mythology of the old Northside of Buenos Aires. In it, I was trying to tell a purely Argentine story in an Argentine way. This story is one I have been retelling, with small variations, ever since. It is the tale of the motiveless, or disinterested, duel—of courage for its own sake. I insisted when I wrote it that in our sense of the language we Argentines were different from the Spaniards. Now, instead, I think we should try to stress our linguistic affinities. I was still writing, but in a milder way, so that Spaniards would not understand me—writing, it might be said, to be un-understood. The Gnostics claimed that the only way to avoid a sin was to commit it and be rid of it. In my books of these years, I seem to have committed most of the major literary sins, some of them under the influence of a great writer, Leopoldo Lugones, whom I still cannot help admiring. These sins were fine writing, local color, a quest for the unexpected, and a seventeenth-century style. Today, I no longer feel guilty over these excesses; those books were written by somebody else. Until a few years ago, if the price were not too stiff, I would buy up copies and burn them.

Of the poems of this time, I should perhaps have also suppressed my second collection, Luna de enfrente (Moon Across the Way). It was published in 1925 and is a kind of riot of sham local color. Among its tomfooleries were the spelling of my first name in the nineteenth-century Chilean fashion as “Jorje” (it was a halfhearted attempt at phonetic spelling); the spelling of the Spanish for “and” as “i” instead of “y” (our greatest writer, Sarmiento, had done the same, trying to be as un-Spanish as he could); and the omission of the final “d” in words like “autoridá” and “ciudá” In later editions, I dropped the worst poems, pruned the eccentricities, and, successively—through several reprintings—revised and toned down the verses. The third collection of the time, Cuaderno San Martín (the title has nothing to do with the national hero; it was merely the brand name of the out-of-fashion copybook into which I wrote the poems), includes some quite legitimate pieces, such as “La noche que en el Sur lo velaron,” whose title has been strikingly translated by Robert Fitzgerald as “Deathwatch on the Southside,” and “Muertes de Buenos Aires” (Deaths of Buenos Aires), about the two chief graveyards of the Argentine capital. One poem in the book (no favorite of mine) has somehow become a minor Argentine classic: “The Mythical Founding of Buenos Aires.” This book, too, has been improved, or purified, by cuts and revisions down through the years.

In 1929, that third book of essays won the Second Municipal Prize of three thousand pesos, which in those days was a lordly sum of money. I was, for one thing, to acquire with it a secondhand set of the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. For another, I was insured a year’s leisure and decided I would write a longish book on a wholly Argentine subject. My mother wanted me to write about any of three really worthwhile poets—Ascasubi, Almafuerte, or Lugones. I now wish I had. Instead, I chose to write about a nearly invisible popular poet, Evaristo Carriego. My mother and father pointed out that his poems were not good. “But he was a friend and neighbor of ours,” I said. “Well, if you think that qualifies him as the subject for a book, go ahead,” they said. Carriego was the man who discovered the literary possibilities of the run-down and ragged outskirts of the city—the Palermo of my boyhood. His career followed the same evolution as the tango— rollicking, daring, courageous at first, then turning sentimental. In 1912, at the age of twenty-nine, he died of tuberculosis, leaving behind a single volume of his work. I remember that a copy of it, inscribed to my father, was one of several Argentine books we had taken to Geneva and that I read and reread there. Around 1909, Carriego had dedicated a poem to my mother. Actually, he had written it in her album. In it, he spoke of me: “And may your son . . . go forth, led by the trusting wing of inspiration, to carry out the vintage of a new annunciation, which from lofty grapes will yield the wine of Song.” But when I began writing my book the same thing happened to me that happened to Carlyle as he wrote his Frederick the Great. The more I wrote, the less I cared about my hero. I had started out to do a straight biography, but on the way I became more and more interested in old-time Buenos Aires. Readers, of course, were not slow in finding out that the book hardly lived up to its title, Evaristo Carriego, and so it fell flat. When the second edition appeared twenty-five years later, in 1955, as the fourth volume of my “complete” works, I enlarged the book with several new chapters, one a “History of the Tango.” As a consequence of these additions, I feel Evaristo Carriego has been rounded out for the better.

Prisma
(Prism), founded in 1921 and lasting two numbers, was the earliest of the magazines I edited. Our small ultraist group was eager to have a magazine of its own, but a real magazine was beyond our means. I had noticed billboard ads, and the thought came to me that we might similarly print a “mural magazine” and paste it up ourselves on the walls of buildings in different parts of town. Each issue was a large single sheet and contained a manifesto and some six or eight short, laconic poems, printed with plenty of white space around them, and a woodcut by my sister. We sallied forth at night—González Lanuza, Piñero, my cousin, and I—armed with pastepots and brushes provided by my mother, and, walking miles on end, slapped them up along Santa Fe, Callao, Entre Ríos, and Mexico Streets. Most of our handiwork was torn down by baffled readers almost at once, but luckily for us Alfredo Bianchi, of
Nosotros, saw one of them and invited us to publish an ultraist anthology among the pages of his solid magazine. After
Prisma, we went in for a six-page magazine, which was really just a single sheet printed on both sides and folded twice. This was the first
Proa
(Prow), and three numbers of it were published. Two years later, in 1924, came the second
Proa. One afternoon, Brandán Caraffa, a young poet from Córdoba, came to see me at the Garden Hotel, where we were living upon return from our second European trip. He told me that Ricardo Güiraldes and Pablo Rojas Paz had decided to found a magazine that would represent the new literary generation, and that everyone had said that if that were its goal I could not possibly be left out. Naturally, I was flattered. That night, I went around to the Phoenix Hotel, where Güiraldes was staying. He greeted me with these words: “Brandán told me that the night before last all of you got together to found a magazine of young writers, and everyone said I couldn’t be left out.” At that moment, Rojas Paz came in and told us excitedly, “I’m quite flattered.” I broke in and said, “The night before last, the three of us got together and decided that in a magazine of new writers you couldn’t be left out.” Thanks to this innocent stratagem, Proa was born. Each one of us put in fifty pesos, which paid for an edition of three to five hundred copies with no misprints and on fine paper. But a year and a half and fifteen issues later, for lack of subscriptions and ads, we had to give it up.

These years were quite happy ones because they stood for many friendships. There were those of Norah Lange, Macedonio, Piñero, and my father. Behind our work was a sincerity; we felt we were renewing both prose and poetry. Of course, like all young men, I tried to be as unhappy as I could—a kind of Hamlet and Raskolnikov rolled into one. What we achieved was quite bad, but our comradeships endured.

In 1924, I found my way into two different literary sets. One, whose memory I still enjoy, was that of Ricardo Güiraldes, who was yet to write Don Segundo Sombra. Güiraldes was very generous to me. I would give him a quite clumsy poem and he would read between the lines and divine what I had been trying to say but what my literary incapacity had prevented me from saying. He would then speak of the poem to other people, who were baffled not to find these things in the text. The other set, which I rather regret, was that of the magazine Martín Fierro. I disliked what Martín Fierro stood for, which was the French idea that literature is being continually renewed—that Adam is reborn every morning, and also for the idea that, since Paris had literary cliques that wallowed in publicity and bickering, we should be up to date and do the same. One result of this was that a sham literary feud was cooked up in Buenos Aires—that between Florida and Boedo. Florida represented downtown and Boedo the proletariat. I’d have preferred to be in the Boedo group, since I was writing about the old Northside and slums, sadness, and sunsets. But I was informed by one of the two conspirators—they were Ernesto Palacio, of Florida, and Roberto Mariani, of Boedo—that I was already one of the Florida warriors and that it was too late for me to change. The whole thing was just a put-up job. Some writers belonged to both groups—Roberto Arlt and Nicolás Olivari, for example. This sham is now taken into serious consideration by “credulous universities.” But it was partly publicity, partly a boyish prank.

Linked to this time are the names of Silvina and Victoria Ocampo, of the poet Carlos Mastronardi, of Eduardo Mallea, and, not least, of Alejandro Xul-Solar. In a rough-andready way, it may be said that Xul, who was a mystic, a poet, and a painter, is our William Blake. I remember asking him on one particularly sultry afternoon about what he had done that stifling day. His answer was “Nothing whatever, except for founding twelve religions after lunch.” Xul was also a philologist and the inventor of two languages. One was a philosophical language after the manner of John Wilkins and the other a reformation of Spanish with many English, German, and Greek words thrown in. He came of Baltic and Italian stock. “Xul” was his version of “Schulz” and “Solar” of “Solari.” At this time, I also met Alfonso Reyes. He was the Mexican ambassador to Argentina, and used to invite me to dinner every Sunday at the embassy. I think of Reyes as the finest Spanish prose stylist of this century, and in my writing I learned a great deal about simplicity and directness from him.

Summing up this span of my life, I find myself completely out of sympathy with the priggish and rather dogmatic young man I then was. Those friends, however, are still very living and very close to me. In fact, they form a precious part of me. Friendship is, I think, the one redeeming Argentine passion.

Maturity

In the course of a lifetime devoted chiefly to books, I have read but few novels, and, in most cases, only a sense of duty has enabled me to find my way to their last page. At the same time, I have always been a reader and re-reader of short stories. Stevenson, Kipling, James, Conrad, Poe, Chesterton, the tales of Lane’s Arabian Nights, and certain stories by Hawthorne have been habits of mine since I can remember. The feeling that great novels like Don Quixote and Huckleberry Finn are virtually shapeless served to reinforce my taste for the short-story form, whose indispensable elements are economy and a clearly stated beginning, middle, and end. As a writer, however, I thought for years that the short story was beyond my powers, and it was only after a long and roundabout series of timid experiments in narration that I sat down to write real stories.

It took me some six years, from 1927 to 1933, to go from that all too self-conscious sketch “Hombres pelearon” to my first outright short story, “Hombre de la esquina rosada” (Streetcorner Man). A friend of mine, don Nicolás Paredes, a former political boss and professional gambler of the Northside, had died, and I wanted to record something of his voice, his anecdotes, and his particular way of telling them. I slaved over my every page, sounding out each sentence and striving to phrase it in his exact tones. We were living out in Adrogué at the time and, because I knew my mother would heartily disapprove of the subject matter, I composed in secret over a period of several months. Originally titled “Hombres de las orillas” (Men from the Edge of Town), the story appeared in the Saturday supplement, which I was editing, of a yellow-press daily called Crítica. But out of shyness, and perhaps a feeling that the story was a bit beneath me, I signed it with a pen name—the name of one of my great-great grandfathers, Francisco Bustos. Although the story became popular to the point of embarrassment (today I only find it stagy and mannered and the characters bogus), I never regarded it as a starting point. It simply stands there as a kind of freak.

The real beginning of my career as a story writer starts with the series of sketches entitled Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy), which I contributed to the columns of Crítica in 1933 and 1934. The irony of this is that “Streetcorner Man” really was a story but that these sketches and several of the fictional pieces which followed them, and which very slowly led me to legitimate stories, were in the nature of hoaxes and pseudoessays. In my Universal History, I did not want to repeat what Marcel Schwob had done in his Imaginary Lives. He had invented biographies of real men about whom little or nothing is recorded. I, instead, read up on the lives of known persons and then deliberately varied and distorted them according to my own whims. For example, after reading Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York, I set down my free version of Monk Eastman, the Jewish gunman, in flagrant contradiction of my chosen authority. I did the same for Billy the Kid, for John Murrel (whom I rechristened Lazarus Morell), for the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, for the Tichborne Claimant, and for several others. I never thought of book publication. The pieces were meant for popular consumption in Crítica and were pointedly picturesque. I suppose now the secret value of those sketches— apart from the sheer pleasure the writing gave me—lay in the fact that they were narrative exercises. Since the general plots or circumstances were all given me, I had only to embroider sets of vivid variations.

My next story, “The Approach to al-Mu’tasim,” written in 1935, is both a hoax and a pseudo-essay. It purports to be a review of a book published originally in Bombay three years earlier. I endowed its fake second edition with a real publisher, Victor Gollancz, and a preface by a real writer, Dorothy L. Sayers. But the author and the book are entirely my own invention. I gave the plot and details of some chapters—borrowing from Kipling and working in the twelfth-century Persian mystic Farid ud-Din Attar—and then carefully pointed out its shortcomings. The story appeared the next year in a volume of my essays, Historia de la eternidad (A History of Eternity), buried at the back of the book together with an article on the “Art of Insult.” Those who read “The Approach to al-Mu’tasim” took it at face value, and one of my friends even ordered a copy from London. It was not until 1942 that I openly published it as a short story in my first story collection, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Branching Paths). Perhaps I have been unfair to this story; it now seems to me to foreshadow and even to set the pattern for those tales that were somehow awaiting me, and upon which my reputation as a storyteller was to be based.

Along about 1937, I took my first regular full-time job. I had previously worked at small editing tasks. There was the Crítica supplement, which was a heavily and even gaudily illustrated entertainment sheet. There was El Hogar, a popular society weekly, to which, twice a month, I contributed a couple of literary pages on foreign books and authors. I had also written newsreel texts and had been editor of a pseudo-scientific magazine called Urbe, which was really a promotional organ of a privately owned Buenos Aires subway system. These had all been small-paying jobs, and I was long past the age when I should have begun contributing to our household upkeep. Now, through friends, I was given a very minor position as First Assistant in the Miguel Cané branch of the Municipal Library, out in a drab and dreary part of town to the southwest. While there were Second and Third Assistants below me, there were also a Director and First, Second, and Third Officials above me. I was paid two hundred and ten pesos a month and later went up to two hundred and forty. These were sums roughly equivalent to seventy or eighty American dollars.

At the library, we did very little work. There were some fifty of us doing what fifteen could easily have done. My particular job, shared with fifteen or twenty colleagues, was classifying and cataloging the library’s holdings, which until that time were uncatalogued. The collection, however, was so small that we knew where to find the books without the system, so the system, though laboriously carried out, was never needed or used. The first day, I worked honestly. On the next, some of my fellows took me aside to say that I couldn’t do this sort of thing because it showed them up. “Besides,” they argued, “as this cataloging has been planned to give us some semblance of work, you’ll put us out of our jobs.” I told them I had classified four hundred titles instead of their one hundred. “Well, if you keep that up,” they said, “the boss will be angry and won’t know what to do with us.” For the sake of realism, I was told that from then on I should do eighty-three books one day, ninety another, and one hundred and four the third.

I stuck out the library for about nine years. They were nine years of solid unhappiness. At work, the other men were interested in nothing but horse racing, soccer matches, and smutty stories. Once, a woman, one of the readers, was raped on her way to the ladies’ room. Everybody said such things were bound to happen, since the men’s and ladies’ rooms were adjoining. One day, two rather posh and well meaning friends—society ladies—came to see me at work. They phoned me a day or two later to say, “You may think it amusing to work in a place like that, but promise us you will find at least a nine-hundred-peso job before the month is out.” I gave them my word that I would. Ironically, at the time I was a fairly well-known writer—except at the library. I remember a fellow employee’s once noting in an encyclopedia the name of a certain Jorge Luis Borges—a fact that set him wondering at the coincidence of our identical names and birth dates. Now and then during these years, we municipal workers were rewarded with gifts of a two-pound package of maté to take home. Sometimes in the evening, as I walked the ten blocks to the tramline, my eyes would be filled with tears. These small gifts from above always underlined my menial and dismal existence.

A couple of hours each day, riding back and forth on the tram, I made my way through The Divine Comedy, helped as far as “Purgatory” by John Aitken Carlyle’s prose translation and then ascending the rest of the way on my own. I would do all my library work in the first hour and then steal away to the basement and pass the other five hours in reading or writing. I remember in this way rereading the six volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and the many volumes of Vicente Fidel López’ History of the Argentine Republic. I read Léon Bloy, Claudel, Groussac, and Bernard Shaw. On holidays, I translated Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. At some point, I was moved up to the dizzying height of Third Official. One morning, my mother rang me up and I asked for leave to go home, arriving just in time to see my father die. He had undergone a long agony and was very impatient for his death.

It was on Christmas Eve of 1938—the same year my father died—that I had a severe accident. I was running up a stairway and suddenly felt something brush my scalp. I had grazed a freshly painted open casement window. In spite of first-aid treatment, the wound became poisoned, and for a period of a week or so I lay sleepless every night and had hallucinations and high fever. One evening, I lost the power of speech and had to be rushed to the hospital for an immediate operation. Septicemia had set in, and for a month I hovered, all unknowingly, between life and death. (Much later, I was to write about this in my story “The South.”) When I began to recover, I feared for my mental integrity. I remember that my mother wanted to read to me from a book I had just ordered, C. S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet, but for two or three nights I kept putting her off. At last, she prevailed, and after hearing a page or two I fell to crying. My mother asked me why the tears. “I’m crying because I understand,” I said. A bit later, I wondered whether I could ever write again. I had previously written quite a few poems and dozens of short reviews. I thought that if I tried to write a review now and failed, I’d be all through intellectually but that if I tried something I had never really done before and failed at that it wouldn’t be so bad and might even prepare me for the final revelation. I decided I would try to write a story. The result was “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote.”

“Pierre Menard,” like its forerunner “The Approach to al-Mu’tasim,” was still a halfway house between the essay and the true tale. But the achievement spurred me on. I next tried something more ambitious—“TIön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” about the discovery of a new world that finally replaces our present world. Both were published in Victoria Ocampo’s magazine Sur. I kept up my writing at the library. Though my colleagues thought of me as a traitor for not sharing their boisterous fun, I went on with work of my own in the basement, or, when the weather was warm, up on the flat roof. My Kafkian story “The Library of Babel” was meant as a nightmare version or magnification of that municipal library, and certain details in the text have no particular meaning. The numbers of books and shelves that I recorded in the story were literally what I had at my elbow. Clever critics have worried over those ciphers, and generously endowed them with mystic significance. “The Lottery in Babylon,” “Death and the Compass,” and “The Circular Ruins” were also written, in whole or part, while I played truant. These tales and others were to become The Garden of Branching Paths, a book expanded and retitled Ficciones in 1944. Ficciones and El Aleph (1949 and 1952), my second story collection, are, I suppose, my two major books.

In 1946, a president whose name I do not want to remember came into power. One day soon after, I was honored with the news that I had been “promoted” out of the library to the inspectorship of poultry and rabbits in the public markets. I went to the City Hall to find out what it was all about. “Look here,” I said. “It’s rather strange that among so many others at the library I should be singled out as worthy of this new position.” “Well,” the clerk answered, “you were on the side of the Allies—what do you expect?” His statement was unanswerable; the next day, I sent in my resignation. My friends rallied round me at once and offered me a public dinner. I prepared a speech for the occasion but, knowing I was too shy to read it myself, I asked my friend Pedro Henríquez Ureña to read it for me.

I was now out of a job. Several months before, an old English lady had read my tea leaves and had foretold that I was soon to travel, to lecture, and to make vast sums of money thereby. When I told my mother about it, we both laughed, for public speaking was far beyond me. At this juncture, a friend came to the rescue, and I was made a teacher of English literature at the Asociación Argentina de Cultura Inglesa. I was also asked at the same time to lecture on classic American literature at the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores. Since this pair of offers was made three months before classes opened, I accepted, feeling quite safe. As the time grew near, however, I grew sicker and sicker. My series of lectures was to be on Hawthorne, Poe, Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, Whitman, Twain, Henry James, and Veblen. I wrote the first one down. But I had no time to write out the second one. Besides, thinking of the first lecture as Doomsday, I felt that only eternity could come after. The first one went off well enough— miraculously. Two nights before the second lecture, I took my mother for a long walk around Adrogué and had her time me as I rehearsed my talk. She said she thought it was overlong. “In that case,” I said, “I’m safe.” My fear had been of running dry. So, at forty-seven, I found a new and exciting life opening up for me. I traveled up and down Argentina and Uruguay, lecturing on Swedenborg, Blake, the Persian and Chinese mystics, Buddhism, gauchesco poetry, Martin Buber, the Kabbalah, the Arabian Nights, T. E. Lawrence, medieval Germanic poetry, the Icelandic sagas, Heine, Dante, expressionism, and Cervantes. I went from town to town, staying overnight in hotels I’d never see again. Sometimes my mother or a friend accompanied me. Not only did I end up making far more money than at the library but I enjoyed the work and felt that it justified me.

One of the chief events of these years—and of my life— was the beginning of my friendship with Adolfo Bioy Casares. We met in 1930 or 1931, when he was about seventeen and I was just past thirty. It is always taken for granted in these cases that the older man is the master and the younger his disciple. This may have been true at the outset, but several years later, when we began to work together, Bioy was really and secretly the master. He and I attempted many different literary ventures. We compiled anthologies of Argentine poetry, tales of the fantastic, and detective stories; we wrote articles and forewords; we annotated Sir Thomas Browne and Gracián; we translated short stories by writers like Beerbohm, Kipling, Wells, and Lord Dunsany; we founded a magazine, Destiempo, which lasted three issues; we wrote film scripts, which were invariably rejected. Opposing my taste for the pathetic, the sententious, and the baroque, Bioy made me feel that quietness and restraint are more desirable. If I may be allowed a sweeping statement, Bioy led me gradually toward classicism.

It was at some point in the early forties that we began writing in collaboration—a feat that up to that time I had thought impossible. I had invented what we thought was a quite good plot for a detective story. One rainy morning, he told me we ought to give it a try. I reluctantly agreed, and a little later that same morning the thing happened. A third man, Honorio Bustos Domecq, emerged and took over. In the long run, he ruled us with a rod of iron and to our amusement, and later to our dismay, he became utterly unlike ourselves, with his own whims, his own puns, and his own very elaborate style of writing. Domecq was the name of a great-grandfather of Bioy’s and Bustos of a great-grandfather of mine from Córdoba. Bustos Domecq’s first book was Six Problems for don Isidro Parodi (1942), and during the writing of that volume he never got out of hand. Max Carrados had attempted a blind detective; Bioy and I went one step further and confined our detective to a jail cell. The book was at the same time a satire on the Argentine. For many years, the dual identity of Bustos Domecq was never revealed. When finally it was, people thought that, as Bustos was a joke, his writing could hardly be taken seriously.

Our next collaboration was another detective novel, A Model for Death. This one was so personal and so full of private jokes that we published it only in an edition that was not for sale. The author of this book we named B. Suárez Lynch. The “B.” stood, I think, for Bioy and Borges, “Suárez” for another great-grandfather of mine, and Lynch for another great-grandfather of Bioy’s. Bustos Domecq reappeared in 1946 in another private edition, this time of two stories, entitled Two Memorable Fantasies. After a long eclipse, Bustos took up his pen again, and in 1967 brought out his Chronicles. These are articles written on imaginary, extravagantly modern artists—architects, sculptors, painters, chefs, poets, novelists, couturiers—by a devotedly modern critic. But both the author and his subjects are fools, and it is hard to tell who is taking in whom. The book is inscribed, “To those three forgotten greats— Picasso, Joyce, Le Corbusier.” The style is itself a parody. Bustos writes a literary journalese, abounding in neologisms, a Latinate vocabulary, clichés, mixed metaphors, non sequiturs, and bombast.

I have often been asked how collaboration is possible. I think it requires a joint abandoning of the ego, of vanity, and maybe of common politeness. The collaborators should forget themselves and think only in terms of the work. In fact, when somebody wants to know whether such-and-such a joke or epithet came from my side of the table or Bioy’s, I honestly cannot tell him. I have tried to collaborate with other friends—some of them very close ones—but their inability to be blunt on the one hand or thick-skinned on the other has made the scheme impossible. As to the Chronicles of Bustos Domecq, I think they are better than anything I have published under my own name and nearly as good as anything Bioy has written on his own.

In 1950, I was elected President of the Sociedad Argentina de Escritores (Argentine Society of Writers). The Argentine Republic, then as now, is a soft country, and the S.A.D.E. was one of the few strongholds against the dictatorship. This was so evident that many distinguished men of letters did not dare set foot inside its doors until after the revolution. One curious trait of the dictatorship was that even its professed upholders made it clear that they did not really take the government seriously but were acting out of self-interest. This was understood and forgiven, since most of my countrymen have an intellectual, if not a moral, conscience. Nearly all the smutty jokes made up about Perón and his wife were the invention of Peronistas themselves, trying to save face. The S.A.D.E. was eventually closed. I remember the last lecture I was allowed to give there. The audience, quite a small one, included a very puzzled policeman who did his clumsy best to set down a few of my remarks on Persian Sufism. During this drab and hopeless period, my mother—then in her seventies—was under house arrest. My sister and one of my nephews spent a month in jail. I myself had a detective on my heels, whom I first took on long, aimless walks and at last made friends with. He admitted that he too hated Perón, but said that he was obeying orders. Ernesto Palacio once offered to introduce me to the Unspeakable, but I did not want to meet him. How could I be introduced to a man whose hand I would not shake?

The long-hoped-for revolution came in September, 1955. After a sleepless, anxious night, nearly the whole population came out into the streets, cheering the revolution and shouting the name of Córdoba, where most of the fighting had taken place. We were so carried away that for some time we were quite unaware of the rain that was soaking us to the bone. We were so happy that not a single word was even uttered against the fallen dictator. Perón went into hiding, and was later allowed to leave the country. No one knows how much money he got away with.

Two very dear friends of mine, Esther Zemborain de Torres and Victoria Ocampo, dreamed up the possibility of my being appointed Director of the National Library. I thought the scheme a wild one, and hoped at most to be given the directorship of some small-town library, preferably to the south of the city. Within the space of a day, a petition was signed by the magazine Sur (read Victoria Ocampo), by the reopened S.A.D.E. (read Carlos Alberto Erro), by the Sociedad Argentina de Cultura Inglesa (read Carlos del Campillo), and by the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores (read Luis Reissig). This was placed on the desk of the Minister of Education, and eventually I was appointed to the directorship by General Eduardo Lonardi, who was Acting President. A few days earlier, my mother and I had walked to the Library one night to take a look at the building, but, feeling superstitious, I refused to go in. “Not until I get the job,” I said. That same week, I was called to come to the Library to take over. My family was present, and I made a speech to the employees, telling them I was actually the Director—the incredible Director. At the same time, José Edmundo Clemente, who a few years before had managed to persuade Emecé to bring out an edition of my works, became the Assistant Director. Of course, I felt very important, but we got no pay for the next three months. I don’t think my predecessor, who was a Peronista, was ever officially fired. He just never came around to the Library again.

They named me to the job but did not take the trouble to unseat him. Another pleasure came to me the very next year, when I was named to the professorship of English and American Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. Other candidates had sent in painstaking lists of their translations, papers, lectures, and other achievements. I limited myself to the following statement: “Quite unwittingly, I have been qualifying myself for this position throughout my life.” My plain approach gained the day. I was hired, and spent ten or twelve happy years at the University.

My blindness had been coming on gradually since childhood. It was a slow, summer twilight. There was nothing particularly pathetic or dramatic about it. Beginning in 1927, I underwent eight eye operations, but since the late 1950’s, when I wrote my “Poem of the Gifts,” for reading and writing purposes I have been blind. Blindness ran in my family; a description of the operation performed on the eyes of my great-grandfather, Edward Young Haslam, appeared in the pages of the London medical journal, the Lancet. Blindness also seems to run among the Directors of the National Library. Two of my eminent forerunners, José Mármol and Paul Groussac, suffered the same fate. In my poem, I speak of God’s splendid irony in granting me at one time 800,000 books and darkness.

One salient consequence of my blindness was my gradual abandonment of free verse in favor of classical metrics. In fact, blindness made me take up the writing of poetry again. Since rough drafts were denied me, I had to fall back on memory. It is obviously easier to remember verse than prose, and to remember regular verse forms rather than free ones. Regular verse is, so to speak, portable. One can walk down the street or be riding the subway while composing and polishing a sonnet, for rhyme and meter have mnemonic virtues. In these years, I wrote dozens of sonnets and longer poems consisting of eleven-syllable quatrains. I thought I had taken Lugones as my master, but when the verses were written my friends told me that, regrettably, they were quite unlike him. In my later poetry, a narrative thread is always to be found. As a matter of fact, I even think of plots for poems. Perhaps the main difference between Lugones and me is that he held French literature as his model and lived intellectually in a French world, whereas I look to English literature. In this new poetic activity, I never thought of building a sequence of poems, as I always formerly did, but was chiefly interested in each piece for its own sake. In this way, I wrote poems on such different subjects as Emerson and wine, Snorri Sturluson and the hourglass, my grandfather’s death and the beheading of Charles I. I also went in for summing up my literary heroes: Poe, Swedenborg, Whitman, Heine, Camões, Jonathan Edwards, and Cervantes. Due tribute, of course, was also paid to mirrors, the Minotaur, and knives.

I had always been attracted to the metaphor, and this leaning led me to the study of the simple Saxon kennings and overelaborate Norse ones. As far back as 1932, I had even written an essay about them. The quaint notion of using, as far as it could be done, metaphors instead of straightforward nouns, and of these metaphors’ being at once traditional and arbitrary, puzzled and appealed to me. I was later to surmise that the purpose of these figures lay not only in the pleasure given by the pomp and circumstance of compounding words but also in the demands of alliteration. Taken by themselves, the kennings are not especially witty, and calling a ship “a sea-stallion” and the open sea “the whale’s-road” is no great feat. The Norse skalds went a step further, calling the sea “the seastallion’s-road,” so that what originally was an image became a laborious equation. In turn, my investigation of kennings led me to the study of Old English and Old Norse. Another factor that impelled me in this direction was my ancestry. It may be no more than a romantic superstition of mine, but the fact that the Haslams lived in Northumbria and Mercia—or, as they are today called, Northumberland and the Midlands—links me with a Saxon and perhaps a Danish past. (My fondness for such a northern past has been resented by some of my more nationalistic countrymen, who dub me an Englishman, but I hardly need point out that many things English are utterly alien to me: tea, the Royal Family, “manly” sports, the worship of every line written by the uncaring Shakespeare.)

At the end of one of my University courses, several of my students came to see me at the Library. We had just polished off all English literature from Beowulf to Bernard Shaw in the span of four months, and I thought we might now do something in earnest. I proposed that we begin at the beginning, and they agreed. I knew that at home, on a certain top shelf, I had copies of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. When the students came the next Saturday morning, we began reading these two books. We skipped grammar as much as we could and pronounced the words like German. All at once, we fell in love with a sentence in which Rome (Romeburh) was mentioned. We got drunk on these words and rushed down Peru Street shouting them at the top of our voices. And so we had set out on a long adventure. I had always thought of English literature as the richest in the world; the discovery now of a secret chamber at the very threshold of that literature came to me as an additional gift. Personally, I knew that the adventure would be an endless one, and that I could go on studying Old English for the rest of my days. The pleasure of studying, not the vanity of mastering, has been my chief aim, and I have not been disappointed these past twelve years. As for my recent interest in Old Norse, this is only a logical step, since the two languages are closely linked and since of all medieval Germanic literature Old Norse is the crown. My excursions into Old English have been wholly personal and, therefore, have made their way into a number of my poems. A fellow-academician once took me aside and said in alarm, “What do you mean by publishing a poem entitled ‘Embarking on the Study of Anglo-Saxon Grammar’?” I tried to make him understand that Anglo-Saxon was as intimate an experience to me as looking at a sunset or falling in love. Around 1954, I began writing short prose pieces— sketches and parables. One day, my friend Carlos Frías, of Emecé, told me he needed a new book for the series of my so-called complete works. I said I had none to give him, but Frías persisted, saying, “Every writer has a book if he only looks for it.” Going through drawers at home one idle Sunday, I began ferreting out uncollected poems and prose pieces, some of the latter going back to my days on Crítica.

These odds and ends, sorted out and ordered and published in 1960, became El hacedor (The Maker). Remarkably, this book, which I accumulated rather than wrote, seems to me my most personal work and, to my taste, maybe my best. The explanation is only too easy: the pages of El hacedor contain no padding. Each piece was written for its own sake and out of an inner necessity. By the time it was undertaken, I had come to realize that fine writing is a mistake, and a mistake born out of vanity. Good writing, I firmly believe, should be done in an unobtrusive way.

On the closing page of that book, I told of a man who sets out to make a picture of the universe. After many years, he has covered a blank wall with images of ships, towers, horses, weapons, and men, only to find out at the moment of his death that he has drawn a likeness of his own face. This may be the case of all books; it is certainly the case of this particular book.

Crowded Years

Fame, like my blindness, had been coming gradually to me. I had never expected it, I had never sought it. Néstor Ibarra and Roger Caillois, who in the early 1950’s daringly translated me into French, were my first benefactors. I suspect that their pioneer work paved the way for my sharing with Samuel Beckett the Formentor Prize in 1961, for until I appeared in French I was practically invisible—not only abroad but at home in Buenos Aires. As a consequence of that prize, my books mushroomed overnight throughout the western world.

This same year, under the auspices of Edward Larocque Tinker, I was invited as Visiting Professor to the University of Texas. It was my first physical encounter with America. In a sense, because of my reading, I had always been there, and yet how strange it seemed when in Austin I heard ditch diggers who worked on campus speaking in English, a language I had until then always thought of as being denied that class of people. America, in fact, had taken on such mythic proportions in my mind that I was sincerely amazed to find there such commonplace things as weeds, mud, puddles, dirt roads, flies, and stray dogs. Though at times we fell into homesickness, I know now that my mother—who accompanied me—and I grew to love Texas. She, who always loathed football, even rejoiced over our victory when the Longhorns defeated the neighboring Bears. At the University, when I finished one class I was giving in Argentine literature, I would sit in on another as a student of Saxon verse under Dr. Rudolph Willard. My days were full. I found American students, unlike the run of students in the Argentine, far more interested in their subjects than in their grades. I tried to interest people in Ascasubi and Lugones, but they stubbornly questioned and interviewed me about my own output. I spent as much time as I could with Ramón Martínez López, who, as a philologist, shared my passion for etymologies and taught me many things. During those six months in the States, we traveled widely, and I lectured at universities from coast to coast. I saw New Mexico, San Francisco, New York, New England, Washington. I found America the friendliest, most forgiving, and most generous nation I had ever visited. We South Americans tend to think in terms of convenience, whereas people in the United States approach things ethically. This— amateur Protestant that I am—I admired above all. It even helped me overlook skyscrapers, paper bags, television, plastics, and the unholy jungle of gadgets.

My second American trip came in 1967, when I held the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry at Harvard, and lectured to well-wishing audiences on “This Craft of Verse.” I spent seven months in Cambridge, also teaching a course on Argentine writers and traveling all over New England, where most things American, including the West, seem to have been invented. I made numerous literary pilgrimages—to Hawthorne’s haunts in Salem, to Emerson’s in Concord, to Melville’s in New Bedford, to Emily Dickinson’s in Amherst, and to Longfellow’s around the corner from where I lived. Friends seemed to multiply in Cambridge: Jorge Guillén, John Murchison, Juan Marichal, Raimundo Lida, Héctor Ingrao, and a Persian physicist who had worked out a theory of spherical time that I do not quite understand but hope someday to plagiarize—Farid Hushfar. I also met writers like Robert Fitzgerald, John Updike, and the late Dudley Fitts. I availed myself of chances to see new parts of the continent: Iowa, where I found my native pampa awaiting me; Chicago, recalling Carl Sandburg; Missouri; Maryland; Virginia. At the end of my stay, I was greatly honored to have my poems read at the Y.M.H.A. Poetry Center in New York, with several of my translators reading and a number of poets in the audience. I owe a third trip to the United States, in November of 1969, to my two benefactors at the University of Oklahoma, Lowell Dunham and Ivar Ivask, who invited me to give talks there and called together a group of scholars to comment on, and enrich, my work. Ivask made me a gift of a fish-shaped Finnish dagger—rather alien to the tradition of the old Palermo of my boyhood.

Looking back on this past decade, I seem to have been quite a wanderer. In 1963, thanks to Neil MacKay of the British Council in Buenos Aires, I was able to visit England and Scotland. There, too, again in my mother’s company, I made my pilgrimages: to London, so teeming with literary memories; to Lichfield and Dr. Johnson; to Manchester and De Quincey; to Rye and Henry James; to the Lake Country; to Edinburgh. I visited my grandmother’s birthplace in Hanley, one of the Five Towns—Arnold Bennett country. Scotland and Yorkshire I think of as among the loveliest places on earth. Somewhere in the Scottish hills and glens I recaptured a strange sense of loneliness and bleakness that I had known before; it took me some time to trace this feeling back to the far-flung wastes of Patagonia. A few years later, this time in the company of María Esther Vázquez, I made another European trip. In England, we stayed with the late Herbert Read in his fine rambling house out on the moors. He took us to Yorkminster, where he showed us some ancient Danish swords in the Viking Yorkshire room of the museum. I later wrote a sonnet to one of the swords, and just before his death Sir Herbert corrected and bettered my original title, suggesting, instead of “To a Sword in York,” “To a Sword in Yorkminster.” We later went to Stockholm, invited by my Swedish publisher, Bonnier, and by the Argentine ambassador. Stockholm and Copenhagen I count among the most unforgettable cities I have seen, like San Francisco, New York, Edinburgh, Santiago de Compostela, and Geneva.

Early in 1969, invited by the Israeli government, I spent ten very exciting days in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. I brought home with me the conviction of having been in the oldest and the youngest of nations, of having come from a very living, vigilant land back to a half-asleep nook of the world. Since my Genevan days, I had always been interested in Jewish culture, thinking of it as an integral element of our so-called Western civilization, and during the Israeli-Arab war of a few years back I found myself taking immediate sides. While the outcome was still uncertain, I wrote a poem on the battle. A week after, I wrote another on the victory. Israel was, of course, still an armed camp at the time of my visit. There, along the shores of Galilee, I kept recalling these lines from Shakespeare:

Over whose acres walk’d those blessed feet, Which, fourteen hundred years ago, were nail’d, For our advantage, on the bitter cross.

Now, despite my years, I still think of the many stones I have left unturned, and of others I would like to turn again. I hope yet to see Mormon Utah, to which I was introduced as a boy by Mark Twain’s Roughing It and by the first book of the Sherlock Holmes saga, A Study in Scarlet. Another daydream of mine is a pilgrimage to Iceland, and another still to return again to Texas and to Scotland.

At seventy-one, I am still hard at work and brimming with plans. Last year I wrote a new book of poems, Elogio de la sombra (In Praise of Darkness). It was my first entirely new volume since 1960, and these were also my first poems since 1929 written with a book in mind. My main concern in this work, running through several of its pieces, is of an ethical nature, irrespective of any religious or antireligious bias. “Darkness” in the title stands for both blindness and death. To finish Elogio, I worked every morning, dictating at the National Library. By the time I ended, I had set up a comfortable routine—so comfortable that I kept it up and began writing tales. These, my first stories since 1953, I published this year. The collection is called El informe de Brodie (Doctor Brodie’s Report). It is a set of modest experiments in straightforward storytelling, and is the book I have often spoken about in the past five years. Recently, I completed the script of a film to be called Los otros (The Others). Its plot is my own; the writing was done together with Adolfo Bioy-Casares and the young Argentine director Hugo Santiago. My afternoons now are usually given over to a long-range and cherished project: for nearly the past three years, I have been lucky to have my own translator at my side, and together we are bringing out some ten or twelve volumes of my work in English, a language I am unworthy to handle, a language I often wish had been my birthright.

I intend now to begin a new book, a series of personal— not scholarly—essays on Dante, Ariosto, and medieval northern subjects. I want also to set down a book of informal, outspoken opinions, whims, reflections, and private heresies. After that, who knows? I still have a number of stories, heard or invented, that I want to tell. At present, I am finishing a long tale called “The Congress.” Despite its Kafkian title, I hope it will turn out more in the line of Chesterton. The setting is Argentine and Uruguayan. For twenty years, I have been boring my friends with the raw plot. Finally, I came to see that no further elaboration was needed. I have another project that has been pending for an even longer period of time—that of revising and perhaps rewriting my father’s novel The Caudillo, as he asked me to years ago. We had gone as far as discussing many of the problems; I like to think of the undertaking as a continued dialogue and a very real collaboration.

People have been unaccountably good to me. I have no enemies, and if certain persons have masqueraded as such, they’ve been far too good-natured to have ever pained me. Anytime I read something written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself. Perhaps I should advise would-be enemies to send me their grievances beforehand, with full assurance that they will receive my every aid and support. I have even secretly longed to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against myself. Ah, the unvarnished truths I harbor! At my age, one should be aware of one’s limits, and this knowledge may make for happiness. When I was young, I thought of literature as a game of skillful and surprising variations; now that I have found my own voice, I feel that tinkering and tampering neither greatly improve nor greatly spoil my drafts. This, of course, is a sin against one of the main tendencies of letters in this century—the vanity of overwriting—which led a man like Joyce into publishing expensive fragments, showily entitled “Work in Progress.” I suppose my best work is over. This gives me a certain quiet satisfaction and ease. And yet I do not feel I have written myself out. In a way, youthfulness seems closer to me today than when I was a young man. I no longer regard happiness as unattainable; once, long ago, I did. Now I know that it may occur at any moment but that it should never be sought after. As to failure or fame, they are quite irrelevant and I never bother about them. What I’m out for now is peace, the enjoyment of thinking and of friendship, and, though it may be too ambitious, a sense of loving and of being loved.

Commentaries

—
With Norman Thomas di Giovanni

The Aleph

What eternity is to time, the Aleph is to space. In eternity, all time—past, present, and future—coexists simultaneously. In the Aleph, the sum total of the spatial universe is to be found in a tiny shining sphere barely over an inch across. When I wrote my story, I recalled Wells’s dictum that in a tale of the fantastic, if the story is to be acceptable to the mind of the reader, only one fantastic element should be allowed at a time. For example, though Wells wrote a book about the invasion of Earth by Martians, and another book about a single invisible man in England, he was far too wise to attempt a novel about an invasion of our planet by an army of invisible men. Thinking of the Aleph as a thing of wonder, I placed it in as drab a setting as I could imagine—a small cellar in a nondescript house in an unfashionable quarter of Buenos Aires. In the world of the Arabian Nights, such things as magic lamps and rings are left lying about and nobody cares; in our skeptical world, we have to tidy up any alarming or out-of-the-way element. Thus, at the end of “The Aleph,” the house has to be pulled down and the shining sphere destroyed with it.

Once, in Madrid, a journalist asked me whether Buenos Aires actually possessed an Aleph. I nearly yielded to temptation and said yes, but a friend broke in and pointed out that were such an object to exist it would not only be the most famous thing in the world but would renew our whole conception of time, astronomy, mathematics, and space. “Ah,” said the journalist, “so the entire thing is your own invention. I thought it was true because you gave the name of the street.” I did not dare tell him that the naming of streets is not much of a feat.

My chief problem in writing the story lay in what Walt Whitman had very successfully achieved—the setting down of a limited catalog of endless things. The task, as is evident, is impossible, for such chaotic enumeration can only be simulated, and every apparently haphazard element has to be linked to its neighbor either by secret association or by contrast.

“The Aleph” has been praised by readers for its variety of elements: the fantastic, the satiric, the autobiographical, and the pathetic. I wonder whether our modern worship of complexity is not wrong, however. I wonder whether a short story should be so ambitious. Critics, going even further, have detected Beatrice Portinari in Beatriz Viterbo, Dante in Daneri, and the descent into hell in the descent into the cellar. I am, of course, duly grateful for these unlooked-for gifts.

Beatriz Viterbo really existed and I was very much and hopelessly in love with her. I wrote my story after her death. Carlos Argentino Daneri is a friend of mine, still living, who to this day has never suspected he is in the story. The verses are a parody of his verse. Daneri’s speech on the other hand is not an exaggeration but a fair rendering. The Argentine Academy of Letters is the habitat of such specimens.

Streetcorner Man

As already stated as far back as 1935 in the foreword to Historia universal de la infamia, this story was written under the triple influence of Stevenson, G. K. Chesterton, and Josef von Sternberg’s unforgettable gangster films. My aim was to recapture the atmosphere of the outer slums of Buenos Aires some fifty years ago. At the same time, I wanted the story to be vividly and persistently visual, and to unfold with a kind of pattern or symmetry. The characters appear on the scene like actors and make set speeches, deliberately unlike the unstudied and careless manner of everyday life. Francisco Real knocks twice at the same door: the first time to swagger in and challenge his man, the second time to die. Another example of this symmetry is the high window, out of which first goes the knife and later the body. All this is sheer choreography. The fact that this story was later made into a ballet, a movie, and a stage play corroborates this. But strangely enough, Argentine readers have always felt the story to be realistic. Some eager young men once asked me if I had actually witnessed the scene. I knew very well when I wrote the story that things could never have happened in that stagy and even operatic way, but I suppose I was indulging in a bit of wishful thinking. All Argentines are fond of an imaginary heroic and mythic past, especially as applied to hoodlums and pimps.

The voice used throughout the story is supposed to be oral, but the sentences are really those of a written work. They are unbroken and complete, while in real life Argentines rarely finish a sentence; the moment they feel the hearer has caught what they are aiming at, they just break off. The language of “Streetcorner Man” is partly a conventionalized slang, or dialect, of Buenos Aires called lunfardo. This language is primarily a device of the writers of sainetes and tango lyrics. It has, as to be expected, been canonized by several glossaries, by an Academy of Lunfardo, and by the Argentine Academy of Letters. As a matter of fact, lunfardo is barely used by the people it is credited to. Once taxed by fellow journalists for his utter ignorance of lunfardo, Roberto Arlt, the novelist of Buenos Aires lowlife, said, “I’m afraid I’ve spent all my life in the outer slums among common people and toughs and so never had time to study such a thing.”

The “esquina rosada” of the Spanish title means pink, or rose-colored, corner. It refers to the painted walls of the Streetcorner almacenes, which a long time ago were both groceries and saloons, where men drank and played cards. These corners were often painted other vivid colors, such as green, purple, or blue, and stood out in an otherwise drab city. For me the esquina rosada symbolizes a particular kind of life. It has nothing whatever to do, as some adventurous translator has supposed, with the red lamp that hung outside Julia’s dance hall. Such an establishment would be called a “Farol Colorado,” which is close to the term “red-light district” In a way, the American “drugstore cowboy” would be something of a latter-day “hombre de la esquina rosada.”

The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim

The idea that a man may be many men is, of course, a literary commonplace. This is usually understood in an ethical way (William Wilson, Jekyll and Hyde, and so on) or in terms of heredity (Hawthorne, Zola). In “The Approach to al-Mu’tasim” the concept undergoes certain modifications. There, I think of men being incessantly changed by each man they talk to and perhaps by each book they read. Thus I arrived at the tale of a kind of saint who spreads circles of diminishing splendor all around him, and is finally discovered by somebody who divines him through these many far-flung echoes of his influence. Since this plot is something of an allegory, it led me quite naturally to an Eastern setting. I do my best to be indebted to Kipling; India, as we are aware, stands for almost countless multitudes.

I knew only too well that this delicate work lay far beyond my powers. I therefore plotted the piece as a literary hoax, rather after the example of Sartor Resartus. Years after the story was published, I found out that Henry James had attempted a similar scheme in his novel The Sacred Fount, and had failed through sheer inability to keep his characters distinguishable.

As to Farid ud-Din Attar, I am afraid my knowledge of his famous poem can be reduced to FitzGerald’s A bird’s-eye view of Faríd-Uddín Attar’s Bird-parliament, to Browne’s Literary History of Persia, and to a few handbooks on Sufism. Silvina Ocampo, by the way, composed a very fine poem based on Attar’s book.

The Circular Ruins

The ontological argument, the claim that Something or Someone could be its own cause—its causa sui—as the Schoolmen and Spinoza have it, has always seemed to me a mere juggling of words, a violence done to language. In my opinion, a speech implies a speaker and a dream, a dreamer; this, of course, leads to the concept of an endless series of speakers and dreamers, an infinite regress, and may be what lies at the root of my story.

Naturally, when I wrote it, I never thought of the story in these abstract terms. In a pair of sonnets on chess, written years afterward, I took up the same idea. The chessmen do not know they are guided by a player; the player does not know he is guided by a god; the god does not know what other gods are guiding him. Several years ago, during a one-day visit to Lubbock, in the Texas panhandle, a girl asked me whether in writing another poem, “The Golem,” I had been consciously rewriting “The Circular Ruins.” The answer was no, but I thanked her for revealing this unsuspected affinity to me. In fact, it amazed me to have traveled hundreds of miles to come upon this piece of news about myself out on the edge of the desert.

Readers have thought of “The Circular Ruins” as my best story. I can hardly share this view since I now think of fine writing, which this tale comes continually to the brink of, as a beginner’s mistake. One might argue, however, that if it is going to be done at all, this kind of story needs this kind of writing. This also accounts for the dim Eastern setting and for the fact that the scheme is somehow timeless. The title itself suggests the Pythagorean and Eastern idea of cyclical time.

Lewis Carroll gave me my epigraph, which may have been the story’s seed, but had I not often thought about life as a dream, that seed, known to millions of readers, might have fallen wide of the furrow.

When I wrote “The Circular Ruins” way back in 1940, the work carried me away as it had never done before and as it has never done since. The whole story is about a dream and, while writing it down, my everyday affairs—my job at the municipal library, going to the movies, dining with friends— were like a dream. For the space of that week, the one thing, real to me was the story.

Death and the Compass

Since 1923 I had been doing my best, and never quite succeeding, to be the poet of Buenos Aires. When, in 1942, I undertook a nightmare version of the city in “Death and the Compass,” my friends told me that at long last I had managed to evoke a sufficiently recognizable image of my home town. A few topographical elucidations may perhaps be in order. The Hôtel du Nord stands for the Plaza Hotel. The estuary is the Río de la Plata, called “the great lion-colored river” by Lugones, and, far more effectively, “the unmoving river” by Eduardo Mallea. The Rue de Toulon is the Paseo Colón, or rather, in terms of rowdiness, the old Paseo de Julio, today called Leandro Alem. Triste-le-Roy, a beautiful name invented by Amanda Molina Vedia, stands for the now demolished Hotel Las Delicias in Adrogué. (Amanda had painted a map of an imaginary island on the wall of her bedroom; on her map I discovered the name Triste-le-Roy.) In order to avoid any suspicion of realism, I used distorted names and placed the story in some cosmopolitan setting beyond any specific geography. The characters’ names further bear this out: Treviranus is German, Azevedo is Portuguese and Jewish, Yarmolinsky is a Polish Jew, Finnegan is Irish, Lönnrot is Swedish.

Patterns in time and space are to be found throughout the story. A triangle is suggested but the solution is really based on a rhombus. This rhombus is picked up in the Carnival costumes of the seeming kidnappers and in the windows of Triste-le-Roy as well as in the Fourfold Name of God—the Tetragrammaton. A thread of red also runs through the story’s pages. There is the sunset on the rose-colored wall and, in the same scene, the blood splashed on the dead man’s face. Red is found in the detective’s and in the gunman’s names.

The killer and the slain, whose minds work in the same way, may be the same man. Lönnrot is not an unbelievable fool walking into his own death trap but, in a symbolic way, a man committing suicide. This is hinted at by the similarity of their names. The end syllable of “Lönnrot” means “red” in German, and “Red Scharlach” is also translatable, in German, as “Red Scarlet.”

No apology is needed for repeated mention of the Kabbalah, for it provides the reader and the all-too-subtle detective with a false track, and the story is, as most of the names imply, a Jewish one. The Kabbalah also provides an additional sense of mystery.

As in the case of most stories, “Death and the Compass” should stand or fall by its general atmosphere, not by its plot, which I suppose is now quite old-fashioned and therefore uninteresting. I have embedded many memories of Buenos Aires and its southern outskirts in this wild story. Triste-le-Roy itself is a heightened and distorted version of the roomy and pleasant Hotel Las Delicias, which still survives in so many memories.

I have written a longish elegy, entitled “Adrogué,” about the real hotel.

The straight-line labyrinth at the story’s close comes out of Zeno the Eleatic.

The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874)

This tale is my Argentine version of the call of the wild. It is also a gloss on the gauchesco poem Martín Fierro, written in 1872 by José Hernández. In the poem, Sergeant Cruz is a former desperado who, as often happens to his kind, becomes the leader of a posse and is sent out to hunt down the deserter and murderer Martín Fierro. Cruz witnesses this outlaw’s courage, goes over to his side, kills some of his own men, and returns to his old life. In this unexpected decision, I think of Cruz as being the most interesting and puzzling character in Hernández’ book. For all I know, I may be the only reader to have wondered at the strange behavior of a policeman who goes over to the enemy. As Martín Fierro is now a classic, all things in it seem to be taken for granted.

I suppose I was moved to write the story out of my personal bewilderment. A quite detailed account of Sergeant Cruz’s former life is given in Hernández; these circumstances had to be changed so that the reader familiar with the poem would not realize until the very end that he was being told something he already knew. The name Cruz itself I buried under the longer Tadeo Isidoro; I also worked in actual historical episodes unconnected with Hernández, such as Mesa’s execution and Laprida’s thirty white men pitted against two hundred Indians. A number of incidental details came out of my own family history. Suárez, who routs the gauchos at the opening of the story, was my great-grandfather; the ranch where Cruz once worked belonged to another relative, Francisco Xavier Acevedo. It was Suárez, by the way, who ordered the drums to drown out Manuel Mesa’s last words. I have, however, left certain tracks and hints in my version in order to prevent the story from concluding on a mere trick. Reference to the poem is made as early as the second paragraph, and, at the end of the story, the obvious reason for my not describing the fight is that it is already very minutely set forth in Martín Fierro,

In the dramatic moment when Tadeo Isidoro Cruz finds out who he is and refuses to act against Martín Fierro, there may be something deeply and unconsciously Hispanic. I am reminded of that famous passage in Don Quixote when the knight urges the officers of the law to set the convicts free, saying to them, “Let each man tend to his own sins; there’s a God in heaven who takes good care to punish the wicked and to reward the good, and an honest man should not go out of his way to be another man’s jailer. . . .”

The Two Kings and Their Two Labyrinths

Several elements or personal whims may be found in this unpresuming fable. Firstly, its Eastern setting, its deliberate aim to be a page—overlooked by Lane or Burton—out of the Arabian Nights. Secondly, that obvious symbol of perplexity, the maze, given in the story two forms—that of the traditional labyrinth, and, even more sinister, that of the unbounded desert. After some twenty-five years, I am beginning to suspect that the king of Babylon, with his lust for winding ways and devious complexity, stands for civilization, while the Arabian king stands for unrelieved barbarism. For all I know, the first may be a porteño and his antagonist, a gaucho.

The Dead Man

A ten days’ stay on the Uruguay-Brazil border in 1934 seems to have impressed me far more than all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, since in my imagination I keep going back to that one not very notable experience. (At the time, I thought of it as boring, though on one of those days I did see a man shot down before my very eyes.) A likely explanation for this is that everything I then witnessed—the stone fences, the longhorn cattle, the horses’ silver trappings, the bearded gauchos, the hitching posts, the ostriches—was so primitive, and even barbarous, as to make it more a journey into the past than a journey through space.

“The Dead Man” should not be taken, as I sometimes fear it may be, as a deliberate allegory on human life, though, like poor Otálora, we are given all things only to have them snatched from us at the moment we die. I prefer the story to be read as a kind of adventure.

Several rash enthusiasts have fallen into the mistake of thinking that “The Dead Man” might easily be worked into a film.

They overlook the fact that Azevedo Bandeira, in a movie, would require psychological plausibility, while in a story he may be both accepted and yet not understandable. No real man, of course, would act the way he does.

The story has been criticized by some friends as being no more than a sketchy outline; my incapacity, or laziness, has led me to believe that such an outline is sufficient.

A few elements in the story may be worth pointing out.

Here, as in other cases, I have begun with a long opening sentence. My feeling is that first sentences should be long in order to tear the reader out of his everyday life and firmly lodge him in an imaginary world. If an illustrious example be allowed me, Cervantes apparently felt the same way when he began his famous novel. As to the names, Otálora is an old family name of mine; so is Azevedo, but with a Spanish c instead of the Portuguese 0. Bandeira was the name of Enrique Amorim’s head gardener, and the word bandeira (flag) also suggests the Portuguese bandeirantes, or conquistadors. During that 1934 trip, we actually spent one night at a ranch called El Suspiro. The present tense, used throughout the story, makes it perhaps more vivid. The gaucho laboriously picking out a milonga at the very end is my comment on the way country people really play the guitar, though I’m sure that in the film version he will be made to sound like Andrés Segovia.

The Other Death

All theologians have denied God one miracle—that of undoing the past. The eleventh-century churchman Pier Damiano, however, grants Him that all but unimaginable power. This gave me the idea of writing a story about a scientist who, in some minor and unobtrusive way, attempts a similar feat. He hides two black balls in an upper drawer and three yellow ones in a lower drawer and, after years of hard work, finds that they have changed places. I was not long in perceiving that this tame miracle would never do, and that I would have to dream up something more dramatic. I thought of a common man coming to such a wonder, unawares, at the very moment he dies. Aparicio Saravia’s revolution had caught my imagination from boyhood, and I saw a way of combining, in a setting of that backwoods civil war, the gaucho idea of courage as the one cardinal virtue and my metaphysical plan. And so my story, which was first titled “The Redemption,” was born.

In the story, for literary purposes, the miracle takes place over a span of some forty-odd years. Pedro Damián’s sin would be the more unbearable for him since, as the lone Argentine among Uruguayans, he would feel greater shame. Ultimately, Damián dies as he would have liked to die—struck down by a bullet in the chest while leading a charge. Had this actually happened, his fellow soldiers would hardly have remarked on such a detail. I introduced it into my story in order to make the whole atmosphere that much more visionary.

Emerson’s verses are mentioned at the outset for two main reasons: first, because I simply admire their beauty; second, so as to send the reader—if he goes back to them—off the track, since they strongly express the idea that the past is unchangeable.

A favorite trick of mine is to work into my fiction the names of real friends. In “The Other Death” we find Ulrike von Kühlmann, Patricio Gannon, and Emir Rodríguez Monegal.

Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth

Before “Ibn Hakkan,” I had previously tried my hand at two detective stories, “The Garden of Branching Paths” (1941) and “Death and the Compass” (1942). The former won a second prize in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; the latter was flatly rejected. My interest in detective fiction is rooted in my reading of Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Wrecker, G. K. Chesterton, Eden Phillpotts, and, of course, Ellery Queen. In a world of shapeless psychological writing, I found in this particular form the classic virtues of a beginning, a middle, and an end—of something planned and executed. Bioy-Casares and I even went to the length of editing, in Buenos Aires, a successful collection of detective novels. The series was called “The Seventh Circle.” The amount of reading required in the selection of these books rid me, in time, of my boyish craze for the general run of such games and puzzles. “Ibn Hakkan” turned out to be my swan song.

My first two exercises of 1941 and 1942 were, I think, fair attempts at Chestertonian storytelling. When I wrote “Ibn Hakkan,” however, it became a cross between a permissible detective story and a caricature of one. The more I worked on it, the more hopeless the plot seemed and the stronger my need to parody. What I ended up with I hope will be read for its humor. I certainly can’t expect anyone to take seriously or to look for symbols in such pictorial whims as a black slave, a lion in Cornwall, a red-haired king, and a scarlet maze so large that on first sight its outer ramparts appear to be a straight blank wall.

The pseudo-Arabian parable preached by the timorous Mr. Allaby from his pulpit was written before “Ibn Hakkan.” How it found its way into the story is now a mystery to me.

The Man on the Threshold

I have previously written of this story:

The sudden and recurring glimpse into a deep set of corridors and patios of a tenement house around the corner from Paraná Street, in Buenos Aires, gave me the tale entitled “The Man on the Threshold”; I placed it in India so as to make its unlikeliness less obvious.

Looking back on this statement, I seem to recall a rather different starting point. One night in Salto, Uruguay, with Enrique Amorim, for lack of anything better to do, we went around to the local slaughterhouse to watch the cattle being killed. Squatting on the threshold of the long, low adobe building was a battered and almost lifeless old man. Amorim asked him, “Are they killing?” The old man appeared to come to a brief and evil awakening, and answered back in a fierce whisper, “Yes, they’re killing! They’re killing!”

Somehow the idea—somehow the image—of an apparently helpless old man holding a secret power impressed itself on my imagination. I wove this image into the present story and, several years later, used it again—almost word for word—near the close of another story, “The South.” Of course, the same linking of seeming helplessness and real power is to be found in the Arabian Nights and in the idea of old and wizened witches.

Students of Kipling will note that my Indian background is, in part, cribbed from him. Mention of Nikal Seyn comes from Kim. The madman counting on his fingers and mocking at the trees comes from the poem “Evarra and His Gods.” The young man crowned with flowers was suggested, I think, by From Sea to Sea.

I’m sorry to say that “The Man on the Threshold” is also a bit of a trick story and a game with time. What is told as having happened years and years earlier is actually taking place at that moment. The teller, of course, as he patiently spins his yam, is really hindering the officer from breaking in and stopping the trial and execution.

The Challenge

I was lecturing during the dictatorship out in the western part of the Province of Buenos Aires, in the city of Chivilcoy, when I was told the story of Wenceslao Suárez, nicknamed the Manco, or One-Handed. After I published “The Challenge,” I received two letters bearing on the subject. (These letters are printed at the back of Evaristo Carriego.) One recounts Wenceslao’s story with certain variations in the place names and in the behavior of his foe. The other tells of a similar incident in Entre Ríos, where the opponents—an Argentine and an Uruguayan—end their fight exchanging knives as a token of friendship. Both letters corroborate rather than debunk the tradition.

I found in this story a key to much of what I had already heard, thought about, and invented in stories of my own about such disinterested duels. I think the reader will find in “The Challenge” a full explanation of my feeling for the subject of knives, knife fighters, courage, and so on, as it has concerned me over the past forty or forty-five years.

Of course, Wenceslao’s story may be found wanting in likelihood, but, as Boileau pointed out, “Reality stands in no need of being true to life.”

This piece, like many others of mine, is halfway between a real short story and an essay.

The Captive

This tale, of course, is true. Frontier life has always attracted me, no doubt because some hundred years ago my grandparents lived among civilization’s outposts out on the edge of the Province of Buenos Aires. Colonel Borges, my grandfather, there held the command of the Northern and Western Frontier until he met his death in 1874. Additionally, I have always been interested in the strangeness of memory and in the fact that the past is somehow rescued, or saved for us, by it. De Quincey thought of the human brain as a palimpsest, wherein all our yesterdays, down to the minutest detail, survive; for their release, these yesterdays only await the proper, unsuspected stimulus. Memory, not the captive, may very well be the real subject of the story.

Borges and Myself

This all-too-famous sketch is my personal rendering of the old Jekyll-and-Hyde theme, save that in their case the opposition is between good and evil and in my version the opposites are the spectator and the spectacle. During extremes of happiness or unhappiness, I am apt to feel—in the space of a single, fleeting moment—that what I am undergoing is happening, independent of me, to somebody else. According to one of the Indian schools of philosophy, the ego is merely an onlooker who has identified himself with the man he is continually looking at. The fact that when I write I am stressing certain peculiarities of mine and omitting others has led me to think of Borges as a creature of fancy. This suspicion is strengthened by the existence of so many articles and studies that deal with him. A preoccupation with identity and sometimes its discord, duality, runs through much of my work—for example, in “The Theologians” and in “Tadeo Isidoro Cruz” and in the very title of my later poetry, The Self and the Other.

The Maker

This story may be thought of as autobiographical—Homer as an exaltation of myself, his blindness as my blindness, his acceptance of darkness as my acceptance. On the other hand, the departures from autobiography are striking. Blindness came to me as a slow twilight, not as a revelation; no Iliads and no Odysseys ever awaited me. When I first conceived this piece, I hesitated between Homer and Milton. Milton, however, is almost a contemporary, and also—as Dr. Johnson felt—a not very lovable figure. But Homer, as old as Western civilization itself, is a myth and so may quite easily be made into another myth. Eleven years after writing “The Maker,” I seem to have recast my fable—without being aware of it—into a more narrowly autobiographical poem called “In Praise of Darkness.” As for Milton, I have paid due tribute to him in a sonnet entitled “A Rose and Milton.”

An early translator was worried that there was no strict English equivalent for the words “El hacedor,” my Spanish title. I could only inform him that “hacedor” was my own translation of the English “maker,” as used by Dunbar in his “Lament.”

Ever since 1934, the writing of short prose pieces—fables, parables, brief narratives—has given me a certain mysterious satisfaction. I think of such pages as these as I think of coins— small material objects, hard and bright, tokens of something else.

The Intruder

In the fall of 1965, the Buenos Aires bibliophile Gustavo Fillol Day asked me for a short story to be published by him in one of those fine and secret editions meant for the happy few. Around that time I had been rereading Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills, and I told Fillol that I had a story in mind. The brevity and straightforwardness of the young Kipling tempted me, since I had always written very involved and many-faceted narratives. A few months later I was ready to get down to work, and at the beginning of 1966 I dictated “The Intruder” to my mother.

Without my suspecting it, the hint for this story—perhaps the best I have ever written—came out of a chance conversation with my friend don Nicolás Paredes sometime back in the late twenties. Commenting on the decadence of tango lyrics, which even then went in for “loud self-pity” among sentimental compadritos betrayed by their wenches, Paredes remarked dryly, “Any man who thinks five minutes straight about a woman is no man—he’s a queer.” Love among such people was obviously ruled out; I knew that their real passion would be friendship. Out of this rather abstract set of ideas I evolved my story. I placed it in an almost nameless town to the south of Buenos Aires more than seventy years ago so that nobody could dispute the details. Really there are only two characters—the two brothers. Of them, we are allowed to hear only what the elder brother says; it is he who takes all the decisions, even the last one. I made them brothers for the sake of likelihood and, of course, to avoid unsavory implications.

I was stuck at the end of the story, unsure of the words

Cristián would say. My mother, who from the outset thoroughly
disliked the tale, at that point gave me the words I needed without a moment’s hesitation.

“The Intruder” was, by the way, the first of my new ventures into straightforward storytelling. From this beginning I went on to write many others, ultimately collecting them under the title El informe de Brodie (Doctor Brodie’s Report).

The Immortals

Blake wrote that were our senses closed—were we made blind, deaf, dumb, and so forth—we should see all things as they are: endless. “The Immortals” came out of that strange idea and also out of Rupert Brooke’s derivative line, “And see, no longer blinded by our eyes.” We acknowledge this first debt by calling one of the characters don Guillermo Blake.

Thrice over I attempted writing the story. First with Marta Mosquera Eastman and later with Alicia Jurado. They may still have copies of those early drafts. The story was to have been called “The Chosen One.” For some reason or other, each of these schemes was dropped. Then, in 1966, I took the story up again with Bioy-Casares. By that time, Bioy and I had invented a new way of telling gruesome and uncanny tales. It lay in understating the grimness and essential horror while playing up certain humorous aspects—a kind of graft between Alfred Hitchcock and the Marx Brothers. This not only made for more amusing and less pretentious writing, but at the same time underlined the horror. We developed the technique in our comic detective saga, Six Problems for don Isidro Parodi, and, more openly, in the first of the Two Memorable Fantasies, “The Witness.” In fact, some of the personages in “The Immortals” are taken from the Six Problems, and in the present story are fated to a terrible eternity. Another detail may be pointed out, the circumstance that all the characters—including the very Frankenstein of the story, the maker of monsters Dr. Narbondo—are also blatant fools and indulge in a silly jargon all their own.

The story deals in its own way with the problem of immortality. Since our only proof of personal death is statistical, and inasmuch as a new generation of deathless men may be already on its way, I have for years lived in fear of never dying. Such an idea as immortality would, of course, be unbearable. In “The Immortals” we are face to face with people who are only immortal and nothing else, and the prospect, I trust, is appalling. I think that this joint story (I can say this without undue vanity because I wrote it with someone else) is among my very best and that, despite its having been overlooked by Argentine critics, it may yet come into its own.

The Meeting

I seem to be telling the same story over and over again. Obviously, “The Meeting” is at heart the identical tale I have told in another new story of mine, “Juan Muraña.” It is also linked to a fairly recent sonnet called “Allusion to a Shadow of the Nineties,” which is about Muraña’s knife, and to a short prose poem, “The Dagger,” written I think in the late forties. Perhaps not so obvious is the fact that when I wrote these things I was quite unaware of repeating myself or of attempting variations. Precisely what takes over my mind in these cases, I do not know.

Spinoza’s doctrine of things having a life of their own, or of wanting to persist in their own being, has struck me as particularly true of those things, such as weapons, meant for quite specific ends. A dagger, for example, has to fulfill a destiny. In the story, the two knives have a will of their own, ruling the hapless young men who are supposed to be wielding them. Duncan and Uriarte are gentlemen, but the knives turn them into gauchos. In order to make this sufficiently clear, I have given Uriarte, who is a coward, the victory.

Back of all this lies my personal—or perhaps Argentine—obsession with knives. In the United States or in England, where men tend to square off with their fists, people think of fighting as something to be done bare-handed. In Western or gangster films, we often see men throw down their arms and resort to their fists. To me this seems highly unnatural and even unconvincing, since there is no earthly reason for a cowboy or a gangster also to be something of a boxer. Among compadritos, if a man struck another he did it with the back of his hand, as a mere provocation, and then the real fighting began. To me there is real intimacy in the knife; in fact, in one of my poems, the last line runs: “and across my throat the intimate knife.” Firearms, of course, stand for marksmanship rather than courage. Fistfighting seems both harmless and undignified to an Argentine, while knife dueling has what Dr. Johnson said of the lives of sailors and seamen—“the dignity of danger.”

A few minor autobiographical elements have found their way into “The Meeting.” Álvaro Melián Lafinur was a childhood idol of mine and really was my cousin. He wore a dagger and a cloak and used to play the guitar, singing the Uruguayan ballads of Elias Regules which I mention, Álvaro was a quite bad poet and, as to be expected, an academician. It is in this latter role that I introduced him into “The Aleph.”

Pedro Salvadores

I think the tale of Pedro Salvadores is summed up fully enough in its last paragraph. I might therefore take this opportunity to say something about the way it was written. At first, I played with the idea of attempting historical research, but I soon realized that for aesthetic purposes oral tradition is truer than mere facts. (The early version of Chevy Chase seems clumsier than the later.) I perhaps first heard this story from my grandfather when I was five or six. I set it down, in part, as my mother recalled it. I recently learned that the nineteenth-century novelist Eduardo Gutiérrez had already recorded the story—I think in a book called El puñal del tirano—and that the man’s real name was José María Salvadores. As to Unitarians and Federals, these words should not be taken at face value. The Unitarians, as Sarmiento and Echeverría well knew, represented civilization, while the Federals stood for the barbarism of caudillo clans. Honorably, my own forebears on both sides were Unitarians.

Our own time has furnished us with many destinies like that of Pedro Salvadores; Anne Frank’s is perhaps the best known of them.

Rosendo’s Tale

This story is, obviously, a sequel and an antidote to “Streetcorner Man.” The earlier story was mistakenly read as realistic; the present one is a deliberate surmise as to how events might actually have happened on the night Francisco Real was murdered. When I wrote “Streetcorner Man,” I was—as I pointed out at the time—fully aware of its stagy unreality. As the years went by, however, and that story became embarrassingly popular, I wanted people to understand that I was not quite the fool I was being admired for.

I had been rereading my Browning and knew from
The
Ring and the Book that a story could be told from different points of view. Rosendo Juárez, the seeming coward of the first version, might perhaps be allowed to have his own say. So, instead of the braggart of “Streetcorner Man,” we get a Shavian character who sees through the romantic nonsense and childish vanity of dueling, and finally attains manhood and sanity. In the first telling, Francisco Real is mortally wounded in the chest; sadly and realistically enough, he was really stabbed in the back while fornicating with La Lujanera in a ditch.

In the days when the story took place, toughs and killers were aided and abetted by the authorities, since most of them were official bodyguards of leading political figures. They were also used during elections to intimidate voters, knowing very well that because of police support they could act with impunity. Seldom outlaws, they were simply strong-arm men. I recall an anecdote told me by a priest in Adrogué. He walked up to the polling booth during one election and was politely and firmly informed by the local Rosendo Juárez, “Father, you have already cast your vote.”

Incidentally, the reference to the young man dressed in black, who wrote Paredes’ letter for him, is to the poet Evaristo Carriego.

A Universal History of Infamy

Preface to the 1954 Edition

Preface to the First Edition

A Universal History of Infamy

The Dread Redeemer Lazarus Morell

Tom Castro, the Implausible Impostor

The Widow Ching, Lady Pirate

Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities

The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan

The Insulting Master of Etiquette Kôtsuké no Suké

The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv

Etcetera

A Theologian in Death

The Chamber of Statues

Tale of the Two Dreamers

The Wizard Postponed

The Mirror of Ink

A Double for Mohammed

The Generous Enemy

Of Exactitude in Science

Preface to the 1954 Edition

I should define as baroque that style which deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) all its possibilities and which borders on its own parody. It was in vain that Andrew Lang, back in the eighteen-eighties, attempted a burlesque of Pope’s
Odyssey; that work was already its own parody, and the would-be parodist was unable to go beyond the original text. ‘Baroque’ is the name of one of the forms of the syllogism; the eighteenth century applied it to certain excesses in the architecture and painting of the century before. I would say that the final stage of all styles is baroque when that style only too obviously exhibits or overdoes its own tricks. The baroque is intellectual, and Bernard Shaw has stated that all intellectual labour is essentially humorous. Such humour is not deliberate in the work of Baltasar Gracian, but is deliberate, or self-conscious, in John Donne’s.

The very tide of these pages flaunts their baroque character. To curb them would amount to destroying them; that is why I now prefer to invoke the pronounce-ment ‘What I have written I have written’ (John 19:22) and to reprint them, twenty year later, as they stand. They are the irresponsible game of a shy young man who dared not write stories and so amused himself by falsifying and distorting (without any aesthetic justification whatever) the tales of others. From these ambiguous exercises, he went on to the laboured composition of a straightforward story ‘Streetcorner Man’ which he signed with the name of one of his great grandfathers, Francisco Bustos, and which has enjoyed an unusual and somewhat mystifying success.

In that story, which is about life on the outer edge of old-time Buenos Aires, it will be noted that I have introduced a few cultivated words ‘intestines’, ‘involutions’, and so forth. I did so because the hoodlum aspires to refinement, or (this reason invalidates the other but is perhaps the true one) because hoodlums are individuals and do not always speak like The Hoodlum, who is a platonic type.

The theologians of the Great Vehicle point out that the essence of the universe is emptiness. Insofar as they refer to that particle of the universe which is this book, they are entirely right. Scaffolds and pirates populate it, and the word ‘infamy’ in the title is thunderous, but behind the sound and fury there is nothing. The book is no more than appearance, than a surface of images; for that very reason, it may prove enjoyable. Its author was a somewhat unhappy man, but he amused himself writing it; may some echo of that pleasure reach the reader.

In the ‘Etcetera’ section, I have added three new pieces.

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Preface to the First Edition

The exercises in narrative prose that make up this book were written in 1933 and 1934. They stem, I believe, from my rereadings of Stevenson and Chesterton, and also from Sternberg’s early films, and perhaps from a certain biography of Evaristo Carriego. They overly exploit certain tricks: random enumerations, sudden shifts of continuity, and the paring down of a man’s whole life to two or three scenes. (A similar concern with visual aims gives shape to the story “Streetcorner Man”) They are not, they do not try to be, psychological.

As for the examples of magic that close the volume, I have no other rights to them than those of translator and reader. Sometimes I suspect that good readers are even blacker and rarer swans than good writers. Will anyone deny that the pieces attributed by Valery to his pluperfect Edmond Teste are, on the whole, less admirable than those of Teste’s wife and friends? Reading, obviously, is an activity which comes after that of writing; it is more modest, more unobtrusive, more intellectual.

Buenos Aires, 27 May 1935
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A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INFAMY

The Dread Redeemer Lazarus Morell

The Remote Cause

In 1517, the Spanish missionary Bartolomé de las Casas, taking great pity on the Indians who were languishing in the hellish workpits of Antillean gold mines, suggested to Charles V, king of Spain, a scheme for importing blacks, so that they might languish in the hellish workpits of Antillean gold mines. To this odd philanthropic twist we owe, all up and down the Americas, endless things W. C. Handy’s blues; the Parisian success of the Uruguayan lawyer and painter of Negro genre, don Pedro Figari; the solid native prose of another Uruguayan, don Vicente Rossi, who traced the origin of the tango to Negroes; the mythological dimensions of Abraham Lincoln; the five hundred thousand dead of the Civil War and its three thousand three hundred millions spent in military pensions; the entrance of the verb ‘to lynch’ into the thirteenth edition of the dictionary of the Spanish Academy; King Vidor’s impetuous film
Hallelujah; the lusty bayonet charge led by the Argentine captain Miguel Soler, at the head of his famous regiment of ‘Mulattoes and Blacks’, in the Uruguayan battle of Cerrito; the Negro killed by Martín Fierro; the deplorable Cuban rumba ‘The Peanut Vender’; the arrested, dungeon-ridden Napoleonism of Toussaint L’Ouverture; the cross and the snake of Haitian voodoo rites and the blood of goats whose throats were slit by the papaloi’s machete; the habanera, mother of the tango; another old Negro dance, of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the candombe.

And, further, the great and blameworthy life of the nefarious redeemer Lazarus Morell.

The Place

The Father of Waters, the Mississippi, the largest river in the world, was the worthy theatre of this peerless scoundrel. (Alvarez de Pineda discovered the river, and its earliest explorer was Captain Hernando de Soto, the old conqueror of Peru, who helped while away the Inca chief Atahualpa’s months of prison, teaching him the game of chess. When de Soto died, he was given the Mississippi’s waters for a grave.)

The Mississippi is a broad-bosomed river, an immense, dim brother of the Paraná, the Uruguay, the Amazon, and the Orinoco. It is a river of muddy waters; each year, disgorged by it, over four hundred million tons of silt profane the Gulf of Mexico. From time immemorial, so much muck has built up a delta, where gigantic swamp cypresses grow out of the debris of a continent in perpetual dissolution, and where labyrinths of mud and rushes and dead fish extend the bounds and the peace of this foul-smelling alluvial domain. Upstream, between the Arkansas and the Ohio, is another stretch of lowlands. Living there is a sallow race of squalid men, prone to fever, who avidly gape at stone and iron, for in their environs there is little but sand, timber, and muddy water.

The Men

At the beginning of the nineteenth century (the date that concerns us), the vast cotton plantations along the river were worked, from sunup to sundown, by blacks. These blacks slept on dirt floors in wooden cabins. Apart from mother-child relations, kinships were casual and unclear. They had first names, but they made do without family names. Nor could they read. Their soft falsetto voices intoned an English of drawled vowels. They worked in rows, bent under the overseer’s lash. When they ran away, full-bearded men, springing onto beautiful horses, tracked them down with snarling packs of hounds.

To successive layers of animal hopes and African fears there had been added the words of the Bible. Their faith, therefore, lay in Christ, They sang deeply and in chorus, ‘Go down, Moses.’ The Mississippi served them as a magnificent image of the paltry Jordan. The owners of this hard-worked land and of these black gangs were idle, greedy gentlemen with flowing locks, who lived in big mansions that overlooked the river always with a white pine, Greek Revival portico. A good slave was worth a thousand dollars and did not last long. Some of them were thankless enough to fall ill and die. Out of such uncertainties, one had to wring the greatest return. This is why slaves were kept in the fields from first light to last; this is why plantations required yearly crops, such as cotton or tobacco or sugarcane. The soil, overworked and mismanaged by this greedy cultivation, was left exhausted within a short time, and tangled, miry wastes encroached upon the land. On abandoned farms, on the outskirts of towns, among the thick canebrakes, and in the abject bayous lived the poor whites. They were fishermen, occasional hunters, and horse thieves. They often begged bits of stolen food from the blacks, and even in their lowly condition these poor whites kept up a certain pride that of their untainted, unmixed blood. Lazarus Morell was one of them.

The Man

The daguerreotypes of Morell usually published in American magazines are not authentic. This lack of genuine representations of so memorable and famous a man cannot be accidental. We may suppose that Morell resisted the camera, essentially, so as not to leave behind pointless clues, and, at the same time, to foster the mystery that surrounded him. We know, however, that as a young man he was not favoured with looks, and that his eyes, which were too close together, and his straight lips were not prepossessing. Thereafter, the years conferred upon him that majesty peculiar to white-haired scoundrels and daring, unpunished criminals. He was an old Southern gentleman, despite a miserable childhood and an inglorious life. Versed in Scripture, he preached with unusual conviction ; ‘I saw Lazarus Morell in the pulpit,’ noted the proprietor of a Baton Rouge gambling house, ‘and I listened to his edifying words and I saw the tears gather in his eyes. I knew that in God’s sight he was an adulterer, a Negro-stealer, and a murderer, but my eyes wept, too.’

Another fair record of these holy effusions is furnished by Morell himself. ‘I opened my Bible at random,’ he wrote, ‘and came upon a fitting verse from Saint Paul, and I preached an hour and twenty minutes. Nor was this time misspent by my assistant Crenshaw and his confederates, for they were outside rounding up all the hearers’ horses. We sold them on the Arkansas side of the river, except for one spirited chestnut that I reserved for my own private use. He pleased Crenshaw as well, but I made him see that the animal was not for him.’

The Method

The stealing of horses in one state and selling them in another were barely more than a digression in Morell’s criminal career, but they foreshadowed the method that now assures him his rightful place in a Universal History of Infamy. This method is unique not only for the peculiar circumstances that distinguished it but also for the sordidness it required, for its deadly manipulation of hope, and for its step by step development, so like the hideous unfolding of a nightmare. Al Capone and Bugs Moran were later to operate in a great city, with dazzling sums of money and lowly submachine guns, but their affairs were vulgar. They merely vied for a monopoly. As to numbers of men, Morell came to command some thousand all sworn confederates. Two hundred of them made up the Heads, or Council, and they gave the orders that the remaining eight hundred carried out. All the risks fell upon these active agents, or strikers, as they were called. In the event of trouble, it was they who were handed over to justice or thrown into the Mississippi with a stone fixed securely about their feet. A good many of them were mulattoes. Their diabolical mission was the following:

Flashing rings on their fingers to inspire respect, they traveled up and down the vast plantations of the South. They would pick out a wretched black and offer him freedom. They would tell him that if he ran away from his master and allowed them to sell him, he would receive a portion of the money paid for him, and they would then help him escape again, this second time sending him to a free state. Money and freedom, the jingle of silver dollars together with his liberty what greater temptation could they offer him? The slave became emboldened for his first escape.

The river provided the natural route. A canoe; the hold of a steamboat; a scow; a great raft as big as the sky, with a cabin at the point or three or four wigwams the means mattered little, what counted was feeling the movement and the safety of the unceasing river. The black would be sold on some other plantation, then run away again to the canebrakes or the morasses. There his terrible benefactors (about whom he now began to have serious misgivings) cited obscure expenses and told him they had to sell him one final time. On his return, they said, they would give him part of both sales and his freedom. The man let himself be sold, worked for a while, and on his final escape defied the hounds and the whip. He then made his way back bloodied, sweaty, desperate, and sleepy.

Final Release

The legal aspect of these doings must now be reviewed. The runaway slave was not put up for sale by Morell’s gang until his first master had advertised and offered a reward to any man who would catch him. An advertisement of this kind warranted the person to take the property, if found. The black then became a property in trust, so that his subsequent sale was only a breach of trust, not stealing. Redress by a civil action for such a breach was useless, as the damages were never paid.

All this was very reassuring but not entirely foolproof. The black, out of sheer gratitude or misery, might open his mouth. A jug of rye whisky in some Cairo brothel, where the son of a bitch, born a slave, would squander those good dollars that they had no business letting him have, and their secret was spilled. Throughout these years, abolitionist agitators roamed the length and breadth of the North a mob of dangerous madmen who opposed private property, preached the emancipation of slaves, and incited them to run away. Morell was not going to let himself be taken in by those anarchists. He was no Yankee, he was a Southern white, the son and grandson of whites, and he hoped one day to retire from business and become a gentleman and have his own miles of cotton fields and rows of bent-over slaves. He was not about to take pointless risks not with his experience.

The runaway expected his freedom. Lazarus Morell’s shadowy mulattoes would give out an order among themselves that was sometimes barely more than a nod of the head, and the slave would be freed from sight, hearing, touch, day, infamy, time, his benefactors, pity, the air, the hound packs, the world, hope, sweat, and himself. A bullet, a knife, or a blow, and the Mississippi turtles and catfish would receive the last evidence.

The Cataclysm

In the hands of reliable men, the business had to prosper. At the beginning of 1834, Morell had already ‘emancipated’ some seventy blacks, and many others were ready to follow the lead of these lucky forerunners. The field of operations grew wider, and it became essential to take on new associates. Among those who swore to the oath was a young man from Arkansas, one Virgil Stewart, who very soon made himself conspicuous for his cruelty. Stewart was the nephew of a gentleman who had had many slaves decoyed away. In August 1834 this young man broke his oath and exposed Morell and his whole gang. Morell’s house in New Orleans was surrounded by the authorities. Only due to their negligence, or perhaps through a bribe, was Morell able to make good an escape.

Three days passed. During this time, Morell remained hidden on Toulouse Street in an old house with courtyards that were filled with vines and statues. It seems that he took to eating little and would stalk up and down the dim, spacious rooms in his bare feet, smoking thoughtful cigars. By a slave of the place, he sent two letters to Natchez and a third to Red River. On the fourth day, three men joined him, and they stayed until dawn, arguing over plans. On the fifth day, Morell got out of bed as it was growing dusk and, asking for a razor, carefully shaved off his beard. Then he dressed and left. At an easy pace, he made his way across the city’s northern suburbs. Once in the country, skirting the Mississippi flats, he walked more briskly.

His scheme was foolhardy. He planned to enlist the services of the last men still to owe him honour the South’s obliging blacks. They had watched their companions run off and never seen them reappear. Their freedom, therefore, was real. Morell’s object was to raise the blacks against the whites, to capture and sack New Orleans, and to take possession of the territory. Morell, brought down and nearly destroyed by Stewart’s betrayal, contemplated a nationwide response a response in which criminal elements would be exalted to the point of redemption and a place in history. With this aim, he started out for Natchez, where he enjoyed greater strength. I copy his account of that journey:

I walked four days, and no opportunity offered for me to get a horse. The fifth day, about twelve, I stopped at a creek to get some water and rest a little. While I was sitting on a log, looking down the road the way that I had come, a man came in sight riding on a good-looking horse. The very moment I saw him, I was determined to have his horse. I arose and drew an elegant rifle pistol on him and ordered him to dismount. He did so, and I took his horse by the bridle and pointed down the creek, and ordered him to walk before me. He went a few hundred yards and stopped. I made him undress himself. He said, ‘If you are determined to kill me, let me have time to pray before I die.’ I told him I had no time to hear him pray. He dropped on his knees, and I shot him through the back of the head. I ripped open his belly and took out his entrails, and sunk him in the creek. I then searched his pockets, and found four hundred dollars and thirty-seven cents, and a number of papers that I did not take time to examine. His boots were brand-new, and fitted me genteelly. I put them on and sunk my old shoes in the creek.

That was how I obtained the horse I needed, and directed my course for Natchez in much better style than I had been for the last five days.

The Disruption

Morell leading rebellions of blacks who dreamed of lynching him; Morell lynched by armies of blacks he dreamed of leading it hurts me to confess that Mississippi history took advantage of neither of these splendid opportunities. Nor, contrary to all poetic justice (or poetic symmetry), did the river of his crimes become his grave. On the second of January 1835 Lazarus Morell died of a lung ailment in the Natchez hospital, where he had been interned under the name Silas Buckley. A fellow patient on the ward recognized him. On the second and on the fourth, the slaves of certain plantations attempted an uprising, but they were put down without a great deal of bloodshed.

Tom Castro, the Implausible Impostor

Tom Castro is what I call him, for this was the name he was known by, around 1850, in the streets and houses of Talcahuano, Santiago, and Valparaiso, and it is only fitting now that he comes back to these shores even if only as a ghost and as mere light reading that he go by this name again. The registry of births in Wapping lists him as Arthur Orton, and enters the name under the date 7 June 1834. It is known that he was a butcher’s son, that his childhood suffered the drabness and squalor of London slums, and that he felt the call of the sea. This last fact is not uncommon. Running away to sea is, for the English, the traditional break from parental authority the road to adventure; Geography fosters it, and so does the Bible (Psalms, 107): ‘They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.’

Orton ran away from his familiar, dirty, brick-red streets, went down to the sea in a ship, gazed at the Southern Cross with the usual disappointment, and deserted in the Chilean port of Valparaiso. As an individual, he was at once quiet and dull. Logically, he might (and should) have starved to death, but his dim-witted good humour, his fixed smile, and his unrelieved meekness brought him under the wing of a family called Castro, whose name he came to adopt. Of this South American episode no other traces are left, but his gratefulness does not seem to have flagged, since, in 1861, he reappears in Australia still using that name Tom Castro. There, in Sydney, he made the acquaintance of a certain Ebenezer Bogle, a Negro servant. Bogle, without being especially handsome, had about him that air of authority and assurance, that architectural solidity typical of certain Negroes well along in years, in flesh, and in dignity. He had another quality, which most anthropology textbooks have denied his race a capacity for sudden inspiration. In due time, we shall see proof of this. He was a well-mannered, upright person, whose primeval African lusts had been carefully channelled by the uses and misuses of Calvinism. Apart from receiving divine visitations (which will presently be described), Bogle was no different from other men, with nothing more distinctive about him than a longstanding, shamefaced fear that made him linger at street crossings glancing east, west, south, and north in utter dread of the vehicle that might one day take his life.

Orton first saw him early one evening on a deserted Sydney street corner, steeling himself against this quite unlikely death. After studying him for a long while, Orton offered the Negro his arm, and, sharing the same amazement, the two men crossed the harmless street. From that moment of a now dead and lost evening, a protectorate came into being that of the solid, unsure Negro over the obese dimwit from Wapping. In September 1865 Bogle read a forlorn advertisement in the local paper.

The Idolized Dead Man

Toward the end of April 1854 (while Orton was enjoying the effusions of Chilean hospitality), the steamer Mermaid, sailing from Rio de Janeiro to Liverpool, went down in the waters of the Atlantic. Among those lost was Roger Charles Tichborne, an army officer brought up in France and heir of one of the leading Roman Catholic families of England. Incredible as it may seem, the death of this Frenchified young man who spoke English with the most refined Parisian accent and awoke in others that incomparable resentment which only French intelligence, French wit, and French pedantry can touch off was a fateful event in the life of Arthur Orton, who had never laid eyes on Tichborne. Lady Tichborne, Roger’s anguished mother, refused to give credence to her son’s death and had heartrending advertisements published in newspapers the world over. One of these notices fell into the soft, black hands of Ebenezer Bogle, and a masterly scheme was evolved.

The Virtues of Disparity

Tichborne was a gentleman, slight in build, with a trim, buttoned-up look, sharp features, darkish skin, straight black hair, lively eyes, and a finicky, precise way of speaking. Orton was an enormously fat, out-and-out boor, whose features could hardly be made out; he had somewhat freckled skin, wavy brown hair, heavy-lidded eyes, and his speech was dim or nonexistent. Bogle got it into his head that Orton’s duty was to board the next Europe-bound steamer and to satisfy Lady Tichborne’s hopes by claiming to be her son. The plan was outrageously ingenious. Let us draw a simple parallel. If an impostor, in 1914, had undertaken to pass himself off as the German emperor, what he would immediately have faked would have been the turned-up moustache, the withered arm, the authoritarian frown, the grey cape, the illustriously bemedalled chest, and the pointed helmet. Bogle was more subtle. He would have put forward a clean-shaven kaiser, lacking in military traits, stripped of glamorous decorations, and whose left arm was in an unquestionable state of health. We can lay aside the comparison. It is on record that Bogle put forward a flabby Tichborne, with an imbecile’s amiable smile, brown hair, and an invincible ignorance of French. He knew that an exact likeness of the long-lost Roger Charles Tichborne was an outright impossibility. He also knew that any resemblances, however successfully contrived, would only point up certain unavoidable disparities. Bogle therefore steered clear of all likeness. Intuition told him that the vast ineptitude of the venture would serve as ample proof that no fraud was afoot, since an impostor would hardly have overlooked such flagrant discrepancies. Nor must the all-important collaboration of time be forgotten: fourteen years of Southern Hemisphere, coupled with the hazards of chance, can wreak change in a man.

A further assurance of success lay in Lady Tichborne’s unrelenting, harebrained advertisements, which showed how unshakably she believed that Roger Charles was not dead and how willing she was to recognize him,

The Meeting

Tom Castro, always ready to oblige, wrote to Lady Tichborne. To confirm his identity, he cited the unimpeachable proof of two moles located close to the nipple of his left breast and that childhood episode so painful, but at the same time so unforgettable of his having been attacked by a nest of hornets. The letter was short and, in keeping with Tom Castro and Bogle, was wanting in the least scruples of orthography. In the imposing seclusion of her Paris hotel, the lady read and reread the letter through tears of joy, and in a few days’ time she came up with the memories her son had asked for.

On the sixteenth of January 1867 Roger Charles Tichborne announced his presence in that same hotel. He was preceded by his respectful manservant, Ebenezer Bogle. The winter day was bright with sunshine; Lady Tichborne’s weary eyes were veiled with tears. The Negro threw open wide the window blinds, the light created a mask, and the mother, recognizing her prodigal son, drew him into her eager embrace. Now that she really had him back, she could relinquish his diary and the letters he had sent from Brazil those cherished reflections that had nourished her through fourteen years of solitude. She handed them back with pride. Not a scrap was missing.

Bogle smiled to himself. Now he had a way to flesh out the compliant ghost of Roger Charles.

Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam

This glad reunion which seems somehow to belong to a tradition of the classical stage might well have crowned our story, rendering certain, or at least probable, the happiness of three parties: the real mother, the spurious son, the successful plotter. Fate (such is the name we give the infinite, ceaseless chain of thousands of intertwined causes) had another end in store. Lady Tichborne died in 1870, and her relatives brought suit against Arthur Orton for false impersonation. Unburdened by solitude or tears though not by greed they had never believed in the obese and nearly illiterate prodigal son who appeared, straight out of the blue, from the wilds of Australia. Orton counted on the support of his numerous creditors who, anxious to be paid what was owed them, were determined that he was Tichborne.

He also counted on the friendship of the family solicitor, Edward Hopkins, and of Francis J. Baigent, an antiquary intimately acquainted with the Tichborne family history. This, however, was not enough. Bogle reasoned that, to win the game, public opinion would have to be marshaled in their favour. Assuming a top hat and rolled umbrella, he went in search of inspiration along the better streets of London. It was early evening. Bogle perambulated about until a honey-coloured moon repeated itself in the rectangular basins of the public fountains. The expected visitation was paid him. Hailing a cab, he asked to be driven to Baigent’s flat. Baigent sent a long letter to the
Times certifying that the supposed Tichborne was a shameless impostor. He signed it with the name of Father Goudron of the Society of Jesus. Other equally papist accusations soon followed. Their effect was immediate: decent people everywhere were quick to discover that Sir Roger Charles was the target of an unscrupulous Jesuitical plot.

The Hansom Cab

The trial lasted one hundred and ninety days. Something like a hundred witnesses swore that the defendant was Tichborne among them, four fellow officers in the 6th Dragoon Guards. The claimant’s supporters kept on repeating that he was not an impostor, for, had he been one, he would have made some effort to ape his model’s youthful portraits. Furthermore, Lady Tichborne had identified him, and obviously a mother cannot be wrong. All went well, or more or less well, until a former sweetheart of Orton’s took the stand to testify. Bogle was unshaken by this treacherous maneuver on the part of the ‘relatives’; assuming top hat and umbrella, he once again took to the London streets in search of a visitation. We will never know whether he found it. Shortly before reaching Primrose Hill, there loomed out of the dark the dreaded vehicle that had been in pursuit of him down through the years. Bogle saw it coming, he cried out, but salvation eluded him. Dashed violently against the stone pavement, his skull was split by the dizzying hoofs.

The Spectre

Tom Castro was the ghost of Roger Charles Tichborne, but he was a sorry ghost animated by someone else’s genius. On hearing the news of Bogle’s death, he collapsed. He went on lying, but with failing conviction and obvious discrepancies. It was not hard to foresee the end.

On the twenty-seventh of February 1874 Arthur Orton, alias Tom Castro, was sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude. In prison, he got himself liked; this was Orton’s calling. Good behaviour won him a four-year reduction of sentence. When this last touch of hospitality prison was behind him, he toured the hamlets and centres of the United Kingdom, giving little lectures in which he alternately pleaded his innocence or his guilt. Modesty and ingratiation were so deep-seated in him that many a night he would begin by exoneration and end by confession, always disposed to the leanings of his audience. On 2 April 1898, he died.

The Widow Ching, Lady Pirate

Any mention of pirates of the fair sex runs the immediate risk of awakening painful memories of the neighbourhood production of some faded musical comedy, with its chorus line of obvious housewives posing as pirates and hoofing it on a briny deep of unmistakable cardboard. Nonetheless, lady pirates there have been women skilled in the handling of ships, in the captaincy of brutish crews, and in the pursuit and plunder of sea-going vessels. One such was Mary Read, who once declared that the profession of pirate was not for everyone, and that to engage in it with dignity one had, like her, to be a man of courage. At the flamboyant outset of her career, when as yet she captained no crew, one of her lovers was wronged by the ship’s bully. Challenging the fellow to a duel, Mary took him on with both hands, according to the time-honoured custom of the West Indies unwieldy and none-too-sure flintlock in the left, trusty cutlass in the right. The pistol misfired, but the sword behaved as it should . . .

Along about 1720, Mary Read’s daring career was cut short by a Spanish gallows at St Jago de la Vega, in Jamaica.

Another lady buccaneer of those same seas was Anne Bonney, a good-looking, boisterous Irishwoman, with high breasts and fiery red hair, who was always among the first to risk her neck boarding a prize. She was a shipmate and, in the end, gallowsmate of Mary Read; Anne’s lover, Captain John Rackam, sported a noose on that occasion, too. Contemptuous of him, Anne came up with this harsh variant of Aisha’s reproach of Boabdil: ‘If you had fought like a Man, you need not have been hang’d like a Dog.’

A third member of this sisterhood, more venturesome and longer-lived than the others, was a lady pirate who operated in Asian waters, all the way from the Yellow Sea to the rivers of the Annam coast. I speak of the veteran widow Ching.

The Apprentice Years

Around 1797, the shareholders of the many pirate squadrons of the China seas formed a combine, to which they named as admiral a man altogether tried and true a certain Ching. So severe was this Ching, so exemplary in his sacking of the coasts, that the terror-stricken inhabitants of eighty seaboard towns, with gifts and tears, implored imperial assistance. Their pitiful appeal did not go unheard: they were ordered to put their villages to the torch, forget their fishing chores, migrate inland, and there take up the unfamiliar science of agriculture. All this they did, so that the thwarted invaders found nothing but deserted coasts. As a result, the pirates were forced to switch to preying on ships, a form of depredation which, since it seriously hampered trade, proved even more obnoxious to the authorities than the previous one. The imperial government was quick to act, ordering the former fishermen to abandon plough and yoke and mend their nets and pars. True to their old fears, however, these fishermen rose up in revolt, and the authorities set upon another course that of pardoning Ching by appointing him Master of the Royal Stables. Ching was about to accept the bribe. Finding this out in time, the shareholders made their righteous indignation evident in a plate of poisoned greens, cooked with rice. The morsel proving deadly, the onetime admiral and would-be Master of the Royal Stables gave up his ghost to the gods of the sea. His widow, transfigured by this twofold double-dealing, called the pirate crews together, explained to them the whole involved affair, and urged them to reject both the emperor’s deceitful pardon and the unpleasant service rendered by the poison-dabbling shareholders. She proposed, instead, the plundering of ships on their own account and the election of a new admiral.

The person chosen was the widow Ching. She was a slinking woman, with sleepy eyes and a smile full of decayed teeth. Her blackish, oiled hair shone brighter than her eyes. Under her sober orders, the ships embarked upon danger and the high seas.

The Command

Thirteen years of systematic adventure ensued. Six squadrons made up the fleet, each flying a banner of a different colour red, yellow, green, black, purple, and one (the flagship’s) emblazoned with a serpent. The captains were known by such names as ‘Bird and Stone’, ‘Scourge of the Eastern Sea’, ‘Jewel of the Whole Crew’, ‘Wave with Many Fishes’, and ‘Sun on High’. The code of rules, drawn up by the widow Ching herself, is of an unappealable severity, and its straightforward, laconic style is utterly lacking in the faded flowers of rhetoric that lend a rather absurd loftiness to the style of Chinese officialdom, of which we shall presently offer an alarming specimen or two. For now, I copy out a few articles of the widow’s code:

All goods transshipped from enemy vessels will be entered in a register and kept in a storehouse. Of this stock, the pirate will receive for himself out of ten parts, only two; the rest shall belong to the storehouse, called the general fund. Violation of this ordinance will be punishable by death.

The punishment of the pirate who abandons his post without permission will be perforation of the ears in the presence of the whole fleet; repeating the same, he will suffer death.

Commerce with captive women taken in the villages is prohibited on deck; permission to use violence against any woman must first be requested of the ship’s purser, and then carried out only in the ship’s hold. Violation of this ordinance will be punishable by death.

Information extracted from prisoners affirms that the fare of these pirates consisted chiefly of ship biscuits, rats fattened on human flesh, and boiled rice, and that, on days of battle, crew members used to mix gunpowder with their liquor. With card games and loaded dice, with the metal square and bowl of fan-tan, with the little lamp and the pipe dreams of opium, they whiled away the time. Their favourite weapons were a pair of short swords, used one in each hand. Before seizing another ship, they sprinkled their cheekbones and bodies with an infusion of garlic water, which they considered a certain charm against shot. Each crewman traveled with his wife, but the captain sailed with a harem, which was five or six in number and which, in victory, was always replenished.

Kia-king, the Young Emperor, Speaks

Somewhere around the middle of 1809, there was made public an imperial decree, of which I transcribe the first and last parts. Its style was widely criticized. It ran:

Men who are cursed and evil, men capable of profaning bread, men who pay no heed to the clamour of the tax collector or the orphan, men in whose undergarments are stitched the phoenix and the dragon, men who deny the great truths of printed books, men who allow their tears to run toward the North all these are disrupting the commerce of our rivers and the age-old intimacy of our seas. In unsound, unseaworthy craft, they are tossed by storms both night and day. Nor is their object one of benevolence: they are not and never were the true friends of the seafarer. Far from lending him their aid, they swoop down on him most viciously, inviting him to wrack and ruin, inviting him to death. In such wise do they violate the natural laws of the Universe that rivers overflow their banks, vast acreages are drowned, sons are pitted against fathers, and even the roots of rain and drought are altered . . .

. . . In consequence, Admiral Kwo-lang, I leave to your hand the administration of punishment. Never forget that clemency is a prerogative of the throne and that it would be presumptuous of a subject to endeavour to assume such a privilege. Therefore, be merciless, be impartial, be obeyed, be victorious.

The incidental reference to unseaworthy vessels was, of course, false. Its aim was to encourage Kwo-lang’s expedition. Some ninety days later, the forces of the widow Ching came face to face with those of the Middle Kingdom. Nearly a thousand ships joined battle, fighting from early morning until late evening. A mixed chorus of bells, drums, curses, gongs, and prophecies, along with the report of the great ordnance, accompanied the action. The emperor’s forces were sundered. Neither the proscribed clemency nor the recommended cruelty had occasion to be exercised. Kwo-lang observed a rite that our present-day military, in defeat, choose to ignore suicide.

The Terrorized Riverbanks

The proud widow’s six hundred war junks and forty thousand victorious pirates then sailed up the mouths of the Si-kiang, and to port and starboard they multiplied fires and loathsome revels and orphans. Entire villages were burned to the ground. In one of them alone, the number of prisoners passed a thousand. A hundred and twenty women who sought the confused refuge of neighbouring reedfields and paddies were betrayed by a crying baby and later sold into slavery in Macao. Although at some remove, the tears and bereavement wreaked by this depredation came to the attention of Kia-king, the Son of Heaven. Certain historians contend that this outcry pained him less than the disaster that befell his punitive expedition. The truth is that he organized a second expedition, awesome in banners, in sailors, in soldiers, in the engines of war, in provisions, in augurs, and in astrologers. The command this time fell upon one Ting-kwei. The fearful multitude of ships sailed into the delta of the Si-kiang, closing off passage to the pirate squadron. The widow fitted out for battle. She knew it would be difficult, even desperate; night after night and month after month of plundering and idleness had weakened her men. The opening of battle was delayed. Lazily, the sun rose and set upon the rippling reeds. Men and their weapons were waiting. Noons were heavy, afternoons endless.

The Dragon and the Fox

And yet, each evening, high, shiftless flocks of airy dragons rose from the ships of the imperial squadron and came gently to rest on the enemy decks and surrounding waters. They were lightweight constructions of rice paper and strips of reed, akin to comets, and their silvery or reddish sides repeated identical characters. The widow anxiously studied this regular stream of meteors and read in them the long and perplexing fable of a dragon which had always given protection to a fox, despite the fox’s long ingratitude and repeated transgressions. The moon grew slender in the sky, and each evening the paper and reed figures brought the same story, with almost imperceptible variants. The widow was distressed, and she sank deep into thought. When the moon was full in the sky and in the reddish water, the story seemed to reach its end.

Nobody was able to predict whether limitless pardon or limitless punishment would descend upon the fox, but the inexorable end drew near. The widow came to an understanding. She threw her two short swords into the river, kneeled in the bottom of a small boat, and ordered herself rowed to the imperial flagship. It was dark; the sky was filled with dragons this time, yellow ones. On climbing aboard, the widow murmured a brief sentence. ‘The fox seeks the dragon’s wing’, she said.

The Apotheosis

It is a matter of history that the fox received her pardon and devoted her lingering years to the opium trade. She also left off being the widow, assuming a name which in English means ‘Luster of Instruction’.

From this period [wrote one Chinese chronicler lyrically], ships began to pass and repass in tranquility. All became quiet on the rivers and tranquil on the four seas. Men sold their weapons and bought oxen to plough their fields. They buried sacrifices, said prayers on the tops of hills, and rejoiced themselves by singing behind screens during the day-time.

Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities

Those of This America

Standing out sharply against a background of blue walls or open sky, two hoodlums dressed in close-fitting suits of sober black and wearing thick-heeled shoes dance a deadly dance a ballet of matching knives until a carnation starts from the ear of one of them as a knife finds its mark in him, and he brings the unaccompanied dance to a close on the ground with his death. Satisfied, the other adjusts his high-crowned hat and spends his final years recounting the story of this clean duel. That, in sum and substance, is the history of our old-time Argentine underworld. The history of New York’s old underworld is both more dizzying and more clumsy.

Those of the Other

The history of the gangs of New York (revealed in 1928 by Herbert Asbury in a solid volume of four hundred octavo pages) contains all of the confusion and cruelty of the barbarian cosmogonies, and much of their giant-scale ineptitude cellars of old breweries honeycombed into Negro tenements; a ramshackle New York of three-storey structures; criminal gangs like the Swamp Angels, who rendezvoused in a labyrinth of sewers; criminal gangs like the Daybreak Boys, who recruited precocious murderers of ten and eleven; loners, like the bold and gigantic Plug Uglies, who earned the smirks of passersby with their enormous plug hats, stuffed with wool and worn pulled down over their ears as helmets, and their long shirttails, worn outside the trousers, that flapped in the Bowery breeze (but with a huge bludgeon in one hand and a pistol peeping out of a pocket); criminal gangs like the Dead Rabbits, who entered into battle under the emblem of a dead rabbit impaled on a pike; men like Dandy Johnny Dolan, famous for the oiled forelock he wore curled and plastered against his forehead, for his cane whose handle was carved in the likeness of a monkey, and for the copper device he invented and used on the thumb for gouging out an adversary’s eyes; men like Kit Burns, who for twenty-five cents would decapitate a live rat with a single bite; men like Blind Danny Lyons, young and blond and with immense dead eyes, who pimped for three girls, all of whom proudly walked the streets for him; rows of houses showing red lanterns in the windows, like those run by seven sisters from a small New England village, who always turned their Christmas Eve proceeds over to charity; rat pits, where wharf rats were starved and sent against terriers; Chinese gambling dives; women like the repeatedly widowed Red Norah, the vaunted sweetheart of practically the entire Gopher gang; women like Lizzie the Dove, who donned widow’s weeds when Danny Lyons was executed for murder, and who was stabbed in the throat by Gentle Maggie during an argument over whose sorrow for the departed blind man was the greater; mob uprisings like the savage week of draft riots in 1863, when a hundred buildings were burned to the ground and the city was nearly taken over; teeming street fights in which a man went down as at sea, trampled to death; a thief and horse poisoner like Yoske Nigger. All these go to weave underworld New York’s chaotic history. And its most famous hero is Edward Delaney, alias William Delaney, alias Joseph Marvin, alias Joseph Morris, alias Monk Eastman boss of twelve hundred men.

The Hero

These shifts of identity (as distressing as a masquerade, in which one is not quite certain who is who) omit his real name presuming there is such a thing as a real name. The recorded fact is that he was born in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn as Edward Osterman, a name later Americanized to Eastman. Oddly enough, this stormy underworld character was Jewish. He was the son of the owner of a kosher restaurant, where men wearing rabbinical beards could safely partake of the bloodless and thrice-cleansed flesh of ritually slaughtered calves. At the age of nineteen, about 1892, his father set him up in business with a bird store. A fascination for animals, an interest in their small decisions and inscrutable innocence, turned into a lifelong hobby. Years afterwards, in a period of opulence, when he scornfully refused the Havana cigars of freckle-faced Tammany sachems or when he paid visits to the best houses of prostitution in that new invention, the automobile (which seemed the bastard offspring of a gondola), he started a second business, a front, that accommodated a hundred cats and more than four hundred pigeons none of which were for sale to anyone. He loved each one, and often he strolled through his neighbourhood with a happy cat under an arm, while several others trailed eagerly behind.

He was a battered, colossal man. He had a short, bull neck; a barrel chest; long, scrappy arms; a broken nose; a face, although plentifully scarred, less striking than his frame; and legs bowed like a cowboy’s or a sailor’s. He could usually be found without a shirt or coat, but not without a derby hat several sizes too small perched on his bullet-shaped head. Mankind has conserved his memory. Physically, the conventional moving-picture gunman is a copy of him, not of the pudgy, epicene Capone. It is said of Louis Wolheim that Hollywood employed him because his features suggested those of the lamented Monk Eastman. Eastman used to strut about his underworld kingdom with a great blue pigeon on his shoulder, just like a bull with a cowbird on its rump.

Back in the mid-nineties, public dance halls were a dime a dozen in the city of New York. Eastman was employed in one of them as a bouncer. The story is told that a dance-hall manager once refused to hire him, whereupon Monk demonstrated his capacity for the work by wiping the floor with the pair of giants who stood between him and the job. Single-handed, universally feared, he held the position until 1899. For each troublemaker he quelled, he cut a notch in his brutal bludgeon. One night, his attention drawn to a shining bald pate minding its own business over a bock beer, he laid its bearer out with a blow. ‘I needed one more notch to make fifty,’ he later explained.

The Territory

From 1899 on, Eastman was not only famous but, during elections, he was captain of an important ward. He also collected protection money from the houses of prostitution, gambling dives, streetwalkers, pickpockets, and burglars of his sordid domain. Tammany politicians hired him to stir up trouble; so did private individuals. Here are some of his prices:

Ear chewed off | $15
Leg or arm broke | $19
Shot in leg | $25
Stab | $25
Doing the big job | $100 and up

Sometimes, to keep his hand in, Eastman personally carried out a commission.

A question of boundaries (as subtle and thorny as any cramming the dockets of international law) brought Eastman into confrontation with Paul Kelly, the well-known chief of a rival gang. Bullets and rough-and-tumble fighting of the two gangs had set certain territorial limits. Eastman crossed these bounds alone one early morning and was assailed by five of Kelly’s men. With his flailing, apelike arms and blackjack, Monk knocked down three of the attackers, but he was ultimately shot twice in the stomach and left for dead. Eastman closed the hot wounds with thumb and index finger and staggered to Gouverneur Hospital. There, for several weeks, life, a high fever, and death vied for him, but his lips refused to name his would-be killer. When he left the hospital, the war was on, and, until the nineteenth of August, 1903 it flowered in one shoot-out after another.

The Battle of Rivington Street

A hundred heroes, each a bit different from his photograph fading in police files; a hundred heroes reeking of tobacco smoke and alcohol; a hundred heroes wearing straw boaters with gaily coloured bands; a hundred heroes afflicted, some more, some less, with shameful diseases, tooth decay, complaints of the respiratory tracts or kidneys; a hundred heroes as insignificant or splendid as those of Troy or Bull Run these hundred let loose this black feat of arms under the shadows of the arches of the Second Avenue elevated. The cause was the attempted raid by Kelly’s gunmen on a stuss game operated by a friend of Eastman’s on Rivington Street. One of the gunmen was killed, and the ensuing flurry of shots swelled into a battle of uncounted revolvers. Sheltered behind the pillars of the elevated structure, smooth-shaven men quietly blazed away at each other and became the focus of an awesome ring of rented automobiles loaded with eager reinforcements, each bearing a fistful of artillery.

What did the protagonists of this battle feel? First (I believe), the brutal conviction that the senseless din of a hundred revolvers was going to cut them down at any moment; second (I believe), the no less mistaken certainty that if the first shots did not hit them they were invulnerable. What is without doubt, however, is that, under cover of the iron pillars and the night, they fought with a vengeance. Twice the police intervened, and twice they were driven off. At the first glimmer of dawn, the battle petered out as if it were obscene or ghostly. Under the great arches of the elevated were left seven critically wounded men, four corpses, and one dead pigeon.

The Creakings

The local politicians, in whose ranks Monk Eastman served, always publicly denied that such gangs existed, or else claimed that they were mere sporting clubs. The indiscreet battle of Rivington Street now alarmed them. They arranged a meeting between Eastman and Kelly in order to suggest to them the need for a truce. Kelly (knowing very well that Tammany Hall was more effective than any number of Colts when it came to obstructing police action) agreed at once; Eastman (with the pride of his great, brutish hulk) hungered for more blasting and further frays. He began to refuse, and the politicians had to threaten him with prison. In the end, the two famous gangsters came face to face in an unsavoury dive, each with a huge cigar between his teeth, a hand on his revolver, and his watchful thugs surrounding him. They arrived at a typically American decision: they would settle their dispute in the ring by squaring off with their fists. Kelly was an experienced boxer. The fight took place in a barn up in the Bronx, and it was an extravagant affair. A hundred and forty spectators looked on, among them mobsters with rakish derbies and their molls with enormous coiffures in which weapons were sometimes concealed.

The pair fought for two hours and it ended in a draw. Before a week was out, the shooting started up again. Monk was arrested for the nth time. With great relief Tammany Hall washed their hands of him; the judge prophesied for him, with complete accuracy, ten years in prison.

Eastman vs Germany

When the still puzzled Monk was released from Sing Sing, the twelve hundred members of his gang had broken up into warring factions. Unable to reorganize them, he took to operating on his own. On the eighth of September 1917, he was arrested for creating a disturbance in a public thoroughfare. The next day, deciding to take part in an even larger disturbance, he enlisted in the 106th Infantry of the New York National Guard. Within a few months, he was shipped overseas with his regiment.

We know about various aspects of his campaign. We know that he violently disapproved of taking prisoners and that he once (with just his rifle butt) interfered with that deplorable practice. We know that he managed to slip out of the hospital three days after he had been wounded and make his way back to the front, lines. We know that he distinguished himself in the fighting around Montfaucon. We know that he later held that a number of little dance halls around the Bowery were a lot tougher than the war in Europe.

The Mysterious, Logical End

On Christmas Day, 1920, Monk Eastman’s body was found at dawn on one of the downtown streets of New York. It had five bullet wounds in it. Happily unaware of death, an alley cat hovered around the corpse with a certain puzzlement.

The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan

An image of the desert wilds of Arizona, first and foremost, an image of the desert wilds of Arizona and New Mexico a country famous for its silver and gold camps, a country of breathtaking open spaces, a country of monumental mesas and soft colours, a country of bleached skeletons picked clean by buzzards. Over this whole country, another image that of Billy the Kid, the hard rider firm on his horse, the young man with the relentless six-shooters, sending out invisible bullets which (like magic) kill at a distance.

The desert veined with precious metals, arid and blinding-bright. The near child who on dying at the age of twenty-one owed to the justice of grown men twenty-one deaths ‘not counting Mexicans’.

The Larval Stage

Along about 1859, the man who would become known to terror and glory as Billy the Kid was born in a cellar room of a New York City tenement. It is said that he was spawned by a tired-out Irish womb but was brought up among Negroes. In this tumult of lowly smells and woolly heads, he enjoyed a superiority that stemmed from having freckles and a mop of red hair. He took pride in being white; he was also scrawny, wild, and coarse. At the age of twelve, he fought in the gang of the Swamp Angels, that branch of divinities who operated among the neighbourhood sewers. On nights redolent of burnt fog, they would clamber out of that foul-smelling labyrinth, trail some German sailor, do him in with a knock on the head, strip him to his underwear, and afterward sneak back to the filth of their starting place. Their leader was a grey-haired Negro, Gas House Jonas, who was also celebrated as a poisoner of horses.

Sometimes, from the upper window of a waterfront dive, a woman would dump a bucket of ashes upon the head of a prospective victim. As he gasped and choked, Swamp Angels would swarm him, rush him into a cellar, and plunder him.

Such were the apprentice years of Billy Harrigan, the future Billy the Kid. Nor did he scorn the offerings of Bowery playhouses, enjoying in particular (perhaps without an inkling that they were signs and symbols of his destiny) cowboy melodramas.

Go West!

If the jammed Bowery theatres (whose top-gallery riffraff shouted ‘Hoist that rag!’ when the curtain failed to rise promptly on schedule) abounded in these blood and thunder productions, the simple explanation is that America was then experiencing the lure of the Far West. Beyond the sunset lay the goldfields of Nevada and California. Beyond the sunset were the redwoods, going down before the axe; the buffalo’s huge Babylonian face; Brigham Young’s beaver hat and plural bed; the red man’s ceremonies and his rampages; the clear air of the deserts; endless-stretching range land; and the earth itself, whose nearness quickens the heart like the nearness of the sea. The West beckoned. A slow, steady rumour populated those years that of thousands of Americans taking possession of the West. On that march, around 1872, was Bill Harrigan, treacherous as a bull rattler, in flight from a rectangular cell.

The Demolition of a Mexican

History (which, like certain film directors, proceeds by a series of abrupt images) now puts forward the image of a danger-filled saloon, located as if on the high seas out in the heart of the all-powerful desert. The time, a blustery night of the year 1873; the place, the Staked Plains of New Mexico. All around, the land is almost uncannily flat and bare, but the sky, with its storm-piled clouds and moon, is full of fissured cavities and mountains. There are a cow’s skull, the howl and the eyes of coyotes in the shadows, trim horses, and from the saloon an elongated patch of light. Inside, leaning over the bar, a group of strapping but tired men drink a liquor that warms them for a fight; at the same time, they make a great show of large silver coins bearing a serpent and an eagle. A drunk croons to himself, poker-faced. Among the men are several who speak a language with many s’s, which must be Spanish, for those who speak it are looked down on. Bill Harrigan, the red-topped tenement rat, stands among the drinkers. He has downed a couple of aguardientes and thinks of asking for one more, maybe because he hasn’t a cent left. He is somewhat overwhelmed by these men of the desert. He sees them as imposing, boisterous, happy, and hatefully wise in the handling of wild cattle and big horses. All at once there is dead silence, ignored only by the voice of the drunk, singing out of tune. Someone has come in a big, burly Mexican, with the face of an old Indian squaw. He is endowed with an immense sombrero and with a pair of six-guns at his side. In awkward English, he wishes a good evening to all the gringo sons of bitches who are drinking. Nobody takes up the challenge. Bill asks who he is, and they whisper to him, in fear, that the Dago that is, the Diego is Belisario Villagrán, from Chihuahua. At once, there is a resounding blast. Sheltered by that wall of tall men, Bill has fired at the intruder. The glass drops from Villagrán’s hand; then the man himself drops. He does not need another bullet. Without deigning to glance at the showy dead man, Bill picks up his end of the conversation. ‘Is that so?’ he drawled. ‘Well, I’m Billy the Kid, from New York.’ The drunk goes on singing, unheeded. One may easily guess the apotheosis. Bill gives out handshakes all around and accepts praises, cheers, and whiskies. Someone notices that there are no notches on the handle of his revolver and offers to cut one to stand for Villagrán’s death. Billy the Kid keeps this someone’s razor, though he says that ‘ It’s hardly worthwhile noting down Mexicans.’ This, perhaps, is not quite enough. That night, Bill lays out his blanket beside the corpse and with great show sleeps till daybreak.

Deaths for Deaths’ Sake

Out of that lucky blast (at the age of fourteen), Billy the Kid the hero was born, and the furtive Bill Harrigan died. The boy of the sewer and the knock on the head rose to become a man of the frontier. He made a horseman of himself, learning to ride straight in the saddle Wyoming or Texas-style and not with his body thrown back, the way they rode in Oregon and California. He never completely matched his legend, but he kept getting closer and closer to it. Something of the New York hoodlum lived on in the cowboy; he transferred to Mexicans the hate that had previously been inspired in him by Negroes, but the last words he ever spoke were (swear) words in Spanish. He learned the art of the cowpuncher’s maverick life. He learned another, more difficult art how to lead men. Both helped to make him a good cattle rustler. From time to time, Old Mexico’s guitars and whorehouses pulled on him.

With the haunting lucidity of insomnia, he organized populous orgies that often lasted four days and four nights. In the end, glutted, he settled accounts with bullets. While his trigger finger was unfailing, he was the most feared man (and perhaps the most anonymous and most lonely) of that whole frontier. Pat Garrett, his friend, the sheriff who later killed him, once told him, ‘I’ve had a lot of practice with the rifle shooting buffalo.’

‘I’ve had plenty with the six-shooter,’ Billy replied modestly. ‘Shooting tin cans and men.’

The details can never be recovered, but it is known that he was credited with up to twenty-one killings — ‘not counting Mexicans’. For seven desperate years, he practiced the extravagance of utter recklessness.

The night of the twenty-fifth of July 1880, Billy the Kid came galloping on his piebald down the main, or only, street of Fort Sumner. The heat was oppressive and the lamps had not been lighted; Sheriff Garrett, seated on a porch in a rocking chair, drew his revolver and sent a bullet through the Kid’s belly. The horse kept on; the rider tumbled into the dust of the road. Garrett got off a second shot. The townspeople (knowing the wounded man was Billy the Kid) locked their window shutters tight. The agony was long and blasphemous. In the morning, the sun by then high overhead, they began drawing near, and they disarmed him. The man was gone. They could see in his face that used-up look of the dead.

He was shaved, sheathed in ready-made clothes, and displayed to awe and ridicule in the window of Fort Sumner’s biggest store. Men on horseback and in buckboards gathered for miles and miles around. On the third day, they had to use make-up on him. On the fourth day, he was buried with rejoicing.

The Insulting Master of Etiquette Kôtsuké no Suké

The infamous subject of this tale is the insulting master of etiquette Kira Kôtsuké no Suké, the unfortunate court official who brought on the degradation and death of the lord of the castle of Akô and later refused to perform hara-kiri (which, as a nobleman, was his duty) when menaced by the vengeance he deserved. He is a man worthy of the thanks of all humankind, for he awakened keen loyalties and provided the necessary black occasion for an immortal undertaking. A hundred or so novels, studies, doctoral dissertations, and operas commemorate the deed to say nothing of the effusions in porcelain, spangled lapis lazuli, and lacquer work. The story is served even by the versatile silver screen, since ‘The Learned History of the Forty-seven Retainers’ such is its name is the Japanese film’s most frequently recurring inspiration. The painstakingly documented renown which these burning attentions confirm is something more than justified it strikes any person at once as just.

I follow A. B. Mitford’s account, which, in leaving out distracting intrusions of local colour, is more concerned with the glorious episode’s whole narrative sweep. These missing Oriental touches lead me to suspect that we are dealing with a version straight from the Japanese.

The Untied Ribbon

Sometime in the vanished spring of 1702, it happened that Asano Takumi no Kami, the distinguished lord of the castle of Akô, was appointed to receive and feast an imperial envoy. Twenty-three hundred years (some of them mythological) of polished manners had nervously defined the ceremonies to be observed upon the occasion. The envoy represented the Mikado, but by way of allusion or symbol a subtlety one has to be careful neither to overdo nor to neglect. In order to prevent blunders that could easily prove fatal, a high official from the court of Yedo preceded the envoy in the capacity of master of etiquette. At a remove from the comfort of the court and condemned to a rustic holiday which must have seemed to him a form of exile, Kira Kôtsuké no Suké took no pains in the instruction of his charge. Sometimes he exaggerated his lofty tone to the point of insolence. His pupil, the lord of the castle, tried to ignore this ridicule. He did not know how to reply to it, and a strict sense of duty held him back from all violence. Nevertheless, one day the ribbon of the master’s sock had come untied and he asked the lord to tie it up for him. Although burning with rage, Takumi no Kami patiently submitted. The rude master of etiquette told him that, in truth, he was unteachable and that only a boor could tie a knot so clumsily. The lord of the castle drew his dirk and aimed a blow at the master’s head. Kôtsuké no Suké ran away, his forehead barely marked with a faint thread of blood.

A few days later, the deliberations of the military council were completed, and Takumi no Kami was sentenced to commit suicide. In the central courtyard of the castle of Akô, a platform covered in red felt was erected, and on it the doomed man appeared. Having been handed a golden dagger with a jeweled handle, he publicly confessed his guilt, stripped to the waist, and, disemboweling himself with the two ritual wounds, died like a samurai. Because of the red felt the more distant spectators were unable to see blood. A grey-haired, painstaking man he was the councilor Oishi Kuranosuke, the condemned man’s second severed the head with a stroke of his sword.

The Simulator of Infamy

Takumi no Kami’s castle was confiscated, his retainers were disbanded, his family was brought to ruin, and his tarnished name became the object of curses. Rumour has it that on the very night that he killed himself, forty-seven of his retainers, forming a league, met in a mountain fastness and planned to the last detail what eventually came to pass a year later. The truth is that they were forced to proceed step by step and with great caution, and some of their meetings took place not on an inaccessible mountaintop but in a chapel in a small forest a kind of shabby pavilion of white wood, with no other adornment than a rectangular box containing a mirror. They craved vengeance, and vengeance must have seemed to them beyond reach.

Kira Kôtsuké no Suké, the hated master of etiquette, had fortified his house, and a crowd of archers and swordsmen guarded his palanquin. He could also count on his spies, who were incorruptible, scrupulous, and stealthy. They watched and spied on no one as much as they did on the presumed ringleader of the avengers, the councilor Kuranosuké. It was only by chance that he found out, but he built his scheme for vindication upon this fact.

Kuranosuké moved to Kyoto, a city unmatched in all the empire for its autumn colours. He gave himself up to gambling dens, taverns, and houses of the worst repute. In spite of greying hair, he rubbed elbows with harlots and poets, and with even sorrier sorts. Once, thrown out of some low haunt, he fell down and spent the night asleep in the street, his head wallowing in his own vomit.

It happened that a Satsuma man saw this, and he said sadly and angrily: ‘Is not this, by chance, Oishi Kuranosuké, who was a councilor of Asano Takumi no Kami, who assisted his lord in death, and who, not having the heart to avenge him, gives himself up to pleasure and shame? You are unworthy the name of a samurai!’

And he trod on Kuranosuké’s sleeping face, and spat upon it. When the spies reported this bit of debauchery, Kôtsuké no Suké was greatly relieved.

Things did not come to rest there. The councilor sent away his wife and younger son, and he bought himself a concubine in a brothel. This famous act of infamy gladdened his enemy’s heart and made him relax in watchfulness. So it was that Kôtsuké no Suké packed off half his guard.

On one of the bitterest nights of the winter of 1703, the forty-seven retainers met in a bare, windswept garden on the outskirts of Yedo, next to a bridge and a playing-card factory. From there, they marched forth with the banners of their lord. But before launching their raid, they sent a message to their enemy’s neighbours, announcing that they were neither night robbers nor ruffians but were engaged in a military action in the name of strict justice.

The Scar

Two bands attacked Kira Kôtsuké no Suké’s palace. The councilor led the first, which assaulted the front gate; the second was led by his older son, who was about to turn sixteen and who died that night. All history knows the different moments of that vivid nightmare; the tricky, dangling descent into the courtyard on rope ladders; the drum signaling the attack; the rush of the defenders; the archers posted on the four sides of the roof; the arrows’ swift mission to a man’s vital organs; the porcelains smeared with blood; death, burning and then icy; the wantonness and turmoil of the slaughter. Nine retainers laid down their lives; the defenders were no less brave, and they refused to give ground. Shortly after midnight, however, all resistance came to an end.

Kira Kôtsuké no Suké, the despicable root of this display of loyalty, did not turn up. Every nook and cranny of the palace was searched for him, but women and children weeping were all to be seen. At this, when the retainers began to despair of ever finding him, the councilor noticed that the quilts of the master’s bed were still warm. Renewing their search, they discovered a narrow window hidden under a bronze mirror. From down below in a gloomy little courtyard, a man dressed in white stared up at them. In his right hand, he held a trembling sword. When they climbed down, the man gave himself up without a struggle. His forehead still bore a scar the old etching of Takumi no Kami’s dirk.

The bloodstained band then went down on their knees before their hated adversary, and they told him they were the retainers of the lord of the castle of Akô, for whose loss and end the master of etiquette was to blame, and they entreated him to commit suicide, as a samurai was obliged to do.

Offering this honour to such a cringing spirit was pointless. Kôtsuké no Suké was a man to whom honour was inaccessible. As the day dawned, they were forced to cut his throat.

Testimony

Their vengeance now satisfied (but without anger or commotion or pity), the retainers make their way to the temple that holds their lord’s remains.

In a bucket they carry Kira Kôtsuké no Suké’s unbelievable head, taking turns looking after it. They cross the countryside and the province by the full light of day. Along the way, people flock to them with blessings and tears. The Prince of Sendai invites them to his table, but they decline, replying that their lord has been waiting for nearly two years. They come to his obscure tomb and lay their enemy’s head before it as an offering.

The Supreme Court passes sentence. It is what the retainers expect they are granted the privilege of committing suicide. They all do so, some with ardent serenity, and they are laid to rest at their lord’s side. Men, women, and children gather to pray at the graves of these faithful men.

The Satsuma Man

Among those who come is a boy, dusty and weary, who must have traveled a long way. He prostrates himself before Oishi Kuranosuké’s tombstone and says aloud: ‘I saw you lying drunk by the door of a brothel in Kyoto, and I did not think you were plotting to avenge your lord; I thought you to be a faithless soldier, and I spat in your face. Now I have come to offer atonement.’ So saying, he performed hara-kiri.

The abbot of the temple, feeling sympathy for his deed, buried him alongside the retainers.

This is the end of the story of the forty-seven loyal men except that it has no end, for the rest of us, who are not loyal perhaps but will never wholly give up the hope of being so, will go on honouring them with words.

The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv

To Angélica Ocampo

If I am not mistaken, the chief sources of information concerning Mokanna, the Veiled (or, literally, Masked) Prophet of Khurasan, are only four in number:
a)
those passages from the
History of the Caliphs culled by Baladhuri; b)
the
Giant's Handbook, or
Book of Precision and Revision, by the official historian of the Abbasids,
Ibn abi Tahir Taifur; c)
the Arabic codex entitled
The
Annihilation of the Rose, wherein we find a refutation of the abominable heresies of the
Dark Rose, or
Hidden
Rose, which was the Prophet’s holy book; and d)
some barely legible coins unearthed by the engineer Andrusov during excavations for the Trans-Caspian Railway. These coins, now on deposit in the Numismatic Collection at Tehran, preserve certain Persian distichs which abridge or emend key passages of the
Annihilation.
The original
Rose is lost, for the manuscript found in 1899 and published all too hastily by the
Morgenlandisches
Archiv has been pronounced a forgery first by Horn, and afterwards by Sir Percy Sykes.

The Prophet’s fame in the West is owed to a longwinded poem by Thomas Moore, laden with all the sentimentality of an Irish patriot.

The Scarlet Dye

Along about the year 120 of the Hegira (a.d. 736), the man Hakim, whom the people of that time and that land were later to style the Prophet of the Veil, was born in Turkestan. His home was the ancient city of Merv, whose gardens and vineyards and pastures sadly overlook the desert. Midday there, when not dimmed by the clouds of dust that choke its inhabitants and leave a greyish film on the clusters of black grapes, is white and dazzling.

Hakim grew up in that weary city. We know that a brother of his father apprenticed him to the trade of dyer that craft of the ungodly, the counterfeiter, and the shifty, who were to inspire him to the first imprecations of his unbridled career. In a famous page of the Annihilation, he is quoted as saying:

My face is golden but I have steeped my dyes, dipping uncarded wool on second nights and soaking treated wool on third nights, and the emperors of the islands still compete for this scarlet cloth. Thus did I sin in the days of my youth, tampering with the true colours of God’s creation. The Angel told me that the ram was not the colour of the tiger, the Satan told me that the Almighty wanted them to be, and that He was availing Himself of my skill and my dye stuffs. Now I know that the Angel and the Satan both strayed from the truth, and that all colours are abominable.

In the year 146 of the Hegira, or Flight, Hakim was seen no more in Merv. His caldrons and dipping vats, along with a Shirazi scimitar and a bronze mirror, were found destroyed.

The Bull

At the end of the moon of Sha’ban, in the year 158, the desert air was very clear, and from the gate of a caravan halting place on the way to Merv a group of men sat gazing at the evening sky in search of the moon of Ramadan, which marks the period of continence and fasting. They were slaves, beggars, horse dealers, camel thieves, and butchers of livestock. Huddled solemnly on the ground, they awaited the sign. They looked at the sunset, and the colour of the sunset was the colour of the sand.

From the other end of the shimmering desert (whose sun engenders fever, just as its moon engenders chills), they saw three approaching figures, which seemed to be of gigantic size. They were men, and the middle one had the head of a bull. When they drew near, it was plain that this man was wearing a mask and that his companions were blind.

Someone (as in the tales of the
Arabian Nights)
pressed him for the meaning of this wonder. ‘They are blind,’ the masked man said, ‘because they have looked upon my face.’

The Leopard

It is recorded by the Abbasids’ official chronicler that the man from the desert (whose voice was singularly sweet, or so it seemed in contrast to his brutish mask) told the caravan traders that they were awaiting the sign of a month of penance, but that he was the preacher of a greater sign that of a lifetime of penance and a death of martyrdom. He told them that he was Hakim, son of Osman, and that in the year 146 of the Flight a man had made his way into his house and, after purification and prayer, had cut off his head with a scimitar and taken it to heaven. Held in the right hand of the stranger (who was the angel Gabriel), his head had been before the Lord in the highest heaven who entrusted it with the mission of prophesying, taught it words so ancient that their mere utterance could burn men’s mouths, and endowed it with a radiance that mortal eyes could not bear. Such was his justification of the mask. When all men on earth professed the new law, the Face would be revealed to them and they could worship it openly as the angels already worshipped it. His mission proclaimed, Hakim exhorted them to a holy war a jihad and to their forthcoming martyrdom.

The slaves, beggars, horse dealers, camel thieves, and butchers of livestock shunned his call. One voice shouted out ‘Sorcerer!’ and another ‘Impostor!’ Someone had a leopard with him a specimen, perhaps, of that sleek, bloodthirsty breed that Persian hunters train and it happened that the animal broke free of its bonds. Except for the masked prophet and his two acolytes, the rest of them trampled each other to escape. When they flocked back, the prophet had blinded the beast. Before its luminous dead eyes, the men worshipped Hakim and acknowledged his supernatural powers.

The Veiled Prophet

It is with scant enthusiasm that the historian of the Abbasid caliphs records the rise of the Veiled Hakim in Khurasan. That province much disturbed by the failure and crucifixion of its most famous chieftain embraced the teachings of the Shining Face with fervour and desperation, and it laid down in tribute its blood and gold. (By then, Hakim had set aside his brutish effigy, replacing it with a fourfold veil of white silk embossed with precious stones. The symbolic colour of the ruling dynasty, the Banu Abbas, was black; for his Protective Veil, for his banners and turbans, Hakim chose the very opposite colour white.) The campaign began well. In the
Book of Precision, of course, the armies of the Caliph are everywhere victorious; but as the invariable result of these victories is the removal of generals or the withdrawal from impregnable fortresses, the chary reader can surmise actual truth. At the end of the moon of Rajab, in the year 161, the famed city of Nishapur opened its metal gates to the Masked One; at the beginning of 162, the city of Asterabad did the same. Hakim’s military activity (like that of a more fortunate prophet) was limited to praying in a tenor voice, elevated toward the Divinity on the back of a reddish camel, in the very thick of battle. Arrows whistled all around without ever once striking him. He seemed to court danger. On the night a group of hated lepers gathered around his palace, he had them let in, kissed them, and given them silver and gold.

The petty tasks of government were delegated to six or seven devotees. Ever mindful of serenity and meditation, the Prophet kept a harem of a hundred and fourteen blind women, who did their best to satisfy the needs of his divine body.

The Abominable Mirrors

However indiscreet or threatening they may be, so long as their words are not in conflict with orthodox faith, Islam is tolerant of men who enjoy an intimacy with God. The Prophet himself, perhaps, might not have scorned this leniency, but his followers, his many victories, and the outspoken wrath of the Caliph who was Mohammed al-Mahdi drove him at last into heresy. This discord, though it led to his undoing, also made him set down the tenets of a personal creed, in which borrowings from old Gnostic beliefs are nonetheless detectable.

At the root of Hakim’s cosmogony is a spectral god. This godhead is as majestically devoid of origin as of name or face. It is an unchanging god, but its image cast nine shadows which, condescending to creation, conceived and presided over a first heaven. Out of this first demiurgic crown there issued a second, with its own angels, powers, and thrones, and these founded a lower heaven, which was the symmetrical mirror of the first. This second conclave, in its turn, was mirrored in a third, and this in a lower one, and so on to the number 999. The lord of this lowermost heaven is he who rules us shadow of shadows of still other shadows and his fraction of divinity approaches zero.

The world we live in is a mistake, a clumsy parody. Mirrors and fatherhood, because they multiply and confirm the parody, are abominations. Revulsion is the cardinal virtue. Two ways (whose choice the Prophet left free) may lead us there: abstinence or the orgy, excess of the flesh or its denial. Hakim’s personal heaven and hell were no less hopeless:

Those who deny the Word, those who deny the Veil and the Face [runs a curse from the
Hidden Rose], are promised a wondrous Hell: for each lost soul shall hold sway over 999 empires of fire; and in each empire, over 999 mountains of fire; and in each mountain, over 999 castles of fire; and in each castle, over 999 chambers of fire; and in each chamber, over 999 beds of fire; and in each bed he will find himself everlastingly tormented by 999 shapes of fire, which will have his face and his voice.

This is confirmed in another surviving versicle:

In this life, ye suffer in a single body; in death and Retribution, in numberless numbers of bodies.

Heaven is less dearly drawn:

Its darkness is never-ending, there are fountains and pools made of stone, and the happiness of this Heaven is the happiness of leave-taking, of self-denial, and of those who know they are asleep.

The Face

In the year 163 of the Flight (and fifth year of the Shining Face), Hakim was besieged at Sanam by the Caliph’s army. There was no lack of provisions or martyrs, and the arrival of a host of golden angels was imminent. It was at this point that an alarming rumour made its way through the fortress. An adultress in the harem, as she was strangled by the eunuchs, had cried out that the ring finger of the Prophet’s right hand was missing and that all his other fingers lacked nails. This rumour spread among the faithful. From the top of a terrace, in the midst of his people, Hakim was praying to the Lord for a victory or for a special sign. Two captains, their heads bowed down, slavish as if beating into a driving rain tore away the Veil.

At first, there was a shudder. The Apostle’s promised face, the face that had been to the heavens, was indeed white but with that whiteness peculiar to spotted leprosy. It was so bloated and unbelievable that to the mass of onlookers it seemed a mask. There were no brows; the lower lid of the right eye hung over the shriveled cheek; a heavy cluster of tubercles ate away the lips; the flattened, inhuman nose was like a lion’s.

Hakim’s voice attempted one final stratagem. ‘Your unforgivable sins do not allow you to see my splendour—’ it began to say.

Paying no heed, the captains ran him through with spears.

ETCETERA

To Néstor Ibarra

A Theologian in Death

The angels told me that when Melancthon died he was provided with a house deceptively like the one in which he lived in this world. (This happens to most newcomers in eternity upon their first arrival it is why they are ignorant of their death, and think they are still in the natural world.) All the things in his room were similar to those he had had before the table, the desk with its drawers, the shelves of books. As soon as Melancthon awoke in this new abode, he sat at his table, took up his literary work, and spent several days writing as usual on justification by faith alone, without so much as a single word on charity. This omission being remarked by the angels, they sent messengers to question him. ‘I have proved beyond refutation,’ Melancthon replied to them, ‘that there is nothing in charity essential to the soul, and that to gain salvation faith is enough.’ He spoke with great assurance, unsuspecting that he was dead and that his lot lay outside Heaven. When the angels heard him say these things, they departed.

After a few weeks, the furnishings in his room began to fade away and disappear, until at last there was nothing left but the armchair, the table, the paper, and his inkstand. What is more, the walls of the room became encrusted with lime, and the floor with a yellow glaze. Melancthon’s own clothes were now much coarser. He wondered at these changes, but he went on writing about faith while denying charity, and was so persistent in this exclusion that he was suddenly transported underground to a kind of workhouse, where there were other theologians like him. Locked up for a few days, Melancthon fell to doubting his doctrine, and was allowed to return to his former room. He was now clad in a hairy skin, but he tried hard to convince himself that what had just happened to him was no more than a hallucination, and he went back to extolling faith and belittling charity.

One evening, Melancthon felt cold. He began examining the house, and soon discovered that the other rooms no longer matched those of his old house in the natural world. One was cluttered with instruments whose use he did not understand; another had shrunk so small that entrance was impossible; a third had not changed, but its doors and windows opened onto vast sandbanks. One of the rooms at the back of the house was full of people who worshipped him and who kept telling him that no theologian was ever as wise as he. These praises pleased him, but since some of the visitors were faceless and others seemed dead he ended up hating and distrusting them. It was at this point that he decided to write something concerning charity. The only difficulty was that what he wrote one day he could not see the next. This was because the pages had been written without conviction.

Melancthon received many visits from persons newly dead, but he felt shame at being found in so rundown a lodging. In order to have them believe he was in Heaven, he hired a neighbouring magician, who tricked the company with appearances of peace and splendour. The moment his visitors had gone and sometimes a little before these adornments vanished, leaving the former plaster and draughtiness.

The last I heard of Melancthon was that the magician and one of the faceless men had taken him away into the sand hills, where he is now a kind of servant of demons.

From the
Arcana Coelestia
(1749-1756) by Emanuel Swedenborg

The Chamber of Statues

This tale, taken from an Arab source, is of uncertain authorship. From internal evidence, we may infer that the writer was a Spanish Muslim:

In ages long gone, in the kingdom of the Andalusians, there was a city, whose name was Lebtit or Ceuta or Jaén, where the kings had their dwelling place. In this city stood a strong castle with leafed gates meant neither for going in nor for coming out but only to be kept locked. Whenever a king died and another king took the high throne after him, he set with his own hands a new lock to the gates, until these locks numbered twenty-four one for each of the kings.

After this time, it befell the kingdom that an evil man, who was not of the royal house, usurped the throne and rather than add a new lock, had a mind to open the twenty-four old locks so that he might see what lay within the castle. The vizier and the emirs beseeched him not to do this, and they hid the iron key ring from him and told him it was easier to add one lock than to force twenty-four. But the king persisted with wondrous craft, saying, ‘I want to look upon the contents of this castle.’ They then offered him all the wealth their hands could gather in flocks, in Christian idols, in silver and gold. Still he would not be denied, and, with his own right hand (may it bum forever!), he prized off the locks.

Inside the castle, they found figures of Arabs in metalwork and in wood mounted on their swift camels and horses, with turbans hanging down over their shoulders and scimitars dangling from their belts and bearing long lances in their hands. All these figures were sculptured, and they threw shadows over the floor. The forelegs of the horses, as if they were rearing up, did not touch the ground, and yet the mighty steeds did not topple or fall. Great fear was implanted in the king by these skilful figures, the more so for their discipline and perfect silence, since they all faced the same way which was toward the west and not a word or a trumpet blast could be heard from them. This was in the first chamber.

In the second, they found the table set for Solomon, son of David peace be on them both! It was carved from a single emerald, whose colour, as everyone knows, is green, and whose hidden virtues are real yet indescribable, for they quiet tempests, protect the chastity of the owner, dispel dysentery and evil spirits, assure a favourable outcome in litigations, and bring great relief in childbearing.

In the third chamber, two books were found. One was black, and it set forth the properties of metals, the use of talismans, and the planetary laws of the days, as well as the preparation of poisons and antidotes. The other book was white, and although its letters were quite clear, no one could decipher its teaching.

In the fourth chamber, they found a map of the world, figuring all its kingdoms and cities and seas and castles and perils each one with its true name and exact shape.

In the fifth chamber, they came upon a circular mirror, made for Solomon, son of David peace be on the twain! whose worth was priceless, for it was of mixed metals, and he who looked into it could see the faces of his fathers and his sons from the first Adam down to those who shall hear the Trumpet.

The sixth chamber was filled with an elixir, a single dram of which was enough to turn three thousand ounces of silver into three thousand ounces of fine gold.

The seventh chamber appeared to be empty. It was so long that even the most skilled of archers could not have shot an arrow from the entrance and hit the opposite wall. On that wall, they found carved a dire inscription. The king read it and understood it, and its words were these: ‘If any hand dare open the door of this castle, living warriors after the likeness of the figures here depicted will conquer the kingdom.’

These things came to pass in the year 89 of the Hegira. Before this twelve-month was out, Tariq ibn-Ziyad overpowered the fortress, defeated the king, sold his women and children into slavery, and laid waste the land. So it was that the Arabs spread over the kingdom of Andalusia, with its fig trees and watered meadows in which no thirst is suffered. As to the treasures, it is widely known that Tariq, son of Ziyad, sent them to his lord the caliph, who hoarded them in the heart of a pyramid.

From the
Thousand and One Nights, Nos. 271 & 272

Tale of the Two Dreamers

The Arabic historian al-Ishaqi tells this story in the reign of the caliph al-Ma’mun ( a
.
d
. 786-83):

Men worthy of trust have recorded (but Allah alone is All-Knowing and All-Powerful and All-Merciful and does not sleep) that there once lived in Cairo a man who possessed great wealth, but so freehanded and liberal was he that he lost all he had, save his father’s house, and in time was forced to earn his living by his own hands. He worked so hard that one night sleep overcame him at the foot of a fig tree in his garden, and in a dream he was visited by a man, drenched through and through, who took a gold coin out of his mouth and said to him, ‘Your fortune lies in Persia, in Isfahan; go thither and seek it.’

Early the next morning, the man awoke and set out on the long journey, facing the dangers of desert wastes, of ships, of pirates, of idolaters, of rivers, of wild beasts, and of men. At last, he found his way to Isfahan, but within the gates of that city night overtook him, and he lay down to sleep in the courtyard of a mosque. Close by the mosque there was a house, and, by decree of Allah Almighty, a band of robbers entered the mosque and made its way thence to the adjoining house. But the owners of the house, aroused by the noise of the thieves, awoke and cried out for help. The neighbours, too, shouted for help, until the captain of the police arrived with his officers, and the robbers fled over the rooftops. The captain ordered a search of the mosque, and, finding there the man from Cairo, dealt him such a whipping with bamboo lashes that he was well-nigh dead.

Two days later, he came to his senses in jail. The captain sent for him and asked, ‘Who are you, and where are you from?’

The man said, ‘I am from the famed city of Cairo, and my name is Mohammed al-Maghribi.’ The captain asked him, ‘And what brought you to Isfahan?’ The man chose the truth, and he said to the captain, ‘I was ordered by one in a dream to go to Isfahan, for my fortune awaited me there. But when I came to Isfahan, the fortune he promised me proved to be the lashing that you so generously dealt me.’

Hearing this, the captain laughed until he showed his wisdom teeth, and at last he said, ‘O man of little wit, thrice have I dreamed of a house in Cairo in whose yard is a garden, at the lower end of which is a sundial and beyond the sundial a fig tree and beyond the fig tree a fountain and beneath the fountain a great sum of money. Yet I have not paid the least heed to this lie; but you, offspring of a mule and a devil, have journeyed from place to place on the faith of a dream. Don’t show your face again in Isfahan. Take these coins and leave.’

The man took the money and set out upon his homeward march. Beneath the fountain in his garden (which was the one in the captain’s dream), he dug up a great treasure. And thus Allah brought abundant blessing upon him and rewarded him and exalted him. Allah is the Beneficent, the Unseen.

From the
Thousand and One Nights, No. 351

The Wizard Postponed

In the city of Santiago, there was a dean who had a burning desire to learn the art of magic. Hearing that don Illán of Toledo knew more about magic than anyone else, the dean went to Toledo in search of him.

The very morning he arrived, he went straight to don Illán’s and found him reading in a room at the back of his house. Don Illán received the dean cordially and asked him to postpone telling him the object of his visit until after they had eaten. Showing his guest into pleasant quarters, don Illán said he felt very happy about the dean’s visit. After their meal, the dean told don Illán why he had come, and he begged to be taught the craft of magic. Don Illán said that he already knew that his guest was a dean, a man of good standing and of good prospects, but that were he to teach him all his knowledge, the day might come when the dean would fail to repay his services as men in high places are often wont to do. The dean swore that he would never forget Don Illán’s bounty and that he would always be at his call. Once they came to an agreement, don Illán explained that the magic arts could not be learned save in a place of deep seclusion, and, taking the dean by the hand, he led him to the next room, in whose floor there was a large iron ring. Before this, however, he told the serving maid to prepare partridges for supper but not to put them on to roast until he so ordered.

Don Illán and his guest lifted the ring and went down a well-worn, winding stairway until it seemed to the dean they had gone down so far that the bed of the Tagus must now be above them. At the foot of the staircase was a cell, and in it were a library of books and a kind of cabinet with magic instruments. They were leafing through the books, when suddenly two men appeared bearing a letter for the dean, written by the bishop, his uncle, in which the bishop informed him that he was gravely ill, and that if the dean wanted to find him alive he should not tarry. The news was very upsetting to the dean for one thing, because of his uncle’s illness; for another, because he would be forced to interrupt his studies. In the end, choosing to stay, he wrote an apology and sent it to the bishop. Three days passed, and there arrived several men in mourning bearing further letters for the dean, in which he read that the bishop had died, that a successor was being chosen, and that they hoped by the grace of God that the dean would be elected. The letters advised him to remain where he was, it seeming better that he be absent during his election.

Ten days elapsed, and two finely dressed squires came, throwing themselves down at the dean’s feet and kissing his hands and greeting him as bishop. When don Illán saw these things, he turned to the new prelate with great joy and said that he thanked the Lord that such good news should have come to his house. He then asked for the now vacant deanery for his son. The bishop answered that he had already set aside the deanery for his own brother but that he would find the son some post in the Church, and he begged that they all three leave together for Santiago.

They made their way to the city of Santiago, where they were received with honours. Six months passed, and messengers from the pope came to the bishop, offering him the archbishopric of Toulouse and leaving in his hands the naming of a successor. When don Illán heard this, he reminded the archbishop of his old promise and asked for the vacated title for his son. The archbishop told him that he had already set aside the bishopric for his own uncle, his father’s brother, but that as he had given his word to shed favour on don Illán, they should, together with the son, all leave for Toulouse. Don Illán had no recourse but to agree .The three set out for Toulouse, where they were received with honours and Masses. Two years passed, and messengers from the pope came to the archbishop, elevating him to the cardinalate and leaving in his hands the naming of a successor. When don Illán learned this, he reminded the cardinal of his old promise and asked for the vacant title for his son. The cardinal told him that he had already set aside the archbishopric for his own uncle, his mother’s brother a good old man but that if don Illán and his son were to accompany him to Rome, surely some favourable opportunity would present itself. Don Illán protested, but in the end he was forced to agree.

The three then set out for Rome, where they were received with honours, Masses, and processions. Four years elapsed, and the pope died, and our cardinal was elected to the papacy by all the other cardinals. Learning of this, don Illán kissed His Holiness’s feet, reminded him of his old promise, and asked for the vacant cardinal’s office for his son. The pope told don Illán that by now he was weary of his continued requests and that if he persisted in importuning him he would clap him in gaol, since he knew full well that don Illán was no more than a wizard and that in Toledo he had been a teacher of the arts of magic.

Poor don Illán could only answer that he was going back to Spain, and he asked the pope for something to eat during the long sea journey. Once more the pope refused him, whereupon don Illán (whose face had changed in a strange fashion) said in an unwavering voice, ‘In that case, I shall have to eat the partridges that I ordered for tonight.’

The serving maid came forward, and don Illán ordered the partridges roasted. Immediately the pope found himself in the underground cell in Toledo, no more than dean of Santiago, and so taken aback with shame that he did not know what to say. Don Illán said that this test was sufficient, refused the dean his share of the partridges, and saw him to the door, where, taking leave of him with great courtesy, he wished him a safe journey home.

From the
Libro de los enxiemplos del Conde Lucanor et de Patronio
(1335) by Juan Manuel

The Mirror of Ink

All history knows that the cruelest of the rulers of the Sudan was Yaqub the Ailing, who delivered his country to the rapacity of Egyptian tax collectors and died in a palace chamber on the fourteenth day of the moon of Barmahat, in the year 1842. There are those who hold that the wizard Abd-er-Rahman al-Masmudi (whose name may be translated as the ‘Servant of the All-Merciful) slew him by means of a dagger or poison. That he died a natural death is more likely, however, since he was called the Ailing. Captain Richard F. Burton spoke to the wizard in 1853, and recounts the tale I quote here:

It is true that as a consequence of the conspiracy woven by my brother Ibrahim, with the treacherous and useless support of the black chiefs of Kordofan, who betrayed him, I suffered captivity in the castle of Yaqub the Ailing. My brother perished by the sword, on the blood-red skin of Justice, but I flung myself at the hated feet of the Ailing, telling him that I was a wizard, and that if he spared my life I would show him shapes and appearances still more wonderful than those of the magic lantern. The tyrant demanded an immediate proof. I asked for a reed pen, a pair of scissors, a large leaf of Venetian paper, an inkhorn, a chafing dish with some live coals in it, some coriander seeds, and an ounce of benzoin. I cut up the paper into six strips, wrote charms and invocation on the first five, and on the remaining one wrote the following words, taken from the glorious Koran: ‘And we have removed from thee thy veil; and thy sight today is piercing.’ Then I drew a magic square in the palm of Yaqub’s right hand, told him to make a hollow of it, and into the centre I poured a pool of ink. I asked him if he saw himself clearly reflected in it, and he answered that he did. I told him not to raise his head. I dropped the benzoin and coriander seeds into the chafing dish, and I burned the invocations upon the glowing coals. I next asked him to name the image he desired to see.

He thought a moment and said, ‘A wild horse, the finest of those that graze along the borders of the desert.’
Looking, he saw a quiet, green pasture, and a minute later a horse drawing near, lithe as a leopard, with a white spot on its face. He asked me for a drove of horses as handsome as the first one, and on the horizon he saw a cloud of dust, and then the drove. It was at this point that I knew my life was spared.

From that day on, with the first streak of light in the eastern sky, two soldiers would enter my cell and lead me to the Ailing’s bedchamber, where the incense, the chafing dish, and the ink were already laid out. So it was that he demanded of me, and I showed him, all the visible things of this world. This man, whom I still hate, had in his palm everything seen by men now dead and everything seen by the living: the cities, the climates, the kingdoms into which the earth is divided; the treasures hidden in its bowels; the ships that ply its seas; the many instruments of war, of music, of surgery; fair women; the fixed stars and the planets; the colours used by the ungodly to paint their odious pictures; minerals and plants, with the secrets and properties they hold locked up in them; the silvery angels, whose only food is the praise and worship of the Lord; the awarding of prizes in schools; the idols of birds and kings buried in the heart of the pyramids; the shadow cast by the bull that holds up the world and by the fish that lies under the bull; the sandy wastes of Allah the All-Merciful. He saw things impossible to tell, like gaslit streets and the whale that dies on hearing the cry of a man. Once, he ordered me to show him the city called Europe. I let him see its main thoroughfare, and it was there, I believe, in that great stream of men all wearing black and many using spectacles that he first set eyes on the Man with the Mask.

This figure, at times in Sudanese garments and at times in uniform, but always with a veil over his face, from then on haunted the things we saw. He was never absent, and we dared not divine who he was. The images in the mirror of ink, at first fleeting or fixed, were more intricate now; they obeyed my commands without delay, and the tyrant saw them quite plainly. Of course, the growing cruelty of the scenes left us both in a state of exhaustion. We witnessed nothing but punishments, garrottings, mutilations, the pleasures of the executioner and of the merciless.

In this way, we came to the dawn of the fourteenth day of the moon of Barmahat. The circle of ink had been poured into the tyrant’s hand, the benzoin and coriander cast into the chafing dish, the invocations burned. The two of us were alone. The Ailing ordered me to show him a punishment both lawful and unappealable, for that day his heart hungered to view an execution. I let him see the soldiers with their drums, the spread calfskin, the persons lucky enough to be onlookers, the executioner wielding the sword of Justice. Marveling at the sight of him, Yaqub told me, ‘That’s Abu Kir, he who dealt justice to your brother Ibrahim, he who will seal your fate when it’s given me to know the science of bringing together these images without your aid.’

He asked me to have the doomed man brought forward. When this was done, seeing that the man to be executed was the mysterious man of the veil, the tyrant paled. I was ordered to have the veil removed before justice was carried out. At this, I threw myself at his feet, beseeching,
‘O king of time and sum and substance of the age, this figure is not like any of the others, for we do not know his name or the name of his fathers or the name of the city where he was born. I dare not tamper with the image, for fear of incurring a sin for which I shall be held to account.’

The Ailing laughed, and when he finished he swore that he would take the guilt on his own head if guilt there were. He swore this by his sword and by the Koran. I then commanded that the prisoner be stripped and that he be bound on the calfskin, and that the mask be torn from his face. These things were done. At last, Yaqub’s stricken eyes could see the face it was his own. He was filled with fear and madness. I gripped his trembling hand in mine, which was steady, and I ordered him to go on witnessing the ceremony of his death. He was possessed by the mirror, so much so that he attempted neither to avert his eyes nor to spill the ink. When in the vision the sword fell on the guilty head, Yaqub moaned with a sound that left my pity untouched, and he tumbled to the floor, dead. Glory be to Him, who endureth forever, and in whose hand are the keys of unlimited Pardon and unending Punishment.

From
The Lake Regions of Central Africa
(1860)by Richard F. Burton

A Double for Mohammed

Since the idea of Mohammed is so closely associated with religion in the minds of Muslims, the Lord has ordained that they should be presided over in Heaven by someone impersonating Mohammed. This delegate is not always the same person. A native of Saxony who in earthly life was taken prisoner by the Algerines and became a Muslim once held this position. Having been a Christian, he was moved to speak to them of the Lord, and to say that He was not Joseph’s son but the Son of God; it was found advisable to have this man replaced. The office of the representative Mohammed is marked by a torchlike flame, visible only to Muslims.

The real Mohammed, who wrote the Koran, is no longer visible to his followers. I have been informed that at first he presided over them, but that because he strove to rule like God he was deposed and sent away to the south. A certain community of Muslims was once instigated by evil spirits to acknowledge Mohammed as God. To allay the disturbance, Mohammed was brought up from the nether earth and shown to them, and on this occasion I also saw him. He resembled the bodily spirits who have no interior perception, and his face was very dark. I heard him utter these words:

‘I am your Mohammed’; and thereupon he sank down again.

From
Vera Christiana Religio
(1771)by Emanuel Swedenborg

The Generous Enemy

In the year 1102, Magnus Barford undertook the general conquest of the Irish kingdoms; it is said that on the eve of his death he received this greeting from Muirchertach, the King of Dublin:

May gold and the storm fight on your side, Magnus Barfod.

May your fighting meet with good fortune, tomorrow, on the fields of my kingdom.

May your royal hands strike awe, weaving the sword’s web.

May those who oppose your sword be food for the red swan.

May your many gods sate you with glory, may they sate you with blood.

May you be victorious in the dawn, King who tread upon Ireland.

May tomorrow shine the brightest of all your many days.

Because it will be your last. That I swear to you, King Magnus.

Because before its light is blotted out I will defeat you and blot you out, Magnus Barfod.

From the
Anhang zur Heimskringla
(1893) by H. Gering

[Translated by W. S. Merwin]

Of Exactitude in Science

In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.

From
Travels of Praiseworthy Men
(1658) by J. A. Suárez Miranda

The Book of Sand

Author's Note

The Other

Ulrike

The Congress

There Are More Things

The Sect of the Thirty

The Night of the Gifts

The Mirror and the Mask

Undr

Utopia of a Tired Man

The Bribe

Avelino Arredondo

The Disk

The Book of Sand

Afterword

Author's Note

At my age (I was born in 1899), I cannot promise I cannot even promise myself more than these few variations on favourite themes. As everyone knows, this is the classic recourse of irreparable monotony. Allow me, nevertheless, to point out one or two details.

The volume includes thirteen stories. The number is accidental, or fatal here the two words are strictly synonymous and not magical. If of all my stories I had to save one, I would probably save ‘The Congress’, which at the same time is the most autobiographical (the one richest in memories) and the most imaginative. Nor shall I hide a predilection for ‘The Book of Sand’. There is also a love story, a ‘psychological’ story, and the story of a dramatic episode in South American history.

In these blind man’s exercises, I have tried to be faithful to the example of H. G. Wells in combining a plain and at times almost colloquial style with a fantastic plot. To Wells’ name the reader may add those of Swift and of Poe, who, around 1838, gave up a very rich style in order to bequeath us the admirable final chapters of his
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as ‘The Masses’. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.

The Other

It was in Cambridge, back in February, 1969, that the event took place. I made no attempt to record it at the time, because, fearing for my mind, my initial aim was to forget it. Now, some years later, I feel that if I commit it to paper others will read it as a story and, I hope, one day it will become a story for me as well. I know it was horrifying while it lasted and even more so during the sleepless nights that followed but this does not mean that an account of it will necessarily move anyone else.

It was about ten o’clock in the morning. I sat on a bench facing the Charles River. Some five hundred yards distant, on my right, rose a tall building whose name I never knew. Ice floes were borne along on the grey water. Inevitably, the river made me think about time Heraclitus’ millennial image. I had slept well; my class on the previous afternoon had, I thought, managed to hold the interest of my students. Not a soul was in sight.

All at once, I had the impression (according to psychologists, it corresponds to a state of fatigue) of having lived that moment once before. Someone had sat down at the other end of the bench. I would have preferred to be alone, but not wishing to appear unsociable I avoided getting up abruptly. The other man had begun to whistle. It was then that the first of the many disquieting things of that morning occurred. What he whistled, what he tried to whistle (I have no ear for music), was the tune of ‘La tapera’, an old milonga by Elías Regules. The melody took me back to a certain Buenos Aires patio, which has long since disappeared, and to the memory of my cousin Álvaro Melián Lafinur, who has been dead for so many years. Then came the words. They were those of the opening line. It was not Álvaro’s voice but an imitation of it. Recognizing this, I was taken aback.

‘Sir,’ I said, turning to the other man, ‘are you an Uruguayan or an Argentine?’

‘Argentine, but I’ve lived in Geneva since 1914,’ he replied.

There was a long silence. ‘At number seventeen Malagnou across from the Orthodox church?’ I asked.

He answered in the affirmative.

‘In that case,’ I said straight out, ‘your name is Jorge Luis Borges. I, too, am Jorge Luis Borges. This is 1969 and we’re in the city of Cambridge.’

‘No,’ he said in a voice that was mine but a bit removed.

He paused, then became insistent. ‘I’m here in Geneva, on a bench, a few steps from the Rhone. The strange thing is that we resemble each other, but you’re much older and your hair is grey.’

‘I can prove I’m not lying,’ I said. ‘I’m going to tell you things a stranger couldn’t possibly know. At home we have a silver maté cup with a base in the form of entwined serpents. Our great-grandfather brought it from Peru. There’s also a silver washbasin that hung from his saddle. In the wardrobe of your room are two rows of books: the three volumes of Lane’s Thousand and One Nights, with steel engravings and with notes in small type at the end of each chapter; Quicherat’s Latin dictionary; Tacitus’ Germania in Latin and also in Gordon’s English translation; a Don Quixote published by Garnier; Rivera Indarte’s Tablas de Sangre, inscribed by the author; Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus; a biography of Amiel; and, hidden behind the other volumes, a book in paper covers about sexual customs in the Balkans. Nor have I forgotten one evening on a certain second floor of the Place Dubourg.’

‘Dufour,’ he corrected.

‘Very well Dufour. Is this enough now?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘These proofs prove nothing. If I am dreaming you, it’s natural that you know what I know. Your catalogue, for all its length, is completely worthless.’

His objection was to the point. I said, ‘If this morning and this meeting are dreams, each of us has to believe that he is the dreamer. Perhaps we have stopped dreaming, perhaps not. Our obvious duty, meanwhile, is to accept the dream just as we accept the world and being born and seeing and breathing.’

‘And if the dream should go on?’ he said anxiously.

To calm him and to calm myself, I feigned an air of assurance that I certainly did not feel. ‘My dream has lasted seventy years now,’ I said. ‘After all, there isn’t a person alive who, on waking, does not find himself with himself. It’s what is happening to us now except that we are two. Don’t you want to know something of my past, which is the future awaiting you?’

He assented without a word. I went on, a bit lost.

‘Mother is healthy and well in her house on Charcas and Maipú, in Buenos Aires, but Father died some thirty years ago. He died of heart trouble. Hemiplegia finished him; his left hand, placed on his right, was like the hand of a child on a giant’s. He died impatient for death but without complaint. Our grandmother had died in the same house. A few days before the end, she called us all together and said, “I’m an old woman who is dying very, very slowly. Don’t anyone become upset about such a common, everyday thing.” Your sister, Norah, married and has two sons. By the way, how is everyone at home?’

‘Quite well. Father makes his same antireligious jokes. Last night he said that Jesus was like the gauchos, who don’t like to commit themselves, and that’s why he preached in parables.’ He hesitated and then said, ‘And you?’

‘I don’t know the number of books you’ll write, but I know they’ll be too many. You’ll write poems that will give you a pleasure that others won’t share and stories of a somewhat fantastic nature. Like your father and so many others of our family, you will teach.’

It pleased me that he did not ask about the success or failure of his books. I changed my tone and went on.

‘As for history, there was another war, almost among the same antagonists. France was not long in caving in; England and America fought against a German dictator named Hitler the cyclical battle of Waterloo. Around 1946, Buenos Aires gave birth to another Rosas, who bore a fair resemblance to our kinsman. In 1955, the province of Córdoba came to our rescue, as Entre Ríos had in the last century. Now things are going badly. Russia is taking over the world; America, hampered by the superstition of democracy, can’t make up its mind to become an empire. With every day that passes, our country becomes more provincial. More provincial and more pretentious as if its eyes were closed. It wouldn’t surprise me if the teaching of Latin in our schools were replaced by that of Guaraní.’

I could tell that he was barely paying attention. The elemental fear of what is impossible and yet what is so dismayed him. I, who have never been a father, felt for that poor boy more intimate to me even than a son of my flesh a surge of love. Seeing that he clutched a book in his hands, I asked what it was.

‘The Possessed, or, as I believe,
The Devils, by Fëdor Dostoevski,’ he answered, not without vanity.

‘It has faded in my memory. What’s it like?’ As soon as I said this, I felt that the question was a blasphemy.

‘The Russian master,’ he pronounced, ‘has seen better than anyone else into the labyrinth of the Slavic soul.’ This attempt at rhetoric seemed to me proof that he had regained his composure. I asked what other volumes of the master he had read. He mentioned two or three, among them The Double. I then asked him if on reading them he could clearly distinguish the characters, as you could in Joseph Conrad, and if he thought of going on in his study of Dostoevski’s work.

‘Not really,’ he said with a certain surprise.

I asked what he was writing and he told me he was putting together a book of poems that would be called
Red Hymns. He said he had also considered calling it
Red Rhythms.

‘And why not?’ I said. ‘You can cite good antecedents. Rubén Darío’s blue verse and Verlaine’s grey song.’

Ignoring this, he explained that his book would celebrate the brotherhood of man. The poet of our time could not turn his back on his own age, he went on to say. I thought for a while and asked if he truly felt himself a brother to everyone to all funeral directors, for example, to all post-men, to all deep-sea divers, to all those who lived on the even-numbered side of the street, to all those who were aphonic, and so on. He answered that his book referred to the great mass of the oppressed and alienated.

‘Your mass of oppressed and alienated is no more than an abstraction,’ I said. ‘Only individuals exist if it can be said that anyone exists. “The man of yesterday is not the man of today,” some Greek remarked. We two, seated on this bench in Geneva or Cambridge, are perhaps proof of this.’

Except in the strict pages of history, memorable events stand in no need of memorable phrases. At the point of death, a man tries to recall an engraving glimpsed in childhood; about to enter battle, soldiers speak of the mud or of their sergeant. Our situation was unique and, frankly, we were unprepared for it. As fate would have it, we talked about literature; I fear I said no more than the things I usually say to journalists. My alter ego believed in the invention, or discovery, of new metaphors; I, in those metaphors that correspond to intimate and obvious affinities and that our imagination has already accepted. Old age and sunset, dreams and life, the flow of time and water. I put forward this opinion, which years later he would put forward in a book. He barely listened to me. Suddenly, he said, ‘If you have been me, how do you explain the fact that you have forgotten your meeting with an elderly gentleman who in 1918 told you that he, too, was Borges?’

I had not considered this difficulty. ‘Maybe the event was so strange I chose to forget it,’ I answered without much conviction.

Venturing a question, he said shyly, ‘What’s your memory like?’

I realized that to a boy not yet twenty a man of over seventy was almost in the grave. ‘It often approaches forgetfulness,’ I said, ‘but it still finds what it’s asked to find. I study Old English, and I am not at the bottom of the class.’

Our conversation had already lasted too long to be that of a dream. A sudden idea came to me. ‘I can prove at once that you are not dreaming me,’ I said. ‘Listen carefully to this line, which, as far as I know, you’ve never read.’

Slowly I intoned the famous verse, ‘L’hydre-univers tordant son corps écaillé d’astres.’ I felt his almost fearful awe. He repeated the line, low-voiced, savouring each resplendent word.

‘It’s true,’ he faltered. ‘I’ll never be able to write a line like that.’

Victor Hugo had brought us together.

Before this, I now recall, he had fervently recited that short piece of Whitman’s in which the poet remembers a night shared beside the sea when he was really happy. ‘If Whitman celebrated that night,’ I remarked, ‘it’s because he desired it and it did not happen. The poem gains if we look on it as the expression of a longing, not the account of an actual happening.’

He stared at me open-mouthed. ‘You don’t know him!’ he exclaimed. ‘Whitman is incapable of telling a lie.’

Half a century does not pass in vain. Beneath our conversation about people and random reading and our different tastes, I realized that we were unable to understand each other. We were too similar and too unalike.

We were unable to take each other in, which makes conversation difficult. Each of us was a caricature copy of the other. The situation was too abnormal to last much longer. Either to offer advice or to argue was pointless, since, unavoidably, it was his fate to become the person I am.

All at once, I remembered one of Coleridge’s fantasies.

Somebody dreams that on a journey through paradise he is given a flower. On awaking, he finds the flower. A similar trick occurred to me. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Have you any money?’

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I have about twenty francs. I’ve invited Simon Jichlinski to dinner at the Crocodile tonight.’

‘Tell Simon that he will practice medicine in Carouge and that he will do much good. Now, give me one of your coins.’

He drew out three large silver pieces and some small change. Without understanding, he offered me a five-franc coin. I handed him one of those not very sensible American bills that, regardless of their value, are all the same size. He examined it avidly.

‘It can’t be,’ he said, his voice raised. ‘It bears the date 1964. All this is a miracle, and the miraculous is terrifying.

Witnesses to the resurrection of Lazarus must have been horrified.’

We have not changed in the least, I thought to myself. Ever the bookish reference. He tore up the bill and put his coins away. I decided to throw mine into the river. The arc of the big silver disk losing itself in the silver river would have conferred on my story a vivid image, but luck would not have it so. I told him that the supernatural, if it occurs twice, ceases to be terrifying. I suggested that we plan to see each other the next day, on this same bench, which existed in two times and in two places. He agreed at once and, without looking at his watch, said that he was late. Both of us were lying and we each knew it of the other. I told him that someone was coming for me.

‘Coming for you?’ he said.

‘Yes. When you get to my age, you will have lost your eyesight almost completely. You’ll still make out the colour yellow and lights and shadows. Don’t worry. Gradual blindness is not a tragedy. It’s like a slow summer dusk.’

We said goodbye without having once touched each other. The next day, I did not show up. Neither would he. I have brooded a great deal over that meeting, which until now I have related to no one. I believe I have discovered the key. The meeting was real, but the other man was dreaming when he conversed with me, and this explains how he was able to forget me; I conversed with him while awake, and the memory of it still disturbs me. The other man dreamed me, but he did not dream me exactly. He dreamed, I now realize, the date on the dollar bill.

Ulrike

He took the sword Gram and laid it naked between them.

The Saga of the Volsungs, 29

My story will be true to reality or, in any case, to my personal memory of reality, which amounts to the same thing. The events took place only a short time ago, but I know that literary habit is also the habit of adding circumstantial details and of underlining high points. I want to give an account of my meeting with Ulrike (I never knew her surname and perhaps never shall) in the city of York. The narrative will encompass one night and a morning.

It would be easy to say that I saw her for the first time by the Five Sisters of York Minster, those stained-glass windows which, pure of any image, Cromwell’s iconoclasts respected, but the fact is that we met in the small lounge of The Northern Inn, which lies outside the city walls.

We were a handful, and Ulrike stood with her back to us. Someone offered her a drink and she refused it.

‘I am a feminist,’ she said. ‘I am not out to ape men. I dislike their tobacco and their alcohol.’

The remark was meant to be witty, and I guessed that this was not the first time she had delivered it. I later found out that it was not typical of her, but what we say is not always like us. She mentioned that she had arrived at the museum too late, but that they let her in when they learned she was a Norwegian.

One of those present remarked, ‘It’s not the first time the Norwegians have entered York.’

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘England was once ours and we lost it if one can have anything or if anything can be lost.’ It was at this point that I looked at her. A line in Blake speaks of girls of mild silver or of furious gold, but in Ulrike were both gold and mildness. She was tall and slender, with sharp features and grey eyes. Less than by her face, I was impressed by her air of calm mystery. She smiled easily, and the smile seemed to withdraw her from the company. She was dressed in black, which is strange for northern lands, which try to liven the drab surroundings with vivid colours. She spoke a crisp, precise English, rolling her r’s slightly. I am not much of an observer; these things I discovered bit by bit.

We were introduced. I told her that I was a professor at the University of the Andes, in Bogotá. I explained that I was a Colombian.

She asked me in a thoughtful way, ‘What does it mean to be a Colombian?’

‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘It’s an act of faith.’

‘Like being Norwegian,’ she affirmed.

I can remember no more of what was said that night.

The next day, I came down to the dining room early. Through the windows I saw that it had snowed; in the early morning light the moors faded away. We were the only ones there. Ulrike invited me to her table. She told me that she liked going out for solitary walks.

Recalling a joke of Schopenhauer’s, I said, ‘So do I. The two of us could go out together.’

We walked away from the inn on the new-fallen snow.

There was not a soul about. I suggested that we go on to Thorgate, a few miles down the river. I know that I was already in love with Ulrike; I could never have wanted any other person by my side.

All at once, I heard the distant howling of a wolf. I had never before-heard a wolf howl, but I knew it was a wolf. Ulrike was impassive.

A while later she said, as if thinking aloud, ‘The few poor swords I saw yesterday in York Minster moved me more than the great ships in the Oslo museum.’ Our paths had crossed. That evening Ulrike would continue her journey on to London; I to Edinburgh.

‘In Oxford Street,’ she told me, ‘I shall follow De Quincey’s footsteps in search of his Ann, lost amid the crowds of London.’

‘De Quincey stopped looking for her,’ I replied. ‘All my life, I never have.’

‘Maybe you’ve found her,’ Ulrike said, her voice low.

I realized that an unexpected thing was not forbidden me, and I kissed her on the mouth and eyes. She drew away firmly but gently and then declared, ‘I’ll be yours in the inn at Thorgate. Until then, I ask you not to touch me. It is better that way.’

To a bachelor well along in years, the offer of love is a gift no longer expected. The miracle has a right to impose conditions. I thought back on my youth in Popayán and on a girl in Texas, as fair and slender as Ulrike, who once denied me her love.

I did not make the mistake of asking Ulrike whether she loved me. I realized that this was not her first time nor would it be her last. The adventure, perhaps my last, would be one of many for that splendid, determined follower of Ibsen. Hand in hand, we walked on.

‘All this is like a dream, and I never dream,’ I said.

‘Like that king who never dreamed until a wizard made him sleep in a pigsty,’ Ulrike replied. Then she added, ‘Listen. A bird is about to sing.’

A moment or two later we heard the song.

‘In these lands,’ I said, ‘it’s thought that a person about to die sees into the future.’

‘And I am about to die,’ she said.

I looked at her in astonishment. ‘Let’s cut through the woods,’ I urged. ‘We’ll reach Thorgate sooner.’

‘The woods are dangerous,’ she said. We continued along the moors.

‘I should like this moment to last forever,’ I murmured.

‘“Forever” is a word forbidden to men,’ Ulrike said and, to soften the force of this, she asked me to repeat my name, which she had not caught.

‘Javier Otálora,’ I said.

She tried to pronounce it and couldn’t. I failed, equally, with the name Ulrike.

‘I shall call you Sigurd,’ she said with a smile.

‘If I am Sigurd,’ I replied, ‘you will be Brynhild.’

She had slowed her step.

‘Do you know the saga?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘The tragic story spoiled by the Germans with their late Nibelungs.’

Not wishing to argue the point, I answered, ‘Brynhild, you’re walking as if you wished a sword lay between us in bed.’

Suddenly we stood before the inn. It did not surprise me that, like the other one, it was called The Northern Inn.

From the top of the stairs, Ulrike called down to me, ‘Did you hear the wolf? There are no longer any wolves in England. Hurry.'

Climbing to the upper floor, I noticed that the walls were papered in the style of William Morris, in a deep red, with a design of fruit and birds intertwined. Ulrike went on ahead. The dark room was low, with a slanted ceiling. The awaited bed was duplicated in a dim mirror, and the polished mahogany reminded me of the looking glass of Scriptures. Ulrike had already undressed. She called me by my real name Javier. I felt that the snow was falling faster. Now there were no longer any mirrors or furniture. There was no sword between us. Time passed like the sands. In the darkness, centuries old, love flowed, and for the first and last time I possessed Ulrike’s image.

The Congress

. . . ils s’acheminèrent vers un château immense, au frontispice duquel on lisait: ‘Je n’appartiens à personne et j’appartiens à tout le monde. Vous y étiez avant que d’y entrer, et vous y serez encore quand vous en sortirez.’

Diderot,
Jacques le Fataliste et son Maître

Buenos Aires, 1955

Alejandro Ferri is my name. Martial echoes may be heard in it, but neither the metals of glory nor the great shadow of the Macedonian the words belong to the poet of The Marble Pillars, who honoured me with his friendship has any kinship with the nearly anonymous man who strings together these lines on the upper floor of a hotel on Santiago del Estero Street, on the south side of town, which is no longer the old Southside. Any day now, I’ll turn seventy-one or seventy-two; I am still teaching English to a handful of students. Out of indecision or carelessness, or for some other reason, I never married, and now I live alone. Loneliness does not worry me ; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits. I realize I am getting on in years. An unmistakable symptom of this is the fact that novelties maybe because I feel they hold nothing essentially new and are really no more than timid variations neither interest nor distract me. When I was a young man, I was fond of sunsets, the city’s sprawling slums, and of unhappiness; now I prefer mornings and downtown and peace. I no longer play at being Hamlet. I have become a member of the Conservative Party and of a chess club, which I usually attend as an onlooker sometimes an absentminded onlooker. Anyone who is curious may dig up from some out-of-the-way nook of the National Library, on Mexico Street, a copy of my Short Study of John Wilkins’ Analytical Language, a work that sadly stands in need of a new edition, if only to correct or to lessen its many mistakes. The library’s new director, I am told, is a literary man who dedicates himself to the study of ancient languages (as if modern ones were not sufficiently rudimentary) and to the demagogic exaltation of an imaginary Buenos Aires of knife fighters. I have never cared to meet him. I came to this city in 1899, and only once did chance bring me face to face with a knife fighter or with an individual who had a reputation as such. Further on, should the occasion present itself, I shall relate the episode.

I have already said that I live alone. Several days ago, a fellow-roomer, who had heard me speak of Fermín Eguren, told me that he had died in Punta del Este.

The death of this man, who was certainly never a friend of mine, has unaccountably saddened me. I know that I am alone; I know that in the whole world I am the only keeper of that secret event the Congress whose memory I can no longer share. I am now the last member of that Congress. It is undeniable that all men are members of that Congress that there is not a single being on earth who is not but I know I am a member in a very different way. I know that I am, and that’s what sets me apart from my numberless colleagues, present and future. It is undeniable that on the seventh of February, 1904, we swore by what is most holy (is there anything holy on earth, or anything that is not?) never to reveal the history of the Congress, but it is no less undeniable that my now committing perjury is also part of the Congress. This last statement is sufficiently dim, but it may whet the curiosity of my eventual readers.

At any rate, the task I have taken upon myself is not an easy one. I have never before attempted the art of narration not even in its epistolary form and, what is doubtless even more important, the story itself is unbelievable. The pen of José Fernández Irala, the undeservedly forgotten author of The Marble Pillars, was the one destined for this work, but now it is too late. I shall not deliberately falsify the real facts, although I foresee that laziness and incompetence will more than once lead me into error. Exact dates are of no account. Let it be recalled that I came from Santa Fe, my native province, in 1899. I have never gone back. I have grown accustomed to Buenos Aires, a city I am not fond of, in the same way that a man grows accustomed to his own body or to an old ailment. Without much caring, I am aware that I am going to die soon; I must, consequently, control my digressive tendencies and get on with my story.

The years do not change our essential selves if one has an essential self. The impulse that would one night lead me to the Congress of the World was the same that first brought me to the staff of Última Hora. To a poor boy from the provinces, becoming a newspaperman was a romantic fate, just as to a poor city boy the life of a gaucho or a farmhand is romantic. I feel no shame at having once wanted to be a journalist, an occupation that now seems trivial to me. I remember having heard my colleague Fernández Irala say that newspapermen wrote for oblivion but that his ambition was to write for time and for memory. He had already chiseled (the verb was then in common use) some of those perfect sonnets that were later to reappear, with one or two minor touches, in the pages of The Marble Pillars.

I cannot quite recall the first time I heard the Congress spoken of. Maybe it was on that same evening the cashier paid me my first month’s salary and, to celebrate this proof that Buenos Aires had taken me to its bosom, I suggested to Irala that we dine together. He excused himself, saying he could not miss the Congress. I understood at once that he was not referring to the rather pompous, domed building at the foot of an avenue peopled by Spaniards but to something more secret and far more important. People spoke of the Congress, some with open scorn, others with lowered voices, still others with alarm or curiosity all, I believe, without knowing anything about it. A few Saturdays later, Irala invited me to go along with him.

It must have been nine or ten o’clock at night. On our way, in a streetcar, he told me these preliminary meetings took place every Saturday arid that don Alejandro Glencoe, the president of the Congress, perhaps struck by my name, had already signed his approval of my attendance. We went to the Gas-Lamp Coffee House. Some fifteen or twenty members of the Congress sat around a long table; I don’t know if there was a dais or if memory adds it. I immediately recognized the president, whom I had never seen before. Don Alejandro was a gentleman, already well along in years, with a high forehead and thinning hair, grey eyes, and a greying reddish beard. I always saw him dressed in a dark frock coat, and he usually held his hands locked together over the head of his cane. He was portly and tall. To his left sat a much younger man, also with red hair. Its violent colour suggested fire, while the colour of Mr. Glencoe’s beard suggested autumn leaves. To his right was a long-faced young man with an unusually low forehead and dressed like a dandy. Everyone had ordered coffee, and several absinthe. What first caught my attention was the presence of a woman the only woman among so many men.

At the other end of the table sat a boy of about ten, dressed in a sailor suit, who was not long in falling asleep.

There were also a Protestant minister, two unmistakable Jews, and a Negro, who, with a white silk handkerchief around his neck and very tight-fitting clothes, was dressed like a street-corner hoodlum. In front of the Negro and the boy were cups of chocolate. I do not remember any of the other people except for a Mr. Marcelo del Mazo, a man of great politeness and fine conversation, whom I never saw again. (I still have a faded, poorly done photograph of one of the gatherings, but I shall not publish it, since the dress, the long hair, and the moustaches of that period would make the whole thing look burlesque and even shabby.)

All groups tend to create their own dialects and rites; the Congress, which always had something dreamlike about it, seemed to want its members to discover at leisure and for themselves its real aim and even the names and surnames of its members. I was not long in realizing that I was duty-bound not to ask questions, and I refrained even from asking any of Fernández Irala, who never told me a thing. I did not miss a single Saturday, but a good month or two went by before I reached this understanding. From the second meeting on, my neighbour was Donald Wren, an engineer on the Southern Railways, who was to give me English lessons.

Don Alejandro spoke very little. The rest did not address themselves directly to him, but I felt that their words were meant for him and that everyone was after his approval. One gesture of his slow hand was enough to change the topic of discussion. I came to find out, little by little, that the red-haired man to his left bore the strange name of Twirl. I remember that fragile look of his, which, as though their stature made them dizzy and forced them to hunch forward, is characteristic of some very tall people. His hand, I recall, often played with a copper compass case, which from time to time he set on the table. At the end of 1914, he was killed as an infantryman in an Irish regiment. The person who always sat to the right, the young man with the low forehead, was Fermín Eguren, the president’s nephew.

Putting no faith in the methods of realism (a most artificial school if there ever was one), I shall declare right off what I learned only little by little. Beforehand, I want to remind the reader of my situation at the time. I was a poor boy from Casilda, a farmer’s son, who had come to the capital and suddenly found himself this was the way I felt in the intimate heart of Buenos Aires and perhaps (who knows?) of the whole world. After half a century, I still feel those first dazzling moments, which certainly were not to be the last.

Here are the facts. I shall tell them as briefly as I can. Don Alejandro Glencoe, the president, was an Uruguayan rancher and owner of a large spread of land bordering on Brazil. His father, a native of Aberdeen, had established himself on this continent around the middle of the last century. He brought with him some hundred books the only books, I venture to say, that don Alejandro read in the course of his life. (I speak of these assorted books, which I have had in my hands, because in one of them lies the root of my story.) The elder Mr. Glencoe, on dying, left a daughter and a son. The son was later to become our president; the daughter married an Eguren and was Fermín’s mother. Don Alejandro at one time aspired to the Uruguayan National Congress, but the political bosses barred his way. Rankled, he decided to found another Congress and on a vaster scale. He remembered having read in the volcanic pages of Carlyle the fate of Anacharsis Clootz, that worshipper of the goddess Reason who, at the head of thirty-six foreigners, addressed a Paris assembly as ‘mankind’s spokesman’. Moved by this example, don Alejandro conceived the idea of calling together a Congress of the World that would represent all men of all nations. The centre for the preliminary meetings was the Gas-Lamp Coffee House; the formal act of inauguration, which would take place within some four years, would be held at don Alejandro’s ranch. Like so many Uruguayans, don Alejandro who was no lover of Uruguay’s now national hero, Artigas was fond of Buenos Aires, but he nonetheless decided that the Congress must eventually meet in his own country. Oddly enough, the four-year planning period was carried out with a precision that was almost magical.

In the beginning, we were paid a considerable sum as a per diem, but the zeal that enflamed us prompted Fernández Irala who was as poor as I was to renounce his, and all the rest of us followed suit. This measure was healthy, since it served to separate the wheat from the chaff; the number of members was reduced, and only the faithful remained. The one paid position was that of the secretary, Nora Erfjord, who lacked other means of support and whose work at the same time was staggering. To set up a worldwide organization is no trifling enterprise. Letters came and went, and so did cables and telegrams. Potential delegates wrote from Peru, Denmark, and India. A Bolivian wrote that his country’s lack of access to the sea should be a matter of prime consideration in our first meetings. Twirl, who had a farseeing mind, remarked that the Congress involved a problem of a philosophical nature. Planning an assembly to represent all men was like fixing the exact number of platonic types a puzzle that had taxed the imagination of thinkers for centuries. Twirl suggested that, without going farther afield, don Alejandro Glencoe might represent not only cattlemen but also Uruguayans, and also humanity’s great forerunners, and also men with red beards, and also those who are seated in armchairs. Nora Erfjord was Norwegian. Would she represent secretaries, Norwegian womanhood, or more obviously all beautiful women?

Would a single engineer be enough to represent all engineers including those of New Zealand?

It was then, I believe, that Fermín broke in. ‘Ferri represents the gringos,’ he said in a flood of laughter.

Don Alejandro looked at him severely and, in an even voice, said, ‘Mr Ferri is representative of the immigrants whose labour is building up this country.’

Fermín Eguren never could bear the sight of me. He took pride in an assortment of things: in being Uruguayan; in coming from old stock; in attracting women; in having chosen an expensive tailor; and, God knows why, in his Basque origin a people who throughout history have done little else than milk cows.

An incident of the most trivial sort sealed our enmity. After one of the meetings, Eguren suggested that we pay a visit to one of the Junín Street brothels. The plan did not attract me, but, in order not to make myself the butt of his jokes, I accepted. We went with Fernández Irala.

On leaving the establishment, we ran into a huge specimen of a man. Eguren, who may have been a bit drunk, gave him a shove. The stranger quickly barred our way and told us, ‘Whoever wants to leave is going to have to pass by this knife.’

I remember the glint of the blade in the darkness of the long entranceway. Eguren drew back, visibly afraid. I wasn’t too sure of myself, but my hatred got the best of my fright. I reached into my armpit, as if to draw out a weapon, and said in a firm voice, ‘We’ll settle this out on the street.’

The stranger answered with another voice now, ‘That’s the kind of man I like. I wanted to test you, friend.’ Then he began to laugh in a cordial way.

‘As to “friend”,’ I answered him, ‘that’s what you think.’ The three of us made our way past him.

The man with the knife entered the brothel. I heard later that his name was Tapia, or Paredes, or something of the kind, and that he had a reputation for brawling. Out on the sidewalk, Irala, who had kept cool, slapped me on the back and said, impressively, ‘Among us three, we had a musketeer. Hail, d’Artagnan!’

Fermín Eguren never forgave me for having witnessed his backing down.

I feel that now, and only now, my story begins. The preceding pages have set down no more than the conditions that chance or fate required so that the unbelievable event perhaps the single event of my whole life might take place. Don Alejandro Glencoe was always at the centre of the Congress, but over a period of time we felt, not without misgiving, that the real president was Twirl. This singular character, with the flaming moustache, fawned on Glencoe and even on Fermín Eguren but in such an exaggerated way that those present would think he was actually mocking the two. By so doing, he never once compromised his integrity. Glencoe laboured under the pride of his vast fortune; Twirl discovered that in order to get anything done it was enough to suggest that its cost might prove beyond the president’s means. It is my suspicion that at the outset the Congress had been nothing more than a haphazard sort of name. Twirl was continually proposing new areas of expansion, and don Alejandro always accepted. It was like being at the middle of a spreading circle, which grows ever larger and always farther away. Twirl said, for example, that the Congress could not get along without a reference library, and Nierenstein, who worked in a bookshop, went about ordering us the atlases of Justus Perthes and several extensive encyclopedias all the way from Pliny’s Natural History and Beauvais’ Speculum down to the pleasant mazes (I reread these words with Fernández Irak’s voice) of the illustrious French Encyclopedists, of the Britannica, of Pierre Larousse, of Brockhaus, of Larsen, and of Montaner y Simón. I recall how I reverently fondled the silky volumes of a certain Chinese encyclopedia whose finely brushed characters seemed to me more mysterious than the spots on a leopard’s skin. As yet, I will say nothing of what lay in store for them and which certainly I do not regret.

Don Alejandro, maybe because we were the only ones who did not try to flatter him, had grown quite fond of Fernández Irala and me. He invited us to spend a few days at his ranch, La Caledonia, where he had a crew of stonemasons already at work.

At the end of a long trip upriver by steamer and a ferry crossing on a raft, we set foot one morning on the Uruguay shore. We then had to spend successive nights in run-down country saloons, while opening and shutting dozens of gateways all day along back roads in the Cuchilla Negra. We made our way in a light carriage; the countryside seemed wider and lonelier to me than the small farm where I was born.

I still hold my two images of the ranch the one I brought with me and the one my eyes finally saw. Absurdly, I had imagined, as in a dream, an impossible combination of the flat plains of Santa Fe and of the rather gaudy Victorian Buenos Aires Waterworks. La Caledonia was a long adobe building with a thatched saddle roof and a brick-paved gallery. It appeared to be built for hardship and endurance. The rough walls were nearly a yard thick and the doors were narrow. Nobody had ever thought of planting a tree. The sun’s first and last rays beat down on the place. The corrals were of stone; the cattle were many, scrawny and long-horned; the horses’ switching tails reached the ground. For the first time in my life, I knew the taste of freshly slaughtered meat. Some sacks of sea biscuit were brought out; a few days later, the foreman told me he had never eaten bread in his life. Irala asked where the bathroom was, and, with a sweeping gesture, don Alejandro indicated the entire continent. It was a moonlit night; I went out to stretch my legs, and I surprised Irala being watched by an ostrich. The heat, which the night had not dispelled, was unbearable, and everyone praised the coolness. The rooms were low-ceilinged and many, and seemed to me barely furnished; we were given one, facing south, in which there were two cots and a dresser with a silver washbasin and pitcher. The floor was dirt.

The second day, I came across the library and the volumes of Carlyle, and I found the pages dedicated to mankind’s spokesman, Anacharsis Clootz, who had led me to that morning and to that loneliness. After breakfast, which was identical with dinner, don Ajelandro showed us the building under construction. We rode three or four miles on horseback out in the wide open. Irala, whose horsemanship was shaky, had an accident; unsmiling, the foreman remarked, ‘You Argentines really know how to dismount.’ From way off, we could see the construction site. Some twenty men were at work building a kind of tumbledown amphitheatre. I recall a series of stages and ladders and stone tiers with stretches of sky showing between.

More than once, I tried to speak with the gauchos, but my efforts failed. In some way, they knew they were different. Among themselves, they used a spare, guttural Brazilianized Spanish. It was obvious that both Indian and Negro blood ran in their veins. They were short and strong; at La Caledonia, I became a tall man something that had never happened to me until then.

Almost all of them dressed with their legs wrapped in the chiripá, and a few wore the wide, baggy bombachas. They had little or nothing in common with the complaining heroes found in the books of Hernández or of Rafael Obligado. Under the stimulus of Saturday-night alcohol, they were easily moved to violence. There wasn’t a single woman around, and I never once heard a guitar.

I was more interested in the change that had come over don Alejandro than I was in these border-country men. In Buenos Aires, he was a pleasant, reserved gentleman; at La Caledonia, like his fathers before him, he became the stern chief of a clan. Sunday mornings, he read Holy Scripture to the hands, who did not understand a single word. One night, the foreman, a youngish man who had inherited the job from his father, reported to us that one of the day labourers and one of the regular help were having it out with knives. Don Alejandro got up, unruffled. When he came to the circle of onlookers, he drew out the weapon he always carried, handed it to the foreman (who appeared to me to cringe), and stepped between the knives. At once, I heard the order, ‘Drop those knives, boys.’ With the same calm voice, he added, ‘Now shake hands and behave yourselves. I don’t want any brawling around here.’

The two men obeyed. The next day, I learned that don Alejandro had fired the foreman.

I felt the loneliness ringing me in, and I began fearing I’d never get back to Buenos Aires. I wonder whether Fernández Irala shared that fear. We talked a lot about Argentina and what we’d do when we returned. I missed the stone lions of a certain gateway on Jujuy Street, near the Plaza del Once, and the light of a particular old bar in some dim part of town, but not my familiar haunts.

Always a good rider, I fell into the habit of going out on horseback and riding long distances. I still remember the particular piebald I used to saddle up myself. On some afternoon or on some night or other, I probably was in Brazil, since the border was nothing but a line traced out by widely spaced markers. Then, at the close of a day exactly like all the rest, don Alejandro told us, ‘We’ll turn in early. Tomorrow we’ll be off while it’s still cool.’

Once down the river, I felt so happy that I was even able to think back to La Caledonia with affection.

We took up our Saturday meetings again. At the first one, Twirl asked for the floor. He said, with his usual flowers of rhetoric, that the library of the Congress of the World could not be limited to reference books alone, and that the classical works of all nations and all languages were a veritable storehouse that we could not safely afford to ignore. The suggestion was approved on the spot; Fernández Irala and Dr Ignacio Cruz, who was a teacher of Latin, accepted the job of selecting the appropriate texts. Twirl had already talked things over with Nierenstein.

In those days, there wasn’t a single Argentine whose utopia was not Paris. Perhaps the most enthusiastic of us was Fermín Eguren; next, for quite different reasons, came Fernández Irala. To the poet of The Marble Pillars, Paris was Verlaine and Leconte de Lisle, while to Eguren it was an improved version of Junín Street. I suspect that he had come to some understanding with Twirl. At a subsequent meeting, Twirl brought up the question of what language the members of the Congress would use, arguing the feasibility of sending delegates to London and Paris to gather information. Feigning impartiality, he first put up my name, and then, as an apparent afterthought, that of his friend Eguren. As always, don Alejandro agreed.

I think I have written that, in exchange for some lessons in Italian, Wren had initiated me into the study of the inexhaustible English language. As far as possible, we did away with grammar and with those exercises concocted for the beginner, and we found our way directly into poetry, whose forms demand brevity. My first contact with the language that was to fill out my life was Stevenson’s brave ‘Requiem’. Then came the ballads that Percy revealed to the dignified eighteenth century. A short while before leaving for London, I was dazzled by Swinburne an experience that made me begin to doubt (and to feel guilty about it) the eminence of Irala’s alexandrines.

I reached London early in January, 1902; I remember the soft touch of falling snow, which I had never before seen and for which I was grateful. Luckily, Eguren and I had traveled separately. I roomed at a modest boarding house behind the British Museum, where mornings and afternoons I studied in the library in search of a language worthy of the Congress of the World. I did not overlook universal languages, investigating both Esperanto which Lugones qualifies as ‘impartial, simple, and economical’ and Volapük, which, declining verbs and conjugating nouns, attempts to work out all linguistic possibilities. I also weighed the arguments in favour of and against the revival of Latin, a nostalgia for which has endured down through the centuries. I even dwelled on an examination of John Wilkins’ analytical language, in which the definition of each word is to be found in the letters that spell it out. It was beneath the high dome of the reading room that I first met Beatrice.

This is meant to be a general history of the Congress of the World, not of Alejandro Ferri, but the former takes in the latter, just as it takes in all other histories. Beatrice was tall, trim, with fine features and a head of red hair that might have reminded me but never did of the shady Twirl. She was not yet twenty. She had come down from one of the northern counties to study literature at the university. Her background, like mine, was humble. At that time, to be of Italian stock in Buenos Aires was still to be looked down on, but in London I found out that being Italian was to many people a romantic attribute. Within a few evenings, we were lovers; I asked her to marry me, but Beatrice Frost, like Nora Erfjord, was a follower of the faith preached by Ibsen, and she did not want to tie herself down to anyone. From her lips came the word I never dared speak. O nights, O darkness warm and shared, O love that flows in shadows like some secret river, O that instant of ecstasy when each is both, O that ecstasy’s purity and innocence, O the coupling in which we became lost so as then to lose ourselves in sleep, O the first light of dawn, and I watching her.

On the rough Brazil border, I had been plagued by homesickness; not so in London’s red labyrinth, which gave me so many things. Despite the pretexts I dreamed up to delay my departure, I had to return home at the end of the year. Beatrice and I celebrated Christmas together. I assured her that don Alejandro would invite her to join the Congress; she answered, in an offhand way, that she had always wanted to visit the Southern Hemisphere, and that a cousin of hers, a dentist, had settled in Tasmania.

Beatrice did not want to come to the boat. Goodbyes, to her way of thinking, were too dramatic, were a senseless feast of unhappiness, and she detested dramatics. We parted in the library, where we had met the winter before. As a man, I’m a coward; to avoid the anguish of waiting for letters, I did not leave her my address.

Return trips are shorter, I have always noticed, but that crossing of the Atlantic, heavy with memories and anxieties, seemed unusually long. Nothing hurt me as much as thinking that, in a parallel with my life, Beatrice would go on living hers, minute by minute and night by night. I wrote a lengthy letter, destroying it as we left Montevideo. When I reached Argentina it was on a Thursday Irala was waiting for me at the dock. I went back to my old place on Chile Street; that day and the next he and I spent together talking and taking long walks. I wanted to recover Buenos Aires again. It was a relief to find out that Fermín Eguren was staying on in Paris; I knew the fact of my having come back before him would in some way make up for my long absence.

Irala was downcast. Fermín was squandering huge sums in Europe, and had more than once disobeyed the order to return home. This was to have been foreseen. I was more disturbed by other news. Twirl, in spite of the opposition of Irala and Cruz, had invoked the Younger Pliny, according to whom there is no book so bad it does not contain some good, and had proposed the indiscriminate purchase of bound volumes of the daily press, of thirty-four hundred copies of Don Quixote in various editions, of the complete works of General Mitre, of Ph.D. theses, of old account books, of bulletins, and of theatre programmes. Everything gives witness, he had said. Nierenstein backed him; don Alejandro, ‘after three resounding Saturdays’ (as Irala put it), approved the motion. Nora Erfjord had resigned her position as secretary; it was taken over by a new member, Karlinski, who was a tool of Twirl’s. The bulky packages began piling up now, without files or catalogues, in the back rooms and in the wine cellar of don Alejandro’s rambling old town house. Early in July, Irala spent a week back at La Caledonia, where the masons had broken off their work. The foreman, upon questioning, explained that that was what the boss had ordered, and that there would always be time enough tomorrow.

In London, I had drafted a report that there is now no point in going into. That Friday, I went to pay a visit to don Alejandro and to deliver a copy of what I had written. Fernández Irala came with me. It was early evening, and the cold south wind blew into the house. At the front gate, on Alsina Street, a delivery wagon, pulled by three horses, stood waiting. I remember that the deliverymen were weighed down under the loads they went about piling up in the last patio. Twirl was imperious, giving them orders. Also present, indoors, as if they had had an inkling of something, were Nora Erfjord and Nierenstein and Cruz and Donald Wren and a few other members of the Congress. Nora threw her arms around me and kissed me, and that embrace and that kiss made me remember others. The Negro, brimming over with good nature and happiness, kissed my hand.

In one of the rooms, the square trapdoor to the cellar was wide open; some masonry steps plunged down into darkness. Suddenly we heard footsteps. Before laying eyes on him, I knew it was don Alejandro. He came almost on the run.

His voice was different. It was not the voice of the deliberate gentleman who presided over our Saturdays, nor that of the feudal landowner who had put a stop to a knife duel and who preached the word of God to his gauchos — but it seemed more like this latter.

Without looking at anyone, he ordered, ‘Get everything out that’s packed away down there. I don’t want a single book left in that cellar.’

The work went on for nearly an hour. Outside, on the earth floor of the last patio, we made a pile that was taller than the tallest head. All of us marched back and forth; the only person who failed to move was don Alejandro.

Then came the order, ‘Now set fire to that heap.’

Twirl went pale. Nierenstein blurted, ‘How can the Congress of the World do without this valuable material I’ve collected with so much love?’

‘The Congress of the World?’ said don Alejandro. He laughed scornfully. I had never before heard him laugh.

There is a mysterious pleasure in destruction. The flames crackled brightly, and we all had to press back against the walls or move indoors. Darkness, ashes, and an odour of burning were left behind in the patio. I remember some undamaged pages lying white against the ground. Nora Erfjord, who felt for don Alejandro that love which young women often feel for older men, said, without really understanding, ‘Don Alejandro knows what he’s doing.’

Irala, always true to literature, attempted an epigram.

‘Every few centuries,’ he said, ‘the Library of Alexandria must be burned down.’

Then the revelation was made to us.

‘It has taken me four years to understand what I am about to say,’ don Alejandro began. ‘My friends, the undertaking we have set for ourselves is so vast that it embraces I now see the whole world. Our Congress cannot be a group of charlatans deafening each other in the sheds of an out-of-the-way ranch. The Congress of the World began with the first moment of the world and it will go on when we are dust. There’s no place on earth where it does not exist. The Congress is the books we’ve burned. The Congress is Job on the ash heap and Christ on the Cross. The Congress is that worthless boy who squanders my substance on whores.’

I could not hold myself back. ‘Don Alejandro,’ I broke in, ‘I, too, am to blame. I had finished my report, which I now hand you, but I stayed on and on in England, throwing your money away on a woman.’

Don Alejandro went on. ‘I had already guessed as much, Ferri. The Congress is my cattle. The Congress is the cattle I have sold and the miles of land that are no longer mine.’

A horror-stricken voice was raised Twirl’s. ‘You don’t mean to say you’ve sold La Caledonia?’

‘Yes,’ don Alejandro said calmly, ‘I’ve sold it. I haven’t a square foot of land to my name, but I do not regret it, because now I see things as they are. Perhaps we shall never meet again, for the Congress stands in no need of us. But this last night we will all go out together to see the true Congress.’

Drunk with victory, he overwhelmed us with his resolution and faith. No one not for a single second thought he was mad.

In the square, we climbed into an open carriage. I squeezed myself onto the driver’s seat beside the coachman, and don Alejandro ordered, ‘Maestro, let’s have a turn around the city. Take us anywhere you like.’

The Negro, perched on the running board, never stopped smiling. I’ll never know whether or not he realized what was going on.

Words are symbols that assume a shared memory. The memory I now want to set down is mine alone; all those who share it have died. The mystics invoke a rose, a kiss, a bird that is all birds, a sun that is all the stars and the sun, a jug of wine, a garden, or the sexual act. Of these metaphors, none will serve me for that long, joyous night, which left us, tired out and happy, at the borders of dawn. We barely spoke while the wheels and the horses’ hooves clattered over the cobblestones. Before daybreak, beside a dark, humble body of water that may have been the Maldonado or the Riachuelo, Nora Erfjord’s high voice sang the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, and don Alejandro, in a low voice and out of tune, chimed in with a few verses. The English words did not bring me Beatrice’s image. At my back, Twirl muttered, ‘I wanted to do evil and I have done good.’

Something of what we glimpsed lives on the reddish wall of the Recoleta cemetery, the yellow wall of a jail, a couple of men dancing together at a right-angled street corner, a church courtyard with black and white tiles and a grilled iron fence, a railway gate crossing, my house, a marketplace, the damp unfathomable night but none of these fleeting things, which may have been others, now matter. What really matters is having felt that our plan, which more than once we made a joke of, really and secretly existed and was the world and ourselves. Down through the years, without much hope, I have sought the taste of that night; a few times I thought I had recaptured it in music, in love, in untrustworthy memories, but it has never come back to me except once in a dream. When we swore not to say a word to anyone, it was already Saturday morning.

I never saw any of them again, outside of Irala. He and I never spoke about the Congress; anything we might have said would have been a desecration. In 1914, don Alejandro Glencoe died and was buried in Montevideo. Irala had already passed away the year before.

Once, I ran across Nierenstein on Lima Street, and we pretended not to see each other.

There Are More Things

To the memory of H. P. Lovecraft

On the point of taking my last examination at the University of Texas, in Austin, I learned that my uncle Edwin Arnett had died of an aneurysm at the far end of the South American continent. I felt what we all feel when someone dies the remorse, now pointless, for not having been kinder. We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men. My course of study was philosophy. I remembered that it was my uncle, at the Casa Colorada, his home near Lomas, on the edge of Buenos Aires, who, without invoking a single proper name, had first revealed to me philosophy’s beautiful perplexities. One of the after-dinner oranges was his aid in initiating me into Berkeley’s idealism; a chessboard was enough to illustrate the paradoxes of the Eleatics. Years later, he was to lend me Hinton’s treatises which attempt to demonstrate the reality of four-dimensional space and which the reader is meant to imagine by means of complicated exercises with multicoloured cubes. I shall never forget the prisms and pyramids that we erected on the floor of his study.

My uncle was an engineer. Before retiring from his job with the railroad, he decided to build himself a house in Turdera, which offered the advantages of almost country-like solitude and of proximity to the city. Nothing was more predictable than that the architect should be his close friend Alexander Muir. This uncompromising man followed the uncompromising teachings of John Knox. My uncle, like almost all the gentlemen of his day, had been a freethinker or, rather, an agnostic, but he was interested in theology, just as he was interested in Hinton’s unreal cubes and in the well-constructed nightmares of the young H. G. Wells. He liked dogs, and he had a great sheepdog that he had named Samuel Johnson, in memory of Lichfield, his far-off birthplace.

The Casa Colorada stood on a height of land, bordered on the west by sun-blackened fields. Inside its fence, the araucarias did nothing to soften its air of gloom. Instead of a flat roof, there was a slate-tiled saddle roof and a square tower with a clock. These seemed to oppress the walls and the meagre windows. As a boy, I used to accept all this ugliness, just as one accepts those incompatible things which, only because they coexist, are called the world.

I returned home in 1921. To avoid legal complications, the house had been auctioned off. It was bought by a foreigner, a Max Preetorius, who paid double what was offered by the highest bidder. No sooner was the deed signed than he arrived, late one afternoon, with two helpers and they carted off to a rubbish dump, not far from the old Drover’s Road, all the furniture, all the books, and all the utensils of the house. (I sadly recalled the diagrams in the Hinton volumes and the great globe.) The next day, Preetorius went to Muir and proposed certain alterations that the architect indignantly rejected. In the end, a firm from Buenos Aires took charge of the work. The local carpenters refused to furnish the house again. Finally, a certain Mariani, from Glew, accepted the conditions laid down by Preetorius. For an entire fortnight he had to labour by night behind closed doors. It was also by night that the new owner of the Casa Colorada moved in. The windows no longer opened, but chinks of light could be made out in the dark. One morning, the milkman found the sheepdog dead on the walk, headless and mutilated. That winter they felled the araucarias. Nobody saw Preetorius again.

News of these events, as may be imagined, left me uneasy. I know that my most obvious trait is curiosity that same curiosity that brought me together with a woman completely different from me only in order to find out who she was and what she was like, to take up (without appreciable results) the use of laudanum, to explore transfinite numbers, and to undertake the hideous adventure that I am about to tell. Ominously, I decided to look into the matter.

My first step was to see Alexander Muir. I remembered him as tall-standing and dark, with a. wiry build that suggested strength. Now the years had stooped him and his black beard had gone grey. He received me at his Temperley house, which, foreseeably, was like my uncle’s, since both houses followed the solid standards of the good poet and bad builder William Morris.

Conversation was spare Scotland’s symbol, after all, is the thistle. I had the feeling, nonetheless, that the strong Ceylon tea and the equally generous plate of scones (which my host broke in two and buttered for me as if I were still a boy) were, in fact, a frugal Calvinistic feast offered to the nephew of his friend. His theological differences with my uncle had been a long game of chess, demanding of each player the collaboration of his opponent.

Time passed and I was no nearer my business. There was an uncomfortable silence and Muir spoke. ‘Young man,’ he said, ‘you have not come all this way to talk about Edwin or the United States, a country that I have little interest in. What’s troubling you is the sale of the Casa Colorada and its odd buyer. They do me, too. Frankly, the story displeases me, but I’ll tell you what I can. It will not be much.’

After a while he went on, unhurriedly. ‘Before Edwin died, the mayor called me into his office. He was with the parish priest. They asked me to draw the plans for a Catholic chapel. My work would be well paid. On the spot, I answered no. I am a servant of God and I cannot commit the abomination of erecting altars to idols.’ Here he stopped.

‘Is that all?’ I finally dared ask.

‘No. This whelp of a Jew Preetorius wanted me to destroy my work and in its place get up a monstrous thing. Abomination comes in many shapes.’ He pronounced these words gravely and got to his feet.

Outside, on turning the corner, I was approached by Daniel Iberra. We knew one another the way people in small towns do. He suggested that we accompany each other back to Turdera. I have never been keen on hoodlums, and I expected a sordid litany of violent and more or less apocryphal back-room stories, but I gave in and accepted his invitation. It was nearly nightfall. On seeing the Casa Colorada come into view from a few blocks off, Iberra made a detour. I asked him why. His reply was not what I anticipated.

‘I am don Felipe’s right arm,’ he said. ‘Nobody has ever called me soft. That young Urgoiti who took the trouble to come looking for me all the way from Merlo you probably remember what happened to him. Look. A few nights ago, I was returning from a party. A hundred yards or so from that house I saw something. My horse reared up, and if I hadn’t had a good grip on him and made him turn down an alley, maybe I wouldn’t be telling this story now. What I saw justified the horse’s fright.’

Angrily, Iberra added a swear word.

That night I did not sleep. Around dawn, I dreamed about an engraving that I had never seen before or that I had seen and forgotten; it was in the style of Piranesi, and it had a labyrinth in it. It was a stone amphitheatre ringed by cypresses, above whose tops it reached. There were neither doors nor windows; rather, it displayed an endless row of narrow vertical slits. With a magnifying glass, I tried to see the Minotaur inside. At last, I made it out. It was a monster of a monster, more bison than bull, and, its human body stretched out on the ground, it seemed to be asleep and dreaming. Dreaming of what or of whom?

That evening, I passed by the Casa Colorada. The iron gate was shut and some of its bars were bent. What once was garden was now overgrown with weeds. To the right, there was a shallow ditch and its outer edges were trampled.

There was only one move left, but for days I kept putting it off not because I felt it to be altogether a waste, but because it would drag me to the inevitable, to the last. Without much hope, I went to Glew. Mariani, the carpenter, was a stout, pink-faced Italian, common and cordial and now somewhat advanced in years. A glance at him was enough for me to dismiss the stratagems I had contrived the night before. I handed him my card, which he pompously spelled out aloud with a certain reverential stumbling when he reached the ‘Ph.D.’ I told him I was interested in the furniture made by him for the house in Turdera that had been my uncle’s. The man spoke on and on. I shall not try to transcribe his torrent of words and gestures, but he told me that his motto was to satisfy his customer’s every demand, no matter how outlandish it was, and that he had carried out his work to the letter. After rummaging in various drawers he showed me some papers that I could make neither head nor tail of; they were signed by the elusive Preetorius. (Doubtless, Mariani mistook me for a lawyer.) On saying goodbye, he confided to me that even for all the world’s gold he would never again set foot in Turdera, let alone that house. He added that the customer is sacred, but that in his humble opinion Mr. Preetorius was crazy. Then he grew quiet, obviously repentant. I was unable to worm anything more out of him.

I had allowed for this failure, but it is one thing to allow for something and quite another to see it happen. Time and again, I said to myself that the solution of this enigma did not concern me and that the one true enigma was time, that seamless chain of past, present, and future, of the ever and the never. Such reflections turned out to be useless, however; after whole afternoons devoted to the study of Schopenhauer or Royce, night after night I would walk the dirt roads ringing the Casa Colorada. Sometimes I caught a glimpse upstairs of a very white light; other times, I thought I heard a moaning. It went on this way until the nineteenth of January.

It was one of those Buenos Aires days when a man feels himself not only bullied and insulted by the summer but even debased by it. At around eleven o’clock at night the storm broke. First came the south wind, and then the water in torrents. I wandered about looking for a tree. In the sudden glare of a lightning flash I found myself a few steps from the fence. Whether out of fear or hope I don’t know, but I tried the gate. Unexpectedly, it opened. I made my way, pushed along by the storm. Sky and earth threatened me. The door of the house was also open. A squall of rain lashed my face and I went in.

Inside, the floor tiles had been torn up and I stepped on matted grass. A sweet, sickening smell filled the house. Right or left, I’m not sure which, I tripped on a stone ramp. Quickly, I went up. Almost unawares, I turned on the light switch.

The dining room and the library of my memories were now, with the wall between them torn down, a single great bare room containing one or two pieces of furniture. I shall not try to describe them, since I am not altogether sure in spite of the cruel white light of having seen them. Let me explain myself. To see a thing one has to comprehend it. An armchair presupposes the human body, its joints and limbs; a pair of scissors, the act of cutting. What can be said of a lamp or a car? The savage cannot comprehend the missionary’s Bible; the passenger does not see the same rigging as the sailors. If we really saw the world, maybe we would understand it.

None of the meaningless shapes that that night granted me corresponded to the human figure or, for that matter, to any conceivable use. I felt revulsion and terror. In one of the corners, I found a ladder which led to the upper floor. The spaces between the iron rungs, which were no more than ten, were wide and irregular. That ladder, implying hands and feet, was comprehensible, and in some way this relieved me. I put out the light and waited for some time in the dark. I did not hear the least sound, but the presence there of incomprehensible things disquieted me. In the end, I made up my mind.

Once upstairs, my fearful hand switched on the light a second time. The nightmare that had foreshadowed the lower floor came alive and flowered on the next. Here there were either many objects or a few linked together.

I now recall a sort of long operating table, very high and in the shape of a U, with round hollows at each end. I thought that maybe it was the bed of the house’s inhabitant, whose monstrous anatomy revealed itself in this way, implicitly, like an animal’s or a god’s by its shadow.

From some page or other of Lucan there came to my lips the word ‘amphisbaena’, which hinted at, but which certainly did not exhaust, what my eyes were later to see. I also remember a V of mirrors that became lost in the upper darkness.

What would the inhabitant be like? What could it be looking for on this planet, no less hideous to it than it to us? From what secret regions of astronomy or time, from what ancient and now incalculable dusk can it have reached this South American suburb and this particular night?

I felt an intruder in the chaos. Outside, the rain had stopped. I looked at my watch and saw with astonishment that it was almost two o’clock. I left the light on and carefully began climbing down. To get down the way I had come up was not impossible to get down before the inhabitant returned. I guessed that it had not locked the doors because it did not know how.

My feet were touching the next to last rung of the ladder when I felt that something, slow and oppressive and two-fold, was coming up the ramp. Curiosity overcame my fear, and I did not shut my eyes.

The Sect of the Thirty

The original manuscript may be consulted at the University of Leiden; the text is in Latin, but one or two Hellenisms justify the conjecture that it was translated from the Greek. According to Leisegang, it dates from the fourth century a.d.
Gibbon mentions it in passing in one of the footnotes to the fifteenth chapter of his Decline and Fall. The anonymous author has recorded:

. . . The Sect was never large, and now its proselytes number but a scant few. Decimated by sword and fire, they sleep by the wayside or, since it is forbidden them to build any form of dwelling place, among the ruins spared by war. They also journey about quite naked. These facts are common knowledge. My aim here is to leave a written record of what it has been vouchsafed me to discover of the Sect’s beliefs and customs. I have argued at length with its masters and have met with little success in converting them to the Faith of Our Lord.

The first thing about the Sect that drew my attention was the variousness of its notions regarding the dead. Among the most ignorant, for example, it is held that the burial of those who have departed this life is entrusted to their spirits; others, the unorthodox, maintain that Jesus’ admonition to ‘let the dead bury their dead’ is meant to condemn the pompous vanity of our funeral rites.

The advice to sell what one has and give to the poor is closely followed by every sectarian; those so benefited give to others and these, in turn, to still others. This should suffice to explain their indigence and nakedness, which, in addition, brings them nearer the state of paradise. Fervently they repeat the words, ‘Behold the ravens of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor have they barns or sheds; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?’ Their teaching forbids all saving: ‘Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink?’

The judgment ‘whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart’ is a piece of straightforward advice about maintaining purity. Yet, many are the members of the Sect who point out that if there is not one man on earth who has not looked upon a woman to lust after her all men have committed adultery. Since the desire is as sinful as the act, the righteous may without risk indulge in the most outrageous lust.

The Sect shuns temples; its elders preach in the open air, from the top of a hill or a wall, or sometimes from a boat on the shore.

The Sect’s name has given rise to persistent conjectures. One such suggests that it refers to the number to which the faithful have been reduced, which is ridiculous and yet prophetic, because, due to its perverse set of beliefs, the Sect is destined to die out. Another conjecture is that the name derives from the height of the Ark, which was thirty cubits; another, which distorts the calendar, from the number of nights that make up a lunar month; another, from the Saviour’s age at baptism; another, from Adam’s years when he rose out of the red dust of the ground. All are equally untrue. No less deceiving is the list of thirty godheads or thrones, of which one is Abraxas, portrayed by a cock’s head, the arms and torso of a man, and the tail of an entwined serpent.

The priceless gift of communicating Truth has not been granted me. One knows the Truth but is unable to argue it. May others more gifted than I save the members of the Sect by preaching or by fire, for it is better to be put to death than to commit suicide. I shall therefore limit myself to giving an account of the abominable heresy.

The Word was made flesh to become a man among men, who would deliver Him up to the cross and be redeemed by Him. He was born of the womb of a woman of the chosen people not only to preach Love, but to suffer martyrdom.

It was necessary that events be unforgettable. The death of a human being by the sword or by drinking hemlock was not enough to move the imagination of mankind to the end of time. The Lord arranged things in a dramatic way. This accounts for the Last Supper, for Jesus’ words that foretold his betrayal, for the repeated warning to one of the disciples, for the blessing of the bread and wine, for Peter’s pledges, for the solitary vigil in the garden of Gethsemane, for the sleep of the twelve disciples, for the Son of God’s human prayer, for the sweat like blood, for the multitude with swords and staves, for the kiss of betrayal, for Pilate’s washing his hands, for the scourging, for the mocking, for the crown of thorns, for the purple robe and reed sceptre, for the vinegar with gall, for the cross on the summit of a hill, for the promise to the repentant thief, for the earth that shook and the darkness over all the land.

Divine Providence, to which I owe so many blessings, has allowed me to discover the real and secret reason for the Sect’s name. In Kerioth, where in all likelihood it originated, there survives a conventicle known as the Thirty Coins. This was the earliest name, and it gives us the clue. In the drama of the Cross (I mean this with due reverence) there were intentional and unintentional actors; all of them indispensable, all of them fatal. Unintentional were the priests who handed out the pieces of silver, unintentional was the multitude that asked for Barabbas, unintentional was the Governor of Judea, unintentional were the Roman soldiers who erected the cross of His martyrdom and nailed the nails and cast lots for His garments. The intentional actors were only two: the Redeemer and Judas. The latter cast down the thirty pieces of silver that were the price of Salvation and went and hanged himself. At the time, like the Son of Man, he was thirty-three years old. The Sect worships them equally and absolves all the others. There is no one culprit. Everyone, unwitting or not, is an agent in the scheme laid down by Divine Wisdom. All of them now share the Glory.

My hand trembles to set down yet another abomination. In order to follow the example of their masters, the believers, upon attaining the designated age, have themselves mocked and crucified on the summit of a hill. This criminal violation of the Fifth Commandment must be brought to an end with all the severity that human and divine laws have always demanded. May the curses of the skies, may the hatred of the angels . . .

No more of the manuscript has been unearthed.

The Night of the Gifts

It was many years ago in the old Confitería del Águila, on Florida Street up around Piedad, that we heard this story. The problem of knowledge was being discussed. Someone invoked the platonic theory that we have already seen everything in a previous world, so that to know is to know again. My father, I believe, said that Bacon had written that if to learn is to remember, not to know is in fact to have forgotten. Another person, a man getting on in years, who was probably a bit lost in metaphysics, decided to enter in. Speaking slowly and deliberately this is what he told us:

Frankly, I don’t understand all this talk of platonic archetypes. Nobody remembers the first time he saw the colour yellow or black, or the first time he tasted a certain fruit maybe because he was small then and had no way of knowing he was initiating a very long series. Of course, there are other first times that no one forgets. I can tell you what a certain night of my life gave me, one I often recall the night of the thirtieth of April, 1874.

Summer holidays were much longer then, but I don’t know why we stayed away from Buenos Aires until that late date. We were at the ranch of some cousins, the Dornas, not far from Lobos. During that time, one of the cowhands, Rufino, initiated me into country things.

I was approaching thirteen; he was somewhat older and had a reputation as a daredevil. He was quick, agile. When the younger hands played at knife-fighting with burnt sticks, the one who always got his face marked was Rufino’s opponent. One Friday, Rufino suggested we go into town the next night to have a little fun. Of course, I leaped at the chance, but without really knowing what it was all about. I warned him I didn’t know how to dance. Dancing was easy to learn, he said.

After dinner on Saturday, at around seven-thirty, we set off. Rufino had rigged himself out like someone going to a party, and he wore a silver knife in his belt. I had a little knife like it, but I didn’t bring mine for fear of being laughed at. It was not long before we glimpsed the first houses. I don’t suppose any of you has ever been to Lobos. Not that it matters. There’s no small town in the Argentine that isn’t exactly like all the others even to the point of thinking itself different. Each has the same unpaved alleys, the same empty lots, the same one-story houses all of which make a man on horseback seem more important.

We dismounted at a certain street corner in front of a house painted sky-blue or pink, with a sign saying ‘La Estrella’. Tied to the hitching post were some horses with good saddles. Through the half-open street door I saw a shaft of light. At the end of the entranceway was a large room with wooden benches on either side and, between the benches, a number of dark doors that opened who knew where. A little mongrel with yellow fur ran up barking to welcome me. Quite a few people were about, and a half dozen or so women in floral dressing gowns came and went. A respectable-looking lady, dressed in black from head to foot, seemed to be the owner of the house. Rufino greeted her, saying, ‘I’ve brought a new friend, but he’s not much of a rider.’

‘Don’t worry,’ the woman answered. ‘He’ll learn soon enough.’

I felt ashamed. To draw their attention away, or to make them see that I was a boy, I began playing with the dog at the end of one of the benches. On a table in the kitchen burned some cheap candles in bottles, and I also remember a small brazier in a corner to the rear. On the whitewashed wall opposite was a picture of Our Lady of Mercy. Somebody, between one joke and another, was tuning a guitar that gave him a lot of trouble. Out of sheer timidity I did not refuse a gin, which burned my mouth like a red-hot coal. Among the women I noticed one who seemed different from the others. They called her La Cautiva
— the Captive. There was something Indian about her, but her features were like a picture and her eyes very sad. Her braided hair reached her waist. Rufino saw that I was looking at her.

‘Let’s hear about the raid again to refresh our memories,’ he said to her.

The girl spoke as if she were alone, and in some way I felt that she was unable to think of anything else and that the story she told us was the only thing that had happened to her in her life.

‘I was very young when they brought me from Catamarca,’ she said. ‘What did I know about Indian raids? At Santa Irene we didn’t even mention such things, we were so scared. As if unraveling a secret, I gradually found out that Indians could descend like a cloud and kill people and steal their stock. Women they carried off into the pampa, and they did everything to them. I tried as hard as I could not to believe any of this. My brother Lucas the Indians later put a spear through him swore it was all lies, but when a thing is true it has to be said only once for you to know it’s so. The government hands out strong drink and yerba to keep the Indians happy, but they have very clever wizards telling them what to do.

At the word of one of their chiefs, it’s nothing for them to attack a ranch somewhere out between the forts, which are far apart. Just from thinking about it so much, I almost wished they would come, and I knew how to look for them out towards the setting sun. I don’t know how much time went by, but there were frosts and summers and roundups and the death of the foreman’s son before the raid.’

She paused for a moment or two, lost in thought, then went on. ‘It was as if the south wind brought them. I saw a thistle in a ditch, and that night I dreamed of Indians. It happened at daybreak. The animals knew it before we did the same as when there’s an earthquake. The cattle were restless and birds wheeled in the sky. We ran to look in the direction I always looked.’

‘Who warned you?’ someone asked.

Distant as ever, the girl repeated her last sentence. ‘We ran to look in the direction I always looked. It was as if the whole desert had begun to move. Through the bars of the window grille we saw the cloud of dust before we saw them. It was a raiding party. They beat their hands over their mouths, whooping. We had some rifles at Santa Irene, but all they were good for was making noise and turning the Indians even more savage.’

La Cautiva spoke like someone saying a prayer she had learned by heart, but out in the street I heard the desert Indians and their war cries. There was an eruption and, as if riding in on horseback in the fragments of some dream, they were in the room. They were local toughs and they were drunk. Now, in my memory, I see them as very tall. The one who came in at the head of them elbowed past Rufino, who stood by the door. Rufino changed colour and got out of the way. The lady in black, who had not stirred from her place, rose to her feet.

‘It’s Juan Moreira!’ she said.

After so much time, I no longer know whether I remember the man of that night the outlaw Moreira or somebody else I was later often to see around cattle fairs. The long, thick hair and black beard of stage characters based on Moreira come to mind, but I also recall a ruddy face pitted by smallpox. The little dog scurried forward to give him a welcome. With a single whiplash, Moreira left it in a sprawl on the floor. It lay on its back and died pawing the air. This is where my story really begins. Without a sound I made my way to one of the doors, which opened into a narrow passageway and a staircase. On the upper floor, I hid myself in a dark room. Apart from the bed, which was very low, I never knew what other furniture was there. I was trembling. Below, the shouting did not let up, and there was a shattering of glass. I heard a woman’s footsteps coming up the stairs and I saw a momentary slit of light. Then La Cautiva’s voice called out to me in a whisper. ‘I’m here to serve but to serve peaceable people,’ she said. ‘Come closer, I’m not going to hurt you.’

She had taken off her dressing gown. I lay beside her and felt for her face with my hands. I have no idea how much time passed. We exchanged neither a word nor a kiss. I untied her braid, and my hands played with her hair, which was very straight, and then they played with her. We did not see each other again after that, and I never learned her real name.

A shot startled us. La Cautiva said, ‘You can leave by the other stairway.’

I did, and I found myself out in the dirt alley. It was a moonlit night. A police sergeant, Andrés Chirino, stood on watch by the wall with a rifle and fixed bayonet. He laughed, saying to me, ‘I see you’re an early riser.’

I must have answered something, but he paid me no attention. A man was lowering himself over the wall. With a bound, the sergeant buried the steel in his flesh. The man dropped to the ground, where he lay on his back, moaning and bleeding to death. I remembered the dog. To finish the man off once and for all, Chirino sank the bayonet in again.

‘You didn’t make it this time, Moreira,’ he said almost joyously.

From every side came uniformed men, who had surrounded the house, and then the neighbours. The sergeant had a struggle to pull out the bayonet. Everybody wanted to shake his hand.

‘The fancy footwork’s all over for this hoodlum,’ Rufino said with a laugh.

I went from group to group, telling people what I had seen. Then, all at once, I felt very tired; maybe I was even feverish. Slipping away, I found Rufino and we started home. From our horses, we saw the pale dawn light. More than tired, I felt dazed by that torrent of events.

‘By the great river of that night,’ my father said when the man had finished.

‘That’s right,’ he agreed. ‘In the bare space of a few hours I had known love and had looked on death. All things are revealed to all men or, anyway, all those things it’s granted a man to know but to me two fundamental things were revealed in a single night. The years pass and I’ve told this story so many times I no longer know whether I remember it as it was or whether it’s only my words I’m remembering. Maybe the same thing happened to La Cautiva with her Indian raid. It doesn’t matter now whether it was I or someone else who saw Moreira killed.’

The Mirror and the Mask

The battle of Clontarf over, in which the Norwegians met defeat, the High King of Ireland spoke to his court poet.

‘The greatest deeds lose their lustre if they are not coined in words,’ the king said. ‘I want you to sing my victory and my praise. I will be Aeneas; you will be my Virgil. Do you think yourself capable of this task, which will make us both immortal?’

‘Yes, my lord,’ said the bard. ‘I am Ollan. For twelve winters I have trained in the disciplines of prosody. I know by heart the three hundred and sixty legends that form the basis of true poetry. The cycles of Ulster and Munster are in the strings of my harp. The laws authorize me to be lavish in using the oldest words of our tongue and the most complex metaphors. I have mastered the secret of writing, which protects our art from the undiscerning eyes of the common herd. I can celebrate loves, cattle thieves, voyages, and wars. I know the mythological lineages of all the royal houses of Ireland. I possess a knowledge of judicial astrology, mathematics, canon law, and the powers of plants. I have defeated my rivals in public contest. I have made myself skilled in satire, which causes infirmities of the skin, including leprosy. I know how to wield a sword, as I proved in your battle. I am ignorant of only one thing: how to thank you for the gift you make me.’

The king, who was easily tired by long speeches, especially those of others, said with relief, ‘I know these things quite well, I have been told that the nightingale recently sang in England. When the rains and snows pass, and the nightingale returns from its southern lands, you will sing your praises before the court and before the School of Bards. I grant you a whole year. You will polish each word and letter. Reward, as you know by now, will not be unworthy of my royal custom nor of the sleepless nights of your inspiration.’

‘O king, what greater reward than to see your face!’ said the poet, who was also a courtier. He bowed and withdrew, already glimpsing one or two verses.

When the year came round it had been a time of epidemics and uprisings the poet presented his panegyric.

He declaimed it slowly, confidently, without a glance at the manuscript. With his head the king showed his approval. Everyone imitated his gesture, even those thronging the doorways, who were unable to make out a single word. At the end the king spoke.

‘I accept your labour,’ he said. ‘It is another victory. You have given each word its true meaning, and each substantive the epithet given it by the poets of old. In your whole panegyric there is not a single image unknown to the classics. War is the beautiful web of men, and blood is the sword’s water. The sea has its gods and the clouds foretell the future. You have skillfully handled rhyme, alliteration, assonance, quantities, the artifices of learned rhetoric, the wise variation of metres. If all the literature of Ireland were to perish
— absit omen
— it could be reconstructed without loss from your classic ode. Thirty scribes shall copy it twelve times each.’

There was a silence, then he went on. ‘All is well and yet nothing has happened. In our veins the blood runs no faster. Our hands have not sought the bow. No one has turned pale. No one uttered a battle cry or set his breast against the Vikings. Before a year is out, poet, we shall applaud another ode. As a sign of our approval, take this mirror, which is of silver.’

‘I give thanks and I understand,’ said the bard. The stars in the sky went on in their bright course. Once more the nightingale sang in the Saxon forests, and the poet came back with his manuscript, which was shorter than the one before. He did not repeat it from memory but read it, obviously hesitant, omitting certain passages as if he himself did not completely understand them or did not wish to profane them. The ode was strange. It was not a description of the battle—it was the battle. In its warlike chaos there struggled with one another the God that is Three and is One, Ireland’s pagan deities, and those who would wage war hundreds of years later at the beginning of the Elder Edda. The form was no less odd. A singular noun governed a plural verb. The prepositions were alien to common usage. Harshness alternated with sweetness. The metaphors were arbitrary, or so they seemed.

The king exchanged a few words with the men of letters who stood around him, then spoke to the bard. ‘Your first ode I could declare was an apt compendium of all that has been sung in Ireland,’ the king said. ‘This one outdoes, and even makes as nothing, whatever came before it. It astounds, it dazzles, it causes wonderment. The ignorant will be unworthy of it, but not so the learned, the few. An ivory casket will be the resting place of its single copy. Of the pen that has produced so eminent a work we may expect one still more lofty.’ He added with a smile, ‘We are the figures of a fable, and it is good to remember that in fables the number three prevails.’

‘The wizard’s three gifts, triads, and the unquestionable Trinity,’ the bard made bold to murmur.

The king continued, ‘As a token of our approval, take this golden mask.’

‘I give thanks and I have understood,’ said the bard.

The anniversary came round again. The palace sentries noticed that the poet carried no manuscript. In amazement, the king looked at him; the bard was like another man. Something other than time had furrowed and transformed his features. His eyes seemed to stare into the distance or to be blind. The bard begged to be allowed a few words with the king. The slaves left the chamber.

‘Have you not written the ode?’ asked the king.

‘Yes,’ the bard sadly replied. ‘But would that Christ Our Lord had prevented me!’

‘Can you repeat it?’

‘I dare not.’

‘I will give you the courage you lack,’ said the king.

The bard recited the poem. It consisted of a single line.

Not venturing to repeat it aloud, the poet and his king savoured it as if it were a secret prayer or a blasphemy. The king was as awestricken and overcome as the bard. The two looked at each other, very pale.

‘In my youth,’ said the king, ‘I sailed towards the sunset. On one island I saw silver hounds that dealt death to golden boars. On another we fed ourselves on the fragrance of magic apples. On a third I saw walls of fire. On the farthest island of all an arched and hanging river cut across the sky and in its waters went fishes and boats. These are wonders, but they do not compare with your poem, which in some way encompasses them all. What bewitchery gave it to you?’

‘In the dawn I woke up speaking words I did not at first understand,’ said the bard. ‘Those words were a poem. I felt I had committed a sin, perhaps one the Holy Ghost does not forgive.’

‘The one we two now share,’ the king said in a whisper.

‘The sin of having known Beauty, which is a gift forbidden to men. Now it behooves us to expiate it. I gave you a mirror and a golden mask; here is my third present, which will be the last.’

In the bard’s right hand he placed a dagger.

Of the poet, we know that he killed himself upon leaving the palace; of the king, that he is a beggar wandering the length and breadth of Ireland which was once his kingdom, and that he has never repeated the poem.

Undr

The reader should be forewarned that the following pages will not be found in the Libellus (1615) of Adam of Bremen, who, as everyone knows, was born and died in the eleventh century. They were unearthed by Lappenberg in a manuscript in the Bodleian, at Oxford, and, given the wealth of circumstantial details, he judged them a late interpolation, but he published them as a curiosity in his Analecta Germanica (Leipzig, 1894). The opinion of a mere Argentine amateur is of little account; let the reader judge these pages for himself. My translation is faithful, but it is not literal. Adam of Bremen wrote:

. . . Of the peoples who live on the edge of the wilderness that stretches away on the other shore of the Barbarian Gulf, beyond the lands where the wild horse breeds, the worthiest of mention are the Urns. The uncertain or invented information of traders, the dangers of the route, and the plundering of nomads prevented me from reaching their territory. It is clear, however, that their rudimentary, unfrequented villages are located in the lowlands of the Vistula. Unlike the Swedes, the Urns profess the true faith of Christ, untainted by Arianism or by the bloodthirsty worship of devils, from which the royal houses of England and other northern nations trace their lineages. The Urns are herdsmen, ferrymen, shamans, forgers of swords, and harness makers. Owing to the rigours of war, they barely till the soil. One invariably comes to resemble one’s enemies, and the steppe and the tribes that roam it have made the Urns very skilled in the handling of horse and bow. Their spears, since they are used by horsemen and not foot soldiers, are longer than ours.

As may be imagined, the Urns are unfamiliar with pen, inkhorn, and parchment. They carve their characters as our ancestors carved the runes which Odin revealed to them after having hung from the ash tree Odin given to Odin through nine days and nights.

To this general information I add an account of what I was told by a traveler from Iceland, Ulf Sigurdsson, a man of grave and measured words. We met in Uppsala, near the temple. The wood fire had died, and the cold and the dawn entered through the uneven chinks in the wall. Outside, the grey wolves, which eat the flesh of the heathens sacrificed to the three gods, left their wary tracks in the snow. Our conversation began in Latin, as is usual with churchmen, but we were not long in slipping into the tongue of the north, which extends from Thule all the way to the marketplaces of Asia. The man said:

As I am of the race of the skalds, to learn that the poetry of the Urns consists of a single word was enough for me to set out in search of them and the way that would lead to their land. Not without exhaustion and hardship did I arrive there after a year-long journey. It was night, and all those I came upon shot me odd looks, and one or two stones were hurled at me.

Seeing the light of a blacksmith’s forge, I approached it. The smith, whose name was Orm, offered me lodging for the night. His language was more or less ours. We exchanged a few words. From his lips I heard for the first time the name of the reigning king Gunnlaug. I learned that after his last war he looked with suspicion upon strangers and that it was his custom to crucify them.

To avoid that fate, which is less fitting to a man than a god, I undertook the composition of a drápa, or ode, that celebrated the victories, the fame, and the mercy of the king. I had barely committed it to memory when two men came searching for me. I did not want to surrender my sword to them, but I let myself be led away.

There were still stars in the sky. We crossed the first of several stretches of open ground with huts on every side. I had been led to expect pyramids, but what I saw in the middle of this square was a yellow wooden post. At the top of it I made out the black figure of a fish. Orm, who had accompanied us, said that the fish was the Word. In the next opening, I saw a red post marked with a disk. Orm said that this was the Word. I asked him to tell me it. He was a simple artisan, he said, and he did not know. In the third opening, which was the last, I saw a post painted black, with a design on it that I have forgotten. On the far side of the square was a long, straight wall whose ends I could not catch sight of. Later I found out that it was circular, that it supported a mud roof, that it enclosed a single chamber, and that it stretched around the whole city.

The horses tied to the hitching post outside were of small stature and had long manes. The blacksmith was not allowed entrance. Inside there were armed men, all standing. Gunnlaug, the king, who was ailing, lay with his eyes half shut on some camel hides on a kind of dais. He was a wasted, yellowish man, a sacred and almost forgotten thing; old scars spanned the width of his chest. One of the soldiers opened a way for me. Someone had brought a harp. Kneeling, I intoned the drápa in a low voice. There was no lack of the rhetorical figures, the alliterations, and the stresses that the form demands. I do not know whether the king understood it, but he gave me a silver ring, which I still preserve. Under his pillow, I glimpsed the edge of a dagger. To his right was a chessboard with a hundred squares and a handful of scattered pieces.

The guard shoved me to the rear. A man took my place before the king but did not kneel. He plucked the harp as if tuning it, and in a low voice he uttered the word that I had come in search of and had not yet fathomed.

‘It no longer means anything now,’ someone said reverently.

I saw tears. The man raised or modulated his voice, and his scarcely varying chords were monotonous or, still better, infinite. I would have liked his song to go on forever and to be my life. Abruptly, it stopped. I heard the noise the harp made when the singer, no doubt in utter exhaustion, threw it down. We all went out in disorder. I was one of the last. In astonishment I saw that the light was waning on another day. I walked a few steps, when a hand on my shoulder made me pause.

‘The king’s ring was your talisman,’ I was told, ‘but you will not be long in meeting your death, because you have heard the Word. I, Bjarni Thorkelsson, will save you. I am of the race of the skalds. In your ode you called blood the sword’s water and a battle the web of men. I remember having heard those figures from my father’s father. You and I are poets, and I will save you. Nowadays, we do not define each thing that our song quickens; we express it in a single word, which is the Word.’

‘I was unable to hear it,’ I said. ‘I beg you to tell me what it is.’

He paused for a moment or two and replied, ‘I have sworn not to divulge it. Besides, nobody can teach anything. You must find it out for yourself. But let’s hurry; your life is in danger. I’ll hide you in my house, where no one will dare look for you. If the wind is favourable, tomorrow you will sail southward on the river.’

So began the adventure that was to last so many winters.

I shall not go into all that befell me, nor shall I try to give an orderly account of my shifting fortunes. I was an oarsman, slave dealer, slave, woodcutter, highwayman, singer, and taster of deep waters and metals. I suffered captivity, and spent a year in the quicksilver mines, which loosen one’s teeth. I fought side by side with men of Sweden in the Varangian guard at Mikligarðr [Constantinople]. On the shores of the Sea of Azov I was loved by a woman whom I shall never forget; I left her or she left me, it amounts to the same thing. I betrayed and I was betrayed. More than once fate made me kill. A Greek soldier challenged me and gave me the choice between two swords. One was a hand’s breadth longer than the other. Knowing he was out to intimidate me, I chose the shorter. He asked me why. I replied that with either the distance from my hand to his heart was the same. At the edge of the Black Sea stands the runic epitaph I carved for my comrade in arms, Leif Arnarson. I have fought the Blue Men of Serkland, the Saracens. In the course of time I have been many men; it was a whirlwind, a long dream, but all the while the main thing was the Word. From time to time I disbelieved in it. I kept telling myself that to renounce the beautiful game of combining beautiful words was senseless, and that there was no reason to search for a single, and perhaps imaginary, word. Such reasoning was vain. A missionary suggested the word ‘God’, which I rejected. One early dawn, along the banks of a river that widened into a sea, I believed I had come upon the revelation.

Returning to the land of the Urns, I had some trouble finding the singer’s house. When I did, I entered and spoke my name. By that time, night had fallen. From the floor, Thorkelsson told me to light a candle in the bronze candlestick. His face had aged so much that I could not help thinking that I, too, was old. As is the custom, I asked about his king.

‘The king is no longer called Gunnlaug,’ he said. ‘His name is now another. Tell me all about your travels.’

I did so in exact order and with a great many details that I shall omit here. Before I had finished, he asked me, ‘Did you often sing in those lands?’

The question took me by surprise. ‘At first, I sang to earn my living,’ I said. ‘Later, overcome by a fear I do not understand, I was estranged from my harp and my song.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘You may go on with your story now.’

I obeyed. After I had finished, a long silence followed.

‘The first woman you had, what did she give you?’ he asked.

‘Everything,’ I said.

‘Life gave me everything as well. Life gives everything to everyone, but most men are unaware of it. My voice is tired and my fingers weak, but listen to me.’

He took up his harp and uttered the word ‘undr’, which means ‘wonder’. The dying man’s song held me rapt, but in it and in his chords I recognized my own verses, the slave woman who gave me my first love, the men I had killed, the chill of dawn, daybreak over the water, the oars. I took up the harp and sang to a different word.

‘All right,’ the other man said, and I had to draw close to hear him. ‘You have understood.’

Utopia of a Tired Man

He called it Utopia, a Greek word meaning there is no such place.

—Quevedo

No two hills are alike, but everywhere on earth plains are one and the same. I was making my way in such country, asking myself, not that it really mattered, if this were Oklahoma or Texas or the part of the Argentine that literary men called the pampa. Neither to right nor left did I see a fence. As on other occasions, I slowly repeated these lines by the poet Emilio Oribe:

At the heart of the endless awesome plain and close by the border of Brazil....

The road was uneven. Rain began to fall. Some two or three hundred yards off I saw light from a house, which was low and rectangular and surrounded by trees. The door was opened by a man so tall he almost gave me a fright. He was dressed in grey. I felt he was waiting for someone. There was no lock on the door. We went into a long room with wooden walls, a table, and chairs. A lamp giving off a yellowish light hung from the ceiling. The table, for some reason, seemed strange to me. On it stood an hourglass, the first, outside of some steel engraving or other, I had ever laid eyes on. The man motioned me to one of the chairs.

I tried out various languages, and we did not understand each other. When at last he spoke, he did so in Latin. I dusted off what I remembered from my now distant school days, readying myself for conversation.

‘By your clothes, I see you come from another century,’ he said. ‘A diversity of tongues favoured a diversity of peoples and even of wars. The world has fallen back on Latin. There are those who fear it may degenerate again into French, Lemosi, or Papiamento, but that is not an immediate risk. Be that as it may, neither the past nor the future interests me.’

I said nothing, and he added, ‘If you don’t mind watching somebody else eat, will you join me?’

Seeing that he noticed my uneasiness, I said yes. We went down a corridor, with doors on either hand, that led to a small kitchen in which everything was made of metal.

We came back with our dinner on a tray: bowls of cornflakes, a bunch of grapes, an unfamiliar fruit whose taste reminded me of figs, and a big pitcher of water. If I remember correctly, there was no bread. My host’s features were sharp, and there was something unusual about his eyes. I won’t forget his pale, austere face, which I shall never see again. He made no gestures when he spoke. Having to converse in Latin inhibited me, but at last I said, ‘Doesn’t my sudden appearance amaze you?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘We receive such visits from century to century. They don’t last long. Tomorrow, at the latest, you’ll be home again.’

The certainty in his voice was reassuring. I thought it proper to introduce myself. ‘I am Eudoro Acevedo. I was born in 1897, in the city of Buenos Aires. I am seventy years old. I am a professor of English and American literatures and a writer of imaginative tales.’

‘I remember having read, not without pleasure, two tales of an imaginative nature,’ he said. ‘Travels of a Captain Lemuel Gulliver, which many people take to be true, and the Summa Theologiae. But let’s not speak of facts. Facts matter to no one any more. They are mere points of departure for invention and reasoning. In our schools we are taught doubt and the art of forgetting above all, the forgetting of what is personal and local. We live in time, which is successive, but we try to live sub specie aeternitatis. Of the past we retain a few names, which language tends to lose. We shun pointless details. We have neither dates nor history. Nor have we statistics. You said your name is Eudoro. I can’t tell you my name, because I’m simply called Someone.’

‘And what was your father’s name?’

‘He had none.’

On one of the walls I saw a shelf. I opened a book at random; the letters were clean and undecipherable, and they were written by hand. Their angular lines reminded me of the runic alphabet, which, however, was only used for writing inscriptions. I reflected that these men of the future were not only taller but were more skilled. Instinctively, I looked at the man’s long, fine fingers.

‘Now you are going to see something you’ve never seen,’ he said. He handed me a copy of Thomas More’s Utopia, printed in Basel in the year 1518; leaves and pages were missing.

Somewhat foolishly, I answered, ‘It’s a printed book. At home, I had over two thousand of them, though they were neither as old nor as valuable as this one.’ I read the title aloud.

The man laughed. ‘No one can read two thousand books. In the four centuries I have lived, I haven’t read more than half a dozen. Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts. Printing, which is now abolished, since it tended to multiply unnecessary texts to the point of dizziness, was one of man’s worst evils.’

‘In my strange past,’ I said, ‘the superstition prevailed that every day, between evening and morning, certain acts occur which it is a shame to be ignorant of. The planet was populated by collective ghosts Canada, Brazil, the Swiss Congo, and the Common Market. Almost no one knew anything of the history that preceded those platonic entities, but, of course, they knew every last detail of the most recent congress of pedagogues, or of imminent breakdowns in diplomatic relations, or of statements issued by presidents, drawn up by the secretary of a secretary and containing all the carefully worded haziness appropriate to the genre. These things were read to be forgotten, for, only hours later, other trivialities would blot them out. Of all offices, that of politician was without doubt the most public. An ambassador or a Cabinet minister was a kind of cripple whom it was necessary to cart around in long, noisy vehicles, ringed by motorcyclists and military escorts and awaited by eager photographers. It seems that their feet have been cut off, my mother used to say. Pictures and the printed word were more real than the things they stood for. Only what was published had any reality. Esse est percipi (to be is to be photographed) was the beginning, middle, and end of our singular idea of the world. In that past of mine, people were naïve; they believed that certain merchandise was good because its own makers claimed so over and over again. Robberies were also frequent, though everyone knew that the possession of money brings no greater happiness or peace of mind.’

‘Money?’ the man echoed. ‘No one any longer suffers poverty, which must have been unbearable, or wealth, which must have been the most uncomfortable form of vulgarity. Everyone has a calling.’

‘Like the rabbis,’ I said.

He appeared not to understand and went on. ‘Nor are there cities anymore. To judge by the ruins of Bahia Blanca, which I once explored, not much has been lost. There are no personal possessions now, there are no inheritances. At the age of a hundred, when a man matures, he is ready to come face to face with himself and his loneliness. By then he will have fathered a child.’

‘One child?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Only one. There is no reason to carry on the human race. Some people think man is an organ of the godhead for universal consciousness, but nobody knows for sure whether such a godhead exists. The advantages and disadvantages of gradual or simultaneous suicide by every man and woman on earth are, I believe, now being argued. But let’s get back to what we were saying.’

I agreed.

‘Having reached a hundred, the individual no longer stands in need of love or friendship. Evils and involuntary death are no threat to him. He practices one of the arts or philosophy or mathematics or he plays a game of solitary chess. When he wants to, he kills himself. Man is master of his life. He is also master of his death.’

‘Is that a quotation?’ I asked.

‘Of course. Quotations are all we have now. Language is a system of quotations.’

‘And the great adventure of my time space travel?’ I asked.

‘It’s centuries ago now that those travels were given up. They were certainly to be admired, but we could never rid ourselves of a here and now.’ With a smile, he added, ‘Besides, all travel is spatial. To go from one planet to another is like going to the farm across the way. When you entered this room, you were carrying out a voyage through space.’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘And one also used to speak of chemical substances and animals.’

The man now turned his back to me and looked outside. Beyond the windows, the plain was white with silent snow and moonlight.

I got up my courage to ask, ‘Are there still museums and libraries?’

‘No. We try to forget the past, except for the writing of elegies. There are no commemorations or anniversaries or effigies of dead men now. Each of us must himself produce the arts and sciences he needs.’

‘Then everyone must be his own Bernard Shaw, his own Jesus Christ, his own Archimedes.’

He agreed without a word.

‘What happened to governments?’

‘According to tradition, they fell into gradual disuse,’ he said. ‘They called elections, declared wars, collected taxes, confiscated fortunes, ordered arrests, and tried to impose censorship, but nobody on earth obeyed them. The press stopped publishing the news and photographs of government leaders. Politicians had to find honest work; some of them made good comedians or good faith healers. What actually happened was probably far more complex than this summary.’ He went on in a changed tone. ‘I built this house, which is the same as all others. I carved this furniture and these utensils. I worked these fields, which will be improved by people unknown to me. May I show you a few things?’

I followed him into an adjoining room. He lit a lamp like the first one; it too, hung from the ceiling. In a corner I saw a harp with few strings. On the walls were rectangular canvases in which yellow tones predominated. The work did not seem that of the same hand.

‘This is what I do,’ he said.

I examined the canvases, stopping before the smallest one, which represented, or suggested, a sunset and which encompassed something infinite.

‘If you like it, you can have it as a keepsake of a future friend,’ he said matter-of-factly.

I thanked him, but there were a few canvases that left me uneasy. I won’t say that they were blank, but they were nearly so.

‘They’re painted in colours that your eyes of the past can’t see,’ he said.

A moment later, when his delicate hands plucked the strings of the harp, I barely caught an occasional sound.

Just then a knock was heard.

A tall woman and three or four men entered the house. One would have said that they were brothers and sisters or that time had made them alike. My host spoke to the woman first.

‘I knew you wouldn’t fail to come tonight. Have you seen Nils?’

‘Off and on. He’s as devoted to his painting as ever.’

‘Let’s hope with more success than his father.’

The dismantling began. Manuscripts, pictures, furnishings, utensils we left nothing in the house. The woman worked alongside the men. I was ashamed of my weakness, which scarcely allowed me to be of any help. No one shut the door and we went out, loaded with things. I noticed that the house had a saddle roof.

After a fifteen-minute walk, we turned left. In the distance I made out a kind of tower, crowned with a cupola.

‘It’s the crematory,’ someone said. ‘Inside it is the lethal chamber. It’s said to have been invented by a philanthropist whose name, I think, was Adolf Hitler.’

The caretaker, whose stature by now did not astonish me, opened the gate to us. My host exchanged a few words with him. Before stepping into the enclosure, he waved goodbye.

‘It looks like more snow,’ the woman said.

In my study on Mexico Street, in Buenos Aires, I have the canvas that someone will paint, thousands of years from now, with substances today scattered over the whole planet.

The Bribe

My story is about two men or, rather, about an episode involving two men. The actual affair, in itself neither singular nor even out of the ordinary, matters less than the character of its protagonists. Each of them sinned out of vanity, but in different ways and with different results. The events giving rise to the anecdote (for really it is not much more) took place a short time ago. To my mind, it could only have happened where it did in America.

I had occasion at the University of Texas, in Austin, to speak at length to one of the two, Dr Ezra Winthrop. This was towards the end of 1961. Winthrop was a professor of Old English (he did not approve of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’, which to him suggested an artifact made of two parts). I can remember that without once contradicting me he corrected my many mistakes and rash assumptions about the language. I was told that in his examinations he never asked a single question but invited his students to expatiate upon this or that topic, leaving the choice up to them. Of old Puritan stock, a native of Boston, Winthrop had found it hard getting used to the habits and prejudices of the South. He missed the snow, but it is my observation that Northerners are conditioned to the cold, much as we Argentines are to the heat. I still preserve the image, now dim, of a rather tall man with grey hair, less agile than strong. Clearer is my memory of his colleague, Herbert Locke, who gave me a copy of his book Towards a History of the Kenning, in which one reads that the Saxons were not long in dispensing with those somewhat too mechanical metaphors (‘whale’s road’ for ‘the sea’, ‘falcon of battle’ for ‘the eagle’), whereas the skalds went on combining and interweaving them to the point of inextricability. I mention Herbert Locke because he is an integral part of my story.

I now come to the Icelander, Eric Einarsson, who is perhaps the true protagonist. I never set eyes on him. He arrived in Texas in 1969, when I was in Cambridge, but the letters of a mutual friend, Ramón Martínez López, have left me feeling I know Einarsson intimately. I know that he was impetuous, energetic, and cold, and that in a land of tall men he was tall. Given his red hair, it was inevitable that his students dub him Eric the Red. In his opinion, the use of slang by a foreigner was forced and mistaken, making him an intruder, so he never condescended even to an occasional ‘okay’. A serious scholar of the Nordic languages, of English, of Latin, and although he would not admit it of German, he found no difficulty in making his way in American universities.

Einarsson’s first work of any consequence was a study of the four articles that De Quincey wrote on the Danish origins of Cumbrian dialect. This was followed by a study of one of the rural dialects of Yorkshire. Both publications were well received, but Einarsson felt his career needed a boost. In 1970, the Yale University Press published his lengthy critical edition of the Battle of Maldon. The scholarship of Einarsson’s notes was undeniable; in the introduction, however, certain of his hypotheses stirred up controversy in the almost secret circles of academics. There he stated, for example, that in style the poem has an affinity even if a remote one — with the heroic Finnsburh fragment and not with the deliberate rhetoric of Beowulf, and that its handling of moving circumstantial details strangely foreshadows the methods which, not unjustly, we admire in the Icelandic sagas. He also emended a number of readings in Elphinston’s text. Einarsson was made full professor at Texas the same year he arrived.

As everyone knows, scholarly conferences are popular in American universities. Dr Winthrop, in his turn, had given a paper at one of the important Germanic symposia the year before, at Michigan State. His department head, who was getting ready to go off on sabbatical, asked Winthrop to choose a delegate to deliver a paper at the next conference, to be held at Wisconsin. There were only two real candidates Herbert Locke and Eric Einarsson.

Winthrop, like Carlyle, had renounced the Puritan faith of his ancestors but not its ethics. His duty was clear, and he did not decline to give his advice. Herbert Locke, going back to 1954, had been unstinting in his assistance to him, particularly with regard to a certain annotated edition of Beowulf which, in a number of universities, had replaced Klaeber’s edition. Locke was now compiling a very useful work for the Germanic specialist an English Anglo-Saxon dictionary that would save readers from the often useless examination of etymological dictionaries. The Icelander was considerably younger; his insolence had earned him everyone’s dislike, including Winthrop’s. Einarsson’s critical edition of Maldon had contributed a good deal to spreading his name. He was a master of polemic, and at the symposium he would cut a better figure than the shy, taciturn Locke.

Winthrop was in the midst of these considerations when there appeared in the review columns of the Yale Philological Quarterly a long article on the teaching of Anglo-Saxon. The piece was signed with the giveaway initials ‘E. E.’ and, as if to allay any doubt, under them it read ‘University of Texas’. Written in a foreigner’s correct English, the article, while not admitting of the least incivility, embodied a certain violence. It argued that to begin Anglo-Saxon by studying Beowulf, the work of an early period but in a pseudo-Virgilian, rhetorical style, was as arbitrary as to begin the study of English with the elaborate poetry of Milton. Its author advised an inversion of chronological order, starting, say, with the eleventh-century poem ‘The Grave’, in which the everyday language comes through, and then going back to the origins. As for Beowulf, some excerpt from its tedious aggregate of over three thousand lines was enough for example, the funeral rites of Scyld, who came from the sea and returns to the sea. There was no mention of Winthrop’s name in the article, but nonetheless he felt himself stiffly attacked. This mattered less to him, however, than the fact that his teaching method had been impugned.

Only a few days were left. Wanting to be fair, Winthrop could not allow Einarsson’s article, which was being widely commented upon, to influence his decision. The choice between Locke and the Icelander gave him no small trouble. Winthrop spoke to Lee Rosenthal, the department chairman, one morning, and that same afternoon Einarsson was officially named to make the trip to Wisconsin.

On the eve of his departure, Einarsson presented himself in Ezra Winthrop’s office. He had come to say goodbye and to thank Winthrop. One of the windows opened onto a tree-lined side street, and the two men were surrounded by shelves of books. Einarsson was quick to recognize a first edition of the Edda Islandorum, bound in parchment. Winthrop told him that he was sure Einarsson would do a good job and that he had nothing to thank him for. Their conversation, if I am not mistaken, was long. ‘Let’s speak frankly,’ said Einarsson. ‘Everyone knows that in honouring me with representing the university, Rosenthal is acting upon your advice. I am a good Germanic scholar; I’ll do my best not to disappoint him.

The tongue of my childhood is the tongue of the sagas, and I pronounce Anglo-Saxon better than my British colleagues. My students say “cyning”, not “cunning”. They also know that smoking is absolutely forbidden in my classes and that they cannot come to them rigged out as hippies. As regards my unsuccessful rival, it would be in very bad taste were I to criticize him. In his book on the kenning he demonstrates not only his research into original sources but also into the pertinent works of Meissner and Marquardt. But let’s put all this nonsense aside. I owe you a personal explanation.’

Einarsson paused, gave a glance out the window, and resumed. ‘I left my country at the end of 1964,’ he said. ‘When someone decides to emigrate to a distant land, he fatally imposes upon himself the duty of getting on in that land. My first two small works, whose nature was strictly philological, had no other object than to demonstrate my ability. That, obviously, was not enough. I had always been interested in the Battle of Maldon, which I can repeat from memory with an occasional slip or two. I managed to get Yale to publish my critical edition of it. The poem records a Norse victory, as you know, but as regards the notion that it may have influenced the later Icelandic sagas, I judge that inadmissible and absurd. I hinted at this merely to flatter English-speaking readers.’

The Icelander held Winthrop in his gaze. ‘I come now to the heart of the matter my polemical piece in the
Quarterly. As you are aware, it justifies, or tries to justify, my system, but it deliberately exaggerates the drawbacks of yours, which, in exchange for imposing on the student the boredom of three thousand consecutive lines of intricate verse that narrate a confused story, endows him with a large vocabulary, allowing him to enjoy if by then he has not given it up the entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature. To go to Wisconsin was my real aim. You and I, my dear friend, know that these conferences are foolish and that they entail pointless expense but that they can prove useful in one’s career.’

Winthrop looked at him in surprise. The New Englander was an intelligent man, but he tended to take things seriously including conferences and the world, which may very well be a cosmic joke.

‘You perhaps remember our first conversation,’ Einarsson went on. ‘I had arrived from New York. It was a Sunday. The university dining halls were closed, and we had lunch at the Nighthawk. I learned a great deal from that meeting. As a good European, I had always supposed that the American Civil War was a crusade against slave owners; you argued that the South was within its rights to wish to secede from the Union and to maintain its own institutions. To lend greater strength to what you were saying, you told me that you were a Northerner and that one of your forebears had fought in that war in the ranks of Henry Halleck. You also praised the courage of the Confederates. I have an unusual flair for making instant assessments. That morning was enough for me. I realized, my dear Winthrop, that you are governed by the curious American passion for impartiality. You want, above all, to be fair-minded. Precisely because you are a Northerner, you attempt to understand and justify the South’s cause. As soon as I knew that my trip to Wisconsin depended on what you might say to Rosenthal, I pressed the Quarterly to get my article into print, knowing that to criticize your teaching methods was the best means of getting your vote.’

There was a long silence. Winthrop was the first to break it. ‘I’m an old friend of Herbert’s, whose work I esteem,’ he said. ‘Directly or indirectly, you attacked me. To have denied you my vote would have been a sort of reprisal. I assessed his merits and yours, and the result you already know.’ He added, as if thinking aloud, ‘Maybe I gave in to the vanity of not seeking revenge. As you see, your stratagem worked.’

‘Stratagem is the right word,’ Einarsson replied, ‘but I do not regret what I did. I shall always act in the best interests of our department. Be that as it may, I was determined to go to Wisconsin.’

‘My first Viking,’ said Winthrop, looking Einarsson straight in the eye.

‘Another romantic superstition. It is not enough to be a Scandinavian to have descended from Vikings. My forefathers were good pastors of the Evangelical church; at the beginning of the tenth century, my ancestors may have been good priests of Thor. In my family, as far as I know, there were never any seafarers.’

‘There were many in mine,’ Winthrop said. ‘Still, we aren’t so different. One sin is common to us both — vanity. You pay me this visit to boast of your clever stratagem; I backed you to boast that I am an upright man.’

‘Another thing is common to us,’ said Einarsson. ‘Nationality. I am an American citizen. My destiny is here, not in Ultima Thule. You would say that a passport does not change a man’s nature.’

Then, shaking hands, they took leave of each other.

Avelino Arredondo

The event took place in Montevideo in 1897.

Every Saturday, in the way of the honest poor who know they cannot invite people home or else are trying to escape home, a group of young men occupied the same side table at the Café del Globo. They were all from Montevideo, and they had found it hard at first to make friends with Arredondo, a man from the interior, who neither confided in others nor encouraged others to confide in him. A little over twenty years old, he was lean and dark, rather short, and maybe a bit clumsy. His would have been an almost anonymous face had his eyes at one and the same time sleepy and lively not rescued it. He worked as a clerk in a drygoods store on Buenos Aires Street, studying law in his spare time. When the others condemned the war that ravaged the country and that, according to general opinion, the president was prolonging for unworthy reasons, Arredondo remained silent. He also remained silent when they made fun of him for being stingy.

A short while after the battle of Cerros Blancos, Arredondo told his companions that they would not be seeing him for a time, since he had to travel to Mercedes. The news stirred no one. Somebody told him to watch out for the gaucho rabble of Aparicio Saravia, the rebel leader of the Whites. With a smile, Arredondo answered that he was not afraid of the Whites. The other man, who was a White himself, said nothing.

His goodbye to Clara, his fiancée, Arredondo found harder. He made it in almost the same words he had used with his friends, warning her not to expect letters, as he would be very busy. Clara, who was not in the habit of writing, accepted the explanation without a protest. The two were very much in love.

Arredondo lived on the outskirts of town. He was looked after by a mulatto woman who bore the same surname as he, since her forebears had been slaves of his family many years earlier, at the time of the Great War. Clementina was completely trustworthy, and he ordered her to tell anyone who came looking for him that he was away in the country. He had already collected his last pay from the dry goods store.

He moved into a back room of his house one that opened onto the earth-paved third patio. It was a pointless measure, but it helped him to initiate his self-imposed reclusion. From the narrow iron bed, in which he was beginning to take naps again, he looked with a touch of melancholy at a bare shelf. He had sold his books even his textbooks. All he had left was a Bible that he had never read before and that he would never finish reading. He leafed through it page by page sometimes out of interest, sometimes out of boredom and he took upon himself the task of learning by heart some chapter or other of Exodus and the end of Ecclesiastes. He made no effort to understand what he read. He was a freethinker, but he never let a single night pass without saying the Lord’s Prayer, which, on coming to Montevideo, he had promised his mother he would do. To fail in this filial promise, he thought, might bring him bad luck. Arredondo knew that his goal was the morning of the twenty-fifth of August. He knew the exact number of days he had to get through. Once his goal was attained, time would cease, or, rather, nothing that happened after that would matter. He awaited the date like someone awaiting a boon or a liberation. He had let his clock run down so as not to be forever looking at it, but every night, on hearing the twelve dark strokes of midnight on a town clock, he tore a leaf out of the calendar and thought, One day less.

In the beginning he worked to build up a routine brewing maté, smoking Turkish cigarettes that he rolled himself, reading and rereading a set number of pages, trying to converse with Clementina when she brought him his meals on a tray, and, before putting out the candle, repeating and embellishing the speech he planned to give. Talking to Clementina, a woman well along in years, was not at all easy, for her memory had remained rooted in the countryside and in its daily life. Arredondo also laid out a chessboard, on which he played haphazard games that never came to a conclusion. He was missing a rook, which he replaced with a bullet or with a two-cent coin. To fill time, he cleaned his room every morning, chasing away spiders with a dust cloth and broom. The mulatto woman did not like his doing these menial tasks, which were her domain and which, in addition, he was not especially good at. He would have preferred waking with the sun already high, but his habit of getting up at dawn was stronger than his will. He missed his friends a good deal but, without feeling bitter about it, he knew that, given his invincible reserve, they were not missing him. One evening, one of them came to ask for him and was turned away from the door. Clementina did not know the caller, and Arredondo never learned who it was. He had been an avid reader of newspapers, and now he found it hard giving up these museums of ephemeral tidbits. He was not a man cut out for deep thinking or for deliberating. His days and his nights were all the same, but Sundays weighed most on him. Towards the middle of July, he suspected that it had been a mistake to parcel out time, which in some way bears us along. Presently, he let his imagination wander over the length and breadth of Uruguay, then running with blood over the rolling fields of Santa Irene, where he had flown kites; over a certain pinto, which by now would be dead; over the dust raised by cattle when they are herded by drovers; over the weary stagecoach that came from Fray Bentos once a month with its hoard of trinkets; over the bay of La Agraciada, where the Thirty-Three, the country’s national heroes, had disembarked; over the Hervidero; over the hill ranges, the woods, and the rivers; over the Cerro, where he had climbed up to the lighthouse, thinking that on either bank of the Plate there was no other hill like it. From this hill overlooking the bay of Montevideo his thoughts passed on to the hill of the Uruguayan national emblem, and he fell asleep.

Every night the breeze off the sea brought a coolness propitious to sleep. He was never wakeful. He loved his fiancée completely, but it had been said that a man should not think about women above all when they are not there. Life in the country had accustomed him to chastity. As for this other business, he tried to think as little as possible about the man he hated. The din of the rain on the flat roof kept him company.

To a man in jail or to a blind man, time flows downstream, as if along an easy slope. Halfway through his reclusion, Arredondo experienced more than once that almost timeless time. In the first of the house’s three patios there was a cistern with a frog in it. It never occurred to Arredondo to think that the frog’s time, which borders on eternity, was what he himself sought.

When the date was not far off, his impatience began again. One night, unable to bear it any longer, he went out into the street. Everything seemed different, larger. Turning a corner, he saw a light and entered a saloon. To justify his presence, he ordered a bitter rum. Some soldiers, leaning on the wooden bar, were holding forth.

‘You know it’s absolutely forbidden to give out news of battles,’ one of them said. ‘Listen to what happened yesterday evening. This will amuse you. A few of us were passing by La Razón, when we heard a voice inside defying the order. Losing no time, we marched in. The office was pitch-dark, but we riddled with bullets whoever was doing the talking. We wanted to drag him out by the heels. When it was quiet, we searched the place for him, but what we found was one of those machines they call a phonograph, which speaks by itself.’

All of them laughed. ‘What do you think of a dodge like that, farmer?’ the soldier said to Arredondo, who had been eavesdropping. Arredondo kept silent.

The uniformed man brought his face close to Arredondo’s and said, ‘Quick! Let me hear you shout, “Long live the president of our country Juan Idiarte Borda!”’

Arredondo did not disobey, and amid mocking applause he managed to reach the door. He was in the street when a final insult was hurled at him. ‘Fear’s no fool,’ he heard. ‘It kills anger.’ Arredondo had behaved like a coward, but he knew he was not one. Slowly he made his way back home.

On the twenty-fifth of August, Avelino Arredondo woke up at a little after nine. He thought first of Clara and only later of the date. ‘Goodbye to waiting,’ he told himself then, relieved. ‘Today’s the day.’

He shaved without hurrying, and in the mirror he found his everyday face. He chose a red necktie and put on his best clothes. He ate a late lunch. The overcast sky threatened drizzle. He had always imagined the sky would be bright and blue. A touch of sadness came over him as he left his damp room for the last time. In the arched entranceway he met Clementina and gave her his few remaining pesos. On the sign over the hardware store he saw the coloured diamond shapes, meaning paint was sold there, and he reflected that for over two months he had not given them a thought. He walked towards Sarandi Street. It was a holiday and very few people were about.

The clock had not struck three when he reached the Plaza Matriz. The ‘Te Deum’ was already over. A group of dignitaries government officials, Army officers, and prelates was coming down the slow steps of the church. At first sight, the tall hats some still in hand the uniforms, the gold braid, the arms, and the tunics created the illusion that the group was large; in reality, there were no more than about thirty people. Arredondo, who felt no fear, was filled with a kind of respect. He asked someone which was the president.

‘You see the archbishop, with his mitre and crosier the one beside him,’ he was told.

Arredondo drew a revolver and opened fire. Idiarte Borda took one or two steps, fell headlong, and said distinctly, ‘I’ve been shot!’

Arredondo gave himself up to the authorities. Later he was to declare, ‘I am a Colorado, a Red, and I say it with pride. I’ve killed the president, who betrayed and tainted our party. I broke with my friends and my fiancée, so as not to implicate them. I did not look at the newspapers, so that nobody could say they had incited me. I claim this act of justice as my own. Now let me be judged.’

This is the way it probably happened, although in a more involved fashion; this is the way I imagine it happened.

The Disk

I am a woodcutter. My name does not matter. The hut where I was born and where I shall probably soon die stands at the edge of the forest. It is said of the forest that it stretches as far as the sea, which rings the whole earth and on which wooden huts like mine wend their way. Never having seen this sea, I don’t know. Nor have I ever seen the other side of the forest. When we were boys my elder brother made me vow that between us we would chop down the entire woods until not a single tree was left. My brother died, and what I seek now and what I shall go on seeking is something else. To the west runs a stream that I know how to fish with my hands. In the forest there are wolves, but wolves do not scare me, and my axe has never been untrue to me.

Of my years I have never kept count. I know they are many. My eyes no longer see. In the village, where I venture no more, since I would lose my way, I am known as a miser. But how much treasure can a mere woodcutter have laid up?

To keep snow out, I shut tight the door of my house with a stone. One evening long ago, I heard laboured footsteps approach, and then a knock. I opened, and a stranger came in. He was old and tall, and he was wrapped in a threadbare blanket. A scar marked his face. His years seemed to have given him more authority than frailty, but I noticed that he was unable to get about without the aid of a staff. We exchanged a few words that I no longer remember. At the end, he said, ‘I am homeless and sleep wherever I can. I have traveled the length and breadth of this land of the Saxons.’

These words testified to his years. My father had always spoken of the Saxon land, which nowadays people call England.

I had bread and fish. We did not speak a word during the meal. Rain began to fall. With a few skins I made him a pallet on the earth floor, where my brother had died. When night fell, we went to sleep.

Day was dawning when we left the hut. The rain had stopped and the ground was covered with new-fallen snow. My companion’s staff slipped from his hand and he ordered me to pick it up.

‘Why must I obey you?’ I asked him.

‘Because I am a king,’ he answered.

I thought him mad. Picking up the staff, I handed it to him. He spoke with a different voice.

‘I am king of the Secgens,’ he said. ‘Often in hard-pitched battle I carried my people to victory, but at the fateful hour I lost my kingdom. My name is Isern and I am of the race of Odin.’

‘I do not worship Odin,’ I said. ‘I worship Christ.’

He went on as if he had not heard me. ‘I travel the paths of exile, but I am still king, for I have the disk. Do you want to see it?’

He opened the palm of his bony hand. There was nothing in it. Only then did I recall that he had always kept the hand closed.

Staring hard at me, he said, ‘You may touch it.’

With a certain misgiving, I touched my fingertips to his palm. I felt something cold, and saw a glitter. The hand closed abruptly. I said nothing. The man went on patiently, as if speaking to a child.

‘It is Odin’s disk,’ he said, ‘It has only one side. In all the world there is nothing else with only one side. As long as the disk remains mine, I shall be king.’

‘Is it golden?’ I said.

‘I don’t know. It is Odin’s disk and it has only one side.’

Then and there I was overcome with greed to own the disk. If it were mine, I could trade it for an ingot of gold and I would be a king. I said to the vagabond, whom to this day I go on hating, ‘In my hut I have buried a box of coins. They are of gold and they shine like an axe. If you give me Odin’s disk, I’ll trade you the box.’

He said stubbornly, ‘I don’t want to.’

‘Then,’ I said, ‘you may continue on your path.’

He turned his back to me. One blow with the axe at the back of his neck was more than enough to bring him down, but as he fell his hand opened, and in the air I saw the glitter. I took care to mark the spot with my axe, and dragged the dead man to the stream, which was running high. There I threw him in.

Coming back to my hut, I searched for the disk. I did not find it. That was years ago, and I am searching still.

The Book of Sand

Thy rope of sands . . .

George Herbert

The line is made up of an infinite number of points; the plane of an infinite number of lines; the volume of an infinite number of planes; the hypervolume of an infinite number of volumes . . . No, unquestionably this is not more geometrico the best way of beginning my story. To claim that it is true is nowadays the convention of every made-up story. Mine, however, is true.

I live alone in a fourth-floor apartment on Belgrano Street, in Buenos Aires. Late one evening, a few months back, I heard a knock at my door. I opened it and a stranger stood there. He was a tall man, with nondescript features or perhaps it was my myopia that made them seem that way. Dressed in grey and carrying a grey suitcase in his hand, he had an unassuming look about him. I saw at once that he was a foreigner. At first, he struck me as old; only later did I realize that I had been misled by his thin blond hair, which was, in a Scandinavian sort of way, almost white. During the course of our conversation, which was not to last an hour, I found out that he came from the Orkneys.

I invited him in, pointing to a chair. He paused awhile before speaking. A kind of gloom emanated from him as it does now from me.

‘I sell Bibles,’ he said.

Somewhat pedantically, I replied, ‘In this house are several English Bibles, including the first John Wiclif’s. I also have Cipriano de Valera’s, Luther’s which, from a literary viewpoint, is the worst and a Latin copy of the Vulgate. As you see, it’s not exactly Bibles I stand in need of.’

After a few moments of silence, he said, ‘I don’t only sell Bibles. I can show you a holy book I came across on the outskirts of Bikaner. It may interest you.’

He opened the suitcase and laid the book on a table. It was an octavo volume, bound in cloth. There was no doubt that it had passed through many hands. Examining it, I was surprised by its unusual weight. On the spine were the words ‘Holy Writ’ and, below them, ‘Bombay’.

‘Nineteenth-century, probably,’ I remarked.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve never found out.’

I opened the book at random. The script was strange to me. The pages, which were worn and typographically poor, were laid out in double columns, as in a Bible. The text was closely printed, and it was ordered in versicles. In the upper corners of the pages were Arabic numbers. I noticed that one left-hand page bore the number (let us say) 40,514 and the facing right-hand page 999. I turned the leaf; it was numbered with eight digits. It also bore a small illustration, like the kind used in dictionaries an anchor drawn with pen and ink, as if by a schoolboy’s clumsy hand.

It was at this point that the stranger said, ‘Look at the illustration closely. You’ll never see it again.’

I noted my place and closed the book. At once, I re-opened it. Page by page, in vain, I looked for the illustration of the anchor. ‘It seems to be a version of Scriptures in some Indian language, is it not?’ I said to hide my dismay.

‘No,’ he replied. Then, as if confiding a secret, he lowered his voice. ‘I acquired the book in a town out on the plain in exchange for a handful of rupees and a Bible. Its owner did not know how to read. I suspect that he saw the Book of Books as a talisman. He was of the lowest caste; nobody but other untouchables could tread his shadow without contamination. He told me his book was called the Book of Sand, because neither the book nor the sand has any beginning or end.’

The stranger asked me to find the first page.

I laid my left hand on the cover and, trying to put my thumb on the flyleaf, I opened the book. It was useless. Every time I tried, a number of pages came between the cover and my thumb. It was as if they kept growing from the book.

‘Now find the last page.’

Again I failed. In a voice that was not mine, I barely managed to stammer, ‘This can’t be.’

Still speaking in a low voice, the stranger said, ‘It can’t be, but it is. The number of pages in this book is no more or less than infinite. None is the first page, none the last. I don’t know why they’re numbered in this arbitrary way. Perhaps to suggest that the terms of an infinite series admit any number.’

Then, as if he were thinking aloud, he said, ‘If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time.’

His speculations irritated me. ‘You are religious, no doubt?’ I asked him.

‘Yes, I’m a Presbyterian. My conscience is clear. I am reasonably sure of not having cheated the native when I gave him the Word of God in exchange for his devilish book.’

I assured him that he had nothing to reproach himself for, and I asked if he were just passing through this part of the world. He replied that he planned to return to his country in a few days. It was then that I learned that he was a Scot from the Orkney Islands. I told him I had a great personal affection for Scotland, through my love of Stevenson and Hume.

‘You mean Stevenson and Robbie Burns,’ he corrected. While we spoke, I kept exploring the infinite book. With feigned indifference, I asked, ‘Do you intend to offer this curiosity to the British Museum?’

‘No. I’m offering it to you,’ he said, and he stipulated a rather high sum for the book.

I answered, in all truthfulness, that such a sum was out of my reach, and I began thinking. After a minute or two, I came up with a scheme.

‘I propose a swap,’ I said. ‘You got this book for a handful of rupees and a copy of the Bible. I’ll offer you the amount of my pension cheque, which I’ve just collected, and my black-letter Wiclif Bible. I inherited it from my ancestors.’

‘A black-letter Wiclif!’ he murmured.

I went to my bedroom and brought him the money and the book. He turned the leaves and studied the title page with all the fervour of a true bibliophile.

‘It’s a deal,’ he said.

It amazed me that he did not haggle. Only later was I to realize that he had entered my house with his mind made up to sell the book. Without counting the money, he put it away.

We talked about India, about Orkney, and about the Norwegian jarls who once ruled it. It was night when the man left. I have not seen him again, nor do I know his name.

I thought of keeping the Book of Sand in the space left on the shelf by the Wiclif, but in the end I decided to hide it behind the volumes of a broken set of The Thousand and One Nights. I went to bed and did not sleep. At three or four in the morning, I turned on the light. I got down the impossible book and leafed through its pages. On one of them I saw engraved a mask. The upper corner of the page carried a number, which I no longer recall, elevated to the ninth power.

I showed no one my treasure. To the luck of owning it was added the fear of having it stolen, and then the misgiving that it might not truly be infinite. These twin preoccupations intensified my old misanthropy. I had only a few friends left; I now stopped seeing even them. A prisoner of the book, I almost never went out anymore. After studying its frayed spine and covers with a magnifying glass, I rejected the possibility of a contrivance of any sort. The small illustrations, I verified, came two thousand pages apart. I set about listing them alphabetically in a notebook, which I was not long in filling up. Never once was an illustration repeated. At night, in the meagre intervals my insomnia granted, I dreamed of the book.

Summer came and went, and I realized that the book was monstrous. What good did it do me to think that I, who looked upon the volume with my eyes, who held it in my hands, was any less monstrous? I felt that the book was a nightmarish object, an obscene thing that affronted and tainted reality itself.

I thought of fire, but I feared that the burning of an infinite book might likewise prove infinite and suffocate the planet with smoke. Somewhere I recalled reading that the best place to hide a leaf is in a forest. Before retirement, I worked on Mexico Street, at the Argentine National Library, which contains nine hundred thousand volumes. I knew that to the right of the entrance a curved staircase leads down into the basement, where books and maps and periodicals are kept. One day I went there and, slipping past a member of the staff and trying not to notice at what height or distance from the door, I lost the Book of Sand on one of the basement’s musty shelves.

Afterword

Prefacing stories a reader has not yet read, since it demands the analysis of plots that it may be inconvenient to deal with in advance, is a somewhat impossible task. I therefore prefer an afterword.

The book’s first story takes up the old theme of the double, which several times moved Robert Louis Stevenson’s ever-fortunate pen. In England, its name is ‘fetch’ or, more bookishly, ‘wraith of the living’; in Germany, ‘Doppelgänger’. One of its earliest names, I suspect, was mirrors of metal or from reflections in water or simply from memory, which makes of anyone both a spectator and an actor. In ‘The Other’, I had to ensure that the speakers were sufficiently different to be two persons and alike enough to be one. Is it worth stating that the idea for the story came to me in Cambridge on the banks of the Charles River, whose cold course reminded me of the far-off course of the Rhone?

The theme of love is quite common in my poems but not in my prose, which offers no other example than ‘Ulrike’. The reader will notice its formal affinity with ‘The Other’.

‘The Congress’ is perhaps the most ambitious of the tales in this book; its subject is that of an enterprise so vast that in the end it becomes confused with the world itself and with the sum of daily life. Its opaque beginning tries to imitate that of a Kafka story; its end tries, doubtless in vain, to match the ecstasies of Chesterton and John Bunyan. I have never been worthy of such a revelation, but I managed to dream one up. I have woven into the story as is my habit a number of autobiographical elements. Life, which everyone knows is inscrutable, left me no peace until I perpetrated a posthumous story by H. P. Lovecraft, a writer whom I have always considered an unconscious parodist of Poe. In the end, I gave in; the lamentable fruit is entitled ‘There Are More Things’.

‘The Sect of the Thirty’ salvages, without a shred of documentation, the tale of a possible heresy. ‘The Night of the Gifts’ is perhaps the most innocent, most violent, and most exalted story offered by this collection.

An earlier story of mine, ‘The Library of Babel’ (1941), imagines an infinite number of books; ‘Undr’ and ‘The Mirror and the Mask’, centuries-old literatures that are made up of a single line or word.

‘Utopia of a Tired Man’ is in my judgment the most honest and melancholy piece in the collection.

I have always been amazed by the ethical obsession of Americans. ‘The Bribe’ attempts to reflect this trait.

In spite of John Felton, Charlotte Corday, the well-known opinion of Rivera Indarte (‘It is a holy act to kill Rosas’), and the Uruguayan National Anthem (‘If they are tyrants, Brutus’ dagger’), I do not approve of political assassination. Be that as it may, readers of Avelino Arredondo’s solitary crime might wish to know the story’s outcome. The historian Luis Melián Lafinur asked for Arredondo’s pardon, but his judges Carlos Fein and Cristóbal Salvanach sentenced him to a month in solitary confinement and five years’ imprisonment. One of the streets of Montevideo now bears Arredondo’s name.

Two opposite and inconceivable concepts are the subjects of the last two stories. ‘The Disk’ is about the Euclidean circle, which has only one side; ‘The Book of Sand’, a volume of incalculable pages.

I hope that these hasty notes I have just dictated do not exhaust this book and that its dreams go on branching out in the hospitable imagination of those who now close it.

Buenos Aires, 3 February 1975

J. L. B.

In Praise of Darkness

The Anthropologist

This story was told to me in Texas, but it took place in another of the Southwestern states. It has one character only, except for the fact that in any story there are thousands of characters, seen and unseen, living and dead. His name, I believe, was Fred Murdock. He was lanky, was neither light nor dark, had a hatchet face, and wasted few words. There was nothing out of the ordinary about him, not even that wish to be out of the ordinary common to most young men. Naturally respectful, he never questioned what he read or what his teachers told him. He was at that age when, not yet knowing who he is, a man is ready to go whichever way a chance wind blows— into Persian Sufism or the unknown beginnings of Hungarian, the adventures of war or of algebra, puritanism or the orgy. At the university, he was advised to take up the study of aboriginal languages. Among a few tribes of the Southwest, certain unexplained rites still survived; his adviser, a man getting along in years, suggested that he go live on a reservation, where he might be initiated into tribal ceremonies, and try to uncover the medicine man’s secret. On his return, he would prepare a thesis that the university press would undertake to publish. Murdock jumped at the chance. One of his forebears had been killed by Indians in a frontier raid; this old family bloodshed was now a link. No doubt he foresaw the difficulties that were in store for him; he would have to do his best to get the red men to accept him as one of them.

Murdock undertook the arduous adventure. He lived over two years in the desert in adobe huts or out in the open. He would get up before the dawn, he would go to sleep at nightfall, and he came to dream in a language that was not the language of his fathers. His palate became accustomed to new tastes, he dressed in strange clothes, he forgot his friends and the city, he came to see things in a way his reason rejected. During the first months of his training, he took secret notes that later he was to burn—maybe not to arouse suspicion, maybe because he no longer needed them. At the end of a period of many months, after he had at last undergone certain exercises of a moral and physical nature, the medicine man took him aside and told him that from then on he must remember his dreams and relate them to him every morning. Murdock found out that on nights when the moon was full he dreamed of mustangs. He confided these repeated dreams to his teacher; in time, the teacher taught him the secret. One day without saying goodbye to anyone, Murdock went away.

Back in the city, he felt homesick for those first evenings out in the desert when, a long time before, he had felt homesick for the city. He made his way to his adviser’s office and told him that he now knew the secret and that he had made up his mind not to reveal it.

“Are you sworn to an oath?” asked the professor.

“That’s not my reason,” answered Murdock. “I found out something off there in the desert that I can’t tell.”

“Do you mean to say the English language is inadequate?” the professor may have said.

“No, that’s not it, sir. Now that I have the secret, I could explain it in a hundred different and even contradictory ways. I don’t really know how to tell you, but the secret means a great deal to me. Compared to it, science—our science—seems not much more than a trifle.” He added, after a pause, “The secret, I should tell you, is not as valuable as the steps that brought me to it. Those steps have to be taken, not told.”

The professor said coldly, “Very well, I shall report your decision to the board. Are you thinking of living among the Indians?”

Murdock answered, “No. Maybe I won’t be going back to the reservation. What I learned there I can apply anyplace on earth and under any circumstances.”

That, substantially, is what was said.

Fred married, was divorced, and is now a librarian at Yale.

Legend

Abel and Cain met again after Abel’s death. They were walking in the desert and knew each other from a distance, for both men were very tall. The brothers sat on the ground, made a fire, and ate. For a while, they were untalkative, the way tired men can be after a long day’s work. In the sky, some still unnamed star appeared. By the firelight, Cain made out the mark of the stone on Abel’s forehead, dropped the food he was about to put into his mouth, and asked to be forgiven for his crime.

“I no longer remember—did you kill me or was it I who killed you?” Abel answered. “Here we are together again, just as we used to be.”

“Now I know for sure you’ve forgiven me,” said Cain, “because to forget is to have forgiven. I’ll try my best to forget, too.”

“Yes,” said Abel, speaking slowly, “you’re right. As long as there’s remorse, there’s guilt.”

A Prayer

Thousands of times, and in the two languages that are close to me, my lips have said and will go on saying the Lord’s Prayer, but only in part do I understand it. This morning, the first day of July, 1969, I want to attempt a prayer that will be my own, not handed down. I know this is an undertaking that demands an almost super- human sincerity. It is obvious, to begin with, that I may not ask for anything. To ask that darkness not wholly descend on my eyes would be senseless; I know thousands of persons who see and yet are not especially happy, righteous, or wise. The process of time is a network of effects and causes, so that to ask for any gift, however small, is to ask that a link in that iron network be broken. Nobody is worthy of such a miracle. Nor can I beg forgiveness for my mistakes. Forgiving is what someone else does, and only I can save myself; forgiving makes pure the one who has been offended, not the offender, whom it hardly concerns. Free will is perhaps an illusion, but I can always give or dream that I am giving. I can give the courage I lack, the hope I lack; I can teach others the will to learn what I barely know, or only half know. I want to be remembered less as a poet than as a friend; let someone recall a verse of Frost or of Dunbar or of the nameless Saxon who at midnight saw the shining tree that bleeds, the Cross, and let him think he heard it for the first time from my lips. The rest is of little importance; I hope oblivion will not be long in coming. The laws of the universe are unknown to us, but we are somehow sure that to reason clearly and to act righteously is to help those laws, which will never be revealed to us.

My wish is to die wholly; my wish is to die with this companion, my body.

His End And His Beginning

After death, after the wrench and the stark loneliness, he dropped into a deep sleep. When he woke up, every- day habits and places came back to him. Telling himself he must keep his mind off what had happened the night before (and comforted by this decision), he slowly dressed. At the office he went about his work as well as he could, though with that uneasy feeling, usually brought on by fatigue, of repeating something he had done before. He had a suspicion that others were avoiding him, that maybe they knew he was dead. That night his terrible dreams began and, though he never remembered a trace of them, he feared their return. In time this fear prevailed, coming between him and the page he was writing or the book he was trying to read. Letters swarmed and throbbed, faces—familiar faces—began to blur, and men and objects kept drifting away from him. In a frenzy of tenacity, his mind clung to these shifting shapes.

Strangely enough, he never suspected the truth, but all at once it struck him. He realized that he was unable to recall the shapes or sounds or colors of his dreams—that there were no shapes or sounds or colors—and that they were not dreams. They were his reality, a reality beyond silence or sight and so, beyond memory. This troubled him far more than the fact that after his death he had been struggling against a current of meaningless images. The voices he had heard were no more than echoes; the faces he had seen, masks. Even the fingers of his own hand were shadows; but however dim and unreal, they were familiar, they were something to cling to.

Still, he somehow felt it his duty to be rid of everything. He belonged to another world now, detached from past, present, or future. Gradually, this world came to enclose him. He suffered agony upon agony, he passed through regions of despair and loneliness—wanderings that he found cruel, frightening, because they went beyond all his former perceptions, memories, and hopes. The horror lay in their utter newness and splendor. He had attained grace; from the moment of death he had been in heaven.

Dr. Brodie's Report

Foreword

Preface to the First Edition

The Gospel According to Mark

The Unworthy Friend

The Duel

The End of the Duel

Rosendo’s Tale

The Intruder

The Meeting

Juan Muraña

The Elder Lady

Guayaquil

Doctor Brodie’s Report

Afterword

Foreword

The principle we have followed in translating this book is, of course, the same used in our previous Dutton volume, The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969. There our guiding aim had been to make the text read as though it had been written in English; in so doing, we quite soon discovered that the English and Spanish languages are not, as is often taken for granted, a set of interchangeable synonyms but are two possible ways of viewing and ordering reality. We have also continued in the present volume to supply the American reader with historical and geographical details not necessarily known to him.

One difference between this volume and the last lies in the fact that the writing and the translation were, except in one case, more or less simultaneous. In this way our work was easier for us, since, as we were always under the spell of the originals, we stood in no need of trying to recapture past moods. This seems to us to be the best possible condition under which to practice the craft of translation.

The Afterword, written directly in English, was prepared especially for this volume.

Buenos Aires, December 29, 1970

J. L. B.

N. T. di G.

Preface to the First Edition

Kipling’s last stories were no less tormented and mazelike than the stories of Kafka or Henry James, which they doubtless surpass; but in 1885, in Lahore, the young Kipling began a series of brief tales, written in a straightforward manner, that he was to collect in 1890. Several of them —“In the House of Suddhoo,” “Beyond the Pale,” “The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows”— are laconic masterpieces. It occurred to me that what was conceived and carried out by a young man of genius might modestly be attempted by a man on the borders of old age who knows his craft Out of that idea came the present volume, which I leave to the reader to judge.

I have done my best—I don’t know with what success—to write straightforward stories. I do not dare state that they are simple; there isn’t anywhere on earth a single page or single word that is, since each thing implies the universe, whose most obvious trait is complexity. I want to make it quite clear that I am not, nor have I ever been, what used to be called a preacher of parables or a fabulist and is now known as a committed writer. I do not aspire to be Aesop. My stories, like those of the Thousand and One Nights, try to be entertaining or moving but not persuasive. Such an intention does not mean that I have shut myself up, according to Solomon’s image, in an ivory tower. My political convictions are quite well known; I am a member of the Conservative Party—this in itself is a form of skepticism—and no one has ever branded me a Communist, a nationalist, an anti-Semite, a follower of Billy the Kid or of the dictator Rosas. I believe that some day we will deserve not to have governments. I have never kept my opinions hidden, not even in trying times, but neither have I ever allowed them to find their way into my literary work, except once when I was buoyed up in exultation over the Six-Day War. The art of writing is mysterious; the opinions we hold are ephemeral, and I prefer the Platonic idea of the Muse to that of Poe, who reasoned, or feigned to reason, that the writing of a poem is an act of the intelligence. It never fails to amaze me that the classics hold a romantic theory of poetry, and a romantic poet a classical theory.

Apart from the text that gives this book its title and that obviously derives from Lemuel Gulliver’s last voyage, my stories are—to use the term in vogue today—realistic. They follow, I believe, all the conventions of that school, which is as conventional as any other and of which we shall soon grow tired if we have not already done so. They are rich in the required invention of circumstances. Splendid examples of this device are to be found in the tenth century Old English ballad of Maldon and in the later Icelandic sagas. Two stories—I will not give their names—hold the same fantastic key. The curious reader will notice certain dose affinities between them. The same few plots, I am sorry to say, have pursued me down through the years; I am decidedly monotonous.

I owe to a dream of Hugo Rodríguez Moroni the general outline of the story—perhaps the best of this collection—called “The Gospel According to Mark.” I fear having spoiled it with the changes that my fancy or my reason judged fitting. But after all, writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

I have given up the surprises inherent in a baroque style as well as the surprises that lead to an unforeseen ending. I have, in short, preferred to satisfy an expectation rather than to provide a startling shock. For many years, I thought it might be given me to achieve a good page by means of variations and novelties; now, having passed seventy, I believe I have found my own voice. Slight rewording neither spoils nor improves what I dictate, except in cases of lightening a clumsy sentence or toning down an exaggeration. Each language is a tradition, each word a shared symbol, and what an innovator can change amounts to a trifle; we need only remember the splendid but often unreadable work of a Mallarmé or a Joyce. It is likely that this all-too-reasonable reasoning is only the fruit of weariness. My now advanced age has taught me to resign myself to being Borges.

I am impartially indifferent to both the dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy—dont chaque édition fait regretter la précédente, according to the sad observation of Paul Groussac—and those weighty Argentine dictionaries of local usage. All, I find—those of this and those of the other side of the ocean—have a tendency to emphasize differences and to fragment the Spanish language. In connection with this, I recall that when it was held against the novelist Roberto Arlt that he had no knowledge of Buenos Aires slang, he replied, “I grew up in Villa Luro, among poor people and hoodlums, and I really had no time to learn that sort of thing.” Our local slang, in fact, is a literary joke concocted by writers of popular plays and tango lyrics, and the people who are supposed to use it hardly know what it means, except when they have been indoctrinated by phonograph records.

I have set my stories some distance off in time and in space. The imagination, in this way, can operate with greater freedom. Who, in 1970, is able to remember with accuracy what at the end of the last century the outskirts of Buenos Aires around Palermo and Lomas were like? Unbelievable as it may seem, there are those who go to the length of playing policeman and looking for a writer’s petty slips. They remark, for example, that Martín Fierro would have spoken of a “bag” and not a “sack” of bones, and they find fault, perhaps unjustly, with the roan piebald coat of a certain horse famous in our literature.

God spare thee, reader, long prefaces. The words are Quevedo’s, who, careful not to fall into an anachronism which in the long run would have been detected, never read those of Bernard Shaw.

Buenos Aires, April 19, 1970

J. L. B.

The Gospel According to Mark

These events took place at La Colorada ranch, in the southern part of the township of Junín, during the last days of March, 1928. The protagonist was a medical student named Baltasar Espinosa. We may describe him, for now, as one of the common run of young men from Buenos Aires, with nothing more noteworthy about him than an almost unlimited kindness and a capacity for public speaking that had earned him several prizes at the English school in Ramos Mejía. He did not like arguing, and preferred having his listener rather than himself in the right. Although he was fascinated by the probabilities of chance in any game he played, he was a bad player because it gave him no pleasure to win. His wide intelligence was undirected; at the age of thirty-three, he still lacked credit for graduation, by one course—the course to which he was most drawn. His father, who was a freethinker (like all the gentlemen of his day), had introduced him to the lessons of Herbert Spencer, but his mother, before leaving on a trip for Montevideo, once asked him to say the Lord’s Prayer and make the sign of the cross every night. Through the years, he had never gone back on that promise.

Espinosa was not lacking in spirit; one day, with more indifference than anger, he had exchanged two or three punches with a group of fellow-students who were trying to force him to take part in a university demonstration. Owing to an acquiescent nature, he was full of opinions, or habits of mind, that were questionable: Argentina mattered less to him than a fear that in other parts of the world people might think of us as Indians; he worshiped France but despised the French; he thought little of Americans but approved the fact that there were tall buildings, like theirs, in Buenos Aires; he believed the gauchos of the plains to be better riders than those of hill or mountain country. When his cousin Daniel invited him to spend the summer months out at La Colorada, he said yes at once—not because he was really fond of the country, but more out of his natural complacency and also because it was easier to say yes than to dream up reasons for saying no.

The ranch’s main house was big and slightly run-down; the quarters of the foreman, whose name was Gutre, were close by. The Gutres were three: the father, an unusually uncouth son, and a daughter of uncertain paternity. They were tall, strong, and bony, and had hair that was on the reddish side and faces that showed traces of Indian blood. They were barely articulate. The foreman’s wife had died years before.

There in the country, Espinosa began learning things he never knew, or even suspected— for example, that you do not gallop a horse when approaching settlements, and that you never go out riding except for some special purpose. In time, he was to come to tell the birds apart by their calls.

After a few days, Daniel had to leave for Buenos Aires to close a deal on some cattle. At most, this bit of business might take him a week. Espinosa, who was already somewhat weary of hearing about his cousin’s incessant luck with women and his tireless interest in the minute details of men’s fashions, preferred staying on at the ranch with his textbooks. But the heat was unbearable, and even the night brought no relief. One morning at daybreak, thunder woke him. Outside, the wind was rocking the Australian pines. Listening to the first heavy drops of rain, Espinosa thanked God. All at once, cold air rolled in. That afternoon, the Salado overflowed its banks.

The next day, looking out over the flooded fields from the gallery of the main house, Baltasar Espinosa thought that the stock metaphor comparing the pampa to the sea was not altogether false—at least, not that morning—though W. H. Hudson had remarked that the sea seems wider because we view it from a ship’s deck and not from a horse or from eye level.

The rain did not let up. The Gutres, helped or hindered by Espinosa, the town dweller, rescued a good part of the livestock, but many animals were drowned. There were four roads leading to La Colorada; all of them were under water. On the third day, when a leak threatened the foreman’s house, Espinosa gave the Gutres a room near the tool shed, at the back of the main house. This drew them all closer; they ate together in the big dining room. Conversation turned out to be difficult. The Gutres, who knew so much about country things, were hard put to it to explain them. One night, Espinosa asked them if people still remembered the Indian raids from back when the frontier command was located there in Junín. They told him yes, but they would have given the same answer to a question about the beheading of Charles I.

Espinosa recalled his father’s saying that almost every case of longevity that was cited in the country was really a case of bad memory or of a dim notion of dates. Gauchos are apt to be ignorant of the year of their birth or of the name of the man who begot them.

In the whole house, there was apparently no other reading matter than a set of the Farm Journal, a handbook of veterinary medicine, a deluxe edition of the Uruguayan epic Tabaré, a History of Shorthorn Cattle in Argentina, a number of erotic or detective stories, and a recent novel called Don Segundo Sombra. Espinosa, trying in some way to bridge the inevitable after-dinner gap, read a couple of chapters of this novel to the Gutres, none of whom could read or write. Unfortunately, the foreman had been a cattle drover, and the doings of the hero, another cattle drover, failed to whet his interest. He said that the work was light, that drovers always traveled with a packhorse that carried everything they needed, and that, had he not been a drover, he would never have seen such far-flung places as the Laguna de Gómez, the town of Bragado, and the spread of the Núñez family in Chacabuco. There was a guitar in the kitchen; the ranch hands, before the time of the events I am describing, used to sit around in a circle. Someone would tune the instrument without ever getting around to playing it. This was known as a guitarfest.

Espinosa, who had grown a beard, began dallying in front of the mirror to study his new face, and he smiled to think how, back in Buenos Aires, he would bore his friends by telling them the story of the Salado flood. Strangely enough, he missed places he never frequented and never would: a comer of Cabrera Street on which there was a mailbox; one of the cement lions of a gateway on Jujuy Street, a few blocks from the Plaza del Once; an old barroom with a tiled floor, whose exact whereabouts he was unsure of. As for his brothers and his father, they would already have learned from Daniel that he was isolated—etymologically, the word was perfect—by the floodwaters.

Exploring the house, still hemmed in by the watery waste, Espinosa came across an English Bible. Among the blank pages at the end, the Guthries—such was their original name—had left a handwritten record of their lineage. They were natives of Inverness; had reached the New World, no doubt as common laborers, in the early part of the nineteenth century; and had intermarried with Indians. The chronicle broke off sometime during the eighteen-seventies, when they no longer knew how to write. After a few generations, they had forgotten English; their Spanish, at the time Espinosa knew them, gave them trouble. They lacked any religious faith, but there survived in their blood, like faint tracks, the rigid fanaticism of the Calvinist and the superstitions of the pampa Indian. Espinosa later told them of his find, but they barely took notice.

Leafing through the volume, his fingers opened it at the beginning of the Gospel according to St. Mark. As an exercise in translation, and maybe to find out whether the Gutres understood any of it, Espinosa decided to begin reading them that text after their evening meal. It surprised him that they listened attentively, absorbed. Maybe the gold letters on the cover lent the book authority. It’s still there in their blood, Espinosa thought. It also occurred to him that the generations of men, throughout recorded time, have always told and retold two stories—that of a lost ship which searches the Mediterranean seas for a dearly loved island, and that of a god who is crucified on Golgotha. Remembering his lessons in elocution from his schooldays in Ramos Mejía, Espinosa got to his feet when he came to the parables.

The Gutres took to bolting their barbecued meat and their sardines so as not to delay the Gospel. A pet lamb that the girl adorned with a small blue ribbon had injured itself on a strand of barbed wire. To stop the bleeding, the three had wanted to apply a cobweb to the wound, but Espinosa treated the animal with some pills. The gratitude that this treatment awakened in them took him aback. (Not trusting the Gutres at first, he’d hidden away in one of his books the two hundred and forty pesos he had brought with him.) Now, the owner of the place away, Espinosa took over and gave timid orders, which were immediately obeyed. The Gutres, as if lost without him, liked following him from room to room and along the gallery that ran around the house. While he read to them, he noticed that they were secretly stealing the crumbs he had dropped on the table. One evening, he caught them unawares, talking about him respectfully, in very few words.

Having finished the Gospel according to St. Mark, he wanted to read another of the three Gospels that remained, but the father asked him to repeat the one he had just read, so that they could understand it better. Espinosa felt that they were like children, to whom repetition is more pleasing than variations or novelty. That night—this is not to be wondered at—he dreamed of the Flood; the hammer blows of the building of the Ark woke him up, and he thought that perhaps they were thunder. In fact, the rain, which had let up, started again. The cold was bitter. The Gutres had told him that the storm had damaged the roof of the tool shed, and that they would show it to him when the beams were fixed. No longer a stranger now, he was treated by them with special attention, almost to the point of spoiling him. None of them liked coffee, but for him there was always a small cup into which they heaped sugar.

The new storm had broken out on a Tuesday. Thursday night, Espinosa was awakened by a soft knock at his door, which—just in case—he always kept locked. He got out of bed and opened it; there was the girl. In the dark he could hardly make her out, but by her footsteps he could tell she was barefoot, and moments later, in bed, that she must have come all the way from the other end of the house naked. She did not embrace him or speak a single word; she lay beside him, trembling. It was the first time she had known a man. When she left, she did not kiss him; Espinosa realized that he didn’t even know her name. For some reason that he did not want to pry into, he made up his mind that upon returning to Buenos Aires he would tell no one about what had taken place.

The next day began like the previous ones, except that the father spoke to Espinosa and asked him if Christ had let Himself be killed so as to save all other men on earth. Espinosa, who was a freethinker but who felt committed to what he had read to the Gutres, answered, “Yes, to save everyone from Hell.”

Gutre then asked, “What’s Hell?”

“A place under the ground where souls burn and burn.”

“And the Roman soldiers who hammered in the nails—were they saved, too?”

“Yes,” said Espinosa, whose theology was rather dim.

All along, he was afraid that the foreman might ask him about what had gone on the night before with his daughter. After lunch, they asked him to read the last chapters over again.

Espinosa slept a long nap that afternoon. It was a light sleep, disturbed by persistent hammering and by vague premonitions. Toward evening, he got up and went out onto the gallery. He said, as if thinking aloud, “The waters have dropped. It won’t be long now.”

“It won’t be long now,” Gutre repeated, like an echo.

The three had been following him. Bowing their knees to the stone pavement, they asked his blessing. Then they mocked at him, spat on him, and shoved him toward the back part of the house. The girl wept. Espinosa understood what awaited him on the other side of the door.

When they opened it, he saw a patch of sky. A bird sang out. A goldfinch, he thought. The shed was without a roof; they had pulled down the beams to make the cross.

The Unworthy Friend

Our image of the city is always slightly out of date. Cafés have degenerated into barrooms; old arched entranceways with their grilled inner gates, once giving us a glimpse of patios and of overhanging grapevines, are now dingy corridors that lead abruptly to an elevator. For years, in this way, I thought that in a certain block of Talcahuano Street I might still find the Buenos Aires Bookstore. But one morning I discovered its place had been taken by an antique shop, and I was told that don Santiago Fischbein, its owner, had died. Fischbein had been a heavyset, rather overweight man, whose features I now remember less than our long talks. In a quiet but firm way he had always been against Zionism, which he held would turn the Jew into a man like anyone else—tied down to a single tradition and a single homeland, and no longer enriched by strife and complexities. He’d been at work, he once told me, putting together a comprehensive anthology of the writings of Baruch Spinoza, freed of all that Euclidean apparatus, which, while lending to its strange system an illusory rigor, bogs the reader down. He would not sell me, but let me look at, a rare copy of Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata. At home I still have a few books on the Kabbalah by Ginsburg and by Waite which bear the seal of Fischbein’s shop.

One afternoon, when the two of us were alone, he confided a story to me about his early life, and I feel I can now set it down. As may be expected, I will alter one or two details. Here is what Fischbein said.

I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone before. Ana—my wife—doesn’t know a word about this, nor do any of my closest friends. These things took place so many years ago now that I sometimes feel they might have happened to another person. Maybe you can make some use of this as a story—which, of course, you’ll dress up with daggers. I wonder if I’ve already told you I was born in the Province of Entre Ríos. I can’t say we were Jewish gauchos—there never were any Jewish gauchos. We were shopkeepers and farmers.

Anyway, I was born in Urdinarrain, a town I can hardly remember anymore. I was very young when my parents moved to Buenos Aires to open up a shop. A few blocks away from where we lived was the Maldonado, and beyond that ditch were open lots.

Carlyle says that men need heroes to worship. Argentine schoolbooks tried getting me to worship San Martín, but in him I found little more than a soldier who’d fought his battles in other countries and who’s now only a bronze statue and the name of a square. Chance, however— unfortunately enough for the two of us—provided me with another kind of hero. This is probably the first time you’ve ever heard of him. His name was Francisco Ferrari.

Our neighborhood may not have been as tough as the Stockyards or the waterfront, but it had its share of hoodlums who hung out in the old saloons. Ferrari’s particular hangout was a place at the comer of Triunvirato and Thames. It was there the thing happened that brought me under his spell. I’d been sent around to the saloon to buy a small package of mate, when in walked a stranger with long hair and a moustache, and ordered a shot of gin. Ferrari said to him, mildly, “By the way, didn’t we see each other night before last dancing at Juliana’s? Where are you from?”

“From San Cristóbal,” the other man said.

“My advice,” Ferrari said, still gently, “is that you might find it healthier to keep away from here. This neighborhood’s full of people on the lookout for trouble.”

On the spot, the man from San Cristóbal turned tail—moustache and all. Maybe he was just as much a man as Ferrari was, but he knew others of the gang were around.

From that afternoon on, Francisco Ferrari was the hero my fifteen years were in search of. He was dark and stood straight and tall— good-looking in the style of the day. He always wore black. One day, a second episode brought us together. I was on the street with my mother and aunt, when we ran into a bunch of young toughs and one of them said loudly to the others:

“Old stuff. Let them by.”

I didn’t know what to do. At that moment, Ferrari stepped in. He had just left his house. He looked the ringleader straight in the eye and said, “If you’re out for fun, why not try having some with me?”

He kept staring them up and down, one after the other, and there wasn’t a word out of any of them. They knew all about him. Ferrari shrugged his shoulders, tipped his hat, and went on his way. But before starting off, he said to me, “If you have nothing else to do, drop in at the saloon later on.”

I was tongue-tied. “There’s a gentleman who demands respect for ladies,” my Aunt Sarah pronounced.

Coming to my rescue, my mother said, “I’d say more a hoodlum who wants no competition.”

I don’t really know how to explain this now. I’ve worked my way up, I own this shop—which I love—and I know my books; I enjoy friendships like ours, I have my wife and children, I belong to the Socialist Party, I’m a good Argentine and a good Jew. People look up to me. As you can see, I’m almost bald; in those days I was just a poor redheaded Jew-boy, living in a down-and-out neighborhood. Like all young men, of course, I tried hard to be the same as everyone else. Still, I was sneered at. To shake off the Jacob, I called myself Santiago, but just the same there was the Fischbein. We all begin taking on the idea others have of us. Feeling people despised me, I despised myself as well. At that time, and above all in that neighborhood, you had to be tough. I knew I was a coward. Women scared the daylights out of me, I was deeply ashamed of my inexperience with them, and I had no friends my own age.

That night I didn’t go around to the saloon. How I wish I never had! But the feeling grew on me that Ferrari’s invitation was something of an order, so the next Saturday, after dinner, I finally walked into the place.

Ferrari sat at the head of one of the tables.

I knew all the other men by sight. There were six or seven of them. Ferrari was the eldest, except for an old man who spoke little and wearily and whose name is the only one I have not forgotten—don Eliseo Amaro. The mark of a slash crossed his broad, flabby face. I found out afterward he’d spent some time in jail.

Ferrari sat me down at his left, making don Eliseo change places for me. I felt a bit uneasy, afraid Ferrari would mention what had happened on the street a few days before. But nothing of the kind took place. They talked of women, cards, elections, of a street singer who was about to show up but never did, of neighborhood affairs. At first, they seemed unwilling to accept me, then later—because it was what Ferrari wanted—they loosened up. In spite of their names, which for the most part were Italian, every one of them thought of himself (and thought of each other) as Argentine and even gaucho. Some of them owned or drove teams or were butchers at the slaughter yards, and having to deal with animals made them a lot like farm hands. My suspicion is that their one desire was to have played the outlaw Juan Moreira. They ended up calling me the Sheeny, but they didn’t mean it in a bad way. It was from them that I learned to smoke and do other things.

In a brothel on Junín Street, somebody asked me whether I wasn’t a friend of Francisco Ferrari’s. I told him I wasn’t, feeling that to have answered yes would have been bragging.

One night the police came into the saloon and frisked us. Two of the gang were taken into custody, but Ferrari was left alone. A couple of weeks later the same thing happened all over again; this second time they rounded up Ferrari, too. Under his belt he was carrying a knife. What happened was that he must have had a falling out with the political boss of our ward.

As I look back on Ferrari today, I see him as an unlucky young man who was filled with illusions and in the end was betrayed; but at the time, to me he was a god.

Friendship is no less a mystery than love or any other aspect of this confusion we call life. There have been times when I’ve felt the only thing without mystery is happiness, because happiness is an end in itself. The plain fact is that, for all his brass, Francisco Ferrari, the tough guy, wanted to be friends with someone as pitiful as me. I was sure he’d made a mistake, I was sure I was unworthy of his friendship, and I did my best to keep clear of him. But he wouldn’t let me. My anxiety over this was made even worse by my mother’s disapproval. She just couldn’t get used to the company I kept and went around aping, and referred to them as trash and scum. The point of what I’m telling you is my relationship with Ferrari, not the sordid facts, which I no longer feel sorry about. As long as any trace of remorse remains, guilt remains.

One night, the old man, who had again taken up his usual place beside Ferrari, was whispering back and forth in Ferrari’s ear. They were up to something. From the other end of the table, I thought I made out the name of Weidemann, a man who owned a textile mill out on the edge of the neighborhood. Soon after, without any explanation, I was told to take a stroll around Weidemann’s factory and to have a good look at the gates. It was beginning to get dark when I crossed the Maldonado and cut through the freight yards. I remember the houses, which grew fewer and farther between, a clump of willows, and the empty lots. Weidemann’s was new, but it was lonely and somehow looked like a ruin; in my memory, its red brick gets mixed up with the sunset. The mill was surrounded by a tall fence. In addition to the front entrance, there were two big doors out back opening into the south side of the building.

I have to admit it took me some time to figure out what you’ve probably guessed already. I brought back my report, which was confirmed by one of the others, who had a sister working in the place. Then the plan was laid out. For the gang not to have shown up at the saloon on a Saturday night would have attracted attention, so Ferrari set the robbery for the following Friday. I was the one they picked for lookout. Meanwhile, it was best that we shouldn’t be seen together. When we were alone in the street—just Ferrari and myself—I asked him, “Are you sure you can trust me?”

“Yes,” he answered. “I know you’ll handle yourself like a man.”

That night and the following nights I slept well. Then, on Wednesday, I told my mother I was going downtown to see a new cowboy picture. I put on my best clothes and started out for Moreno Street. The trip on the streetcar was a long one. At police headquarters I was kept waiting, but finally one of the desk sergeants—a certain Eald or Alt—saw me. I told him I’d come about a confidential matter and he said I could speak without fear. I let him in on the gang’s plan. What surprised me was that Ferrari’s name meant nothing to him; but it was something else again when I mentioned don Eliseo.

“Ah,” he said. “He used to be one of the old Montevideo gang.”

He called in another man, who came from my part of town, and the two of them talked things over. The second officer asked me, with a certain scorn in his voice, “Have you come here with this information because you think of yourself as a good citizen?”

I knew he would never understand, but I answered, “Yes, sir. I’m a good Argentine.” They told me to go through with my job exactly as Ferrari had ordered, but not to whistle when I saw the police arrive. As I was leaving, one of them warned me:

“Better be careful. You know what happens to stoolies.”

Policemen are just like kids when it comes to using slang. I answered him, “I wish they would lay their hands on me—maybe that’s the best thing that could happen.”

From early in the morning that Friday, I had the feeling of relief that the day had come, and at the same time I felt the guilt of not feeling guilty. The hours seemed to drag. All day I barely ate a mouthful. At ten that night we met a couple of blocks away from the factory. When one of the gang didn’t show up, don Eliseo remarked that someone always turned yellow. I knew when it was over he’d be the one they’d blame.

It looked like it was about to pour. At first, I was scared someone else would be named to stand watch with me, but when it came time I was left alone near one of the back doors. After a while, the police, together with a superior officer, put in their appearance. They came on foot, having left their horses some distance off. Ferrari had forced one of the two doors and the police were able to slip in without a sound. Then four shots rang out, deafening me. I imagined that there on the inside, in all that dark, they were slaughtering each other. At that point the police led a few of the men out in handcuffs. Then two more policemen came out, dragging the bodies of Francisco Ferrari and don Eliseo Amaro. In the official report it was stated that they had resisted arrest and had been the first to open fire. I knew the whole thing was a lie because I’d never once seen any of the gang carrying guns. They’d just been shot down; the police had used the occasion to settle an old score. A few days later, I heard that Ferrari had tried to escape but had been stopped by a single bullet. As was to be expected, the newspapers made the hero of him he had never been except maybe in my eyes.

As for me, they rounded me up with the others and a short time later set me free.

The Duel

To Juan Osvaldo Viviano

Henry James—whose world was first revealed to me by one of my two characters, Clara Figueroa—would perhaps have been interested in this story. He might have devoted to it a hundred or so pages of tender irony, enriched by complex and painstakingly ambiguous dialogues. The addition at the end of some melodramatic touch would not have been at all unlikely, nor would the essence of the tale have been changed by a different setting—London or Boston. The actual events took place in Buenos Aires, and there I shall leave them, limiting myself to a bare summary of the affair, since its slow evolution and sophisticated background are quite alien to my particular literary habits. To set down this story is for me a modest and peripheral adventure. I should warn my reader ahead of time that its episodes are of less importance than its characters and the relationship between them.

Clara Glencairn de Figueroa was stately and tall and had fiery red hair. Less intellectual than understanding, she was not witty, though she did appreciate the wit of others—even of other women. Her mind was full of hospitality. Distinctions pleased her; perhaps that’s why she traveled so much. She realized that her world was an all too arbitrary combination of rites and ceremonies, but these things amused her and she carried them out with dignity. Her family married her off very young to a distinguished lawyer, Isidro Figueroa, who was to become the Argentine ambassador to Canada and who ended by resigning that post, stating that in a time of telephones and telegraph, embassies were anachronisms and amounted to a needless public burden. This decision earned him the disapproval of all his colleagues; Clara liked the Ottawa climate—after all, she was of Scottish ancestry—and the duties of an ambassador’s wife did not displease her, but she never once dreamed of protesting. Figueroa died soon after. Clara, following several years of indecision and self-searching, took up the exercise of painting—stimulated perhaps, by the example of her friend Marta Pizarro.

It is characteristic of Marta Pizarro that when speaking about her, people referred to her as the sister of the brilliant Nélida Sara, who was married and divorced.

Before choosing palette and brush, Marta Pizarro had considered the alternative of writing. She could be quite clever in French, the language in which she had done most of her reading, while Spanish was to her—like Guaraní to ladies in the Province of Corrientes—little more than a household utensil. The literary supplements had placed within her reach pages of Lugones and of the Spaniard Ortega y Gasset; the style of these masters confirmed her suspicion that the language to which she had been born was less fit for expressing the mind or the passions than for verbal showing off. Of music, all she knew was what any person who attends a concert should know. Coming from the western province of San Luis, she began her career with faithful portraits of Juan Crisóstomo Lafinur and of Colonel Pascual Pringles, which were—as was to be expected—acquired by the Provincial Museum. From portraits of local worthies, she passed on to pictures of old houses in Buenos Aires, whose quiet patios she painted with quiet colors and not that stage-set showiness with which they are frequently endowed by others. Someone—surely not Clara Figueroa— remarked that her whole art drew its inspiration from the work of anonymous nineteenth century Italian bricklayers. Between Clara Glencairn and Nélida Sara (who, according to gossip, had once had a fancy for Dr. Figueroa) there had always been a certain rivalry; perhaps the duel was between them, and Marta was merely a tool.

As is well known, most things originate in other countries and only in time find their way into the Argentine. That now so unjustly forgotten school of painters who call themselves concrete, or abstract, as if to show their utter scorn for logic and language, is but one of many examples. It was argued, as I recall, that just as music is expected to create its own world of sound, its sister art, painting, should be allowed to attempt a world of color and form without reference to any actual physical objects. The Dallas art critic Lee Kaplan wrote that this school’s pictures, which outraged the bourgeoisie, followed the Biblical proscription, also shared by the Islamic world, that man shall make no images of living things. The iconoclasts, he argued, were going back to the true tradition of painting, which had been led astray by such heretics as Dürer and Rembrandt. Kaplan’s enemies accused him of being influenced merely by broadloom rugs, kaleidoscopes, and men’s neckwear.

All aesthetic revolutions put forth a temptation toward the irresponsible and the far too easy; Clara Glencairn chose to be an abstract painter. Having always been an admirer of Turner, she set as her goal the enrichment of abstract art with the diffused splendor of the Master. She worked under no pressure, painted over or destroyed a number of canvases, and in the winter of 1954 exhibited a series of temperas in a gallery on Suipacha Street whose specialty was paintings which, according to a military metaphor then in vogue, was called the vanguard. Something paradoxical happened. On the whole, the reviews were favorable, but the sect’s official organ condemned her anomalous forms, which, although they were not representational, suggested the tumult of a sunset, a tangled forest, or the sea, and did not limit themselves to dots and stripes. Perhaps the first person to smile was Clara Glencairn. She had tried her best to be modern and the moderns had rejected her. The act of painting, however, mattered more to her than its public success, and she went on working. Indifferent to this episode, art also went on.

The secret duel had already begun. Marta was not only an artist; she was, as well, deeply committed to what may not unfairly be called the administrative side of art, and was assistant secretary of the organization known as the Giotto Circle. Sometime toward the middle of 1955, Marta managed to have Clara, who had already been accepted in the Circle, figure as a committee member among the Circle’s new officers. The fact, in itself trivial, may be worth analyzing. Marta had lent support to her friend, but it is undeniable—although mysterious—that the person who confers a favor in some way stands above the one who receives it.

Around 1960, “two plastic artists of international stature”—may we be forgiven the jargon—were in the running for a first prize. One of the candidates, the elder, had dedicated solemn oils to the representation of awe-inspiring gauchos of a Scandinavian altitude; his rather young rival, a man in his early twenties, had won both praise and indignation through deliberate chaos. The members of the jury, all past fifty and fearing that the general public would impute outdated standards to them, tended to favor the latter painter, though deep down they rather disliked him. After arguing back and forth, at first politely and finally out of boredom, they could not reach an agreement. In the course of their third meeting, one of them remarked, “B. seems quite bad to me; really, I think he’s even worse than Clara Figueroa.”

“Would you give her your vote?” said another juror, with a trace of scorn.

“Yes,” answered the first, at the brink of ill-temper.

That same evening, the prize was unanimously granted to Clara Glencairn. She was elegant, lovable, scandal had never touched her, and in her villa out in Pilar she gave parties to which the most lavish magazines sent photographers. The expected dinner in her honor was organized and offered by Marta. Clara thanked her with few and carefully chosen words, remarking that between the traditional and the new, or between order and adventure, no real opposition exists, and that what we now call tradition is made up of a centuries-old web of adventures. The banquet was attended by a large number of society people, by almost all the members of the jury, and by two or three painters.

All of us tend to think of our own circumstances in terms of a narrow range and to feel that other pastures are greener. The worship of the gaucho and the Beatus ille are but a wistfulness bred of city living; Clara Glencairn and Marta Pizarro, weary of the continual round of wealth and idleness, longed for the world of art, for people who had devoted their lives to the creation of things of beauty. My suspicion is that in Heaven the Blessed are of the opinion that the advantages of that locale have been overrated by theologians who were never actually there. Perhaps even in Hell the damned are not always satisfied.

A year or two later, in the city of Cartagena, there took place the First Congress of InterAmerican Painting and Sculpture. Each country sent its representative. The themes of the conference—may we be forgiven the jargon—were of burning interest: Can the artist disregard the indigenous? Can he omit or slight flora and fauna? Can he be insensitive to problems of a social nature? Should he not join his voice to those suffering under the yoke of Saxon imperialism? Et cetera, et cetera. Before becoming ambassador to Canada, Dr. Figueroa had performed a diplomatic mission in Cartagena. Clara, a bit proud over the prize, would have liked returning there—this time as an artist. That hope was denied her; the government appointed Marta Pizarro. According to the impartial reports of correspondents from Buenos Aires, her participation (although not always persuasive) was on several occasions quite brilliant.

Life demands a passion. Both women found it in painting, or rather, in the relationship imposed on them by painting. Clara Glencairn painted against Marta and in a sense for Marta; each of them was her rival’s judge and only public. In their pictures, which even then no one ever looked at, I think I observe—as was unavoidable—a mutual influence. Clara’s sunset glows found their way into Marta Pizarro’s patios, and Marta’s fondness for straight lines simplified the ornateness of Clara’s final stage. It is important to remember that the two women were genuinely fond of each other and that in the course of their intimate duel they behave toward one another with perfect loyalty.

It was during those years that Marta, who by then was no longer so young, rejected a marriage proposal. All that interested her was her battle. On the second of February, 1964, Clara Glencairn died of a heart ailment. The columns of the newspapers devoted long obituaries to her of the kind that are still quite common in the Argentine, where a woman is regarded as a member of the species, not an individual. Outside of some hasty mention of her dabbling in painting and of her impeccable good taste, she was praised for her religious devotion, her kindness, her constant and almost anonymous philanthropy, her illustrious family tree—General Glencairn had fought in the Brazilian campaign—and her outstanding place in society’s highest circles. Marta realized that her life now lacked a meaning. She had never before felt so useless.

Remembering her first endeavors, now so far in the past, she hung in the National Gallery a sober portrait of Clara after the manner of those English masters whom the two women had so admired. Some judged it her finest work. She was never to paint again.

In that delicate duel, only suspected by a few close friends, there were neither defeats nor victories nor even an open encounter, nor any visible circumstances other than those I have attempted respectfully to record. Only God (of whose aesthetic preferences we are unaware) can grant the final palm. The story that made its way in darkness ends in darkness.

The End of the Duel

It’s a good many years ago now that Carlos Reyles, the son of the Uruguayan novelist, told me the story one summer evening out in Adrogué. In my memory, after all this time, the long chronicle of a feud and its grim ending are mixed up with the medicinal smell of the eucalyptus trees and the babbling voices of birds.

We sat talking, as usual, of the tangled history of our two countries, Uruguay and the Argentine. Reyles said that probably I’d heard of Juan Patricio Nolan, who had won quite a reputation as a brave man, a practical joker, and a rogue. Lying, I answered yes. Though Nolan had died back in the nineties, people still thought of him as a friend. As always happens, however, he had his enemies as well. Reyles gave me an account of one of Nolan’s many pranks. The thing had happened a short time before the battle of Manantiales; two gauchos from Cerro Largo, Manuel Cardoso and Carmen Silveira, were the leading characters.

How and why did they begin hating each other? How, after a century, can one unearth the long-forgotten story of two men whose only claim to being remembered is their last duel? A foreman of Reyles’ father, whose name was Laderecha and “who had the whiskers of a tiger,” had collected from oral accounts certain details that I transcribe now with a good deal of misgiving, since both forgetfulness and memory are apt to be inventive.

Manuel Cardoso and Carmen Silveira had a few acres of land that bordered each other. Like the roots of other passions, those of hatred are mysterious, but there was talk of a quarrel over some unbranded cattle or a free-for-all horse race in which Silveira, who was the stronger of the two, had run Cardoso’s horse off the edge of the course. Months afterward, a long two-handed game of truco of thirty points was to take place in the local saloon. Following almost every hand, Silveira congratulated his opponent on his skill, but in the end left him without a cent. When he tucked his winnings away in his money belt, Silveira thanked Cardoso for the lesson he had been given. It was then, I believe, that they were at the point of having it out. The game had had its ups and downs. In those rough places and in that day, man squared off against man and steel against steel. But the onlookers, who were quite a few, separated them. A peculiar twist of the story is that Manuel Cardoso and Carmen Silveira must have run across each other out in the hills on more than one occasion at sundown or at dawn, but they never actually faced each other until the very end. Maybe their poor and monotonous lives held nothing else for them than their hatred, and that was why they nursed it. In the long run, without suspecting it, each of the two became a slave to the other.

I no longer know whether the events I am about to relate are effects or causes. Cardoso, less out of love than out of boredom, took up with a neighbor girl, La Serviliana. That was all Silveira had to find out, and, after his manner, he began courting her and brought her to his shack. A few months later, finding her in the way, he threw her out. Full of spite, the woman tried to seek shelter at Cardoso’s. Cardoso spent one night with her, and by the next noon packed her off. He did not want the other man’s leavings.

It was around that same time, just before or just after La Serviliana, that the incident of Silveira’s sheepdog took place. Silveira was very fond of the animal, and had named him Treinta y Tres, after Uruguay’s thirty-three founding fathers. When the dog was found dead in a ditch, Silveira was quick to suspect who had given it poison.

Sometime during the winter of 1870, a civil war broke out between the Colorados, or Reds, who were in power, and Aparicio’s Blancos, or Whites. The revolution found Silveira and Cardoso in the same crossroads saloon where they had played their game of cards. A Brazilian half-breed, at the head of a detachment of gaucho militiamen, harangued all those present, telling them that the country needed them and that the government oppression was unbearable. He handed around white badges to mark them as Blancos, and at the end of his speech, which nobody understood, everyone in the place was rounded up. They were not allowed even to say goodbye to their families.

Manuel Cardoso and Carmen Silveira accepted their fate; a soldier’s life was no harder than a gaucho’s. Sleeping in the open on their sheepskin saddle blankets was something to which they were already hardened, and as for killing men, that held no difficulty for hands already in the habit of killing cattle. The clinking of stirrups and weapons is one of the things always heard when cavalry enter into action. The man who is not wounded at the outset thinks himself invulnerable. A lack of imagination freed Cardoso and Silveira from fear and from pity, although once in a while, heading a charge, fear brushed them. They were never homesick. The idea of patriotism was alien to them, and, in spite of the badges they wore on their hats, one party was to them the same as the other. During the course of marches and countermarches, they learned what a man could do with a spear, and they found out that being companions allowed them to go on being enemies. They fought shoulder to shoulder and, for all we know, did not exchange a single word.

It was in the sultry fall of 1871 that their end was to come. The fight, which would not last an hour, happened in a place whose name they never knew. (Such places are later named by historians.) On the eve of battle, Cardoso crept on all fours into his officer’s tent and asked him sheepishly would he save him one of the Reds if the Whites won the next day, because up till then he had not cut anyone’s throat and he wanted to know what it was like. His superior promised him that if he handled himself like a man he would be granted that favor.

The Whites outnumbered the enemy, but the Reds were better equipped and cut them down from the crown of a hill. After two unsuccessful charges that never reached the summit, the Whites’ commanding officer, badly wounded, surrendered. On the very spot, at his own request, he was put to death by the knife.

The men laid down their arms. Captain Juan Patricio Nolan, who commanded the Reds, arranged the expected execution of the prisoners down to the last detail. He was from Cerro Largo himself, and knew all about the old rivalry between Silveira and Cardoso. He sent for the pair and told them, “I already know you two can’t stand the sight of each other, and that for some time now you’ve been looking for a chance to have it out. I have good news for you. Before sundown, the two of you are going to have that chance to show who’s the better man. I’m going to stand you up and have your throats cut, and then you’ll run a race. God knows who’ll win.” The soldier who had brought them took them away.

It was not long before the news spread throughout the camp. Nolan had made up his mind that the race would close the proceedings, but the prisoners sent him a representative to tell him that they, too, wanted to be spectators and to place wagers on the outcome. Nolan, who was an understanding man, let himself be convinced. The bets were laid down—money, riding gear, spears, sabers, and horses. In due time they would be handed over to the widows and next of kin. The heat was unusual. So that no one would miss his siesta, things were delayed until four o’clock. Nolan, in the South American style, kept them waiting another hour. He was probably discussing the campaign with his officers, his aide shuttling in and out with the maté kettle.

Both sides of the dirt road in front of the tents were lined with prisoners, who, to make things easier, squatted on the ground with their hands tied behind their backs. A few of them relieved their feelings in a torrent of swearwords, one went over and over the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer, almost all were stunned. Of course, they could not smoke. They no longer cared about the race now, but they all watched.

“They’ll be cutting my throat on me, too,” one of them said, showing his envy.

“Sure, but along with the mob,” said his neighbor.

“Same as you,” the first man snapped back.

With his saber, a sergeant drew a line in the dust across the road. Silveira’s and Cardoso’s wrists had been untied so that they could run freely. A space of some five yards was between them. Each man toed the mark. A couple of the officers asked the two not to let them down because everyone had placed great faith in them, and the sums they had bet on them came to quite a pile.

It fell to Silveira’s lot to draw as executioner the mulatto Nolan, whose forefathers had no doubt been slaves of the captain’s family and therefore bore his name. Cardoso drew the Red’s official cutthroat, a man from Corrientes well along in years, who, to comfort a condemned man, would pat him on the shoulder and tell him, “Take heart, friend. Women go through far worse when they give birth.”

Their torsos bent forward, the two eager men did not look at each other. Nolan gave the signal.

The mulatto, swelling with pride to be at the center of attention, overdid his job and opened a showy slash that ran from ear to ear; the man from Corrientes did his with a narrow slit. Spurts of blood gushed from the men’s throats. They dashed forward a number of steps before tumbling face down. Cardoso, as he fell, stretched out his arms. Perhaps never aware of it, he had won.

The Intruder

. . .
passing the love of women.

2 Samuel 1:26

People say (but this is unlikely) that the story was first told by Eduardo, the younger of the Nelsons, at the wake of his elder brother Cristián, who died in his sleep sometime back in the nineties out in the district of Morón. The fact is that someone got it from someone else during the course of that drawn-out and now dim night, between one sip of mate and the next, and told it to Santiago Dabove, from whom I heard it. Years later, in Turdera, where the story had taken place, I heard it again. The second and more elaborate version closely followed the one Santiago told, with the usual minor variations and discrepancies. I set down the story now because I see in it, if I’m not mistaken, a brief and tragic mirror of the character of those hard-bitten men living on the edge of Buenos Aires before the turn of the century. I hope to do this in a straightforward way, but I see in advance that I shall give in to the writer’s temptation of emphasizing or adding certain details.

In Turdera, where they lived, they were called the Nilsens. The priest there told me that his predecessor remembered having seen in the house of these people—somewhat in amazement—a worn Bible with a dark binding and blackletter type; on the back flyleaf he caught a glimpse of names and dates written in by hand. It was the only book in the house—the roaming chronicle of the Nilsens, lost as one day all things will be lost. The rambling old house, which no longer stands, was of unplastered brick; through the arched entranceway you could make out a patio paved with red tiles and beyond it a second one of hard-packed earth. Few people, at any rate, ever set foot inside; the Nilsens kept to themselves. In their almost bare rooms they slept on cots. Their extravagances were horses, silver-trimmed riding gear, the short-bladed dagger, and getting dressed up on Saturday nights, when they blew their money freely and got themselves into boozy brawls. They were both tall, I know, and wore their red hair long. Denmark or Ireland, which they probably never heard of, ran in the blood of these two Argentine brothers. The neighborhood feared the Redheads; it is likely that one of them, at least, had killed his man. Once, shoulder to shoulder, they tangled with the police. It is said that the younger brother was in a fight with Juan Iberra in which he didn’t do too badly, and that, according to those in the know, is saying something. They were drovers, teamsters, horse thieves, and, once in a while, professional gamblers. They had a reputation for stinginess, except when drink and cardplaying turned them into spenders. Of their relatives or where they themselves came from, nothing is known. They owned a cart and a yoke of oxen.

Their physical make-up differed from that of the rest of the toughs who gave the Costa Brava its unsavory reputation. This, and a lot that we don’t know, helps us understand the close ties between them. To fall out with one of them was to reckon with two enemies.

The Nilsens liked carousing with women, but up until then their amorous escapades had always been carried out in darkened passageways or in whorehouses. There was no end of talk, then, when Cristián brought Juliana Burgos to live with him. Admittedly, in this way he gained a servant, but it is also true that he took to squandering his money buying her the most hideous junk jewelry, and showing her off at parties. At those dingy parties held in tenements, where suggestive dance steps were strictly forbidden and where, at that time, partners still danced with a good six inches of light showing between them. Juliana was a dark girl and her eyes had a slight slant to them; all anyone had to do was look at her and she’d break into a smile. For a poor neighborhood, where drudgery and neglect wear women out, she was not bad-looking.

In the beginning, Eduardo went places with them. Later, at one point, he set out on a journey north to Arrecifes on some business or other, returning home with a girl he had picked up along the way. But after a few days he threw her out. He turned more sullen; he took to drinking alone at the comer saloon and kept completely to himself. He had fallen in love with Cristián’s woman. The whole neighborhood, which may have realized it before he did, maliciously and cheerfully looked forward to the enmity about to break out between the two brothers.

Late one night, on coming from the comer, Eduardo saw Cristián’s horse, a big bay, tied to the hitching post. Inside in the patio, dressed in his Sunday best, his older brother was waiting for him. The woman shuttled in and out serving maté. Cristián said to Eduardo, “I’m on my way over to Farías’ place, where they’re throwing a party. Juliana stays here with you; if you want her, use her.”

His tone was half-commanding, half-friendly.

Eduardo stood there a while staring at him, not knowing what to do. Cristián got up, said goodbye—to his brother, not to Juliana, who was no more than an object—mounted his horse, and rode off at a jog, casually.

From that night on they shared her. Nobody will ever know the details of this strange partnership which outraged even the Costa Brava’s sense of decency. The arrangement went well for several weeks, but it could not last. Between them the brothers never mentioned her name, not even to call her, but they kept looking for, and finding, reasons to be at odds. They argued over the sale of some hides, but what they were really arguing about was something else. Cristián took to raising his voice, while Eduardo kept silent. Without knowing it, they were watching each other. In tough neighborhoods a man never admits to anyone—not even to himself—that a woman matters beyond lust and possession, but the two brothers were in love. This, in some way, made them feel ashamed.

One afternoon, in the square in Lomas, Eduardo ran into Juan Iberra, who congratulated him on this beauty he’d got hold of. It was then, I believe, that Eduardo let him have it. Nobody—not to his face—was going to poke fun at Cristián.

The woman attended both men's wants with an animal submission, but she was unable to keep hidden a certain preference, probably for the younger man, who had not refused sharing her but who had not proposed it either.

One day, they ordered Juliana to bring two chairs out into the first patio and then not show her face for a while because they had things to talk over. Expecting a long session between them, she lay down for a nap, but before very long they woke her up. She was to fill a sack with all her belongings, including her glass-bead rosary and the tiny crucifix her mother had left her. Without any explanation, they lifted her onto the oxcart and set out on a long, tiresome, and silent journey. It had rained; the roads were heavy with mud, and it was nearly daybreak before they reached Morón. There they sold her to the woman who ran the whorehouse. The terms had already been agreed to; Cristián pocketed the money and later on split it with his brother.

Back in Turdera, the Nilsens, up till then trapped in the web (which was also a routine) of this monstrous love affair, tried to take up their old life of men among men. They went back to cardplaying, to cockfights, to their Saturday night binges. At times, perhaps, they felt they were saved, but they often indulged—each on his own—in unaccountable or only too accountable absences. A little before the year was out, the younger brother said he had business in the city. Immediately, Cristián went off to Morón; at the hitching post of the whorehouse he recognized Eduardo’s piebald. Cristián walked in; there was his brother, sure enough, waiting his turn. It is said that Cristián told him, “If we go on this way, we’ll wear out the horses. We’d be better off keeping her close at hand.”

He spoke with the owner of the place, drew a handful of coins out of his money belt, and they took the girl away. Juliana rode with Cristián. Eduardo dug his spurs into his horse, not wanting to see them together.

They went back to what has already been told. Their solution had ended in failure, for the two had fallen into cheating. Cain was on the loose here, but the affection between the Nilsens was great—who knows what hard times and what dangers they may have faced together!— and they preferred taking their feelings out on others. On strangers, on the dogs, on Juliana, who had set this wedge between them.

The month of March was coming to a close and there was no sign of the heat’s letting up. One Sunday (on Sundays people go to bed early), Eduardo, on his way home from the comer saloon, saw that Cristián was yoking the oxen. Cristián said to him, “Come on. We have to leave some hides off at Pardo’s place. I’ve already loaded them; let’s make the best of the night air.”

Pardo’s warehouse lay, I believe, farther south; they took the old cattle trail, then turned down a side road. As night fell, the countryside seemed wider and wider.

They skirted a growth of tall reeds; Cristián threw down the cigar he had just lit, and said evenly, “Let’s get busy, brother. In a while the buzzards will take over. This afternoon I killed her. Let her stay here with all her trinkets, she won’t cause us any more harm.”

They threw their arms around each other, on the verge of tears. One more link bound them now—the woman they had cruelly sacrificed and their common need to forget her.

The Meeting

To Susana Bombal

Anyone leafing his way through the morning paper does so either to escape his surroundings or to provide himself with small talk for later in the day, so it is not to be wondered at that no one any longer remembers—or else remembers as in a dream—the famous and once widely discussed case of Maneco Uriarte and of Duncan. The event took place, furthermore, back around 1910, the year of the comet and the Centennial, and since then we have had and have lost so many things. Both protagonists are now dead; those who witnessed the episode solemnly swore silence. I, too, raised my hand for the oath, feeling the importance of the ritual with all the romantic seriousness of my nine or ten years. I do not know whether the others noticed that I had given my word; I do not know whether they kept theirs. Anyway, here is the story, with all the inevitable variations brought about by time and by good or bad writing.

My cousin Lafinur took me to a barbecue that evening at a country house called The Laurels, which belonged to some friends of his. I cannot fix its exact location; let us take any of those suburban towns lying just to the north, shaded and quiet, that slope down to the river and that have nothing in common with sprawling Buenos Aires and its surrounding prairie. The journey by train lasted long enough to seem endless to me, but time for children—as is well known— flows slowly. It was already dark when we passed through the villa’s main gate. Here, I felt, were all the ancient, elemental things: the smell of meat cooking golden brown, the trees, the dogs, the kindling wood, and the fire that brings men together.

The guests numbered about a dozen; all were grown-ups. The eldest, I learned later, was not yet thirty. They were also—this I was soon to find out—well versed in matters about which I am still somewhat backward: race horses, the right tailors, motorcars, and notoriously expensive women. No one ruffled my shyness, no one paid any attention to me. The lamb, slowly and skillfully prepared by one of the hired men, kept us a long time in the big dining room. The dates of vintages were argued back and forth. There was a guitar; my cousin, if I remember correctly, sang a couple of Elías Regules’ ballads about gauchos in the back country of Uruguay and some verses in dialect, in the incipient lunfardo of those days, about a knife fight in a brothel on Junín Street. Coffee and Havana cigars were brought in. Not a word about getting back. I felt (in the words of the poet Lugones) the fear of what is suddenly too late. I dared not look at the clock. In order to disguise my boyish loneliness among grown-ups, I put away—not really liking it—a glass or two of wine. Uriarte, in a loud voice, proposed to Duncan a two-handed game of poker. Someone objected that that land of play made for a poor game and suggested a hand of four. Duncan agreed, but Uriarte, with a stubbornness that I did not understand and that I did not try to understand, insisted on the first scheme. Outside of truco— a game whose real aim is to pass time with mischief and verses—and of the modest mazes of solitaire, I never enjoyed cards. I slipped away without anyone’s noticing. A rambling old house, unfamiliar and dark (only in the dining room was there light), means more to a boy than a new country means to a traveler. Step by step, I explored the rooms; I recall a billiard room, a long gallery with rectangular and diamond-shaped panes, a couple of rocking chairs, and a window from which you could just make out a summerhouse. In the darkness I lost my way; the owner of the house, whose name, as I recall after all these years, may have been Acevedo or Acebal, finally came across me somehow. Out of kindness or perhaps out of a collector’s vanity, he led me to a display cabinet. On lighting a lamp, I saw the glint of steel. It was a collection of knives that had once been in the hands of famous fighters. He told me that he had a bit of land somewhere to the north around Pergamino, and that he had been picking up these things on his travels back and forth across the province. He opened the cabinet and, without looking at what was written on the tags, he began giving me accounts of each item; they were more or less the same except for dates and place names. I asked him whether among the weapons he might have the dagger of Juan Moreira, who was in that day the archetype of the gaucho, as later Martín Fierro and Don Segundo Sombra would be. He had to confess that he hadn’t but that he could show me one like it, with a U-shaped crosspiece in the hilt. He was interrupted by the sound of angry voices. At once he shut the cabinet and turned to leave; I followed him.

Uriarte was shouting that his opponent had tried to cheat him. All the others stood around the two players. Duncan, I remember, was a taller man than the rest of the company, and was well built, though somewhat round-shouldered; his face was expressionless, and his hair was so light it was almost white. Maneco Uriarte was nervous, dark, with perhaps a touch of Indian blood, and wore a skimpy, petulant moustache. It was obvious that everybody was drunk; I do not know whether there were two or three emptied bottles on the floor or whether an excess of movies suggests this false memory to me. Uriarte’s insults did not let up; at first sharp, they now grew obscene. Duncan appeared not to hear, but finally, as though weary, he got up and threw a punch. From the floor, Uriarte snarled that he was not going to take this outrage, and he challenged Duncan to fight.

Duncan said no, and added, as though to explain, “The trouble is I’m afraid of you.”

Everybody howled with laughter.

Uriarte, picking himself up, answered, “I’m going to have it out with you, and right now.” Someone—may he be forgiven for it—remarked that weapons were not lacking.

I do not know who went and opened the glass cabinet. Maneco Uriarte picked out the showiest and longest dagger, the one with the U-shaped crosspiece; Duncan, almost absentmindedly, picked a wooden-handled knife with the stamp of a tiny tree on the blade. Someone else said it was just like Maneco to play it safe, to choose a sword. It astonished no one that his hand began shaking; what was astonishing is that the same thing happened with Duncan.

Tradition demands that men about to fight should respect the house in which they are guests, and step outside. Half on a spree, half seriously, we all went out into the damp night. I was not drunk—at least, not on wine—but I was reeling with adventure; I wished very hard that someone would be killed, so that later I could tell about it and always remember it. Maybe at that moment the others were no more adult than I was. I also had the feeling that an overpowering current was dragging us on and would drown us. Nobody believed the least bit in Maneco’s accusation; everyone saw it as the fruit of an old rivalry, exacerbated by the wine.

We pushed our way through a clump of trees, leaving behind the summerhouse. Uriarte and Duncan led the way, wary of each other. The rest of us strung ourselves out around the edge of an opening of lawn. Duncan had stopped there in the moonlight and said, with mild authority, “This looks like the right place.”

The two men stood in the center, not quite knowing what to do. A voice rang out: “Let go of all that hardware and use your hands!”

But the men were already fighting. They began clumsily, almost as if they were afraid of hurting each other; they began by watching the blades, but later their eyes were on one another. Uriarte had laid aside his anger, Duncan his contempt or aloofness. Danger, in some way, had transfigured them; these were now two men fighting, not boys. I had imagined the fight as a chaos of steel; instead, I was able to follow it, or almost follow it, as though it were a game of chess. The intervening years may, of course, have exaggerated or blurred what I saw. I do not know how long it lasted; there are events that fall outside the common measure of time.

Without ponchos to act as shields, they used their forearms to block each lunge of the knife. Their sleeves, soon hanging in shreds, grew black with blood. I thought that we had gone wrong in supposing that they knew nothing about this kind of fencing. I noticed right off that they handled themselves in different ways. Their weapons were unequal. Duncan, in order to make up for his disadvantage, tried to stay in close to the other man; Uriarte kept stepping back to be able to lunge out with long, low thrusts. The same voice that had called attention to the display cabinet shouted out now: “They’re killing each other! Stop them!”

But no one dared break it up. Uriarte had lost ground; Duncan charged him. They were almost body to body now. Uriarte’s weapon sought Duncan’s face. Suddenly the blade seemed shorter, for it was piercing the taller man’s chest. Duncan lay stretched out on the grass. It was at this point that he said, his voice very low, “How strange. All this is like a dream.”

He did not shut his eyes, he did not move, and I had seen a man kill another man.

Maneco Uriarte bent over the body, sobbing openly, and begged to be forgiven. The thing he had just done was beyond him. I know now that he regretted less having committed a crime than having earned out a senseless act.

I did not want to look anymore. What I had wished for so much had happened, and it left me shaken. Lafinur told me later that they had had to struggle hard to pull out the weapon. A makeshift council was formed. They decided to lie as little as possible and to elevate this duel with knives to a duel with swords. Four of them volunteered as seconds, among them Acebal. In Buenos Aires anything can be fixed; someone always has a friend.

On top of the mahogany table where the men had been playing, a pack of English cards and a pile of bills lay in a jumble that nobody wanted to look at or to touch.

In the years that followed, I often considered revealing the story to some friend, but always I felt that there was a greater pleasure in being the keeper of a secret than in telling it. However, around 1929, a chance conversation suddenly moved me one day to break my long silence. The retired police captain, don José Olave, was recalling stories about men from the tough riverside neighborhood of the Retiro who had been handy with their knives; he remarked that when they were out to kill their man, scum of this kind had no use for the rules of the game, and that before all the fancy playing with daggers that you saw now on the stage, knife fights were few and far between. I said I had witnessed one, and gave him an account of what had happened nearly twenty years earlier.

He listened to me with professional attention, then said, “Are you sure Uriarte and What’s-His-Name never handled a knife before? Maybe they had picked up a thing or two around their fathers’ ranches.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Everybody there that night knew one another pretty well, and I can tell you they were all amazed at the way the two men fought.”

Olave went on in his quiet manner, as if thinking aloud. “One of the weapons had a U-shaped crosspiece in the handle. There were two daggers of that kind which became quite famous—Moreira’s and Juan Almada’s. Almada was from down south, in Tapalquén.”

Something seemed to come awake in my memory. Olave continued. “You also mentioned a knife with a wooden handle, one with the Little Tree brand. There are thousands of them, but there was one—"

He broke off for a moment, then said, “Señor Acevedo had a big property up around Pergamino. There was another of these famous toughs from up that way—Juan Almanza was his name. This was along about the turn of the century. When he was fourteen, he killed his first man with one of these knives. From then on, for luck, he stuck to the same one. Juan Almanza and Juan Almada had it in for each other, jealous of the fact that many people confused the two. For a long time they searched high and low for one another, but they never met. Juan Almanza was killed by a stray bullet during some election brawl or other. The other man, I think, died a natural death in a hospital bed in Las Flores.”

Nothing more was said. Each of us was left with his own conclusions.

Nine or ten men, none of whom is any longer living, saw what my eyes saw—that sudden stab and the body under the night sky—but perhaps what we were really seeing was the end of another story, an older story. I began to wonder whether it was Maneco Uriarte who killed Duncan or whether in some uncanny way it could have been the weapons, not the men, which fought. I still remember how Uriarte’s hand shook when he first gripped his knife, and the same with Duncan, as though the knives were coming awake after a long sleep side by side in the cabinet. Even after their gauchos were dust, the knives—the knives, not their tools, the men—knew how to fight. And that night they fought well.

Things last longer than people; who knows whether these knives will meet again, who knows whether the story ends here.

Juan Muraña

For years now, I have been telling people I grew up in that part of Buenos Aires known as Palermo. This, I’ve come to realize, is mere literary bravado; the truth is that I really grew up on the inside of a long iron picket fence in a house with a garden and with my father’s and his father’s library. The Palermo of knife fights and of guitar playing lurked (so they say) on street comers and down back alleys. In 1930, I wrote a study of Evaristo Carriego, a neighbor of ours, a poet and glorifier of the city’s outlying slums. A little after that, chance brought me face to face with Emilio Trápani. I was on the train to Morón. Trápani, who was sitting next to the window, called me by name. For some time I could not place him, so many years had passed since we’d been classmates in a school on Thames Street. Roberto Godel, another classmate, may remember him.

Trápani and I never had any great liking for each other. Time had set us apart, and also our mutual indifference. He had taught me, I now recall, all the basic slang words of the day. Riding along, we struck up one of those trivial conversations that force you to unearth pointless facts and that lead up to the discovery of the death of a fellow-schoolmate who is no longer anything more than a name. Then, abruptly, Trápani said to me, “Someone lent me your Carriego book, where you’re talking about hoodlums all the time. Tell me, Borges, what in the world can you know about hoodlums?” He stared at me with a kind of wonder.

“I’ve done research,” I answered.

Not letting me go on, he said, “Research is the word, all right. Personally, I have no use for research—I know these people inside out.” After a moment’s silence, he added, as though he were letting me in on a secret, “I’m Juan Muraña’s nephew.”

Of all the men around Palermo famous for handling a knife way back in the nineties, the one with the widest reputation was Muraña. Trápani went on, “Florentina—my aunt—was his wife. Maybe you’ll be interested in this story.”

Certain devices of a literary nature and one or two longish sentences led me to suspect that this was not the first time he had told the story.

My mother [Trápani said] could never quite stomach the fact that her sister had linked herself up with a man like Muraña, who to her was just a big brute, while to Aunt Florentina he was a man of action. A lot of stories circulated about my uncle’s end. Some say that one night when he was dead drunk he tumbled from the seat of his wagon, making the turn around the comer of Coronel, and cracked his skull on the cobblestones. It’s also said that the law was on his heels and he ran away to Uruguay. My mother, who couldn’t stand her brother-in-law, never explained to me what actually happened. I was just a small boy then and have no memories of him.

Along about the time of the Centennial, we were living in a long, narrow house on Russell Alley. The back door, which was always kept locked, opened on the other side of the block, on San Salvador Street. My aunt, who was well along in years and a bit queer, had a room with us up in our attic. Big-boned but thin as a stick, she was—or seemed to me—very tall. She also wasted few words. Living in fear of fresh air, she never went out; nor did she like our going into her room. More than once, I caught her stealing and hiding food. The talk around the neighborhood was that Muraña’s death, or disappearance, had affected her mind. I remember her always in black. She had also fallen into the habit of talking to herself.

Our house belonged to a certain Mr. Luchessi, the owner of a barbershop on the Southside, in Barracas. My mother, who did piecework at home as a seamstress, was in financial straits. Without being able to understand them, I heard whispered terms like “court order” and “eviction notice.” My mother was really at her wit’s end, and my aunt kept saying stubbornly that Juan was not going to stand by and let the gringo, that wop, throw us out. She recalled the incident—which all of us knew by heart—of a bigmouthed tough from the Southside who had dared doubt her husband’s courage. Muraña, the moment he found out, took all the trouble to go clear across the town, ferret the man out, put him straight with a blow of his knife, and dump his body into the Riachuelo. I don’t know if the story’s true; what matters is that it was told and that it became accepted.

I saw myself sleeping in empty lots on Serrano Street or begging handouts or going around with a basket of peaches. Selling on the streets tempted me, because it would free me from school. I don’t know how long our troubles lasted. Your late father once told us that you can’t measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well. I didn’t quite understand what he meant, but the words stuck in my mind.

One night, I had a dream that ended in a nightmare. I dreamed of my Uncle Juan. I had never got to know him, but I thought of him as a burly man with a touch of the Indian about him, a sparse moustache and his hair long. He and I were heading south, cutting through huge stone quarries and scrub, but these quarries and thickets were also Thames Street. In the dream, the sun was high overhead. Uncle Juan was dressed in a black suit. He stopped beside a sort of scaffolding in a narrow mountain pass. He held his hand under his jacket, around the level of his heart—not like a person who’s about to pull a knife but as though he were keeping the hand hidden. In a very sad voice, he told me, “I’ve changed a lot.” He withdrew the hand, and what I saw was the claw of a vulture. I woke up screaming in the dark.

The next day, my mother made me go with her to Luchessi’s. I know she was going to ask him for extra time; she probably took me along so that our landlord would see her helplessness. She didn’t mention a word of this to her sister, who would never have let her lower herself in such a way. I hadn’t ever set foot in Barracas before; it seemed to me there were a lot more people around than I imagined there’d be, and a lot more traffic and fewer vacant lots. From the comer, we saw several policemen and a flock of people in front of the house we were looking for. A neighbor went from group to group telling everyone that around three o’clock that morning he had been awakened by someone thumping on a door. He heard the door open and someone go in. Nobody shut the door, and as soon as it was light Luchessi was found lying there in the entranceway, half dressed. He’d been stabbed a number of times. The man lived alone; the authorities never caught up with the murderer. Nothing, it seems, had been stolen. At the time, somebody recalled that the deceased had almost lost his sight. In an important-sounding voice, someone else said, “His time had come.” This judgment and the tone made an impression on me; as the years passed I was to find out that any time a person dies there’s always somebody who makes this same discovery.

At the wake, we were offered coffee and I had a cup. In the coffin there was a wax dummy in place of the dead man. I mentioned this to my mother; one of the undertaker’s men laughed and explained to me that the dummy dressed in black was Mr. Luchessi. I stood spellbound, staring at him. My mother had to yank me away.

For months afterward, nobody talked of anything else. Crimes were so few in those days; just remember all the fuss that was made over the case of Melena, Campana, and Silletero. The one person in all Buenos Aires who showed no interest whatever was Aunt Florentina. She kept on saying, with the persistence of old age, “I told you Juan would never let that gringo put us out in the street.”

One day, it rained buckets. As I could not go to school that morning, I began rummaging through the house. I climbed up to the attic. There was my aunt, sitting with her hands folded together; I could tell that she wasn’t even thinking. The room smelled damp. In one corner stood the iron bedstead, with her rosary beads attached to one of the bars, in another a wooden chest where she kept her clothes. A picture of the Virgin was pinned to one of the whitewashed walls. On the table by the bed was a candlestick. Without lifting her eyes, my aunt said, “I know what brings you up here. Your mother sent you. She just doesn’t seem to understand that it was Juan who saved us.”

“Juan?” I said, amazed. “Juan died over ten years ago.”

“Juan is here,” she told me. “Do you want to see him?” She opened the drawer of the night table and took out a dagger, then went on speaking in a soft, low voice. “Here he is. I knew he would never forsake me. In the whole world there hasn’t been another man like him. He didn’t let the gringo get out a word.”

It was only then that I understood. That poor raving woman had murdered Luchessi. Driven by hate, by madness, and maybe—who knows—by love, she had slipped out by the back door, had made her way block after block in the dead of night, had found the house she was after, and, with those big, bony hands, had sunk the dagger. The dagger was Muraña—it was the dead man she had gone on worshiping.

I never knew whether she told my mother the story or not. She died a short time before the eviction.

Here Trápani—whom I have never run across again—ended his account. Since then, I have often thought about this bereft woman and about her man. Juan Muraña walked the familiar streets of my boyhood; I may have seen him many times, unawares. He was a man who knew what all men come to know, a man who tasted death and was afterward a knife, and is now the memory of a knife, and will tomorrow be oblivion—the oblivion that awaits us all.

The Elder Lady

On the fourteenth of January, 1941, María Justina Rubio de Jáuregui was to be one hundred years old. She was the last surviving daughter of any of the soldiers who had fought in the South American War of Independence.

Colonel Mariano Rubio, her father, was what might, without irreverence, be called a minor immortal. Born in 1799 in the Buenos Aires parish of La Merced, the son of local landowners, he was promoted to ensign in San Martín’s Army of the Andes, and he fought in the battle of Chacabuco, in the defeat of Cancha Rayada, at Maipú, and, two years after that, at Arequipa. It is told that on the eve of one of these battles, he and a fellow-officer, José de Olavarría, exchanged swords. At the beginning of April, 1823, there took place the famous engagement of Big Hill, which, having been fought in a valley between two summits, is often also known as the battle of Red Hill. Always envious of our glories, the Venezuelans attribute this victory to General Simón Bolívar, but the impartial observer, the Argentine historian, is not easily taken in and knows only too well that the laurels rightfully belong to Colonel Mariano Rubio. The Colonel, at the head of a regiment of Colombian hussars, turned the tide in this battle, waged entirely with sabers and lances, which paved the way for the no less famous action at Ayacucho, in which he also took part, receiving a wound. In 1827, it was his fate to fight boldly at Ituzaingó, under the immediate command of Alvear. In spite of his blood tie with the dictator Rosas, in later years he Was one of Lavalle’s men, and once broke up a troop of gaucho militia in an action the Colonel always referred to as a saberfest. With the defeat of the Unitarians, he emigrated to Uruguay, where he married. In the eighteen-forties, in the course of that country’s long civil war, the Guerra Grande, he died in Montevideo during the siege of the city by Oribe’s Blancos. He was nearly forty-four, which at that time was almost old age. He had been a friend of the writer Florencio Varela. It is quite likely that professors at the Military Academy would have flunked him, since his only experience lay in fighting battles, not in taking examinations.

He left two daughters, of which the younger, María Justina, is the one who concerns us.

Toward the end of 1853, the Colonel’s widow and his daughters settled in Buenos Aires. They never got back their lands, which had been confiscated by the dictator during the Colonel’s long absence, but the memory of those miles and miles of lost acres on which they had never laid eyes survived in the family for many years. At the age of seventeen, María Justina married the physician Bernado Jáuregui, who, though a civilian, fought during the civil wars in the battles of Pavón and Cepeda, and later died practicing his profession during the yellow-fever epidemic of the eighteen-seventies. He left a son and two daughters. Mariano, the firstborn, was a customs inspector, and he used to frequent the National Library and National Archives, with the intention of compiling an exhaustive life of the hero, his grandfather, which he never finished and perhaps never began. The older daughter, María Elvira, married a cousin, a Saavedra, who was employed in the Ministry of Finance. Julia, the second daughter, had married a Mr. Molinari, who, despite his Italian name, was a professor of Latin and a person of the highest accomplishments. I pass over grandchildren and great-grandchildren; it is enough that my reader picture a family that is honorable, that has come down in life, and that is presided over by a heroic shade and by a daughter born in exile.

The family lived modestly in Palermo, in what at the time was the outskirts of Buenos Aires, not far from the church of Guadalupe. Mariano still remembered having seen there, from a tramcar of the Grand National Lines, the big pond on whose shores were scattered a series of hovels, not of galvanized-iron sheets but of unplastered brick. Yesterday’s poverty was less poor than the poverty handed down to us today by industrialism. Fortunes were also much smaller then.

The Rubios lived above a local dry-goods store. The stairway was narrow; the banister, which ran up the right-hand side, led to a longish corridor, at the end of which was a dark vestibule, where there were a coatrack and a few chairs. The vestibule opened into the small drawing room, with its upholstered furniture, and the drawing room into the dining room, with its mahogany furniture and glass-fronted china closet. The metal shutters, always kept drawn in fear of the sunlight, let a little dim twilight filter through. I recall an odor of stored away things. At the back of the house were the bedrooms, the bathroom, a small gallery with a laundry tub, and the servant’s room. In the whole house there were no books other than a volume of the poet Andrade; a short biography of the hero, with handwritten additions scribbled into the margins; and Montaner y Simón’s Hispano-American Encyclopedia, acquired on installments, together with the small set of shelves that came with it. They lived on a pension, which was never paid them punctually, and on the income from a rented property—the single remains of the once vast acreage—in Lomas de Zamora.

At the time of my story, the elder lady lived with Julia, who was widowed, and with Julia’s son. Mrs. Jáuregui went on hating bygone tyrants—Artigas, Rosas, and Urquiza. The First World War, which made her loathe the Germans, about whom she knew very little, was less real to her than the revolution of 1890 and, needless to say, the cavalry charge at Big Hill. Since 1932, she had been growing dimmer and dimmer; common metaphors are the best because they are the only true ones. She was, of course, a Catholic, which does not necessarily mean that she believed in a God that is One and is Three, or even in an afterlife. While her hands moved over her rosary, she muttered prayers that she had never understood. In place of Easter and of Twelfth Night she had accepted Christmas, just as she had grown to accept tea instead of maté. To her, the words “Protestant,” “Jew,” “Freemason,” “heretic,” and “atheist” were synonyms and empty of meaning. While she could still talk, she spoke not of Spaniards but of godos, or Goths, just as her ancestors had done. During the Centennial, in 1910, she could hardly believe that the Spanish Infanta—who, after all, was a princess—spoke, against all expectation, like a common Spaniard and not like an Argentine lady; it was at her son-in-law’s wake that a rich relative, who had never set foot in the Jáuregui house but whose name they avidly sought in the society pages of the newspapers, gave her the disquieting news. Many of the place names that Mrs. Jáuregui used had long since been altered; she still spoke of such streets as Las Artes, Temple, Buen Orden, La Piedad, the two Calles Largas, and of the Plaza del Parque and the Portones. The family affected these archaisms, which in her were spontaneous. They spoke of “Orientales” instead of “Uruguayans.”

Mrs. Jáuregui never went out of the house after 1921; perhaps she never suspected that Buenos Aires had been changing and growing. First memories are the most vivid. The city that she pictured beyond her front door may well have been a much earlier one than that of the time they were forced to move from the center of town out to Palermo. If so, to her the oxen that hauled wagons still rested in the square of the Once, and dead violets still spread their fragrance among the gardens of Barraeas. “Now all my dreams are of dead people” was one of the last things she was heard to say. No one had ever thought of her as a fool, but as far as I know she had never enjoyed the pleasures of the mind; the last pleasures left her would be those of memory and, later on, of forgetfulness. She had always been generous. I recall her bright, quiet eyes and her smile. Who knows what tumult of passions—now lost but which once burned—there had been in that old woman; in her day, she had been quite pleasant looking. Sensitive to plants, whose modest and silent life was so akin to her own, she looked after some begonias in her room and touched their leaves, which she could no longer see. Up until 1929, the year in which she sank into a kind of half sleep, she recounted historical happenings, but always using the same words in the same order, as if they were the Lord’s Prayer, so that I grew to suspect there were no longer any real images behind them. Even eating one thing or another was all the same to her. She was, in short, happy.

Sleeping, as we all know, is the most secret of our acts. We devote a third of our lives to it, and yet do not understand it. For some, it is no more than an eclipse of wakefulness; for others, a more complex state spanning at one and the same time past, present, and future; for still others, an uninterrupted series of dreams. To say that Mrs. Jáuregui spent ten years in a quiet chaos is perhaps mistaken; each moment of those ten years may well have been a pure present, without a before or after. There is no reason to marvel at such a present, which we count by days and nights and by the hundreds of leaves of many calendars and by anxieties and events; it is what we go through every morning before waking up and every night before falling asleep. Twice each day, we are all the elder lady.

The Jáuregui family lived, as we have already seen, in a somewhat false situation. They felt they belonged to the aristocracy, but the people spoken of in the society column knew nothing whatever about them; they were descendants of a founding father, but more often than not the schoolbooks overlooked him. While it is undeniable that a street bore his name, that street, known to very few people, was lost somewhere out behind the sprawling Westside cemetery.

The fourteenth of January was drawing near.

On the tenth, an officer in full-dress uniform delivered to the family a letter signed by the Minister of War himself, announcing his visit on the fourteenth. The Jáureguis showed the letter to the whole neighborhood and made a great deal of the engraved stationery and the signature. Then the newspapermen came. The family helped them with all available information; it was obvious that they had never heard of Colonel Rubio. People whom the family scarcely knew called by telephone so as to be invited.

They all worked very hard for the great day. They waxed the floors, they washed the windows, they undraped the chandeliers, they polished the mahogany, they shined all the silver in the china closet, they moved the furniture around, and they opened the lid of the drawing-room piano to show off the velvet cloth that covered the keys. People came and went. A neighbor lady very kindly lent a pot of geraniums. The only person unaware of all the fuss was Mrs. Jáuregui, who, wearing a fixed smile, seemed not to understand a thing. Helped by the servant girl, Julia got her mother primped up as though she were already dead. The first things visitors would see on entering would be the oil portrait of the hero and, a little below it and to the right, the sword of his many battles. Even in hard times, the Jáureguis had always refused to sell the sword, thinking they would one day donate it to the Historical Museum.

The party would begin at seven. They had set the hour for six-thirty, knowing all along that nobody likes to be the first to arrive. By ten minutes past seven, not a soul had yet appeared; the family argued somewhat nervously the advantages and disadvantages of not being punctual. Elvira, who took pride in arriving on the dot, flatly stated that it was an unpardonable discourtesy to keep others waiting. Julia, repeating what her husband had always said, was of the opinion that arriving late was a courtesy, because if everyone did so it would make things easier and that way no one would be hurrying anyone else. At seven-fifteen, the house was packed. The whole neighborhood could see and envy the automobile and chauffeur of Mrs. Figueroa, who almost never invited the Jáureguis to her house but whom they received effusively, so that nobody would guess they only saw each other once in a blue moon. The President sent his aide, an extremely polite gentleman, who said that it was a great honor for him to shake the hand of the daughter of the hero of Big Hill. The Minister, who had to leave early, read a very fine speech, in which more was said about General San Martín, however, than about Colonel Rubio. The elderly lady sat in her armchair, propped up with pillows, and from time to time nodded her head approvingly or dropped her fan. A group of distinguished ladies, the Daughters of the Republic, sang her the National Anthem, which she seemed not to hear. The photographers herded the gathering into artistic groupings and were lavish with their flashbulbs. The small glasses of sherry and port were not enough to go around. Someone uncorked a number of bottles of champagne. Mrs. Jáuregui did not utter a single word; perhaps she no longer knew who she was. From that night on, she never left her bed.

When all the strangers had gone, the family improvised a small cold supper. The delicate perfume of incense had long since been dispelled by the odor of tobacco smoke and coffee.

The morning and afternoon papers loyally lied, dwelling on the almost miraculous memory of the hero’s daughter, who “is an eloquent storehouse of a century of Argentine history.” Julia wanted to show her mother the clippings. In her twilit room, the elder lady lay motionless, her eyes closed. She had no fever; the doctor examined her and said that everything was as it should be. A few days later, she died. The press of so many people, the unusual clamor, the flashbulbs, the speech, the uniforms, and the repeated handshaking had hastened her end. Perhaps she believed that they were Rosas’ henchmen, who had broken into the house.

I think back on the dead soldiers of Big Hill; I think of the nameless men of America and of Spain who met their deaths under the hooves of the horses; I think that the last victim of that throng of lances high on a Peruvian tableland was, more than a century later, a very old lady.

Guayaquil

Now I shall not journey to the Estado Occidental; now I shall not set eyes on snowcapped Higuerota mirrored in the waters of the Golfo Plácido; now I shall not decipher Bolívar’s manuscripts in that library, which doubtless has its own shape and its own lengthening shadows but which from here in Buenos Aires I picture in so many different ways.

Rereading the above paragraph preparatory to writing the next, its at once melancholy and pompous tone troubles me. Perhaps one cannot speak of that Caribbean republic without, even from afar, echoing the monumental style of its most famous historian, Captain Joseph Korzeniowski—but in my case there is another reason. My opening paragraph, I suspect, was prompted by the unconscious need to infuse a note of pathos into a slightly painful and rather trivial episode. I shall with all probity recount what happened, and this may enable me to understand it. Furthermore, to confess to a thing is to leave off being an actor in it and to become an onlooker—to become somebody who has seen it and tells it and is no longer the doer.

The actual event took place last Friday, in this same room in which I am writing, at this same—though now slightly cooler—evening hour. Aware of our tendency to forget unpleasant things, I want to set down a written record of my conversation with Dr. Edward Zimmerman, of the University of Cordoba, before oblivion blurs the details. The memory I retain of that meeting is still quite vivid.

For the better understanding of my story, I shall have to set forth briefly the curious facts surrounding certain letters of General Bolívar’s found among the papers of Dr. José Avellanos, whose History of Fifty Years of Misrule— thought to be lost under circumstances that are only too well known—was ultimately unearthed and published by his grandson, Dr. Ricardo Avellanos. To judge from references I have collected from various sources, these letters are of no particular interest, except for one dated from Cartagena on August 13, 1822, in which the Liberator places upon record details of his celebrated meeting with the Argentine national hero General San Martín. It is needless to underscore the value of this document; in it, Bolívar reveals—if only in part—exactly what had taken place during the two generals’ interview the month before at Guayaquil. Dr. Ricardo Avellanos, embattled opponent of the government, refused to turn the correspondence over to his own country’s Academy of History, and, instead, offered it for initial publication to a number of Latin American republics. Thanks to the praiseworthy zeal of our ambassador, Dr. Melaza-Mouton, the Argentine government was the first to accept Dr. Avellanos’ disinterested offer. It was agreed that a delegate should be sent to Sulaco, the capital of the Estado Occidental, to transcribe the letters so as to see them into print upon return here. The rector of our university, in which I hold the chair of Latin American History, most generously recommended to the Minister of Education that I be appointed to carry out this mission. I also obtained the more or less unanimous vote of the National Academy of History, of which I am a member. The date of my audience with the Minister had already been fixed when it was learned that the University of Córdoba—which, I would rather suppose, knew nothing about these decisions—had proposed the name of Dr. Zimmerman.

Reference here, as the reader may be well aware, is to a foreign-born historian expelled from his country by the Third Reich and now an Argentine citizen. Of the doubtless noteworthy body of his work, I have glanced only at a vindication of the Semitic republic of Carthage—which posterity judges through the eyes of Roman historians, its enemies—and a sort of polemical essay which holds that government should be neither visible nor emotional. This proposal drew the unanswerable refutation of Martin Heidegger, who, using newspaper headlines, proved that the modern chief of state, far from being anonymous, is rather the protagonist, the choragus, the dancing David, who acts out the drama of his people with all the pomp of stagecraft, and resorts unhesitatingly to the overstatement inherent in the art of oration. He also proved that Zimmerman came of Hebrew, not to say Jewish, stock. Publication of this essay by the venerated existentialist was the immediate cause of the banishment and nomadic activities of our guest.

Needless to say, Zimmerman had come to Buenos Aires to speak to the Minister, who personally suggested to me, through one of his secretaries, that I see Zimmerman and, so as to avoid the unpleasant spectacle of two universities in disagreement, inform him of exactly how things stood. I of course agreed. Upon return home, I was told that Dr. Zimmerman had telephoned to announce his visit for six o’clock that same afternoon. I live, as everyone knows, on Chile Street. It was the dot of six when the bell rang.

With republican simplicity, I myself opened the door and led him to my private study. He paused along the way to look at the patio; the black and white tiles, the two magnolias, and the wellhead stirred him to eloquence. He was, I believe, somewhat ill at ease. There was nothing out of the ordinary about him. He must have been forty or so, and seemed to have a biggish head. His eyes were hidden by dark glasses, which he once or twice left on the table, then snatched up again. When we first shook hands, I remarked to myself with a certain satisfaction that I was the taller, and at once I was ashamed of myself, for this was not a matter of a physical or even a moral duel but was simply to be an explanation of where things stood. I am not very observant—if I am observant at all—but he brought to mind what a certain poet has called, with an ugliness that matches what it defines, an “immoderate sartorial inelegance.” I can still see garments of electric blue, with too many buttons and pockets. Zimmerman’s tie, I noticed, was one of those conjuror’s knots held in place by two plastic clips. He carried a leather portfolio, which I presumed was full of documents. He wore a short military moustache, and when in the course of our talk he lit a cigar I felt that there were too many things on that face. Trop meublé, I said to myself.

The successiveness of language—since every word occupies a place on the page and a moment in the reader’s mind—tends to exaggerate what we are saying; beyond the visual trivia that I have listed, the man gave the impression of having experienced an arduous life.

On display in my study are an oval portrait of my great-grandfather, who fought in the wars of Independence, and some cabinets containing swords, medals, and flags. I showed Zimmerman those old glorious things, explaining as I went along; his eyes passed over them quickly, like one who is carrying out a duty, and, not without a hint of impoliteness that I believe was involuntary and mechanical, he interrupted and finished my sentences for me. He said, for example:

“Correct. Battle of Junín. August 6, 1824 Cavalry charge under Juárez.”

“Under Suárez,” I corrected.

I suspect his error was deliberate. He spread his arms in an Oriental gesture and exclaimed, “My first mistake, and certainly not my last! I feed on texts and slip up on facts—in you the interesting past lives.” He pronounced his v’s like f’s.

Such flatteries displeased me. He was far more interested in my books, and let his eyes wander almost lovingly over the titles. I recall his saying, “Ah, Schopenhauer, who always disbelieved in history. This same set, edited by Grisebach, was the one I had in Prague. I thought I’d grow old in the friendship of those portable volumes, but it was history itself, in the flesh of a madman, that evicted me from that house and that city. Now here I am, with you, in South America, in this hospitable house of yours.”

He spoke inelegantly but fluently, his noticeable German accent going hand in hand with a Spanish lisp. By then we were seated, and I seized upon what he had said in order to take up our subject. “History here in the Argentine is more merciful,” I said. “I was born in this house and I expect to die here. Here my great-grandfather lay down his sword, which saw action throughout the continent. Here I have pondered the past and have compiled my books. I can almost say I’ve never been outside this library, but now I shall go abroad at last and travel to lands I have only traveled in maps.” I cut short with a smile my possible rhetorical.

“Are you referring to a certain Caribbean republic?” said Zimmerman.

“So I am,” I answered. “And it’s to this imminent trip that I owe the honor to your visit.” Trinidad served us coffee. I went on slowly and confidently. “You probably know by now that the Minister has entrusted me with the mission of transcribing and writing an introduction to the new Bolívar letters, which have accidentally turned up in Dr. Avellanos’ files. This mission, by a happy stroke, crowns my lifework—the work that somehow runs in my blood.”

It was a relief having said what I had to say. Zimmerman appeared not to have heard me; his averted eyes were fixed not on my face but on the books at my back. He vaguely assented, and then spoke out, saying, “In your blood. You are the true historian. Your people roamed the length and breadth of this continent and fought in the great battles, while in obscurity mine were barely emerging from the ghetto. You, according to your own eloquent words, carry history in your blood; you have only to listen closely to an inner voice. I, on the other hand, must go all the way to Sulaco and struggle through stacks of perhaps apocryphal papers. Believe me, sir, I envy you.”

His tone was neither challenging nor mocking; his words were the expression of a will that made of the future something as irrevocable as the past. His arguments hardly mattered. The strength lay in the man himself, not in them. Zimmerman continued, with a schoolteachers deliberation: “In this matter of Bolívar—I beg your pardon, San Martín—your stand, cher maître, is known to all scholars. Votre siège est fait. As yet, I have not examined Bolívar’s pertinent letter, but it is obvious, or reasonable to guess, that it was written as a piece of self-justification. In any case, this much-touted letter will show us only Bolívar’s side of the question, not San Martín’s. Once made public, it should be weighed in the balance, studied, passed through the sieve of criticism, and, if need be, refuted. No one is better qualified for that final judgment than you, with your magnifying glass. The scalpel, the lancet—scientific rigor itself demands them! Allow me at the same time to point out that the name of the editor of the letter will remain linked to the letter. Such a link is hardly going to stand you in good stead. The public at large will never bother to look into these subtleties.”

I realize now that what we argued after that, in the main, was useless. Maybe I felt it at the time. In order to avoid an outright confrontation I grasped at a detail, and I asked him whether he really thought the letters were fakes.

“That they are in Bolívar’s own hand,” he said, “does not necessarily mean that the whole truth is to be found in them. For all we know, Bolívar may have tried to deceive the recipient of the letter or, simply, may have deceived himself. You, a historian, a thinker, know far better than I that the mystery lies in ourselves, not in our words.”

These pompous generalities irritated me, and I dryly remarked that within the riddle that surrounded us, the meeting at Guayaquil—in which General San Martín renounced mere ambition and left the destiny of South America in the hands of Bolívar—was also a riddle possibly not unworthy of our attention.

“The interpretations are so many,” Zimmerman said. “Some historians believe San Martín fell into a trap; others, like Sarmiento, have it that he was a European soldier at loose ends on a continent he never understood; others again— for the most part Argentines—ascribe to him an act of self-denial; still others, weariness. We also hear of the secret order of who knows what Masonic lodge.”

I said that, at any rate, it would be interesting to have the exact words spoken between San Martín, the Protector of Peru, and Bolívar, the Liberator. Zimmerman delivered his judgment. “Perhaps the words they exchanged were irrelevant,” he said. “Two men met face to face at Guayaquil; if one of them was master, it was because of his stronger will, not because of the weight of arguments. As you see, I have not forgotten my Schopenhauer.” He added, with a smile, “Words, words, words. Shakespeare, insuperable master of words, held them in scorn. In Guayaquil or in Buenos Aires—in Prague, for that matter—words always count less than persons.”

At that moment I felt that something was happening between us, or, rather, that something had already happened. In some uncanny way we were already two other people. The dusk entered into the room, and I had not lit the lamps. By chance, I asked, “You are from Prague, Doctor?”

“I was from Prague,” he answered.

To skirt the real subject, I said, “It must be an unusual city. I’ve never been there, but the first book I ever read in German was Meyrink’s novel Der Golem.”

“It’s the only book by Gustav Meyrink worth remembering,” Zimmerman said. “It’s wiser not to attempt the others, compounded as they are of bad writing and worse theosophy. All in all, something of the strangeness of Prague stalks the pages of that book of dreams within dreams. Everything is strange in Prague, or, if you prefer, nothing is strange. Anything may happen there. In London, on certain evenings, I have had the same feeling.”

“You have spoken of the will,” I said. “In the tales of the Mabinogion, two kings play chess on the summit of a hill, while below them their warriors fight. One of the kings wins the game; a rider comes to him with the news that the army of the other side has been beaten. The battle of the men was a mirror of the battle of the chessboard.”

“Ah, a feat of magic,” said Zimmerman.

“Or the display of a will in two different fields,” I said. “Another Celtic legend tells of the duel between two famous bards. One, accompanying himself on the harp, sings from the twilight of morning to the twilight of evening. Then, under the stars or moon, he hands his harp over to his rival. The second bard lays the instrument aside and gets to his feet. The first bard acknowledges defeat.”

“What erudition, what power of synthesis!” exclaimed Zimmerman. Then he added, more calmly, “I must confess my ignorance, my lamentable ignorance, of Celtic lore. You, like the day, span East and West, while I am held to my little Carthaginian comer, complemented now with a smattering of Latin American history. I am a mere plodder.”

In his voice were both Jewish and German servility, but I felt, insofar as victory was already his, that it cost him very little to flatter me or to admit I was right. He begged me not to trouble myself over the arrangements for his trip. (“Provisions” was the actual word he used.) On the spot, he drew out of his portfolio a letter addressed to the Minister. In it, I expounded the motives behind my resignation, and I acknowledged Dr. Zimmerman’s indisputable merits. Zimmerman put his own fountain pen in my hand for my signature. When he put the letter away, I could not help catching a glimpse of his passage aboard the next day’s Buenos Aires-Sulaco flight.

On his way out he paused again before the volumes of Schopenhauer, saying, “Our master, our common master, denied the existence of involuntary acts. If you stay behind in this house—in this spacious, patrician home—it is because down deep inside you want to remain here. I obey, and I thank you for your will.”

Taking this last pittance without a word, I accompanied him to the front door. There, as we said goodbye, he remarked, “The coffee was excellent.”

I go over these hasty jottings, which will soon be consigned to the flames. Our meeting had been short. I have the feeling that I shall give up any future writing.
Mon siège est fait.

Doctor Brodie’s Report

Among the pages of one of the volumes of Lane’s Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (London, 1839), a set of which my dear friend Paul Keins turned up for me, we made the discovery of the manuscript I am about to transcribe below. The neat handwriting—an art which typewriters are now helping us to forget—suggests that it was composed some time around that same date. Lane’s work, as is well known, is lavish with extensive explanatory notes; in the margins of my copy there are a number of annotations, interrogation marks, and now and then emendations written in the same hand as the manuscript. We may surmise that the wondrous tales of Shahrazad interested the annotator less than the customs of the Mohammedans. Of David Brodie, D.D., whose signature adorns the bottom of the last page with a fine flourish, I have been unable to uncover any information except that he was a Scottish missionary, born in Aberdeen, who preached the Christian faith first in the heart of Africa and later on in certain backlying regions of Brazil, a land he was probably led to by his knowledge of Portuguese. I am unaware of the place and date of his death. The manuscript, as far as I know, was never given to the press.

What follows is a faithful transcription of his report, composed in a rather colorless English, with no other omissions than two or three Bible verses jotted in the margins and a curious passage concerning the sexual practices of the Yahoos, which our good Presbyterian discreetly committed to Latin. The first page is missing.

. . . of the region infested by Ape-men dwell the “Mlch,” whom I shall call Yahoos so that my readers will be reminded of their bestial nature and also because, given the total absence of vowels in their harsh language, an exact transliteration is virtually impossible. Including the “Nr,” who dwell farther to the south in the thorn-bush, the numbers of the tribe do not, I believe, exceed seven hundred. The cipher which I propose is a mere conjecture, since, save for the king and queen and the witch doctors, the Yahoos sleep in no fixed abode but wherever night overtakes them. Swamp fever and the continual incursions of the Ape-men diminish their number. Only a very few individuals have names. In order to address one another, it is their custom to fling a small handful of mud. I have also noticed Yahoos who, to attract a friend’s attention, throw themselves on the ground and wallow in the dust. Save for their lower foreheads and for having a peculiar copperish hue that reduces their blackness, in other physical respects they do not noticeably differ from the “Kroo.” They take their nourishment from fruits, root-stalks, and the smaller reptiles; they imbibe the milk of cats and of chiropterans; and they fish with their hands. While eating, they normally conceal themselves or else close their eyes. All other physical habits they perform in open view, much the same as the Cynics of old. . . . So as to partake of their wisdom, they devour the raw corpses of their witch doctors and of the royal family. When I admonished them for this evil custom they touched their lips and their bellies, perhaps to indicate that the dead are also edible, or—but this explanation may be farfetched—in order that I might come to understand that everything we eat becomes, in the long run, human flesh. In their warfare they employ stones, which they gather for that purpose, and magical spells and incantations. They go about quite naked, the arts of clothing and tattooing being altogether unknown to them.

It is worthy of note that, though they have at hand a wide, grassy plateau on which there are springs of clear water and shade-dispensing trees, they prefer to swarm in the marshlands which surround this eminence, as if delighting in the rigors of the hot climate and the general unwholesomeness. The slopes of the plateau are steep and could easily be utilized as a natural bulwark against the onslaughts of the Ape-men. The clans of Scotland, in similar circumstances, erected their castles on the summits of hills; I advised the witch doctors to adopt this simple defensive measure, but my words were of no avail. They allowed me, however, to build a hut for myself on higher ground, where the night air is cooler.

The tribe is ruled over by a king, whose power is absolute, but it is my suspicion that the true rulers are the witch doctors, who administer to him and who have chosen him. Every male born into the tribe is subjected to a painstaking examination; if he exhibits certain stigmata, the nature of which were not revealed to me, he is elevated to the rank of king of the Yahoos. So that the physical world may not lead him from the paths of wisdom, he is gelded on the spot, his eyes are burned, and his hands and feet are amputated. Thereafter, he lives confined in a cavern called the Castle (“Qzr”), into which only the four witch doctors and the two slave women who attend him and anoint him with dung are permitted entrance. Should war arise, the witch doctors remove him from his cavern, display him to the tribe to excite their courage, and bear him, lifted onto their shoulders after the manner of a flag or a talisman, to the thick of the fight. In such cases, he dies almost immediately under the hail of stones flung at him by the Ape-men.

In another Castle lives the queen, who is not permitted to see her king. During my sojourn, this lady was kind enough to receive me; she was smiling, young, and insofar as her race allowed, graceful. Bracelets of metalwork and of ivory and necklaces of teeth adorned her nakedness. She inspected me, sniffed me, and, after touching me with a finger, ended by offering herself to me in the presence of all her retinue. My cloth and my ethics, however, forbade me that honor, which commonly she grants only to the witch doctors and to the slave hunters, for the most part Muslims, whose caravans journey across the kingdom. Twice or thrice she sank a gold pin into my flesh; such prickings being tokens of royal favor, the number of Yahoos are more than a few who stick themselves with pins to encourage the belief that the queen herself pricked them. The ornaments she wore, and which I have described, come from other regions. Since they lack the capacity to fashion the simplest object, the Yahoos regard such ornaments as natural. To the tribe my hut was a tree, despite the fact that many of them saw me construct it and even lent me their aid. Amongst a number of other items, I had in my possession a watch, a cork helmet, a mariner’s compass, and a Bible. The Yahoos stared at them, weighed them in their hands, and wanted to know where I had found them. They customarily reached for my cutlass not by the hilt but by the blade, seeing it, undoubtedly, in their own way, which causes me to wonder to what degree they would be able to perceive a chair. A house of several rooms would strike them as a maze, though perhaps they might find their way inside it in the manner of the cat, though the cat does not imagine the house. My beard, which then was red, was a source of wonderment to them all, and it was with obvious fondness that they stroked it.

The Yahoos are insensitive to pain and pleasure, save for the relishment they get from raw and rancid meat and evil-smelling things. An utter lack of imagination moves them to cruelty.

I have spoken of the queen and the king; I shall speak now of the witch doctors. I have already recorded that they are four, this number being the largest that their arithmetic spans. On their fingers they count thus: one, two, three, four, many. Infinity begins at the thumb. The same, I am informed, occurs among the Indian tribes who roam in the vicinity of Buenos-Ayres on the South American continent. In spite of the fact that four is the highest number at their disposal, the Arabs who trade with them do not swindle them, because in the bartering everything is divided into lots—which each of the traders piles by his side—of one, two, three, and four. Such translations are cumbersome, but they do not admit of error or fraudulence. Of the entire nation of the Yahoos, the witch doctors are the only persons who have aroused my interest. The tribesmen attribute to them the power of transforming into ants or into turtles anyone who so desires; one individual, who detected my disbelief, pointed out an ant-hill to me, as though that constituted a proof.

Memory is greatly defective among the Yahoos, or perhaps is altogether nonexistent. They speak of the havoc wrought by an invasion of leopards, but do not know who witnessed the event, they or their fathers, nor do they know whether they are recounting a dream. The witch doctors show some signs of memory, albeit to a reduced degree; they are able to recollect in the evening things which took place that morning or the preceding evening. They are also endowed with the faculty of foresight, and can state with quiet confidence what will happen ten or fifteen minutes hence. They convey, for example, that “A fly will graze the nape of my neck” or “In a moment we shall hear the song of a bird.” Hundreds of times I have borne witness to this curious gift, and I have also reflected upon it at length. Knowing that past, present, and future already exist, detail upon detail, in God’s prophetic memory, in His Eternity, what baffles me is that men, while they can look indefinitely backward, are not allowed to look one whit forward. If I am able to remember in all vividness that towering four-master from Norway which I saw when I was scarcely four, why am I taken aback by the fact that man may be capable of foreseeing what is about to happen? To the philosophical mind, memory is as much a wonder as divination; tomorrow morning is closer to us than the crossing of the Red Sea by the Hebrews, which, nevertheless, we remember.

The tribesmen are proscribed from lifting their gaze to the stars, a privilege accorded only to the witch doctors. Each witch doctor has a disciple, whom he instructs from childhood in secret lore and who succeeds him upon his death. In this wise they are always four, a number of magical properties, since it is the highest to which the Yahoo mind attains. They profess, in their own fashion, the doctrines of heaven and hell. Both places are subterranean. Hell, which is dry and filled with light, harbours the sick, the aged, the ill-treated, the Ape-men, the Arabs, and the leopards; heaven, which is depicted as marshy and beclouded, is the dwelling-place of the king and queen, the witch doctors, and those who have been happy, merciless, and blood-thirsty on earth. They worship as well a god whose name is “Dung,” and whom possibly they have conceived in the image and semblance of the king; he is a blind, mutilated, stunted being, and enjoys limitless powers. Dung is wont to take the form of an ant or a serpent.

After the foregoing remarks, it should cause no one to wonder that during my long stay among them I did not contrive to convert a single Yahoo. The words “Our father,” owing to the fact that they have no notion of fatherhood, left them puzzled. They cannot, it seems, accept a cause so remote and so unlikely, and are therefore uncomprehending that an act carried but several months before may bear relation to the birth of a child. Moreover, all the women engage in carnal commerce, and not all are mothers.

The Yahoo language is complex, having affinities with no others of which I have any knowledge. We cannot speak even of parts of speech, for there are no parts. Each monosyllabic word corresponds to a general idea whose specific meaning depends on the context or upon accompanying grimaces. The word “nrz,” for example, suggests dispersion or spots, and may stand for the starry sky, a leopard, a flock of birds, smallpox, something bespattered, the act of scattering, or the flight that follows defeat in warfare. “Hrl,” on the other hand, means something compact or dense. It may stand for the tribe, a tree trunk, a stone, a heap of stones, the act of heaping stones, the gathering of the four witch doctors, carnal conjunction, or a forest. Pronounced in another manner or accompanied by other grimaces, each word may hold an opposite meaning. Let us not be unduly amazed; in our own tongue, the verb “to cleave” means both to divide asunder and to adhere. Of course, among the Yahoos, there are no sentences, nor even short phrases.

The intellectual power to draw abstractions which such a language assumes has led me to believe that the Yahoos, for all their backwardness, are not a primitive but a degenerate nation. This conjecture is borne out by the inscriptions I discovered on the heights of the plateau and whose characters, which are not unlike the runes carved by our forefathers, are no longer within the tribe’s capacity to decipher. It is as though the tribe had forgotten written language and found itself reduced now only to the spoken word.

The diversions of these people are the fights which they stage between trained cats, and capital executions. Someone is accused of an attempt against the queen’s chastity, or of having eaten in the sight of another; without either the testimony of witnesses or a confession, the king finds a verdict of guilty. The condemned man suffers tortures that I shall do my best to forget, and then is stoned to death. The queen is privileged to cast the first stone and, what is usually superfluous, the last. The throng applauds her skill and the beauty of her parts, and, all in a frenzy, acclaims her, pelting her with roses and fetid things. The queen, without uttering a sound, smiles.

Another of the tribe’s customs is the discovery of poets. Six or seven words, generally enigmatic, may come to a man’s mind. He cannot contain himself and shouts them out, standing in the center of a circle formed by the witch doctors and the common people, who are stretched out on the ground. If the poem does not stir them, nothing comes to pass, but if the poet’s words strike them they all draw away from him, without a sound, under the command of a holy dread. Feeling then that the spirit has touched him, nobody, not even his own mother, will either speak to him or cast a glance at him. Now he is a man no longer but a god, and anyone has license to kill him. The poet, if he has his wits about him, seeks refuge in the sand dunes of the North.

I have already described how I came to the land of the Yahoos. It will be recalled that they encircled me, that I discharged my firearm into the air, and that they took the discharge for a kind of magical thunderclap. In order to foster that error, I strove thereafter to go about without my weapon. One spring morning, at the break of day, we were suddenly overrun by the Ape-men; I started down from the highlands, gun in hand, and killed two of these animals. The rest fled in amazement. Shot, it is known, is invisible. For the first time in my life I heard myself cheered. It was then, I believe, that the queen received me. The memory of the Yahoos, as I have mentioned, being undependable, that very afternoon I made good an escape. My subsequent adventures in the jungle are of little account. In due course, I came upon a village of black men who knew how to plough, to sow, and to pray, and with whom I made myself understood in Portuguese. A Romish missionary, Father Fernandes, offered me the hospitality of his hut, and cared for me until I was able to continue on my hard journey. At first I found it revolting to see him open his mouth without the slightest dissimulation and put into it pieces of food. I still covered my mouth with my hand, or averted my eyes; a few days later, however, I had readjusted myself. I recall with distinct pleasure our debates in topics theological, but I had no success in turning him to the true faith of Jesus.

I set down this account now in Glasgow. I have told of my visit among the Yahoos, but have not dwelt upon the essential horror of the experience, which never ceases entirely to be with me, and which visits me yet in dreams. In the street, upon occasion, I feel that they still surround me. Only too well do I know the Yahoos to be barbarous nation, perhaps the most barbarous to be found upon the face of the earth, but it would be unjust to overlook certain traits which redeem them. They have institutions of their own; they enjoy a king; they employ a language based upon abstract concepts; they believe, like the Hebrews and the Greeks, in the divine nature of poetry; and they surmise that the soul survives the death of the body. They also uphold the truth of punishments and rewards. After their fashion, they stand for civilization much as we ourselves do, in spite of our many transgressions. I do not repent having fought in their ranks against the Ape-men. Not only is it our duty to save their souls, but it is my fervent prayer that the Government of Her Majesty will not ignore what this report makes bold to suggest.

Afterword

It is a known fact that the word “invention” originally stood for “discovery,” and thus the Roman Church celebrates the Invention of the Cross, not its unearthing, or discovery. Behind this etymological shift we may, I think, glimpse the whole Platonic doctrine of archetypes—of all things being already there. William Morris thought that the essential stories of man’s imagination had long since been told and that by now the storyteller’s craft lay in rethinking and retelling them. His Earthly Paradise is a token of the theory, though not, of course, a proof. I do not go as far as Morris went, but to me the writing of a story has more of discovery about it than of deliberate invention.

Walking down the street or along the galleries of the National Library, I feel that something is about to take over in me. That something may be a tale or a poem. I do not tamper with it; I let it have its way. From afar, I sense it taking shape. I dimly see its end and beginning but not the dark gap in between. This middle, in my case, is given me gradually. If its discovery happens to be withheld by the gods, my conscious self has to intrude, and these unavoidable makeshifts are, I suspect, my weakest pages.

“The Intruder,” the first written of these new stories of mine, haunted me for some thirty years before I set it down. At first, all I had was the idea of two brothers and a woman, loved by them both, who in the end had to be sacrificed to their friendship. Initially, I wanted a California setting, but as I knew—and so would my readers—that my knowledge of California was merely bookish, the credibility of the tale would have been impaired. I finally kept to Buenos Aires.

In my Preface, I mention a hidden link between two of the stories. Now I can say openly that I meant “Juan Muraña” and “The Meeting.” Underlying both of them is the fancy that a weapon, in time, may have a secret life of its own. In “Juan Muraña,” we also get the idea of a man, after death, becoming a thing— of a knife fighter being his knife.

Three of the stories are taken from life. The elder lady who presides over one of these was—may I confide this to the reader?—a great-aunt of mine. In another, a certain duel is still being fought with a fine grace by the two antagonists. The tale of the two gauchos whose throats were cut and who were then made to run a race actually took place a century ago in Uruguay.

“The Unworthy Friend” is really a confession. During my schooldays in Geneva, a companion whom I looked on as a hero offered me his friendship. I thrust it aside thinking his offer was a mistake, since I did not deserve it. Out of that personal experience came the tale of the Jewish boy in a Buenos Aires slum.

“Rosendo’s Tale” is, I think, a fair rendering of what actually happened, or might have happened, in an early and all-too-famous extravaganza of mine called “Streetcorner Man.” In the new version I have done my best to hark back to sanity.

“Guayaquil” can be read in two different ways—as a symbol of the meeting of the famous generals, or, if the reader is in a magical mood, as the transformation of the two historians into the two dead generals.

In most cases, my stories are woven around a plot. In “The Elder Lady” and in “The Duel” I have attempted something else. I have tried, after the manner of Henry James, to build these tales around a situation or a character.

Since 1953, after a longish interval of composing only poems and short prose pieces, these are the first stories I have written.

Buenos Aires, December 29, 1970J. L. B.

The Garden of Branching Paths

Prologue

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote

The Lottery in Babylon

A Glimpse Into the Work of Herbert Quain

The Library of Babel

The Garden of Branching Paths

Prologue

The eight pieces of this book do not require extraneous elucidation. The eighth piece, "The Garden of Forking Paths," is a detective story; its readers will assist at the execution, and all the preliminaries, of a crime, a crime whose purpose will not be unknown to them, but which they will not understand — it seems to me — until the last paragraph. The other pieces are fantasies. One of them, "The Babylon Lottery," is not entirely innocent of symbolism.

I am not the first author of the narrative titled "The Library of Babel"; those curious to know its history and its prehistory may interrogate a certain page of Number 59 of the journal Sur,[1] which records the heterogeneous names of Leucippus and Lasswitz, of Lewis Carroll and Aristotle. In "The Circular Ruins" everything is unreal. In "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote," what is unreal is the destiny imposed upon himself by the protagonist. The list of writings I attribute to him is not too amusing but neither is it arbitrary; it constitutes a diagram of his mental history ....

The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary. Thus proceeded Carlyle in Sartor Resartus. Thus Butler in The Fair Haven. These are works which suffer the imperfection of being themselves books, and of being no less tautological than the others. More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books. Such are "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain," "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim." The last-named dates from 1935. Recently I read The Sacred Fount (1901), whose general argument is perhaps analogous. The narrator, in James's delicate novel, investigates whether or not B is influenced by A or C; in "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" the narrator feels a presentiment or divines through B the extremely remote existence of Z, whom B does not know.

Buenos Aires, November 10, 1941

- J. L. B.

(1) The great South American literary journal edited in Buenos Aires by Victoria Ocampo. — Editor's note.

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

I

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the concurrence of a mirror and an encyclopaedia. The mirror unsettled the far end of a corridor in a villa in Gaona Street, in the Buenos Aires suburb of Ramos Mejía; the encyclopaedia, fraudulently entitled The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917), is an exact, if belated, reprint of the 1902 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. All this took place four or five years ago. Bioy Casares had dined with me that evening and we'd lingered over a discussion on the mechanics of writing a novel in the first person, in which the narrator omitted or distorted events, thereby creating discrepancies that would allow a handful of readers — a tiny handful — to come to an appalling or banal realization.

From along the corridor the mirror spied on us. We found out (inevitably at such an hour) that there is something unnatural about mirrors. Then Bioy recalled that one of Uqbar's heresiarchs had said that mirrors and copulation are abominable because they multiply the number of men. When I asked him the source of this pithy dictum, he told me it appeared in the article on Uqbar in The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia. The villa, which we were renting furnished, had a copy of the work. Towards the end of Volume XLVI we found an entry on Uppsala and at the beginning of Volume XLVII one on Ural-Altaic languages, but nowhere was there a mention of Uqbar. Somewhat bewildered, Bioy scoured the index. He tried all conceivable spellings — Ukbar, Ucbar, Ooqbar, Ookbar, Oukbahr, and so forth. Before he left that night, he told me that Uqbar was a region of Iraq or Asia Minor. I took his word for it, but, I must confess, with misgivings. I suspected that, in his modesty, Bioy had invented the unrecorded country and the nameless heresiarch to give weight to his statement. A fruitless search through one of Justus Perthes's atlases only confirmed my suspicion.

The next day, Bioy phoned me from Buenos Aires. He said he had before him the entry on Uqbar, in Volume XLVI of the encyclopaedia. The article did not name the heresiarch but did cite his tenet, setting it out in words almost identical to Bioy's, although perhaps less literary. Bioy had remembered the quotation as, 'Copulation and mirrors are abominable.' The text of the encyclopædia ran, 'To one of these Gnostics, the visible world was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they reproduce and multiply the planet.' I said that I should by all means like to see the article. A day or two later Bioy brought it round. This surprised me, for the detailed gazetteer to Ritter's Erdkunde was utterly innocent of the name Uqbar.

Bioy's book was indeed Volume XLVI of The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia. On its spine and half-title page the index key, Tor-Ups, was the same as on our copy, but instead of 917 pages his volume had 921. The four additional pages contained the entry on Uqbar — not shown (as the reader will have noted) by the alphabetic indication. We then verified that there was no other difference between the two volumes. Both, as I believe I have said, were reprints of the tenth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Bioy had acquired his copy at some auction sale or other.

We read the article with considerable care. The passage Bioy remembered was perhaps the only extraordinary one. The rest seemed quite plausible, and, fitting in with the general tone of the work, was — as might be expected — a bit boring. Re-reading the entry, we found beneath its painstaking style an intrinsic vagueness. Of the fourteen place names that appeared in the geographical section, we recognized only three — Khorasan, Armenia, and Erzurum — all worked into the text in a suspect way. Of the historical names, only one was familiar — the impostor Smerdis the Magus — and he was cited rather more as a metaphor. The article purported to set out the boundaries of Uqbar, but the hazy points of reference were the region's own rivers, craters, and mountain ranges. We read, for instance, that the Tsai Khaldun lowlands and the delta of the Axa mark the southern border and that wild horses breed on islands in the delta. All this came at the beginning of page 918. In the historical section, on page 920, we found out that as a result of religious persecution during the thirteenth century orthodox believers sought refuge on the islands, where their obelisks still stand and where their stone mirrors are not infrequently unearthed. The section on language and literature was short. One feature stood out: Uqbar's literature was of a fantastic nature, while its epic poetry and its myths never dealt with the real world but only with two imaginary regions, Mlejnas and Tlön. The bibliography listed four titles, which so far Bioy and I have been unable to trace, although the third — Silas Haslam's
History of the Land Called Uqbar (1874) — appears in a Bernard Quaritch catalogue.* The first,
Lesbare und lesenswerthe Bemerkungen über das Land Ukkbar in Klein-Asien, dated 1641, was written by Johann Valentin Andreä. This fact is worth pointing out, for a year or two later I came across his name again in the unexpected pages of De Quincey (Writings, Volume XIII) and found that Andreä was a German theologian who, in the early seventeenth century, described an imaginary community of Rosicrucians, which others later founded in imitation of the one foreshadowed by him.

That night Bioy and I paid a visit to the National Library. In vain we exhausted atlases, catalogues, yearbooks of geographical societies, accounts by travelers and historians. No one had ever been to Uqbar, nor did the name appear in the general index of Bioy's encyclopaedia. The next day, Carlos Mastronardi, to whom I had spoken of the matter, noticed in a bookshop at the corner of Corrientes and Talcahuano the black-and-gold spines of The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia. He went in and asked to see Volume XLVI. Naturally, he did not find in it the slightest mention of Uqbar.

II

A dim and dwindling memory of Herbert Ashe, an engineer on the Southern Railways, lingers amid the overpowering jasmine and in the illusory depths of the mirrors in the Hotel Adrogué. In his lifetime, Ashe — like so many Englishmen — seemed not altogether real; in death, he is not even the ghost he was then. A tall, phlegmatic man, whose tired, square-cut beard had once been red, he was, I believe, a childless widower. Every few years he went back to England to visit — judging from the snapshots he showed us — a sundial and some oak trees. With him, my father had cemented (the verb is extreme) one of those English friendships that begin by eschewing confidences and very soon dispense with conversation. The two men used to engage in an exchange of books and magazines and, with scarcely a word, would duel at chess.

I remember Ashe in the hotel corridor, holding a book on mathematics and from time to time gazing at the irretrievable colours of the sky. One evening, we discussed the duodecimal system, in which the number twelve is equivalent to ten. Ashe said that he was just then transposing duodecimal into sexagesimal tables, in which sixty is equivalent to ten. He added that while in Rio Grande do Sul he had been commissioned to do this work by a Norwegian. My father and I had known Ashe for eight years, but he had never before mentioned having been in that place. We talked about cattle breeding and ranch foremen, about the Brazilian root of the word 'gaucho', which certain elderly Uruguayans still pronounce gaúcho, and he said nothing further — thank God — about duodecimal functions.

In September, 1937 (we were not then at the hotel), Herbert Ashe died of a ruptured aneurysm. A few days earlier, he had received a sealed, registered package from Brazil. It was a book in royal octavo. Ashe left it in the bar, where, months later, I found it. Leafing through the volume, I felt a strange lightheadedness that I shall not enlarge on, for this is not the story of my feelings but of Uqbar, Tlön, and Orbis Tertius. On a particular Islamic night called the Night of Nights, the secret gates of heaven are thrown open and the water in jugs tastes much sweeter. Had these gates opened just then, I would not have felt what I felt that evening. The book, which was written in English, contained 1,001 pages. On its yellow leather spine I read the following strange words, which also appeared on the half-title page:
A First Encyclopædia of Tlön. Volume XI. Hlaer to Jangr. No date or place of publication was given. On the opening page and on a sheet of tissue paper that guarded one of the coloured plates, a printed blue oval bore the words Orbis Tertius. Two years before, in a volume of a certain pirated encyclopaedia, I had come across a cursory description of a bogus country; now chance was offering me something more precious and more demanding. What I held in my hands was an enormous, systematically presented fragment of the complete history of an unknown planet, embracing its architecture and its playing cards, its terrifying mythologies and the sound of its languages, its emperors and its seas, its minerals, birds, and fishes, its algebra and fire, its theological and metaphysical controversies — all coherently set out, without any apparent dogmatic viewpoint or hint of parody.

In the Volume XI just mentioned are references to both prior and subsequent volumes. Néstor Ibarra, in a now classic article in the
Nouvelle Revue Française, denies that such accompanying tomes exist; Ezequiel Martínez Estrada and Drieu La Rochelle have — perhaps successfully — refuted Ibarra's doubts. The fact is that until today the most diligent searches have proved fruitless. To no avail, we have ransacked the libraries of both Americas and of Europe. Alfonso Reyes, weary of this laborious and petty sleuthing, suggests that all of us should together undertake to reconstruct ex ungue leonem the several missing bulky volumes. He calculates, not entirely in jest, that one generation of Tlön specialists should be enough. This figure out of a hat takes us back to the basic problem of who the people were who invented Tlön. The plural is unavoidable, for the idea of a single inventor — an eternal Leibniz labouring away in darkness and humility — has been unanimously rejected. One speculation is that this 'brave new world' is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, and geometricians — all led by an obscure genius. There are plenty of men outstanding in these various disciplines but none who is capable of such sublime invention, much less of subordinating his creativity to a minutely detailed plan. The plan is so vast that each writer's contribution would have been infinitesimal. At first, it was thought that Tlön was nothing but a chaos, an irresponsible excess of the imagination; it is now known that Tlön is a harmonious universe and that the secret laws governing it were in fact framed, albeit in a makeshift way. I need only point out that the logic displayed in Volume XI is so lucid and perfect that the tome's apparent contradictions are the very crux of the proof that other volumes exist. Popular magazines, with pardonable extravagance, have spread the news of Tlön's zoology and geography. In my opinion, however, the planet's transparent tigers and towers of blood are perhaps not worthy of the perpetual attention of all mankind. May I be permitted a few moments to explain Tlön's view of the world.

Hume noted for all time that Berkeley's arguments neither allowed for the least rebuttal nor produced the slightest conviction. Applied to our earth, such a finding is completely true; in the case of Tlön, it is completely false. The nations of that planet are congenitally idealist. Its language and those things derived from language — religion, literature, metaphysics — are predicated on idealism. To the inhabitants of Tlön, the world is not an assemblage of objects in space but a diverse series of separate acts. The world is sequential, rooted in time rather than space. In Tlön's putative
Ursprache, from which its 'modern' languages and dialects stem, there are no nouns but only impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes or prefixes that function as adverbs. For example, there is nothing equivalent to our word 'moon', but there is a verb that for us would be 'to moonrise' or 'to moon'. 'The moon rose over the river' would be 'Hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö' or, literally, 'Upward behind the lasting-flow it moonrose'. (Xul Solar translates this more succinctly as 'Upward, behind the onstreaming, it mooned.')

The above applies to the languages of Tlön's southern hemisphere. In northern hemisphere languages, about whose Ursprache Volume XI gives little information, the basic unit is not the verb but the monosyllabic adjective. Nouns are formed by an accumulation of adjectives. One does not say 'moon' but rather 'air-bright on round-dark' or 'pale-gold of-the-sky' or other combinations. In this particular example, the mass of adjectives denotes an actual object; the fact is pure chance. The literature of this hemisphere — as with the real world of Meinong — abounds in ideal objects, joined together or separated at will, according to poetic necessity. Sometimes, mere simultaneity dictates what these objects are. They can be made up of two terms, one visual and the other aural — the colour of the sunrise and the distant cry of a bird. Others are made up of several terms — the sun and the water against a swimmer's breast; the flickering pink blur you see when your eyes are closed; the feeling of letting yourself drift down a river or into sleep. These second-degree objects can be combined with others, a process which — with the aid of certain contractions — becomes virtually endless. There are famous poems that consist of one enormous word. Such a word is a 'poetic object' created by the author. Paradoxically, the fact that nobody believes nouns to be real objects makes their number countless. The languages of Tlön's northern hemisphere boast all the nouns of Indo-European languages and many others as well.

It is no exaggeration to say that Tlön's classical culture comprises a single discipline — psychology. All other disciplines are held to be inferior to this one. I have mentioned that the men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes that unfold not in space but serially in time. Spinoza attributes to his inexhaustible deity the faculties of omnipresence and of thought; nobody in Tlön would understand the juxtaposition of the former, which is characteristic only of certain states of being, with the latter, which is a perfect synonym for the cosmos. In other words, they cannot conceive that space can exist in time. The sight of a puff of smoke on the horizon and then of a burning field and then of a half-stubbed-out cigar that produced the blaze is deemed an example of the association of ideas.

This monism, or total idealism, invalidates science. To explain or assess a fact is to link it to another. In Tlön, this linkage is a later state of the fact, which cannot affect or illuminate its earlier state. Every mental state is irreducible and the mere fact of naming it — that is, of classifying it — implies a falsification. From this it could be inferred that there are no sciences on Tlön — or even reasoning. The paradoxical truth is that there are, and in almost numberless number. The same happens with philosophies as happens in the northern hemisphere with nouns. The fact that every philosophy is first of all a dialectic game, a Philosophie des Als Ob, has contributed to their proliferation. Improbable systems abound on Tlön, but they are all pleasing in structure or else of a sensational type. The planet's metaphysicians seek neither truth nor the appearance of truth; rather, they seek to astonish. Metaphysics they deem to be a branch of imaginative literature. They know that any system is but the subordination of all aspects of the world to one in particular. Even the words 'all aspects' are inapt, since they infer the impossible addition of time present and all time past. Nor is the plural, 'times past', legitimate, in that it infers another impossible process. One of Tlön's schools manages to refute time, reasoning that the present is indeterminate, that the future has no reality except as present hope, and that the past has no reality except as present memory.** Another school claims that all time has already passed and that our lives are barely the memory or dim reflection, doubtless falsified and distorted, of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the world — and in it our lives and every least detail of our lives — is the scripture produced by a lesser god to communicate with a demon. Another, that the world is comparable to those codes in which some symbols have no meaning and the only truth is what takes place every three hundred nights. Yet another, that while we are asleep here we are awake somewhere else and that consequently each man is two men.

Among the doctrines of Tlön, none is so deserving of opprobrium as that of materialism. Certain thinkers have presented this particular belief with more enthusiasm than clarity, as if they were advancing a paradox. To aid understanding of the preposterous thesis, an eleventh-century† heresiarch dreamed up the sophism of the nine copper coins, whose notoriety on Tlön vies with that of the Eleatic aporias among us. There are many versions of the heresiarch's specious reasoning, each of which varies the number of coins and the number of finds. The following is the best known:

On Tuesday, X crosses a deserted road and loses nine copper coins. On Thursday, Y finds in the road four coins that are slightly tarnished by Wednesday's rain. On Friday, Z discovers three coins in the road. On Friday morning, X finds two coins in the passageway of his house.

The heresiarch tried to deduce from this story the truth — that is, the continuity — of the nine recovered coins. 'It is absurd', he claimed, 'to imagine that four of the coins did not exist between the Tuesday and the Thursday, three between the Tuesday and the Friday afternoon, two between the Tuesday and early on the Friday. It is logical to assume that the coins existed — if only in some secret way whose understanding is hidden from men — during each moment of these three periods of time.'

Since this paradox could not be expressed in the language of Tlön, most people did not understand it. Upholders of common sense at first limited themselves to denying the truth of the anecdote. They insisted it was a verbal fallacy, based on a rash application of two neologisms unauthorized by usage and contrary to all rigorous thought. The verbs 'find' and 'lose' begged the question, for they presupposed the existence of the nine original coins and all the later ones. These upholders recalled that every noun (man, coin, Thursday, Wednesday, rain) has only metaphorical value. They branded as insidious the circumstantial detail that the coins were 'slightly tarnished by Wednesday's rain', since this presupposed what was yet to be proved — the continuous existence of the four coins between the Thursday and the Tuesday. Explaining that 'equivalence' is one thing and 'existence' another, they formulated a kind of reductio ad absurdum, or a hypothetical case of nine men who on nine successive nights suffer acute pain. Would it not be ridiculous, they asked, to pretend that this pain was one and the same.†† They said that the heresiarch was moved only by the blasphemous aim of attributing the divine quality of being to a few mere coins and that sometimes he denied plurality and sometimes not. They argued that if equivalence allowed for existence, by the same token it would have to be admitted that the nine coins were a single coin.

Strange to say, these refutations were not the end of the story. A hundred years after the problem was first posed, one thinker, no less brilliant than the heresiarch but of orthodox persuasion, came up with a bold hypothesis. His felicitous theory affirmed that there is but one person, that this indivisible person is each being in the world and that these beings are the organs and the masks of the godhead. X is Y and is Z. Z discovers three coins, because he remembers that X lost them; X finds two in the passageway, because he remembers that the rest have been recovered. Volume XI of the Tlön encyclopaedia gives us to understand that there were three main reasons why this idealist pantheism triumphed. One, solipsism was repudiated; two, the psychological basis of the sciences was preserved; three, the worship of the gods could continue. Schopenhauer — passionate, lucid Schopenhauer — comes up with a similar idea in the first volume of his
Parerga und Paralipomena.

Tlön's geometry is made up of two somewhat different disciplines — one visual, the other tactile. The latter, which is equivalent to our geometry, is held to be subordinate to the former. The basis of visual geometry is the surface, not the point. This geometry has no idea of parallel lines and holds that a moving man modifies the forms that surround him. The basis of Tlön's arithmetic is the notion of indefinite numbers. Emphasis is placed on the importance of the concepts of greater and lesser, for which our mathematicians use the symbols > and <. On Tlön, it is affirmed that the act of counting modifies quantities and changes them from indefinite to definite. The fact that several individuals, counting the same quantity, reach the same result is to a psychologist an example either of the association of ideas or of a well-functioning memory. We now know that on Tlön the subject of knowledge is one and eternal.

In literary usage too the idea of a single subject is all-powerful. Authorship is seldom credited, and the notion of plagiarism does not exist. It has been established that all works are the work of a single author, who is both timeless and anonymous. Authors are usually invented by the critics. They choose two dissimilar works — the Tao Te Ching and the Arabian Nights, let us say — attribute them to the same writer, and then with probity construct the psychology of their remarkable man of letters.

The books are different too. Fictional works embrace a single plot, with all conceivable permutations. Works of a philosophical nature invariably contain both a thesis and an antithesis, the strict pros and cons of a theory. A book that does not encompass its counter-book is considered incomplete.

Centuries and centuries of idealism have continued to influence reality. In the oldest parts of Tlön, lost objects are frequently duplicated. Two people look for a pencil; the first finds it but says nothing; the second finds another pencil, just as real but closer to his expectations. These secondary objects are called hrönir and, while they look unattractive, they are slightly longer. Until recently hrönir were the chance offspring of inattention and forgetfulness. It's hard to believe that they have been deliberately fabricated for fewer than a hundred years, but so Volume XI tells us. The earliest efforts were unsuccessful. The process, nonetheless, deserves to be recorded. The governor of one of the state prisons informed the inmates that in the ancient bed of a river there were a number of burial sites, and he promised freedom to anyone who made an important find. During the months preceding the excavation, the convicts were shown photographs of what they were likely to discover. The first attempt proved that hope and greed can be a hindrance; the only hrön unearthed by a week's work with pick and shovel was a rusty wheel of later date than the start of the excavation. This was kept secret, and shortly afterwards the experiment was repeated in four schools. Three managed to find next to nothing; in the fourth, whose head died in an accident at the outset, the pupils dug up — or produced — a gold mask, an archaic sword, two or three clay amphorae, and the greenish, legless trunk of a king whose breast bore an inscription that has never been deciphered. The unreliability of witnesses who know the experimental nature of a search was thus proven. Group excavations come up with contradictory objects; nowadays individual, virtually impromptu, labour is preferred. The systematic manufacture of hrönir, according to Volume XI, has given great scope to archeologists, allowing them to question and even change the past, which is now as pliant and manageable as the future. Curiously, hrönir of the second and third degree — hrönir derived from another hrön, hrönir derived from the hrön of a hrön — magnify the flaws of those of the first degree; fifth-degree hrönir are almost identical; those of the ninth can be confused with those of the second; those of the eleventh show a purity of line that the originals do not possess. The progression is regular, and a twelfth-degree hrön is already in a state of deterioration. Often stranger and purer than a hrön is the ur, a thing produced by suggestion, an object elicited by hope. The great gold mask that I have mentioned is a famous example.

Things are duplicated on Tlön; also, as people forget them, objects tend to fade and lose detail. A classic example is that of the doorstep that lasted as long as a certain beggar huddled there but was lost from sight upon his death. On occasion, a few birds or a horse have saved the ruins of an amphitheatre.

Salto Oriental, 1940

*

Postscript, 1947 — I have copied the above article just as it appeared in the
Anthology of Imaginative Literature (1940), leaving out but a handful of metaphors and a kind of mock summary that now seems frivolous. So many things have taken place since then; I shall list them briefly.

In March, 1941, a handwritten letter from Gunnar Erfjord was found in a book by Hinton that had belonged to Herbert Ashe. The envelope was postmarked Ouro Preto; the letter illuminated the whole mystery of Tlön. Its contents supported Martínez Estrada's theory. The remarkable story began one night in Lucerne or London back at the beginning of the seventeenth century. A secret benevolent society (among whose members were Dalgarno and, later, George Berkeley) was formed with the object of inventing a country. The vaguely outlined initial programme featured 'hermetic studies', philanthropy, and the cabala. Andreä's strange book dates from this early period. After some years of secret meetings and an overhasty amalgamation of ideas, they saw that one generation was not enough to delineate a new country. They resolved that each of the masters who made up the society should choose a disciple to carry on his work. This hereditary arrangement became the custom.

After a hiatus of two centuries, the persecuted brotherhood was reborn in America. In about 1824, in Memphis, Tennessee, one of the members spoke to the millionaire ascetic Ezra Buckley. Disdainfully, Buckley heard the man out, then laughed at the modest scope of the project. In America it was absurd to invent a country, he said, and he suggested they invent a whole planet. To this gigantic idea he added another, the child of his nihilism‡ — that of keeping the enormous undertaking secret. At that time, the Encyclopædia Britannica was in print in all its twenty volumes; Buckley proposed a similar encyclopaedia of the imaginary planet. He would bequeath the society his gold-bearing mountain ranges, his navigable rivers, his plains trodden by the steer and the buffalo, his slaves, his brothels, and his dollars — all on one condition: that 'The work will make no pact with the impostor Jesus Christ.' Buckley did not believe in God, but he wanted to prove to the non-existent God that mortal men were capable of conceiving a world. Buckley was poisoned in Baton Rouge, in 1828; in 1914, the society sent its collaborators, who numbered three hundred, the final volume of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön. The publication was private; its forty volumes (the vastest work ever undertaken by men) would be the basis of another edition, more detailed and compiled not in English but in one or other of Tlön's languages. This emended description of an imaginary world was provisionally called
Orbis Tertius, and one of its modest lesser gods was Herbert Ashe, whether as an agent of Gunnar Erfjord or as a member of the society I do not know. That he received a copy of Volume XI of the work would seem to suggest the latter.

But what of the other volumes? From about 1942, events followed each other thick and fast. I remember one of the first of these with singular clarity, and I believe I felt something of its premonitory nature. The incident took place in a flat in Laprida Street, over the way from a high bright balcony that faced the setting sun. The Princess de Faucigny Lucinge's silver dinner service had arrived from Poitiers. Out of the vast depths of a chest adorned with seals from all over the globe came a stream of fine ware — silver from Utrecht and Paris chased with heraldic fauna, a samovar. Among these items — with the barely perceptible flutter of a sleeping bird — a compass quivered mysteriously. The princess did not recognize it. The blue needle yearned for magnetic north; the metal case was concave; the letters on the compass rose came from one of the alphabets of Tlön.

This was the first intrusion of the imaginary world into the real world. A chance occurrence that still troubles me led to my also being a witness to the second. It took place some months later, in the Cuchilla Negra, in a country saloon belonging to a Brazilian. Enrique Amorim and I were on our way back from Sant'Anna. The river Tacuarembó had risen, forcing us to risk — and to survive — the place's primitive hospitality. In a big room cluttered with barrels and leather hides, the saloon-keeper supplied us with a couple of creaking cots. We lay down, but the drunkenness of an unseen neighbour, who veered back and forth from incomprehensible insults to snatches of milonga — or, at least, to snatches of one particular milonga
— did not allow us to sleep until dawn. As may be imagined, we attributed his persistent shouting to the proprietor's fiery rum. At daybreak, the man lay dead in the corridor. The roughness of his voice had fooled us — he was a youth. In his drunken state, a handful of coins had come loose from his wide leather belt, as had a cone of gleaming metal the size of a dice. A boy tried without success to pick up the cone. A man barely managed it. I held the object in the palm of my hand for a minute or so. I remember that it was intolerably heavy and that after I laid it aside its weightiness stayed with me. I also remember the perfect circle it left imprinted in my flesh. The evidence of a very small object that was at the same time very heavy left me with a disagreeable feeling of revulsion and fear. One of the locals suggested that we throw it into the fast-moving river; Amorim bought the cone for a few pesos. Nobody knew anything about the dead man except that 'he was from the Brazilian border'. In certain religions of Tlön, small and extremely heavy cones made of a metal that is not of this planet represent the godhead.

This concludes the personal part of my story. The rest exists in the memory — when not in the hopes and fears — of all my readers. I shall simply record the following events in a few words and let mankind's collective memory enrich or amplify them. In about 1944, a researcher working for The American, a Nashville newspaper, found buried in a Memphis library the forty volumes of the First Encyclopedia of Tlön. Even today it is a matter of dispute as to whether the discovery was accidental or whether the directors of the still nebulous Orbis Tertius arranged it. The latter is likely. Some of the less credible bits of Volume XI (for example, the proliferation of hrönir) have been eliminated or played down in the Memphis copies. It may reasonably be supposed that the suppressed material was part of a plan to introduce a world that was not overly incompatible with the real world. The distribution of objects from Tlön to different countries contributed to the plan.‡‡ In the event, the international press kept the 'find' in the public eye. Handbooks, anthologies, digests, facsimiles, authorized and pirated reprintings of the Greatest Work of Man flooded and continue to flood the world. Almost at once, the real world gave way in more than one area. The truth is that it was longing to give way. Ten years ago, any symmetrical scheme with an appearance of order — dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism — was enough to hold mankind in thrall. Why not submit to Tlön, to the immense, meticulous evidence of an ordered planet? It is useless to reply that the real world too is ordered. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws — that is, non-human laws — that we shall never comprehend. Tlön may be a labyrinth, but a labyrinth contrived by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.

Contact and familiarity with Tlön have brought about the deterioration of our world. Mesmerized by that planet's discipline, we forget — and go on forgetting — that theirs is the discipline of chess players, not of angels. Tlön's putative 'primitive language' has now found its way into our schools; the teaching of its harmonious history, so full of stirring episodes, has obliterated the history that presided over my childhood; in our memories a fictitious past has now replaced our past, of which we know nothing for certain — not even that it is false. Numismatics, pharmacology, and archaeology have all been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics too await their avatars. A far-flung dynasty of isolated individuals has changed the face of the earth. Their task goes on. If our forecasts are not mistaken, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.

Then English, French, and mere Spanish will disappear from this planet. Our world will be Tlön. All this means nothing to me; here in the quiet of the Hotel Adrogué I spend my days polishing a tentative translation in Quevedo's style — which I do not propose to publish — of Sir Thomas Browne's Urne-Buriall.

* Haslam has also published
A General History of Labyrinths.

** Bertrand Russell (The Analysis of Mind, 1921, p. 159) hypothesizes that the world was created a few minutes ago, together with a population that 'remembers' an unreal past..

† A century, in terms of the duodecimal system, is equivalent to a period of a hundred and forty-four years.

†† At present, one of Tlön's churches takes the platonic view that a given pain, a given greenish shade of yellow, a given temperature, a given sound, are the only reality. All men, in the dizzying moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who recite a line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.

‡ Buckley was a freethinker, a fatalist, and a defender of slavery.

‡‡ There remains, of course, the problem of the materia of certain objects.

Pierre Menard, the Author of
Don Quixote

To Silvina Ocampo

The visible body of work left by the novelist Pierre Menard is easily and briefly listed. Inexcusable, therefore, are the omissions and additions perpetrated by Madame Henri Bachelier in a misleading checklist which a certain newspaper that makes no secret of its Protestant leanings has had the insensitivity to thrust upon its unfortunate readers — few and Calvinist though these be, when not Freemason or circumcised. Menard's true friends looked on this checklist with alarm and even a certain sadness. Only yesterday, in a manner of speaking, did we gather among the mournful cypresses at his final resting place, and already Error creeps in to blur his Memory. Unquestionably, some small rectification is in order.

It is all too easy, I realize, to challenge my meagre credentials. Nevertheless, I trust that I shall not be disallowed from citing the names of two eminent patrons. The Baroness of Bacourt (at whose unforgettable vendredis it was my privilege to come to know the late-lamented poet) has been kind enough to grant approval to the pages that follow. The Countess of Bagnoreggio, one of the most refined minds of the Principality of Monaco (now of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, following her recent marriage to the international philanthropist Simon Kautzsch, a man much vilified, alas, by the victims of his disinterested activities), has sacrificed 'to truth and to the death' (her own words) the aristocratic reserve that so distinguishes her, and in an open letter published in the review Luxe she too grants me her approbation. These patents, I believe, should suffice.

I have said that Menard's visible work is readily listed. After careful examination of his private papers, I find that they contain the following items:

a) A Symbolist sonnet which appeared twice (the second time with variants) in the review
La Conque (March and October, 1899).

b) A study of the feasibility of constructing a poetic vocabulary of concepts that are neither synonyms for nor circumlocutions of those that shape our everyday speech 'but ideal objects created by consensus and intended essentially for poetic needs' (Nîmes, 1901).

c) A study of 'certain connections or affinities' in the thinking of Descartes, Leibniz, and John Wilkins (Nîmes, 1903).

d) A study of Leibniz's
Characteristica Universalis (Nîmes, 1904).

e) A technical article on the possibility of enriching the game of chess by removing one of the rook's pawns. Menard sets forth his case, elaborates, argues, and in the end rejects his own innovation.

f) A study of Ramon Lull's
Ars Magna Generalis (Nîmes, 1906).

g) A translation, with a foreword and notes, of
The Book of the Free Invention and Art of the Game of Chess by Ruy López de Segura (Paris, 1907).

h) The draft pages of a monograph on George Boole's symbolic logic.

i) An examination of the basic metrical laws of French prose, illustrated with examples from Saint-Simon (Revue des langues romanes, Montpellier, October, 1909).

j) A reply to Luc Durtain (who had denied the existence of such laws), illustrated with examples from Luc Durtain (Revue des langues romanes, Montpellier, December, 1909).

k) A manuscript translation of Quevedo's
Aguja de navegar cultos, entitled
La boussole des précieux.

l) A foreword to the catalogue of an exhibition of lithographs by Carolus Hourcade (Nîmes, 1914).

m)
Problems with a Problem (Paris, 1917), a book discussing in chronological order the solutions to the well-known paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. To date, two editions of this book have appeared; the second bears in an epigraph Leibniz's advice, 'Have not the slightest fear, Mr Tortoise', and amends the chapters on Russell and Descartes.

n) A dogged analysis of Toulet's 'syntactic usage' (Nouvelle revue française, March, 1921). Menard, I recall, held that censure and praise are sentimental activities which have little or nothing to do with criticism.

o) A transposition into alexandrines of Paul Valéry's 'Cimitière marin' (N.R.F., January, 1928).

p) An invective against Paul Valéry in Jacques Reboul's
Pages Towards the Suppression of Reality. (This denunciation, if I may digress, is the exact reverse of his true opinion of Valéry. Valéry knew this, and the old friendship between the two men was not imperiled.)

q) A 'definition' of the Countess of Bagnoreggio, included in the 'triumphant tome' — the words of another contributor, Gabriele D'Annunzio — published annually by this lady for the purpose of correcting the inevitable falsehoods of the gutter press and of presenting 'to the world and to Italy' a true portrait of her person, so often exposed (by reason of her beauty and conduct) to over-hasty misinterpretation.

r) An admirable crown of sonnets for the Baroness of Bacourt (1934).

s) A handwritten list of verses whose effect derives from their punctuation.*

The above, then, is a summary in chronological order (omitting only a few woolly occasional sonnets inscribed in Madame Henri Bachelier's hospitable, or greedy, album) of Menard's visible work. I shall now move on to his other work — the underground, the infinitely heroic, the singular, and (oh, the scope of the man!) the unfinished. This oeuvre, possibly the most significant of our time, consists of chapters nine and thirty-eight of the first part of Don Quixote and of a fragment of chapter twenty-two. I am aware that my claim will seem an absurdity, but to vindicate this 'absurdity' is the principle object of the present essay.**

Two texts of differing value inspired Menard's undertaking. One was that philological fragment (number 2005 in the Dresden edition) in which Novalis outlines the notion of total identification with a particular author. The other was one of those derivative books that place Christ on a boulevard, Hamlet in the Cannebière, or don Quixote on Wall Street. Like any man of good taste, Menard loathed such pointless masquerades, since all they were fit for, he said, was to amuse the man in the street with anachronisms or, worse still, to bewitch us with the infantile idea that every historical period is the same or is different. What seemed to Menard more interesting — albeit superficial and inconsistent in execution — was Daudet's famous attempt to combine in one character, Tartarin, both the Ingenious Knight and his squire. Anyone who suggests that Menard dedicated his life to writing a modern-day Don Quixote defiles Menard's living memory.

Pierre Menard was not out to write another Don Quixote — which would have been easy — but Don Quixote itself. Needless to add, he never envisaged a mindless transcription of the original; it was not his intention to copy it. His ambition, an admirable one, was to produce a handful of pages that matched word for word and line for line those of Miguel de Cervantes.

'Only my aim is astonishing,' he wrote to me from Bayonne on the thirtieth of September, 1934. 'The final term, the conclusion, of a theological or metaphysical proof — about, say, the objective world, God, causation, platonic forms — is just as foregone and familiar as my well-known novel. The one difference is that the philosopher gives us in pretty volumes the intermediary stages of his work, while I have chosen to destroy mine.' In fact, not a single draft page remains to bear witness to Menard's many years of toil.

The first method he devised was relatively simple. To learn Spanish well, to return to the Catholic faith, to fight the Moor and Turk, to forget European history from 1602 to 1918, to be Miguel de Cervantes. This was the course Pierre Menard embarked upon (I know he gained a fair command of seventeenth-century Spanish), but he rejected the method as too easy. Too impossible, rather! the reader will say. Granted, but the scheme was impossible from the start, and of all the impossible ways of achieving his aim this was the least interesting. To be in the twentieth century a popular novelist of the seventeenth century seemed to him a belittlement. To be, however possible, Cervantes and to come to Don Quixote seemed less exacting — therefore less interesting — than to stay Pierre Menard and come to Don Quixote through the experience of Pierre Menard. (This conviction, let me add, made him leave out the autobiographical prologue to the second part of Don Quixote. To have retained this prologue would have been to create another character — Cervantes — and would also have meant presenting Don Quixote through this character and not through Menard. Naturally, Menard denied himself this easy way out.) 'In essence, my scheme is not difficult,' I read in another part of his letter. 'To carry it through all I need is to be immortal.' Should I confess that I often find myself thinking that he finished the book and that I read Don Quixote — all of Don Quixote — as if it had been Menard's brainchild? A few nights ago, leafing through chapter twenty-six, which he never tried his hand at, I recognized our friend's style and voice in this fine phrase: 'the nymphs of the streams, the damp and doleful Echo....' This effective coupling of a moral and a physical adjective brought back to me a line of Shakespeare's that Menard and I talked about one evening:

Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk ...

But why Don Quixote? our reader will ask. For a Spaniard such a choice would have been understandable; not, however, for a Symbolist poet from Nîmes, an ardent follower of Poe, who begat Baudelaire, who begat Valéry, who begat Edmond Teste. The letter quoted above sheds light on the point. 'Don Quixote', explains Menard, 'interests me deeply but does not seem to me — how can I put it? — inevitable. While I find it hard to imagine a world without Edgar Allan Poe's interjection,

Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!

or without the “Bateau ivre” or the “Ancient Mariner”, I am quite able to imagine it without Don Quixote. (Of course, I am talking about my own ability and not about the historical resonance of these works.) Don Quixote is an incidental book; Don Quixote is not necessary. I can therefore plan the writing of it — I can write it — without the risk of tautology. I read it from cover to cover when I was about twelve or thirteen. Since then, I have carefully reread certain chapters — those that for the moment I shall not try my hand at. I have also delved into Cervantes's one-act farces, his comedies, Galatea, the exemplary novels, the all-too laboured Travails of Persiles and Segismunda, and the Voyage to Parnassus. My overall recollection of Don Quixote, simplified by forgetfulness and lack of interest, is much like the hazy outline of a book one has before writing it. Given this outline (which can hardly be denied me), it goes without saying that my problem is somewhat more difficult than the one Cervantes faced. My obliging forerunner, far from eschewing the collaboration of chance, went about writing his immortal work in something of a devil-may-care spirit, carried along by the inertial force of language and invention. I have taken upon myself the mysterious duty of reconstructing his spontaneous novel word for word. My solitary game is governed by two contradictory rules. The first allows me to try out variations of a formal or psychological nature; the second makes me sacrifice these variations to the “original” text while finding solid reasons for doing so. To these assumed obstacles we must add another — an inbuilt one. To compose Don Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was reasonable, necessary, and perhaps even predestined; at the beginning of the twentieth century, however, it is well-nigh impossible. Three centuries, packed with complex events, have not passed without effect. One of these events was Don Quixote itself.'

In spite of this trio of obstacles, Menard's fragmentary Don Quixote is subtler than that of Cervantes. Cervantes sets up a crude contrast between the fantasy of the chivalric tale and the tawdry reality of the rural Spain he knew, whereas Menard chooses as his reality the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope de Vega. What picturesque touches would this not have suggested to a Maurice Barrès or a Dr Rodríguez Larreta! Menard, with complete unselfconsciousness, avoids the least hint of exoticism. We find in his work no gypsydom, no conquistadores, no mystics, no Philip II, no burnings at the stake. He does away with local colour. This disdain hints at a new treatment of the historical novel. This disdain is an outright condemnation of Salammbô.

If we examine isolated chapters we are equally astonished. Let us, for example, look into chapter thirty-eight of part one, 'in which don Quixote gives a strange discourse on arms and letters.' We all know that don Quixote (like Quevedo in an analogous later passage from his Hora de todos) finds for arms over letters. Cervantes was an old soldier; his finding is understandable. But that the don Quixote of Pierre Menard, a contemporary of La trahison des clercs and of Bertrand Russell, should relapse into such fuzzy sophistry! Madame Bachelier sees this as the author subordinating himself in an admirable and characteristic way to the mentality of his hero; others, showing not the slightest perceptiveness, see only a transcription of Don Quixote; the Baroness of Bacourt sees the influence of Nietzsche. To this third view (which I consider beyond dispute) I wonder if I dare add a fourth, which accords quite well with Pierre Menard's all but divine modesty — his self-effacing or ironic habit of propagating ideas that were the exact reverse of those he himself held. (Let us once more remember his diatribe against Paul Valéry in Jacques Reboul's short-lived super-realist pages.) Cervantes's text and Menard's are identical as to their words, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors will claim, but the ambiguity is itself a richness.)

It is a revelation to compare Menard's Don Quixote with Cervantes's. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):

... truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, storehouse of great deeds, witness to the past, example and admonition to the present, warning to the future.

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the 'lay genius' Cervantes, this catalogue is no more than a rhetorical eulogy to history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

... truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, storehouse of great deeds, witness to the past, example and admonition to the present, warning to the future.

History, the 'mother' of truth; the idea is breathtaking. Menard, the contemporary of William James, does not define history as an enquiry into reality but as its source. To him historic truth is not what actually took place, it is what we think took place. The last two phrases — 'example and admonition to the present, warning to the future' — are shamelessly pragmatic.

As vivid is the contrast in styles. Menard's, deliberately archaic — he was a foreigner, after all — is prone to certain affectations. Not so the style of his forerunner, who uses the everyday Spanish of his time with ease.

There is no intellectual exercise which in the end is not pointless. A philosophical tenet is at the outset a true description of the world; with the passage of time it becomes no more than a chapter — perhaps only a paragraph or a name — in the history of philosophy. In literature this eventual withering away is even plainer. Don Quixote, Menard once told me, was first and foremost an entertaining book; now it has become a pretext for patriotic toasts, grammatical arrogance, and obscene deluxe editions. Fame is a form of incomprehension — perhaps the worst.

There is nothing new in such nihilistic conclusions; what is unusual is the resolve that Pierre Menard derived from them. Determined to rise above the emptiness that awaits all man's endeavours, he embarked upon a task that was extremely complex and, even before it began, futile. He devoted his utmost care and attention to reproducing, in a language not his own, a book that already existed. He wrote draft after draft, revising assiduously and tearing up thousands of manuscript pages.*** He never let anyone see them and took pains to ensure they did not survive him. I have tried without success to reconstruct them.

It seems to me that the 'final' Don Quixote can be looked on as a kind of palimpsest in which traces — faint but still decipherable — of our friend's 'earlier' writing must surely shine through. Unfortunately, only a second Pierre Menard, working his way back over the pages of the first one, would be capable of digging up and restoring to life those lost Troys.

'To think, to analyse, to invent,' Menard also wrote to me, 'far from being exceptional acts are the way the intelligence breathes. To glorify one particular instance of this action, to store as treasure the ancient thoughts of others, to recollect in amazed disbelief what the doctor universalis thought is to admit to our own indolence and crudeness. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will.'

Through a new technique, using deliberate anachronisms and false attributions, Menard (perhaps without trying to) has enriched the static, fledgling art of reading. Infinite in its possibilities, this technique prompts us to reread the Odyssey as if it came after the Aeneid and Madame Henri Bachelier's book The Centaur's Garden as if it were written by Madame Henri Bachelier. The technique fills the mildest of books with adventure. To attribute The Imitation of Christ to Louis Ferdinand Céline or to James Joyce — would this not be a satisfactory renewal of its subtle spiritual lessons?

Nîmes, 1939

* Madame Henri Bachelier also lists a literal translation of Quevedo's literal translation of St Francis of Sales's Introduction à la vie dévote. No trace of this work is to be found in Pierre Menard's library. The ascription must have arisen from something our friend said in jest, which the lady misunderstood.

** I had a secondary purpose as well — to sketch a portrait of Pierre Menard. But dare I compete with the gilded pages that I am told the Baroness of Bacourt is preparing, or with Carolus Hourcade's delicate, precise pencil?

*** I remember his notebooks with their square-ruled pages, the heavy black deletions, the personal system of symbols he used for marginal emendations, and his minute handwriting. He liked to stroll through the outskirts of Nîmes at sunset, often taking along a notebook with which he would make a cheerful bonfire.

The Lottery In Babylon

Like all men in Babylon, I have been a proconsul; like all, a slave. I have known absolute power, public disgrace, and imprisonment. Behold, my right forefinger is missing. Behold, beneath this rent in my cloak my flesh bears a red tattoo. It is a beth, the second letter of our alphabet. On nights when the moon is full, this symbol grants me sway over men whose sign is a gimel but, at the same time, it makes me subject to those marked with an aleph. They, on moonless nights, owe obedience to men branded with the gimel. In the twilight of dawn, before a black altar deep in a vault, I have slit the throats of sacred bulls. For the space of a lunar year, I was declared invisible. When I cried out, no one answered; when I stole bread, I was not beheaded. I have suffered that which the Greeks did not — uncertainty. In a bronze chamber, confronting the strangler's silent cord, hope did not abandon me; in the river of pleasure, neither did panic. Heraclides of Pontus relates in wonder that Pythagoras remembered having been Pyrrhus and before that Euphorbus and before that some other mortal. In order to remember similar experiences, I have no need to fall back either on death or deception.

I owe this almost hideous alternation in my fortunes to a practice that other republics do not follow or that in them works in an imperfect, secret way. I speak of our lottery. Although I have not delved into its history, I find our sages cannot agree on it. Of the lottery's mighty purpose, I know what a man unversed in astrology knows of the moon. I come from a bewildering country, where daily life revolves round the lottery. Until now, I have given this institution no more thought than I have the behaviour of the inscrutable gods or of my own heart. Here, far from Babylon and its cherished customs, I think back in amazement on the lottery and on the blasphemous speculations about it whispered by men lurking in shadows.

My father used to say that long ago — was it centuries? years? — the Babylonian lottery was little more than a street game. He said (I do not know how true it is) that barbers sold for a few copper coins oblong bits of bone or parchment, marked with symbols. A draw was made in broad daylight, and, without further complication, winners received a handful of silver coins. It was, as you see, a simple arrangement.

Of course, these so-called lotteries failed. Their moral force was nil. They did not take into account all of man's capacities but only his hope. Faced with public apathy, the shopkeepers who set up these venal lotteries began to lose money. One of their number, introducing a reform, added a few forfeits to the winning lots. Accordingly, anyone who bought a numbered ticket faced a twofold contingency — that of winning a sum of money or of paying a fine. These fines were often considerable. Naturally, the slight risk — out of every thirty winning numbers one was unlucky — aroused the public's interest. The Babylonians threw themselves into the game. Anyone who did not buy a ticket was looked on as a coward and a faintheart. In time, this well-deserved contempt grew. Those who did not play were despised, but so were the losers, who had to pay the fine. The Company (as it then began to be called) had to protect the winners, who could not collect their prizes until almost all the fines were in the lottery's coffers. Claims would be made against the losers, and a judge would order them to pay the fine, together with court costs, or spend a few days in jail. To cheat the Company, the losers all chose jail. Out of this defiance by a few the Company's absolute power, its ecclesiastical and metaphysical basis, was born.

Soon after, financial reports gave up listing the fines and took to publishing only the number of days in custody a particular ticket imposed. The omission, which passed almost unnoticed at the time, proved to be of prime importance. It was the first appearance in the lottery of a non-pecuniary element. Success was immediate. On the insistence of the gamblers, the Company found it had to issue more unlucky numbers.

Everyone knows that the people of Babylon set great store by logic and symmetry. It was deemed inconsistent that lucky numbers should be reckoned in coinage and unlucky numbers in days and nights of imprisonment. Certain moralists pointed out that money does not always lead to happiness and that other forms of reward might be simpler.

A further concern swept the humbler neighbourhoods. Members of the college of priests, laying more bets than ever, were able to relish the thrills of impending terror or hope. Not so the poor, who knew, with inevitable and understandable envy, that they were barred from the much-touted delights of the lottery's fluctuations. The right and proper wish that rich and poor participate equally in the game sparked off an indignant protest, whose memory the years have not dimmed. A stubborn few failed to understand (or pretended to fail to understand) that a new order — an inescapable historical advance — was in the making. A slave stole a red ticket, which, when drawn, entitled him to have his tongue burned. This was the same penalty the law imposed for the theft of a lottery ticket. Some Babylonians argued that the man deserved the executioner's branding iron because he was a thief; others, more generous, because it was the luck of the draw.

There were riots, there was regrettable bloodshed, but in the end the will of Babylon's common people prevailed against that of the rich. The citizenry achieved its aims in full. First, it got the Company to take over the reins of power. (This unifying act was essential in view of the breadth and complexity of the operation's new scope.) Second, the citizenry managed to get the lottery made secret, gratis, and available to all. The sale of tickets for money was abolished. Now initiated into the mysteries of Bel, every free men was automatically entered in the sacred draws, which were held in the labyrinths of the god on each sixtieth night and which, until the next round, decided a man's fate. The possibilities were countless. A lucky draw could lead to promotion to the council of sages, to the arrest of a public or a personal enemy, or to a tryst in the hushed dark of a room with a woman who intrigues us but whom we never expected to see again; an unlucky draw, to mutilation, various types of disgrace, or death. Sometimes a single event — the murder of C in some low haunt, the mysterious deification of B — was the happy outcome of thirty or forty draws. Getting the combinations right was tricky, but it should be remembered that Company agents were (and are) shrewd and all-powerful. In many instances, the knowledge that certain lucky draws were simply a matter of chance would have lessened their attraction. To get round this difficulty, agents of the Company resorted to the power of suggestion and sorcery. Their maneuverings, their wiles, were secret. To find out everyone's intimate hopes and fears, they used spies and astrologers. Certain stone lions, a sacred privy called Qaphqa, cracks in a crumbling aqueduct — all these, according to popular belief, 'were pathways to the Company'. Both malicious and well-meaning people began informing on each other. Their reports, which were of varying reliability, were collected and filed away.

Unbelievably, the mutterings went on. The Company, with its usual prudence, did not reply directly. Instead, it chose to scrawl in the trash heap of a mask factory a brief explanation, which is now part of holy writ. This tenet affirmed that the lottery is an introduction of chance into the order of the world and that to accept error does not contradict but rather confirms chance. The doctrine further held that the lions and the sacred receptacle, although not unauthorized by the Company (which reserved the right to consult them), operated without official sanction.

This declaration allayed the fears of the public. It also gave rise to other consequences, perhaps not foreseen by its author. The statement profoundly changed the nature and conduct of the Company. I have little time left; we have been told that our ship is about to set sail, but I will try to explain things.

Strange as it may seem, no one so far had come up with a general theory of probability. Babylonians are little concerned with odds. They respect the dictates of chance, to which they hand over their lives, their hopes, and their wild panic, but it never occurs to my countrymen to look into the labyrinthine laws of chance or the revolving spheres that reveal them. Nevertheless, the semi-official statement I have referred to prompted much discussion of a juridico-mathematical cast. Out of some of this discussion came the following premise: If the lottery is a heightening of chance, a periodic infusion of chaos into the cosmos, would it not be better if chance intervened in all stages of the draw and not just one? Is it not absurd that if chance dictates someone's death the details of this death — whether in obscurity or in the public eye, whether spanning an hour or a century — should not also be tied to chance? In the end, these quite reasonable reservations prompted a substantial reform, whose complexities (weighted by the practice of hundreds of years) only a handful of specialists understand. These complexities I shall try to sum up, albeit in a hypothetical way.

Let us imagine a first draw that sentences a man to death. To carry it out, we advance to a second draw, which comes up with, say, nine possible executioners. Of these, four may initiate a third draw, which will select the name of the actual executioner; two may replace the initial unlucky draw by a lucky one — the finding of treasure, for example; another may enhance the execution — either by bungling it or by enriching it with torture; the last two may refuse to carry out the sentence. This, in theory, is the plan. In reality, the number of draws is infinite. No decision is final, and all can branch out into others. The uninformed assume that infinite draws require infinite time, but the fact of the matter is that time is infinitely divisible, as the well-known parable of the hare and the tortoise teaches us. This infinitude ties in nicely with the sinuous gods of Chance and with the Heavenly Archetype of the Lottery so beloved of platonists. Some garbled echo of our rituals seems to have reverberated along the Tiber. Aelius Lampridius, in his biography of Elagabalus, relates that the emperor wrote on seashells the lots that he intended for his guests, such that one would receive ten pounds of gold, another ten flies, a third ten dormice, a fourth ten bears. It should be remembered that Elagabalus was educated in Asia Minor among priests of the divinity whose name he bore.

There are also impersonal draws, with unspecific aims. One decrees that a Taprobane sapphire be flung into the waters of the Euphrates; another, that a bird be released from a tower roof; yet another, that once a century a grain of sand be removed from (or added to) the numberless grains on a beach. The consequences are sometimes terrible.

Under the Company's benevolent influence, our customs are permeated with chance. Anyone who purchases a dozen amphorae of Damascene wine will not be surprised if one of them contains a talisman or else a viper; the scribe who drafts a contract seldom fails to work in some piece of false information. I myself, in these hasty words, have distorted some of the splendour, some of the cruelty. Perhaps also some of the mysterious sameness. Our historians, who are the shrewdest in the world, have invented a method of adjusting chance. The mechanics of this method are widely known and (generally) reliable, although of course they are never disclosed without a pinch of falsehood. Aside from this, nothing is so tainted with fiction as the Company's history. A stone tablet excavated in a temple may refer to a draw made only the other day or to one made centuries ago. Not a volume is published without some difference in each copy. Scribes swear a secret oath to delete, insert, or change. Evasion is also employed.

The Company, with godlike restraint, shuns all publicity. As is only to be expected, its agents are covert, and the directives it continually (perhaps incessantly) issues are no different from those liberally dispensed by impostors. For who would boast of being a mere impostor? The drunkard who comes out with an absurd order, the dreamer who suddenly wakes and with his bare hands strangles the woman sleeping beside him — are they perhaps not carrying out one of the Company's secret decisions? These silent workings, so like those of God, give rise to all manner of speculation. One is the heinous suggestion that the Company has not existed for centuries and that the hallowed confusion in our lives is purely inherited, a tradition. Another deems the Company to be eternal and teaches that it will endure until the last trumpet, when the last remaining god will destroy the world. Still another holds that the Company is everywhere at all times but that its influence is only over miniscule things — the call of a bird, the hues of rust or of dust, one's waking moments. Another, out of the mouths of masked heresiarchs, 'that it never existed and never will'. Another, equally base, reasons that to affirm or deny the existence of the phantom corporation is of no consequence, for Babylon itself is nothing more than one unending game of chance.

A Glimpse Into the Work of Herbert Quain

When Herbert Quain died recently, at his home in Roscommon, it came as no surprise to me that
The Times Literary Supplement granted him a bare half column of pious valediction, none of whose complimentary adjectives went unmodified — and considerably tempered — by an adverb.
The Spectator, in its relevant issue, was undeniably less brief and perhaps kinder. However, to liken
The God of the Labyrinth, Quain's first book, to Mrs. Agatha Christie and other of his writings to Gertrude Stein are not comparisons that inevitably spring to mind, nor would the late author have been cheered by them. Quain never considered himself a genius, not even on those peripatetic nights of literary discussion when, having by then exhausted the printing presses, he played at being Monsieur Teste or Dr Samuel Johnson. Herbert Quain was fully aware of the experimental nature of his books, which were admirable perhaps for their novelty and for a certain blunt honesty but not for the power of their passion. 'As with Cowley's odes,' he wrote to me from Longford on the sixth of March, 1939, 'I belong not to art but to the mere history of art.' To him there was no lower discipline than history.

I stress Herbert Quain's modesty — a modesty that is not, of course, the sum total of his thought. Flaubert and Henry James have led us to believe that works of art are rare and painstakingly created, but the sixteenth century (let us recall Cervantes's Voyage to Parnassus, let us recall Shakespeare's career) did not share this dismal view. Nor did Herbert Quain. In his opinion, good writing was not uncommon; he held that almost any street talk reached similar heights. He also felt that the aesthetic act demanded an element of surprise and that it was difficult to be surprised by something remembered. Smiling sincerely, he would deplore 'the stubborn, slavish preservation' of books from the past. I do not know whether his woolly theory can be justified, but I know his books are too eager to surprise.

I regret that I lent a certain lady — irrecoverably — the first thing he wrote. This I have said was a detective novel called
The God of the Labyrinth; I can add that it was published towards the end of November, 1933. By early December, the pleasing but laboured convolutions of Ellery Queen's
Siamese Twin Mystery had London and New York engrossed; I would suggest that the failure of our friend's novel should be blamed on this disastrous coincidence. Also
— and I want to be absolutely honest — on the book's flawed construction and on a number of stiff, pretentious passages that describe the sea. Seven years on, I find it impossible to recollect the details of the plot. Here, then, is its outline, now impoverished (or purified) by my dim memory. There is a puzzling murder in the opening pages, plodding conversation in the middle, and a solution at the end. Once the mystery is solved, we come upon a long paragraph of retrospection containing this sentence: 'Everyone thought that the meeting between the two chess players had been accidental.' The words lead us to believe that the solution is wrong. The anxious reader, going back over the relevant chapters, discovers a different solution, the true one. In so doing, the reader of this curious book turns out to be cleverer than the detective.

Still more unconventional is Quain's 'retrogressive, branching novel'
April March, whose third (and only) part appeared in 1936. Nobody on studying the book could fail to see that it is a game. Allow me to recall that the author never regarded it as anything else. 'I claim for this work', I once heard him say, 'the essential features of all games — symmetry, arbitrary rules, and tedium.' Even the title is a feeble pun. It does not mean the 'march of April' but literally 'April, March'. Someone has pointed out in it an echo of the theories of J.W. Dunne; in fact, Quain's foreword is more reminiscent of F.H. Bradley's reversed world, where death precedes birth, the scar the wound, and the wound the blow (Appearance and Reality, 1893, p. 215*). The worlds depicted in
April March are not backwards-moving, only Quain's method of chronicling them is. Retrogressive and branching, as I have said. The novel consists of thirteen chapters. The first relates a cryptic conversation among strangers on a railway platform. The second relates the events of the evening in the first chapter. The third, still moving backwards, relates the events of what may be another evening in the first chapter; the fourth, the events of yet a third evening. Each of these three evenings (which rigorously exclude one another) branches off in a very different way into a further three evenings. The whole work consists of nine novels; each novel, of three long chapters. (The first, of course, is common to all of them.) One of these novels is symbolic in nature; another, supernatural; another, like a detective story; another, psychological; another, Communist; another, anti-Communist; and so forth. Perhaps a diagram will help elucidate the structure.

Of this structure it may be worth mentioning what Schopenhauer said of Kant's twelve categories — that he sacrifices everything to a passion for symmetry. Predictably, a few of the nine stories are unworthy of Quain. The best is not the one he first dreamed up, the x4; rather, it is the fantasy, x9. Others are marred by long drawn-out jokes and pointless bogus detail. Anyone reading the stories in chronological order (that is, x3, y1, z) will lose this peculiar book's odd flavour. Two of the tales — x7 and x8 — do not hold up on their own; only their placement, one after the other, makes them work. It may or may not be worth pointing out that once April March was published, Quain regretted its ternary arrangement and predicted that his imitators would opt for the binary

and the gods and demiurges for an infinite scheme — infinite stories, branching off infinitely.

Quite different, but also moving backwards, is Quain's two-act heroic comedy
The Secret Mirror. In the books considered above, complexity of form restricted the author's imagination; in the play, it has freer rein. The first (and longer) act takes place in a country house near Melton Mowbray, belonging to a certain General Thrale, C.I.E. The pivot of the plot is the absent Miss Ulrica Thrale, the general's eldest daughter. Through the dialogue, we build up a picture of her as a haughty Amazon and we suspect that her forays into literature are infrequent. The newspapers announce her engagement to the Duke of Rutland, then belie the event. The playwright Wilfred Quarles worships Miss Thrale, who, at some time or other, has granted him an absent-minded kiss. The characters are all immensely rich and blue-blooded; their affections, noble though vehement. The dialogue seems to waver between Bulwer-Lytton's mere verbosity and the epigrams of Wilde or Mr. Philip Guedalla. There is a nightingale and a night; there is a secret duel on a terrace. (Certain strange contradictions and sordid details hover in the background.) The characters in the first act reappear in the second — with different names. The 'playwright' Wilfred Quarles is a sales representative from Liverpool whose real name is John William Quigley. Miss Thrale actually exists. Quigley has never laid eyes on her but he morbidly collects photographs of her out of The Tattler or The Sketch. Quigley is the author of Act One. The unlikely or improbable 'country house' is the Judaeo-Irish boarding-house he lives in, transfigured and exalted by him. The plot line of the two acts is parallel, but in Act Two everything is tinged with horror, everything is postponed or frustrated. When The Secret Mirror opened, critics invoked the names of Freud and Julian Green. Mention of the former seems to me completely unjustified.

Word spread that
The Secret Mirror was a Freudian comedy, and this providential but false interpretation guaranteed the play's success. Unfortunately, Quain, by then forty, was inured to failure and did not resign himself graciously to a change of regimen. He decided to seek revenge. Towards the end of 1939, he published Statements, perhaps the most original and certainly the least praised or known of his books. Quain had taken to arguing that readers were an extinct species. 'Every European', he declared, 'is either potentially or actually a writer.' He also held that of the various pleasures writing can provide, the greatest was inventiveness. Since few of these would-be writers had any capacity for invention, most would have to make do with mimicry. For these 'deficient writers', whose name was legion, Quain wrote the eight stories in
Statements. Each foreshadows or promises a good plot, which the author then deliberately sabotages. One or two — not the best — hint at two plots. The reader, carried away by vanity, thinks he has invented them. From the third tale, 'Yesterday's Rose', I was ingenious enough to fashion 'The Circular Ruins', a story which appears in my book
The Garden of Branching Paths.

* So much for Herbert Quain's learning; so much for the learning on page 215 of a book published in 1893. A speaker in Plato's Statesman had long since described a similar regression — that of an earth-born race who, subjected to the power of a contrary rotation of the universe, went from old age to manhood, from manhood to boyhood, from boyhood to disappearance, or wasting away. Then there is Theopompus, who, in his Philippics, speaks of certain northern fruits that produce in those who eat them the same backward progression. More interesting is the idea of a reversal of Time, when we might remember the future and forget, or barely perceive, the past. Cf. the tenth canto of the Inferno, lines 97-102, in which prophetic and presbyopic sight are compared.

The Library of Babel

By this art you may contemplate the variation of the 23 letters ...

The Anatomy of Melancholy, Partition 2, Section 2, Member 4

The world (which some call the Library) is made up of an unknown, or perhaps unlimited, number of hexagonal galleries, each with a vast central ventilation shaft surrounded by a low railing. From any given hexagon, the higher and lower galleries can be seen stretching away interminably. The layout of every floor is identical. Twenty-five long shelves, five on each side, fill all the sides but one; the height of the shelves, which is the height of the walls, is little more than that of the average librarian. From the unshelved side, a narrow passageway leads off to another gallery, which is identical to the first and to all the others. To left and right of the passageway are a pair of tiny cupboards. One is used for sleeping upright; the other, for satisfying faecal necessities. From this passage a spiral stairway climbs up, or goes down, to the uttermost reaches. The passageway contains a mirror, which faithfully duplicates what appears before it. From this, most people infer that the Library is not infinite, for, if it were, why this illusion of duplication? I prefer to imagine that the mirror's gleaming surface depicts and promises infinity. Illumination comes from spherical fruit called lamps. There are two, opposite each other, in each hexagon. Their light is inadequate, though continuous.

Like all men in the Library, in my youth I traveled, roaming in search of a book, perhaps of a catalogue of catalogues. Now, when my eyes can barely make out what I write, I am getting ready to die a league or two from the hexagon where I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no want of pious hands to hurl me over the railing. My grave will be the bottomless air; my body will plummet for a long, long time, decaying and dissolving in the wind generated by my fall, which will be infinite. I have said that the Library is limitless. Idealists argue that hexagonal chambers are the quintessential form of absolute space or, at least, of our perception of space. A triangular or five-sided chamber, they reason, is unimaginable. (Mystics claim that their ecstasies reveal a circular chamber with a great circular book, whose continuous spine runs all the way round the walls, but the evidence of these seers is suspect and their words obscure. Such a cyclical book is God.) For now, I need only quote the classic dictum that 'The Library is a sphere whose exact centre is any hexagon and whose circumference is beyond reach.'

Each wall but one of each hexagon has five shelves; each shelf holds thirty-two books of a uniform size. Each book contains four hundred and ten pages; each page, forty lines; each line, eighty characters in black letter. There are also characters on the spine of each book but they give no indication or forewarning of what is inside. I know that this discrepancy was once looked on as a mystery. Before I run through the explanation (whose discovery, despite its tragic ramifications, may be the most important event in history), let me call to mind a few salient facts.

First, that the Library has always existed. Of this truth, whose direct corollary is that the world will always exist, no reasonable mind can be in doubt. Man, the imperfect librarian, may be a creation of chance or of evil lesser deities. The world, with its elegant supply of bookshelves, of baffling volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and privies for the seated librarian, can only be the creation of a god. To appreciate the distance between the divine and the human, all we need do is compare the crude, spidery symbols my fallible hand is scrawling on the endpapers of this book with the organic letters on the inside, which are precise, fine, deep black, and perfectly symmetrical.

Second, that the number of these symbols is twenty-five.* The discovery of this fact three hundred years ago led to the formulation of a general theory of the Library and to a satisfactory solution of a problem which, until then, no hypothesis had addressed — namely, the formless and random nature of almost all books. One, once seen by my father in a hexagon of Circuit 1594, consisted of a relentless repetition, from beginning to end, of the letters M C V. Another, frequently consulted in this zone, is nothing more than a labyrinth of letters but its second-to-last page reads, 'O time your pyramids.' We now know that for every coherent or straightforward line there are leagues of nonsensical, clashing sounds, verbal hodgepodge, and gibberish. (I know of a wild hinterland whose librarians reject the superstitious and pointless custom of looking for meaning in books, which they equate with seeking meaning in dreams or in the haphazard lines of one's hand. They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but they maintain that their use is accidental and that books in themselves mean nothing. This notion, as we shall see, is not entirely false.)

For a long time it was believed that these impenetrable books were works in dead or remote languages. It is true that earliest man, the first librarians, used a language very different from the one we speak now; it is true that some miles to our right the language spoken is a dialect and that ninety floors above us that dialect is incomprehensible. All this, I repeat, is true, but four hundred and ten pages of unbroken lines of M C V can be part of no language, however primitive or however much of a dialect it may be. Some people suggested that each letter might have a bearing on the one after it and that the meaning of M C V in the third line of page 71 was not the same as that of these letters in another position on another page, but this embryonic theory came to nothing. Others believed that these letter sequences were codes, a hypothesis that has been widely accepted, although not in the sense intended by its originators.

Five hundred years ago, the head of an upper hexagon** came across a book as confused as the rest but which had almost two pages of identical lines. He showed his find to a peripatetic cryptographer, who told him they were in Portuguese. Others said they were Yiddish. Within a hundred years, the language had been established as a Samoyed-Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with inflections from classical Arabic. The contents, which were also decoded, proved to be theories of synthetic analysis, illustrated by endlessly repeated examples of variations. Such examples led one librarian of genius to stumble on the Library's fundamental law. This thinker noted that all the books, however different they may be, have identical elements — the space, the full stop, the comma, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also claimed something that all travelers have confirmed — that in the whole vast Library no two books are the same. From these undeniable premises he deduced that the Library is complete and that its shelves hold all possible permutations of the twenty-odd symbols (a number which, although vast, is not infinite) or, in effect, everything that can be expressed in all languages — a history of the future down to the last detail, the autobiographies of the archangels, a true catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false ones, a proof of the falseness of these catalogues, a proof of the falseness of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, a commentary on this gospel, a commentary on the commentary on this gospel, a true account of your death, translations of each book into all languages, interpolations from each book into every other book.

When it was announced that the Library was the repository of all books, the initial response was one of unrestrained joy. Men everywhere felt they were lords of a secret and still intact treasure. There was no individual or world problem for which an eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe had been justified and at a stroke had usurped the limitless dimensions of hope. At the time, there was much talk of the Vindications — books of apologia and prophecy, which justified for ever the actions of each man on earth and held wondrous mysteries concerning his future. Thousands of avid seekers abandoned their comfortable native hexagons and rushed upstairs and down, driven by a fruitless urge to find their particular Vindication. These pilgrims wrangled in the narrow passageways, uttering dark curses and seizing each other by the throat on the divine stairways; they flung the deceiving books into the bottomless pit of the shafts and were hurled to their deaths by men from distant regions. Others went mad. The Vindications exist (I have seen two that tell of people in the future, who may not be imaginary), but the seekers forgot that the likelihood of a man's finding his own apologia — or some false version of it — is next to nil.

It was also hoped at that period that the fundamental mysteries of human life
— the origin of the Library and of time — would be revealed. Clearly, these deep mysteries can be explained in words, and, should the language of philosophers be inadequate, the multiform Library will doubtless have produced the undiscovered language that is required, together with its vocabulary and grammar. For four hundred years, men have been exhausting the hexagons. There are official searchers, or inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their work. They always arrive bone weary, talking about a stairway with missing steps, which was nearly the death of them. They talk to the librarian about galleries and staircases. Sometimes they pick out the nearest book and leaf through it in search of shameful words. Plainly, none of them expects to find anything.

Of course, the excessive hope was followed by extreme depression. The conviction that some shelf in some hexagon held precious books and that these precious books were inaccessible seemed almost too much to bear. A blasphemous sect suggested that the searches stop and that everyone keep scrambling and re-scrambling the letters and symbols until, through an improbable stroke of luck, the canonical books emerged. The authorities felt obliged to lay down strict rules. The sect disappeared, but in my childhood I saw old men who for long periods hid in the privies, with some metal disks in a forbidden shaker, trying feebly to ape the divine disorder.

Others, conversely, believed that the most important thing was to eliminate useless works. These men, showing credentials that were not always false, invaded the hexagons, pored over a single volume and condemned whole shelves. To their ascetic zeal for cleansing we owe the senseless loss of millions of books. The names of these perpetrators are still cursed, but those who mourn the 'treasures' destroyed in such frenzy overlook two well-known facts. One, that the Library is so vast that any loss caused by humans is necessarily minute. The other, that each copy is unique, irreplaceable, but since the Library is a totality there are always several hundred thousand imperfect copies — works that differ in no other detail than a letter or a comma. Contrary to general opinion, I take the view that the damage caused by the Purifiers' raids has been exaggerated as a result of the terror these fanatics unleashed. A madness drove them to defeat the books of the Crimson Hexagon — books of a smaller than average size, which were all-powerful, illustrated, and magical.

We also know of another superstition of that time — that of the Man of the Book. On some shelf in some hexagon, it was said, there must be a book that is the sum and substance of all the others. A certain librarian has studied it and he is akin to a god. In the language of this particular zone, traces of the worship of this long-dead official remain. Many have made pilgrimages in search of Him. For a hundred years, they vainly exhausted every possible path. How were they to discover the venerated secret hexagon that gave Him shelter? Someone suggested that they should try working backwards. To find book A, first consult book B, which will tell where A is; to find book B, first consult book C, and so on ad infinitum. I have squandered and used up my years in quests of this kind. It seems to me quite possible that on some shelf or other in the world there may be an all-embracing book.† I pray the unknown gods that one man
— just one, even if thousands of years ago — has examined and read it. If honour and wisdom and happiness are not my lot, may they be the lot of others. May heaven exist, even if my place is in hell. Let me be reviled and obliterated, so long as for a single instant — in a single being
— Your vast Library finds justification.

Unbelievers insist that in the Library nonsense is the norm, while reason (or even simple, lowly coherence) is an almost miraculous exception. I know they speak of 'the feverish Library, any one of whose haphazard volumes runs the endless risk of turning into any other and that all books affirm, deny, or cast confusion on this fact like a god in a state of delirium'. These words, which not only denounce but also exemplify chaos, are a clear proof of bad taste and hopeless ignorance. In fact, the Library includes every verbal structure and every permutation that the twenty-five symbols permit but not a single piece of sheer nonsense. It is of no purpose to point out that the best book in the many hexagons I administrate is entitled Combed Thunder, and another The Plaster Cramp, and a third Axaxaxas Mlö. These titles, although at first sight meaningless, must lend themselves to some coded or allegorical interpretation. Such an interpretation consists of words and so, by definition, is in the Library. I can make no combination of letters
— even dhcmrlchtdj
— which the divine library has not envisaged and that in one or another of its secret languages does not hold some fearful meaning. Any syllable full of tenderness or fear uttered in any one of those languages is the all-powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology. The present futile, long-winded epistle already exists in one of the thirty-two volumes of the five shelves in one of the numberless hexagons — as does its refutation. (An n number of possible languages use the same vocabulary; in some, the symbol for 'library' correctly denotes 'a ubiquitous, ever-lasting system of hexagonal galleries', but in others 'library' is 'bread' or 'pyramid' or anything else, and the seven words that define it have another meaning. Are you sure, you who are reading this, that you understand my language?)

The act of writing methodically distracts me from the current condition of mankind. The certainty that everything is already written negates or makes phantoms of us. I know of regions where young people prostrate themselves before books and crudely kiss their pages but do not know how to decipher a single letter. Epidemics, heresies, pilgrimages that inevitably degenerate into hooliganism, have decimated the population. I believe I mentioned suicides, whose numbers rise every year. Perhaps age and fear deceive me, yet I suspect that the human race — the only race
— stands on the brink of extinction but that the Library will live on — its lights burning, unvisited, infinite, perfectly still, and bristling with precious, useless, incorruptible, secret volumes.

I have just used the word 'infinite'. I did not choose this adjective out of rhetorical habit. I do not find it illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge the world to be limited put forward the notion that in remote parts the passageways and stairways and hexagons might inconceivably end. This is absurd. Those who imagine the world to be without limits forget that these are defined by the possible number of books. I make bold to suggest the following solution to the age-old question: The Library is limitless and recurrent. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, he would discover after centuries that the same volumes were repeated in the same random order. This, when it occurred, would be an order — the Order. My solitude is cheered by this elegant hope.††

Mar del Plata, 1941

* The original manuscript has neither numerals nor capital letters. Punctuation was limited to the comma and full stop. These two signs, the space, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet were the twenty-five symbols found to be sufficient by the unknown author. [Editor's Note.]

** Formerly, for every three hexagons, there was one man. Suicides and lung diseases have upset the ratio. There have been times when I travelled for nights along corridors and worn stairways without finding a single librarian. The memory of this fills me with inexpressible melancholy.

† Let me reiterate that for a book to exist it has only to be possible. The impossible alone is excluded. For example, no book is also a stairway, although there are certainly books that argue or deny or demonstrate the possibility and others whose structure resembles that of a stairway.

†† Letizia Alvarez de Toledo has remarked that the vast Library is useless. In point of fact, a single ordinary-sized volume, printed in nine- or ten-point type and consisting of an infinite number of infinitely thin leaves, would be enough. (Early in the seventeenth century, Cavalieri noted that all solids are the superimposition of an infinite number of planes.) Handling such a silky vade-mecum would be awkward, for each apparent leaf would divide into others. The unimaginable middle leaf would have no reverse.

The Garden of Branching Paths

To Victoria Ocampo

In his
History of the World War (page 252), Liddell Hart writes that an assault on the Serre-Montauban line intended for the twenty-fourth of July, 1916, and consisting of thirteen British divisions supported by fourteen hundred guns, had to be postponed until the morning of the twenty-ninth. The cause of this otherwise inconsequential delay, he goes on, was torrential rain. The following statement, dictated, checked, and signed by Dr Yu Tsun, one-time head of English at the Tsingtao Hochschule, throws new light on the event. The first two pages are missing.

*

... and replaced the receiver. Immediately afterwards, I realized I knew the voice, which had answered in German. It was that of Captain Richard Madden. Madden speaking from Viktor Runeberg's flat meant the end of all our efforts and
— but this seemed, or should have seemed, quite secondary
— of our lives as well. It meant that Runeberg had been arrested, or killed.* Before the sun set that day, I would suffer the same fate. Madden was implacable. Or, rather, he felt bound to be implacable. An Irishman in the service of England, a man accused of half-heartedness and even treason, how could he fail to welcome and seize upon such a miraculous gift
— the discovery, capture, and perhaps death as well, of two agents of the German Empire?

I went up to my room; absurdly, I locked the door and threw myself down on the narrow iron bedstead. Outside the window were the usual slate roofs and an overcast six o'clock evening sky. It was hard to believe that this unremarkable day, without an omen, without a warning, was to be the day of my inescapable death. Despite my dead father, despite having been a child in one of Hai Feng's symmetrical gardens, was I about to die? I then reflected that everything that happens does so only to oneself and only now. Centuries of centuries pass, but events take place only in the present; countless men are battling in the air, on land, and at sea, yet all that really happens is happening to me.

The almost unbearable memory of Madden's horse-like face put an end to these ramblings. In the depths of my hatred and fear (now that I have outwitted Richard Madden, now that my neck yearns for the noose, I can admit my fear), I realized that this troublesome and doubtless happy warrior had no idea that I possessed the secret
— the name of the place on the Ancre where the new British artillery depot was located. A bird streaked across the grey sky, and automatically I converted it into an aeroplane and that aeroplane into many
— over France
— demolishing the depot with a rain of bombs. If only, before a bullet silenced my mouth, I could shout out the name of that place so that it could be heard in Germany! But a human voice is feeble. How could I make mine reach my commander's ears? The ears of that warped, loathsome man, who knew nothing of Runeberg or me except that we were in Staffordshire but who, in his drab Berlin office, was poring over endless newspapers, vainly awaiting information from us.

'I must get out of here,' I said aloud. Without making a sound, I stood up. It was a pointless perfection of silence, as if Madden were about to pounce. Something
— perhaps the simple need to confirm that my resources were nil
— made me go through my pockets. I found what I knew would be there. My American watch; a nickel-plated chain and square coin; a key-ring with the useless but compromising keys to Runeberg's flat; my notebook; a letter I decided to destroy at once (and didn't); a crown, two shillings, and a few pence; my blue-and-red pencil; a handkerchief; my revolver with a single bullet. Foolishly, I picked it up and, to bolster my courage, weighed it in my hand. A gunshot can be heard from some distance, I vaguely judged. Ten minutes later, my plan was ripe. The telephone directory gave me the name of the one person who could transmit my message. He lived out in the suburbs, in Fenton, less than half an hour away by train.

I am a coward. I now confess it, now that I have carried out a plan which was nothing if not risky. I know it was a terrible thing to do. I certainly did not do it for Germany. I care nothing for a barbaric country that forced me into the ignominy of spying. What is more, I now know of an Englishman
— a modest man
— who in my view is Goethe's equal. I only spoke to him for an hour, but for that hour he was Goethe. I did the deed because I felt my commander had little regard for men of my race — for my numerous ancestors, who unite in me. I wanted to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies. Meanwhile, I had to get away from Captain Madden. At any moment his hand and his voice could sound at my door. I dressed quietly, bade myself farewell in the mirror, went downstairs, peered along the empty street, and slipped out. The station was only a short distance away, but I thought it best to take a taxi. That way, I told myself, I would run less risk of being spotted. As it was, in the deserted street I felt utterly visible and defenseless. I remember telling the driver to stop just before he reached the entrance. I alighted with deliberate, almost painful, slowness. My destination was the village of Ashgrove, but I bought a ticket for a station farther along the line.

The train was due to leave in a minute or two
— at eight fifty. I quickened my step; the next train would arrive at nine-thirty. There was hardly anyone on the platform. Boarding, I made my way along the corridor. I remember some farmworkers, a woman in mourning, a youth engrossed in Tacitus's
Annals, a wounded but happy soldier. Finally, we moved off. A man I recognized came dashing, too late, onto the platform. It was Captain Richard Madden. Devastated, trembling, I shrank down in my seat, pulling away from the fearful window.

My devastation changed to a state of almost abject bliss. I told myself that I had already crossed swords and had scored the first hit by eluding, if only for forty minutes, if only by a stroke of luck, my adversary's attack. This small triumph, I argued, foreshadowed total victory. Nor was it such a small triumph, since without the precious advantage afforded me by the train timetable I would be in prison or dead. I argued (no less falsely) that my cowardly joy proved I was a man who could bring the assignment to a successful end. Out of my weakness, I drew a strength that did not let me down. I foresee that man will daily give in to ever more hideous deeds, and that soon there will be no one but warriors and bandits. I give them this advice: To perform a hideous deed, a man must tell himself that he has already done it; he must force upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past. This I did, as my eyes
— those of a man already dead
— took in the passing of that day and the gathering of the night. The train ran smoothly past a copse of ash trees, coming to a halt in what seemed open countryside. No one called out the name of the station.

'Ashgrove?' I asked some boys outside the window.

'Ashgrove,' they replied.

I got down. A street lamp lit up the platform, but the boys' faces remained in shadow.

'Are you going to Dr Albert's house?' one of them asked.

Before I could reply, another said, 'It's a good distance from here, but if you take the first road on the left and then left again at each turning, you can't go wrong.'

I tossed them a coin (my last), made my way down some stone steps, and set off along the lonely road. It descended slowly, its surface unmade. Branches met overhead, and a low full moon seemed to keep company with me.

For a moment, I thought that Richard Madden had somehow fathomed my desperate plan, but soon I realized this was impossible. It occurred to me that the advice to keep taking a left turn was the normal way to reach the central point of certain mazes. I know something about labyrinths. Not for nothing am I the great-grandson of the famous Ts'ui Pên, who was governor of Yunnan and who renounced office in order to write a novel that teemed with more characters than the Hung Lu Meng and to construct a maze in which all mankind might lose its way. Thirteen years he dedicated to these diverse labours, but a stranger's hand struck him down, and his novel proved meaningless and no one ever found the maze.

Under English trees I contemplated that lost labyrinth, imagining it pristine and inviolate in a mountain fastness. I imagined it obliterated by paddies or under water; I pictured it endless, no longer consisting of octagonal pavilions and of paths that turn back on themselves but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms. I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of a meandering, ever-growing labyrinth that would encompass the past and future and would somehow take in the heavenly bodies. Absorbed in these imaginings, I forgot my predicament as a hunted man. For untold moments, I felt I was a detached observer of the world. The living, twilit fields, the moon, the remains of the evening were playing on me; as was the easy slope of the road, which removed any chance of tiring. The evening was intimate, infinite. The road descended and branched across now shadowy pastures. A high-pitched, almost syllabic music drifted in, blurred by leaves and distance, and then moved off on wafting breezes. I reflected that a man can be an enemy of other men, of other moments of other men, but not of a country
— not of fireflies, words, gardens, waterways, sunsets.

I came to a high, rusty gate. Through its bars I made out an avenue and a sort of pavilion. At once, I grasped two things. The first was trivial, the second almost beyond belief. The music came from the pavilion, and the music was Chinese. This was why I had accepted it, without paying it any special heed. I do not remember whether there was a bellpull or a button or whether I called by clapping my hands. The scratchy music went on.

From the inner depths of the house came a light, whose beam the trees intersected and sometimes blotted out. Shaped like a drum, the paper lantern was the colour of the moon. It was carried by a tall man, whose face I could not see, because the light blinded me. Opening the gate, he said slowly, in my language, 'I see that the pious Hsi P'êng feels bound to correct my solitude. You have no doubt come to inspect the garden?'

I recognized the name of one of our consuls and echoed, baffled, 'The garden?'

'The garden of branching paths.'

Something stirred in my memory, and with utter conviction I said, 'The garden of my ancestor Ts'ui Pên.'

'Your ancestor? Your illustrious ancestor? Step inside.'

The damp path zigzagged as in my childhood. We entered a library of Eastern and Western books. I recognized, bound in yellow silk, some manuscript volumes of the Lost Encyclopedia compiled for the Third Emperor of the Luminous Dynasty but never printed. A gramophone record still revolved beside a bronze phoenix. I also remember a famille rose vase and another, many centuries older, in that shade of blue copied by our potters from Persian craftsmen.

Dr Albert watched me, smiling. He was, as I have said, tall, with sharp features, grey eyes, and grey whiskers. There was something of the priest and also the sailor about him. He told me he had been a missionary in Tientsin 'before aspiring to become a Sinologist'.

We sat down
— I on a long, low divan, he with his back to the window and to a grandfather clock. I worked out that my pursuer, Richard Madden, would not appear for at least an hour. My irrevocable plan could wait.

'A strange fate, Ts'ui Pên's,' said Stephen Albert. 'Governor of his native province, a learned astronomer and astrologer, a tireless interpreter of the canonical books, a chess player, a famous poet and calligrapher
— he gave up everything to write a book and build a maze. He renounced the pleasures of oppression, justice, the plural bed, banquets, and even learning to cloister himself for thirteen years in the Pavilion of Limpid Solitude. Upon his death, his heirs found nothing but a chaos of manuscripts. The family, as you must know, wanted to consign them to the flames, but his executor
— a Taoist or Buddhist monk
— insisted on their publication.'

'Ts'ui Pên's blood kin still curse that monk,' I replied. 'The publication was pointless. The book is an indecisive pile of contradictory drafts. I have examined it on a couple of occasions. In the third chapter the hero dies, in the fourth he is alive. As for Ts'ui Pên's other enterprise, his labyrinth— '

'Here it is,' Dr Albert said, pointing to a high, lacquered writing cabinet.

'An ivory labyrinth!' I exclaimed. 'A miniature labyrinth.'

'A labyrinth of symbols,' he corrected. 'An invisible labyrinth of time. It has been granted to me, a barbarous Englishman, to unravel this delicate mystery. After more than a hundred years, the details are irrecoverable, but it is not difficult to surmise what took place. Ts'ui Pên may once have said, “I am retiring to write a book.” And on another occasion, “I am retiring to build a maze.” Everyone imagined these to be two works; nobody thought that book and labyrinth were one and the same. The Pavilion of Limpid Solitude stood in the centre of what was perhaps an elaborately laid-out garden. This may have suggested a physical labyrinth. Ts'ui Pên died, and no one in his vast domains ever found the labyrinth. The confusion of the novel suggested to me that it was the labyrinth. Two facts corroborated this. One, the curious story that the maze Ts'ui Pên had planned was specifically infinite. The second, my discovery of a fragment of a letter.'

Albert got up. For several moments he stood with his back to me, opening a drawer of the black-and-gold writing cabinet. He turned and held out a squarish piece of paper that had once been crimson and was now pink and brittle. The script was the renowned calligraphy of Ts'ui Pên himself. Uncomprehending but with deep emotion, I read these words written with a tiny brush by a man of my own blood: 'I leave to various futures (but not all) my garden of branching paths.' In silence, I handed back the page.

'Before unearthing this letter,' Albert went on, 'I wondered how a book could be infinite. I came up with no other conclusion than that it would have to be a cyclical, or circular, volume
— one whose last page was the same as its first, and with the potential to go round and round for ever. I recalled the night in the middle of the Thousand and One Nights, in which Queen Scheherazade
— having distracted the scribe by a trick of magic
— starts to recount the history of the Thousand and One Nights, thereby running the risk of coming back full circle to this same night and continuing forever more. I also imagined an archetypal, hereditary work handed down from father to son, wherein each new heir would add a chapter or, piously, rewrite a page of his forebears. These speculations engaged my mind, but none seemed even remotely relevant to Ts'ui Pên's contradictory chapters. In my perplexity, I received from Oxford the manuscript you have just seen. One sentence caught my attention: “I leave to various futures (but not all) my garden of branching paths.” Almost at once, light dawned. The garden of branching paths was the chaotic novel; the phrase 'to various futures (but not all)' conjured up an image of a branching in time, not in space. A re-reading of the book confirmed this theory. In all works of fiction, each time the writer is confronted with choices, he opts for one and discards the rest. In the inextricable Ts'ui Pên, he opts
— at one and the same time
— for all the alternatives. By so doing, he creates several futures, several times over, and in turn these proliferate and branch off. Hence, his novel's contradictions. Fang, let us say, has a secret. A stranger calls at his door; Fang decides to kill him. Naturally, there are several possible outcomes. Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, both can be spared, both can die, and so forth. In Ts'ui Pên's novel, all of these happen, and each is a point of departure for other branchings off. Now and again, the paths of this labyrinth converge. For example, in one possible past you come to this house as an enemy, in another as a friend. If you can bear my incurable pronunciation, we shall read some pages.'

In the bright circle of lamplight, his face was clearly that of an old man, yet with something unconquerable and even immortal about it. Slowly, precisely, he read two forms of the same epic chapter. In the first, an army marches into battle across a bare mountain; dread of the rocks and the darkness makes the troops hold life cheap, and they easily win a victory. In the second, the same army storms a palace, which is in the midst of festivities; the resplendent battle seems to them an extension of the revelry, and they are victorious. I listened with seemly veneration to these old tales, which were perhaps less of a marvel than the fact that my blood had contrived them and that a man from a distant empire had restored them to me while I was engaged in a desperate assignment on an island in the West. I remember the concluding words, repeated at the end of each version like a secret watchword: 'So battled the heroes, their stout hearts calm, their swords violent, each man resigned to kill and to die.'

From that moment, I felt around me and within my dark body an invisible, intangible swarming. Not that of diverging, parallel, and finally converging armies but a more inaccessible, more intimate turmoil, which these armies somehow foreshadowed.

'I do not think your illustrious ancestor toyed idly with different versions,' Stephen Albert went on. 'I do not consider it likely that he would sacrifice thirteen years to the endless compilation of a rhetorical experiment. In your country, the novel is a lesser genre; at that time, it was a genre that was not respected. Ts'ui Pên was a novelist of genius, but he was also a man of letters who certainly did not look on himself as a mere novelist. The testimony of his contemporaries proclaims
— and his life confirms
— his metaphysical and mystical leanings. Philosophical argument usurps a good part of his novel. I know that of all quandaries, none so troubled or exercised him as the fathomless quandary of time. But, then, time is the only problem that does not appear in the pages of his Garden. He does not even use the word that means “time”. How do you explain this deliberate omission?'

I put forward several suggestions, all inadequate. We discussed them.

'In a riddle about chess,' Stephen Albert concluded, 'what is the one forbidden word?'

I thought for a moment and replied, 'The word “chess”.'

'Exactly,' said Albert. 'The Garden of Branching Paths is a vast riddle, or parable, about time. This is the hidden reason that prevents Ts'ui Pên from using the word. To omit a particular word in all instances, to resort to clumsy metaphors and obvious circumlocutions, is probably the surest way of calling attention to it. This was the convoluted method that the oblique Ts'ui Pên chose in each meandering of his unrelenting novel. I have studied hundreds of manuscripts, I have corrected the mistakes introduced by careless copyists, I have deduced the plan behind that chaos, I have reestablished
— I believe I have re-established
— its original order, and I have translated the whole work. I can guarantee that he does not use the word “time” even once. The explanation is plain
—
The Garden of Branching Paths is an incomplete but not false picture of the world as Ts'ui Pên perceived it. Unlike Newton or Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing and dizzying web of diverging and converging and parallel times. This mesh of times that merge, split apart, break, and for centuries are unaware of each other, embraces all possibilities. In most of these times, we do not exist; in some, you exist but not I; in others, I but not you; in still others, both of us. In our present time, granted me by a lucky chance, you have come to my house; in another, on making your way across the garden, you find me dead; in still another, I speak these same words, but I am a delusion, a ghost.'

'In all,' I said, not without a shudder, 'I thank you and honour you for your re-creation of Ts'ui Pên's garden.'

'Not in all,' he murmured, smiling. 'Time keeps branching into countless futures. In one of them, I am your enemy.'

I felt again that swarming of which I have spoken. It seemed to me that the dank garden around the house was utterly saturated with invisible beings. These were Albert and myself, secret and busy and in numberless guises, in other dimensions of time. I lifted my gaze, and the tenuous nightmare fled. In the yellow and black garden, stood one man alone. But the man was strong as a statue, and he was coming towards me down the path. He was Captain Richard Madden.

'The future is already here,' I replied, 'but I'm your friend. May I see the letter again?'

Albert got up. Tall, he opened the drawer of the writing cabinet, and for a moment his back was to me. I had drawn my revolver. I fired with great care; Albert collapsed instantly, without a groan. I swear his death was immediate, a thunderbolt.

The rest is unreal, meaningless. Madden burst in and seized me. I have been condemned to hang. Horrible to say, I won. I passed on to Berlin the secret name of the city to be attacked. Yesterday the Germans shelled it; I read this in the same newspapers that reported to all England the curious case of the learned Sinologist Stephen Albert, who had been murdered by a perfect stranger, one Yu Tsun. My commander solved the riddle. He knew that my dilemma was how
— in the noise and confusion of war
— to signal the name of the place to be targeted and that the only way I could find was to kill someone named Albert. My superior knows nothing — nor can anyone — of my unceasing remorse and weariness.

* An outrageous and despicable suggestion. The Prussian spy Hans Rabener, alias Viktor Runeberg, drew an automatic pistol on Captain Richard Madden, the bearer of an arrest warrant. In self-defence, Madden inflicted wounds from which Runeberg later died. [Editor's Note.]

Other Fictions

Three Versions of Judas

Funes, The Memorious

The Form of the Sword

Theme of the Traitor and Hero

The Secret Miracle

The End

The Sect of the Phoenix

The South

Three Versions of Judas

There seemed a certainty in degradation.

- T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic conventicles. Dante would have destined him, perhaps, for a fiery sepulcher; his name might have augmented the catalogues of heresiarchs, between Satornibus and Carpocrates; some fragment of his preaching, embellished with invective, might have been preserved in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses or might have perished when the firing of a monastic library consumed the last example of the Syntagma. Instead, God assigned him to the twentieth century, and to the university city of Lund. There, in 1904, he published the first edition of Kristus och Judas; there, in 1909, his masterpiece Dem hemlige Frälsaren appeared. (Of this last mentioned work there exists a German version, called Der heimliche Heiland, executed in 1912 by Emil Schering.)

Before undertaking an examination of the foregoing works, it is necessary to repeat that Nils Runeberg, a member of the National Evangelical Union, was deeply religious. In some salon in Paris, or even in Buenos Aires, a literary person might well rediscover Runeberg's theses; but these arguments, presented in such a setting, would seem like frivolous and idle exercises in irrelevance or blasphemy. To Runeberg they were the key with which to decipher a central mystery of theology; they were a matter of meditation and analysis, of historic and philologic controversy, of loftiness, of jubilation, and of terror. They justified, and destroyed, his life. Whoever peruses this essay should know that it states only Runeberg's conclusions, not his dialectic or his proof. Someone may observe that no doubt the conclusion preceded the "proofs" For who gives himself up to looking for proofs of something he does not believe in or the predication of which he does not care about?

The first edition of Kristus och Judas bears the following categorical epigraph, whose meaning, some years later, Nils Runeberg himself would monstrously dilate:

Not one thing, but everything tradition attributes to Judas Iscariot is false. (De Quincey, 1857.) Preceded in his speculation by some German thinker, De Quincey opined that Judas had betrayed Jesus Christ in order to force him to declare his divinity and thus set off a vast rebellion against the yoke of Rome; Runeberg offers a metaphysical vindication. Skillfully, he begins by pointing out how superfluous was the act of Judas. He observes (as did Robertson) that in order to identify a master who daily preached in the synagogue and who performed miracles before gatherings of thousands, the treachery of an apostle is not necessary. This, nevertheless, occurred. To suppose an error in Scripture is intolerable; no less intolerable is it to admit that there was a single haphazard act in the most precious drama in the history of the world. Ergo, the treachery of Judas was not accidental; it was a predestined deed which has its mysterious place in the economy of the Redemption. Runeberg continues: The Word, when It was made flesh, passed from ubiquity into space, from eternity into history, from blessedness without limit to mutation and death; in order to correspond to such a sacrifice it was necessary that a man, as representative of all men, make a suitable sacrifice. Judas Iscariot was that man. Judas, alone among the apostles, intuited the secret divinity and the terrible purpose of Jesus. The Word had lowered Himself to be mortal; Judas, the disciple of the Word, could lower himself to the role of informer (the worst transgression dishonor abides), and welcome the fire which can not be extinguished. The lower order is a mirror of the superior order, the forms of the earth correspond to the forms of the heavens; the stains on the skin are a map of the incorruptible constellations; Judas in some way reflects Jesus. Thus the thirty pieces of silver and the kiss; thus deliberate self-destruction, in order to deserve damnation all the more. In this manner did Nils Runeberg elucidate the enigma of Judas.

The theologians of all the confessions refuted him. Lars Peter Engström accused him of ignoring, or of confining to the past, the hypostatic union of the Divine Trinity; Axel Borelius charged him with renewing the heresy of the Docetists, who denied the humanity of Jesus; the sharpedged bishop of Lund denounced him for contradicting the third verse of chapter twenty-two of the Gospel of St. Luke.

These various anathemas influenced Runeberg, who partially rewrote the disapproved book and modified his doctrine. He abandoned the terrain of theology to his adversaries and postulated oblique arguments of a moral order. He admitted that Jesus, "who could count on the considerable resources which Omnipotence offers," did not need to make use of a man to redeem all men. Later, he refuted those who affirm that we know nothing of the inexplicable traitor; we know, he said, that he was one of the apostles, one of those chosen to announce the Kingdom of Heaven, to cure the sick, to cleanse the leprous, to resurrect the dead, and to cast out demons (Matthew 10:7-8; Luke 9:1). A man whom the Redeemer has thus distinguished deserves from us the best interpretations of his deeds. To impute his crime to cupidity (as some have done, citing John 12:6) is to resign oneself to the most torpid motive force. Nils Runeberg proposes an opposite moving force: an extravagant and even limitless asceticism. The ascetic, for the greater glory of God, degrades and mortifies the flesh; Judas did the same with the spirit. He renounced honor, good, peace, the Kingdom of Heaven, as others, less heroically, renounced pleasure.<1> With a terrible lucidity he premeditated his offense.

In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendor. Judas elected those offenses unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence (John 12 :6) and informing. He labored with gigantic humility; he thought himself unworthy to be good. Paul has written: Whoever glorifieth himself, let him glorify himself in God (I Corinthians 1:31); Judas sought Hell because the felicity of the Lord sufficed him. He thought that happiness, like good, is a divine attribute and not to be usurped by men.<2>

Many have discovered post factum that in the justifiable beginnings of Runeberg lies his extravagant end and that Dem hemlige Frälsaren is a mere perversion or exacerbation of Kristus och Judas. Toward the end of 1907, Runeberg finished and revised the manuscript text; almost two years passed without his handing it to the printer. In October of 1909, the book appeared with a prologue (tepid to the point of being enigmatic) by the Danish Hebraist Erik Erfjord and bearing this perfidious epigraph: In the world he was, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not (John 1:10). The general argument is not complex, even if the conclusion is monstrous. God, argues Nils Runeberg, lowered himself to be a man for the redemption of the human race; it is reasonable to assume that the sacrifice offered by him was perfect, not invalidated or attenuated by any omission. To limit all that happened to the agony of one afternoon on the cross is blasphemous.<3>

To affirm that he was a man and that he was incapable of sin contains a contradiction; the attributes of impeccabilitas and of humanitas are not compatible. Kemnitz admits that the Redeemer could feel fatigue, cold, confusion, hunger and thirst; it is reasonable to admit that he could also sin and be damned. The famous text "He will sprout like a root in a dry soil; there is not good mien to him, nor beauty; despised of men and the least of them; a man of sorrow, and experienced in heartbreaks" (Isaiah 53:2-3) is for many people a forecast of the Crucified in the hour of his death; for some (as for instance, Hans Lassen Martensen), it is a refutation of the beauty which the vulgar consensus attributes to Christ; for Runeberg, it is a precise prophecy, not of one moment, but of all the atrocious future, in time and eternity, of the Word made flesh. God became a man completely, a man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of being reprehensible — all the way to the abyss. In order to save us, He could have chosen any of the destinies which together weave the uncertain web of history; He could have been Alexander, or Pythagoras, or Rurik, or Jesus; He chose an infamous destiny: He was Judas.

In vain did the bookstores of Stockholm and Lund offer this revelation. The incredulous considered it, a priori, an insipid and laborious theological game; the theologians disdained it. Runeberg intuited from this universal indifference an almost miraculous confirmation. God had commanded this indifference; God did not wish His terrible secret propagated in the world. Runeberg understood that the hour had not yet come. He sensed ancient and divine curses converging upon him, he remembered Elijah and Moses, who covered their faces on the mountain top so as not to see God; he remembered Isaiah, who prostrated himself when his eyes saw That One whose glory fills the earth; Saul who was blinded on the road to Damascus; the rabbi Simon ben Azai, who saw Paradise and died; the famous soothsayer John of Viterbo, who went mad when he was able to see the Trinity; the Midrashim, abominating the impious who pronounce the Shem Hamephorash, the secret name of God. Wasn't he, perchance, guilty of this dark crime? Might not this be the blasphemy against the Spirit, the sin which will not be pardoned (Matthew 12:3)? Valerius Soranus died for having revealed the occult name of Rome; what infinite punishment would be his for having discovered and divulged the terrible name of God?

Intoxicated with insomnia and with vertiginous dialectic, Nils Runeberg wandered through the streets of Malmö, praying aloud that he be given the grace to share Hell with the Redeemer.

He died of the rupture of an aneurysm, the first day of March 1912. The writers on heresy, the heresiologists, will no doubt remember him; he added to the concept of the Son, which seemed exhausted, the complexities of calamity and evil.

<1> Borelius mockingly interrogates: Why did he not renounce to renounce? Why not renounce renouncing?

<2> Euclydes da Cunha, in a book ignored by Runeberg, notes that for the heresiarch of Canudos, Antonio Conselheiro, virtue was "a kind of impiety almost." An Argentine reader could recall analogous passages in the work of Almafuerte. Runeberg published, in the symbolist sheet Sju insegel, an assiduously descriptive poem, "The Secret Water": the first stanzas narrate the events of one tumultuous day; the last, the finding of a glacial pool; the poet suggests that the eternalness of this silent water checks our useless violence, and in some way allows and absolves it. The poem concludes in this way:

The water of the forest is still and felicitous, And we, we can be vicious and
full of pain.

<3> Maurice Abramowicz observes: "Jesus, d'apres ce scandinave, a toujours le beau role; ses deboires, grace a la science des typographes, jouissent d'une reputation polyglotte; sa residence de trente-trois ans parmis les humains ne fut, en somne, qu'une villegiature." Erfjord, in the third appendix to the Christelige Dogmatik, refutes this passage. He writes that the crucifying of God has not ceased, for anything which has happened once in time is repeated ceaselessly through all eternity. Judas, now, continues to receive the pieces of silver; he continues to hurl the pieces of silver in the temple; he continues to knot the hangman's noose on the field of blood. (Erfjord, to justify this affirmation, invokes the last chapter of the first volume of the Vindication of Eternity, by Jaromir Hladlk.)

- Translated by ANTHONY KERRIGAN

Funes, The Memorious

I remember him (I scarcely have the right to use this ghostly verb; only one man on earth deserved the right, and he is dead), I remember him with a dark passionflower in his hand, looking at it as no one has ever looked at such a flower, though they might look from the twilight of day until the twilight of night, for a whole life long. I remember him, his face immobile and Indian-like, and singularly remote, behind his cigarette. I remember (I believe) the strong delicate fingers of the plainsman who can braid leather. I remember, near those hands, a vessel in which to make mate tea, bearing the arms of the Banda Oriental;1 I remember, in the window of the house, a yellow rush mat, and beyond, a vague marshy landscape. I remember clearly his voice, the deliberate, resentful, nasal voice of the old Eastern Shore man, without the Italianate syllables of today, I did not see him more than three times; the last time, in 1887 . . .

That all those who knew him should write something about him seems to me a very felicitous idea; my testimony may perhaps be the briefest and without doubt the poorest, and it will not be the least impartial. The deplorable fact of my being an Argentinian will hinder me from falling into a dithyramb — an obligatory form in the Uruguay, when the theme is an Uruguayan.

Litterateur, slicker, Buenos Airean: Funes did not use these insulting phrases, but I am sufficiently aware that for him I represented these unfortunate categories. Pedro Leandro Ipuche has written that Funes was a precursor of the superman, "an untamed and vernacular Zarathustra"; I do not doubt it, but one must not forget, either, that he was a countryman from the town of Fray Bentos, with certain incurable limitations.

My first recollection of Funes is quite clear, I see him at dusk, sometime in March or February of the year '84. That year, my father had taken me to spend the summer at Fray Bentos. I was on my way back from the farm at San Francisco with my cousin Bernardo Haedo. We came back singing, on horseback; and this last fact was not the only reason for my joy. After a sultry day, an enormous slategray storm had obscured the sky. It was driven on by a wind from the south; the trees were already tossing like madmen; and I had the apprehension (the secret hope) that the elemental downpour would catch us out in the open. We were running a kind of race with the tempest. We rode into a narrow lane which wound down between two enormously high brick footpaths. It had grown black of a sudden; I now heard rapid almost secret steps above; I raised my eyes and saw a boy running along the narrow, cracked path as if he were running along a narrow, broken wall. I remember the loose trousers, tight at the bottom, the hemp sandals; I remember the cigarette in the hard visage, standing out against the by now limitless darkness. Bernardo unexpectedly yelled to him: "What's the time, Ireneo?" Without looking up, without stopping, Ireneo replied: "In ten minutes it will be eight o'clock, child Bernardo Juan Francisco." The voice was sharp, mocking.

I am so absentminded that the dialogue which I have just cited would not have penetrated my attention if it had not been repeated by my cousin, who was stimulated, I think, by a certain local pride and by a desire to show himself indifferent to the other's three-sided reply.

He told me that the boy above us in the pass was a certain Ireneo Funes, renowned for a number of eccentricities, such as that of having nothing to do with people and of always knowing the time, like a watch. He added that Ireneo was the son of Maria Clementina Funes, an ironing woman in the town, and that his father, some people said, was an "Englishman" named O'Connor, a doctor in the salting fields, though some said the father was a horse-breaker, or scout, from the province of El Salto. Ireneo lived with his mother, at the edge of the country house of the Laurels.

In the years '85 and '86 we spent the summer in the city of Montevideo. We returned to Fray Bentos in '87. As was natural, I inquired after all my acquaintances, and finally, about "the chronometer Funes." I was told that he had been thrown by a wild horse at the San Francisco ranch, and that he had been hopelessly crippled. I remember the impression of uneasy magic which the news provoked in me: the only time I had seen him we were on horseback, coming from San Francisco, and he was in a high place; from the lips of my cousin Bernardo the affair sounded like a dream elaborated with elements out of the past. They told me that Ireneo did not move now from his cot, but remained with his eyes fined on the backyard fig tree, or on a cobweb. At sunset he allowed himself to be brought to the window. He carried pride to the extreme of pretending that the blow which had befallen him was a good thing . . . Twice I saw him behind the iron grate which sternly delineated his eternal imprisonment: unmoving, once, his eyes closed; unmoving also, another time, absorbed in the contemplation of a sweet-smelling sprig of lavender cotton.

At the time I had begun, not without some ostentation, the methodical study of Latin. My valise contained the De viris illustribus of Lhomond, the Thesaurus of Quicherat, Caesar's Commentaries, and an odd-numbered volume of the Historia Naturalis of Pliny, which exceeded (and still exceeds) my modest talents as a Latinist. Everything is noised around in a small town; Ireneo, at his small farm on the outskirts, was not long in learning of the arrival of these anomalous books. He sent me a flowery, ceremonious letter, in which he recalled our encounter, unfortunately brief, "on the seventh day of February of the year '84," and alluded to the glorious services which Don Gregorio Haedo, my uncle, dead the same year, "had rendered to the Two Fatherlands in the glorious campaign of Ituzaingo," and he solicited the loan of any one of the volumes, to be accompanied by a dictionary "for the better intelligence of the original text, for I do not know Latin as yet." He promised to return them in good condition, almost immediately. The letter was perfect, very nicely constructed; the orthography was of the type sponsored by Andres Bello: i for y, j for g. At first I naturally suspected a jest. My cousins assured me it was not so, that these were the ways of Ireneo. I did not know whether to attribute to impudence, ignorance, or stupidity, the idea that the difficult Latin required no other instrument than a dictionary; in order fully to undeceive him I sent the Gradus ad Parnassum of Quicherat, and the Pliny.

On February 14, I received a telegram from Buenos Aires telling me to return immediately, for my father was "in no way well." God forgive me, but the prestige of being the recipient of an urgent telegram, the desire to point out to all of Fray Bentos the contradiction between the negative form of the news and the positive adverb, the temptation to dramatize my sorrow as I feigned a virile stoicism, all no doubt distracted me from the possibility of anguish. As I packed my valise, I noted that I was missing the Gradus and the volume of the Historia Naturalis. The "Saturn" was to weigh anchor on the morning of the next day; that night, after supper, I made my way to the house of Funes. Outside, I was surprised to find the night no less oppressive than the day.

Ireneo's mother received me at the modest ranch.

She told me that Ireneo was in the back room and that I should not be disturbed to find him in the dark, for he knew how to pass the dead hours without lighting the candle. I crossed the cobblestone patio, the small corridor; I came to the second patio. A great vine covered everything, so that the darkness seemed complete. Of a sudden I heard the high-pitched, mocking voice of Ireneo. The voice spoke in Latin; the voice (which came out of the obscurity) was reading, with obvious delight, a treatise or prayer or incantation. The Roman syllables resounded in the earthen patio; my suspicion made them seem undecipherable, interminable; afterwards, in the enormous dialogue of that night, I learned that they made up the first paragraph of the twenty-fourth chapter of the seventh book of the Historia Naturalis. The subject of this chapter is memory; the last words are ut nihil non iisdem verbis redderetur auditum.

Without the least change in his voice, Ireneo bade me come in. He was lying on the cot, smoking. It seems to me that I did not see his face until dawn; I seem to recall the momentary glow of the cigarette. The room smelled vaguely of dampness. I sat down, and repeated the story of the telegram and my father's illness.

I come now to the most difficult point in my narrative. For the entire story has no other point (the reader might as well know it by now) than this dialogue of almost a half-century ago. I shall not attempt to reproduce his words, now irrecoverable. I prefer truthfully to make a resume of the many things Ireneo told me. The indirect style is remote and weak; I know that I sacrifice the effectiveness of my narrative; but let my readers imagine the nebulous sentences which clouded that night.

Ireneo began by enumerating, in Latin and Spanish, the cases of prodigious memory cited in the Historia Naturalis: Cyrus, king of the Persians, who could call every soldier in his armies by name; Mithridates Eupator, who administered justice in the twenty-two languages of his empire; Simonides, inventor of mnemotechny; Metrodorus, who practiced the art of repeating faithfully what he heard once. With evident good faith Funes marveled that such things should be considered marvelous. He told me that previous to the rainy afternoon when the blue-tinted horse threw him, he had been — like any Christian — blind, deaf-mute, somnambulistic, memoryless. (I tried to remind him of his precise perception of time, his memory for proper names; he paid no attention to me). For nineteen years, he said, he had lived like a person in a dream: he looked without seeing, heard without hearing, forgot everything — almost everything. On falling from the horse, he lost consciousness; when he recovered it, the present was almost intolerable it was so rich and bright; the same was true of the most ancient and most trivial memories. A little later he realized that he was crippled. This fact scarcely interested him. He reasoned (or felt) that immobility was a minimum price to pay. And now, his perception and his memory were infallible.

We, in a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table; Funes saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho. These recollections were not simple; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his fancies. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day. He told me: I have more memories in myself alone than all men have had since the world was a world. And again: My dreams are like your vigils. And again, toward dawn: My memory, sir, is like a garbage disposal.

A circumference on a blackboard, a rectangular triangle, a rhomb, are forms which we can fully intuit; the same held true with Ireneo for the tempestuous mane of a stallion, a herd of cattle in a pass, the ever-changing flame or the innumerable ash, the many faces of a dead man during the course of a protracted wake. He could perceive I do not know how many stars in the sky.

These things he told me; neither then nor at any time later did they seem doubtful. In those days neither the cinema nor the phonograph yet existed; nevertheless, it seems strange, almost incredible, that no one should have experimented on Funes. The truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything.

The voice of Funes, out of the darkness, continued. He told me that toward 1886 he had devised a new system of enumeration and that in a very few days he had gone beyond twenty-four thousand. He had not written it down, for what he once meditated would not be erased. The first stimulus to his work, I believe, had been his discontent with the fact that "thirty-three Uruguayans" required two symbols and three words, rather than a single word and a single symbol. Later he applied his extravagant principle to the other numbers. In place of seven thousand thirteen, he would say (for example) Maximo Perez; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Train; other numbers were Luis Melian Lafinur, Olimar, Brimstone, Clubs, The Whale, Gas, The Cauldron, Napoleon, Agustin de Vedia. In lieu of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had a particular sign, a species of mark; the last were very complicated . . . I attempted to explain that this rhapsody of unconnected terms was precisely the contrary of a system of enumeration. I said that to say three hundred and sixty-five was to say three hundreds, six tens, five units: an analysis which does not exist in such numbers as The Negro Timoteo or The Flesh Blanket. Funes did not understand me, or did not wish to understand me.

Locke, in the seventeenth century, postulated (and rejected) an impossible idiom in which each individual object, each stone, each bird and branch had an individual name; Funes had once projected an analogous idiom, but he had renounced it as being too general, too ambiguous. In effect, Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. He determined to reduce all of his past experience to some seventy thousand recollections, which he would later define numerically. Two considerations dissuaded him: the thought that the task was interminable and the thought that it was useless. He knew that at the hour of his death he would scarcely have finished classifying even all the memories of his childhood.

The two projects I have indicated (an infinite vocabulary for the natural series of numbers, and a usable mental catalogue of all the images of memory) are lacking in sense, but they reveal a certain stammering greatness. They allow us to make out dimly, or to infer, the dizzying world of Funes. He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of general, platonic ideas. It was not only difficult for him to understand that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and different forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front). His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him on every occasion. Swift writes that the emperor of Lilliput could discern the movement of the minute hand; Funes could continuously make out the tranquil advances of corruption, of caries, of fatigue. He noted the progress of death, of moisture. He was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform world which was instantaneously and almost intolerably exact. Babylon, London, and New York have overawed the imagination of men with their ferocious splendor; no one, in those populous towers or upon those surging avenues, has felt the heat and pressure of a reality as indefatigable as that which day and night converged upon the unfortunate Ireneo in his humble South American farmhouse. It was very difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to be abstracted from the world; Funes, on his back in his cot, in the shadows, imagined every crevice and every molding of the various houses which surrounded him. (I repeat, the least important of his recollections was more minutely precise and more lively than our perception of a physical pleasure or a physical torment.) Toward the east, in a section which was not yet cut into blocks of homes, there were some new unknown houses. Funes imagined them black, compact, made of a single obscurity; he would turn his face in this direction in order to sleep. He would also imagine himself at the bottom of the river, being rocked and annihilated by the current.

Without effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.

The equivocal clarity of dawn penetrated along the earthen patio.

Then it was that I saw the face of the voice which had spoken all through the night. Ireneo was nineteen years old; he had been born in 1868; he seemed as monumental as bronze, more ancient than Egypt, anterior to the prophecies and the pyramids. It occurred to me that each one of my words (each one of my gestures) would live on in his implacable memory; I was benumbed by the fear of multiplying superfluous gestures.

Ireneo Funes died in 1889, of a pulmonary congestion.

1942

(1) The Eastern Shore (of the Uruguay River); now the Orient Republic of Uruguay. — Editor's note.

- Translated by ANTHONY KERRIGAN

The Form of the Sword

To E. H. M.

His face was crossed with a rancorous scar: a nearly perfect ashen arc which sank into his temple on one side and his cheek on the other. His real name is of no importance: in Tacuarembo everyone knew him as the Englishman of La Colorada. The great landowner of these parts, Cardoso, had not been interested in selling; I have heard that the Englishman had recourse to an unexpected argument: he told him the secret history of the scar. The Englishman had come from the frontier, from Rio Grande del Sur; there were those who said he had been a smuggler in Brazil. His fields were overgrown with underbrush; the wells were bitter; to remedy these faults, the Englishman worked alongside his peones. They say he was strict to the point of cruelty, but scrupulously fair. They also say he was a drinking man: a couple of times a year he would lock himself up in a room in the tower, and two or three days later he would emerge as if from a bout of insanity or from the battlefield, pale, tremulous, abashed-and as authoritarian as ever. I remember his glacial eyes, his energetic thinness, his gray mustache. He had scant dealings with anyone; true, his Spanish was rudimentary, contaminated with Brazilian. Apart from an occasional commercial letter or pamphlet, he received no correspondence.

The last time I made a trip through the Northern provinces a flash flood in the Caraguata arroyo forced me to spend the night at La Colorada. I was only there a few minutes when I felt that my presence was inopportune. I tried getting into the good graces of the Englishman; I resorted to the least acute of all the passions: patriotism. I said that a country with the spirit of England was invincible. My interlocutor agreed, but he added with a smile that he was not English. He was Irish, from Dungarvan. Having said this, he stopped himself, as if he had revealed a secret.

After supper we went out to look at the sky. It had cleared, but behind the ridge of the mountains, the south, fissured and shot through with lightning flashes, was brewing up another storm. Back in the deserted dining room, the waiter who had served us supper brought out a bottle of rum. We drank steadily, in silence.

I do not know what hour of the night it might have been when I realized that I was drunk; I do not know what inspiration or exultation or tedium made me mention the scar. The Englishman's face changed color. For a few seconds I thought he was going to ask me to leave. Finally he said, in a normal voice:

"I'll tell you the story of my wound on one condition: that you do not minimize the opprobrium it calls forth, that you not belittle a single infamous circumstance."

I agreed. And this, then, is the story he recounted, in a mixture of English, Spanish, and Portuguese:

About 1922, in a city in Connaught, I was one of many men conspiring for Irish independence. Of my comrades, some survived to engage in peaceful pursuits; others, paradoxically, fight in the desert and at sea under the English colors; another, the man of greatest worth, died in the courtyard of a barracks, at dawn, before a firing squad of soldiers drowsy with sleep; still others (not the most unfortunate ones), met their fate in the anonymous and nearly secret battles of the civil war. We were Republicans, Catholics; we were, I suspect, romantics. For us Ireland was not only the utopian future and the intolerable present; it was a bitter and loving mythology, it was the circular towers and the red bogs, it was the repudiation of Parnell and the enormous epics which sing of the theft of bulls who in a former incarnation were heros and in others were fish and mountains . . . On one evening I shall never forget, we were joined by a comrade from Munster: a certain John Vincent Moon.

He was scarcely twenty years old. He was thin and soft at the same time. He gave one the uncomfortable impression of being invertebrate. He had studied, with fervor and vanity, every page of some communist manual or other; dialectic materialism served him as a means to end any and all discussion. The reasons that one man may have to abominate another, or love him, are infinite: Moon reduced universal history to a sordid economic conflict. He asserted that the revolution is predestined to triumph. I told him that only lost causes can interest a gentleman . . . By then it was nighttime. We continued our disagreements along the corridor, down the stairs, into the vague streets. The judgments emitted by Moon impressed me less than their unattractive and apodictic tone. The new comrade did not argue: he passed judgment with obvious disdain and a certain fury.

As we came to the outlying houses, a sudden exchange of gunfire caught us by surprise. (Just before or after, we skirted the blank wall of a factory or barracks.) We took refuge along a dirt road; a soldier, looming gigantic in the glare, rushed out of a burning cabin. He shrieked at us and ordered us to halt. I pressed on; my comrade did not follow me. I turned back: John Vincent Moon was frozen in his tracks, fascinated and eternalized, as it were, by terror. I rushed to his side, brought down the soldier with a single blow, shook and pounded Vincent Moon, berated him, and ordered him to follow me. I was forced to yank him by his arm; a passionate fear paralyzed him. We fled through a night suddenly shot through with blazes. A burst of rifle fire sought us out; a bullet grazed Moon's right shoulder; while we ran among the pines, he broke into feeble sobbing.

During that autumn of 1922 1 had taken refuge in a country house belonging to General Berkeley. This officer (whom I had never seen) was carrying out some administrative assignment in Bengal. His house, though it was less than a hundred years old, was dark and deteriorated and abounded in perplexing corridors and vain antechambers. A museum and an enormous library usurped the ground floor: controversial and incompatible books which, somehow, make up the history of the nineteenth century; scimitars from Nishapur, in whose arrested circular arcs the wind and violence of battle seemed to last. We entered (I seem to remember) through the back part of the house. Moon, his lips dry and quivering, muttered that the events of the evening had been very interesting. I dressed his wound, and brought him a cup of tea. (His "wound," I saw, was superficial.) Suddenly he stammered perplexedly:

"But you took a considerable chance."

I told him not to worry. (The routine of the civil war had impelled me to act as I had acted. Besides, the capture of a single one of our men could have compromised our cause.)

The following day Moon had recovered his aplomb. He accepted a cigarette, and severely cross-questioned me concerning "the economic resources of our revolutionary party." His questions were quite lucid. I told him (in all truth) that the situation was serious. Shattering volleys of rifle fire reverberated in the south. I told Moon that our comrades expected us. My trench coat and revolver were in my room; when I returned, I found Moon stretched on the sofa, his eyes shut. He thought he had fever; he spoke of a painful shoulder spasm.

I realized then that his cowardice was irreparable. I awkwardly urged him to take care of himself and took my leave. I blushed for this fearful man, as if I, and not Vincent Moon, were the coward. What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men. For that reason a disobedience committed in a garden contaminates the human race; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew suffices to save it. Perhaps Schopenhauer is right: I am all others, any man is all men, Shakespeare is in some way the wretched John Vincent Moon.

We spent nine days in the enormous house of the General. Of the agony and splendor of the battle I shall say nothing: my intention is to tell the story of this scar which affronts me. In my memory, those nine days form a single day; except for the next to the last, when our men rushed a barracks and we were able to avenge, man for man, the sixteen comrades who had been machine-gunned at Elphin. I would slip out of the house toward dawn, in the confusion of the morning twilight. I was back by dusk. My companion would be waiting for me upstairs: his wound did not allow him to come down to meet me. I can see him with some book of strategy in his hand: F. N. Maude or Clausewitz. "The artillery is my preferred arm," he conceded one night. He would inquire into our plans; he liked to censure or revamp them. He was also in the habit of denouncing our "deplorable economic base." Dogmatic and somber, he would prophesy a ruinous end. C'est une affaire flambee, he would murmur. In order to show that his being a physical coward made no difference to him, he increased his intellectual arrogance. Thus, for better or for worse, passed nine days.

On the tenth, the city definitively fell into the hands of the Black and Tans. Tall silent horsemen patrolled the streets. The wind was filled with ashes and smoke. At an intersection in the middle of a square, I saw a corpse — less tenacious in my memory than a manikin — upon which some soldiers interminably practiced their marksmanship . . . I had left my quarters as the sunrise hung in the sky. I returned before midday. In the library, Moon was talking to someone; by his tone of voice I realized that he was using the telephone. Then I heard my name; then that I would return at seven; then the suggestion that I be arrested as I crossed the garden. My reasonable friend was selling me reasonably. I heard him requesting certain guarantees of personal security.

At this point my story becomes confused, its thread is lost. I know I pursued the informer down the dark corridors of nightmare and the deep stairs of vertigo. Moon had come to know the house very well, much better than I. Once or twice I lost him. I cornered him before the soldiers arrested me. From one of the general's mounted sets of arms I snatched down a cutlass; with the steel half-moon I sealed his face, forever, with a half-moon of blood. Borges, I have confessed this to you, a stranger. Your contempt will not wound me as much.

Here the narrator stopped. I noticed that his hands were trembling.

"And Moon?" I asked him.

"He was paid the Judas-money, and fled to Brazil. And that afternoon, he watched some drunks in an impromptu firing squad in the town square shoot down a manikin."

I waited in vain, for him to go on with his story. At length I asked him to continue.

A sob shook his body. And then, with feeble sweetness, he pointed to the white arced scar.

"You don't believe me?" he stammered. "Don't you see the mark of infamy written on my face? I told you the story the way I did so that you would hear it to the end. I informed on the man who took me in: I am Vincent Moon. Despise me."

1942

- Translated by ANTHONY KERRIGAN

Theme of the Traitor and Hero

So the Platonic Year
Whirls out new right and wrong,
Whirls in the old instead;
All men are dancers and their tread
Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.

— W. B. Yeats, The Tower

Under the influence of the flagrant Chesterton (contrives and embellishes of elegant mysteries) and of the court counselor Leibnitz (who invented pre-established harmony), I have imagined the following argument, which I shall doubtless develop (and which already justifies me in some way), on profitless afternoons. Details, revisions, adjustments are lacking; there are areas of this history which are not yet revealed to me; today, the third of January of 1944, I dimly perceive it thus:

The action transpires in some oppressed and stubborn country: Poland, Ireland, the Republic of Venice, some state in South America or the Balkans . . . Has transpired, we should say, for although the narrator is contemporary, the narrative related by him occurred toward the middle or beginnings of the nineteenth century. Let us say, for purposes of narration, that it was in Ireland, in 1824. The narrator is named Ryan; he is a great-grandson of the young, heroic, handsome, assassinated Fergus Kilpatrick, whose sepulchre was mysteriously violated, whose name embellishes the verse of Browning and Hugo, whose statue presides over a gray hill amidst red moors.

Kilpatrick was a conspirator, a secret and glorious captain of conspirators; he was like Moses in that, from the land of Moab, he descried the Promised Land but would not ever set foot there, for he perished on the eve of the victorious rebellion which he had premeditated and conjured. The date of the first centenary of his death draws near; the circumstances of the crime are enigmatic; Ryan, engaged in compiling a biography of the hero, discovers that the enigma goes beyond the purely criminal. Kilpatrick was assassinated in a theater; the English police could find no trace of the killer; historians declare that the failure of the police does not in any way impugn their good intentions, for he was no doubt killed by order of this same police. Other phases of the enigma disquiet Ryan. These facets are of cyclic character: they seem to repeat or combine phenomena from remote regions, from remote ages. Thus, there is no one who does not know that the bailiffs who examined the hero's cadaver discovered a sealed letter which warned him of the risk of going to the theater on that particular night: Julius Caesar, too, as he walked toward the place where the knives of his friends awaited him, was handed a message, which he never got to the point of reading, in which the treason was declared, and the names of the traitors given. In her dreams, Caesar's wife, Calpurnia, saw a tower, which the Senate had dedicated to her husband, fallen to the ground; false and anonymous rumors throughout the land were occasioned, on the eve of Kilpatrick's death, by the burning of the round tower of Kilgarvan — an event which might have seemed an omen, since Kilpatrick had been born at Kilgarvan. These parallels (cad others) in the history of Caesar and the history of an Irish conspirator induce Ryan to assume a secret pattern in time, a drawing in which the lines repeat themselves. He ponders the decimal history imagined by Condorcet; the morphologies proposed by Hegel, Spengler, and Vico; the characters of Hesiod, who degenerate from gold to iron. He considers the transmigration of souls, a doctrine which horrifies Celtic belles-lettres and which the very same Caesar attributed to the Britannic Druids; he thinks that before the hero was Fergus Kilpatrick, Fergus Kilpatrick was Julius Caesar. From these circular labyrinths he is saved by a curious species of proof which immediately plunges him into other labyrinths even more inextricable and heterogeneous: certain words spoken by a mendicant who conversed with Fergus Kilpatrick on the day of his death were prefigured in the tragedy of Macbeth. That history should have imitated history was already sufficiently marvelous; that history should imitate literature is inconceivable . . .

Ryan discovers that in 1814, James Alexander Nolan, the oldest of the hero's comrades, had translated into Gaelic the principal dramas of Shakespeare, among them Julius Caesar. In the archives he also finds a manuscript article by Nolan on Festspiele of Switzerland: vast and roving theatrical representations these, which require thousands of actors and which reiterate historic episodes in the same cities and mountains where they occurred. Still another unpublished document reveals that a few days before the end, Kilpatrick, presiding over his last conclave, had signed the death sentence of a tractor, whose name has been blotted out. This sentence scarcely harmonizes with Kilpatrick's pious attitude. Ryan goes deeper into the matter (the investigation covers one of the hiatuses in the argument) and he succeeds in solving the enigma.

Kilpatrick was brought to his end in a theater, but he made of the entire city a theater, too, and the actors were legion. And the drama which was climaxed by his death embraced many days and many nights. Here is what happened:

On the second of August of 1824, the conspirators gathered. The country was ripe for rebellion. But somehow every attempt always failed: there was a traitor in the group. Fergus. Kilpatrick ordered James Nolan to uncover this traitor. Nolan carried out his orders: before the gathering as a whole, he announced that the traitor was Kilpatrick himself. He demonstrated the truth of his accusation with irrefutable proofs; the conspirators condemned their president to death. The latter signed his own death sentence; but he implored that his condemnation not be allowed to hurt the fatherland.

Nolan thereupon conceived his strange project. Ireland idolized Kilpatrick; the most tenuous suspicion of his disgrace would have compromised the rebellion; Nolan proposed a plan which would make Kilpatrick's execution an instrument for the liberation of the fatherland. He suggested the condemned man die at the hands of an unknown assassin, in circumstances deliberately dramatic, which would engrave themselves upon the popular imagination and which would speed the revolt. Kilpatrick swore to collaborate in a project which allowed him the opportunity to redeem himself and which would add a flourish to his death.

Pressed for time, Nolan was unable to integrate the circumstances he invented for the complex execution; he was forced to plagiarize another dramatist, the enemy-Englishman William Shakespeare. He repeated scenes from Macbeth, and from Julius Caesar. The public — and the secret — presentation took several days. The condemned man entered Dublin, discussed, worked, prayed, reproved, spoke words which seemed (later) to be pathetic — and each one of these acts, which would eventually be glorious, had been foreordained by Nolan. Hundreds of actors collaborated with the protagonist; the role of some was stellar, that of others ephemeral. What they said and did remains in the books of history, in the impassioned memory of Ireland. Kilpatrick, carried away by the minutely scrupulous destiny which redeemed and condemned him, more than once enriched the text (Nolan's text) with words and deeds of his own improvisation. And thus did the popular drama unfold in Time, until, on the sixth of August of 1824, in a theater box hung with funereal curtains, which foreshadowed Abraham Lincoln's, the anticipated pistol-shot entered the breast of the traitor and hero, who could scarcely articulate, between two effusions of violent blood, some prearranged words.

In Nolan's work, the passages imitated from Shakespeare are the least dramatic; Ryan suspects that the author interpolated them so that one person, in the future, might realize the truth. He understands that he, too, forms part of Nolan's plan . . . At the end of some tenacious caviling, he resolves to keep silent his discovery. He publishes a book dedicated to the glory of the hero; this, too, no doubt was foreseen.

- Translated by ANTHONY KERRIGAN

The Secret Miracle

And God made him die during the course of a hundred years and then He revived him and said:
"How long have you been here?"
"A day, or part of a day," he replied.
- The Koran, II 261

On the night of March 14, 1939, in an apartment on the Zelternergasse in Prague, Jaromir Hladik, author of the unfinished tragedy The Enemies, of a Vindication of Eternity, and of an inquiry into the indirect Jewish sources of Jakob Boehme, dreamt a long drawn out chess game. The antagonists were not two individuals, but two illustrious families. The contest had begun many centuries before. No one could any longer describe the forgotten prize, but it was rumored that it was enormous and perhaps infinite. The pieces and the chessboard were set up in a secret tower. Jaromir (in his dream) was the first-born of one of the contending families. The hour for the next move, which could not be postponed, struck on all the clocks. The dreamer ran across the sands of a rainy desert — and he could not remember the chessmen or the rules of chess. At this point he awoke. The din of the rain and the clangor of the terrible clocks ceased. A measured unison, sundered by voices of command, arose from the Zelternergasse. Day had dawned, and the armored vanguards of the Third Reich were entering Prague.

On the 19th, the authorities received an accusation against Jaromir Hladik; on the same day, at dusk, he was arrested. He was taken to a barracks, aseptic and white, on the opposite bank of the Moldau. He was unable to refute a single one of the charges made by the Gestapo: his maternal surname was Jaroslavski, his blood was Jewish, his study of Boehme was Judaizing, his signature had helped to swell the final census of those protesting the Anschluss. In 1928, he had translated the Sepher Yezirah for the publishing house of Hermann Barsdorf; the effusive catalogue issued by this firm had exaggerated, for commercial reasons, the translator's renown; this catalogue was leafed through by Julius Rothe, one of the officials in whose hands lay Hladik's fate. The man does not exist who, outside his own specialty, is not credulous: two or three adjectives in Gothic script sufficed to convince Julius Rothe of Hladik's pre-eminence, and of the need for the death penalty, pour encourager les autres. The execution was set for the 29th of March, at nine in the morning. This delay (whose importance the reader will appreciate later) was due to a desire on the part of the authorities to act slowly and impersonally, in the manner of planets or vegetables.

Hladik's first reaction was simply one of horror. He was sure he would not have been terrified by the gallows, the block, or the knife; but to die before a firing squad was unbearable. In vain he repeated to himself that the pure and general act of dying, not the concrete circumstances, was the dreadful fact. He did not grow weary of imagining these circumstances: he absurdly tried to exhaust all the variations. He infinitely anticipated the process, from the sleepless dawn to the mysterious discharge of the rifles. Before the day set by Julius Rothe, he died hundreds of deaths, in courtyards whose shapes and angles defied geometry, shot down by changeable soldiers whose number varied and who sometimes put an end to him from close up and sometimes from far away. He faced these imaginary executions with true terror (perhaps with true courage). Each simulacrum lasted a few seconds. Once the circle was closed, Jaromir returned interminably to the tremulous eve of his death. Then he would reflect that reality does not tend to coincide with forecasts about it. With perverse logic he inferred that to foresee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Faithful to this feeble magic, he would invent, so that they might not happen, the most atrocious particulars. Naturally, he finished by fearing that these particulars were prophetic. During his wretched nights he strove to hold fast somehow to the fugitive substance of time. He knew that time was precipitating itself toward the dawn of the 29th. He reasoned aloud: I am now in the night of the 22nd. While this night lasts (and for six more nights to come) I am invulnerable, immortal. His nights of sleep seemed to him deep dark pools into which he might submerge. Sometimes he yearned impatiently for the firing squad's definitive volley, which would redeem him, for better or for worse, from the vain compulsion of his imagination. On the 28th, as the final sunset reverberated across the high barred windows, he was distracted from all these abject considerations by thought of his drama, The Enemies.

Hladik was past forty. Apart from a few friendships and many habits, the problematic practice of literature constituted his life. Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned. All of the books he had published merely moved him to a complex repentance. His investigation of the work of Boehme, of Ibn Ezra, and of Fludd was essentially a product of mere application; his translation of the Sepher Yezirah was characterized by negligence, fatigue, and conjecture. He judged his Vindication of Eternity to be perhaps less deficient: the first volume is a history of the diverse eternities devised by man, from the immutable Being of Parmenides to the alterable past of Hinton; the second volume denies (with Francis Bradley) that all the events in the universe make up a temporal series. He argues that the number of experiences possible to man is not infinite, and that a single "repetition" suffices to demonstrate that time is a fallacy . . . Unfortunately, the arguments that demonstrate this fallacy are not any less fallacious. Hladik was in the habit of running through these arguments with a certain disdainful perplexity. He had also written a series of expressionist poems; these, to the discomfiture of the author, were included in an anthology in 1924, and there was no anthology of later date which did not inherit them. Hladik was anxious to redeem himself from his equivocal and languid past with his verse drama, The Enemies. (He favored the verse form in the theater because it prevents the spectators from forgetting unreality, which is the necessary condition of art.)

This opus preserved the dramatic unities (time, place, and action). It transpires in Hradcany, in the library of the Baron Roemerstadt, on one of the last evenings of the nineteenth century. In the first scene of the first act, a stranger pays a visit to Roemerstadt. (A clock strikes seven, the vehemence of a setting sun glorifies the window panes, the air transmits familiar and impassioned Hungarian music.) This visit is followed by others; Roemerstadt does not know the people who come to importune him, but he has the uncomfortable impression that he has seen them before: perhaps in a dream. All the visitors fawn upon him, but it is obvious — first to the spectators of the drama, and then to the Baron himself — that they are secret enemies, sworn to ruin him. Roemerstadt manages to outwit, or evade, their complex intrigues. In the course of the dialogue, mention is made of his betrothed, Julia de Weidenau, and of a certain Jaroslav Kubin, who at one time had been her suitor. Kubin has now lost his mind and thinks he is Roemerstadt . . . The dangers multiply. Roemerstadt, at the end of the second act, is forced to kill one of the conspirators. The third and final act begins. The incongruities gradually mount up: actors who seemed to have been discarded from the play reappear; the man who had been killed by Roemerstadt returns, for an instant. Someone notes that the time of day has not advanced: the clock strikes seven, the western sun reverberates in the high window panes, impassioned Hungarian music is carried on the air. The first speaker in the play reappears and repeats the words he had spoken in the first scene of the first act. Roemerstadt addresses him without the least surprise. The spectator understands that Roemerstadt is the wretched Jaroslav gubin. The drama has never taken place: it is the circular delirium which Kubin unendingly lives and relives.

Hladik had never asked himself whether this tragicomedy of errors was preposterous or admirable, deliberate or casual. Such a plot, he intuited, was the most appropriate invention to conceal his defects and to manifest his strong points, and it embodied the possibility of redeeming (symbolically) the fundamental meaning of his life. He had already completed the first act and a scene or two of the third. The metrical nature of the work allowed him to go over it continually, rectifying the hexameters, without recourse to the manuscript. He thought of the two acts still to do, and of his coming death. In the darkness, he addressed himself to God. If I exist at all, if I am not one of Your repetitions and errata, I exist as the author of The Enemies. In order to bring this drama, which may serve to justify me, to justify You, I need one more year. Grant me that year, You to whom belong the centuries and all time. It was the last, the most atrocious night, but ten minutes later sleep swept over him like a dark ocean and drowned him.

Toward dawn, he dreamt he had hidden himself in one of the naves of the Clementine Library. A librarian wearing dark glasses asked him: What are you looking for? Hladik answered: God. The Librarian told him: God is in one of the letters on one of the pages of one of the 400,000 volumes of the Clementine. My fathers and the fathers of my fathers have sought after that letter. I've gone blind looking for it. He removed his glasses, and Hladik saw that his eyes were dead. A reader came in to return an atlas. This atlas is useless, he said, and handed it to Hladik, who opened it at random. As if through a haze, he saw a map of India. With a sudden rush of assurance, he touched one of the tiniest letters. An ubiquitous voice said: The time for your work has been granted. Hladik awoke.

He remembered that the dreams of men belong to God, and that Maimonides wrote that the words of a dream are divine, when they are all separate and clear and are spoken by someone invisible. He dressed. Two soldiers entered his cell and ordered him to follow them.

From behind the door, Hladik had visualized a labyrinth of passageways, stairs, and connecting blocks. Reality was less rewarding: the party descended to an inner courtyard by a single iron stairway. Some soldiers — uniforms unbuttoned — were testing a motorcycle and disputing their conclusions. The sergeant looked at his watch: it was 8:44. They must wait until nine. Hladik, more insignificant than pitiful, sat down on a pile of firewood. He noticed that the soldiers' eyes avoided his. To make his wait easier, the sergeant offered him a cigarette. Hladik did not smoke. He accepted the cigarette out of politeness or humility. As he lit it, he saw that his hands shook. The day was clouding over. The soldiers spoke in low tones, as though he were already dead. Vainly, he strove to recall the woman of whom Julia de Weidenau was the symbol . . .

The firing squad fell in and was brought to attention. Hladik, standing against the barracks wall, waited for the volley. Someone expressed fear the wall would be splashed with blood. The condemned man was ordered to step forward a few paces. Hladik recalled, absurdly, the preliminary maneuvers of a photographer. A heavy drop of rain grazed one of Hladik's temples and slowly rolled down his cheek. The sergeant barked the final command.

The physical universe stood still.

The rifles converged upon Hladik, but the men assigned to pull the triggers were immobile. The sergeant's arm eternalized an inconclusive gesture. Upon a courtyard flag stone a bee cast a stationary shadow. The wind had halted, as in a painted picture. Hladik began a shriek, a syllable, a twist of the hand. He realized he was paralyzed. Not a sound reached him from the stricken world.

He thought: I'm in hell, I'm dead.

He thought: I've gone mad.

He thought: Time has come to a halt.

Then he reflected that in that case, his thought, too, would have come to a halt. He was anxious to test this possibility: he repeated (without moving his lips) the mysterious Fourth Eclogue of Virgil. He imagined that the already remote soldiers shared his anxiety; he longed to communicate with them. He was astonished that he felt no fatigue, no vertigo from his protracted immobility. After an indeterminate length of time he fell asleep. On awaking he found the world still motionless and numb. The drop of water still clung to his cheek; the shadow of the bee still did not shift in the courtyard; the smoke from the cigarette he had thrown down did not blow away. Another "day" passed before Hladik understood.

He had asked God for an entire year in which to finish his work: His omnipotence had granted him the time. For his sake, God projected a secret miracle: German lead would kill him, at the determined hour, but in his mind a year would elapse between the command to fire and its execution. From perplexity he passed to stupor, from stupor to resignation, from resignation to sudden gratitude.

He disposed of no document but his own memory; the mastering of each hexameter as he added it, had imposed upon him a kind of fortunate discipline not imagined by those amateurs who forget their vague, ephemeral, paragraphs. He did not work for posterity, nor even for God, of whose literary preferences he possessed scant knowledge. Meticulous, unmoving, secretive, he wove his lofty invisible labyrinth in time. He worked the third act over twice. He eliminated some rather too-obvious symbols: the repeated striking of the hour, the music. There were no circumstances to constrain him. He omitted, condensed, amplified; occasionally, he chose the primitive version. He grew to love the courtyard, the barracks; one of the faces endlessly confronting him made him modify his conception of Roemerstadt's character. He discovered that the hard cacaphonies which so distressed Flaubert are mere visual superstitions: debilities and annoyances of the written word, not of the sonorous, the sounding one . . . He brought his drama to a conclusion: he lacked only a single epithet. He found it: the drop of water slid down his cheek. He began a wild cry, moved his face aside. A quadruple blast brought him down.

Jaromir Hladik died on March 29, at 9:02 in the morning.

1943

The End[1]

Lying prone, Recabarren half-opened his eyes and saw the slanting rattan ceiling. The thrumming of a guitar reached him from the other room; the invisible instrument was a kind of meager labyrinth infinitely winding and unwinding . . . Little by little he returned to reality, to the daily details which now would never change. He gazed without sorrow at his great useless body, at the poncho of coarse wool wrapped around his legs. Outside, beyond the barred windows, stretched the plain and the afternoon. He had been sleeping, but the sky was still filled with light. Groping about with his left arm, he finally touched a bronze cowbell hanging at the foot of the cot. He banged on it two or three times; from the other side of the door the humble chords continued to reach him. The guitarist was a Negro who had shown up one night to display his pretensions as a singer: he had challenged another stranger to a drawn out contest of singing to guitar accompaniment. Bested, he nevertheless continued to haunt the general store, as if waiting for someone. He passed the hours playing on his guitar, but he no longer ventured to sing. Perhaps his defeat had embittered him. The other customers had grown accustomed to this inoffensive player. Recabarren, the shopowner, would never forget the songs of the guitar contest: the next day, as he adjusted a load of mate upon a mule's back, his right side had suddenly died and he had lost his power of speech. By dint of taking pity on the misfortunes of the heroes of novels we come to take too much pity on our own misfortunes; not so the enduring Recabarren, who accepted his paralysis as he had previously accepted the rude solitude of America. Habituated to living in the present, like the animals, he gazed now at the sky and considered how the crimson circle around the moon presaged rain.

A boy with Indian features (one of his sons, perhaps) half-opened the door. Recabarren asked him with his eyes if there were anyone in the shop. The boy, taciturn, indicated by terse signs that there was no one. (The Negro, of course, did not count.) The prostrate man was left alone. One hand played briefly with the cowbell, as if he were wielding some power.

Beneath the final sun of the day, the plain seemed almost abstract, as if seen in a dream. A point shimmered on the horizon, and then grew until it became a horseman, who came, or seemed to come, toward the building. Recabarren saw the wide-brimmed hat, the long dark poncho, the dappled horse, but not the man's face; at length the rider tightened the reins and cut down the gallop, approaching at a trot. Some two hundred yards away, he turned sharply. Recabarren could no longer see him, but he heard him speak, dismount, tie the horse to the paling, and enter the shop with a firm step.

Without raising his eyes from his instrument, where he seemed to be searching for something, the Negro said gently:

"I was sure, senor, that I could count on you."

The other man replied with a harsh voice:

"And I on you, colored man. I made you wait a pack of days, but here I am."

There was a silence. At length the Negro responded:

"I'm getting used to waiting. I've waited seven years."

Without haste the other explained:

"I went longer than seven years without seeing my children. I saw them that day, but I didn't want to seem like a man always fighting."

"I realize that. I understand what you say," said the Negro. "I trust you left them in good health."

The stranger, who had taken a seat at the bar, laughed a deep laugh. He asked for a rum. He drank with relish, but did not drain it down.

"I gave them some good advice," he declared. "That's never amiss, and it doesn't cost anything. I told them, among other things, that one man should not shed another man's blood."

A slow chord preceded the Negro's reply:

"You did well. That way they won't be like us."

"At least they won't be like me," said the stranger. And then he added, as if he were ruminating aloud: "Destiny has made me kill, and now, once more, it has put a knife in my hand."

The Negro, as if he had not heard, observed:

"Autumn is making the days grow shorter."

"The light that's left is enough for me," replied the stranger, getting to his feet.

He stood in front of the Negro and said, with weariness:

"Leave off the guitar. Today there's another kind of counterpoint waiting for you."

The two men walked toward the door. As he went out, the Negro murmured:

"Perhaps this time it will go as hard on me as the first time."

The other answered seriously:

"It didn't go hard on you the first time. What happened was that you were anxious for the second try."

They moved away from the houses for a good bit, walking together. One point on the plain was as good as another, and the moon was shining. Suddenly they looked at each other, halted, and the stranger began taking off his spurs; They already had their ponchos wound around their forearms when the Negro said:

"I want to ask you a favor before we tangle. I want you to put all your guts into this meeting, just as you did seven years ago, when you killed my brother."

Perhaps for the first time in the dialogue, Martin Fierro heard the sound of hate. He felt his blood like a goad. They clashed, and the sharp-edged steel marked the Negro's face.

There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says it, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is as untranslatable as music . . . From his cot, Recabarren saw the end. A charge, and the Negro fell back; he lost his footing, feinted toward the other's face, and reached out in a great stab, which penetrated the stranger's chest. Then there was another stab, which the shopowner did not clearly see, and Fierro did not get up. Immobile, the Negro seemed to watch over his enemy's laboring death agony. He wiped his bloodstained knife on the turf and walked back toward the knot of houses slowly, without looking back. His righteous task accomplished, he was nobody. More accurately, he became the stranger: he had no further mission on earth, but he had killed a man.

(1) This account of a knife fight with Martin Fierro, the Argentine gaucho of Jose Hernandez' great folk poem, takes up the story of Fierro where the popular poem leaves off. A singing encounter, or challenge, with a black man (one of ten brothers, the eldest of whom has been killed) occurs toward the end of the poem. A fight is at that time averted. Borges here gives us the account of a subsequent meeting. (And see Prologue to Artifices.) — Editor's note.

- Translated by ANTHONY KERRIGAN

The Sect of the Phoenix

Those who write that the sect of the Phoenix originated in Heliopolis, and make it derive from the religious restoration which followed the death of the reformer Amenhotep IV, cite texts by Herodotus, Tacitus, and inscriptions from the Egyptian monuments; but they ignore, or try to ignore, the fact that the denomination of the sect by the name of Phoenix is not prior to Rabanus Maurus, and that the most ancient sources (the Saturnalia, or Flavius Josephus, let us say) speak only of the People of Custom or the People of the Secret. Gregorovius had already observed, in the Conventicles of Ferrara, that any mention of the Phoenix was extremely rare in oral language. In Geneva, I have spoken to artisans who did not understand me when I asked if they were men of the Phoenix, but who admitted, in the next breath, that they were men of the Secret. Unless I am mistaken, the same phenomenon is observable among the Buddhists: the name by which they are known to the world is not the same as the one they themselves pronounce.

Miklosic, in an overly famous page, has compared the sectarians of the Phoenix with the gypsies. In Chile and in Hungary there are sectarians of the Phoenix and there are also gypsies; beyond their ubiquity, they have very little in common. The gypsies are horsedealers, tinkers, smiths, and fortune tellers; the sectarians tend to practice the liberal professions successfully. The gypsies are of a certain definite physical type, and they speak — or used to speaks secret language; the sectarians are indistinguishable from the rest of the world: the proof of it is that they have not suffered persecutions. Gypsies are picturesque and inspire bad poets. Narrative verse, colored lithographs, and boleros pay no heed to the sectarians . . . Martin Buber declares that Jews are essentially pathetic; not all sectarians are, and some of them despise pathos; this public and notorious fact suffices to refute the vulgar error (absurdly defended by Urmann) which sees in the Phoenix a derivative of Israel. People think more or less as follows: Urmann was a sensitive man; Urmann was a Jew; Urmann associated with the sectarians in the ghetto at Prague; the affinity felt by Urmann serves to prove a fact. I can not in good faith agree with this judgment. The fact that sectarians in a Jewish environment should resemble Jews does not prove anything; the undeniable fact is that they resemble, like Hazlitt's infinite Shakespeare, all the men in the world. They are everything to all men, like the Apostle. Only a short time ago Doctor Juan Francisco Amaro, of Paysandu, marveled at the ease with which they became Spanish-Americans.

I have mentioned that the history of the sect does not record persecutions. Still, since there is no human group which does not include partisans of the Phoenix, it is also true that there has never been a persecution which they have not suffered or a reprisal they have not carried out. Their blood has been spilled, through the centuries, under opposing enemy flags, in the wars of the West and in the remote battles of Asia. It has availed them little to identify themselves with all the nations of the earth.

Lacking a sacred book to unify them as the Scripture does Israel, lacking a common memory, lacking that other social memory which is language, scattered across the face of the earth, differing in color and features, only one thing — the Secret — unites them and will unite them until the end of time. Once upon a time, in addition to the Secret, there was a legend (and perhaps also a cosmogonic myth), but the superficial men of the Phoenix have forgotten it, and today they conserve only the obscure tradition of some cosmic punishment: of a punishment, or a pact, or a privilege, for the versions differ, and they scarcely hint at the verdict of a God who grants eternity to a race of men if they will only carry out a certain rite, generation after generation. I have compared the testimony of travelers, I have conversed with patriarchs and theologians; and I can testify that the performance of the rite is the only religious practice observed by the sectarians. The rite itself constitutes the Secret. And the Secret, as I have already indicated, is transmitted from generation to generation; but usage does not favor mothers teaching it to their sons, nor is it transmitted by priests. Initiation into the mystery is the task of individuals of the lowest order. A slave, a leper, a beggar plays the role of mystagogue. A child can indoctrinate another child. In itself the act is trivial, momentary, and does not require description. The necessary materials are cork, wax, or gum arabic. (In the liturgy there is mention of silt; this, too, is often used.) There are no temples specially dedicated to the celebration of this cult; a ruin, a cellar, an entrance way are considered propitious sites. The Secret is sacred, but it is also somewhat ridiculous. The practice of the mystery is furtive and even clandestine, and its adepts do not speak about it. There are no respectable words to describe it, but it is understood that all words refer to it, or better, that they inevitably allude to it, and thus, in dialogue with initiates, when I have prattled about anything at all, they have smiled enigmatically or taken offense, for they have felt that I touched upon the Secret. In Germanic literature there are poems written by sectarians, whose nominal theme is the sea, say, or the evening twilight; but they are, I can hear someone say, in some measure symbols of the Secret.

As stated by Du Cange in his Glossary, by way of apocryphal proverb, Orbis terrarum est speculum Ludi. A kind of sacred horror prevents some of the faithful from practicing the extremely simple ritual; the others despise them for it, but they despise themselves even more. On the other hand, those sectarians who deliberately renounce the Custom and manage to engage in direct communication with the divinity enjoy a large measure of credit. To make this commerce manifest, these latter sectarians have recourse to figures from the liturgy; thus John of the Rood wrote:

May the Nine Firmaments know that God
Is as delightful as cork or muck.

I have enjoyed the friendship of devotees of the Phoenix on three continents; it seems clear to me that at first the Secret struck them as something paltry, distressing, vulgar and (what is even stranger) incredible. They could not reconcile themselves to the fact that their ancestors had lowered themselves to such conduct. The odd thing is that the Secret has not been lost long ago; despite the vicissitudes of the world, despite wars and exoduses, it extends, in its tremendous fashion, to all the faithful. One commentator has not hesitated to assert that it is already instinctive.

- Translated by ANTHONY KERRIGAN

The South

The man who landed in Buenos Aires in 1871 bore the name of Johannes Dahlmann and he was a minister in the Evangelical Church. In 1939, one of his grandchildren, Juan Dahlmann, was secretary of a municipal library on Calle Cordoba, and he considered himself profoundly Argentinian. His maternal grandfather had been that Francisco Flores, of the Second Line-Infantry Division, who had died on the frontier of Buenos Aires, run through with a lance by Indians from Catriel; in the discord inherent between his two lines of descent, Juan Dahlmann (perhaps driven to it by his Germanic blood) chose the line represented by his romantic ancestor, his ancestor of the romantic death. An old sword, a leather frame containing the daguerreotype of a blank-faced man with a beard, the dash and grace of certain music, the familiar strophes of Martin Fierro, the passing years, boredom and solitude, all went to foster this voluntary, but never ostentatious nationalism. At the cost of numerous small privations, Dahlmann had managed to save the empty shell of a ranch in the South which had belonged to the Flores family; he continually recalled the image of the balsamic eucalyptus trees and the great rosecolored house which had once been crimson. His duties, perhaps even indolence, kept him in the city. Summer after summer he contented himself with the abstract idea of possession and with the certitude that his ranch was waiting for him on a precise site in the middle of the plain. Late in February, 1939, something happened to him.

Blind to all fault, destiny can be ruthless at one's slightest distraction. Dahlmann had succeeded in acquiring, on that very afternoon, an imperfect copy of Weil's edition of The Thousand and One Nights. Avid to examine this find, he did not wait for the elevator but hurried up the stairs. In the obscurity, something brushed by his forehead: a bat, a bird? On the face of the woman who opened the door to him he saw horror engraved, and the hand he wiped across his face came away red with blood. The edge of a recently painted door which someone had forgotten to close had caused this wound. Dahlmann was able to fall asleep, but from the moment he awoke at dawn the savor of all things was atrociously poignant. Fever wasted him and the pictures in The Thousand and One Nights served to illustrate nightmares. Friends and relatives paid him visits and, with exaggerated smiles, assured him that they thought he looked fine. Dahlmann listened to them with a kind of feeble stupor and he marveled at their not knowing that he was in hell. A week, eight days passed, and they were like eight centuries. One afternoon, the usual doctor appeared, accompanied by a new doctor, and they carried him off to a sanitarium on the Calle Ecuador, for it was necessary to X-ray him. Dahlmann, in the hackney coach which bore them away, thought that he would, at last, be able to sleep in a room different from his own. He felt happy and communicative. When he arrived at his destination, they undressed him, shaved his head, bound him with metal fastenings to a stretcher; they shone bright lights on him until he was blind and dizzy, auscultated him, and a masked man stuck a needle into his arm. He awoke with a feeling of nausea, covered with a bandage, in a cell with something of a well about it; in the days and nights which followed the operation he came to realize that he had merely been, up until then, in a suburb of hell. Ice in his mouth did not leave the least trace of freshness. During these days Dahlmann hated himself in minute detail: he hated his identity, his bodily necessities, his humiliation, the beard which bristled upon his face. He stoically endured the curative measures, which were painful, but when the surgeon told him he had been on the point of death from septicemia, Dahlmann dissolved in tears of self-pity for his fate. Physical wretchedness and the incessant anticipation of horrible nights had not allowed him time to think of anything so abstract as death. On another day, the surgeon told him he was healing and that, very soon, he would be able to go to his ranch for convalescence. Incredibly enough, the promised day arrived.

Reality favors symmetries and slight anachronisms: Dahlmann had arrived at the sanitarium in a hackney coach and now a hackney coach was to take him to the Constitucion station. The first fresh tang of autumn, after the summer's oppressiveness, seemed like a symbol in nature of his rescue and release from fever and death. The city, at seven in the morning, had not lost that air of an old house lent it by the night; the streets seemed like long vestibules, the plazas were like patios. Dahlrnann recognized the city with joy on the edge of vertigo: a second before his eyes registered the phenomena themselves, he recalled the corners, the billboards, the modest variety of Buenos Aires. In the yellow light of the new day, all things returned to him.

Every Argentine knows that the South begins at the other side of Rivadavia. Dahlmann was in the habit of saying that this was no mere convention, that whoever crosses this street enters a more ancient and sterner world. From inside the carriage he sought out, among the new buildings, the iron grill window, the brass knocker, the arched door, the entrance way, the intimate patio.

At the railroad station he noted that he still had thirty minutes. He quickly recalled that in a cafe on the Calle Brazil (a few dozen feet from Yrigoyen's house) there was an enormous cat which allowed itself to be caressed as if it were a disdainful divinity. He entered the cafe. There was the cat, asleep. He ordered a cup of coffee, slowly stirred the sugar, sipped it (this pleasure had been denied him in the clinic), and thought, as he smoothed the cat's black coat, that this contact was an illusion and that the two beings, man and cat, were as good as separated by a glass, for man lives in time, in succession, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant.

Along the next to the last platform the train lay waiting. Dahlmann walked through the coaches until he found one almost empty. He arranged his baggage in the network rack. When the train started off, he took down his valise and extracted, after some hesitation, the first volume of The Thousand and One Nights. To travel with this book, which was so much a part of the history of his ill-fortune, was a kind of affirmation that his ill-fortune had been annulled; it was a joyous and secret defiance of the frustrated forces of evil.

Along both sides of the train the city dissipated into suburbs; this sight, and then a view of the gardens and villas, delayed the beginning of his reading. The truth was that Dahlmann read very little. The magnetized mountain and the genie who swore to kill his benefactor are — who would deny it? — marvelous, but not so much more than the morning itself and the mere fact of being. The joy of life distracted him from paying attention to Scheherezade and her superfluous miracles. Dahlmann closed his book and allowed himself to live.

Lunch — the bouillon served in shining metal bowls, as in the remote summers of childhood — was one more peaceful and rewarding delight.

Tomorrow I'll wake up at the ranch, he thought, and it was as if he was two men at a time: the man who traveled through the autumn day and across the geography of the fatherland, and the other one, locked up in a sanitarium and subject to methodical servitude. He saw unplastered brick houses, long and angled, timelessly watching the trains go by; he saw horsemen along the dirt roads; he saw gullies and lagoons and ranches; he saw great luminous clouds that resembled marble; and all these things were accidental, casual, like dreams of the plain. He also thought he recognized trees and crop fields; but he would not have been able to name them, for his actual knowledge of the countryside was quite inferior to his nostalgic and literary knowledge.

From time to time he slept, and his dreams were animated by the impetus of the train. The intolerable white sun of high noon had already become the yellow sun which precedes nightfall, and it would not be long before it would turn red. The railroad car was now also different; it was not the same as the one which had quit the station siding at Constitucion; the plain and the hours had transfigured it. Outside, the moving shadow of the railroad car stretched toward the horizon. The elemental earth was not perturbed either by settlements or other signs of humanity. The country was vast but at the same time intimate and, in some measure, secret. The limitless country sometimes contained only a solitary bull. The solitude was perfect, perhaps hostile, and it might have occurred to Dahlmann that he was traveling into the past and not merely south. He was distracted from these considerations by the railroad inspector who, on reading his ticket, advised him that the train would not let him off at the regular station but at another: an earlier stop, one scarcely known to Dahlmann. (The man added as explanation which Dahlmann did not attempt to understand, and which he hardly heard, for the mechanism of events did not concern him.)

The train laboriously ground to a halt, practically in the middle of the plain. The station lay on the other side of the tracks; it was not much more than a siding and a shed. There was no means of conveyance to be seen, but the station chief supposed that the traveler might secure a vehicle from a general store and inn to be found some ten or twelve blocks away.

Dahlmann accepted the walk as a small adventure. The sun had already disappeared from view, but a final splendor exalted the vivid and silent plain, before the night erased its color. Less to avoid fatigue than to draw out his enjoy meat of these sights, Dahlmann walked slowly, breathing in the odor of clover with sumptuous joy.

The general store at one time had been painted a deep scarlet, but the years had tempered this violent color for its own good. Something in its poor architecture recalled a steel engraving, perhaps one from an old edition of Paul et Virginie. A number of horses were hitched up to the paling. Once inside, Dahlmann thought he recognized the shopkeeper. Then he realized that he had been deceived by the man's resemblance to one of the male nurses in the sanitarium. When the shopkeeper heard Dahlmann's request, he said he would have the shay made up. In order to add one more event to that day and to kill time, Dahlmann decided to eat at the general store.

Some country louts, to whom Dahlmann did not at first pay any attention, were eating and drinking at one of the tables. On the floor, and hanging on to the bar, squatted an old man, immobile as an object. His years had reduced and polished him as water does a stone or the generations of men do a sentence. He was dark, dried up, diminutive, and seemed outside time, situated in eternity. Dahlmann noted with satisfaction the kerchief, the thick poncho, the long chiripa, and the colt boots, and told himself, as he recalled futile discussions with people from the Northern counties or from the province of Entre Rios, that gauchos like this no longer existed outside the South.

Dahlmann sat down next to the window. The darkness began overcoming the plain, but the odor and sound of the earth penetrated the iron bars of the window. The shop owner brought him sardines, followed by some roast meat. Dahlmann washed the meal down with several glasses of red wine. Idling, he relished the tart savor of the wine, and let his gaze, now grown somewhat drowsy, wander over the shop. A kerosene lamp hung from a beam. There were three customers at the other table: two of them appeared to be farm workers; the third man, whose features hinted at Chinese blood, was drinking with his hat on. Of a sudden, Dahlmann felt something brush lightly against his face. Next to the heavy glass of turbid wine, upon one of the stripes in the table cloth, lay a spit ball of breadcrumb. That was all: but someone had thrown it there.

The men at the other table seemed totally cut off from him. Perplexed, Dahlmann decided that nothing had happened, and he opened the volume of The Thousand and One Nights, by way of suppressing reality. After a few moments another little ball landed on his table, and now the peones laughed outright. Dahlmann said to himself that he was not frightened, but he reasoned that it would be a major blunder if he, a convalescent, were to allow himself to be dragged by strangers into some chaotic quarrel. He determined to leave, and had already gotten to his feet when the owner came up and exhorted him in an alarmed voice:

"Senor Dahlmann, don't pay any attention to those lads; they're half high."

Dahlmann was not surprised to learn that the other man, now, knew his name. But he felt that these conciliatory words served only to aggravate the situation. Previous to this moment, the peones' provocation was directed against an unknown face, against no one in particular, almost against no one at all. Now it was an attack against him, against his name, and his neighbors knew it. Dahlmann pushed the owner aside, confronted the peones, and demanded to know what they wanted of him.

The tough with a Chinese look staggered heavily to his feet. Almost in Juan Dahlmann's face he shouted insults, as if he had been a long way off. His game was to exaggerate his drunkenness, and this extravagance constituted a ferocious mockery. Between curses and obscenities, he threw a long knife into the air, followed it with his eyes, caught and juggled it, and challenged Dahlmann to a knife fight. The owner objected in a tremulous voice, pointing out that Dahlmann was unarmed. At this point, something unforeseeable occurred.

From a corner of the room, the old ecstatic gaucho — in whom Dahlmann saw a summary and cipher of the South (his South) — threw him a naked dagger, which landed at his feet. It was as if the South had resolved that Dahlmann should accept the duel. Dahlmann bent over to pick up the dagger, and felt two things. The first, that this almost instinctive act bound him to fight. The second, that the weapon, in his torpid hand, was no defense at all, but would merely serve to justify his murder. He had once played with a poniard, like all men, but his idea of fencing and knife-play did not go further than the notion that all strokes should be directed upwards, with the cutting edge held inwards. They would not have allowed such things to happen to me in the sanitarium, he thought.

"Let's get on our way," said the other man.

They went out and if Dahlmann was without hope, he was also without fear. As he crossed the threshold, he felt that to die in a knife fight, under the open sky, and going forward to the attack, would have been a liberation, a joy, and a festive occasion, on the first night in the sanitarium, when they stuck him with the needle. He felt that if he had been able to choose, then, or to dream his death, this would have been the death he would have chosen or dreamt.

Firmly clutching his knife, which he perhaps would not know how to wield, Dahlmann went out into the plain.

- Translated by ANTHONY KERRIGAN

The Book of Imaginary Beings

Preface

Preface to the 1967 edition

Preface to the 1957 edition

A Bao A Qu

Abtu and Anet

The Amphisbaena

An Animal Imagined by Kafka

An Animal Imagined by C. S. Lewis

The Animal Imagined by Poe

Animals in the Form of Spheres

Antelopes with Six Legs

The Ass with Three Legs

Bahamut

Baldanders

The Banshee

The Barometz

The Basilisk

Behemoth

The Brownies

Burak

The Carbuncle

The Catoblepas

The Celestial Stag

The Centaur

Cerberus

The Cheshire Cat and the Kilkenny Cats

The Chimera

The Chinese Dragon

The Chinese Fox

The Chinese Phoenix

Chronos or Hercules

A Creature Imagined by C. S. Lewis

The Crocotta and the Leucrocotta

A Crossbreed

The Double

The Eastern Dragon

The Eater of the Dead

The Eight-Forked Serpent

The Elephant That Foretold the Birth of the Buddha

The Eloi and the Morlocks

The Elves

An Experimental Account of What Was Known, Seen, and Met by Mrs. Jane Lead in London in 1694

The Fairies

Fastitocalon

Fauna of Chile

Fauna of China

Fauna of Mirrors

Fauna of the United States

Garuda

The Gnomes

The Golem

The Griffon

Haniel, Kafziel, Azriel, and Aniel

Haokah, the Thunder God

Harpies

The Heavenly Cock

The Hippogriff

Hochigan

Humbaba

The Hundred-Heads

The Hydra of Lerna

Ichthyocentaurs

Jewish Demons

The Jinn

The Kami

A King of Fire and His Steed

The Kraken

Kujata

The Lamed Wufniks

The Lamias

Laudatores Temporis Acti

The Lemures

The Leveller

Lilith

The Lunar Hare

The Mandrake

The Manticore

The Mermecolion

The Minotaur

The Monkey of the Inkpot

The Monster Acheron

The Mother of Tortoises

The Nagas

The Nasnas

The Norns

The Nymphs

The Odradek

An Offspring of Leviathan

One-Eyed Beings

The Panther

The Pelican

The Peryton

The Phoenix

The Pygmies

The Rain Bird

The Remora

The Rukh

The Salamander

The Satyrs

Scylla

The Sea Horse

The Shaggy Beast of La Ferté-Bernard

The Simurgh

Sirens

The Sow Harnessed with Chains and Other Argentine Fauna

The Sphinx

The Squonk

Swedenborg’s Angels

Swedenborg’s Devils

The Sylphs

Talos

The T’ao T’ieh

Thermal Beings

The Tigers of Annam

The Trolls

Two Metaphysical Beings

The Unicorn

The Unicorn of China

The Uroboros

The Valkyries

The Western Dragon

Youwarkee

The Zaratan

Preface

As we all know, there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition. The compilation and translation of this volume have given us a great deal of such pleasure; we hope the reader will share something of the fun we felt when ransacking the bookshelves of our friends and the mazelike vaults of the Biblioteca Nacional in search of old authors and abstruse references. We have done our best to trace all our quoted material back to original sources and to translate it from the original tongues medieval Latin, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Lemprière and the Loeb and Bohn collections have, as is their wont, proved most helpful with the classics. As for our invincible ignorance of Eastern languages, it enables us to be grateful for the labours of such men as Giles, Burton, Lane, Waley, and Scholem. The first edition of this book, containing eighty-two pieces, was published in Mexico in 1957. It was called then Manual de zoología fantástica (Handbook of Fantastic Zoology). In 1967, a second edition El libro de los seres imaginarios was published in Buenos Aires with thirty-four additional articles. Now, for this English-language edition, we have altered a good number of the original articles, correcting, adding, or revising material, and we have also compiled a few brand-new ones. This latest edition contains 120 pieces. We extend warm thanks for their help to Marian Skedgell, of E. P. Dutton, and to José Edmundo Clemente, Assistant Director of the Argentine National Library.

Buenos Aires, 23 May 1969
j. l. b.

n. t.
di g.

Preface to the 1967 Edition

The title of this book would justify the inclusion of Prince Hamlet, of the point, of the line, of the surface, of n-dimensional hyperplanes and hypervolumes, of all generic terms, and perhaps of each one of us and of the godhead. In brief, the sum of all things the universe. We have limited ourselves, however, to what is immediately suggested by the words ‘imaginary beings’; we have compiled a handbook of the strange creatures conceived through time and space by the human imagination. We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the dragon’s image that fits man’s imagination, and this accounts for the dragon’s appearance in different places and periods. A book of this kind is unavoidably incomplete; each new edition forms the basis of future editions, which themselves may grow on endlessly. We invite the eventual reader in Colombia or Paraguay to send us the names, accurate description, and most conspicuous traits of their local monsters. As with all miscellanies, as with the inexhaustible volumes of Robert Burton, of Frazer, or of Pliny, The Book of Imaginary Beings is not meant to be read straight through; rather, we should like the reader to dip into these pages at random, just as one plays with the shifting patterns of a kaleidoscope. The sources of this collection are manifold; they are re-corded in each piece. May we be forgiven any accidental omission.

Martínez, September 1967
j.l.b.

m.g.

Preface to the 1957 Edition

A small child is taken to the zoo for the first time. This child may be any one of us or, to put it another way, we have been this child and have forgotten about it. In these grounds these terrible grounds the child sees living animals he has never before glimpsed; he sees jaguars, vultures, bison, and what is still stranger giraffes. He sees for the first time the bewildering variety of the animal kingdom, and this spectacle, which might alarm or frighten him, he enjoys. He enjoys it so much that going to the zoo is one of the pleasures of childhood, or is thought to be such. How can we explain this everyday and yet mysterious event?

We can, of course, deny it. We can suppose that children suddenly rushed off to the zoo will become, in due time, neurotic, and the truth is there can hardly be a child who has not visited the zoo and there is hardly a grown-up who is not a neurotic. It may be stated that all children, by definition, are explorers, and that to discover the camel is in itself no stranger than to discover a mirror or water or a staircase. It can also be stated that the child trusts his parents, who take him to this place full of animals. Besides, his toy tiger and the pictures of tigers in the encyclopedia have somehow taught him to look at the flesh-and-bone tiger without fear. Plato (if he were invited to join in this discussion) would tell us that the child had already seen the tiger in a primal world of archetypes, and that now on seeing the tiger he recognizes it. Schopenhauer (even more wondrously) would tell us that the child looks at the tigers without fear because he is aware that he is the tigers and the tigers are him or, more accurately, that both he and the tigers are but forms of that single essence, the Will.

Let us pass now from the zoo of reality to the zoo of mythologies, to the zoo whose denizens are not lions but sphinxes and griffons and centaurs. The population of this second zoo should exceed by far the population of the first, since a monster is no more than a combination of parts of real beings, and the possibilities of permutation border on the infinite. In the centaur, the horse and man are blended; in the Minotaur, the bull and man (Dante imagined it as having the face of a man and the body of a bull); and in this way it seems we could evolve an endless variety of monsters combinations of fishes, birds, and reptiles, limited only by our own boredom or disgust. This, however, does not happen; our monsters would be stillborn, thank God. Flaubert had rounded up, in the last pages of his Temptation of Saint Anthony, a number of medieval and classical monsters and has tried so say his commentators to concoct a few new ones; his sum total is hardly impressive, and but few of them really stir our imaginations. Anyone looking into the pages of the present handbook will soon find out that the zoology of dreams is far poorer than the zoology of the Maker.

We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the dragon’s image that appeals to the human imagination, and so we find the dragon in quite distinct places and times. It is, so to speak, a necessary monster, not an ephemeral or accidental one, such as the three-headed chimera or the catoblepas. Of course, we are fully aware that this book, perhaps the first of its kind, does not exhaust the sum total of imaginary animals. We have delved into classical and Oriental literatures, but we feel that our subject goes on for ever.

We have deliberately excluded the many legends of men taking the shapes of animals: the lobisón, the werewolf, and so on.

We wish to acknowledge the help given us by Leonor Guerrero de Coppola, Alberto D’Aversa, and Rafael López Pellegri.

Martínez, 29 January 1957
j.l.b.
m.g.

A Bao A Qu

If you want to look out over the loveliest landscape in the world, you must climb to the top of the Tower of Victory in Chitor. There, standing on a circular terrace, one has a sweep of the whole horizon. A winding stairway gives access to this terrace, but only those who do not believe in the legend dare climb up. The tale runs:

On the stairway of the Tower of Victory there has lived since the beginning of time a being sensitive to the many shades of the human soul and known as the A Bao A Qu. It lies dormant, for the most part on the first step, until at the approach of a person some secret life is touched off in it, and deep within the creature an inner light begins to glow. At the same time, its body and almost translucent skin begin to stir. But only when someone starts up the spiralling stairs is the A Bao A Qu brought to consciousness, and then it sticks close to the visitor’s heels, keeping to the outside of the turning steps, where they are most worn by the generations of pilgrims. At each level the creature’s colour becomes more intense, its shape approaches perfection, and the bluish form it gives off is more brilliant. But it achieves its ultimate form only at the topmost step, when the climber is a person who has attained Nirvana and whose acts cast no shadows. Otherwise, the A Bao A Qu hangs back before reaching the top, as if paralysed, its body incomplete, its blue growing paler, and its glow hesitant. The creature suffers when it cannot come to completion, and its moan is a barely audible sound, something like the rustling of silk. Its span of life is brief, since as soon as the traveler climbs down, the A Bao A Qu wheels and tumbles to the first steps, where, worn out and almost shapeless, it waits for the next visitor. People say that its tentacles are visible only when it reaches the middle of the staircase. It is also said that it can see with its whole body and that to the touch it is like the skin of a peach.

In the course of centuries, the A Bao A Qu has reached the terrace only once.

This legend is recorded by C. C. Iturvuru in an appendix to his now classic treatise On Malay Witchcraft (1937).

Abtu and Anet

As all Egyptians knew, Abtu and Anet were two life-sized fishes, identical and holy, that swam on the lookout for danger before the prow of the sun god’s ship. Their course was endless; by day the craft sailed the sky from east to west, from dawn to dusk, and by night made its way underground in the opposite direction.

The Amphisbaena

The Pharsalia (IX, 701-28) catalogues the real or imaginary reptiles that Cato’s soldiers met up with on their scorching march across the African desert. Among them are the Pareas, ‘content with its tail to cleave its track’ (or as a seventeenth-century Spanish poet has it, ‘which makes its way, erect as a staff’), and the Jaculi, which darts from trees like javelins, and ‘the dangerous Amphisbaena, also, that moves on at both of its heads’. Pliny uses nearly the same words to describe the Amphisbaena, adding: ‘as though one mouth were not enough for the discharge of all its venom’

Brunetto Latini’s Tesoro the encyclopedia which Latini recommended to his old disciple in the seventh circle of Hell is less terse and clearer: The Amphisbaena is a serpent having two heads, the one in its proper place and the other in its tail; and it can bite with both, and run with agility, and its eyes glare like candles.’ Sir Thomas Browne in his Vulgar Errors (1646) wrote that there is no species without a bottom, top, front, back, left, and right, and he denied the existence of the Amphisbaena, ‘for the senses being placed at both extreams, doth make both ends anterior, which is impossible . . . And therefore this duplicity was ill contrived to place one head at both extreams . . .’ Amphisbaena, in Greek means ‘goes both ways’. In the Antilles and in certain parts of America, the name is given to a reptile commonly known as the doble andadora (Both ways goer), the ‘two-headed snake’, and ‘mother of ants’. It is said that ants nourish it. Also that if it is chopped in half, its two parts will join again.

The Amphisbaena’s medicinal properties were celebrated by Pliny.

An Animal Imagined by Kafka

It is the animal with the big tail, a tail many yards long and like a fox’s brush. How I should like to get my hands on this tail some time, but it is impossible, the animal is constantly moving about, the tail is constantly being flung this way and that. The animal resembles a kangaroo, but not as to the face, which is flat almost like a human face, and small and oval; only its teeth have any power of expression, whether they are concealed or bared. Sometimes I have the feeling that the animal is trying to tame me.

What other purpose could it have in withdrawing its tail when I snatch at it, and then again waiting calmly until I am tempted again, and then leaping away once more?

Franz
Kafka:
Dearest Father
(Translated from the German by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins)

An Animal Imagined by C. S. Lewis

The noise was very loud now and the thicket very dense so that he could not see a yard ahead, when the music stopped suddenly. There was a sound of rustling and broken twigs and he made hastily in that direction, but found nothing. He had almost decided to give up the search when the song began again a little farther away. Once more he made after it; once more the creature stopped singing and evaded him. He must have played thus at hide-and-seek with it for the best part of an hour before his search was rewarded.

Treading delicately during one of the loudest bursts of music he at last saw through the flowery branches a black something. Standing still whenever it stopped singing, and advancing with great caution whenever it began again, he stalked it for ten minutes. At last it was in full view, and singing, and ignorant that it was watched. It sat upright like a dog, black and sleek and shiny, but its shoulders were high above Ransom’s head, and the forelegs on which they were pillared were like young trees and the wide soft pads on which they rested were large as those of a camel. The enormous rounded belly was white, and far up above the shoulders the neck rose like that of a horse. The head was in profile from where Ransom stood the mouth wide open as it sang of joy in thick-coming trills, and the music almost visibly rippled in its glossy throat. He stared in wonder at the wide liquid eyes and the quivering, sensitive nostrils. Then the creature stopped, saw him, and darted away, and stood, now a few paces distant, on all four legs, not much smaller than a young elephant, swaying a long bushy tail. It was the first thing in Perelandra which seemed to show any fear of man. Yet it was not fear. When he called to it it came nearer. It put its velvet nose into his hand and endured his touch; but almost at once it darted back and, bending its long neck, buried its head in its paws. He could make no headway with it, and when at length it retreated out of sight he did not follow it. To do so would have seemed an injury to its fawn-like shyness, to the yielding softness of its expression, its evident wish to be for ever a sound and only a sound in the thickest centre of untraveled woods. He resumed his journey: a few seconds later the song broke out behind him, louder and lovelier than before, as if in a paean of rejoicing at its recovered privacy.

The beasts of that kind have no milk [said Perelandra] and always what they bring forth is suckled by the she-beast of another kind. She is great and beautiful and dumb, and till the young singing beast is weaned it is among her whelps and is subject to her. But when it is grown it becomes the most delicate and glorious of all beasts and goes from her. And she wonders at its song.’

C. S. Lewis: Perelandra

The Animal Imagined by Poe

In his Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, published in 1838, Edgar Allan Poe attributed to certain Antarctic islands an astounding yet credible fauna. In Chapter XVIII, we read:

We also picked up a bush, full of red berries, like those of the hawthorn, and the carcass of a singular-looking land-animal. It was three feet in length, and but six inches in height, with four very short legs, the feet armed with long claws of a brilliant scarlet, and resembling coral in substance. The body was covered with a straight silky hair, perfectly white. The tail was peaked like that of a rat, and about a foot and a half long. The head resembled a cat’s, with the exception of the ears; these were flapped like the ears of a dog. The teeth were of the same brilliant scarlet as the claws.

No less remarkable was the water found in those southern regions. Towards the close of the chapter, Poe writes:

On account of the singular character of the water, we refused to taste it, supposing it to be polluted . . . I am at a loss to give a distinct idea of the nature of this liquid, and cannot do so without many words. Although it flowed with rapidity in all declivities where common water would do so, yet never, except when falling in a cascade, had it the customary appearance of limpidity. It was, nevertheless, in point of fact, as perfectly limpid as any limestone water in existence, the difference being only in appearance. At first sight, and especially in cases where little declivity was found, it bore resemblance, as regards consistency, to a thick infusion of gum-arabic in common water. But this was only the least remarkable of its extraordinary qualities. It was not colourless, nor was it of any one uniform colour presenting to the eye, as it flowed, every possible shade of purple, like the hues of a changeable silk . . . Upon collecting a basinful, and allowing it to settle thoroughly, we perceived that the whole mass of liquid was made up of a number of distinct veins, each of a distinct hue; that these veins did not commingle; and that their cohesion was perfect in regard to their own particles among themselves, and imperfect in regard to neighbouring veins. Upon passing the blade of a knife athwart the veins, the water closed over it immediately, as with us, and also, in withdrawing it, all traces of the passage of the knife were instantly obliterated. If, however, the blade was passed down accurately between the two veins, a perfect separation was effected, which the power of cohesion did not immediately rectify.

Animals in the Form of Spheres

The sphere is the most uniform of solid bodies since every point on its surface is equidistant from its centre. Because of this, and because of its ability to revolve on an axis without straying from a fixed place, Plato (Timaeus, 33) approved the judgment of the Demiurge, who gave the world a spherical shape. Plato thought the world to be a living being and in the Laws (898) stated that the planets and stars were living as well. In this way, he enriched fantastic zoology with vast spherical animals and cast aspersions on those slow-witted astronomers who failed to understand that the circular course of heavenly bodies was voluntary.

In Alexandria over five hundred years later, Origen, one of the Fathers of the Church, taught that the blessed would come back to life in the form of spheres and would enter rolling into Heaven.

During the Renaissance, the idea of Heaven as an animal reappeared in Lucilio Vanini; the Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino spoke of the hair, teeth, and bones of the earth; and Giordano Bruno felt that the planets were great peaceful animals, warm-blooded, with regular habits, and endowed with reason. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler debated with the English mystic Robert Fludd which of them had first conceived the notion of the earth as a living monster, ‘whose whalelike breathing, changing with sleep and wakefulness, produces the ebb and flow of the sea’. The anatomy, the feeding habits, the colour, the memory, and the imaginative and shaping faculties of the monster were sedulously studied by Kepler.

In the nineteenth century, the German psychologist Gustav Theodor Fechner (a man praised by William James in his A Pluralistic Universe) rethought the preceding ideas with all the earnestness of a child. Anyone not belittling his hypothesis that the earth, our mother, is an organism an organism superior to plants, animals, and men may look into the pious pages of Fechner’s Zend-Avesta. There we read, for example, that the earth’s spherical shape is that of the human eye, the noblest organ of our body. Also, that ‘if the sky is really the home of angels, these angels are obviously the stars, for the sky has no other inhabitants’.

Antelopes with Six Legs

It is said that Odin’s horse, the grey-coated Sleipnir who travels on land, in the air, and down into the regions of Hell is provided (or encumbered) with eight legs; a Siberian myth attributes six legs to the first Antelopes. With such an endowment it was difficult or impossible to catch them; Tunk-poj, the divine huntsman, made some special skates with the wood of a sacred tree which creaked incessantly and that the barking of a dog had revealed to him. The skates creaked too and flew with the speed of an arrow; to control or restrain their course, he found it necessary to wedge into the skates some blocks made of the wood of another magic tree. All over heaven Tunk-poj hunted the Antelope. The beast, tired out, fell to the ground, and Tunk-poj cut off its hindmost pair of legs.

‘Men,’
said Tunk-poj, ‘grow smaller and weaker every day. How are they going to hunt six-legged Antelopes if I myself am barely able to?’

From that day on, Antelopes have been quadrupeds.

The Ass with Three Legs

Pliny attributes to Zarathustra, founder of the religion still professed by the Parsis of Bombay, the composition of two million verses; the Arab historian al-Tabari claims that Zarathustra’s complete works as set down by pious calligraphers cover some twelve thousand cowhides. It is well known that Alexander of Macedonia had these parchments burned in Persepolis, but thanks to the retentive memory of the priests, it was possible to preserve the basic texts, and from the ninth century these have been supplemented by an encyclopedic work, the Bundahish, which contains this page:

Of the three-legged ass it is said that it stands in the middle of the ocean and that three is the number of its hooves and six the number of its eyes and nine the number of its mouths and two the number of its ears and one the number of its horn. Its coat is white, its food is spiritual, and its whole being is righteous. And two of its six eyes are in the place where eyes should be and two on the crown of its head and two in its forehead; through the keenness of its six eyes it triumphs and destroys.

Of its nine mouths, three are placed in the face and three in the forehead and three on the inside of its loins . . . Each hoof, laid on the ground, covers the space of a flock of a thousand sheep, and under each of its spurs up to a thousand horsemen can manoeuvre. As to its ears, they overshadow [the north Persian province of] Mazanderan. Its horn is as of gold and is hollow, and from it a thousand branchlets have grown. With this horn will it bring down and scatter all the machinations of the wicked.

Amber is known to be the dung of the three-legged ass. In the mythology of Mazdaism, this beneficent monster is one of the helpers of Ahura Mazdah (Ormuzd), the principle of Life, Light, and Truth.

Bahamut

Behemoth’s fame reached the wastes of Arabia, where men altered and magnified its image. From a hippopotamus or elephant they turned it into a fish afloat in a fathomless sea; on the fish they placed a bull, and on the bull a ruby mountain, and on the mountain an angel, and over the angel six hells, and over these hells the earth, and over the earth seven heavens. A Moslem tradition runs:

God made the earth, but the earth had no base and so under the earth he made an angel. But the angel had no base and so under the angel’s feet he made a crag of ruby. But the crag had no base and so under the crag he made a bull endowed with four thousand eyes, ears, nostrils, mouths, tongues and feet. But the bull had no base and so under the bull he made a fish named Bahamut, and under the fish he put water, and under the water he put darkness, and beyond this men’s knowledge does not reach.

Others have it that the earth has its foundation on the water; the water, on the crag; the crag, on the bull’s forehead; the bull, on a bed of sand; the sand, on Bahamut; Bahamut, on a stifling wind; the stifling wind on a mist. What lies under the mist is unknown.

So immense and dazzling is Bahamut that the eyes of man cannot bear its sight. All the seas of the world, placed in one of the fish’s nostrils, would be like a mustard seed laid in the desert. In the 496th night of the Arabian Nights we are told that it was given to Isa (Jesus) to behold Bahamut and that, this mercy granted, Isa fell to the ground in a faint, and three days and their nights passed before he recovered his senses. The tale goes on that beneath the measureless fish is a sea; and beneath the sea, a chasm of air; and beneath the air, fire; and beneath the fire, a serpent named Falak in whose mouth are the six hells.

The idea of the crag resting on the bull, and the bull on Bahamut, and Bahamut on anything else, seems to be an illustration of the cosmological proof of the existence of God. This proof argues that every cause requires a prior cause, and so, in order to avoid proceeding into infinity, a first cause is necessary.

Baldanders

Baldanders (whose name we may translate as Soon-another or At-any-moment-something-else) was suggested to the master shoemaker Hans Sachs (1494-1576) of Nuremburg by that passage in the Odyssey in which Menelaus pursues the Egyptian god Proteus, who changes himself into a lion, a serpent, a panther, a huge wild boar, a tree, and flowing water. Some ninety years after Sachs’s death, Baldanders makes a new appearance in the last book of the picaresque fantastic novel by Grimmelshausen, The Adventuresome Simplicissimus (1669). In the midst of a wood, the hero comes upon a stone statue which seems to him an idol from some old Germanic temple. He touches it and the statue tells him he is Baldanders and thereupon takes the forms of a man, of an oak tree, of a sow, of a fat sausage, of a field of clover, of dung, of a flower, of a blossoming branch, of a mulberry bush, of a silk tapestry, of many other things and beings, and then, once more, of a man. He pretends to teach Simplicissimus the art ‘of conversing with things, which by their nature are dumb, such as chairs and benches, pots and pans’; he also makes himself into a secretary and writes these words from the Revelation of St John: ‘I am the first and the last’, which are the key to the coded document in which he leaves the hero his instructions. Baldanders adds that his emblem (like that of the Turk, and with more right to it than the Turk) is the inconstant moon.

Baldanders is a successive monster, a monster in time. The title page of the first edition of Grimmelshausen’s novel takes up the joke. It bears an engraving of a creature having a satyr’s head, a human torso, the unfolded wings of a bird, and the tail of a fish, and which, with a goat’s leg and vulture’s claws, tramples on a heap of masks that stand for the succession of shapes he has taken. In his belt he carries a sword and in his hands an open book showing pictures of a crown, a sailing boat, a goblet, a tower, a child, a pair of dice, a fool’s cap with bells, and a piece of ordnance.

The Banshee

Nobody seems to have laid eyes on this ’woman of the fairies’. She is less a shape than a mournful screaming that haunts the Irish night and (according to Sir Walter Scott’s Demonology and Witchcraft) the Scottish highlands. Beneath the windows of the visited house, she foretells the death of one of the family. She is held to be a token of pure Celtic blood, with no mixture of Latin, Saxon, or Danish. The Banshee has also been heard in Wales and in Brittany. Her wail is called keening.

The Barometz

The vegetable Lamb of Tartary, also named Barometz and Lycopodium barometz and Chinese lycopodium, is a plant whose shape is that of a lamb bearing a golden fleece. It stands on four or five root stalks. Sir Thomas Browne gives this description of it in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646):

Much wonder is made of the Boramez, that strange plant-animal or vegetable Lamb of Tartary, which Wolves delight to feed on, which hath the shape of a Lamb, affordeth a bloody juyce upon breaking, and liveth while the plants be consumed about it.

Other monsters are made up by combining various kinds of animals; the Barometz is a union of animal and vegetable kingdoms.

This brings to mind the mandrake, which cries out like a man when it is ripped from the earth; and in one of the circles of the Inferno, the sad forest of the suicides, from whose torn limbs blood and words drip at the same time; and that tree dreamed by Chesterton, which devoured the birds nesting in its branches, and when spring came put out feathers instead of leaves.

The Basilisk

Down through the ages, the Basilisk (also known as the Cockatrice) grows increasingly ugly and horrendous until today it is forgotten. Its name comes from the Greek and means ‘little king’; to the Elder Pliny (VIII, 333), it was a serpent bearing a bright spot in the shape of a crown on its head. Dating from the Middle Ages, it becomes a four-legged cock with a crown, yellow feathers, wide thorny wings, and a serpent’s tail ending either in a hook or in another cock’s head. The change in its image is reflected in a change in its name; Chaucer in The Persone’s Tale speaks of the ‘basilicok’ (‘the basilicok sleeth folk by the venim of his sighte’). One of the plates illustrating Aldrovandi’s Natural History of Serpents and Dragons gives the Basilisk scales instead of feathers, and the use of eight legs. (According to the Younger Edda, Odin’s horse Sleipnir also had eight legs.)

What remains constant about the Basilisk is the deadly effect of its stare and its venom. The Gorgons’ eyes turned living beings into stone; Lucan tells us that from the blood of one of them all the serpents of Libya sprang the asp, the amphisbaena, the ammodyte, and the Basilisk. We give the following passages, in a literal translation, from Book IX of Pharsalia:

In this body [Medusa’s] first did noxious nature produce deadly plagues; from those jaws snakes poured forth whizzing hisses with vibrating tongues, which, after the manner of a woman’s hair flowing along the back, flapped about the very neck of the delighted Medusa. Upon her forehead turned towards you erect did serpents rise, and viper’s venom flowed from her combed locks.

What avails a Basilisk being pierced by the spear of the wretched Murrus? Swift flies the poison along the weapon, and fastens upon the hand; which, instantly, with sword unsheathed, he smites, and at the same moment severs it entirely from the arm; and, looking upon the dreadful warning of a death his own, he stands in safety, his hand perishing.

The Basilisk dwelled in the desert; or, more accurately, it made the desert. Birds fell dead at its feet and the earth’s fruits blackened and rotted; the water of the streams where it quenched its thirst remained poisoned for centuries. That its mere glance split rocks and burned grass has been attested by Pliny. Of all animals, the weasel alone was unaffected by the monster and could be counted on to attack it on sight; it was also believed that the crowing of a rooster sent the Basilisk scurrying. The seasoned traveler was careful to provide himself with either a caged rooster or a weasel before venturing into unknown territory. Another weapon was the mirror, its own image would strike the Basilisk dead.

Isidore of Seville and the compilers of the Speculum Triplex (Threefold Mirror) rejected Lucan’s fables and sought a rational explanation for the Basilisk’s origin. (They could not deny its existence, since the Vulgate translates the Hebrew word Tsepha, the name of a poisonous reptile, as ‘cockatrice’.) The theory that gained most favour was that of a misshapen egg laid by a cock and hatched by a snake or a toad. In the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas Browne found this explanation as farfetched as the monster itself. At much the same time, Quevedo wrote his romance ’The Basilisk’, in which we read:

Si está vivo quien te vio, Toda su historia es mentira, Pues si no murió, te ignora, Y si murió no lo afirma.

[If the man who saw you is still alive, your whole story is a lie, since if he has not died he cannot have seen you, and if he has died, he cannot tell what he saw.]

Behemoth

Four centuries before the Christian era, Behemoth was a magnification of the elephant or of the hippopotamus, or a mistaken and alarmist version of these animals; it is now precisely the ten famous verses describing it in Job (XL: 15-24) and the huge being which these lines evoke. The rest is wrangling and philology.

The word ‘Behemoth’ is plural; scholars tell us it is the intensive plural form of the Hebrew b’hemah, which means ‘beast’. As Fray Luis de León wrote in his Exposición del Libro de Job: ‘Behemoth is a Hebrew word that stands for “beasts”; according to the received judgement of learned men, it means the elephant, so called because of its inordinate size; and being but a single animal it counts for many.’

We are also reminded of the fact that in the first verse of Genesis in the original text, the Hebrew name for God, Elohím, is plural, though the form of the verb it takes is singular. Bereshit bará Elohím et hashamáim veet haáretz. Trinitarians, by the way, have used this incongruity as an argument for the concept of the godhead being Three-in-One.

We give the ten verses in the translation from the Latin Vulgate by Father Knox (XL: 10-19):

Here is Behemoth, my creature as thou art, fed on the same grass the oxen eat; yet what strength in his loins, what lustihood in the navel of his belly! Stiff as cedarwood his tail, close-knit the sinews of his groin, bones like pipes of bronze, gristle like plates of steel! None of God’s works can vie with him, no weapon so strong in the hands of its maker; whole mountainsides, the playground of his fellow beasts, he will lay under tribute, as he lies there under the close covert of the marsh-reeds, thick boughs for his shadow, among the willows by the stream. The flooded river he drinks unconcerned; Jordan itself would have no terrors for that gaping mouth. Like a lure it would charm his eye, though it should pierce his nostrils with sharp stakes.

The Brownies

Brownies are helpful little men of a brownish hue, which gives them their name. It is their habit to visit Scottish farms and, while the household sleeps, to perform domestic chores. One of the tales by the Grimms deals with the same subject.

The famous writer Robert Louis Stevenson said he had trained his Brownies in the craft of literature. Brownies visited him in his dreams and told him wondrous tales; for instance, the strange transformation of Dr Jekyll into the diabolical Mr. Hyde, and that episode of Olalla, in which the scion of an old Spanish family bites his sister’s hand.

Burak

In George Sale’s translation (1734), the opening verse of Chapter XVII of the Koran consists of these words: ‘Praise be unto him, who transported his servant by night, from the sacred temple of Mecca to his farther temple of Jerusalem, the circuit of which we have blessed, that we might show him some of our signs . . .’ Commentators say that the one praised is God, that his servant is Mohammed, that the sacred temple is that of Mecca, that the distant temple is that of Jerusalem, and that from Jerusalem the Prophet was transported to the seventh heaven. In the oldest versions of the legend, Mohammed is guided by a man or an angel; in those of a later date he is furnished with a heavenly steed, larger than an ass and smaller than a mule. This steed is Burak, whose name means ‘shining’. According to Richard Burton, translator of The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, Moslems in India usually picture Burak with a man’s face, the ears of an ass, a horse’s body, and the wings and tail of a peacock.

One of the Islamic legends tells that Burak, on leaving the ground, tipped a jar of water. The Prophet was taken up to the seventh heaven, along the way speaking in each of the heavens with the patriarchs and angels living there, and he crossed the Unity and felt a coldness that chilled his heart when the Lord laid a hand on his shoulder. Man’s time is not commensurate with God’s time; on his return the Prophet raised the jar, out of which not a single drop had yet been spilled.

Miguel Asm Palacios, the twentieth-century Spanish Orientalist, speaks of a mystic from Murcia of the 1200s who, in an allegory entitled the Book of the Night Journey to the Majesty of the All-Generous, has seen in Burak, a symbol of divine love. In another text he speaks of the ‘Burak of the pureness of heart’.

The Carbuncle

In mineralogy the carbuncle, from the Latin carbunculus, ‘a little coal’, is a ruby; as to the carbuncle of the ancients, it is supposed to have been a garnet.

In sixteenth-century South America, the name was given by the Spanish conquistadors to a mysterious animal mysterious because nobody ever saw it well enough to know whether it was a bird or a mammal, whether it had feathers or fur. The poet-priest Martín del Barco Centenera, who claims to have seen it in Paraguay, describes it in his Argentina (1602) only as ‘a smallish animal, with a shining mirror on its head, like a glowing coal . . .’ Another conquistador, Gonzalo Fernández del Oviedo, associates this mirror or light shining out of the darkness two of which he glimpsed in the Strait of Magellan with the precious stone that dragons were thought to have hidden in their brain. He took his knowledge from Isidore of Seville, who wrote in his Etymologies:

it is taken from the dragon’s brain but does not harden into a gem unless the head is cut from the living beast; wizards, for this reason, cut the heads from sleeping dragons. Men bold enough to venture into dragon lairs scatter grain that has been doctored to make these beasts drowsy, and when they have fallen asleep their heads are struck off and the gems plucked out.

Here we are reminded of Shakespeare’s toad (As You Like It, II, i), which, though ‘ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head . . .’

Possession of the Carbuncle’s jewel offered fortune and luck. Barco Centenera underwent many hardships hunting the reaches of Paraguayan rivers and jungles for the elusive creature; he never found it. Down to this day we know nothing more about the beast and its secret head stone.

The Catoblepas

Pliny (VIII, 32), relates that somewhere on the borders of Ethiopia, near the head of the Nile, there is found a wild beast called the catoblepas; an animal of moderate size, and in other respects sluggish in the movement of the rest of its limbs; its head is remarkably heavy, and it only carries it with the greatest difficulty, being always bent down towards the earth. Were it not for this circumstance, it would prove the destruction of the human race; for all who behold its eyes, fall dead upon the spot.

Catoblepas, in Greek, means ‘that which looks downward’. The French naturalist Cuvier has conjectured that the gnu (contaminated by the basilisk and the gorgon) suggested the Catoblepas to the ancients. At the close of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Flaubert describes it and has it speak in this way:

black buffalo with the head of a hog, hanging close to the ground, joined to its body by a thin neck, long and loose as an emptied intestine. It wallows in the mud, and its legs are smothered under the huge mane of stiff bristles that hide its face.

‘Obese, downhearted, wary, I do nothing but feel under my belly the warm mud. My head is so heavy that I cannot bear its weight. I wind it slowly around my body; with half-open jaws, I pull up with my tongue poisonous plants dampened by my breath. Once, I ate up my forelegs unawares.

‘No one, Anthony, has ever seen my eyes; or else, those who have seen them have died. If I were to lift my eyelids my pink and swollen eyelids you would die on the spot.’

The Celestial Stag

We know absolutely nothing about the appearance of the Celestial Stag (maybe because nobody has ever had a good look at one), but we do know that these tragic animals live underground in mines and desire nothing more than to reach the light of day. They have the power of speech and implore the miners to help them to the surface. At first, a Celestial Stag attempts to bribe the workmen with the promise of revealing hidden veins of silver and gold; when this gambit fails, the beast becomes troublesome and the miners are forced to overpower it and wall it up in one of the mine galleries. It is also rumoured that miners outnumbered by the Stags have been tortured to death.

Legend has it that if the Celestial Stag finds its way into the open air, it becomes a foul-smelling liquid that can breed death and pestilence. The tale is from China and is recorded by G. Willoughby-Meade in his book Chinese Ghouls and Goblins.

The Centaur

The Centaur is the most harmonious creature of fantastic zoology. ‘Biform’ it is called in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but its heterogeneous character is easily overlooked, and we tend to think that in the Platonic world of ideas there is an archetype of the Centaur as there is of the horse or the man. The discovery of this archetype took centuries; early archaic monuments show a naked man to whose waist the body and hind quarters of a horse are uncomfortably fixed. On the west façade of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, the Centaurs already stand on the legs of a horse, and from the place where the animal’s neck should start we find a human torso.

Centaurs were the offspring of Ixion, a king of Thessaly, and a cloud which Zeus had given the shape of Hera (or Juno); another version of the legend asserts that they were the offspring of Centaurus, Apollo’s son, and Stilbia; a third, that they were the fruit of a union of Centaurus with the mares of Magnesium. (It is said that centaur is derived from gandharva; in Vedic myth, the Gandharvas are minor gods who drive the horses of the sun.) Since the art of riding was unknown to the Greeks of Homeric times, it has been conjectured that the first Scythian horseman they came across seemed to them all one with his horse, and it has also been alleged that the cavalry of the conquistadors were Centaurs to the Indians. A text quoted by Prescott runs as follows:

One of the riders fell off his horse; and the Indians, seeing the animal fall asunder, up to now having deemed the beast all one, were so filled with terror that they turned and fled, crying out to their comrades that the animal had made itself into two and wondering at this: wherein we may detect the secret hand of God; since, had this not happened, they might have slaughtered all the Christians.

But the Greeks, unlike the Indians, were familiar with the horse; it is more likely that the Centaur was a deliberate invention and not a confusion born of ignorance.

The best known of the Centaur fables is the one in which they battle with the Lapiths followed a quarrel at a marriage celebration. To the Centaurs wine was now a new experience; in the midst of the banqueting an intoxicated Centaur insulted the bride and, overturning the tables, started the famous Centauromachy that Phidias, or a disciple of his, would carve on the Parthenon, that Ovid would commemorate in Book XII of the Metamorphoses, and that would inspire Rubens. Defeated by the Lapiths, the Centaurs were forced to leave Thessaly. Hercules, in a second encounter with them, all but annihilated the race of Centaurs with his arrows.

Anger and rustic barbarism are symbolized in the Centaur, but Chiron, ‘the most righteous of the Centaurs’ (Iliad, XI, 832), was the teacher of Achilles and Aesculapius, whom he instructed in the arts of music, hunting, and war, as well as medicine and surgery. Chiron stands out in Canto XII of the Inferno, generally known as the ‘Canto of the Centaurs’. The acute observations of Momigliano in his 1945 edition of the Commedia should interest the curious.

Pliny (VII, 3) says he saw a Hippocentaur embalmed in honey that had been brought to Rome from Egypt in the reign of Claudius.

In the ‘Feast of the Seven Sages’, Plutarch humorously tells that one of the shepherds of Periander, a tyrant of Corinth, brought his master, in a leather pouch, a newborn creature that a mare had given birth to and whose face, neck, and arms were human while its body was that of a horse. It cried like a baby, and everyone thought it to be a frightening omen. The sage Thales examined it, chuckled, and said to Periander that really he could not approve his herdsmen’s conduct.

In Book V of his poem De rerum natura, Lucretius declares the Centaur impossible since the equine species reaches maturity before the human, and at the age of three the Centaur would be a full-grown horse and a babbling child. The horse would die fifty years before the man.

Cerberus

If Hell is a house, the house of Hades, it is natural that it have its watchdog; it is also natural that this dog be fearful. Hesiod’s Theogony gives it fifty heads; to make things easier for the plastic arts, this number has been reduced and Cerberus’ three heads are now a matter of public record. Virgil speaks of its three throats; Ovid of its threefold bark; Butler compares the triple-crowned tiara of the Pope, who is Heaven’s doorman, with the three heads of the dog who is the doorman of Hell (Hudibras, IV, 2). Dante lends it human characteristics which increase its infernal nature: a filthy black beard, clawed hands that in the lashing rain rip at the souls of the damned. It bites, barks, and bares its teeth.

Bringing Cerberus up into the light of day was the last of Hercules’ tasks. (‘He drow out Cerberus, the hound of helle,’ writes Chaucer in ‘The Monke’s Tale’.) Zachary Grey, an English writer of the eighteenth century, in his commentary on Hudibras interprets the adventure in this way:

This Dog with three Heads denotes the past, the present, and the Time to come; which receive, and, as it were, devour all things. Hercules got the better of him, which shews that heroick Actions are always victorious over Time, because they are present in the Memory of Posterity.

According to the oldest texts, Cerberus greets with his tail (which is a serpent) those entering into Hell, and tears to pieces those who try to get out. A later legend has him biting the newly arrived; to appease him a honeycake was placed in the coffin of the departed.

In Norse mythology, a blood-spattered dog, Garmr, keeps watch over the house of the dead and will fight against the gods when hell’s wolves devour the moon and sun. Some give this dog four eyes; the dogs of Yama, the Brahman god of death, also have four eyes.

Both Brahmanism and Buddhism offer hells full of dogs, which, like Dante’s Cerberus, are torturers of souls.

The Cheshire Cat and the Kilkenny Cats

Everyone is familiar with the phrases ‘grin like a Cheshire cat’, which means of course to put on a sardonic face. Many explanations of its origin have been attempted. One is that in Cheshire cheeses were sold in the shape of the grinning head of a cat. Another, that Cheshire is a Palatine county or earldom and that this mark of nobility provoked the hilarity of its cats. Still another is that in the time of Richard III there was a gamewarden named Caterling who used to break into an angry smile whenever he crossed swords with poachers.

In Alice in Wonderland, published in 1865, Lewis Carroll endowed the Cheshire Cat with the faculty of slowly disappearing to the point of leaving only its grin without teeth and without a mouth. Of the Kilkenny Cats it is told that they got into raging quarrels and devoured each other, leaving behind no more than their tails. This story goes back to the eighteenth century.

The Chimera

The first mention we have of the Chimera is in Book VI of the Iliad. There Homer writes that it came of divine stock and was a lion in its foreparts, a goat in the middle, and a serpent in its hindparts, and that from its mouth it vomited flames, and finally was killed by the handsome Bellerophon, the son of Glaucus, following the signs of the gods. A lion’s head, goat’s belly, and serpent’s tail is the most obvious image conveyed by Homer’s words, but Hesiod’s Theogony describes the Chimera as having three heads, and this is the way it is depicted in the famous Arezzo bronze that dates from the fifth century. Springing from the middle of the animal’s back is the head of a goat, while at one end it has a snake’s head and at the other a lion’s.

The Chimera reappears in the sixth book of the Aeneid, ‘armed with flame’; Virgil’s commentator Servius Honoratus observed that, according to all authorities, the monster was native to Lycia, where there was a volcano bearing its name. The base of this mountain was infested with serpents, higher up on its flanks were meadows and goats, and towards its desolate top, which belched out flames, a pride of lions had its resort. The Chimera would seem to be a metaphor of this strange elevation. Earlier, Plutarch suggested that Chimera was the name of a pirate captain who adorned his ships with the images of a lion, a goat, and a snake.

These absurd hypotheses are proof that the Chimera was beginning to bore people. Easier than imagining it was to translate it into something else. As a beast it was too heterogeneous; the lion, goat, and snake (in some texts, dragon) do not readily make up a single animal. With time the Chimera tended to become ‘chimerical’; a celebrated joke of Rabelais (‘Can a chimera, swinging in the void, swallow second intentions?’) clearly marks the transition. The patchwork image disappeared but the word remained, signifying the impossible. A vain or foolish fancy is the definition of Chimera that we now find in dictionaries.

The Chinese Dragon

Chinese cosmogony teaches that the Ten Thousand Beings or Archetypes (the world) are born of the rhythmic conjunction of the two complementary eternal principles, the yin and the yang. Corresponding to the yin are concentration, darkness, passivity, even numbers, and cold; to the yang, growth, light, activity, odd numbers, and heat. Symbols of the yin are women, the earth, the colour orange, valleys, riverbeds, and the tiger; of the yang, men, the sky, blue, mountains, pillars, the dragon.

The Chinese Dragon, the lung, is one of the four magic animals. (The others are the unicorn, the phoenix, and the tortoise.) At best, the Western Dragon spreads terror; at worst, it is a figure of fun. The lung of Chinese myth, however, is divine and is like an angel that is also a lion. We read in the Historical Record of Ssu-ma Ch’ien that Confucius went to consult the archivist or librarian Lao-tzu, and after his visit said:

Birds fly, fish swim, animals run. The running animal can be caught in a trap, the swimmer in a net, and the flyer by an arrow. But there is the Dragon; I don’t know how it rides on the wind or how it reaches the heavens. Today I met Lao-tzu and I can say that I have seen the Dragon.

It was a Dragon, or a Dragon Horse, which emerged from the Yellow River to reveal to an emperor the famous circular diagram symbolizing the reciprocal play of the yang and yin. A certain king had in his stables saddle Dragons and draft Dragons; one emperor fed on Dragons, and his kingdom prospered. A famous poet, to illustrate the risks of greatness, wrote: ‘The unicorn ends up coldcuts; the dragon as meat pie.’ In the I Ching or Book of Changes, the Dragon signifies wisdom. For centuries it was the imperial emblem. The emperor’s throne was called the Dragon Throne, his face the Dragon Face. On announcing an emperor’s death, it was said that he had ascended to heaven on the back of a Dragon.

Popular imagination links the Dragon to clouds, to the rainfall needed by farmers, and to great rivers. The earth couples with the dragon’ is a common phrase for rain. About the sixth century, Chang Seng-yu executed a wall painting that depicted four Dragons. Viewers complained that he had left out their eyes. Annoyed, Chang picked up his brushes again and completed two of the twisted figures. Then ‘the air was filled with thunder and lightning, the wall cracked and the Dragons ascended to heaven. But the other two eyeless Dragons remained in place’.

The Chinese Dragon has horns, claws, and scales, and its backbone prickles with spines. It is commonly pictured with a pearl, which it swallows or spits up. In this pearl lies its power; the Dragon is tamed if the pearl is taken from it.

Chuang Tzu tells us of a determined man who at the end of three thankless years mastered the art of slaying Dragons, and for the rest of his days was not given a single chance to put his art into practice.

The Chinese Fox

In everyday zoology the Chinese Fox differs little from other Foxes, but not so in fantastic zoology. Statistics give it a lifespan that varies between eight hundred and a thousand years. The animal is considered a bad omen, and each part of its anatomy enjoys some special power. It has only to strike the ground with its tail to start a fire; it can see into the future; and it can change into many forms, preferably into old men, young ladies, and scholars. It is astute, wary, and sceptical; its pleasures lie in playing pranks and in causing torment. Men, when they die, may transmigrate with the body of a Fox. Its dwelling is close by graves. There are thousands of stories and legends concerning it; we transcribe one, a tale by the ninth-century poet Niu Chiao, which is not without its humorous side:

Wang saw two Foxes standing on their hind legs and leaning against a tree. One of them held a sheet of paper in its hand, and they laughed together as though they were sharing a joke. Wang tried to frighten them off but they stood their ground, and finally he shot at the one holding the page. The Fox was hit in the eye and Wang took away the piece of paper. At the inn Wang told the story to the other guests. While he spoke a gentleman having a bandaged eye came in. He listened to Wang’s story with interest and asked if he might not be shown the paper. Wang was just about to produce it when the innkeeper noticed that the newcomer had a tail. ‘He’s a Fox!’ he shouted, and on the spot the gentleman turned into a Fox and fled. The Foxes tried time after time to recover the paper, which was filled with indecipherable writing, but were repeatedly set back. Wang decided at last to return home. On the road he met his whole family, who were on their way to the capital. They said that he had ordered them to undertake the journey, and his mother showed him the letter in which he asked them to sell off all their property and join him in the city. Wang, studying the letter, saw that the page was blank. Although they no longer had a roof over their heads, he ordered, ‘Let’s go back.’

One day a younger brother appeared whom everyone had given up for dead. He asked about the family’s misfortunes and Wang told him the whole story. ‘Ah,’ said the brother when Wang came to the part about the Foxes, ‘there lies the root of all the evil.’ Wang showed him the page in question. Tearing it from Wang’s hand, the brother stuffed the sheet into his pocket and said, ‘At last I have back what I wanted.’ Then, changing himself into a Fox, he made his escape.

The Chinese Phoenix

The sacred books of the Chinese may be disappointing for the reason that they lack the pathetic element to which we have been accustomed by the Bible. But occasionally, all at once in their even-tempered discourse, we are moved by some intimacy. This one, for instance, recorded in Book VII of the Confucian Analects (Waley translation):

The Master said, How utterly have things gone to the bad with me! It is long now indeed since I dreamed that I saw the Duke of Chou.

Or this one from Book IX:

The Master said, The phoenix does not come; the river gives forth no chart. It is all over with me!

The chart, or sign (explain the commentaries), refers to an inscription on the back of a magical tortoise. As for the Phoenix, it is a bird of brilliant colours, not unlike the pheasant and peacock. In prehistoric times it visited the gardens and palaces of virtuous emperors as a visible token of celestial favour. The male (Feng), which had three legs, lived in the sun. The female is the Huang; together they are the emblem of everlasting love.

In the first century a.d., the daring unbeliever Wang
Ch’ung denied that the Phoenix constituted a determined species. He said that just as the serpent turns into a fish and the rat into a tortoise, the stag in times of widespread prosperity takes the form of the unicorn, and the goose that of the Phoenix. He explained these mutations by the ‘well-known liquid’ which, some 2,356 years b.c., in the courtyard of Yao who was one of the model emperors had made the grass grow scarlet. As may be seen, his information was deficient, or rather, excessive. In the Infernal Regions there is an imaginary structure known as the Tower of the Phoenix.

Chronos or Hercules

The treatise Difficulties and Solutions of First Principles by the Neoplatonist Damascus (born about a.d.
480) records a strange version of the theogony and cosmogony of Orphism, in which Chronos or Hercules is a monster:

According to Hieronymus and Hellanicus (if the two are not one), Orphic doctrine teaches that in the beginning there was water and mud, with which the earth was shaped. These two principles were taught to be the first: water and earth. From them came the third, a winged dragon, which in its foreparts had the head of a bull, in its hindparts the head of a lion, and in its middle the face of a god; this dragon was named the Unageing Chronos and also Heracles. With him Necessity, also known as the Inevitable, was born and spread to the boundaries of the Universe . . . Chronos, the dragon, drew from himself a threefold seed: moist Ether, limitless Chaos, and misty Erebus. Under them he laid an egg, from which the world was to hatch. The last principle was a god who was man and woman, with golden wings on its back, and bulls’ heads on its sides, and on its head a huge dragon, like all manner of beasts . . .

Perhaps because what is excessively monstrous seems less fitting to Greece than to the East, Walter Kranz attributes an Oriental origin to these fancies.

A Creature Imagined by C. S. Lewis

Slowly, shakily, with unnatural and inhuman movements a human form, scarlet in the firelight, crawled out on to the floor of the cave. It was the Un-man, of course: dragging its broken leg and with its lower jaw sagging open like that of a corpse, it raised itself to a standing position. And then, close behind it, something else came up out of the hole. First came what looked like branches of trees, and then seven or eight spots of light, irregularly grouped like a constellation. Then a tubular mass which reflected the red glow as if it were polished. His heart gave a great leap as the branches suddenly resolved themselves into long wiry feelers and the dotted lights became the many eyes of a shell-helmeted head and the mass that followed it was revealed as a large roughly cylindrical body.

Horrible things followed angular, many jointed legs, and presently, when he thought the whole body was in sight, a second body came following it and after that a third. The thing was in three parts, united only by a kind of wasp’s waist structure three parts that did not seem to be truly aligned and made it look as if it had been trodden on a huge, many legged, quivering deformity, standing just behind the Un-man so that the horrible shadows of both danced in enormous and united menace on the wall of rock behind them.

C. S. Lewis:
Perelandra

The Crocotta and the Leucrocotta

Ctesias, physician to Artaxerxes Mnemon in the fourth century b.c., made use of Persian sources to compile a description of India, a work of incalculable value if we are curious as to how Persians under Artaxerxes Mnemon imagined India. In Chapter 32, he gives an account of the cynolycus, or dog-wolf, from which Pliny seems to have evolved his Crocotta. Pliny writes (VIII, 30) that the Crocotta is ‘an animal which looks as though it had been produced by the coupling of the wolf and the dog, for it can break anything with its teeth, and instantly on swallowing it digest it with the stomach He goes on to describe another Indian animal, the Leucrocotta, as follows:

a wild beast of great swiftness, the size of the wild ass, with the legs of a stag, the neck, tail, and breast of a lion, the head of a badger, a cloven hoof, the mouth slit up as far as the ears, and one continuous bone instead of teeth; it is said, too, that this animal can imitate the human voice.

Later authorities seem to feel that Pliny’s Leucrocotta is a cumbersome blend of the Indian antelope and the hyena. All of these animals Pliny has fit into an Ethiopian landscape, where he also lodges a wild bull with convenient movable horns, a hide as hard as flint, and hair turned contrariwise.

A Crossbreed

I have a curious animal, half-cat, half-lamb. It is a legacy from my father. But it only developed in my time; formerly it was far more lamb than cat. Now it is both in about equal parts. From the cat it takes its head and claws, from the lamb its size and shape; from both its eyes, which are wild and changing, its hair, which is soft, lying close to its body, its movements, which partake both of skipping and slinking. Lying on the window-sill in the sun it curls itself up in a ball and purrs; out in the meadow it rushes about as if mad and is scarcely to be caught. It flies from cats and makes to attack lambs. On moonlight nights its favourite promenade is the tiles. It cannot mew and it loathes rats. Beside the hen-coop it can lie for hours in ambush, but it has never yet seized an opportunity for murder.

I feed it on milk; that seems to suit it best. In long draughts it sucks the milk into it through its teeth of a beast of prey. Naturally it is a great source of entertainment for children. Sunday morning is the visiting hour. I sit with the little beast on my knees, and the children of the whole neighbourhood stand round me.

Then the strangest questions are asked, which no human being could answer: Why there is only one such animal, why I rather than anybody else should own it, whether there was ever an animal like it before and what would happen if it died, whether it feels lonely, why it has no children, what it is called, etc.

I never trouble to answer, but confine myself without further explanation to exhibiting my possession. Sometimes the children bring cats with them; once they actually brought two lambs. But against all their hopes there was no scene of recognition. The animals gazed calmly at each other with their animal eyes, and obviously accepted their reciprocal existence as a divine fact.

Sitting on my knees the beast knows neither fear nor lust of pursuit. Pressed against me it is happiest. It remains faithful to the family that brought it up. In that there is certainly no extraordinary mark of fidelity, but merely the true instinct of an animal which, though it has countless step-relations in the world, has perhaps not a single blood relation, and to which consequently the protection it has found with us is sacred. Sometimes I cannot help laughing when it sniffs round me and winds itself between my legs and simply will not be parted from me. Not content with being lamb and cat, it almost insists on being a dog as well. Once when, as may happen to any one, I could see no way out of my business difficulties and all that depends on such things, and had resolved to let everything go, and in this mood was lying in my rocking-chair in my room, the beast on my knees, I happened to glance down and saw tears dropping from its huge whiskers. Were they mine, or were they the animal’s? Had this cat, along with the soul of a lamb, the ambitions of a human being? I did not inherit much from my father, but this legacy is worth looking at.

It has the restlessness of both beasts, that of the cat and that of the lamb, diverse as they are. For that reason its skin feels too narrow for it. Sometimes it jumps up on the armchair beside me, plants its front legs on my shoulder, and puts its muzzle to my ear. It is as if it were saying something to me, and as a matter of fact it turns its head afterwards and gazes in my face to see the impression its communication has made. And to oblige it I behave as if I had understood and nod. Then it jumps to the floor and dances about with joy.

Perhaps the knife of the butcher would be a release for this animal; but as it is a legacy I must deny it that. So it must wait until the breath voluntarily leaves its body, even though it sometimes gazes at me with a look of human understanding, challenging me to do the thing of which both of us are thinking.

Franz
Kafka:
Description of a Struggle
(Translated from the German by Tania and James Stern)

The Double

Suggested or stimulated by reflections in mirrors and in water and by twins, the idea of the Double is common to many countries. It is likely that sentences such as A friend is another self by Pythagoras or the Platonic Know thyself were inspired by it. In Germany this Double is called Doppelgänger, which means ’double walker’. In Scotland there is the fetch, which comes to fetch a man to bring him to his death; there is also the Scottish word wraith for an apparition thought to be seen by a person in his exact image just before death. To meet oneself is, therefore, ominous. The tragic ballad ‘Ticonderoga’ by Robert Louis Stevenson tells of a legend on this theme. There is also the strange picture by Rossetti (‘How They Met Themselves’) in which two lovers come upon themselves in the dusky gloom of a wood. We may also cite examples from Hawthorne (‘Howe’s Masquerade’), Dostoyevsky, Alfred de Musset, James (‘The Jolly Corner’), Kleist, Chesterton (‘The Mirror of Madmen’), and Hearn (Some Chinese Ghosts).

The ancient Egyptians believed that the Double, the ka, was a man’s exact counterpart, having his same walk and his same dress. Not only men, but gods and beasts, stones and trees, chairs and knives had their ka, which was invisible except to certain priests who could see the Doubles of the gods and were granted by them a knowledge of things past and things to come.

To the Jews the appearance of one’s Double was not an omen of imminent death. On the contrary, it was proof of having attained prophetic powers. This is how it is explained by Gershom Scholem. A legend recorded in the Talmud tells the story of a man who, in search of God, met himself.

In the story ‘William Wilson’ by Poe, the Double is the hero’s conscience. He kills it and dies. In a similar way, Dorian Gray in Wilde’s novel stabs his portrait and meets his death. In Yeats’s poems the Double is our other side, our opposite, the one who complements us, the one we are not nor will ever become.

Plutarch writes that the Greeks gave the name other self to a king’s ambassador.

The Eastern Dragon

The Dragon has the ability to assume many shapes, but these are inscrutable. Generally, it is imagined with a head something like a horse’s, with a snake’s tail, with wings on its sides (if at all), and with four claws, each furnished with four curved nails. We read also of its nine resemblances: its horns are not unlike those of a stag, its head that of a camel, its eyes those of a devil, its neck that of a snake, its belly that of a clam, its scales those of a fish, its talons those of an eagle, its footprints those of a tiger, and its ears those of an ox. There are specimens of the Dragon that lack ears and hear with their horns. It is customary to picture them with a pearl, which dangles from their necks and is a symbol of the sun. Within this pearl lies the Dragon’s power. The beast is rendered helpless if its pearl is stolen from it.

History traces the earliest emperors back to Dragons. Their teeth, bones, and saliva all possess medicinal qualities. According to its will, the Dragon can become visible or invisible. In springtime it ascends into the skies; in the fall it dives down into the depths of the seas. Some Dragons lack wings yet fly under their own impetus. Science distinguishes several kinds. The Celestial Dragon carries on its back the palaces of the gods that otherwise might fall to earth, destroying the cities of men; the Divine Dragon makes the winds and rains for the benefit of mankind; the Terrestrial Dragon determines the course of streams and rivers; the Subterranean Dragon stands watch over treasures forbidden to men. The Buddhists affirm that Dragons are no fewer in number than the fishes of their many concentric seas; somewhere in the universe a sacred cipher exists to express their exact number. The Chinese believe in Dragons more than in any other deities because Dragons are frequently seen in the changing formations of clouds. Similarly, Shakespeare has observed, ‘Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish.’

The Dragon rules over mountains, is linked to geomancy, dwells near tombs, is connected with the cult of Confucius is the Neptune of the seas and appears also on terra firma.

The Sea-Dragon Kings live in resplendent underwater palaces and feed on opals and pearls. Of these Kings there are five: the chief is in the middle, the other four correspond to the cardinal points. Each stretches some three or four miles in length; on changing position, they cause mountains to tumble. They are sheathed in an armour of yellow scales, and their muzzles are whiskered. Their legs and tail are shaggy, their forehead juts over their flaming eyes, their ears are small and thick, their mouths gape open, their tongues are long, and teeth sharp. Their breath boils up and roasts whole shoals of fishes. When these Sea Dragons rise to the ocean surface, they cause whirlpools and typhoons; when they take to the air they blow up storms that rip the roofs off the houses of entire cities and flood the countryside. The Dragon Kings are immortal and can communicate among themselves, without recourse to words, in spite of any distance that separates them. It is during the third month that they make their annual report to the upper heavens.

The Eater of the Dead

There is a strange literary genre which, spontaneously, has sprung up in various lands and at various times. This is the manual for the guidance of the dead through the Other World. Heaven and Hell by Swedenborg, the writings of the Gnostics, the Tibetan Bardo Thödol (which, according to Evans-Wentz, should be translated as ‘Liberation by Hearing on the After-Death Plane’), and the Egyptian Book of the Dead do not exhaust the possible examples. The similarities and differences of the latter two books have attracted the attention of esoteric scholarship; for us, let it be enough to recall that in the Tibetan manual the Other World is as illusory as this one, while to the Egyptians it has a real and objective existence.

In both texts there is a Judgment Scene before a jury of deities, some with the heads of apes; in both, a symbolical weighing of evil and good deeds. In the Book of the Dead, a heart and a feather are weighed against each other, ‘the heart representing the conduct or conscience of the deceased and the feather righteousness or truth’. In the Bardo Thödol, white pebbles and black pebbles are placed on either side of the balance. The Tibetans have demons or devils who lead the condemned to the place of purgation in a hell-world; the Egyptians have a grim monster attending their wicked, an Eater of the Dead.

The dead man swears not to have caused hunger or sorrow, not to have killed or to have made others kill for him, not to have stolen the food set aside for the dead, not to have used false weights, not to have taken the milk from a baby’s mouth, not to have driven livestock from their pasturage, not to have netted the birds of the gods.

If he lies, the forty-two judges deliver him to the Eater, ‘who has the head of a crocodile, the trunk of a lion, and the hinder parts of a hippopotamus’. The Eater is assisted by another animal Babaí, of whom we know only that he is frightening and that Plutarch identifies him with the Titan who fathered the Chimera.

The Eight-Forked Serpent

The Eight-Forked Serpent of Koshi is prominent in the mythical cosmogony of Japan. It was eight-headed and eight-tailed; its eyes were red as the winter cherry, and pine trees and mosses grew on its back, while firs sprouted on each of its heads. As it crawled, it stretched over eight valleys and eight hills, and its belly was always flecked with blood. In seven years this beast had devoured seven maidens, the daughters of a king, and in the eighth year was about to eat up the youngest daughter, named Princess Comb-Ricefield. The Princess was saved by a god who bore the name of Brave-Swift-Impetuous-Male. This knight built a circular enclosure of wood with eight gates and eight platforms at each gate. On the platforms he set tubs of rice beer. The Eight-Forked Serpent came and, dipping a head into each of the tubs, gulped down the beer and was soon fast asleep. Then Brave-Swift-Impetuous-Male lopped the heads. A river of blood sprang from the necks. In the Serpent’s tail a sword was found that to this day commands veneration in the Great Shrine of Atsuta. These events took place on the mountain formerly named Serpent-Mountain and now called Eight-Cloud Mountain. The number eight in Japan is a magic number and stands for many, just as forty (‘When forty winters shall besiege thy brow’) did in Elizabethan England. Japanese paper currency still commemorates the killing of the Serpent. It is superfluous to point out that the redeemer married the redeemed, as in Hellenic myth Perseus married Andromeda.

In his English rendering of the cosmogonies and theogonies of old Japan (The Sacred Scriptures of the Japanese), Post Wheeler also records analogous legends of the Hydra of Greek myth, of Fafnir from the Germanic, and of the Egyptian goddess Hathor, whom a god made drunk with blood-red beer so that mankind would be saved from annihilation.

The Elephant That Foretold the birth of the Buddha

Five centuries before the Christian era, Queen Maya, in Nepal, had a dream that a white Elephant, which dwelled on the Golden Mountain, had entered her body. This visionary beast was furnished with six tusks. The King’s soothsayers predicted that the Queen would bear a son who would become either ruler of the world or the saviour of mankind. As is common knowledge, the latter came true.

In India the Elephant is a domestic animal. White stands for humility and the number six is sacred, corresponding to the six dimensions of space: upward, downward, forward, back, left, and right.

The Eloi and the Morlocks

The hero of the novel The Time Machine, which a young writer Herbert George Wells published in 1895, travels on a mechanical device into an unfathomable future. There he finds that mankind has split into two species: the Eloi, who are frail and defenseless aristocrats living in idle gardens and feeding on the fruits of the trees; and the Morlocks, a race of underground proletarians who, after ages of labouring in darkness, have gone blind, but driven by the force of the past, go on working at their rusted intricate machinery that produces nothing. Shafts with winding staircases unite the two worlds. On moonless nights, the Morlocks climb up out of their caverns and feed on the Eloi.

The nameless hero, pursued by Morlocks, escapes back into the present. He brings with him as a solitary token of his adventure an unknown flower that falls into dust and that will not blossom on earth until thousands and thousands of years are over.

The Elves

The Elves are of Nordic origin. Little is known about what they look like, except that they are tiny and sinister. They steal cattle and children and also take pleasure in minor acts of devilry. In England, the world ‘elflock’ was given to a tangle of hair because it was supposed to be a trick of the Elves. An Anglo-Saxon charm, which for all we know may go back to heathen times, credits them with the mischievous habit of shooting, from afar, miniature arrows of iron that break the surface of the skin without a trace and are at the root of sudden painful stitches. In the Younger Edda, a distinction is noted between Light Elves and Dark: ‘The Light Elves are fairer than a glance of the sun, the Dark Elves blacker than pitch.’ The German for nightmare is Alp; etymology traces the word back to ‘elf’, since it was commonly believed in the Middle Ages that Elves weighed heavily upon the breast of sleepers, giving them bad dreams.

An Experimental Account of What Was Known, Seen, and Met by Mrs. Jane Lead in London in 1694

Among the many writings of the blind English mystic Jane Lead (or Leade) is to be found The Wonders of God’s Creation manifested in the variety of Eight Worlds, as they were known experimentally unto the Author (London, 1695). About this time, as Mrs Lead’s fame spread throughout Holland and Germany, her work was done into Dutch by an eager young scholar, H. van Ameyden van Duym. But later on when, due to the jealousies of her disciples, the authenticity of certain manuscripts was disputed, it became necessary for the van Duym versions to be retranslated into English. On page 340 (10 B) of the Eight Worlds, we read:

Salamanders have their appointed Dwelling in Fire; Sylphs in the Air; Nymphs in the flowing Waters; and Gnomes in Earthen-burrows, but the creature whose substance is Bliss is everywhere at home. All sounds, even to the roaring of Lions, the screeching of the nightly Owls, the laments and groans of those entrapped in Hell, are as sweet Musick to her. All odours, even to the foulest stench of Corruption, are to her as the delight of roses and Lilies. All savours, even to the banquet-table of the Harpys of heathen lore, are as Sweet loaves and spiced Ale. Wandering at noon through the Waste-Places of the world, it seems to her she is refreshed by Canopies of flocking Angels. The earnest seeker will look for her in All places, however dim and sordid, of this world or in the seven others. Thrust a keen Sword-blade through her and it will seem as a fountain of Divine and Pure pleasure. These eyes, by Translation, have been given to see her ways; and an equal gift as revealed by Wisdom is sometimes granted the Child.

The Fairies

They meddle magically in human affairs, and their name is linked to the Latin word latum (fate, destiny). It is said that the Fairies are the most numerous, the most beautiful, and the most memorable of the minor supernatural beings. They are not restricted to a particular place or particular period. Ancient Greeks, Eskimos, and Red Indians all tell stories of heroes who have won the love of these creatures of the imagination. Such fortunes hold their perils; a Fairy, once its whim is satisfied, may deal death to its lovers.

In Ireland and Scotland ‘the people of Faery’ are assigned underground dwelling places, where they confine children and men whom they have kidnapped. Believing that the flint arrowheads they dig up in the fields once belonged to Fairies. Irish farmers endow these objects with unfailing medical powers. Yeats’s early tales abound in accounts of village people among the Fairies. In one a countrywoman tells him that she did not believe either in Hell or in ghosts. Hell was an invention got up by the priest to keep people good; and the ghosts would not be permitted, she held, to go ‘trapsin’ about the earth’ at their own free will; ‘but there are faeries and little leprechauns, and water-horses, and fallen angels’.

Fairies are fond of song and music and the colour green.

Yeats notes that ‘The [little] people and faeries in Ireland are sometimes as big as we are, sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about three feet high.’ At the end of the seventeenth century a Scots churchman, the Reverend Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle, wrote a work entitled The Secret Commonwealth; or an Essay on the Nature and Actions of the Subterranean (and for the most part) Invisible People heretofore going under the name of Faunes and Fairies, or the lyke, among the Low Country Scots, as they are described by those who have the second sight. In 1815, Sir Walter Scott had the book reprinted. Of Mr Kirk it is told that the Fairies snatched him away because he had revealed their mysteries. On the seas off Italy, especially in the Strait of Messina, the fata morgana contrives mirages to confuse sailors and lure them aground.

Fastitocalon

The Middle Ages attributed to the Holy Ghost the composition of two books. The first was, as is well known, the Bible; the second, the whole world, whose creatures had locked up in them moral teachings. In order to explain these teachings, Physiologi, or Bestiaries, were compiled in which accounts of birds and beasts and fishes were laid over with allegorical applications. Out of an Anglo-Saxon bestiary, we take the following text, translated by R. K. Gordon:

Now by my wit I will also speak in a poem, a song, about a kind of fish, about the mighty whale. He to our sorrow is often found dangerous and fierce to all seafaring men. The name Fastitocalon is given him, the floater on ocean streams. His form is like a roughstone, as if the greatest of seaweeds, girt by sand-banks, were heaving by the water’s shore, so that seafarers suppose they behold some island with their eyes; and then they fasten the highprowed ships with cables to the false land, tie the sea steeds at the water’s edge, and then undaunted go up into that island. The ships remain fast by the shore, encompassed by water. Then, wearied out, the sailors encamp, look not for danger. On the island they kindle fire, build a great blaze; the men, worn out, are in gladness, longing for rest. When he, skilled in treachery, feels that the voyagers are set firmly upon him, are encamped, rejoicing in the clear weather, then suddenly the ocean creature sinks down with his prey into the salt wave, seeks the depths, and then delivers the ships and the men to drown in the hall of death.

He, the proud voyager, has another habit, yet more wondrous. When on the ocean hunger harries him . . . then the warden of the ocean opens his mouth, his lips wide. A pleasant smell comes from within, so that other kinds of fish are betrayed thereby; they swim swiftly to where the sweet smell issues forth. They enter there in a thoughtless throng, till the wide jaw is filled. Then suddenly the fierce jaws snap together, enclosing the plunder. Thus is it for every man who . . . lets himself be snared by a sweet smell, a false desire, so that he is guilty of sins against the King of glory.

This same story is told in the Arabian Nights, in St Brendan’s Legend, and in Milton’s Paradise Lost, which shows us the whale ‘slumbering on the Norway foam’. Professor Gordon tells us that ‘In earlier versions the creature was a turtle and was named Aspidochelone. In course of time the name became corrupted, and the whale replaced the turtle.’

Fauna of Chile

Our chief authority on animals incubated by the Chilean imagination is Julio Vicuña Cifuentes, whose Myths and Superstitions collects a number of legends drawn from oral tradition. All of the following extracts but one are taken from this work. The Calchona is recorded in Zorobabel Rodríguez’ Dictionary of Chileanisms, published in Santiago de Chile in 1875.

The Alicanto is a nocturnal bird that seeks its food in veins of gold and silver. The variety that feeds on gold may be identified by the golden light that gleams from its wings when it runs with them open (for it cannot fly); the silver-feeding Alicanto is known, as one might expect, by a silvery light.

The fact that the bird is flightless is not due to its wings, which are perfectly normal, but to the heavy metallic meals that weigh down its crop. When hungry it runs swiftly; when gorged it is hardly able to crawl.

Prospectors or mining engineers believe their fortune is made if they are lucky enough to have an Alicanto for a guide, since the bird may lead them to the discovery of hidden ore. Nevertheless, the prospector should be very careful, for, if the bird suspects it is being followed, it dims its light and slips away in the dark. It may also suddenly change its path and draw its pursuer towards a chasm.

The Calchona is a kind of Newfoundland dog woollier than an unshorn ram and more bearded than a billy goat. White in colour, it chooses dark nights to appear before mountain travelers, snatching their lunch baskets from them and muttering sullen threats; it also scares horses, hunts down outlaws, and works all sorts of evil.

The Chonchón has the shape of a human head; its ears, which are extremely large, serve as wings for its flight on moonless nights. Chonchónes are supposed to be endowed with all the powers of wizards. They are dangerous when molested, and many fables are told about them. There are several ways to bring these flying creatures down when they pass overhead intoning their ominous tué, tué, tué, the only sign that betrays their presence, since they are invisible to anyone not a wizard. The following are judiciously advised: to recite or sing a prayer known only to a few who stubbornly refuse to divulge it; to chant a certain twelve words twice over; to mark a Solomon’s seal on the ground; and lastly, to spread open a waistcoat and lay it out in a specified way. The Chonchón falls, flapping its wings furiously, and cannot lift itself again no matter how hard it tries until another Chonchón comes to its aid. Generally, the incident does not conclude here, for sooner or later the Chonchón wreaks its vengeance on whomever has mocked at it.

Creditable witnesses have told the following story. In a house in Limache where visitors had gathered one night, the disorderly cries of a Chonchón were suddenly heard outside. Someone made the sign of Solomon’s seal, and a heavy object fell into the backyard; it was a large bird the size of a turkey and had a head with red wattles. They cut the head off, gave it to a dog, and threw the body up on the roof. At once they heard a deafening uproar of Chonchónes, at the same time noting that the dog’s belly had swollen as though the animal had gulped down the head of a person. The next morning they searched in vain for the Chonchón body; it had disappeared from the roof. Somewhat later the town gravedigger reported that on that same day several unknown persons had come to bury a body which, when they had gone away, he found to be headless.

The Hide is an octopus that lives in the sea and has the dimensions and appearance of a cowhide stretched out flat. Its edges are furnished with numberless eyes, and, in that part which seems to be its head, it has four more eyes of a larger size. Whenever persons or animals enter the water, the Hide rises to the surface and engulfs them with an irresistible force, devouring them in a matter of moments. The Huallepén is an amphibious animal that is fierce, powerful, and shy; under three feet tall, it has a calf’s head and a sheep’s body. On the spur of the moment it mounts sheep and cows, fathering in them offspring of the same species as the mother but which can be spotted by their twisted hooves and sometimes by their twisted muzzles. A pregnant woman who sees a Huallepén, or hears its bellow, or who dreams of it three nights in a row, gives birth to a deformed child. The same happens if she sees an animal begotten by the Huallepén.

The Strong Toad is an imaginary animal different from other toads in that its back is covered with a shell like that of a turtle. This Toad glows in the dark like a firefly and is so tough that the only way to kill it is to reduce it to ashes. It owes its name to the great power of its stare, which it uses to attract or repel whatever is in its range.

Fauna of China

The following list of strange animals is taken from the T’ai P’ing Kuang Chi (Extensive Records Made in the Period of Peace and Prosperity), completed in the year 978 and published in 981:

The Celestial Horse is like a white dog with a black head. It has fleshy wings and can fly.

The Chiang-liang has a tiger’s head, a man’s face, long limbs, four hooves, and a snake between its teeth.

In the region to the west of the Red Water dwells the beast known as the Ch’ou-t’i, which has a head both front and back.

The denizens of Ch’uan-T’ou have human heads, the wings of a bat, and a bird’s beak. They feed exclusively on raw fish.

In the Country of Long Arms, the hands of the inhabitants dangle to the ground. They live by catching fish at the edge of the sea.

The Hsiao is similar to the owl but has a man’s face, an ape’s body, and a dog’s tail. Its presence foretells prolonged drought.

The Hsing-hsing are like apes. They have white faces and pointed ears. They walk upright, like men, and climb trees.

The Hsing-t’ien is a being that was decapitated for having fought against the gods, and so it has remained forever headless. Its eyes are in its chest and its navel is its mouth. It hops up and down and jumps about in clearings and other open places, and brandishes a shield and axe.

The Hua-fish, or flying snakefish, appears to be a fish but has the wings of a bird. Its appearance forebodes a period of drought.

The mountain Hui looks like a dog with a human head. It is a fine jumper and moves with the swiftness of an arrow; this is why its appearance is held to foretell the coming of typhoons. On beholding a man, the Hui laughs mockingly.

The Musical Serpent has a serpent’s head and four wings. It makes sounds like those of the Musical Stone.

The Ocean Men have human heads and arms, and the body and tail of a fish. They come to the surface in stormy weather.

The Ping-feng, which lives in the country of Magical Water, resembles a black pig with a head at each end.

In the region of the Queer Arm, people have a single arm and three eyes. They are exceptionally skilful and build flying chariots in which they travel on the winds.

The Ti-chiang is a supernatural bird dwelling in the Mountains of the Sky. Its colour is bright red, it has six feet and four wings, but has neither face nor eyes.

Fauna of Mirrors

In one of the volumes of the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses that appeared in Paris during the first half of the eighteenth century, Father Fontecchio of the Society of Jesus planned a study of the superstitions and misinformation of the common people of Canton; in the preliminary outline he noted that the Fish was a shifting and shining creature that nobody had ever caught but that many said they had glimpsed in the depths of mirrors. Father Fontecchio died in 1736, and the work begun by his pen remained unfinished; some 150 years later Herbert Allen Giles took up the interrupted task. According to Giles, belief in the Fish is part of a larger myth that goes back to the legendary times of the Yellow Emperor.

In those days the world of mirrors and the world of men were not, as they are now, cut off from each other. They were, besides, quite different; neither beings nor colours nor shapes were the same. Both kingdoms, the specular and the human, lived in harmony; you could come and go through mirrors. One night the mirror people invaded the earth. Their power was great, but at the end of bloody warfare the magic arts of the Yellow Emperor prevailed. He repulsed the invaders, imprisoned them in their mirrors, and forced on them the task of repeating, as though in a kind of dream, all the actions of men. He stripped them of their power and of their forms and reduced them to mere slavish reflections. Nonetheless, a day will come when the magic spell will be shaken off.

The first to awaken will be the Fish. Deep in the mirror we will perceive a very faint line and the colour of this line will be like no other colour. Later on, other shapes will begin to stir. Little by little they will differ from us; little by little they will not imitate us. They will break through the barriers of glass or metal and this time will not be defeated. Side by side with these mirror creatures, the creatures of water will join the battle. In Yunnan they do not speak of the Fish but of the Tiger of the Mirror. Others believe that in advance of the invasion we will hear from the depths of mirrors the clatter of weapons.

Fauna of the United States

The yarns and tall tales of the lumber camps of Wisconsin and Minnesota include some singular creatures, in which, surely, no one ever believed.

There is the Hidebehind, which is always hiding behind something. No matter how many times or whichever way a man turns, it is always behind him, and that’s why nobody has been able to describe it, even though it is credited with having killed and devoured many a lumberjack. Then there is the Roperite. This animal is about the size of a pony. It has a ropelike beak which it uses to snare even the fleetest of rabbits. The Teakettler owes its name to the noises it makes, much like those of a boiling teakettle. Vaporous clouds fume from its mouth and it walks backward. It has been seen very few times.

The Axehandle Hound has a hatchet-shaped head, a handle-shaped body, and stumpy legs. This North Woods dachshund eats only the handles of axes.

Among the fish of this region we find the Upland Trout. They nest in trees and are good fliers but are scared of water.

There’s another fish, the Goofang, that swims backward to keep the water out of its eyes. It’s described as ‘about the size of a sunfish, only much bigger’.

We shouldn’t forget the Goofus Bird that builds its nest upside down and flies backward, not caring where it’s going, only where it’s been.

The Gillygaloo nested on the slopes of Paul Bunyan’s famed Pyramid Forty, laying square eggs to keep them from rolling down the steep incline and breaking. These eggs were coveted by lumberjacks, who hard-boiled them and used them as dice.

And finally there’s the Pinnacle Grouse, which had a single wing. This enabled it to fly in one direction only, circling the top of a conical hill. The colour of its plumage varied according to the season and according to the condition of the observer.

Garuda

Vishnu, second god of the triad that rules over the Hindu pantheon, rides either on the serpent that fills the seas or on the back of Garuda. Pictorially, Vishnu is represented as blue and with four arms, holding in each hand the club, the shell, the sphere, and the lotus. Garuda is half vulture and half man, with the wings, beak, and talons of the one and body and legs of the other. His face is white, his wings of a bright scarlet, and his body golden. Figures of Garuda, worked in bronze or stone, are worshipped in the temples of India. One is found in Gwalior, erected more than a hundred years before the Christian era by a Greek, Heliodorus, who became a follower of Vishnu.

In the Garuda Purana one of the many Puranas, or traditions, of Hindu lore Garuda expounds at length on the beginnings of the universe, the solar essence of Vishnu, the rites of his cult, the genealogies of the kings descended from the sun and the moon, the plot of the Ramayana, and various minor topics, such as the craft of verse, grammar, and medicine.

In a seventh-century drama called the Mirth of the Snakes and held to be the work of a king, Garuda kills and each day devours a snake (probably the hooded cobra) until a Buddhist prince teaches him the value of abstinence. In the last act, the penitent Garuda brings back to life the bones of the many generations of serpents he has fed upon. Eggeling holds that this work may be a Brahman satire on Buddhism. Nimbarka, a mystic whose date is uncertain, has written that Garuda is a soul saved forever, as are his crown, his earrings, and his flute.

The Gnomes

The Gnomes are older than their name, which is Greek but which was unknown to the ancients, since it dates from the sixteenth century, Etymologists attribute it to the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus in whose writings it appears for the first time.

They are sprites of the earth and hills. Popular imagination pictures them as bearded dwarfs of rough and grotesque features; they wear tight-fitting brown clothes with monastic hoods. Like the griffons of Greece and of the East and the dragons of Germanic lore, the Gnomes watch over hidden treasure.

Gnosis, in Greek, means knowledge; and Paracelsus may have called them Gnomes because they know the exact places where precious metals are to be found.

The Golem

In a book inspired by infinite wisdom, nothing can be left to chance, not even the number of words it contains or the order of the letters; this is what the Kabbalists thought, and they devoted themselves to the task of counting, combining, and permutating the letters of the Scriptures, fired by a desire to penetrate the secrets of God. Dante stated that every passage of the Bible has a fourfold meaning the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the spiritual. Johannes Scotus Erigena, closer to the concept of divinity, had already said that the meanings of the Scriptures are infinite, like the hues in a peacock’s tail. The Kabbalists would have approved this view; one of the secrets they sought in the Bible was how to create living beings. It was said of demons that they could make large and bulky creatures like the camel, but were incapable of creating anything delicate or frail, and Rabbi Eliezer denied them the ability to produce anything smaller than a barley grain. ‘Golem’ was the name given to the man created by combinations of letters; the word means, literally, a shapeless or lifeless clod.In the Talmud (Sanhedrin, 65b) we read:

If the righteous wished to create a world, they could do so. By trying different combinations of the letters of the ineffable names of God, Raba succeeded in creating a man, whom he sent to Rabbi Zera. Rabbi Zera spoke to him, but as he got no answer, he said: ‘You are a creature of magic; go back to your dust.’ Rabbi Hanina and Rabbi Oshaia, two scholars, spent every Sabbath eve studying the Book of Creation, by means of which they brought into being a three-year-old calf that they then used for the purposes of supper.

Schopenhauer, in his book Will in Nature, writes (Chapter 7): ‘On page 325 of the first volume of his Zauberbibliothek [Magic Library], Horst summarizes the teachings of the English mystic Jane Lead in this way: Whoever possesses magical powers can, at will, master and change the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms; consequently, a few magicians, working in agreement, could make this world of ours return to the state of Paradise.’

The Golem’s fame in the West is owed to the work of the Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink, who in the fifth chapter of his dream novel Der Golem (1915) writes:

It is said that the origin of the story goes back to the seventeenth century. According to lost formulas of the Kabbalah, a rabbi [Judah Loew ben Bezabel] made an artificial man the aforesaid Golem so that he would ring the bells and take over all the menial tasks of the synagogue.

He was not a man exactly, and had only a sort of dim, half-conscious, vegetative existence. By the power of a magic tablet which was placed under his tongue and which attracted the free sidereal energies of the universe, this existence lasted during the daylight hours.

One night before evening prayer, the rabbi forgot to take the tablet out of the Golem’s mouth, and the creature fell into a frenzy, running out into the dark alleys of the ghetto and knocking down those who got in his way, until the rabbi caught up with him and removed the tablet. At once the creature fell lifeless. All that was left of him is the dwarfish clay figure that may be seen today in the New Synagogue.

Eleazar of Worms has preserved the secret formula for making a Golem. The procedures involved cover some twenty-three folio columns and require knowledge of the ‘alphabets of the 221 gates’, which must be recited over each of the Golem’s organs. The word Emet, which means ‘Truth’, should be marked on its forehead; to destroy the creature, the first letter must be obliterated, forming the word met, whose meaning is ‘death’.

The Griffon

Winged monsters, says Herodotus of the Griffons in his accounts of their continual warfare with the one-eyed Arimaspians; almost as sketchy, Pliny speaks of their ears and their hooked beaks, yet judges them fabulous (X, 70). Perhaps the most detailed description of the Griffon comes from the problematic Sir John Mandeville in Chapter 85 of his famous Travels:

From this land men shal go unto the land of Bactry, where are many wicked men & fell, in that land are trees that beare wol, as it were shepe, of which they make cloth. In this land are ypotains [hippopotamuses] that dwel sometime on land, sometime on water, and are halfe a man and halfe a horse, and they eate not but men, when they may get them. In this land are many gryffons, more than in other places, and some say they haue the body before as an Egle, and behinde as a Lyon, and it is trouth, for they be made so; but the Griffen hath a body greater than viii Lyons and stall worthier than a hundred Egles. For certainly he wyl beare to his nest flying, a horse and a man upon his back, or two Oxen yoked togither as they go at plowgh, for he hath large nayles on hys fete, as great as it were homes of Oxen, and of those they make cups there to drynke of, and of his rybes they make bowes to shoote with.

In Madagascar, another famous traveler, Marco Polo, heard the rukh spoken of and at first understood this as a reference to the uccello grifone, the Griffon bird (Travels, III 36).

In the Middle Ages, the symbolism of the Griffon is contradictory. An Italian bestiary says that it stands for the Devil; usually it is an emblem of Christ, and this is how Isidore of Seville explains it in his Etymologies: ‘Christ is a lion because he reigns and has great strength; and an eagle because, after the Resurrection, he ascended to heaven.’

In Canto XXIX of the Purgatorio, Dante has a vision of a triumphal chariot (the Church), drawn by a Griffon; its eagle portion is golden, its lion portion white mixed with red in order to signify according to the commentaries Christ’s human nature. (White slightly reddened gives the colour of human flesh.) The commentators are recalling the description of the beloved in the Song of Solomon (V: 10-11): ‘My beloved is white and ruddy . . . His head is as the most fine gold . . .’

Others feel that Dante wished to symbolize the Pope, who is both priest and king. Didron, in his Manuel d’iconographie chrétienne (1845, writes: ‘The pope, as pontiff or eagle, is borne aloft to the throne of God to receive his commands, and as lion or king walks on earth with strength and might.’

Haniel, Kafziel, Azriel, and Aniel

In Babylon, the prophet Ezekiel saw in a vision four beasts or angels, ‘And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings’ and ‘As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle.’ They went where the spirit carried them, ‘every one straight forward’, or as the first Spanish Bible (1569) has it, cada uno caminaua enderecho de su rostro (‘each one went in the direction of his face’) which of course is so unimaginable as to be uncanny. Four wheels or rings, ‘so high that they were dreadful’ went with the angels and ‘were full of eyes round about them . . .’

An echo from Ezekiel may have been in the mind of St John the Divine when he spoke of animals in the fourth chapter of Revelation:

And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind.

And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle.

And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.

In the most important of Kabbalistic works, the Zohar or Book of Splendour, we read that these four beasts are called Haniel, Kafziel, Azriel, and Aniel and that they face east, north, south, and west. Stevenson remarked that if such beings were to be found in Heaven, what might not be expected of Hell.A beast full of eyes is sufficiently awful, but Chesterton went further in the poem ‘A Second Childhood’:

But I shall not grow too old to see

Enormous night arise,

A cloud that is larger than the world

And a monster made of eyes.

The fourfold angels in Ezekiel are called Hayoth, or Living Beings; according to the Sefer Yeçirah, another of the Kabbalist books, they are the ten numbers that were used by God, together with the twenty-two letters of the alphabet, to create the world; according to the Zohar, they came down from Heaven crowned with letters.

The Evangelists drew their symbols from the four faces of the Hayoth: to Matthew fell the man’s face, sometimes bearded; to Mark, the lion’s; to Luke, the calf’s; and to John, the eagle’s. St Jerome in his commentary on Ezekiel has attempted to reason out these attributions. Matthew was given the man’s face because he emphasized the humanity of Christ; Mark the lion’s because he declared Christ’s royal standing; Luke the calf’s because it is an emblem of sacrifice; John the eagle’s because of Christ’s soaring spirit.

A German scholar, Dr Richard Hennig, looks for the remote origin of these symbols in four zodiacal signs which lie ninety degrees apart. The lion and the calf give no trouble; the man has been linked to Aquarius, who has a man’s face; and the eagle is evidently Scorpio considered an ill omen and therefore changed. Nicholas de Vore, in his Encyclopedia of Astrology, sustains the same hypothesis and remarks that the four figures come together in the sphinx, which may have a human head, the body of a bull, the claws and tail of a lion, and the wings of an eagle.

Haokah the Thunder God

Among the Dakota Sioux, Haokah used the wind as sticks to beat the thunder drum. His horned head also marked him as a hunting god. He wept when he was happy and laughed in his sadness; heat made him shiver and cold made him sweat.

Harpies

In Hesiod’s Theogony, the Harpies are winged divinities who wear long loose hair and are swifter than the birds and winds, in the Aeneid (Book III), they are vultures with a woman’s face, sharp curved claws and filthy underparts, and are weak with a hunger they cannot appease. They swoop down from the mountains and plunder tables laid for feasts. They are invulnerable and emit an infectious smell; they gorge all they see, screeching the whole while and fouling everything with excrement. Servius, in his commentaries on Virgil, writes that just as Hecate is Proserpina in hell, Diana on earth, and Luna in heaven, and is called a threefold goddess, so the Harpies are Furies in hell, Harpies on earth, and Dirae (or Demons) in heaven. They are also confused with the Parcae, or Fates.

By order of the gods, the Harpies harried a Thracian king who unveiled men’s futures, or who bought a long life with the price of his eyes, for which he was punished by the sun, whose works he had insulted by choosing blindness. He had prepared a banquet for all his court and the Harpies contaminated and devoured the dishes. The Argonauts put the Harpies to flight; Apollonius of Rhodes and William Morris (The Life and Death of Jason) tell the fantastic story. Ariosto in Canto XXXIII of the Furioso transforms the Thracian king into Prester John, fabled emperor of the Abyssinians.

Harpy comes from the Greek harpazein to snatch or carry away. In the beginning they were wind goddesses, like the Maruts of Vedic myth, who wielded weapons of gold (the lightning) and milked the clouds.

The Heavenly Cock

According to the Chinese, the Heavenly Cock is a golden-plumed fowl that crows three times a day. The first, when the sun takes its morning bath on the horizons of the sea; the second, when the sun is at its height; the last, when it sinks in the west. The first crowing shakes the heavens and stirs mankind from sleep. Among the offspring of the Cock is the yang, the male principle of the universe. The Cock has three legs and perches in the fu-sang tree, which grows in the lands of sunrise and whose height is measured by thousands of feet. The Heavenly Cock’s crowing is very loud, and its bearing, lordly. It lays eggs out of which are hatched chicks with red combs, who answer his song every morning. All the roosters on earth are descended from the Heavenly Cock, whose other name is the Bird of Dawn.

The Hippogriff

To signify impossibility or incongruence, Virgil spoke of breeding horses with griffons. Four centuries later, his commentator Servius explained that the griffon is an animal which in the top half of its body is an eagle and in the bottom half a lion. To strengthen his text he added that they detest horses. In time, the expression Jungentur jam grypes equis (‘To cross griffons with horses’) came to be proverbial; at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Ludovico Ariosto, remembering it, invented the Hippogriff. Eagle and lion are united in the griffon of the ancients; horse and griffon in Ariosto’s Hippogriff, which makes it a second generation monster or invention. Pietro Micheli notes that it is more harmonious than the winged horse Pegasus.

A detailed description of the Hippogriff, written as for a handbook of fantastic zoology, is given in Orlando Furioso (IV, 18):

The steed is not imagined but real, for it was sired by a Griffon out of a mare: like its father’s were its feathers and wings, its forelegs, head, and beak; in all its other parts it resembled its mother and was called Hippogriff; they come, though rarely, from the Rhiphaean Mountains, far beyond the icebound seas.

The first mention of the strange beast is deceptively casual (II, 37):

And by the Rhone I came upon a man in arms, reining in a great winged horse.

Other stanzas give us the wonder of this creature that flies. The following (IV, 4) is well known:

E vede l’oste e tutta la famiglia, E chi a finestre e chi fuor ne la via, Tener levati al ciel gli occhi e le ciglia, Come l’Ecclisse o la Cometa sia.Vede la Donna un’alta maraviglia,Che di leggier creduta non saria: Vede passar un gran destriero alato,Che porta in aria un cavalliero armato.

[And she saw the landlord and all his house, and some at the windows and some in the street, their eyes and brows lifted to the sky as though it were an Eclipse or Comet. The Lady saw a wonder on high not easily to be believed: she saw pass over a great winged steed, bearing through the air a knight in arms.]

Astolpho, in one of the last cantos, unsaddles and unbridles the Hippogriff and sets it free.

Hochigan

Ages ago, a certain South African bushman, Hochigan, hated animals, which at that time were endowed with speech. One day he disappeared, stealing their special gift. From then on, animals have never spoken again. Descartes tells us that monkeys could speak if they wished to, but that they prefer to keep silent so that they won’t be made to work. In 1907, the Argentine writer Lugones published a story about a chimpanzee who was taught how to speak and died under the strain of the effort.

Humbaba

What was the giant Humbaba like, who guards the mountain cedars in that pieced-together Assyrian epic Gilgamesh, which may be the world’s oldest poem? Georg Burckhardt has attempted to reconstruct it, and from his German version, published in Wiesbaden in 1952, we give this passage:

Enkidu swung his axe and cut down one of the cedars. An angry voice rang out: Who has entered my forest and cut down one of my trees?’ Then they saw Humbaba himself coming: he had the paws of a lion and a body covered with horny scales; his feet had the claws of a vulture, and on his head were the horns of a wild bull; his tail and male member each ended in a snake’s head.

In one of the later cantos of Gilgamesh, we are introduced to creatures called Men-Scorpions who stand guard at the gate of the mountain Mashu. ‘Its twin peaks [in an English version by N. K. Sandars] are as high as the wall of heaven and its paps reach down to the underworld.’ It is into this mountain that the sun goes down at night and from which it returns at dawn. The Man-Scorpion is human in the upper part of its body, while its lower part ends in a scorpion’s tail.

The Hundred-Heads

The Hundred-Heads is a fish created by a hundred ill-tempered words uttered in the course of an otherwise blameless life. A Chinese biography of the Buddha tells that he once met some fishermen who were dragging in a net. After much toil they hauled up on to the shore a huge fish with one head of an ape, another of a dog, another of a horse, another of a fox, another of a hog, another of a tiger, and so on, up to one hundred. The Buddha asked the fish:

‘Are you Kapila?’

‘Yes, I am,’ the Hundred-heads answered before dying. The Buddha explained to his disciples that in a previous incarnation Kapila was a Brahman who had become a monk and whose knowledge of the holy texts was unrivalled. Upon occasion, when his fellow students misread a word, Kapila would call them ape-head, dog-head, horse-head, and so forth. After his death, the karma of those many insults caused him to be reborn as a sea monster, weighed down by all the heads he had bestowed upon his companions.

The Hydra of Lerna

Typhon (the misshapen son of Tartarus and Terra) and Echidna, who was half beautiful woman and half serpent, gave birth to the Hydra of Lerna. Lemprière tells us that ‘It had 100 heads, according to Diodorus; fifty according to Simonides; and nine according to the more received opinion of Apollodorus, Hyginus &c.’ But what made the creature still more awful was that as soon as one of its heads was cut off, two more sprouted up in their place. It was said that the heads were human and that the middle one was everlasting. The Hydra’s breath poisoned the waters and turned the fields brown. Even when it slept, the pollution in the air surrounding it could cause a man’s death. Juno fostered the Hydra in her efforts to lessen Hercules’ fame.

This monster appears to have been destined for eternity. Its den lay among the marshes near the lake of Lerna. Hercules and Iolaus went in search of it; Hercules lopped its heads and Iolaus applied a burning iron to the bleeding wounds, for only fire would stop the growth of the new heads. The last head, which was deathless, Hercules buried under a great boulder, and where it was buried it remains to this day, hating and dreaming.

In succeeding tasks with other beasts, Hercules inflicted deadly wounds with arrows dipped in the gall of the Hydra.

A sea crab friendly to the Hydra nipped Hercules’ heel when he stepped on it during his struggle with the many-headed monster. Juno placed the crab in the heavens where it is now a constellation and the sign of Cancer.

Ichthyocentaurs

Lycophron, Claudian, and the Byzantine grammarian John Tzetzes have each at some time referred to the Ichthyocentaur; there are no other allusions to it in classical writings. Ichthyocentaur may be translated as ‘Centaur-Fish’. The word is applied to beings that mythologists have also called Centaur-Tritons. The image abounds in Greek and Roman sculpture. They are human down to their waist, with the tail of a dolphin, and have the forelegs of a horse or a lion. Their place is among the gods of the ocean, close to the sea horses.

Jewish Demons

Between the world of the flesh and the world of the spirit, Jewish superstition imagined a middle ground inhabited by angels devils. A census of its population left the bounds of arithmetic far behind. Throughout the centuries, Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia all enriched this teeming middle world. Maybe because of Christian influence (suggests Trachtenberg), demonology, or the lore of devils, became of less account than angelology, or the lore of angels.

Let us, however, single out Keteb Mereri, Lord of the Noontide and of Scorching Summers. Some children on their way to school once met up with him; all but two died. During the thirteenth century Jewish demonology swelled its ranks with Latin, French, and German intruders who ended up becoming thoroughly integrated with the natives recorded in the Talmud.

The Jinn

According to Moslem tradition, Allah created three different species of intelligent beings: Angels, who are made of light; Jinn (‘Jinnee’ or ‘Genie’ in the singular), who are made of fire; and Men, who are made of earth. The Jinn were created of a black smokeless fire some thousands of years before Adam, and consist of five orders. Among these orders we find good Jinn and evil, male Jinn and female. The cosmographer al-Qaswini says that ‘the Jinn are aerial animals, with transparent bodies, which can assume various forms’. At first they may show themselves as clouds or as huge undefined pillars; when their form becomes condensed, they become visible, perhaps in the bulk of a man, a jackal, a wolf, a lion, a scorpion, or a snake. Some are true believers; others, heretics or atheists. The English Orientalist Edward William Lane writes that when Jinn take the shape of human beings they are sometimes of an enormously gigantic size and ‘if good, they are generally resplendently handsome: if evil, horribly hideous.’ They are also said to become invisible at pleasure ‘by a rapid extension or rarefaction of the particles which compose them’, when they may disappear into the air or earth or through a solid wall.

The Jinn often attain the lower heavens, where they overhear the conversations of angels about future events. This enables them to help wizards and soothsayers. Certain scholars attribute to them the building of the Pyramids or, under the orders of Solomon, the great Temple of Jerusalem. The usual dwelling-places of Jinn are ruined houses, water cisterns, rivers, wells, crossroads, and markets. The Egyptians say that the pillar-like whirlwinds of sand raised in the desert are caused by the flight of an evil Jinnee. They also say that shooting stars are arrows hurled by Allah against evil Jinn. Among the acts perpetrated by these evil-doers against human beings, the following are traditional: the throwing of bricks and stones at passers-by from roofs and windows, the abduction of beautiful women, the persecution of anyone who tries to live in an uninhabited house, and the pilfering of provisions. Invoking the name of Allah the All Merciful, the Compassionate, is usually enough to secure one against such depredations, however.

The ghoul, which haunts burial grounds and feeds upon dead human bodies, is thought to be an inferior order of the Jinn. Iblis is the father of the Jinn and their chief.

In 1828, young Victor Hugo wrote a tumultuous fifteen stanza poem ‘Les Djinns’ about a gathering of these beings. With each stanza, as the Jinn cluster together, the lines grow longer and longer, until the eighth, when they reach their fullness. From this point on they dwindle to the close of the poem, when the Jinn vanish.

Burton and Noah Webster link the word ‘Jinn’ and the Latin ‘genius’, which is from the verb ‘beget’. Skeat contradicts this.

The Kami

In a passage from Seneca, we read that Thales of Miletus taught that the earth floats in a surrounding sea, like a ship, and that these waters when tossed and driven by the tempests are the cause of earthquakes. Historians or mythologists of eighth-century Japan offer us a rather different seismological system. In the Sacred Scriptures it is written:

Now beneath the Fertile-Land-of-Reed-Plains lay a Kami in the form of a great cat-fish, and by its movement it caused the earth to quake, till the Great Deity of Deer Island thrust his sword deep into the earth and transfixed the Kami’s head. So, now, when the evil Kami is violent, he puts forth his hand and lays it upon the sword till the Kami becomes quiet.

The hilt of this sword, carved in granite projects some three feet out of the ground near the shrine of Kashima. In the seventeenth century, a feudal lord dug for six days without reaching the tip of the blade.

In popular belief, the Jinshin-Uwo, or Earthquake-Fish, is an eel seven hundred miles long that holds Japan on its back. It runs from north to south, its head lying beneath Kyoto and its tail beneath Awomori. Some logical thinkers have argued for the reverse of this order, for it is in the south of Japan that earthquakes are more frequent, and it is easier to equate this with the lashing of the eel’s tail. This animal is not unlike the Bahamut of Moslem tradition or the Miõgarõsormr of the Eddas.

In certain regions the Earthquake-Fish is replaced, with little apparent advantage, by the Earthquake-Beetle (Jinshin Mushi). It has a dragon’s head, ten spider legs, and a scaly body. It is an underground, not an undersea, creature.

A King of Fire and His Steed

Heraclitus taught us that the primal element, or root, is fire, but this hardly means that there are beings made of fire, carved of the shifting substance of flames. This almost unimaginable fancy was attempted by William Morris in the tale ‘The Ring Given to Venus’ from his cycle The Earthly Paradise (1868-70). It runs as follows:

Most like a mighty king was he, And crowned and sceptred royally;

As a white flame his visage shone, Sharp, clear-cut as a face of stone;

But flickering flame, not flesh, it was;

And over it such looks did pass

Of wild desire, and pain, and fear,

As in his people’s faces were,

But tenfold fiercer: furthermore,

A wondrous steed the master bore,

Unnameable of kind or make,

Not horse, nor hippogriff, nor drake.

Like and unlike to all of these,

And flickering like the semblances

Of an ill dream . . .

Perhaps in the above lines there is an echo of the deliberately ambiguous personification of Death in Paradise Lost (II, 666-73):

The other shape,

If shape it might be called that shape had none

Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb.

Or substance might be call’d that shadow seem’d,

For each seem’d either; black it stood as Night,

Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell,

And shook a dreadful Dart; what seem’d his head

The likeness of a Kingly Crown had on.

The Kraken

The Kraken is a Scandinavian version of the zaratan and of the sea dragon, or sea snake of the Arabs.

In 1752-54, the Dane Erik Pontoppidan, Bihsop of Bergen, published a Natural History of Norway, a work famous for its hospitality or gullibility. In its pages we read that the Kraken’s back is a mile and a half wide and that its tentacles are capable of encompassing the largest of ships. The huge back protrudes from the sea like an island. The Bishop formulates this rule: ‘Floating islands are invariably Krakens.’ He also writes that the Kraken is in the habit of turning the sea murky with a discharge of liquid. This statement has inspired the hypothesis that the Kraken is an enlargement of the octopus.

Among Tennyson’s juvenilia we find this poem to the curious creature:

The Kraken

Below the thunders of the upper deep,

Far, far beneath the abysmal sea,

His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep

The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee

About his shadowy sides; above him swell

Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;

And far away into the sickly light,

From many a wondrous grot and secret cell

Unnumber’d and enormous polypi

Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.

There hath he lain for ages, and will lie

Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,

Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;

Then once by man and angels to be seen,

In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

Kujata

In Moslem cosmology, Kujata is a huge bull endowed with four thousand eyes, ears, nostrils, mouths, and feet. To get from one ear to another or from one eye to another, no more than five hundred years are required. Kujata stands on the back of the fish Bahamut; on the bull’s back is a great rock of ruby, on the rock an angel, and on the angel rests our earth. Under the fish is a mighty sea, under the sea a vast abyss of air, under the air fire, and under the fire a serpent so great that were it not for fear of Allah, this creature might swallow up all creation.

The Lamed Wufniks

There are on earth, and always were, thirty-six righteous men whose mission is to justify the world before God. They are the Lamed Wufniks. They do not know each other and are very poor. If a man comes to the knowledge that he is a Lamed Wufnik, he immediately dies and somebody else, perhaps in another part of the world, takes his place. Lamed Wufniks are, without knowing it, the secret pillars of the universe. Were it not for them, God would annihilate the whole of mankind. Unawares, they are our saviours.

This mystical belief of the Jews can be found in the works of Max Brod. Its remote origin may be the eighteenth chapter of Genesis, where we read this verse: ‘And the Lord said, If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes.’

The Moslems have an analogous personage in the Kutb.

The Lamias

According to the Greeks and Romans, Lamias lived in Africa. From the waist up their form was that of a beautiful woman; from the waist down they were serpents. Many authorities thought of them as witches; others as evil monsters. They lacked the ability to speak, but they made a whistling sound which was musical, and in the spaces of the desert beguiled travelers in order to devour them. Their remote origin was divine, having sprung from one of the many loves of Zeus. In that section of his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) that deals with the power of love, Robert Burton writes:

Philostratus, in his Fourth Book de vita Apollonii, hath a memorable instance in this kind, which I may not omit, of one Menippus Lycius a young man 25 years of age, that going betwixt Cenchreoe and Corinth, met such a phantasm in the habit of a fair gentlewoman, which, taking him by the hand, carried him home to her house in the suburbs of Corinth, and told him she was a Phoenician by birth, and if he would tarry with her, he should hear her sing and play, and drink such wine as never any drank, and no man should molest him; but she being fair and lovely would live and die with him, that was fair and lovely to behold. The young man, a Philosopher, otherwise staid and discreet, able to moderate his passions, though not this of love, tarried with her a while to his great content, and at last married her, to whose wedding, among other guests, came Apollonius, who by some probable conjectures found her out to be a serpent, a Lamia, and that all her furniture was like Tantalus’ gold described by Homer, no substance, but mere illusions. When she saw herself descried, she wept, and desired Apollonius to be silent, but he would not be moved, and thereupon she, plate, house, and all that was in it, vanished in an instant: many thousands took notice of this fact, for it was done in the midst of Greece.

Shortly before his death, John Keats was moved by this reading of Burton to compose his extensive poem ’Lamia’.

Laudatores Temporis Acti

The seventeenth-century Portuguese sea captain, Luiz da Silveira, in his De Gentibus et Moribus Asiae (Lisbon, 1669) refers somewhat obliquely to an Eastern sect whether Indian or Chinese we are not told which he calls, using a Latin tag, Laudatories Temporis Acti. The good captain is no metaphysician or theologian, but he none the less makes clear the nature of time past as conceived by the Worshippers. The past to us is merely a section of time, or a series of sections that were once the present and that may now be approximately recalled by memory or by history. Both memory and history make these sections, of course, part of the present. To the Worshippers, the past is absolute; it never had a present, nor can it be remembered or even guessed at. Neither unity nor plurality can be ascribed to it, since these are attributes of the present. The same may be said of its denizens if the plural be allowed with respect to their colour, size, weight, shape, and so on. Nothing about the beings of this Once That Never Was can be either affirmed or denied.

Silveira remarks on the utter hopelessness of the sect; the Past, as such, could have no inkling of its being worshipped and could afford no help or comfort to its votaries. Had the captain given us the native name or some other clue about this curious community, further investigation would be easier. We know they had neither temples nor sacred books. Are there still any Worshippers or do they now, together with their dim belief, belong to the past?

The Lemures

The ancients supposed that men’s souls after death wandered all over the world and disturbed the peace of its inhabitants. The good spirits were called Lares familiares, and the evil ones were known by the name of Larvae, or Lemures. They terrified the good, and continually haunted the wicked and impious; and the Romans had the custom of celebrating festivals in their honour, called Lemuria, or Lemuralia, in the month of May. They were first instituted by Romulus to appease the ghost of his brother Remus, from whom they were called Remuria, and, by corruption, Lemuria. These solemnities continued three nights, during which the temples of the gods were shut and marriages were prohibited. It was usual for the people to throw black beans on the graves of the deceased, or to burn them, as the smell was supposed to be insupportable to them. They also muttered magical words, and, by beating kettles and drums, they believed that the ghosts would depart and no longer come to terrify their relations upon earth.

Lemprière:
Classical Dictionary

The Leveller

Between 1840 and 1864, the Father of Light (whom we may also call the Inner Voice) granted the Bavarian musician and schoolteacher Jakob Lorber an unbroken series of trustworthy revelations concerning the human population, the fauna, and the flora of the celestial bodies of our solar system. Among the domestic animals we have knowledge of, thanks to these revelations, is found the Leveller, or Ground-Flattener (Bodendrücker), which renders immeasurable services on Miron, the planet identified with Neptune by Lorber’s most recent editors.

The Leveller has ten times the girth of the elephant, to which it bears a striking resemblance. It is provided with a rather stumpy trunk and with long straight tusks; its hide is of a sickly green. Its limbs, pyramid-shaped, widen enormously at the hoof; the apexes of these pyramids appear to be pinned to the body. This noted plantigrade, in advance of builders and bricklayers, is led to the rough terrain of a construction site, where, with the aid of its hooves, its trunk, and its tusks, it proceeds to flatten out and tramp the ground.

The Leveller feeds on roots and herbage and has no enemies outside of one or two species of insects.

Lilith

‘For before Eve was Lilith’, we read in an old Hebrew text. This legend moved the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) to write the poem ‘Eden Bower’. Lilith was a serpent; she was Adam’s first wife and gave him

Shapes that coiled in the woods and waters,

Glittering sons and radiant daughters.

It was later that God created Eve; Lilith, to revenge herself on Adam’s human wife, urged Eve to taste the forbidden fruit and to conceive Cain, brother and murderer of Abel. Such is the early form of the myth followed and bettered by Rossetti. Throughout the Middle Ages the influence of the word layil, Hebrew for ‘night’, gave a new turn to the myth. Lilith is no longer a serpent; she becomes an apparition of the night. At times she is an angel who rules over the procreation of mankind, at times a demon who assaults those who sleep alone or those who travel lonely roads. In popular imagination she is a tall silent woman with long black hair worn loose.

The Lunar Hare

In the blotches of the moon, the English believe they make out the form of a man; in A Midsummer Night’s Dream there are two or three references to the ‘man in the moon’. Shakespeare mentions its bundle, or bush, of thorn; in the last lines of Canto XX of the Inferno, Dante had already spoken of Cain and of these thorns. The commentary by Tommaso Casini cites the Tuscan fable in which the Lord banished Cain to the moon, condemning him to carry a bundle of thorns to the end of time. Others have seen in the moon the Holy Family; Leopoldo Lugones wrote in his Lunario sentimental:

Y está todo: la Virgen con el niño; al flanco, San José (algunos tienen la buena fortuna De ver su vara); y el buen burrito bianco Trota que trota los campos de la luna. [And everything is there: Virgin and Child; by her side, Saint Joseph (some are lucky enough to see his staff); and the good little white donkey that trots and trots over the acres of the moon.]

The Chinese speak of a Lunar Hare. Buddha, in one of his former lives, suffered hunger; in order to feed him, a Hare leaped into a fire. The Buddha in gratitude sent the Hare’s soul to the moon. There, under an acacia, the Hare pounds in a magical mortar the herbs that make up the elixir of life. In the common speech of certain provinces, this Hare is called the Physician or the Precious Hare or the Hare of Jade. The ordinary Hare is believed to live for a thousand years and to turn white in its old age.

Shakespeare, by the way, refers to a dead mooncalf in The Tempest (II, ii). This creature, according to commentators, is an uncouth monster begotten on earth under the moon’s influence.

The Mandrake

Like the barometz, the plant known as the Mandrake borders on the animal kingdom, since it gives a cry when it is torn up; this cry can drive those who hear it mad. We read in Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, IV, iii):

And shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth, That living mortals, hearing them, run mad . . .

Pythagoras called the plant anthropomorphic; the Roman agronomist Lucius Columella called it semi-human; and Albertus Magnus wrote that the Mandrake is like man himself, down to the distinction between the sexes. Earlier, Pliny had said that the white Mandrake is the male and the black the female. Also, that those who root it out first trace three circles on the ground with a sword and look westward; the smell of its leaves is so strong that ordinarily it can deprive men of the power of speech. To uproot it was to run the risk of terrible calamities. In the last book of his History of the Jewish Wars, Flavius Josephus advises us to employ a trained dog; the plant dug up, the dog dies, but the leaves are useful as a narcotic, a laxative, and for the purposes of magic.

The Mandrake’s supposed human form has suggested the superstition that it grows at the foot of the gallows. Sir Thomas Browne (Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 1646) speaks of the grease of hanged men; the once popular German writer Hanns Heinz Ewers wrote a novel (Alraune, 1913) around the idea of the hanged man’s seed being injected into a harlot and producing a beautiful witch. In German, ‘mandrake’ is Alraune; earlier it was Alruna, a word that comes originally from ‘rune’, which stood for ‘whisper’ or ‘buzz’. Hence (according to Skeat) it meant ‘a mystery . . . a writing, because written characters were regarded as a mystery known to the few’. Perhaps, more simply, the idea of a visible mark standing for a sound baffled the Nordic mind, and therein lay the mystery.

Genesis (XXX: 14-17) has this strange account of the reproductive powers of the Mandrake:

And Reuben went in the days of wheat harvest, and found mandrakes in the field, and brought them unto his mother Leah. Then Rachel said to Leah, Give me, I pray thee, of thy son’s mandrakes.

And she said unto her, Is it a small matter that thou hast taken my husband? and wouldest thou take away my son’s mandrakes also? And Rachel said, Therefore he shall lie with thee tonight for thy son’s mandrakes.

And Jacob came out of the field in the evening, and Leah went out to meet him, and said, Thou must come in unto me; for surely I have hired thee with my son’s mandrakes. And he lay with her that night.

And God hearkened unto Leah, and she conceived, and bare Jacob the fifth son.

In the twelfth century, a German-Jewish commentator on the Talmud wrote this paragraph:

A kind of cord comes out of a root in the ground and tied to the cord by its navel, like a squash or melon, is the animal known as the yadu’a, but the yadu’a is in all respects like a man: face, body, hands, and feet. It uproots and destroys all things around it as far as the cord reaches. The cord should be cut by an arrow, and the animal dies.

The physician Dioscorides (second century a.d.) identified the Mandrake with the circea, or herb of Circe, of which we read in the tenth book of the Odyssey:

At the root it was black, but its flower was like milk. Moly the gods call it, and it is hard for mortal man to dig; but the gods are all-powerful.

The Manticore

Pliny (VIII, 30) informs us that according to Ctesias, the Greek physician of Artaxerxes Mnemon, among the Ethiopians there is an animal found, which he calls the mantichora; it has a triple row of teeth, which fit into each other like those of a comb, the face and ears of a man, and azure eyes, is of the colour of blood, has the body of the lion, and a tail ending in a sting, like that of the scorpion. Its voice resembles the union of the sound of the flute and the trumpet; it is of excessive swiftness, and is particularly fond of human flesh.

Flaubert has improved upon this description, and in the last pages of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, we read:

The
Manticore a gigantic red lion with a human face and three rows of teeth.

‘The iridescence of my scarlet hide blends into the shimmering brightness of the desert sands. Through my nostrils I exhale the horror of the lonely places of the earth. I spit out pestilence. I consume armies when they venture into the desert.

‘My nails are twisted into talons, like drills, and my teeth are cut like those of a saw; my restless tail prickles with darts, which I shoot left and right, before me, behind. Watch!’

The Manticore shoots the quills of its tail, which spread out like arrows on every hand. Drops of blood drip down, spattering the leaves of the trees.

The Mermecolion

The Mermecolion is an inconceivable animal defined by Flaubert in this way: ‘lion in its foreparts, ant in its hindparts, with the organs of its sex the wrong way’. The history of this monster is also strange. In the Scriptures (Job IV: II) we read: ‘The old lion perisheth for lack of prey.’ The Hebrew text has layish for lion; this word, an uncommon one for the lion, seems to have produced an equally uncommon translation. The Septuagint version, harking back to an Arabian lion that Aelian and Strabo call myrmex, forged the word Mermecolion. After centuries, the origin of this was forgotten. Myrmex, in Greek, means ant; out of the puzzling words The ant-lion perisheth for lack of prey’ grew a fantasy (translated below by T. H. White) that medieval bestiaries succeeded in multiplying:

The Physiologus said: It had the face (or fore-part) of a lion and the hinder parts of an ant. Its father eats flesh, but its mother grains. If then they engender the ant-lion, they engender a thing of two natures, such that it cannot eat flesh because of the nature of its mother, nor grains because of the nature of its father. It perishes, therefore, because it has no nutriment.

The Minotaur

The idea of a house built so that people could become lost in it is perhaps more unusual than that of a man with a bull’s head, but both ideas go well together and the image of the labyrinth fits with the image of the Minotaur. It is equally fitting that in the centre of a monstrous house there be a monstrous inhabitant.

The Minotaur, half bull and half man, was born of the furious passion of Pasiphae, Queen of Crete, for a white bull that Neptune brought out of the sea. Daedalus, who invented the artifice that carried the Queen’s unnatural desires to gratification, built the labyrinth destined to confine and keep hidden her monstrous son. The Minotaur fed on human flesh and for its nourishment the King of Crete imposed on the city of Athens a yearly tribute of seven young men and seven maidens. Theseus resolved to deliver his country from this burden when it fell to his lot to be sacrificed to the Minotaur’s hunger. Ariadne, the King’s daughter, gave him a thread so that he could trace his way out of the windings of the labyrinth’s corridors; the hero killed the Minotaur and was able to escape from the maze.

Ovid in a line that is meant to be clever speaks of the Semibovemque virum, semivirumque bovem (‘the man half bull, the bull half man’). Dante, who was familiar with the writings of the ancients but not with their coins or monuments, imagined the Minotaur with a man’s head and a bull’s body (Inferno, XII, 1-30).

The worship of the bull and of the two-headed axe (whose name was labrys and may have been at the root of the word labyrinth) was typical of pre-Hellenic religions, which held sacred bullfights. Human forms with bull heads figured, to judge by wall paintings, in the demonology of Crete. Most likely the Greek fable of the Minotaur is a late and clumsy version of far older myths, the shadow of other dreams still more full of horror.

The Monkey of the Inkpot

This animal, common in the north, is four or five inches long; its eyes are scarlet and its fur is jet black, silky, and soft as a pillow. It is marked by a curious instinct the taste for India ink. When a person sits down to write, the monkey squats cross-legged near by with one forepaw folded over the other, waiting until the task is over. Then it drinks what is left of the ink, and afterwards sits back on its haunches, quiet and satisfied.

Wang
Tai-hai
(1791)

The Monster Acheron

Only one person, one time, ever saw the monster Acheron; this took place in the twelfth century in the Irish town of Cork. The original version of the story, written in Gaelic, is now lost, but a Benedictine monk from Regensburg (Ratisbon) translated it into Latin, and from this translation the tale passed into a number of languages, among them Swedish and Spanish. Of the Latin version there are some fifty-odd manuscripts extant, agreeing in all the essentials. Visio Tundali (Tundal’s Vision) is the story’s name, and it has been considered one of the sources of Dante’s poem. Let us begin with the word ‘Acheron’. In the tenth book of the Odyssey it is one of the rivers of hell, flowing somewhere on the western borders of the inhabited world. Its name is reechoed in the Aeneid, in Lucan’s Pharsalia, and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Dante engraves it in a line: Su la trista riviera d’Acheronte (‘On the sad shores of the Acheron’).

In one myth, Acheron is a Titan suffering punishment; in another, dating earlier, he is placed close to the South Pole, below the constellations of the antipodes. The Etruscans had ‘books of fate’ that taught divination and ‘books of Acheron’ that taught the ways of the soul after bodily death. In time, Acheron came to stand for hell.

Tundal was an Irish gentleman, well-mannered and brave, but of hardly irreproachable habits. He once fell ill while at the home of a lady friend, and for three days and nights was taken for dead, except for a bit of warmth in his heart. When he recovered his senses, he told that his guardian angel had shown him the lands beyond this world. Of the many wonders he saw, the one which interests us here is the monster Acheron. He is bigger than any mountain. His eyes flame and his mouth is so large that nine thousand persons could fit in it. Two damned men, like pillars or atlantes, prop it open; one stands on his feet, the other on his head. Three throats lead inside and belch undying fire. From deep in the beast’s belly comes the continuous wailing of the countless lost souls who are being devoured. Devils tell Tundal that the monster is called Acheron. His guardian angel deserts him, and Tundal is swept inside with the others. There he finds himself in the midst of tears, darkness, gnashing teeth, fire, unbearable burning, icy cold, dogs, bears, lions, and snakes. In this legend, hell is a beast with other beasts inside it.

In 1758, Emanuel Swedenborg wrote: ‘It has not been granted me to perceive Hell’s general shape, but I have been told that in the same way that Heaven has a human shape. Hell has the shape of a devil.’

The Mother of Tortoises

Twenty-two centuries before the Christian era, the good emperor Yü the Great travelled and measured with his steps the Nine Mountains, the Nine Rivers, and the Nine Marshes, and divided the land into Nine Provinces fit for virtue and agriculture. In this way he held back the Waters that threatened to flood Heaven and Earth, and left us this account of his Public Works (Legge’s translation):

I mounted my four conveyances (carts, boats, sledges, and spiked shoes), and all along the hills hewed down the woods, at the same time, along with Yi, showing the multitudes how to get flesh to eat. I opened passages for the streams throughout the nine provinces, and conducted them to the sea. I deepened the channels and canals, and conducted them to the streams, at the same time, along with Chi, sowing grain, and showing the multitudes how to procure the food of toil in addition to flesh meat.

Historians tell that the manner in which he divided his territory was revealed to him by a supernatural or sacred Tortoise that arose from the bed of a river. There are those who claim that this amphibious creature, the mother of all Tortoises, was made of water and fire; others attribute a less common substance to it: starlight of the constellation Sagittarius. On the Tortoise’s shell could be read a cosmic treatise called the Hong Fan (Universal Rule), or a diagram made of black and white dots of the Nine Subdivisions of that treatise.

To the Chinese, the heavens are hemispherical and the earth quadrangular, and so, in the Tortoise with its curved upper shell and flat lower shell, they find an image or model of the world. Moreover, Tortoises share in cosmic longevity; it is therefore fitting that they should be included among the spiritually endowed creatures (together with the unicorn, the dragon, the phoenix, and the tiger) and that soothsayers read the future in the pattern of their shells.

Than-Qui (Tortoise-Spirit) is the name of the creature that revealed the Hong Fan to the emperor.

The Nagas

Nagas belong to the mythology of India. They are serpents but often take the form of a man.

In one of the books of the Mahabharata, Arjuna is pursued by Ulupi, the daughter of a Naga king, and firmly but gently has to remind her of his vow of chastity; the maiden tells him that his duty lies in soothing the unhappy. The hero grants her a night. The Buddha, meditating under a fig tree, is chastised by the wind and the rain; a Naga out of pity coils itself around him in a sevenfold embrace and opens over him its seven heads so as to form a kind of umbrella. The Buddha converts him to the Faith.

Kern in his Manual of Indian Buddhism, speaks of the Nagas as cloudlike serpents. They live underground in deep palaces. Believers in the Greater Vehicle tell that the Buddha preached one law to mankind and another to the gods, and that this latter the secret law was kept in the heavens and palaces of the serpents, who revealed it centuries later to the monk Nagarjuna.

We give an Indian legend set down by the Chinese pilgrim Fa-hsien early in the fifth century:

King Asoka came to a lake near whose edge stood a lofty pagoda. He thought of pulling it down in order to raise a higher one. A Brahman let him into the tower and once inside told him:

‘My human form is an illusion. I am really a Naga, a dragon. My sins condemn me to inhabit this frightful body, but I obey the law preached by the Buddha and hope to work my redemption. You may pull down this shrine if you believe you can build a better one.’

The Naga showed him the vessels of the altar. The king looked at them with alarm, for they were quite unlike those made by the hands of men, and he left the pagoda standing.

The Nasnas

Among the monstrous creatures of the Temptation is the Nasnas, which ‘has only one eye, one cheek, one hand, one leg, half a torso and half a heart’. A commentator, Jean Claude Margolin, credits the invention of this beast to Flaubert, but Lane in the first volume of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (1839) says it is believed to be the offspring of the Shikk, a demonical creature divided longitudinally, and a human being. The Nasnas, according to Lane (who gives it as Nesnás), resembles ‘half a human being; having half a head, half a body, one arm, and one leg, with which it hops with much agility . . .’ It is found in the woods and desert country of Yemen and Hadhramaut, and is endowed with speech. One race has its face in the breast, like the blemies, and a tail like that of a sheep. Its flesh is sweet and much sought after. Another variety of Nasnas, having the wings of a bat, inhabits the island of Ráïj (perhaps Borneo) at the edge of the China seas. ‘But God,’ adds the sceptical authority, ‘is All-Knowing.’

The Norns

In medieval Norse mythology the Norns are the Fates. Snorri Sturluson, who at the beginning of the thirteenth century brought order to the scattered Northern myths, tells us that the Norns are three and that their names are Urth (the past), Verthandi (the present), and Skuld (the future). These three heavenly Norns ruled the fate of the world, while at the birth of every man three individual Norns were present, casting the weird of his life. It may be suspected that the names of the Norns are a refinement or addition of a theological nature; ancient Germanic tribes were incapable of such abstract thinking. Snorri shows us three maidens by a fountain at the base of the World Tree, Yggdrasil. Inexorably, they weave our fate.

Time (of which they are made) seemed to have quite forgotten them, but around 1606 William Shakespeare wrote the tragedy of Macbeth, in whose first scene they appear. They are the three witches who predict what fate holds in store for Banquo and Macbeth. Shakespeare calls them the weird sisters (I, iii):

The weird sisters, hand in hand,

Posters of the seas and land,

Thus do go about, about . . .

Wyrd among the Anglo-Saxons was the silent goddess who presided over the destiny of gods and men.

The Nymphs

Paracelsus limited their dominion to water, but the ancients thought the world was full of Nymphs. They distinguished them by names according to the places they haunted. The Dryads, or Hamadryads, dwelled in trees, without being seen, and died with them. Other Nymphs were held to be immortal or, as Plutarch obscurely intimates, lived for above 9,720 years. Among these were the Nereids and the Oceanids, which presided over the sea. Nymphs of the lakes and streams were Naiads; those of mountains and caves, Oreads. There were also Nymphs of the glens, called Napaeae, and of groves called Alseids. The exact number of the Nymphs is unknown; Hesiod gives us the figure three thousand. They were earnest young women and very beautiful; their name may mean simply ‘marriageable woman’. Glimpsing them could cause blindness and, if they were naked, death. A line of Propertius affirms this.

The ancients made them offerings of honey, olive oil, and milk. They were minor goddesses, but no temples were erected in their honour.

The Odradek

Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to account for it on that basis. Others again believe it to be of German origin, only influenced by Slavonic. The uncertainty of both interpretations allows one to assume with justice that neither is accurate, especially as neither of them provides an intelligent meaning of the word.

No one, of course, would occupy himself with such studies if there were not a creature called Odradek. At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colours. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs.

One is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a brokendown remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no sign of it; nowhere is there an unfinished or unbroken surface to suggest anything of the kind; the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished. In any case, closer scrutiny is impossible, since Odradek is extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid hold of.

He lurks by turns in the garret, the stairway, the lobbies, the entrance hall. Often for months on end he is not to be seen; then he has presumably moved into other houses; but he always comes faithfully back to our house again. Many a time when you go out of the door and he happens just to be leaning directly beneath you against the banisters you feel inclined to speak to him. Of course, you put no difficult questions to him, you treat him he is so diminutive that you cannot help it rather like a child.

‘Well, what’s your name?’ you ask him. ‘Odradek,’ he says.

‘And where do you live?’ ‘No fixed abode,’ he says and laughs; but it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves. And that is usually the end of the conversation. Even these answers are not always forthcoming; often he stays mute for a long time, as wooden as his appearance.

I ask myself, to no purpose, what is likely to happen to him? Can he possibly die? Anything that dies has had some kind of aim in life, some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not apply to Odradek. Am I to suppose, then, that he will always be rolling down the stairs, with ends of thread trailing after him, right before the feet of my children, and my children’s children? He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful.

Franz
Kafka:
The Penal Colony
(Translated from the German by Willa and Edwin Muir)

[This piece was originally titled Die Sorge des Hausvaters — ‘The Cares of a Family Man’.]

An Offspring of Leviathan

In the Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century compendium of lives of the saints written by the Dominican friar Jacobus de Voragine, read and re-read in the Middle Ages but now neglected, we find much curious lore. The book went through numerous editions and translations, among them the one into English printed by William Caxton. Chaucer’s ‘Second Nonne’s Tale’ has its source in the Legenda aurea; Longfellow also was inspired by the work of Jacobus, taking the, title from the Golden Legend for one of the books of his trilogy Christus.

Out of Jacobus’ medieval Latin, we translate the following from the chapter on St Martha (CV [100]):

There was at that time, in a certain wood above the Rhone between Arles and Avignon, a dragon that was half beast and half fish, larger than an ox and longer than a horse. Armed with a pair of tusks that were like swords and pointed as horns, it lay in wait in the river, killing all wayfarers and swamping boats. It had come, however, from the sea of Galatia in Asia Minor and was begotten by Leviathan, the fiercest of all water serpents, and by the Wild Ass, which is common to those shores . . .

One-Eyed Beings

Before it became the name of an optical instrument, the word ‘monocle’ was applied to beings who had a single eye. So, in a sonnet composed at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Góngora writes of the Monóculo galán de Galatea (‘The monocle who yearns for Galatea’) referring, of course, to Polyphemus, of whom he had previously written in his Fábula de Polifemo:

Un monte era de miembros eminente

Este que, de Neptuno hijo fiero,

De un ojo ilustra el orbe de su frente,

Émulo casi del mayor lucero;

Cíclope a quien el pino más valiente

Bastón le obedecía tan ligero,

Y al grave peso junco tan delgado,

Que un día era bastón y otro caiado.

Negro el cabello, imitador undoso

De las oscuras aguas del Leteo,

Al viento que le peina proceloso

Vuela sin orden, pende sin aseo;

Un torrente es su barba impetuoso

Que, adusto hijo de este Pirineo,

Su pecho inunda, o tarde o mal o en vano

Surcada aún de los dedos de su mano.

[An eminent peak of limbs he was, this uncouth son of Neptune, lighting the orb of his forehead with an eye almost rivaling the greatest star; a Cyclops to whom the stoutest pine obeyed as a light cane, and was to his bulky mass a reed so slender that one day it was a walking-stick and the next a shepherd’s crook.

Jet black his hair, a wavy imitator of the dark waters of the Lethe, in the wind which stormily combs it, blowing in a tangle and dangling in disorder; a plunging torrent is his beard, which stern son of this Pyrenee overflows his breast, too late or badly or in vain furrowed by the fingers of his hand.]

These lines outdo and are weaker than others from the third book of the Aeneid (praised by Quintilian), which in turn outdo and are weaker than still other lines from the ninth book of the Odyssey. This literary decline matches a decline in the poet’s faith; Virgil wishes to impress us with his Polyphemus, but scarcely believes in him; and Góngora believes only in words or in verbal trickery.

The Cyclops were not the only race of men having one eye; Pliny (VII, 2) also mentions the Arimaspians, a nation remarkable for having but one eye, and that placed in the middle of the forehead. This race is said to carry on a perpetual warfare with the Griffons, a kind of monster, with wings as they are commonly represented, for the gold which they dig out of the mines, and which these wild beasts retain and keep watch over with a singular degree of cupidity, while the Arimaspi are equally desirous to get possession of it.

Five hundred years earlier, the first encyclopedist, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, had written (III, 116):

This is also plain, that to the north of Europe there is by far more gold than elsewhere. In this matter again I cannot with certainty say how the gold is got; some will have it that one-eyed men called Arimaspians steal it from griffons. But this too I hold incredible, that there can be men in all else like other men, yet having but one eye.

The Panther

In medieval bestiaries the word ‘panther’ deals with a very different animal from the carnivorous mammal of present-day zoology. Aristotle had written that it gives off a sweet smell attractive to other animals; Aelian the Roman author nicknamed ‘Honey-Tongued’ for his perfect command of Greek, a language he preferred to Latin stated that this odour was also pleasant to men. (In this characteristic some see a confusion of the Panther with the civet cat.) Pliny endowed the Panther’s back with a large circular spot that waxed and waned with the moon. To these marvelous circumstances came to be added the fact that the Bible, in the Septuagint version, uses the word ‘panther’ in a verse (Hosea, V: 14) that may be a prophetic reference to Jesus: ‘I am become as a panther to Ephraim.’

In the Anglo-Saxon bestiary of the Exeter Book, the Panther is a gentle, solitary beast with a melodious voice and sweet breath (likened elsewhere to the smell of allspice) that makes its home in a secret den in the mountains. Its only foe is the dragon, with which it fights incessantly. After a full meal it sleeps and ‘On the third day when he wakes, a lofty, sweet, ringing sound comes from his mouth, and with the song a most delightful stream of sweet-smelling breath, more grateful than all the blooms of herbs and blossoms of the trees.’ Multitudes of men and animals flock to its den from the fields and castles and towns, drawn on by the fragrance and the music. The dragon is the age-old enemy, the Devil; the waking is the resurrection of the Lord; the multitudes are the community of the faithful; and the Panther is Jesus Christ. To attenuate the amazement this allegory can awaken, let us remember that the Panther was not a wild beast to the Saxons but an exotic sound unsupported by any very concrete image. It may be added, as a curiosity, that Eliot’s poem ‘Gerontion’ speaks of ‘Christ the tiger’.

Leonardo da Vinci notes:

The African panther is like a lion, but with longer legs, and a more slender body. It is completely white, spattered with black spots like rosettes. Its beauty delights the other animals, which would all flock to it were it not for the panther’s terrible stare. Aware of this, the panther lowers its eyes; other animals approach it to drink in such beauty, and the panther pounces on the nearest of them.

The Pelican

The Pelican of everyday zoology is a water bird with a wingspan of some six feet and a very long bill whose lower mandible distends to form a pouch for holding fish. The Pelican of fable is smaller and its bill is accordingly shorter and sharper. Faithful to popular etymology pelicanus, white-haired the plumage of the former is white while that of the latter is yellow and sometimes green. (The real origin of pelican is from the Greek ‘I hew with an axe’, in a confusion of its large bill with that of the woodpecker’s.) But more unusual than its appearance are its habits. With its bill and claws, the mother bird caresses her offspring with such devotion that she kills them. After three days the father arrives and, despairing over the deaths of his young, rips at his own breast with his bill. The blood that spills from his wounds revives the dead birds. This is the account given in medieval bestiaries, though St Jerome in a commentary on the 102nd Psalm (‘I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert’) attributes the death of the nestlings to the serpent. That the Pelican opens its breast and feeds its young with its own blood is the common version of the fable.

Blood that gives life to the dead suggests the Eucharist and the cross, and so a famous line of the Paradiso (XXV, 113) calls Jesus Christ nostro Pellicano — mankind’s Pelican. The Latin commentary by Benvenuto of Imola amplifies this point: ‘He is called pelican because he opened his side for our salvation, like the pelican that revives its dead brood with the blood of its breast. The pelican is an Egyptian Bird.’

The Pelican is common in ecclesiastical heraldry and it is still engraved on chalices. The bestiary by Leonardo da Vinci describes the Pelican in this way:

It is greatly devoted to its young and, finding them in the nest killed by snakes, tears at its breast, bathing them with its blood to bring them back to life.

The Peryton

The Sibyl of Erythraea, it is said, foretold that the city of Rome would finally be destroyed by the Perytons. In the year a.d.
642 the record of the Sibyl's prophecies was consumed in the great conflagration of Alexandria; the grammarians who undertook the task of restoring certain charred fragments of the nine volumes apparently never came upon the special prophecy concerning the fate of Rome.

In time it was deemed necessary to find a source that would throw greater light upon this dimly remembered tradition. After many vicissitudes it was learned that in the sixteenth century a rabbi from Fez (in all likelihood Jakob Ben Chaim) had left behind a historical treatise in which he quoted the now lost work of a Greek scholiast, which included certain historical facts about the Perytons obviously taken from the oracles before the Library of Alexandria was burned by Omar. The name of the learned Greek has not come down to us, but his fragments run:

The Perytons had their original dwelling in Atlantis and are half deer, half bird. They have the deer’s head and legs. As for its body, it is perfectly avian, with corresponding wings and plumage . . .

Its strangest trait is that, when the sun strikes it, instead of casting a shadow of its own body, it casts the shadow of a man. From this, some conclude that the Perytons are the spirits of wayfarers who have died far from their homes and from the care of their gods . . .. . . and have been surprised eating dry earth . . . flying in flocks and have been seen at a dizzying height above the Columns of Hercules.

. . . they [Perytons] are mortal foes of the human race; when they succeed in killing a man, their shadow is that of their own body and they win back the favour of their gods.

. . . and those who crossed the seas with Scipio to conquer Carthage came close to failure, for during the passage a formation of Perytons swooped down on the ships, killing and mangling many . . . Although our weapons have no effect against it, the animal if such it be can kill no more than a single man.

. . . wallowing in the gore of its victims and then fleeing upward on its powerful wings.

. . . in Ravenna, where they were last seen, telling of their plumage which they described as light blue in colour, which greatly surprised me for all that is known of their dark green feathers.

Though these excerpts are sufficiently explicit, it is to be lamented that down to our own time no further intelligence about the Perytons has reached us. The rabbi’s treatise, which preserved this description for us, had been on deposit until before the last World War in the library of the University of Dresden. It is painful to say that this document has also disappeared, and whether as a consequence of bombardment or of the earlier book burning of the Nazis, it is not known. Let us hope that one day another copy of the work may be discovered and again come to adorn the shelves of some library.

The Phoenix

In monumental effigies, in pyramids of stone, and in treasured mummies, the Egyptians sought eternity. It is therefore appropriate that their country should have given rise to the myth of a cyclical and deathless bird, though its subsequent elaboration is the work of Greece and of Rome. Adolf Erman writes that in the mythology of Heliopolis, the Phoenix (benu) is the lord of jubilees or of long cycles of time. Herodotus, in a famous passage (II, 73), tells with insistent scepticism an early form of the legend:

Another bird also is sacred; it is called the phoenix. I myself have never seen it, but only pictures of it; for the bird comes but seldom into Egypt, once in five hundred years, as the people of Heliopolis say. It is said that the phoenix comes when his father dies. If the picture truly shows his size and appearance, his plumage is partly golden and partly red. He is most like an eagle in shape and bigness. The Egyptians tell a tale of this bird’s devices which I do not believe. He comes, they say, from Arabia bringing his father to the Sun’s temple enclosed in myrrh, and there buries him. His manner of bringing is this: first he moulds an egg of myrrh as heavy as he can carry, and when he has proved its weight by lifting it he then hollows out the egg and puts his father in it, covering over with more myrrh the hollow in which the body lies; so the egg being with his father in it of the same weight as before, the phoenix, after enclosing him, carries him to the temple of the Sun in Egypt. Such is the tale of what is done by this bird.

Some five hundred years later, Tacitus and Pliny took up the wondrous tale; the former justly observed that all antiquity is obscure, but that a tradition has fixed the intervals of the Phoenix’s visits at 1,461 years (Annals, VI, 28). The latter also looked into the Phoenix’s chronology; Pliny records (X, 2) that, according to Manilius, the bird’s life coincides with the period of the Platonic year, or Great Year. A Platonic year is the time required by the sun, the moon, and the five planets to return to their initial position; Tacitus in his Dialogus de Oratoribus gives this as 12,994 common years. The ancients believed that, upon fulfilment of this vast astronomical cycle, the history of the world would repeat itself in all its details under the repeated influence of the planets; the Phoenix would be a mirror or an image of this process. For a closer analogy between the cosmos and the Phoenix, it should be recalled that, according to the Stoics, the universe dies in fire and is reborn in fire and that the cycle had no beginning and will have no end.

Time simplified the method of the Phoenix’s generation.

Herodotus speaks of an egg and Pliny of a maggot, but the poet Claudian at the end of the fourth century already celebrates an immortal bird that rises out of its own ashes, an heir to itself and a witness of the ages.

Few myths have been as widespread as that of the Phoenix. In addition to the authors already cited, we may add: Ovid (Metamorphoses, XV), Dante (Inferno, XXIV), Pellicer (The Phoenix and its Natural History), Quevedo (Spanish Parnassus, VI), and Milton (Samson Agonistes, in fine). Shakespeare at the close of Henry VIII (V, iv) wrote these fine verses:

But as when

The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,

Her ashes new create another heir,

As great in admiration as herself . . .

We may also mention the Latin poem ‘De Arte Phoenice’, which has been attributed to Lactantius, and an Anglo-Saxon imitation of it dating from the eighth century. Tertulius, St Ambrose, and Cyrillus of Jerusalem have used the Phoenix as a proof of the resurrection of the flesh. Pliny pokes fun at the physicians who prescribe pills compounded of the nest and ashes of the Phoenix.

The Pygmies

In the knowledge of the ancients, this nation of dwarfs measuring twenty-seven inches in height dwelled in the mountains beyond the utmost limits of India or of Ethiopia. Pliny states that they built their cabins of mud mixed with feathers and eggshells. Aristotle allots them underground dens. For the harvest of wheat they wielded axes, as though they were out to chop down a forest. Each year they were attacked by flocks of cranes whose home lay on the Russian steppe. Riding rams and goats, the Pygmies retaliated by destroying the eggs and nests of their foes. These expeditions of war kept them busy for the space of three months out of every twelve.

Pygmy was also the name of a Carthaginian god whose face was carved as a figurehead on warships in order to spread terror among the enemy.

The Rain Bird

When rain is needed, Chinese farmers have at their disposal besides the dragon the bird called the shang yang. It has only one leg. Long ago, children hopped up and down on one foot, wrinkling their brows and repeating: ‘It will thunder, it will rain, ’cause the shang yang’s here again!’ The tradition runs that the bird drew water from the rivers with its beak and blew it out as rain on the thirsting fields.

An ancient wizard had tamed it and used to carry it perched on his sleeve. Historians tell us that it once paraded back and forth before the throne of the Prince of Ch’i, hopping about and flapping its wings. The Prince, greatly taken aback, sent his chief minister to the Court of Lu to consult Confucius. The Sage foretold that the shang yang would cause the whole countryside and near-by regions to be flooded unless dikes and channels were built at once. The Prince was not deaf to the Sage’s warning, and so in his domain countless damage and disaster were avoided.

The Remora

Remora, in Latin, means ‘delay’ or ‘hindrance’. This is the strict meaning of the word which was figuratively applied to the Echeneis, a genus of sucking fishes credited with the power of holding a ship fast by clinging to it. The Remora is a fish of an ashen hue; on the top of its head it has a cartilaginous disc with which it creates a vacuum that enables it to cling to other underwater creatures. Here is Pliny’s acclamation of its powers (IX, 41):

There is a quite small fish that frequents rocks, called the sucking-fish. This is believed to make ships go more slowly by sticking to their hulls, from which it has received its name; and for this reason it also has an evil reputation for supplying a love-charm and for acting as a spell to hinder litigation in the courts, which accusations it counterbalances only by its laudable property of stopping fluxes of the womb in pregnant women and holding back the offspring till the time of birth. It is not included however among articles of diet. It is thought by some to have feet, but Aristotle denies this, adding that its limbs resemble wings.

(Pliny then goes on to describe the murex, a variety of purple fish also credited with bringing ships under full sail to a standstill: ‘. . . it is a foot long and four inches wide, and hinders ships, and moreover . . . when preserved in salt it has the power of drawing out gold that has fallen into the deepest wells when it is brought near them.’)

It is remarkable how from the idea of delaying ships the Remora came to be associated with delays in lawsuits and later with delayed births. Elsewhere, Pliny tells that a Remora decided the fate of the Roman Empire in the Battle of Actium, detaining the galley in which Mark Antony was reviewing his fleet, and that another Remora stopped Caligula’s ship despite the efforts of its four hundred oarsmen.

‘Winds blow and storms rage,’ exclaims Pliny, ‘but the Remora overmasters their fury and holds ships fast, achieving what the heaviest of anchors and the thickest of hawsers could never achieve.’

‘The mightiest power does not always prevail. A ship may be detained by a small remora,’ repeats the fine Spanish writer Diego de Saavedra Fajardo in his Political Emblems (1640).

The Rukh

The Rukh (or as it is sometimes given, roc) is a vast magnification of the eagle or vulture, and some people have thought that a condor blown astray over the Indian Ocean or China seas suggested it to the Arabs. Lane rejects this idea and considers that we are dealing rather with a ‘fabulous species of a fabulous genus’ or with a synonym for the Persian Simurgh. The Rukh is known to the West through the Arabian Nights, The reader will recall that Sindbad (on his second voyage), left behind by his shipmates on an island, found
a huge white dome rising in air and of vast compass. I walked all around it, but found no door thereto, nor could I muster strength or nimbleness by reason of its exceeding smoothness and slipperiness. So I marked the spot where I stood and went round about the dome to measure its circumference which I found fifty good paces.

Moments later, a huge cloud hid the sun from him and lifting my head . . . I saw that the cloud was none other than an enormous bird, of gigantic girth and inordinately wide of wing . . .

The bird was a Rukh and the white dome, of course, was its egg. Sindbad lashes himself to the bird’s leg with his turban, and the next morning is whisked off into flight and set down on a mountaintop, without having excited the Rukh’s attention. The narrator adds that the Rukh feeds itself on serpents of such great bulk that they would have made but one gulp of an elephant’.

In Marco Polo’s Travels (III, 36) we read:

The people of the island [of Madagascar] report that at a certain season of the year, an extraordinary kind of bird, which they call a rukh, makes its appearance from the southern region. In form it is said to resemble the eagle but it is incomparably greater in size; being so large and strong as to seize an elephant with its talons, and to lift it into the air, from whence it lets it fall to the ground, in order that when dead it may prey upon the carcass. Persons who have seen this bird assert that when the wings are spread they measure sixteen paces in extent, from point to point; and that the feathers are eight paces in length, and thick in proportion.

Marco Polo adds that some envoys from China brought the feather of a Rukh back to the Grand Khan. A Persian illustration in Lane shows the Rukh bearing off three elephants in beak and talons; ‘with the proportion of a hawk and field mice’, Burton notes.

The Salamander

Not only is it a small dragon that lives in fire, it is also (according to one dictionary) ‘an insectivorous batrachian with intensely black smooth skin and yellow spots’. Of these two characters, the better known is the imaginary, and the Salamander’s inclusion in this book will surprise no one. In Book X of his Natural History, Pliny states that the Salamander ‘is so intensely cold as to extinguish fire by its contact, in the same way that ice does’; later he thinks this over, observing sceptically that if what magicians said about the Salamander were true, it would be used to put out house fires. In Book XI, he speaks of a four-footed, winged insect called the ‘pyrallis’ or ‘pyrausta’ living ‘in the copper-smelting furnaces of Cyprus, in the very midst of the fire’; if it comes out into the air and flies a short distance, it will instantly die. The Salamander in man’s memory has incorporated this now forgotten animal.

The phoenix was used as an argument by theologians to prove the resurrection of the flesh; the Salamander, as a proof that bodies can live in fire. In Book XXI of the City of God by St Augustine, there is a chapter called Whether an earthly body may possibly be incorruptible by fire, and it opens in this way:

What then shall I say unto the unbelievers, to prove that a body carnal and living may endure undissolved both against death and the force of eternal fire. They will not allow us to ascribe this unto the power of God, but urge us to produce it to them by some example. We shall answer them that there are some creatures that are indeed corruptible, because mortal, and yet do live untouched in the middle of the fire.

Poets, also, flock to the Salamander and phoenix as devices of rhetorical emphasis. Quevedo in the sonnets of the fourth book of his Spanish Parnassus, which ‘celebrates the exploits of love and beauty’, writes:

Hago verdad la Fénix en la ardiente Llama, en que renaciendo me renuevo; Y la virilidad del fuego pruebo,Y que es padre y que tiene descendiente.La Salamandra fría, que desmiente Noticia docta, a defender me atrevo, Cuando en incendios, que sediento bebo, Mi corazón habita y no los siente.[I testify to the truth of the Phoenix in burning flames, since I also burn and renew myself, and I prove the maleness of fire, which can be a father and have offspring.I dare as well defend the cold Salamander, refuted by men of learning, since my heart dwells in fires, which thirstily I drink, and feels no pain.]

In the middle of the twelfth century, a forged letter supposedly sent by Prester John, the king of kings, to the Emperor of Byzantium, made its way all over Europe. This epistle, which is a catalogue of wonders, speaks of gigantic ants that dig gold, and of a River of Stones, and of a Sea of Sand with living fish, and of a towering mirror that reflects whatever happens in the kingdom, and of a sceptre carved of a single emerald, and of pebbles that make a man invisible or that light up the night. One of its paragraphs states: ‘Our realm yields the worm known as the salamander. Salamanders live in fire and make cocoons, which our court ladies spin and use to weave cloth and garments. To wash and clean these fabrics, they throw them into flames.’

Of these indestructible linens or textiles, which are cleansed by fire, there is mention in Pliny (XIX, 4) and in Marco Polo (I, 39). The latter attests that the Salamander is a substance, not an animal. Nobody, at first, believed him; goods woven of asbestos and sold as the skins of Salamanders were an unanswerable proof of the Salamander’s existence.

Somewhere in his Autobiography, Benvenuto Cellini writes that at the age of five he saw a tiny animal like a lizard playing in the fire. He told this to his father, who said that the animal was a Salamander and gave his son a sound beating so that the remarkable vision, seldom vouchsafed to man, would stick forever in the boy’s memory.

To the alchemists the Salamander was the spirit of the element fire. In this symbol and in an argument of Aristotle’s, preserved for us by Cicero in the first book of his On the Nature of the Gods, we find the reason why men believed in the Salamander of legend. The Sicilian physician Empedocles of Agrigentum had formulated the proposition of the four ‘roots’, or elements of matter, whose opposition and affinity, governed by Discord and Love, made up the cosmic process. There is no death; there are only particles of ‘roots’, which the Romans were to call ‘elements’, and which are either falling apart or coming together. These elements are fire, earth, air, and water. They are eternal and none is stronger than any other. Now we know (now we think we know) that this doctrine is false, but men once thought it valuable, and it is generally held that it was on the whole beneficial. Theodor Gomperz has written that ‘The four elements which make up and support the world, and which still survive in poetry and in popular imagination, have a long and glorious history.’ The system demanded parity: since there were animals of earth and water, animals of fire were needed. For the dignity of science it was essential that Salamanders exist. In a parallel fashion, Aristotle speaks of animals of the air.

Leonardo da Vinci had it that the Salamander fed on fire and in this way renewed its skin.

The Satyrs

Satyrs was the Greek name for them; Rome called them Fauns, Pans, and Sylvans. In the lower part of the body they were goats; their torso, arms, and head were human. Satyrs were thickly covered with hair and had short horns, pointed ears, active eyes, and hooked noses. They were lascivious and fond of their wine. They attended Bacchus in his rollicking and bloodless conquest of India. They set ambushes for nymphs, relished dancing, and their instrument was the flute. Country people paid homage to them, offering them the first fruits of the harvest. Lambs were also sacrificed in their honour.

In Roman times, a specimen of these demigods was surprised asleep in his mountain den in Thessaly by some of Sulla’s soldiers, who brought him before their general. The Satyr uttered inarticulate sounds and was so loathsome to the eyes and nostrils that Sulla had him at once sent back to the wilderness.

A memory of the Satyrs lived on in the medieval image of devils. The word ‘satire’ seems to have no connection with satyr; most etymologists trace satire back to satura lanx, a composite dish, hence a mixed literary composition, like the writings of Juvenal.

Scylla

Before becoming a monster and then turned into rocks, Scylla was a nymph with whom Glaucus, one of the sea gods, had fallen in love. In order to win her, Glaucus sought the help of Circe whose knowledge of herbs and incantations was well known. But Circe became attached to Glaucus on sight, only she was unable to get him to forget Scylla, and so to punish her rival she poured the juice of poisonous herbs into the fountain where the nymph bathed. At this point, according to Ovid (Metamorphoses, XIV, 59-67):

Scylla comes and wades waist-deep into the water; when all at once she sees her loins disfigured with barking monster-shapes. And at the first, not believing that these are parts of her own body, she flees in fear and tries to drive away the boisterous, barking things. But what she flees she takes along with her; and, feeling for her thighs, her legs, her feet, she finds in place of these only gaping dogs’ heads, such as a Cerberus might have. She stands on ravening dogs, and her docked loins and her belly are enclosed in a circle of beastly forms.

She then found herself supported by twelve feet, and she had six heads, each with three rows of teeth. This metamorphosis so terrified her that she threw herself into the strait separating Italy and Sicily, where the gods changed her into rocks. During storms, sailors speak of the dreadful roaring of the breakers when driven into the uneven cavities of the rock.

This legend is also found in the pages of Homer and Pausanias.

The Sea Horse

Unlike most other imaginary animals, the Sea Horse is not a composite creature; it is no more than a wild horse whose dwelling place is the sea and who comes ashore only on moonless nights when the breezes bring him the smell of mares. On some undetermined island maybe Borneo the herders hobble the king’s finest mares along the coast and hide themselves underground. Here Sindbad saw the stallion that rose from the sea, watched it leap on to the female, and heard its cry.

The definitive edition of the Book of a Thousand and One Nights dates, according to Burton, from the thirteenth century; in this same century lived the cosmographer Zakariyya al-Qaswini who in his treatise Wonders of Creation wrote these words: ‘The sea horse is like the horse of dry land, but its mane and tail grow longer; its colour is more lustrous and its hooves are cleft like those of wild oxen, while its height is no less than the land horse’s and slightly larger than the ass’s.’ He remarks that a cross between the sea and land species produces a very beautiful breed, and singles out a certain dark pony ‘with white spots like pieces of silver’.

An eighteenth-century Chinese traveler, Wang Tai-hai, writes:

The sea horse usually appears along the coast in search of a mare; sometimes he is caught. His coat is black and shining, his tail is long and sweeps the ground. On dry land he goes like any other horse, is very tame, and in a day can travel hundreds of miles. But it is well not to bathe him in the river, for as soon as he sees water he recovers his ancient nature and swims off.

Ethnologists have looked for the origin of this Islamic fiction in the Greco-Roman fiction of the wind that makes mares fertile. In the third book of the Georgics, Virgil has set this belief to verse. Pliny’s explanation (VIII, 67) is more rigorous:

It is known that in Lusitania in the neighbourhood of Lisbon and along the Tagus, mares, when a west wind is blowing, stand facing towards it and conceive the breath of life; this produces a foal, and this is the way to breed a very swift colt, but it does not live more than three years. The historian Justinus ventures the guess that the hyperbole ‘sons of the wind’, applied to very fast horses, gave rise to this fable.

The Shaggy Beast of La Ferté-Bernard

Along the banks of the Huisne, an otherwise peaceful stream, there roamed during the Middle Ages a creature that became known as the Shaggy Beast (La velue). This animal had somehow managed to survive the Flood despite its exclusion from the Ark. It was the size of a bull, and it had a snake’s head and a round body buried under long green fur. The fur was armed with stingers whose wound was deadly.

The creatures also had very broad hooves that were similar to the feet of the tortoise, and its tail, shaped like a serpent, could kill men and cattle alike. When its anger was aroused, the Shaggy Beast shot out flames that withered crops. At night it raided stables. Whenever the farmers attempted to hunt it down, it hid in the waters of the Huisne, causing the river to flood its banks and drown the valley for miles.

The Shaggy Beast had a taste for innocent creatures, and devoured maidens and children. It would choose the purest of young womanhood, some Little Lamb (L’agnelle). One day, it waylaid one such Little Lamb and dragged her, mauled and bloody, to its lair in the riverbed. The victim’s sweetheart tracked the monster, and with a sword sliced into the Shaggy Beast’s tail, its only vulnerable spot, and cut it in two. The creature died at once. It was embalmed and its death was celebrated with fifes and drums and dancing.

The Simurgh

The Simurgh is an immortal bird that nests in the branches of the Tree of Knowledge; Burton compares it with the eagle which, according to the Younger Edda, has knowledge of many things and makes its nest in the branches of the World Tree, Yggdrasil.

Both Southey’s Thalaba (1801) and Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874) speak of the Simorg Anka; Flaubert reduces the bird’s status to that of an attendant to the Queen of Sheba, and describes it as having orange-coloured feathers like metallic scales, a small silver-coloured head with a human face, four wings, a vulture’s talons, and a long, long peacock’s tail. In the original sources the Simurgh is a far more important being. Firdausi in the Book of Kings, which compiles and sets to verse ancient Iranian legends, makes the bird the foster father of Zal, father of the poem’s hero; Farid al-Din Attar, in the twelfth century, makes it a symbol of the godhead. This takes place in the Mantiq al-Tayr (Parliament of Birds). The plot of this allegory, made up of some 4,500 couplets, is striking. The distant king of birds, the Simurgh, drops one of his splendid feathers somewhere in the middle of China; on learning of this, the other birds, tired of their present anarchy, decide to seek him. They know that the king’s name means ‘thirty birds’; they know that his castle lies in the Kaf, the mountain or range of mountains that ring the earth. At the outset, some of the birds lose heart: the nightingale pleads his love for the rose; the parrot pleads his beauty, for which he lives caged; the partridge cannot do without his home in the hills, nor the heron without his marsh, nor the owl without his ruins. But finally, certain of them set out on the perilous venture; they cross seven valleys or seas, the next to last bearing the name Bewilderment, the last the name Annihilation. Many of the pilgrims desert; the journey takes its toll among the rest. Thirty, made pure by their sufferings, reach the great peak of the Simurgh. At last they behold him; they realize that they are the Simurgh, and that the Simurgh is each of them and all of them.

Edward Fitzgerald translated portions of the poem under the playful title The Bird-parliament; A bird’s-eye view of Faríd-Uddín Attar’s Bird-parliament.

The cosmographer al-Qaswini, in his Wonders of Creation, states that the Simorg Anka lives for seventeen hundred years and that, upon the coming of age of its son, the father burns himself on a funeral pyre. ‘This,’ observes Lane, ‘reminds us of the phoenix.’

Sirens

Through the course of time the image of the Sirens has changed. Their first historian, Homer, in the twelfth book of the Odyssey, does not tell us what they were like; to Ovid, they are birds of reddish plumage with the faces of young girls; to Apollonius of Rhodes, in the upper part of the body they are women and in the lower part seabirds; to the Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina (and to heraldry), ‘half woman, half fish’. No less debatable is their nature. In his classical dictionary Lemprière calls them nymphs; in Quicherat’s they are monsters, and in Grimal’s they are demons. They inhabit a western island, close to Circe’s, but the dead body of one of them, Parthenope, was found washed ashore in Campania and gave her name to the famed city now called Naples. Strabo, the geographer, saw her grave and witnessed the games held periodically in her memory.

The Odyssey tells that the Sirens attract and shipwreck seamen, and that Ulysses, in order to hear their song and yet remain alive, plugged the ears of his oarsmen with wax and had himself lashed to the mast. The Sirens, tempting him, promised him knowledge of all the things of this world:

For never yet has any man rowed past this isle in his black ship until he has heard the sweet voice from our lips. Nay, he has joy of it, and goes his way a wiser man. For we know all the toils that in wide Troy the Argives and Trojans endured through the will of the gods, and we know all things that come to pass upon the fruitful earth.

A legend recorded by the mythologist Apollodorus in his Bibliotheca, tells that Orpheus, aboard the Argonauts’ ship, sang more sweetly than the Sirens and that because of this these creatures threw themselves into the sea and were changed into rocks, for their fate was to die whenever their spell went unheeded. The sphinx, also, threw herself from a precipice when her riddle was solved.

In the sixth century, a Siren was caught and baptized in northern Wales, and in certain old calendars took her place as a saint under the name Murgen. Another, in 1403, slipped through a breach in a dike and lived in Haarlem until the day of her death. Nobody could make out her speech, but she was taught to weave and she worshipped the cross as if instinctively. A chronicler of the sixteenth century argued that she was not a fish because she knew how to weave and that she was not a woman because she was able to live in water.

The English language distinguishes between the classical Siren and the mermaid, which has the tail of a fish. The making of this later image may have been influenced by the Tritons, who were lesser divinities in the court of Poseidon.

In the tenth book of Plato’s Republic, eight Sirens rule over the revolution of the eight concentric heavens.

Siren: a supposed marine animal, we read in a brutally frank dictionary.

The Sow Harnessed with Chains and other Argentine Fauna

On page 106 of his Dictionary of Argentine Folklore, Felix Coluccio records:

In the northern part of Cordoba, especially around Quilinos, people speak of a sow harnessed with chains which commonly makes its presence known in the hours of night. Those living close to the railroad station maintain that the sow slides on the tracks, and others assured us that it is not unusual for the sow to run along the telegraph wires, producing a deafening racket with its ‘chains’. As yet, nobody has caught a glimpse of the animal, for as soon as you look for it, it vanishes unaccountably.

Belief in the Sow Harnessed with Chains (chancha con cadenas), which also goes by the name of the Tin Pig (chancho de lata), is prevalent as well in the Province of Buenos Aires in slums and towns along the riverside.

There are two Argentine versions of the werewolf. One of them, common also to Uruguay and to southern Brazil, is the lobisón; but since no wolves inhabit these regions, men are supposed to take the shapes of swine or dogs. In certain towns of Entre Ríos, girls shun young men who live in the vicinity of stockyards because on Saturday nights they are said to turn into the aforementioned animals. In the midland provinces, we find the tigre capiango. This beast is not a jaguar but a man who, at will, can take the jaguar’s form. Usually his purpose is to frighten friends in a spirit of rustic jesting, but highwaymen have also availed themselves of the guise. During the civil wars of the last century, General Facundo Quiroga was popularly supposed to have under his command an entire regiment of capiangos.

The Sphinx

The Sphinx of Egyptian monuments (called by Herodotus androsphinx, or man-sphinx, in order to distinguish it from the Greek Sphinx) is a lion having the head of a man and lying at rest; it stood watch by temples and tombs, and is said to have represented royal authority. In the halls of Karnak, other Sphinxes have the head of a ram, the sacred animal of Amon. The Sphinx of Assyrian monuments is a winged bull with a man’s bearded and crowned head; this image is common on Persian gems. Pliny in his list of Ethiopian animals includes the Sphinx, of which he details no other features than ‘brown hair and two mammae on the breast’.

The Greek Sphinx has a woman’s head and breasts, the wings of a bird, and the body and feet of a lion. Some give it the body of a dog and a snake’s tail. It is told that it depopulated the Theban countryside asking riddles (for it had a human voice) and making a meal of any man who could not give the answer. Of Oedipus, the son of Jocasta, the Sphinx asked, ‘What has four legs, two legs, and three legs, and the more legs it has the weaker it is?’ (So runs what seems to be the oldest version. In time the metaphor was introduced which makes of man’s life a single day. Nowadays the question goes, ‘Which animal walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening?’) Oedipus answered that it was a man who as an infant crawls on all fours, when he grows up walks on two legs, and in old age leans on a staff. The riddle solved, the Sphinx threw herself from a precipice.

De Quincey, around 1849, suggested a second interpretation, which complements the traditional one. The subject of the riddle according to him is not so much man in general as it is Oedipus in particular, orphaned and helpless at birth, alone in his manhood, and supported by Antigone in his blind and hopeless old age.

The Squonk

(Lacrimacorpus dissolvens)

The range of the squonk is very limited. Few people outside of Pennsylvania have ever heard of the quaint beast, which is said to be fairly common in the hemlock forests of that State. The squonk is of a very retiring disposition, generally traveling about at twilight and dusk. Because of its misfitting skin, which is covered with warts and moles, it is always unhappy; in fact it is said, by people who are best able to judge, to be the most morbid of beasts. Hunters who are good at tracking are able to follow a squonk by its tear-stained trail, for the animal weeps constantly. When cornered and escape seems impossible, or when surprised and frightened, it may even dissolve itself in tears. Squonk hunters are most successful on frosty moonlight nights, when tears are shed slowly and the animal dislikes moving about; it may then be heard weeping under the boughs of dark hemlock trees. Mr. J. P. Wentling, formerly of Pennsylvania, but now at St Anthony Park, Minnesota, had a disappointing experience with a squonk near Mont Alto. He made a clever capture by mimicking the squonk and inducing it to hop into a sack, in which he was carrying it home, when suddenly the burden lightened and the weeping ceased. Wentling unslung the sack and looked in. There was nothing but tears and bubbles.

William
T. Cox:
Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, With a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts

Swedenborg’s Angels

For the last twenty-five years of his studious life, the eminent philosopher and man of science Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) resided in London. But as the English are not very talkative, he fell into the habit of conversing with devils and Angels. God granted him the privilege of visiting the Other World and of entering into the lives of its inhabitants. Christ had said that souls, in order to be admitted into Heaven, must be righteous. Swedenborg added that they must also be intelligent; later on Blake stipulated that they should be artists and poets. Swedenborg’s Angels are those souls who have chosen Heaven. They need no words; it is enough that an Angel only think of another in order to have him at his side. Two people who have loved each other on earth become a single Angel. Their world is ruled by love; every Angel is a Heaven. Their shape is that of a perfect human being; Heaven’s shape is the same. The Angels, in whatever direction they look north, east, south, or west are always face to face with God. They are, above all, divines; their chief delight lies in prayer and in the unraveling of theological problems. Earthly things are but emblems of heavenly things. The sun stands for the godhead. In Heaven there is no time; the appearance of things changes according to moods. The Angels’ garments shine according to their intelligence. The souls of the rich are richer than the souls of the poor, since the rich are accustomed to wealth. In Heaven, all objects, furniture, and cities are more physical and more complex than those of our earth; colours are more varied and splendid. Angels of English stock show a tendency to politics; Jews to the sale of trinkets; Germans tote bulky volumes which they consult before venturing an answer. Since Moslems venerate Mohammed, God has provided them with an Angel who impersonates the Prophet. The poor in spirit and hermits are denied the pleasures of Heaven, for they would be unable to enjoy them.

Swedenborg’s Devils

In the works of the famous eighteenth-century Swedish visionary, we read that Devils, like angels, are not a species apart but derive from the human race. They are individuals who after death choose Hell. There, in that region of marshlands, of desert wastes, of tangled forests, of towns levelled by fire, of brothels, and of gloomy dens, they feel no special happiness, but in Heaven they would be far unhappier still. Occasionally, a ray of heavenly light falls on them from on high; the Devils feel it as a burning, a scorching, and it reaches their nostrils as a stench. Each thinks himself handsome, but many have the faces of beasts or have shapeless lumps of flesh where faces should be; others are faceless. They live in a state of mutual hatred and of armed violence, and if they come together it is for the purpose of plotting against one another or of destroying each other. God has forbidden men and angels to draw a map of Hell, but we know that its general outline follows that of a Devil, just as the outline of Heaven follows that of an angel. The most vile and loathsome Hells lie to the west.

The Sylphs

To each of the four roots, or elements, into which the Greeks divided all matter, a particular spirit was later made to correspond. Paracelsus, the sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist and physician, gave them their names: the Gnomes of earth, the Nymphs of water, the Salamanders of fire, and the Sylphs, or Sylphides, of air. All of these words come from the Greek. The French philologist Littré traced the etymology of ‘sylph’ to the Celtic languages, but it seems quite unlikely that Paracelsus, who gave us the name, knew anything about those tongues.

No one any longer believes in the Sylphs, but the word is used as a trivial compliment applied to a slender young woman. Sylphs occupy an intermediate place between supernatural and natural beings; Romantic poets and the ballet have not neglected them.

Talos

Living beings made of metal or stone make up some of fantastic zoology’s most alarming species. Let us recall the angry bulls with brass feet and horns that breathed flames and that Jason, helped by the magic arts of Medea, yoked to the plough; Condillac’s psychological statue of sensitive marble; the boatman in the Arabian Nights, ‘a man of brass with a tablet of lead on his breast inscribed with talismans and characts’, who rescued the third Kalandar from the Magnet Mountain; the ‘girls of mild silver, or of furious gold’, which a goddess in William Blake’s mythology caught in silken nets for the delight of her lover; and the metal birds who nursed Ares.

To this list we may also add a draft animal, the swift wild boar Gullinbursti, whose name means ‘golden-bristled’. The mythologist Paul Herrmann writes: This living piece of metalwork came from the forge of skilful dwarfs; they threw a pigskin into the fire and drew out a golden boar with the power of traveling on land, sea, and air. However dark the night, there is always light enough in the boar’s path.’ Gullinbursti pulled the chariot of Freya, the Norse goddess of love, marriage, and fertility.

And then there is Talos, the warden of the island of Crete.

Some consider this giant the work of Vulcan or of Daedalus; Apollonius of Rhodes tells us about him in his Argonautica (IV, 1638-48):

And Talos, the man of bronze, as he broke off the rocks from the hard cliff, stayed them from fastening hawsers to the shore, when they came to the roadstead of Dicte’s haven. He was of the stock of bronze, of the men sprung from ash-trees, the last left among the sons of the gods; and the son of Cronos gave him to Europa to be the warder of Crete and to stride round the island thrice a day with his feet of bronze. Now in all the rest of his body and limbs was he fashioned of bronze and invulnerable; but beneath the sinew by his ankle was a blood-red vein; and this, with its issues of life and death, was covered by a thin skin.

It was through this vulnerable heel, of course, that Talos met his end. Medea bewitched him with a hostile glance, and when the giant again began heaving boulders from his cliff, ‘he grazed his ankle on a pointed crag, and the ichor gushed forth like melted lead; and not long thereafter did he stand towering on the jutting cliff’.

In another version of the myth, Talos, burning red-hot, would put his arms around a man and kill him. The bronze giant this time met death at the hands of Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri, who were led on by the sorceress Medea.

The T’ao T’ieh

Poets and mythology seem to have ignored it, but everyone at some time has discovered a T’ao T’ieh for himself at the corner of a capital or in the middle of a frieze, and felt a slight uneasiness. The dog that guarded the flocks of the threefold Geryon had two heads and a single body, and luckily was killed by Hercules. The T’ao T’ieh inverts this order and is still more horrible: its huge head is connected to one body on the right and another on the left. Generally it has six legs since the front pair serves for both bodies. Its face may be a dragon’s, a tiger’s, or a person’s; art historians call it an ‘ogre’s mask’. It is a formal monster, inspired by the demon of symmetry for sculptors, potters, and ceramicists.

Some fourteen hundred years b.c., under the Shang Dynasty, it already figured on ceremonial bronzes.

T’ao T’ieh means ‘glutton’ and it embodies the vices of sensuality and avarice. The Chinese paint it on their dishes in order to warn against self-indulgence.

Thermal Beings

It was revealed to the visionary and theosophist Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) that this planet, before it was the earth we now know, passed through a solar stage, and before that through a Saturnian stage. Man today is composed of a physical body, of an ethereal body, of an astral body, and of an ego; at the start of the Saturnian period he was a physical body only. This body was neither visible nor tangible, since at that time there were on earth neither solids nor liquids nor gases. There were only states of heat, thermal forms, defining in cosmic space regular and irregular figures; each man, each being, was an organism made of changing temperatures. According to the testimony of Steiner, mankind during the Saturnian period was a blind, deaf, and insensitive multitude of articulated states of heat and cold. ‘To the investigator, heat is but a substance still subtler than a gas,’ we read in one page of Steiner’s Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss (Outline of Occult Science). Before the solar stage, fire spirits, or archangels, animated the bodies of those ‘men’, who began to glow and shine.

Did Steiner dream these things? Did he dream them because they had occurred ages earlier? What is undeniable is that they are far stranger than the demiurges, serpents, and bulls of other cosmogonies.

The Tigers of Annam

To the Annamites, tigers, or spirits who dwell in tigers, govern the four corners of space. The Red Tiger rules over the South (which is located at the top of maps); summer and fire belong to him. The Black Tiger rules over the North; winter and water belong to him. The Blue Tiger rules over the East; spring and plants belong to him. The White Tiger rules over the West; autumn and metals belong to him.

Over these Cardinal Tigers is a fifth tiger, the Yellow Tiger, who stands in the middle governing the others, just as the Emperor stands in the middle of China and China in the middle of the World. (That’s why it is called the Middle Kingdom; that’s why it occupies the middle of the map that Father Ricci, of the Society of Jesus, drew at the end of the sixteenth century for the instruction of the Chinese.)

Lao-tzu entrusted to the Five Tigers the mission of waging war against devils. An Annamite prayer, translated into French by Louis Cho Chod, implores the aid of the Five Heavenly Tigers. This superstition is of Chinese origin; Sinologists speak of a White Tiger that rules over the remote region of the western stars. To the South the Chinese place a Red Bird; the East, a Blue Dragon; to the North, a Black Tortoise. As we see, the Annamites have preserved the colours but have made the animals one.

The Bhils, a people of Central India, believe in hells for Tigers; the Malays tell of a city in the heart of the jungle with beams of human bones, walls of human skin, and eaves of human hair, built and inhabited by Tigers.

The Trolls

In England, after the advent of Christianity, the Valkyries (or ‘Choosers of the Slain’) were relegated to the villages and there degenerated into witches; in the Scandinavian countries the giants of heathen myth, who lived in Jotunnheim and battled against the god Thor, were reduced to rustic Trolls. In the cosmogony opening the Elder Edda, we read that in the Twilight of the Gods, the giants, allied with a wolf and a serpent, will scale the rainbow Bifrost, which will break under their weight, thereby destroying the world. The Trolls of popular superstition are stupid, evil elves who dwell in mountain crannies or in ramshackle huts. Trolls of distinction may bear two or three heads.

Henrik Ibsen’s dramatic poem Peer Gynt (1867) assures them their immortality. Ibsen depicts the Trolls as, above all, nationalists. They think, or do their best to think, that the foul concoction they brew is delicious and that their hovels are palaces. So that Peer Gynt would not witness the sordidness of his surroundings and the ugliness of the princess he is about to marry, the Trolls offer to put out his eyes.

Two Metaphysical Beings

The mystery of the origin of ideas brings a pair of strange creatures to imaginary zoology. One was evolved towards the middle of the eighteenth century, the other a hundred years later.

The first is Condillac’s sensitive statue. Descartes professed the Platonic doctrine of innate ideas; Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, for the purposes of refuting him, conceived a marble statue in the likeness of the human body and inhabited by a soul that had never perceived or thought. Condillac begins by conferring on his statue a single sense, perhaps the least complex of all that of smell. A whiff of jasmine is the start of the statue’s biography; for one moment there is nothing but this odour in the whole universe or, to be more accurate, this odour is the universe, which a moment later will be the odour of a rose, then of a carnation. In the statue’s consciousness, once there is a single odour we have attention; once an odour lasts after the stimulus has ceased we have memory; once a present and a past impression occupy the statue’s attention we have the ability to compare; once the statue perceives likeness and unlikeness we have judgment; once the ability to compare and judgment occur a second time we have reflection; once a pleasant memory is more vivid than an unpleasant impression we have imagination. Once the faculty of understanding is born, the faculty of the will will be born: love and hate (attraction and repulsion), hope and fear. The consciousness of having passed through many states of mind will give the statue the abstract notion of numbers; the consciousness of being the odour of carnation and of having been the odour of jasmine, the notion of the I.

The author will then endow his hypothetical man with hearing, taste, sight, and finally, touch. This last sense will reveal to him that space exists and that in space he exists in a body; sounds, smells, and colours had been to him, before this stage, mere variations or modifications of his consciousness.

The allegory just related is called Traité des sensations and dates from 1754; for this summary we have made use of the second volume of Bréhier’s Histoire de la philosophie.

The other creature raised by the problem of consciousness is the ‘hypothetical animal’ of Rudolf Hermann Lotze. Lonelier than the statue that smells roses and finally becomes a man, this being has in its skin but one movable sensitive point at the extremity of an antenna. Its structure denies it, as is obvious, more than one perception at a time. Lotze argues that the ability to retract or extend its sensitive antenna will enable this all but bereft animal to discover the external world (without the aid of the Kantian categories of time and space) and distinguish a stationary from a moving object. This fiction may be found in the book Medizinische Psychologie (1852); it has been praised by Hans Vaihinger.

The Unicorn

The first version of the Unicorn is nearly identical with the latest. Four hundred years b.c., the Greek historian and physician Ctesias told that among the kingdoms of India there were very swift wild asses with white coats, purple heads, blue eyes, and in the middle of their foreheads a pointed horn whose base was white, whose tip was red, and whose middle was black. Pliny, more precise, wrote (VIII, 31):

the fiercest animal is the unicorn, which in the rest of the body resembles a horse, but in the head a stag, in the feet an elephant, and in the tail a boar, and has a deep bellow, and a single black horn three feet long projecting from the middle of the forehead. They say that it is impossible to capture this animal alive.

Around 1892, the Orientalist Schrader conjectured that the Unicorn might have been suggested to the Greeks by certain Persian bas-reliefs depicting bulls in profile with a single horn.

In Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, composed at the beginning of the seventh century, we read that one thrust of the Unicorn’s horn may kill an elephant; this perhaps is echoed in the similar victory, in Sindbad’s second voyage, of the Karkadan, or rhinoceros, which can ’carry off a great elephant on its horn’. (We also find here that the rhinoceros’s horn ‘cleft in twain, is the likeness of a man’; al Qaswini says it is the likeness of a man on horseback, and others have spoken of birds and fishes.) Another of the Unicorn’s enemies was the lion, and a stanza in the tangled allegory The Faerie Queene records the manner of their duel in this way:

Like as a Lyon, whose imperiall powre

A prowd rebellious Unicom defyes,

T’ avoide the rash assault and wrathful stowre

Of his fiers foe, him to a tree applyes,

And when him ronning in full course he spyes,

He slips aside; the whiles that furious beast

His precious horne, sought of his enimyes,

Strikes in the stocke, ne thence can be releast,

But to the mighty victor yields a bounteous feast.

These lines (Book II, Canto V, Stanza X) date from the sixteenth century; at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the union of the Kingdom of England with the Kingdom of Scotland brought together on the heraldic arms of Great Britain the English Leopard, or Lion, and the Scottish Unicorn.

In the Middle Ages, bestiaries taught that the Unicorn could be captured by a maiden; in the Greek Physiologus we read: ‘How it is captured. A virgin is placed before it and it springs into the virgin’s lap and she warms it with love and carries it off to the palace of kings.’ One of Pisanello’s medals and many famous tapestries illustrate this victory whose allegorical applications are obvious. Leonardo da Vinci attributes the Unicorn’s capture to its lust, which makes it forget its fierceness, lie in a girl’s lap, and so be taken by hunters. The Holy Ghost, Jesus Christ, mercury, and evil have all been represented by the Unicorn. In his Psychologie und Alchemie (1944), Jung gives a history and an analysis of these symbols. A small white horse with the forelegs of an antelope, a goat’s beard, and a long twisted horn projecting straight out from its forehead is the picture usually given of this imaginary animal.

The Unicorn of China

The Chinese Unicorn, the k’i-lin, is one of the four animals of good omen; the others are the dragon, the phoenix, and the tortoise. The Unicorn is foremost of all the 360 creatures that live on land. It has the body of a deer, the tail of an ox, and the hooves of a horse. Its short horn, which grows out of its forehead, is made of flesh; its coat, on its back, is of five mixed colours, while its belly is brown or yellow. It is so gentle that when it walks it is careful not to tread on the tiniest living creature and will not even eat live grass but only what is dead. Its appearance foretells the birth of an upright ruler. To wound the Chinese Unicorn or to come across its dead body is unlucky. The span of this animal’s natural life is a thousand years.

When Confucius’ mother bore him in her womb, the spirits of the five planets brought her an animal ‘having the shape of a cow, scales of a dragon, and a horn on its forehead’. This is the way Soothill reports the annunciation; a variant of this given by Wilhelm tells that the animal appeared on its own and spat out a jade tablet on which these words were read:

Son of mountain crystal [or of the essence of water], when the dynasty crumbles, thou shalt rule as a throneless king. Seventy years later, some hunters killed a k’i-lin which still had a bit of ribbon around its horn that Confucius’ mother had tied there. Confucius went to look at the Unicorn and wept because he felt what the death of this innocent and mysterious animal foretold, and because in that ribbon lay his past.

In the thirteenth century, a scouting expedition of the Emperor Genghis Khan, who had undertaken the invasion of India, met a creature in the desert ‘like a deer, with a head like that of a horse, one horn on its forehead, and green hair on its body’, which addressed them, saying, ‘It is time for your master to return to his own land.’ One of Genghis’ Chinese ministers, upon consultation, explained to him that the animal was a chio-tuan, a variety of the k’i-lin. ‘For four years the great army has been warring in western regions,’ he said. ‘Heaven, which has a horror of bloodshed, gives warning through the Chio-tuan. Spare the Empire for Heaven’s sake; moderation will give boundless pleasure.’ The Emperor desisted in his war plans.

Twenty-two centuries before the Christian era, one of the judges of the Emperor Shun was in possession of a ‘onehorned goat’ which refused to attack the wrongly accused but would butt the guilty.

Margoulies’ Anthologie raisonné de la littérature chinoise (1948) includes this mysterious, soft-spoken allegory, the work of a ninth-century writer of prose:

It is universally held that the unicorn is a supernatural being and of auspicious omen; so say the odes, the annals, the biographies of worthies, and other texts whose authority is unimpeachable. Even village women and children know that the unicorn is a lucky sign. But this animal does not figure among the barnyard animals, it is not always easy to come across, it does not lend itself to zoological classification. Nor is it like the horse or bull, the wolf or deer. In such circumstances we may be face to face with a unicorn and not know for sure that we are. We know that a certain animal with a mane is a horse and that a certain animal with horns is a bull. We do not know what the unicorn looks like.

The Uroboros

To us the ocean is a sea or a system of seas; to the Greeks it was a simple circular river that ringed the land mass. All streams flowed from it and it had neither outlets nor sources. It was also a god or a Titan, perhaps the most ancient of all Titans, since Sleep in Book XIV of the Iliad calls it the source from whom the gods are sprung. In Hesiod’s Theogony, it is the father of all the world’s rivers three thousand in number the leading of which are the Alpheus and the Nile. An old man with a flowing beard was the usual personification of the river-ocean; after centuries men found a better symbol.

Heraclitus had said that in the circumference the beginning and the end are a single point. A third-century Greek amulet, preserved in the British Museum, gives us the image which best illustrates this endlessness: the serpent that bites its own tail or, as the Argentine poet Martínez Estrada so beautifully put it, ‘that begins at the end of its tail’. A story runs that Mary Queen of Scots had engraved on a gold ring the inscription ‘In my end is my beginning,’ meaning perhaps that real life begins after death. Uroboros (Greek for ‘the one that devours its tail’) is the learned name of this creature which became the symbol adopted by alchemists in the Middle Ages. The curious may read further in Jung’s study Psychologie und Alchemie.

A world-circling serpent is also found in Norse cosmology; it is called the Miogarosormr literally, the middle-yard’sworm, middle-yard standing for the earth. In the Younger Edda, Snorri Sturluson recorded that Loki fathered a wolf and a serpent. An oracle warned the gods that these creatures would be the earth’s downfall. The wolf, Fenrir, was kept on a cord woven of six imaginary things: ‘the noise of a cat’s footfall, the beards of women, the roots of stones, the sinews of bears, the breath of fish, and the spittle of birds.’ The serpent, Jormungard, ‘was thrown into the sea surrounding the land and there it has grown so large that now it too surrounds the earth and bites its own tail.’

In Jotunnheim, the land of giants, Utgard-Loki challenges the god Thor to pick up a cat; Thor, using all his strength, barely manages to lift one of the cat’s paws off the ground. The cat is really the serpent. Thor has been tricked by magic.

At the Twilight of the Gods the serpent will devour the earth and the wolf the sun.

The Valkyries

Valkyrie means, in early German languages, the ‘chooser of the slain’. We do not know how the people of Germany and of Austria imagined them; in Norse mythology they are lovely maidens who bear weapons. Their usual number was three, though in the Eddas the names of more than a dozen are given.

In popular myth they took the souls of those slain in battle and brought them to Odin’s epic paradise. There, in the Hall of the Slain, Valhalla, whose ceiling was of gold and was lighted by drawn swords and not lamps, the warriors battled from daybreak to sunset. Then those of them who had been killed were brought back to life, and all shared a divine feast in which they were served the meat of an immortal wild boar and inexhaustible hornfuls of mead. This idea of an endless battle seems to be Celtic in origin.

An Anglo-Saxon charm against the pain of sudden stitches describes the Valkyries without naming them; the lines, as translated by Stopford A. Brooke, run this way:

Loud were they, lo! loud, as over the land they rode; Fierce of heart were they, as over the hill they rode! For the mighty maidens have mustered up their strength . . .

Under the spreading influence of Christianity, the name Valkyrie degenerated; in medieval England a judge had burned at the stake an unlucky woman charged with being a Valkyrie, that is to say, a witch.

The Western Dragon

A tall-standing, heavy serpent with claws and wings is perhaps the description that best fits the Dragon. It may be black, but it is essential that it also be shining; equally essential is that it belch forth fire and smoke. The above description refers, of course, to its present image; the Greeks seem to have applied the name Dragon to any considerable reptile. Pliny informs us that in summer the Dragon craves elephant blood, which is notably cool. It will make a sudden foray on the elephant, coil round it, and plunge its teeth into it. The bloodless elephant rolls on the ground and dies; so does the Dragon, crushed under the weight of its victim. We also read that Ethiopian Dragons, in search of better pasturage, regularly cross the Red Sea and migrate to Arabia. To accomplish this, four or five Dragons coil together and form a kind of craft, with their heads lifted out of the water. In Pliny there is also a chapter devoted to remedies derived from the Dragon. Here we read that its eyes, dried and then stirred with honey, make a liniment that is effective against nightmares. The fat of the Dragon’s heart stored in the hide of a gazelle and tied to the arm with the sinews of a stag assures success in litigation; Dragon teeth, also bound to the body, ensure the indulgence of masters and the mercy of kings. With some scepticism Pliny cites a preparation that renders men invincible. It is concocted of the skin of a lion, a lion’s marrow, the froth of a horse which has just won a race, the nails of a dog, and the tail and head of a Dragon.

In the eleventh book of the Iliad we read that there was a blue three-headed Dragon on Agamemnon’s shield; centuries later Norse pirates painted Dragons on their shields and carved Dragon heads on the prows of their long ships. Among the Romans, the Dragon was the insignia of the cohort, as the eagle was of the legion; this is the origin of present-day dragoons. On the standards of the Saxon kings of England there were Dragons; the object of such images was to impart fear to enemy ranks. In the ballad of Athis, we read:

Ce souloient Romains porter, Ce nous fait moult à redouter. [This was what the Romans used to bear, this which makes us so feared.]

In the West, the Dragon was always thought of as evil. One of the stock exploits of heroes (Hercules, Sigurd, St Michael, St George) was to overcome and slay a Dragon. In Germanic myth, the Dragon kept watch over precious objects. And so in Beowulf, written in England in the seventh or eighth century, there is a Dragon that stands guard over a treasure for some three hundred years. A runaway slave hides in its lair and steals a cup. On waking, the Dragon notices the theft and resolves to kill the thief, but every once in a while goes back inside to make sure the cup has not been merely mislaid. (How strange of the poet to attribute to his monster so human a misgiving.) The Dragon begins to ravage the kingdom; Beowulf searches it out, grapples with it, and kills it, dying himself soon after from a mortal wound inflicted by the Dragon’s tusks. People believed in the reality of the Dragon. In the middle of the sixteenth century, the Dragon is recorded in Conrad Gesner’s Historia Animalium, a work of a scientific nature.

Time has notably worn away the Dragon’s prestige. We believe in the lion as reality and symbol; we believe in the Minotaur as symbol but no longer as reality. The Dragon is perhaps the best known but also the least fortunate of fantastic animals. It seems childish to us and usually spoils the stories in which it appears. It is worth remembering, however, that we are dealing with a modern prejudice, due perhaps to a surfeit of Dragons in fairy tales. In the Revelations, St John speaks twice of the Dragon, ‘that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan . . .’ In the same spirit, St Augustine writes that the Devil ‘is lion and dragon; lion for its rage, dragon for its cunning’. Jung observes that in the Dragon are the reptile and the bird the elements of earth and of air.

Youwarkee

In his Short History of English Literature, Saintsbury finds the flying girl Youwarkee one of the most charming heroines of the eighteenth-century novel. Half woman and half bird, or as Browning was to write of his dead wife, Elizabeth Barrett half angel and half bird, she can open her arms and make wings of them, and a silky down covers her body. She lives on an island lost in Antarctic seas and was discovered there by Peter Wilkins, a shipwrecked sailor, who marries her. Youwarkee is a gawry (or flying woman) and belongs to a race of flying people known as glumms. Wilkins converts them to Christianity and, after the death of his wife, succeeds in making his way back to England.

The story of this strange love affair may be read in the novel Peter Wilkins (1751) by Robert Paltock.

The Zaratan

There is one story that has ranged the whole of geography and all epochs the tale of mariners who land on an unknown island which then sinks into the sea and drowns them because it is a living creature. This invention is found in the first voyage of Sindbad and in Canto VI, Stanza 37, of Orlando Furioso (Ch’ella sia una isoletta ci credemo ‘We believed it [the whale] to be a small island’); in the Irish legend of St Brendan and in the Greek bestiary of Alexandria; in the Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (Rome, 1555) by the Swedish ecclesiastic Olaus Magnus and in this passage from the opening of Paradise Lost, in which Satan, ‘stretched out huge in length’, is compared to a whale (203-8):

Him haply slumbering on the Norway foam,

The pilot of some small night-foundered skiff

Deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell,

With fixed anchor in his scaly rind,

Moors by his side under the lee, while night

Invests the sea . . .

Paradoxically, one of the earliest versions of the legend gives it in order to refute it. This is recorded in the Book of Animals by al-Jahiz, the ninth-century Moslem zoologist. We translate its words from the Spanish version by Miguel Asín Palacios:

As for the zaratan, I never met anyone who actually saw it with his own eyes.

There are sailors who assert that they have drawn alongside certain sea islands, seeing wooded valleys and crevices in the rock, and landed to light a big fire; and when the heat of the flames reached the zaratan’s spine, the beast began to slip under the waters with them on top of him, and with all the plants growing on him, until only those able to swim away were saved. This outdoes even the boldest, most imaginative piece of fiction.

Let us now consider a thirteenth-century text by al-Qaswini, the Persian cosmographer who wrote in Arabic. It comes from a work of his entitled Wonders of Creation, and runs this way:

As for the sea turtle, it is of such huge size that people on shipboard take it for an island.

One merchant has reported:

‘Rising out of the sea we discovered an island with green plants, and we went ashore and dug pits for a cooking fire, and the island began to move and the sailors said: “Back to the ship! It’s a turtle! The heat of the fires has wakened him and we’ll be lost!” ’

This story is repeated in the Navigation of St Brendan:

And than they sayled forth, and came soone after to that lond; but bycause of the lytell depthe in some place, and in some place were grete rockes, but at the last they wente upon an ylonde, wenynge to them they had ben safe, and made theron a fyre for to dresse theyr dyner, but saynt Brandon abode styll in the shyppe. And whan the fyre was ryght hote, and the meet nygh soden, than thisylonde began to move; whereof the monkes were aferde, and fledde anone to the shyppe, and lefte the fyre and meet behynde them, and mervayled sore of the movying. And saynt Brandon comforted them, and sayd that it was a grete fisshe named Jasconye, whiche laboureth nyght and daye to put his tayle in his mouth, but for gretnes he may not.

In the Anglo-Saxon bestiary of the Exeter Book, the dangerous island is a whale, ‘skilled in treachery’, that deliberately tricks seafarers. They camp on its back seeking rest from their labours at sea; suddenly the Ocean’s Guest sinks down and the men drown. In the Greek bestiary, the whale stands for the whore of the Proverbs (‘Her feet go down to death, her steps take hold on hell’); in the Anglo-Saxon bestiary it stands for the Devil and Evil. These same symbolic values will be found in Moby Dick, written ten centuries later.

Table of Contents

Preface
The Aleph
Streetcorner Man
The Approach to al-Mu’tasim
The Circular Ruins
Death and the Compass
The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874)
The Two Kings and their Two Labyrinths
The Dead Man
The Other Death
Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth
The Man on the Threshold
The Challenge
The Captive
Borges and Myself
The Maker
The Immortals
The Meeting
Pedro Salvadores
Rosendo’s Tale
An Autobiographical Essay
Commentaries
Preface to the 1954 Edition
Preface to the First Edition
The Dread Redeemer Lazarus Morell
Tom Castro, the Implausible Impostor
The Widow Ching, Lady Pirate
Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities
The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan

The Insulting Master of Etiquette Kôtsuké no Suké

The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv
A Theologian in Death
The Chamber of Statues
Tale of the Two Dreamers
The Wizard Postponed
The Mirror of Ink
A Double for Mohammed
The Generous Enemy
Of Exactitude in Science
Author's Note
The Other
Ulrike
The Congress
There Are More Things
The Sect of the Thirty
The Night of the Gifts
The Mirror and the Mask
Undr
Utopia of a Tired Man
The Bribe
Avelino Arredondo
The Disk
The Book of Sand
Afterword
The Anthropologist
Legend
A Prayer
His End and His Beginning
Foreword
Preface to the First Edition
The Gospel According to Mark
The Unworthy Friend
The Duel
The End of the Duel
The Intruder
Juan Muraña
The Elder Lady
Guayaquil
Doctor Brodie’s Report
Afterword
Prologue
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote
The Lottery in Babylon
A Glimpse Into the Work of Herbert Quain
The Library of Babel
The Garden of Branching Paths
Three Versions of Judas
Funes, The Memorious
The Form of the Sword
Theme of the Traitor and Hero
The Secret Miracle
The End
The Sect of the Phoenix
The South
Preface
Preface to the 1967 edition
Preface to the 1957 edition
A Bao A Qu
Abtu and Anet
The Amphisbaena
An Animal Imagined by Kafka
An Animal Imagined by C. S. Lewis
The Animal Imagined by Poe
Animals in the Form of Spheres
Antelopes with Six Legs
The Ass with Three Legs
Bahamut
Baldanders
The Banshee
The Barometz
The Basilisk
Behemoth
The Brownies
Burak
The Carbuncle
The Catoblepas
The Celestial Stag
The Centaur
Cerberus
The Cheshire Cat and the Kilkenny Cats
The Chimera
The Chinese Dragon
The Chinese Fox
The Chinese Phoenix
Chronos or Hercules
A Creature Imagined by C. S. Lewis
The Crocotta and the Leucrocotta
A Crossbreed
The Double
The Eastern Dragon
The Eater of the Dead
The Eight-Forked Serpent

The Elephant That Foretold the Birth of the Buddha

The Eloi and the Morlocks

The Elves

An Experimental Account of What Was Known, Seen, and Met by Mrs. Jane Lead in London in 1694

The Fairies
Fastitocalon
Fauna of Chile
Fauna of China
Fauna of Mirrors
Fauna of the United States
Garuda
The Gnomes
The Golem
The Griffon
Haniel, Kafziel, Azriel, and Aniel
Haokah, the Thunder God
Harpies
The Heavenly Cock
The Hippogriff
Hochigan
Humbaba
The Hundred-Heads
The Hydra of Lerna
Ichthyocentaurs
Jewish Demons
The Jinn
The Kami
A King of Fire and His Steed
The Kraken
Kujata
The Lamed Wufniks
The Lamias
Laudatores Temporis Acti
The Lemures
The Leveller
Lilith
The Lunar Hare
The Mandrake
The Manticore
The Mermecolion
The Minotaur
The Monkey of the Inkpot
The Monster Acheron
The Mother of Tortoises
The Nagas
The Nasnas
The Norns
The Nymphs
The Odradek
An Offspring of Leviathan
One-Eyed Beings
The Panther
The Pelican
The Peryton
The Phoenix
The Pygmies
The Rain Bird
The Remora
The Rukh
The Salamander
The Satyrs
Scylla
The Sea Horse
The Shaggy Beast of La Ferté-Bernard
The Simurgh
Sirens

The Sow Harnessed with Chains and Other Argentine Fauna

The Sphinx
The Squonk
Swedenborg's Angels
Swedenborg’s Devils
The Sylphs
Talos
The T’ao T’ieh
Thermal Beings
The Tigers of Annam
The Trolls
Two Metaphysical Beings
The Unicorn
The Unicorn of China
The Uroboros
The Valkyries
The Western Dragon
Youwarkee
The Zaratan