Jorge Luis Borges - Collected Fictions Part 11

When I disentangled myself at last from that nightmare, I found that my hands were bound behind my back and I was lying in an oblong stone niche no bigger than a common grave, sc.r.a.ped into the caustic slope of a moun- tain. The sides of the cavity were humid, and had been polished as much by time as by human hands. In my chest I felt a painful throbbing, and I burned with thirst. I raised my head and cried out weakly. At the foot of the mountain ran a noiseless, impure stream, clogged by sand and rubble; on the far bank, the patent City of the Immortals shone dazzlingly in the last (or first) rays of the sun. I could see fortifications, arches, frontispieces, and forums; the foundation of it all was a stone plateau. A hundred or more ir- regular niches like my own riddled the mountain and the valley. In the sand had been dug shallow holes; from those wretched holes, from the niches, emerged naked men with gray skin and neglected beards. I thought I recog- nized these men: they belonged to the b.e.s.t.i.a.l lineage of the Troglodytes, who infest the sh.o.r.elines of the Persian Gulf and the grottoes of Ethiopia; Iwas surprised neither by the fact that they did not speak nor by seeing them devour serpents.

Urgent thirst lent me temerity. I estimated that I was some thirty paces from the sand; I closed my eyes and threw myself down the mountain, my hands bound behind my back. I plunged my bloodied face into the dark water and lapped at it like an animal. Before I lost myself in sleep and deliri- um once more, I inexplicably repeated a few words of Greek:Those from Zeleia, wealthy Trojans, who drink the water of dark Aisepos...

I cannot say how many days and nights pa.s.sed over me. In pain, unable to return to the shelter of the caverns, naked on the unknown sand, I let the moon and the sun cast lots for my bleak fate. The Troglodytes, childlike in their barbarity, helped me neither survive nor die. In vain did I plead with them to kill me. One day, with the sharp edge of a flake of rock, I severed my bonds. The next, I stood up and was able to beg or steal-I, Marcus Flaminius Rufus, military tribune of one of the legions of Rome -my first abominated mouthful of serpent's flesh.

Out of avidity to see the Immortals, to touch that more than human City, I could hardly sleep. And as though the Troglodytes could divine my goal, they did not sleep, either. At first I presumed they were keeping a watch over me; later, I imagined that my uneasiness had communicated it- self to them, as dogs can be infected in that way. For my departure from the barbarous village I chose the most public of times, sunset, when almost all the men emerged from their holes and crevices in the earth and gazed out unseeingly toward the west. I prayed aloud, less to plead for divine favor than to intimidate the tribe with articulate speech. I crossed the stream bed clogged with sandbars and turned my steps toward the City.

Two or three men followed me confusedly; they were of short stature (like the others of that species), and inspired more revulsion than fear. I had to skirt a number of irregular pits that I took to be ancientquarries; misled by the City's enor- mous size, I had thought it was much nearer. Toward midnight, I set my foot upon the black shadow-bristling with idolatrous shapes upon the yel- low sand-of the City's wall. My steps were halted by a kind of sacred hor- ror. So abhorred by mankind are novelty and the desert that I was cheered to note that one of the Troglodytes had accompanied me to the last. I closed my eyes and waited, unsleeping, for the dawn.

I have said that the City was builded on a stone plateau. That plateau, with its precipitous sides, was as difficult to scale as the walls. In vain did my weary feet walk round it; the black foundation revealed not the slightest ir- regularity, and theinvarianceof the walls proscribed even a single door. Theforce of the day drove me to seek refuge in a cavern; toward the rear there was a pit, and out of the pit, out of the gloom below, rose a ladder. I de- scended the ladder and made my way through a chaos of squalid galleries to a vast, indistinct circular chamber. Nine doors opened into that cellar-like place; eight led to a maze that returned, deceitfully, to the same chamber; the ninth led through another maze to a second circular chamber identical to the first. I am not certain how many chambers there were; my misery and anxiety multiplied them. The silence was hostile, and virtually perfect; aside from a subterranean wind whose cause I never discovered, within those deep webs of stone there was no sound; even the thin streams of iron-colored water that trickled through crevices in the stone were noiseless. Horribly, I grew used to that dubious world; it began to seem incredible that anything could exist save nine-doored cellars and long, forking subter- ranean corridors. I know not how long I wandered under the earth; I do know that from time to time, in a confused dream of home, I conflated the horrendous village of the barbarians and the city of my birth, among the cl.u.s.ters of grapes.

At the end of one corridor, a not unforeseen wall blocked my path- and a distant light fell upon me. I raised my dazzled eyes; above, vertigi- nously high above, I saw a circle of sky so blue it was almost purple. The metal treads of a stairway led up the wall. Weariness made my muscles slack, but I climbed the stairs, only pausing from time to time to sob clum- sily with joy. Little by little I began to discern friezes and the capitals of columns, triangular pediments and vaults, confused glories carved in gran- ite and marble. Thus it was that I was led to ascend from the blind realm of black and intertwining labyrinths into the brilliant City.

I emerged into a kind of small plaza-a courtyard might better de- scribe it. It was surrounded by a single building, of irregular angles and varying heights. It was to this heterogeneous building that the many cupo - las and columns belonged. More than any other feature of that incredible monument, I was arrested by the great antiquity of its construction. I felt that it had existed before humankind, before the world itself.

Its patent an- tiquity (though somehow terrible to the eyes) seemed to accord with the la- bor of immortal artificers. Cautiously at first, with indifference as time went on, desperately toward the end, I wandered the staircases and inlaid floors of that labyrinthine palace. (I discovered afterward that the width and height of the treads on the staircases were not constant; it was this that explained the extraordinary weariness I felt.)This palace is the work of the G.o.ds, was my first thought. I explored the uninhabited s.p.a.ces, and Icorrected myself:The G.o.ds that built this place have died. Then I reflected upon its peculiarities, and told myself:The G.o.ds that built this place were mad. I said this, I know, in a tone of incomprehensible reproof that verged upon remorse-with more intellectual horror than sensory fear.

The im- pression of great antiquity was joined by others: the impression of endless- ness, the sensation of oppressiveness and horror, the sensation of complex irrationality. I had made my way through a dark maze, but it was the bright City of the Immortals that terrified and repelled me. A maze is a house built purposely to confuse men; its architecture, prodigal in symmetries, is made to serve that purpose. In the palace that I imperfectly explored, the architec- ture hadno purpose. There were corridors that led nowhere, unreachably high windows, grandly dramatic doors that opened onto monklike cells or empty shafts, incredible upside-down staircases with upside-down treads and bal.u.s.trades. Other staircases, clinging airily to the side of a monumen- tal wall, petered out after two or three landings, in the high gloom of the cupolas, arriving nowhere. I cannot say whether these are literal examples I have given; I do know that for many years they plagued my troubled dreams; I can no longer know whether any given feature is a faithful tran- scription of reality or one of the shapes unleashed by my nights.This City, I thought,is so horrific that its mere existence, the mere fact of its having endured -even in the middle of asecret desert-pollutes the past and the fu- ture and somehow compromises the stars. So long as this City endures, no one in the world can ever be happy or courageous.I do not want to describe it; a chaos of heterogeneous words, the body of a tiger or a bull pullulating with teeth, organs, and heads monstrously yoked together yet hating each other-those might, perhaps, be approximate images.

I cannot recall the stages by which I returned, nor my path through the dusty, humid crypts. I know only that I was accompanied by the constant fear that when I emerged from the last labyrinth I would be surrounded once again by the abominable City of the Immortals. I remember nothing else. That loss of memory, now insurmountable, was perhaps willful; it is possible that the circ.u.mstances of my escape were so unpleasant that on some day no less lost to memory I swore to put them out of my mind.

III.

Those who have read the story of my travails attentively will recall that a man of the Troglodyte tribe had followed me, as a dog might have, into the jagged shadow of the walls. When I emerged from the last cellar, I foundhim at the mouth of the cavern. He was lying in the sand, clumsily drawing and rubbing out a row of symbols that resembled those letters in dreams that one is just on the verge of understanding when they merge and blur. At first I thought that this was some sort of barbaric writing; then I realized that it was absurd to imagine that men who had never learned to speak should have invented writing.

Nor did any one of the shapes resemble any other-a fact that ruled out (or made quite remote) the possibility that they were symbols. The man would draw them, look at them, and correct them. Then suddenly, as though his game irritated him, he would rub them out with his palm and forearm. He looked up at me, though he seemed not to recognize me. Still, so great was the relief I felt (or so great, so dreadful had my loneliness been) that I actually thought that this primitive Troglodyte looking up at me from the floor of a cave had been waiting for me. The sun warmed the plain; as we began our return to the village, under the first stars of evening, the sand burned our feet. The Troglodyte walked ahead of me; that night I resolved to teach him to recognize, perhaps even to repeat, a few words. Dogs and horses, I reflected, are able to do the first; many birds, like the Caesars' nightingale, can do the second.

However scant a man's under- standing, it will always be greater than that of unreasoning beasts.

The Troglodyte's lowly birth and condition recalled to my memory the image ofArgos,the moribund old dog of theOdyssey, so I gave him the nameArgos,and tried to teach it to him. Time and time again, I failed. No means I employed, no severity, no obstinacy of mine availed. Motionless, his eyes dead, he seemed not even to perceive the sounds which I was at- tempting to imprint upon him. Though but a few paces from me, he seemed immensely distant. Lying in the sand like a small, battered sphinx carved from lava, he allowed the heavens to circle in the sky above him from the first dusky light of morning to the last dusky light of night. It seemed simply impossible that he had not grasped my intention. I recalled that it is generally believed among the Ethiopians that monkeys deliberately do not speak, so that they will not be forced to work; I attributedArgos'silence to distrust or fear. From that vivid picture I pa.s.sed on to others, even more ex- travagant. I reflected thatArgosand I lived our lives in separate universes; I reflected that our perceptions were identical but thatArgos...o...b..ned them differently than I, constructed from them different objects; I reflected that perhaps for him there were no objects, but rather a constant, dizzying play of swift impressions. I imagined a world without memory, without time; I toyed with the possibility of a language that had no nouns, a language of impersonal verbs or indeclinable adjectives. In these reflections many dayswent by, and with the days, years. Until one morning, something very much like joy occurred-the sky rained slow, strong rain.

Nights in the desert can be frigid, but that night had been like a caul- dron. I dreamed that a river in Thessaly (into whose waters I had thrown back a golden fish) was coming to save me; I could hear it approaching over the red sand and the black rock; a coolness in the air and the scurrying sound of rain awakened me. I ran out naked to welcome it. The night was waning; under the yellow clouds, the tribe, as joyously as I, was offering it- self up to the vivid torrents in a kind of ecstasy-they reminded me of Corybantes possessed by the G.o.d.Argos,his eyes fixed on the empyrean, was moaning; streams of water rolled down his face-not just rain, but also (I later learned) tears.Argos,I cried,Argos!Then, with gentle wonder, as though discovering something lost and forgotten for many years,Argosstammered out these words:Argos,Ulysses' dog.And then, without looking at me,This dog lying on the dungheap.

We accept reality so readily-perhaps because we sense that nothing is real. I askedArgoshow much of theOdyssey he knew. He found using Greek difficult; I had to repeat the question.

Very little,he replied.Less than the meagerest rhapsode. It has been eleven hundred years since last I wrote it.

IV.

That day, all was revealed to me. The Troglodytes were the Immortals; the stream and its sand-laden waters, the River sought by the rider. As for the City whose renown had spread to the very Ganges, the Immortals had de- stroyed it almost nine hundred years ago. Out of the shattered remains of the City's ruin they had built on the same spot the incoherent city I had wandered through-that parody or ant.i.thesis of City which was also a tem- ple to the irrational G.o.ds that rule the world and to those G.o.ds about whom we know nothing save that they do not resemble man. The founding of this city was the last symbol to which the Immortals had descended; it marks the point at which, esteeming all exertion vain, they resolved to live in thought, in pure speculation. They built that carapace, abandoned it, and went off to make their dwellings in the caves. In their self-absorption, they scarcely perceived the physical world.

These things were explained to me by Homer as one might explain things to a child. He also told me of his own old age andofthatlate journey he had made-driven, like Ulysses, by the intention to arrive at the nationof men that know not what the sea is, that eat not salted meat, that know not what an oar might be. He lived for a century in the City of the Immor- tals, and when it was destroyed it was he who counseled that this other one be built. We should not be surprised by that-it is rumored that after singing of the war ofIlion,he sang of the war between the frogs and rats. He was like a G.o.d who created first the Cosmos, and then Chaos.

There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the ex- ception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible isto know oneself im- mortal. I have noticed that in spite of religion, the conviction as to one's own immortality is extraordinarily rare. Jews, Christians, and Muslims allprofess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe only in those hundred years, for they des- tine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punis.h.i.+ng what one didwhen alive. In my view, the Wheel conceived by certain religions in Hin- dustan is much more plausible; on that Wheel, which has neither end nor beginning, each life is the effect of the previous life and engenderer of the next, yet no one life determines the whole.... Taught by centuries of living, the republic of immortal men had achieved a perfection of tolerance, al- most of disdain. They knew that over an infinitely long span of time, all things happen to all men. As reward for his past and future virtues, every man merited every kindness-yet also every betrayal, as reward for his past and future iniquities. Much as the way in games of chance, heads and tails tend to even out, so cleverness and dullness cancel and correct each other. Perhaps the rude poem ofEl Cidis the counterweight demanded by a single epithet of the Eclogues or a maxim from Herac.l.i.tus. The most fleeting thought obeys an invisible plan, and may crown, or inaugurate, a secret de- sign. I know of men who have done evil in order that good may come of it in future centuries, or may already have come of it in centuries past.... Viewed in that way, all our acts are just, though also unimportant. There are no spiritual or intellectualmerits. Homer composed theOdyssey; given infi- nite time, with infinite circ.u.mstances and changes, it is impossible that theOdyssey shouldnot be composed at least once. No one is someone; a single immortal man is all men. Like CorneliusAgrippa,I am G.o.d, hero, philoso- pher, demon, and world-which is a long-winded way of saying thatIam not.

The notion of the world as a system of exact compensations had an enormous influence on the Immortals. In the first place, it made them im- mune to pity. I have mentioned the ancient quarries that dotted the countryside on the far bank of the stream; a man fell into the deepest ofthose pits; he could not be hurt, could not die, and yet he burned with thirst; seventy years pa.s.sed before he was thrown arope. Nor was he much interested in his own fate. His body was a submissive domestic animal; all the charity it required each month was a few hours' sleep, a little water, and a sc.r.a.p of meat. But let no one imagine that we were mere ascetics. There is no more complex pleasure than thought, and it was to thought that we de- livered ourselves over. From time to time, some extraordinary stimulus might bring us back to the physical world-for example, on that dawn, the ancient elemental pleasure of the rain. But those lapses were extremely rare; all Immortals were capable of perfect quietude. I recall one whom I never saw standing-a bird had made its nest on his breast.

Among the corollaries to the doctrine that there is no thing that is not counterbalanced by another, there is one that has little theoretical impor- tance but that caused us, at the beginning or end of the tenth century, to scatter over the face of the earth. It may be summarized in these words:There is a river whose waters give immortality; somewhere there must be an- other river whose waters take it away. The number of rivers is not infinite; an immortal traveler wandering the world will someday have drunk from them all. We resolved to find that river.

Death (or reference to death) makes men precious and pathetic; their ghostliness is touching; any act they perform may be their last; there is no face that is not on the verge of blurring and fading away like the faces in a dream. Everything in the world of mortals has the value of the irrecoverable and contingent.

Among the Immortals, on the other hand, every act (every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible beginning, and the faithful presage of others that will repeat it in the future,ad vertiginem. There is nothing that is not as though lost between indefati- gable mirrors. Nothing can occur but once, nothing is preciouslyin peril of being lost. The elegiac, the somber, the ceremonial are not modes the Im- mortals hold in reverence. Homer and I went our separate ways at the por- tals of Tangier; I do not think we said good-bye.

I wandered through new realms, new empires. In the autumn of 1066 I fought at Stamford Bridge, though I no longer recall whether I stood in the ranks of Harold, soon to meet his fate, or in the ranks of that ill-fatedHar- aldHardrada who conquered only six feet or a little more of English soil. In the seventh century of the Hegira, on the outskirts of Bulaq, I transcribedwith deliberate calligraphy, in a language I have forgotten, in an alphabet I know not, the seven voyages of Sindbad and the story of the City of Bra.s.s. In a courtyard of the prison in Samarkand I often played chess. In Bikanir I have taught astrology, as I have in Bohemia. In 1638 I was in Kolzsvar, and later in Leipzig. In Aberdeen, in 1714, I subscribed to the six volumes of Pope'sIliad; I know I often perused them with delight. In 1729 or there - abouts, I discussed the origin of that poem with a professor of rhetoric whose name, I believe, wasGiambattista;his arguments struck me as ir- refutable. On October 4,1921, thePatna, which was taking me to Bombay, ran aground in a harbor on the Eritrean coast.

1.

'Part of the ms. is scratched out just here; the name of the port may have been erased.

1 disembarked; there came to my mind other mornings, long in the past, when I had also looked out over the Red Sea-when I was a Roman tribune, and fever and magic and inactivity consumed the soldiers. Outside the city I saw a spring; impelled by habit, I tasted its clear water. As I scaled the steep bank beside it, a th.o.r.n.y tree scratched the back of my hand. The unaccustomed pain seemed ex- ceedingly sharp. Incredulous, speechless, and in joy, I contemplated the pre- cious formation of a slow drop of blood.Iam once more mortal, I told myself over and over,again I am like all other men. That night, I slept until daybreak.

... A year has pa.s.sed, and I reread these pages. I can attest that they do not stray beyond the bounds of truth, although in the first chapters, and even in certain paragraphs of others, I believe I detect a certain falseness. That is due, perhaps, to an overemployment of circ.u.mstantial details, a way of writing that I learned from poets; it is a procedure that infects everything with falseness, since there may be a wealth of details in the event, yet not in memory.... I believe, nonetheless, that I have discovered a more private and inward reason. I will reveal it; it does not matter that I may be judged a fantast.

The story I have told seems unreal because the experiences of two different men are intermingled in it.In the first chapter, the horseman wishes to know the name of the river that runs beside the walls of Thebes; Flaminius Rufus, who had bestowed upon the city the epithet "hundred-gated," tells him that theriver is the "Egypt"; neither of those statements belongs tohim, but rather to Homer, who in theIliad expressly mentions "Thebes Hekatompylos" and who in theOdyssey, through the mouths of Proteus and Ulysses,invariably calls the Nile the "Egypt." In the second chapter, when the Roman drinks the immortal water he speaks a few words in Greek. Those words are also Homeric; they may be found at the end of the famous catalog of the s.h.i.+ps. Later, in the dizzying palace, he speaks of "a reproof that was almost remorse"; those words, too, belong to Homer, who had foreseen such a hor- ror. Such anomalies disturbed me; others, of an aesthetic nature, allowed me to discover the truth. The clues of this latter type may be found in the last chapter, which says that I fought at Stamford Bridge, that in Bulaq I tran- scribed the voyages of Sindbad the Sailor, and that in Aberdeen I subscribed to Pope's Englis.h.i.+liad.

The text says,inter alia: "In Bikanir I have taught as- trology, as I have in Bohemia." None of those statements is false; what is sig- nificant is the fact of their having been chosen to record. The first seems to befit a man of war, but then one sees that the narrator pays little attention to the war, much more to the fate of the men. The "facts" that follow are even more curious. A dark yet elemental reason led me to put them to pa- per: I knew they were pathetic. They are not pathetic when narrated by the Roman Flaminius Rufus; they are when narrated by Homer. It is odd that Homer, in the thirteenth century, should have copied down the adventures of Sindbad-another Ulysses-and again after many hundreds of years have discovered forms like those of his ownIliad in a northern kingdom and a barbaric tongue. As for the sentence that contains the name "Bikanir," one can see that it has been composed by a man of letters desirous (like the author of the catalog of s.h.i.+ps) of wielding splendid words.

2.

2.

ErnestoSabatosuggests that the"Giambattista"who discussed the origins of theIliad with the rare book dealer Cartaphilus isGiambattista Vico,the Italian who de- fended the argument that Homer is a symbolic character, like Pluto or Achilles.

As the end approaches, there are no longer any images from memory- there are only words. It is not strange that time may have confused those that once portrayedme with those that were symbols of the fate ofthe per- son that accompanied me for so many centuries. I have been Homer; soon, like Ulysses, I shall be n.o.body; soon, I shall be all men-I shall be dead.

Postcript (1950):Among the commentaries inspired by the foregoing publi- cation, the most curious (if not most urbane) is biblically t.i.tledA Coat of Many Colours (Manchester, 1948); it is the work of the supremelypersever- antpen of Dr. Nahum Cordovero, and contains some hundred pages. It speaks of the Greek anthologies, of the anthologies of late Latin texts, of that Ben Johnson who defined his contemporaries with excerpts fromSeneca, of Alexander Ross'sVirgilius evangelizans, of the artifices of George Moore and Eliot, and, finally, of "the tale attributed to the rare-book dealer Joseph Cartaphilus." In the first chapter it points out brief interpolations from Pliny(Historianaturate,V:8); in the second, from ThomasdeQuincey (Writings, III: 439); in the third, from a letter written by Descartes to the amba.s.sador Pierre Chanut; in the fourth, from Bernard Shaw(Back to Methuselah, V). From those "intrusions" (or thefts) it infers that the entire doc.u.ment is apocryphal.

To my way of thinking, that conclusion is unacceptable. Asthe end ap- proaches, wrote Cartaphilus,there are no longer any images from memory -there are only words. Words, words, words taken out of place and mutilated, words from other men-those were the alms left him by the hours and the centuries.

For CeciliaIngenieros

The Dead Man

That a man from the outskirts of Buenos Aires, a sad sort of hoodlum whose only recommendation was his infatuation with courage, should go out into the wilderness of horse country along the Brazilian frontier and become a leader of a band of smugglers-such a thing would, on the face of it, seem impossible. For those who think so, I want to tell the story of the fate ofBenjamin Otalora,whom no one may remember anymore in the neighborhood of Balvanera but who died as he lived, by a bullet, in the province of Rio Grande doSul.*I do not know the full details of his adven- ture; when I am apprised of them, I will correct and expand these pages. For now, this summary may be instructive:In 1891,Benjamin Otalorais nineteen years old-a strapping young man with a miserly brow, earnest blue eyes, and the strength and stamina of a Basque. A lucky knife thrust has revealed to him that he is a man of courage; he is not distressed by the death of his opponent, or by the imme- diate need to flee the country. The ward boss of his parish gives him a letter of introduction to a man namedAzevedoBandeira,over in Uruguay.Otaloratakes s.h.i.+p; the crossing is stormy, creaking; the next day finds him wandering aimlessly through the streets of Montevideo, with unconfessed and perhaps unrecognized sadness. He doesn't manage to come acrossAzevedo Bandeira.Toward midnight, in a general-store-and-bar in Paso delMolino,*he witnesses a fight between two cattle drovers. A knife gleams;Otaloradoesn't know whose side he should be on, but he is attracted by the pure taste of danger, the way other men are attracted by gambling or music. In the confusion, he checks a low thrust meant for a man in a broad-brimmed black hat and a poncho. That man later turns out to beAzevedoBandeira.(WhenOtaloradiscovers this, he tears up the letter of introduc- tion, because he'd rather all the credit be his alone.) ThoughAzevedo Ban- deirais a strong, well-built man, he gives the unjustifiable impression of being something of a fake, a forgery. In his face (which is always too close) there mingle the Jew, the Negro, and the Indian; in his air, the monkey and the tiger; the scar that crosses his face is just another piece of decoration, like the bristling black mustache.

Whether it's a projection or an error caused by drink, the fight stops as quickly as it started.Otaloradrinks with the cattle drovers and then goes out carousing with them and then accompanies them to a big house in the Old City-by now the sun is high in the sky. Out in the back patio, the men lay out their bedrolls.Otaloravaguely compares that night with the previ- ous one; now he is on terrafirma,among friends. He does, he has to admit, feel a small twinge of remorse at not missing Buenos Aires. He sleeps till orisons, when he is awakened by the samepaisanowho had drunkenly at- tackedBandeira. (Otalorarecalls that this man has been with the others, drunk with them, made the rounds of the city with them, thatBandeirasat him at his right hand and made him keep drinking.) The man tells him the boss wants to see him. In a kind of office that opens off the long entryway at the front of the house(Otalorahas never seen an entryway with doors opening off it),Azevedo Bandeirais waiting for him, with a splendid, con- temptuous red-haired woman.Bandeiraheaps praise onOtalora,offers him a gla.s.s of harsh brandy, tells him again that he looks like a man of met- tle, and asks him if he'd like to go up north with the boys to bring a herd back.Otaloratakes the job; by dawn the next morning they are on their way toTacuarembo.

That is the moment at whichOtalorabegins a new life, a life of vast sunrises and days that smell of horses.

This life is new to him, and some- times terrible, and yet it is in his blood, for just as the men of other lands wors.h.i.+p the sea and can feel it deep inside them, the men of ours (including the man who weaves these symbols) yearn for the inexhaustible plains that echo under the horses' hooves.Otalorahas been brought up in neighbor- hoods full of cart drivers and leather braiders; within a year, he has becomea gaucho.He learns to ride, to keep the horses together, to butcher the ani- mals, to use the rope that la.s.sos them and thebolasthat bring them down, to bear up under weariness, storms, cold weather, and the sun, to herd the animals with whistles and shouts. Only once during this period of appren- tices.h.i.+p does he seeAzevedo Bandeira,but he is always aware of his pres- ence, because to bea "Bandeiraman" is to be taken seriously-in fact, to befeared-and because no matter the deed of manly strength or courage they see done, thegauchossayBandeiradoes it better. One of them says he thinksBandeirawas born on the other side of the Cuareim, in Rio Grande doSul;that fact, which ought to bring him down a notch or two in their es- timation, lends his aura a vague new wealth of teeming forests, swamps, im- penetrable and almost infinite distances.

Gradually, Otalora realizes thatBandeirahas many irons in the fire, and that his main business is smuggling. Being a drover is being a servant; Otalora decides to rise higher-decides to become a smuggler. One night, two of his companions are to cross the border to bring back several loads of brandy; Otalora provokes one of them, wounds him, and takes his place. He is moved by ambition, but also by an obscure loyalty.Once and for all (he thinks) /want the boss to see that I'm a better man than all these Uruguayans of his put together.

Another year goes by before Otalora returns to Montevideo. They ride through the outskirts, and thenthrough the city (which seems enormous to Otalora); they come to the boss's house; the men lay out their bedrolls in the back patio. Days go by, and Otalora hasn't seenBandeira.They say, tim- orously, that he's sick; a black man takes the kettle andmate up to him in his room. One afternoon, Otalora is asked to carry the things up toBan- deira.He feels somehow humiliated by this, but derives some pride from it, too.

The bedroom is dark and shabby. There is a balcony facing west, a long table with a gleaming jumble of quirts and bullwhips, cinches, firearms, and knives, a distant mirror of cloudy gla.s.s.Bandeirais lying on his back, doz- ing and moaning some; a vehemence of last sunlight spotlights him. The vast white bed makes him seem smaller, and somehow dimmer; Otalora notes the gray hairs, the weariness, the slackness, and the lines of age. It sud- denly galls him that it's this old man that's giving them their orders.

One thrust, he thinks, would be enough to settlethat matter. Just then, he sees in the mirror that someone has come into the room. It is the redheaded woman; she is barefoot and half dressed, and staring at him with cold curi- osity.Bandeirasits up; while he talks about things out on the range and sipsmate aftermate, his fingers toy with the woman's hair. Finally, he gives Otalora leave to go.

Days later, they receive the order to head up north again. They come to a G.o.dforsaken ranch somewhere (that could be anywhere) in the middle of the unending plains. Not a tree, not a stream of water soften the place; the sun beats down on it from first light to last. There are stone corrals for thestock, which is long-horned and poorly. The miserable place is calledElSuspiro-The Sigh.

Otalorahears from the peons thatBandeirawill be coming up from Montevideo before long. He asks why, and somebody explains that there's a foreigner, a would-begauchotype, that's getting too big for his britches.Otaloratakes this as a joke, but he's flattered that the joke is possible. He later finds out thatBandeirahas had a falling-out with some politico and the politico has withdrawn his protection. The news pleasesOtalora.

Crates of firearms begin to arrive; a silver washbowl and pitcher arrive for the woman's bedroom, then curtains of elaborately figured damask; one morning a somber-faced rider with a thick beard and a poncho rides down from up in the mountains. His name isUlpiano Suarez,and he isAzevedoBandeira's capanga,his foreman. He talks very little, and there is something Brazilian about his speech when he does.Otaloradoesn't know whether to attribute the man's reserve to hostility, contempt, or mere savagery, but he does know that for the plan he has in mind he has to win his friends.h.i.+p.

At this point there enters intoBenjamin Otalora'slife a sorrel with black feet, mane, and muzzle.Azevedo Bandeirabrings the horse up with him from the south; its bridle and all its other gear is tipped with silver and the bindings on its saddle are of jaguar skin. That extravagant horse is a symbol of the boss's authority, which is why the youth covets it, and why he also comes to covet, with grudge-filled desire, the woman with the resplen- dent hair. The woman, the gear, and the sorrel are attributes (adjectives) of a man he hopes to destroy.

Here, the story grows deeper and more complicated.Azevedo Bandeirais accomplished in the art of progressive humiliation, the satanic ability to humiliate his interlocutor little by little, step by step, with a combination of truths and evasions;Otaloradecides to employ that same ambiguous method for the hard task he has set himself. He decides that he will gradu- ally pushAzevedo Bandeiraout of the picture.

Through days of common danger he manages to winSuarez'friends.h.i.+p. He confides his plan to him, andSuarezpromises to help. Many things happen after this, some of which I know about:Otaloradoesn't obeyBandeira;he keeps forgetting, improv- ing his orders, even turning them upside down. The universe seems to con- spire with him, and things move very fast. One noon, there is a shoot-out with men from Rio Grande doSulon the prairies bordering theTacua- rembo. Otalorausurps Bandeira's place and gives the Uruguayans orders. He is shot in the shoulder, but that afternoonOtaloragoes back toEl Sus- piroon the boss's sorrel and that afternoon a few drops of his blood stainthejaguarskin and that night he sleeps with the woman with the s.h.i.+ning hair. Other versions change the order of these events and even deny that they all occurred on a single day.

ThoughBandeirais still nominally the boss, he gives orders that aren't carried out;Benjamin Otaloranever touches him, out of a mixture of habit and pity.

The last scene of the story takes place during the excitement of the last night of 1894. That night, themen ofEl Suspiroeat fresh-butchered lamb and drink bellicose liquor. Somebody is infinitely strumming ata milongathat he has some difficulty playing. At the head of the table,Otalora,drunk, builds exultancy upon exultancy, jubilation upon jubilation; that vertigi- nous tower is a symbol of his inexorable fate.Bandeira,taciturn among the boisterous men, lets the night take its clamorous course. When the twelve strokes of the clock chime at last, he stands up like a man remembering an engagement. He stands up and knocks softly on the woman's door. She opens it immediately, as though she were waiting for the knock. She comes out barefoot and half dressed. In an effeminate, wheedling voice, the boss speaks an order: "Since you and the city slicker there are so in love, go give him a kiss so everybody can see."

He adds a vulgar detail. The woman tries to resist, but two men have taken her by the arms, and they throw her on top ofOtalora.In tears, she kisses his face and his chest.Ulpiano Suarezhas pulled his gun.Otalorare- alizes, before he dies, that he has been betrayed from the beginning, that he has been sentenced to death, that he has been allowed to love, to command, and win because he was already as good as dead, because so far asBandeirawas concerned, he was already a dead man.

Suarezfires, almost with a sneer.

The Theologians

The gardens ravaged, the altars and chalices profaned, the Huns rode their horses into the monastery library and mangled the incomprehensible books and reviled and burned them-fearful perhaps that the letters of the books might harbor blasphemies against their G.o.d, which was a scimitar of iron. They burned palimpsests and codices, but in the heart of the bonfire, among the ashes, there lay, virtually untouched by the flames, the twelfth book of theCivitas Dei, which says that in Athens Plato once taught that at the end of time all things will return again to where they once were-that he, in Athens, before the same circle of listeners, will one day teach that doc- trine once again. That text spared by the flames came to enjoy a special ven- eration; those who read and reread it in that remote province came to forget that the author put forth the doctrine only in order more roundly to refute it. A hundred years later, Aurelian, bishop-coadjutor of Aquileia, learned that on the banks of the Danube the newborn sect called theMonotoni(also theAnnulari) was claiming that history is a circle, and that all things that exist have existed before and will exist again. In the mountains, the Wheel and the Serpent had supplanted the Cross. Fear gripped all men's hearts, yet all were comforted by the rumor that John of Pannonia, who had distin- guished himself by a treatise on the seventh attribute of G.o.d, was preparing to refute this abominable heresy.

Aurelian deplored the entire situation-especially this last report. He knew that in theology, there is no novelty without danger; then he reflected that the notion of circular time was too strange, too shocking, for the dan- ger to be very serious. (The heresies we ought to fear are those that can be confused with orthodoxy.) He was pained most of all by the intervention- the intrusion-of John of Pannonia. Two years before, John's verbose treatiseDe septimaaffectioneDei sive de ceternitatehad trespa.s.sed upon Aurelian'sown field of expertise; now, as though the problem of time were his alone, John promised to set theAnnulari right (no doubt with arguments befitting Procrustes, and remedies more terrible than the Serpent itself).... That night, Aurelian turned the pages of Plutarch's ancient dialogue on the ceas- ing of the oracles; in paragraph twenty-nine, he read a gibe against the Sto- ics, who defended the idea of an infinite cycle of worlds, with infinite suns, moons,Apollos,Artemisias,andPoseidons.His coming upon this pa.s.sage was a good omen; he resolved to steal a march on John of Pannonia and re- fute the heretics of the Wheel himself.

There are those who seek the love of a woman in order to stop thinking of her, to put her out of their mind; similarly, Aurelian wanted to outstrip John of Pannonia not because he wished to do him any harm, but in order to cure himself of the grudge he held for the man. His temper cooled by mere labor, by the crafting of syllogisms and the invention of contumely, by thenego's andautem's andnequaquam's, therancor dropped away. He con- structed vast labyrinthine periods, made impa.s.sable by the piling-up of clauses upon clauses-clauses in which oversight and bad grammar seemed manifestations of disdain.

He crafted an instrument from cacophony. He foresaw that John would thunder down on the Annulari with the gravity of a prophet; resolved to come at the problem from a different tack, he himself chose derision. Augustine had written that Jesus was the straight path that leads men out of the circular labyrinth in which the impious wander; Aure- lian, in his painstakingly trivial way, compared the impious with Ixion, with Prometheus' liver, with Sisyphus, with that king of Thebes who saw two suns, with stuttering, with parrots, mirrors, echoes, mules chained to tread- mills, and two-horned syllogisms. (The heathen fables had managed to en- dure, though reduced now to decoration.) Like all those who possess libraries, Aurelian felt a nagging sense of guilt at not being acquainted with every volume in his; this controversy allowed him to read many of the books that had seemed to reproach his neglect. Thus it was that he inserted into his text a pa.s.sage from Origen'sDe principii*inwhichOrigendenies that Judas Iscariot will sell the Lord again, that Paul will once more witness Stephen's martyrdom in Jerusalem, and another pa.s.sage from Cicero'sAca- demica priorain which Cicero mocks those who dream that while Cicero is speaking with Lucullus, other Luculluses and otherCiceros,infinite in number, speak precisely the same words in infinite identical worlds. He also scourged theMonotoniwith that text from Plutarch on the obsolescence of the oracles, and decried the scandalous fact that thelumen natures should mean more to an idolater than the word of G.o.d to theMonotoni.The laborof composition took Aurelian nine days; on the tenth, he received a copy of the refutation written by John of Pannonia.

It was almost ludicrously brief; Aurelian looked at it with contempt, and then with foreboding. The first section glossed the closing verses of the ninth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, which say that Jesus has not suffered many times since the foundation of the world, but has been sacri- ficed now, once, "in the end of the world." The second section cited the bib- lical injunction concerning the "vain repet.i.tions" of the heathens (Matthew 6:7) and that pa.s.sage from the seventh book of Pliny which praises the fact that in all the wide universe there are no two faces that are the same. John of Pannonia declared that no two souls were the same, either, and that the basest sinner is as precious as the blood shed for him by Jesus Christ.

The act of a single man, he said, weighs more than the nine concentric heavens, and to think, erroneously, that it can be lost and then return again is naught but spectacular foolishness. Time does not restore what we lose; eternity holds it for glory, and also for the fire. John's treatise was limpid, universal; it seemed written not by a particular person, but by any man-or perhaps all men.

Aurelian felt an almost physical sense of humiliation. He considered destroying or reworking his own ma.n.u.script; then, with grudging honesty, he sent it off to Rome without changing a letter. Months later, when the Council of Pergamo was convened, the theologian entrusted with refuting the errors of theMonotoniwas (predictably) John of Pannonia; his learned, measured refutation was the argument that condemned the here-siarch Euphorbus to the stake.This has occurred once, and will occur again, said Euphorbus.It is not one pyre you are lighting, it is a labyrinth of fire. If all the fires on which I have been burned were brought together here, the earth would be too small for them, and the angels would be blinded. These words I have spoken many times. Then he screamed, for the flames had en- gulfed him.

The Wheel fell to the Cross,

1.

'in Runic crosses the two enemy emblems coexist, intertwined.

but the secret battle between John and Au- relian continued. The two men were soldiers in the same army, strove for the same prize, fought against the same Enemy, yet Aurelian wrote not a word that was not aimed, however unconfessably, at besting John. Their duel was an invisible one; if I may trust the swollen indices of Migne'sPa-trology, not once doesthe other man's name figure in the many volumes of Aurelian's works collected therein for posterity. (Of John's writings, only twenty words have survived.) Both men deplored the anathemas of the sec- ond Council of Constantinople; both persecuted the Arians, who denied the eternal generation of the Son; both attested to the orthodoxy of Cosmas'Topographia Christiana, which taught that the earth is foursquare, like the Jewish tabernacle. Then, unfortunately, another tempestuous heresy spread to those four corners of the earth. Sp.a.w.ned in Egypt or in Asia (for accounts differ, and Bousset refuses to accept Harnack's arguments), the sect soon infested the easternprovinces, and sanctuaries were built in Macedonia, Carthage, andTreves.It seemed to be everywhere; people said that in the diocese of Britain crucifixes had been turned upside down and inCa.s.sariathe image of the Lord had been supplanted by a mirror. The mirror and the obolus were the emblems of these new schismatics.

History knows them by many names(Speculari,Abysmali,Cainit),but the most widely accepted is Histrioni, the name that Aurelian gave them and that they defiantly adopted for themselves. In Phrygia, they were called theSimulacra, and in Dardania as well. John of Damascus called them"Forms"; it seems only right to point out that Erfjord thinks the pa.s.sage apocryphal. There is no heresiologue who does not express shock as he re- counts their wild customs. Many Histrioni professed ascetism; some muti - lated themselves, likeOrigen;others lived underground, in the sewers; others put out their own eyes; still others (theNebuchadnezzars ofNitria)"grazed on gra.s.ses like the oxen, and their hair grew like the eagle's." From mortification and severity, they sometimes graduated to crime; certain communities tolerated theft; others, homicide; others, sodomy, incest, and b.e.s.t.i.a.lity. All were blasphemous; they cursed not only the Christian G.o.d, but even the arcane deities of their own pantheon. They plotted together to write sacred texts, whose disappearance is a great loss to scholars. In 1658, Sir Thomas Browne wrote the following: "Time has annihilated the ambi- tious.h.i.+strionic Gospels, although not so theInsulteswith which their Impiousness was scourged"; Erfjord has suggested that those"insultes"(preserved in a Greek codex) are themselves the lost gospels. Unless we re- call the Histrionic cosmology, such a suggestion is incomprehensible.

In the hermetic books, it is written that "things below are as things above, and things above as things below"; the Zohar tells us that the lower world is a reflection of the higher. The Histrioni founded their doctrine on a perversion of this idea. They invoked Matthew 6:12 ("forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors") and 11:12 ("the kingdom of heaven suffereth vio- lence") to prove that the earth influences heaven; they cited I Corinthians 13:12 ("For now we see through a gla.s.s, darkly") to prove that all things wesee are false. Contaminated perhaps by theMonotoni,they imagined that every man is two men, and that the real one is theother one, the one in heaven. They also imagined that our acts cast an inverted reflection, so that if we are awake, the other man is asleep; if we fornicate, the other man is chaste; if we steal, the other man is generous. When we die, they believed, we shall join him and be him. (Some echo of these doctrines continues to be heard in Bloy.) Other Histrioni believed that the world would end when the number of its possibilities was exhausted; since there can be no repet.i.tions, the righteous are duty-bound to eliminate (commit) the most abominable acts so that those acts will not sully the future and so that the coming of the kingdom of Jesus may be hastened.

That particular article of faith was denied by other sects, which re- joined that the history of the world must be acted out in every man. Most men, like Pythagoras, will have to transmigrate through many bodies before obtaining their liberation; some, theProteans, "within the period of a single life are lions, dragons, wild boars, are water and are a tree." Demosthenes tells of the purification by mud to which initiates were subjected as part of the Orphic mysteries; a.n.a.logously, the Proteans sought purification through evil. It was their belief, as it was Carpocrates', that no one shall emerge from the prison until the last obolus is paid (Luke 12:59: "I tell thee, thou shalt not depart thence, till thou hast paid the very last mite"), and they often hornswoggled penitents with this other verse: "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly" (John 10:10). They also said thatnot to be an evildoer was an act of Satanic arro- gance. ... The Histrioni wove many, and diverse, mythologies; some preached asceticism, others license-all preached confusion. Theopompus,a Histrionfrom Berenice, denied all fables; he said that every man is an or- gan projected by the deity in order to perceive the world.