Jorge Luis Borges - Collected Fictions Part 12

The heretics in Aurelian's diocese were not those who claimed that every act is reflected in heaven but rather those who claimed that time does not tolerate repet.i.tions. The circ.u.mstance was peculiar; in a report to the authorities at Rome, Aurelian mentioned it. The prelate who received the report was the empress's confessor; everyone knew that this demanding minister forbade her the private delectations of speculative theology. His secretary-formerly one of John of Pannonia's collaborators, now fallen out with him-was famed as a most diligent inquisitor of heterodoxies; Au- relian added an explanation of the Histrionic heresy, as it was contained in the conventicles of Genoa and Aquileia. He wrote a fewparagraphs; when he tried to write the horrible thesis that no two moments are the same, hispen halted.

He could not find the necessary words; the admonitions of the new doctrine were too affected and metaphorical to be transcribed. ("Wouldst thou see what no human eyes have seen? Look upon the moon. Wouldst thou hear what no ears have heard? Hearken to the cry of the bird. Wouldst thou touch what no hands have touched? Put thy hand to the earth. Truly I say unto thee, that the moment of G.o.d's creation of the world is yet to come.") Then suddenly a sentence of twenty words came to his spirit.

With joy he wrote it on the page; immediately afterward, he was dis- turbed by the sense that it was someone else's. The next day, he remem- bered: he had read it many years ago in theAdversus Annulares, composed by John of Pannonia. He ferreted out the quotation-there it was. He was torn by uncertainty. To alter or omit those words was to weaken the force of the statement; to let them stand was to plagiarize a man he detested; to indi- cate the source was to denounce him. He pleaded for divine aid. Toward the coming of the second twilight, his guardian angel suggested a middle way. Aurelian kept the words, but set this disclaimer before it:That which the heresiarchs howl today, to the confusion of the faith, was said during this cen- tury, with more levity than blameworthiness, by a most learned doctor of the church. Then there occurred the thing he had feared, the thing he had hoped for, the thing that was inevitable. Aurelian was required to declare the ident.i.ty of that doctor of the church; John of Pannonia was accused of professing heretical opinions.

Four months later, a blacksmith on the Aventinus, driven to delusions by the misrepresentations of the Histrioni, set a great iron ball upon the shoulders of his little son so that the child's double might fly. The man's child died; the horror engendered by the crime obliged John's judges to be irreproachably severe with him. The accused would not retract; time and again he repeated that to deny his proposition was to fall into the pestilen- tial heresy of theMonotoni. Hedid not realize (perhapsrefused to realize) that to speak of theMonotoniwas to speak of a thing now forgotten. With somehow senile insistence, he poured forth the most brilliant periods of his old jeremiads; the judges did not even listen to what had once so shocked them. Rather than try to purify himself of the slightest stain of Histrionism, he redoubled his efforts to prove that the proposition of which he was ac- cused was in fact utterly orthodox. He argued with the men upon whose verdict his very life depended, and he committed the supremefaux pas of doing so with genius and with sarcasm. On October 26, after a debate that had lasted three days and three nights, he was condemned to be burned at the stake.

Aurelian witnessed the execution, because to have avoided it would have been to confess himself responsible for it. The place of execution was a hill on whose summit stood a stake pounded deep into the ground; all around it, bundles of firewood had been gathered. A priest read the tri- bunal's verdict.

Under the midday sun, John of Pannonia lay with his face in the dust, howling like a beast. He clawed at the ground, but the executioners seized him, stripped him, and tied him to the stake. On his head they put a crown of straw sprinkled with sulfur; beside him, a copy of the pestilentialAdversusAnnulates.It had rained the night before, and the wood burned smokily. John of Pannonia prayed in Greek, and then in an unknown lan- guage. The pyre was about to consume him, when Aurelian screwed up his courage to raise his eyes. The fiery gusts fell still; Aurelian saw for the first and last time the face of the man he hated. It reminded him of someone, but he couldn't quite remember whom. Then, the flames swallowed him; he screamed and it was as though the fire itself were screaming.

Plutarch reports that Julius Caesar wept at the death of Pompey; Aure- lian did not weep at the death of John, but he did feel what a man cured of an incurable disease that had become a part of his life might feel. In Aquileia, in Ephesus, in Macedonia, he let the years pa.s.s over him. He sought out the hard ends of the empire, the floundering swamps and the contemplative deserts, so that solitude might help him understand his life. In a Mauritanian cell, in the night laden with lions, he rethought the com- plex accusation against John of Pannonia and for the millionth time he jus- tified the verdict. It was harder for him to justify his tortuous denunciation. In Rusaddir he preached that anachronistic sermon t.i.tledThe Light of Lights Lighted in the Flesh of a Reprobate. In Hibernia, in one of the huts of a monastery besieged by forest, he was surprised one night, toward dawn, by the sound of rain. He recalled a Roman night when that same punctilious sound had surprised him. At high noon, a lighting bolt set the trees afire, and Aurelian died as John had.The end of the story can only be told in metaphors, since it takes place in the kingdom of heaven, where time does not exist. One might say that Aurelian spoke with G.o.d and found that G.o.d takes so little interest in reli- gious differences that He took him for John of Pannonia. That, however, would be to impute confusion to the divine intelligence. It is more correct to say that in paradise, Aurelian discovered that in the eyes of the unfath- omable deity, he and John of Pannonia (the orthodox and the heretic, the abominator and the abominated, the accuser and the victim) were a single person.

Storyof the Warrior and the Captive Maiden

On page 278 of his bookLapoesia(Bari,1942),Croce,summarizing and shortening a Latin text by the historian Paul the Deacon, tells the story of the life of Droctulft and quotes his epitaph; I found myself remarkably moved by both life and epitaph, and later I came to understand why. Droc- tulft was a Lombard warrior who during the siege of Ravenna deserted his own army and died defending the city he had been attacking. The people of Ravenna buried him in a church sanctuary; they composed an epitaph in which they expressed their grat.i.tude(contempsitcaros dumnos amatilleparentes)and remarked upon the singular contrast between the hor- rific figure of that barbarian and his simplicity and kindness:

terribilisVISUfaciessedmente benignus, LONGAQUEROBUSTOPECTOREBARBA FUIT1.

'Gibbon also records these lines, in theDecline and Fall, Chapter XLV

Such is the story of the life of Droctulft, a barbarian who died defend- ing Rome-or such is the fragment of his story that Paul the Deacon was able to preserve. I do not even know when the event occurred, whether in the mid-sixth century when the Longobards laid waste to the plains of Italy or in the eighth, before Ravenna's surrender. Let us imagine (this is not a work of history) that it was the mid-sixth century.

Let us imagine Droctulftsub specie aeternitatis -not the individual Droctulft, who was undoubtedly unique and fathomless (as all individuals are), but rather the generic "type" that tradition (the work of memory and forgetting) has made of him and many others like him. Through a gloomy geography of swamps and forests, wars bring him from the sh.o.r.es of theDanube or the Elba to Italy, and he may not realize that he is going toward the south, nor know that he is waging war against a thing called Rome. It is possible that his faith is that of the Arians, who hold that the glory of the Son is a mere reflection of the glory of the Father, but it seems more fitting to imagine him a wors.h.i.+per of the earth,Hertha,whose veiled idol is borne from hut to hut in a cart pulled by cattle-or of the G.o.ds of war and thun- der, who are crude wooden figures swathed in woven clothing and laden with coins and bangles. He comes from the dense forests of the wild boar and theurus;he is white, courageous, innocent, cruel, loyal to his captain and his tribe-not to the universe. Wars bring him to Ravenna, and there he sees something he has never seen before, or never fully seen. He sees day- light and cypresses and marble. He sees an aggregate that is multiple yet without disorder; he sees a city, an organism, composed of statues, temples, gardens, rooms, tiered seats, amphorae, capitals and pediments, and regular open s.p.a.ces. None of those artifices (I know this) strikes him as beautiful; they strike him as we would be struck today by a complex machine whose purpose we know not but in whose design we sense an immortal intelli- gence at work. Perhaps a single arch is enough for him, with its incompre- hensible inscription of eternal Roman letters-he is suddenly blinded and renewed by the City, that revelation. He knows that in this city there will be a dog, or a child, and that he will not even begin to understand it, but he knows as well that this city is worth more than his G.o.ds and the faith he is sworn to and all the marshlands of Germany. Droctulft deserts his own kind and fights for Ravenna. He dies, and on his gravestone are carved words that he would not have understood:

contempsitcaros dumnos amat ille parentes, hanCpatriam reputansesse, ravenna,suam Droctulftwas not a traitor; traitors seldom inspire reverential epitaphs. He was anilluminatus, a convert.

After many generations, the Longobards who had heaped blame upon the turncoat did as he had done; they became Italians, Lombards, and one of their number-Aldiger-may have fathered those who fatheredAlighieri.... There are many conjectures one might make about Droctulft's action; mine is the most economical; if it is not true as fact, it may nevertheless be true as symbol.

When I read the story of this warrior in Croce's book, I found myself enormously moved, and I was struck by the sense that I was recovering, under a different guise, something that had once been my own.

I fleetingly thought of the Mongol hors.e.m.e.n who had wanted to make China aninfinite pastureland, only to grow old in the cities they had yearned to de- stroy; but that was not the memory I sought. I found it at last-it was a tale I had heard once from my English grandmother, who is now dead.

In 1872 my grandfatherBorges wasin charge of the northern and west- ern borders of Buenos Aires province and the southern border of Santa Fe. The headquarters was in Junin; some four or five leagues farther on lay the chain of forts; beyond that, what was then called "the pampas" and also "the interior."

One day my grandmother, half in wonder, half in jest, remarked upon her fate-an Englishwoman torn from her country and her people and carried to this far end of the earth. The person to whom she made the remark told her she wasn't the only one, and months later pointed out an Indian girl slowly crossing the town square. She was barefoot, and wearing two red ponchos; the roots of her hair were blond. A soldier told her that another Englishwoman wanted to talk with her. The woman nodded; she went into the headquarters without fear but not without some misgiving. Set in her coppery face painted with fierce colors, her eyes were that half- hearted blue that the English call gray. Her body was as light as a deer's; her hands, strong and bony. She had come in from the wilderness, from "the in- terior," and everything seemed too small for her-the doors, the walls, the furniture.

Perhaps for one instant the two women saw that they were sisters; they were far from their beloved island in an incredible land. My grandmother, enunciating carefully, asked some question or other; the other woman replied haltingly, searching for the words and then repeating them, as though astonished at the old taste of them. It must have been fifteen years since she'd spoken her native language, and it was not easy to recover it. She said she was from Yorks.h.i.+re, that her parents had emigrated out to Buenos Aires, that she had lost them in an Indian raid, that she had been carried off by the Indians, and that now she was the wife of a minor chieftain-she'd given him two sons; he was very brave. She said all this little by little, in a clumsy sort of English interlarded with words from the Araucan or Pampas tongue,*

and behind the tale one caught glimpses of a savage and uncouth life: tents of horsehide, fires fueled by dung, celebrations in which the peo- ple feasted on meat singed over the fire or on raw viscera, stealthy marches at dawn; the raid on the corrals, the alarm sounded, the plunder, the battle, the thundering roundup of the stock by naked hors.e.m.e.n, polygamy, stench, and magic. An Englishwoman, reduced to such barbarism! Moved by out- rage and pity, my grandmother urged her not to go back. She swore to help her, swore to rescue her children. The other woman answered that she washappy, and she returned that night to the desert. FranciscoBorges wasto die a short time later, in the Revolution of '74; perhaps at that point my grandmother came to see that other woman, torn like herself from her own kind and transformed by that implacable continent, as a monstrous mirror of her own fate....

Every year, that blond-haired Indian woman had come into thepulperias*in Junin orFort Lavalle,looking for trinkets and "vices"; after the conversation with my grandmother, she never appeared again. But they did see each other one more time. My grandmother had gone out hunting; alongside a squalid hut near the swamplands, a man was slitting a sheep's throat. As though in a dream, the Indian woman rode by on horseback. She leaped to the ground and drank up the hot blood. I cannot say whether she did that because she was no longer capable of acting in any other way, or as a challenge, and a sign.

Thirteen hundred years and an ocean lie between the story of the life of the kidnapped maiden and the story of the life of Droctulft. Both, now, are irrecoverable. The figure of the barbarian who embraced the cause of Ravenna, and the figure of the European woman who chose the wilderness-they might seem conflicting, contradictory. But both were transported by some secret impulse, an impulse deeper than reason, and both embraced that impulse that they would not have been able to explain. It may be thatthe stories I have told are one and the same story. The obverse and reverse of this coin are, in the eyes of G.o.d, identical.

ForUlrike von Kuhlmann

A Biography of TadeoIsidoroCruz(1829-1874)

I'm looking for the face I had Before the world was made.

Yeats, "The Winding Stair"

On February 6, 1829, themontoneros*-who by this time were being hounded byLavalle*-were marching northward to joinLopez'divisions; they halted at a ranch whose name they did not know, three or four leagues from thePergamino.Toward dawn, one of the men had a haunting night- mare: in the gloom of the large bunkhouse, his confused cry woke the woman that was sleeping with him. No one knows what his dream was be- cause the next day at four o'clock themontoneroswere put to rout bySuarez'cavalry* and the pursuit went on for nine leagues, all the way to the now-dusky stubble fields, and the man perished in a ditch, his skull split by a saber from the wars in Peru and Brazil. The woman was namedIsidoraCruz; the son she bore was given the name TadeoIsidoro.

It is not my purpose to repeat the story of his life. Of the days and nights that composed it, I am interested in only one; about the rest, I will re- count nothing but that which is essential to an understanding of that single night. The adventure is recorded in a very famous book-that is, in a book whose subject can be all things to all men (I Corinthians 9:22), for it is capa- ble of virtually inexhaustible repet.i.tions, versions, perversions. Those who have commented upon the story of TadeoIsidoro Cruz,and there are many, stress the influence of the wide plains on his formation, butgauchosjust like to him were born and died along the forested banks of theParanaand in the eastern mountain ranges. He did live in a world of monotonous barbarity-when he died in 1874 of the black pox, he had never seen a mountain or a gas jet or a windmill. Or a city: In 1849, he helped drive a herd of stock from Francisc.o.xavier Acevedo'sranch to Buenos Aires; the drovers went into the city to empty their purses; Cruz, a distrustful sort,never left the inn in the neighborhood of the stockyards. He spent many days there, taciturn, sleeping on the ground, sipping hismate, getting up at dawn and lying down again at orisons. He realized (beyond words and even beyond understanding) that the city had nothing to do with him. One of the peons, drunk, made fun of him. Cruz said nothing in reply, but during the nights on the return trip, sitting beside the fire, the other man's mockery continued, so Cruz (who had never shown any anger, or even the slightest resentment) killed him with a single thrust of his knife. Fleeing, he took refuge in a swamp; a few nights later, the cry of a crested screamer warned him that the police had surrounded him. He tested his knife on a leaf. He took off his spurs, so they wouldn't get in his way when the time came-he would fight before he gave himself up. He was wounded in the forearm, the shoulder, and the left hand; he gravely wounded the bravest of the men who'd come to arrest him. When the blood ran down between his fingers, he fought more courageously than ever; toward dawn, made faint by the loss of blood, he was disarmed. Back then, the army served as the country's prison: Cruz was sent to a small fort on the northern frontier. As a low pri- vate, he took part in the civil wars; sometimes he fought for his native prov - ince, sometimes against it. On January 23,1856, at the Cardoso Marshes, he was one of the thirty Christian men who, under the command of Sgt. Maj. Eusebio Laprida, battled two hundred Indians.*

He was wounded by a spear in that engagement.

There are many gaps in his dark and courageous story. In about 1868, we come across him again on thePergamino:married or domesticated, the father of a son, the owner of a parcel of land. In 1869 he was made sergeant of the rural police. He had set his past right; at that point in his life, he should have considered himself a happy man, though deep down he wasn't. (In the future, secretly awaiting him, was one lucid, fundamental night- the night when he was finally to see his own face, the night when he was fi - nally to hear his own true name. Once fully understood, that night encompa.s.ses his entire story-or rather, one incident, one action on that night does, for actions are the symbol of our selves.) Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists ofa single moment -the mo- ment when aman knows forever more who he is. It is said that Alexander of Macedonia saw his iron future reflected in the fabulous story of Achilles; Charles XII of Sweden, in the story of Alexander. It was not a book that re- vealed that knowledge to TadeoIsidoro Cruz,who did not know how to read; he saw himself in a hand-to-hand cavalry fight and in a man. This is how it happened: During the last days of June in the year 1870, an order came down for the capture of an outlaw wanted for two murders. The man was a deserter from the forces on the border under the command of Col.BenitoMachado;in one drunken spree he had killed a black man in a wh.o.r.ehouse; in an- other, a resident of the district ofRojas.The report added that he came fromLaguna Colorada.It was atLaguna Colorada,forty years earlier, that themontoneroshad gathered for the catastrophe that had left their flesh for birds and dogs;LagunaColorado was where Manuel Mesa's career began, before he was executed in the Plazade laVictoria as the snare drums rolled to drown out the sound of the man's fury*;Laguna Coloradawas where the unknown man who fathered Cruz had been born, before he died in a ditch with his skull split by a saber from the battles in Peru and Brazil. Cruz had forgotten the name of the place; with a slight but inexplicable sense of un- easiness he recognized it.... On horseback, the outlaw, harried by the sol- diers, wove a long labyrinth of turns and switchbacks, but the soldiers finally cornered him on the night of July 12. He had gone to ground in a field of stubble. The darkness was virtually impenetrable; Cruz and his men, cautiously and on foot, advanced toward the brush in whose trem- bling depths the secret man lurked, or slept. A crested screamer cried; TadeoIsidoro Cruzhad the sense that he had lived the moment before. The outlaw stepped out from his hiding place to fight them. Cruz glimpsed the terrify- ing apparition-the long mane of hair and the gray beard seemed to con- sume his face. A well-known reason prevents me from telling the story of that fight; let me simply recall that the deserter gravely wounded or killed several of Cruz' men. As Cruz was fighting in the darkness (as his body was fighting in the darkness), he began to understand. He realized that one des- tiny is no better than the next and that every man must accept the destiny he bears inside himself. He realized that his sergeant's epaulets and uniform were hampering him. He realized his deep-rooted destiny as a wolf, not a gregarious dog; he realized that the other man was he himself. Day began to dawn on the lawless plain; Cruz threw his cap to the ground, cried that he was not going to be a party to killing a brave man, and he began to fight against the soldiers, alongside the deserterMartin Fierro.*

EmmaZunz

OnJanuary 14, 1922, when Emma Zunz returned home from the Tarbuch & Loewenthal weaving mill, she found a letter at the far end of the entryway to her building; it had been sent from Brazil, and it informed her that her fa- ther had died. She was misled at first by the stamp and the envelope; then the unknown handwriting made her heart flutter. Nine or ten smudgy lines covered almost the entire piece of paper; Emma read that Sr.Maierhad ac- cidentally ingested an overdose ofveronaland died on the third inst. in the hospital atBage.*The letter was signed by a resident of the rooming house in which her father had lived, one Fein or Fain, in Rio Grande; he could not have known that he was writing to the dead man's daughter.

Emma dropped the letter. The first thing she felt was a sinking in her stomach and a trembling in her knees; then, a sense of blind guilt, of unre- ality, of cold, of fear; then, a desire for this day to be past.

Then immediately she realized that such a wish was pointless, for her father's death was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening, end- lessly, forever after. She picked up the piece of paper and went to her room. Furtively, she put it away for safekeeping in a drawer, as though she some- how knew what was coming. She may already have begun to see the things that would happen next; she was already the person she was to become.

In the growing darkness, and until the endofthatday, Emma wept over the suicide of ManuelMaier,who in happier days gone by had beenEman- uelZunz. She recalled summer outings to a small farm near Gualeguay,* she recalled (or tried to recall) her mother, she recalled the family's little house in La.n.u.s*

that had been sold at auction, she recalled the yellow loz- enges of a window, recalled the verdict ofprison, the disgrace, the anony- mous letters with the newspaper article about the "Embezzlement of Fundsby Teller," recalled (and this she would never forget) that on the last night, her father had sworn that the thief was Loewenthal-Loewenthal, Aaron Loewenthal, formerly the manager of the mill and now one of its owners. Since 1916, Emma had kept the secret. She had revealed it to no one, not even toElsa Urstein,her best friend. Perhaps she shrank from it out of pro- fane incredulity; perhaps she thought that the secret was the link between herself and the absent man. Loewenthal didn't know she knew; Emma Zunz gleaned from that minuscule fact a sense of power.

She did not sleep that night, and by the time first light defined the rect- angle of the window, she had perfected her plan. She tried to make that day (which seemed interminable to her) be like every other. In the mill, there were rumors of a strike; Emma declared, as she always did, that she was op- posed to all forms of violence. At six, when her workday was done, she went withElsato a women's club that had a gymnasium and a swimming pool. They joined; she had to repeat and then spell her name; she had to applaud the vulgar jokes that accompanied the struggle to get it correct. She dis- cussed withElsaand the younger of the Kronfuss girls which moving pic- ture they would see Sunday evening. And then there was talk of boyfriends; no one expected Emma to have anything to say. In April she would be nine- teen, but men still inspired in her an almost pathological fear.... Home again, she made soup thickened with manioc flakes and some vegetables, ate early, went to bed, and forced herself to sleep. Thus pa.s.sed Friday the fif- teenth-a day of work, bustle, and trivia-the day beforethe day.

On Sat.u.r.day, impatience wakened her. Impatience, not nervousness or second thoughts-and the remarkable sense of relief that she had reached this day at last. There was nothing else for her to plan or picture to herself; within a few hours she would have come to the simplicity of thefait accom- pli. She read inLa Prensathat theNordstjarnan,fromMalmo,was to weigh anchor that night from Pier 3; she telephoned Loewenthal, insinuated that she had something to tell him, in confidence, about the strike, and prom- ised to stop by his office at nightfall. Her voice quivered; the quiver befitted a snitch. No other memorable event took place that morning. Emma worked until noon and then settled withPerlaKronfuss andEisa onthe de- tails of their outing on Sunday. She lay down after lunch and with her eyes closed went over the plan she had conceived. She reflected that the final step would be less horrible than the first, and would give her, she had no doubt of it, the taste of victory, and of justice. Suddenly, alarmed, she leaped out of bed and ran to the dressing table drawer. She opened it; under the portraitof Milton Sills, where she had left it night before last, she found Pain's letter. No one could have seen it; she began to read it, and then she tore it up.

To recount with some degree of reality the eventsofthatevening would be difficult, and perhaps inappropriate. One characteristic of h.e.l.l is its un- reality, which might be thought to mitigate h.e.l.l's terrors but perhaps makes them all the worse. How to make plausible an act in which even she who was to commit it scarcely believed? How to recover those brief hours of chaos that Emma Zunz's memory today repudiates and confuses? Emma lived in Amalgro,* onCalleLiniers*;we know that that evening she went down to the docks. On the infamousPaseo deJulio* she may have seen her- self multiplied in mirrors, made public by lights, and stripped naked by hungry eyes-but it is more reasonable to a.s.sume that at first she simply wandered, unnoticed, through the indifferent streets.... She stepped into two or three bars, observed the routine or the maneuvers of other women. Finally she ran into some men from theNordstjarnan.One of them, who was quite young, she feared might inspire in her some hint of tenderness, so she chose a different one-perhaps a bit shorter than she, and foul-mouthed-so that there might be no mitigation of the purity of the horror. The man led her to a door and then down a gloomy entryway and then to a tortuous stairway and then into a vestibule (with lozenges identical to those of the house inLa.n.u.s)and then down a hallway and then to a door that closed behind them. The most solemn of events are outside time-whether because in the most solemn of events the immediate past is severed, as it were, from the future or because the elements that compose those events seem not to be consecutive.

In that time outside time, in that welter of disjointed and horrible sen- sations, did Emma Zunz thinkeven once about the death that inspired the sacrifice? In my view, she thought about it once, and that was enough to en- danger her desperate goal. She thought (she could not help thinking) that her father haddone to her mother the horrible thing being done to her now. She thought it with weak-limbed astonishment, and then, immedi- ately, took refuge in vertigo. The man-a Swede or Finn-did not speak Spanish; he was an instrument for Emma, as she was for him-but she was used for pleasure, while he was used for justice.

When she was alone, Emma did not open her eyes immediately. On the night table was the money the man had left. Emma sat up and tore it to shreds, as she had torn up the letter a short time before. Tearing up money is an act of impiety, like throwing away bread; the minute she did it, Emmawished she hadn't- an act of pride, and onthat day.... Foreboding melted into the sadness of her body, into the revulsion.

Sadness and revulsion lay upon Emma like chains, but slowly she got up and began to dress. The room had no bright colors; the last light of evening made it all the drearier. She managed to slip out without being seen. On the corner she mounted a westbound Lacroze* and following her plan, she sat in the car's frontmost seat, so that no one would see her face. Perhaps she was comforted to see, in the ba.n.a.l bustle of the streets, that what had happened had not polluted everything. She rode through gloomy, shrinking neighborhoods, seeing them and forgetting them instantly, and got off at one of the stops on Warnes.* Paradoxically, her weariness turned into a strength, for it forced her to concentrate on the details of her mission and masked from her its true nature and its final purpose.

Aaron Loewenthal was in the eyes of all an upright man; in those of his few closest acquaintances, a miser. He lived above the mill, alone. Living in the run-down slum, he feared thieves; in the courtyard of the mill there was a big dog, and in his desk drawer, as everyone knew, a revolver. The year be- fore, he had decorously grieved the unexpected death of his wife-a Gauss! who'd brought him an excellent dowry!-but money was his true pa.s.sion. With secret shame, he knew he was not as good at earning it as at holding on to it. He was quite religious; he believed he had a secret pact with the Lord-in return for prayers and devotions, he was exempted from doing good works. Bald, heavyset, dressed in mourning, with his dark-lensed pince-nez and blond beard, he was standing next to the window, awaiting the confidential report from operator Zunz.

He saw her push open the gate (which he had left ajar on purpose) and cross the gloomy courtyard. He saw her make a small detour when the dog (tied up on purpose) barked. Emma's lips were moving, like those of a per- son praying under her breath; weary, over and over they rehea.r.s.ed the phrases that Sr.

Loewenthal would hear before he died.

Things didn't happen the way Emma Zunz had foreseen. Since early the previous morning, many times she had dreamed that she would point the firm revolver, force the miserable wretch to confess his miserable guilt, explain to him the daring stratagem that would allow G.o.d's justice to tri- umph over man's.

(It was not out of fear, but because she was an instrument of that justice, that she herself intended not to be punished.) Then, a single bullet in the center of his chest would put an end to Loewenthal's life. But things didn't happen that way.

Sitting before Aaron Loewenthal, Emma felt (more than the urgency toavenge her father) the urgency to punish the outrage she herself had suffered. She could notnot kill him, after being so fully and thoroughly dishonored. Nor did she have time to waste on theatrics. Sitting timidly in his office, she begged Loewenthal's pardon, invoked (in her guise as snitch) the obliga- tions entailed by loyalty, mentioned a few names, insinuated others, and stopped short, as though overcome by fearfulness. Her performance suc- ceeded; Loewenthal went out to get her a gla.s.s of water. By the time he re- turned from the dining hall, incredulous at the woman's fluttering perturbation yet full of solicitude, Emma had found the heavy revolver in the drawer. She pulled the trigger twice. Loewenthal's considerable body crumpled as though crushed by the explosions and the smoke; the gla.s.s of water shattered; his face looked at her with astonishment and fury; the mouth in the face cursed her in Spanish and in Yiddish. The filthy words went on and on; Emma had to shoot him again. Down in the courtyard, the dog, chained to his post, began barking furiously, as a spurt of sudden blood gushed from the obscene lips and sullied the beard and clothes. Emma began the accusation she had prepared ("I have avenged my father, and I shall not be punished ...") but she didn't finish it, because Sr. Loewenthal was dead. She never knew whether he had managed to understand.

The dog's tyrannical barking reminded her that she couldn't rest, not yet. She mussed up the couch,unb.u.t.toned the dead man's suit coat, re- moved his spattered pince-nez and left them on the filing-cabinet.

Then she picked up the telephone and repeated what she was to repeat so many times, in those and other words:Something has happened, something unbe- lievable. ... Sr. Loewenthal sent for me on the pretext of the strike.... He raped me ----- Ikilled him ----- The story was unbelievable, yes-and yet it convinced everyone, be- cause in substance it was true.

Emma Zunz's tone of voice was real, her shame was real, her hatred was real. The outrage that had been done to her was real, as well; all that was false were the circ.u.mstances, the time, and one or two proper names.

The House ofAsterion

And the queen gave birth to a son namedAsterion.

Apollodorus,Library, Ill:i

I know that I am accused of arrogance and perhaps of misanthropy, and perhaps even of madness. These accusations (which I shall punish in due time) are ludicrous. It is true that I never leave my house, but it is also true that its doors (whose number is infinite1 ).

'The original reads "fourteen," but there is more than enough cause to conclude that when spoken byAsterionthat number stands for "infinite."

stand open night and day to men and also to animals. Anyone who wishes to enter may do so. Here, no wom- anly splendors, no palatial ostentation shall be found, but only calm and solitude. Here shall be found a house like none other on the face of the earth. (Those who say there is a similar house in Egypt speak lies.) Even my detractors admit that there is not a single piece of furniture in the house. An- other absurd tale is that I,Asterion,am a prisoner. Need I repeat that the door stands open? Need I add that there is no lock? Furthermore, one after- noon I did go out into the streets; if I returned before nightfall, I did so because of the terrible dread inspired in me by the faces of the people- colorless faces, as flat as the palm of one's hand. The sun had already gone down, but the helpless cry of a babe and the crude supplications of the ma.s.ses were signs that I had been recognized. The people prayed, fled, fell prostrate before me; some climbed up onto the stylobate of the temple of the Axes, others gathered stones. One, I believe, hid in the sea. Not for noth- ing was my mother a queen; I cannot mix with commoners, even if my modesty should wish it.

The fact is, I am unique. I am not interested in what a man can publish abroad to other men; like the philosopher, I think that nothing can be com- municated by the art of writing. Vexatious and trivial minutiae find norefuge in my spirit, which has been formed for greatness; I have never grasped for long the difference between one letter and another. A certain generous impatience has prevented me from learning to read. Sometimes I regret that, because the nights and the days are long.

Of course I do not lack for distractions. Sometimes I run like a charging ram through the halls of stone until I tumble dizzily to the ground; some- times I crouch in the shadow of a wellhead or at a corner in one of the cor- ridors and pretend I am being hunted. There are rooftops from which I can hurl myself until I am b.l.o.o.d.y. I can pretend anytime I like that I am asleep, and lie with my eyes closed and my breathing heavy. (Sometimes I actually fall asleep; sometimes by the time I open my eyes, the color of the day has changed.) But of all the games, the one I like best is pretending that there is anotherAsterion.I pretend that he has come to visit me, and I show him around the house. Bowing majestically, I say to him:Now let us return to our previous intersection orLet us go this way, now, out into another courtyard or / knew that you would like this rain gutter or Nowyou will see a cistern that has filled with sand or Now you will see how the cellar forks. Sometimes I make a mistake and the two of us have a good laugh over it.

It is not just these games I have thought up-I have also thought a great deal about the house. Each part of the house occurs many times; any par- ticular place is another place. There is not one wellhead, one courtyard, one drinking trough, one manger; there are fourteen [an infinite number of] mangers, drinking troughs, courtyards, wellheads. The house is as big as the world-or rather, itis the world. Nevertheless, by making my way through every single courtyard with its wellhead and every single dusty gallery of gray stone, I have come out onto the street and seen the temple of the Axes and the sea. That sight, I did not understand until a night vision revealed to me that there are also fourteen [an infinite number of] seas and temples. Everything exists many times, fourteen times, but there are two things in the world that apparently exist but once-on high, the intricate sun, and below,Asterion.Perhaps I have created thestars and the sun and this huge house, and no longer remember it.

Every nine years, nine men come into the house so that I can free them from all evil. I hear their footsteps or their voices far away in the galleries of stone, and I run joyously to find them. The ceremony lasts but a few min- utes. One after another, they fall, without my ever having to b.l.o.o.d.y my hands. Where they fall, they remain, and their bodies help distinguish one gallery from the others. I do not know how many there have been, but I do know that one of them predicted as he died that someday my redeemerwould come.

Since then, there has been no pain for me in solitude, because I know that my redeemer lives, and in the end he will rise and stand above the dust. If my ear could hear every sound in the world, I would hear his footsteps. I hope he takes me to a place with fewer galleries and fewer doors. What will my redeemer be like, I wonder. Will he be bull or man? Could he possibly be a bull with the face of a man?

Or will he be like me?

The morning sun s.h.i.+mmered on the bronze sword. Now there was not a trace of blood left on it.

"Can you believe it, Ariadne?" said Theseus. "The Minotaur scarcely defended itself."

For MariaMosqueraEastman

The Other Death

About two years ago, I believe it was (I've lost the letter), Gannon wrote me from Gualeguaychu* to announce that he was sending me a translation, perhaps the first to be done into Spanish, of Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem "The Past"; in a postscript he added that PedroDamian,a man he said he knew I'd remember, had died a few nights earlier of pulmonary congestion. He'd been ravaged by fever, Gannon said, and in his delirium had relived that b.l.o.o.d.y day at Masoller.* The news struck me as predictable and even trite, because at nineteen or twenty PedroDamianhad followed the ban- ners ofAparicio Saravia.*The 1904 uprising had caught him unawares on a ranch in Rio Negro or Paysandu*, where he was working as a common la- borer;Damianwas fromEntre Rios, Gualeguay*to be exact, but where his friends went, he went-just as spirited and ignorant a fellow as they were. He fought in the occasional hand-to-hand skirmish and in that last battle; repatriated in 1905, he went back (with humble tenacity) to working in the fields. So far as I am aware, he never left his province again. He spent his last thirty years on quite a solitary little farm a league or two from thenancay*;it was in that G.o.dforsaken place that I spoke with him one evening in 1942-or tried to speak with him. He was a man of few words and little learning. The sound and fury of Masoller were the full extent of his story; it came as no surprise to me that he had relived those times as he lay dy- ing. ... I had learned that I would never seeDamianagain, and so I tried to recall him; my visual memory is so bad that all I could remember was a photograph that Gannon had taken of him. That, too, is not particularly re- markable, if you consider that I saw the man himself but once, in early 1942, but saw the photograph countless times.

Gannon sent me the photo; I've lost it, but now I've stopped looking for it. I'd be afraid to find it.

The second episode took place in Montevideo, months later. The fever and agonizing death of the man fromEntre Riossuggested to me a tale of fantasy based on the defeat at Masoller; when I told the plot of the story to Emir Rodriguez Monegal, he gave me a letter of introduction toCol. Dioni- sioTabares, who had led the campaign. The colonel received me after din- ner. From his comfortable rocking chair out in the courtyard, he lovingly and confusedly recalled the old days. He spoke of munitions that never ar- rived and of exhausted horses, of grimy, sleepy men weaving labyrinths of marches, and of Saravia, who could have entered Montevideo but turned aside "becausegauchoshave an aversion to the city," of men whose throats were slashed through to the spine,* of a civil war that struck me as more some outlaw's dream than the collision of two armies. He talked about Illescas, Tupambae, Masoller,* and did so with such perfectly formed peri- ods, and so vividly, that I realized that he'd told these same stories many times before-indeed, it all made me fear that behind his words hardly any memories remained. As he took a breath, I managed to mention the nameDamian.

"Damian?PedroDamian?"the colonel said. "He served with me. A lit- tle Indian-like fellow the boys called Dayman." He began a noisy laugh, but suddenly cut it off, with real or pretended discomfort.

It was in another voice that he said that war, like women, served to test a man-before a man goes intobattle, he said, no man knows who he truly is. One fellow might think himself a coward and turn out to be a brave man, or it might be the other way around, which was what happened to that poorDamian,who swaggered around thepulperiaswith his white ribbon* and then fell apart in Masoller.

There was one shoot-out with the Zumacos* where he'd acted like a man, but it was another thing when the armies squared off and the cannon started in and every man felt like five thousand other men had ganged up to kill'im.Poor little mestizo b.a.s.t.a.r.d, he'd spent his whole life dipping sheep, and all of a sudden he'd gotten himself swept up in that call to defend the nation....

Absurdly, Col. Tabares' version of the events embarra.s.sed me. I'd have preferred that they not have taken place quite that way. Out of the agedDamian,a man I'd had a glimpse of on a single afternoon, and that, many years ago, I had unwittingly constructed a sort of idol; Tabares' version shat- tered it. Suddenly I understoodDamian'sreserve and stubborn solitude; they had been dictated not by modesty, but by shame. Futilely I told myself, over and over, that a man pursued by an act of cowardice is more complex and more interesting than a man who is merely brave. Thegaucho MartinFierro,I thought, is less memorable than Lord Jim or Razumov. Yes, butDamian, as a gaucho,had an obligation to beMartin Fierro-especially so in the company of Uruguayangauchos.With respect to what Tabares said and failed to say, I caught the gamy taste of what was calledArtiguismo* - the (perhaps unarguable) awareness that Uruguay is more elemental than our own country, and therefore wilder.... I recall that that night we said our good-byes with exaggerated effusiveness.

That winter, the lack of one or two details for my tale of fantasy (which stubbornly refused to find its proper shape) made me return to Col. Tabares' house. I found him with another gentleman of a certain age-Dr. Juan FranciscoAmaro,ofPaysandu,who had also fought in Saravia's upris- ing. There was talk, predictably enough, of Masoller.Amarotold a few anec- dotes and then, slowly, like a man thinking out loud, he added: "We stopped for the night on the Santa Irene ranch, I remember, and some new men joined up with us.

Among them, there was a French veteri- narian who died the day before the battle, and a sheep shearer, a young kid fromEntre Rios,named PedroDamian."

I interrupted sharply- "I know," I said, "The Argentine kid that fell apart under fire."

I stopped; the two men were looking at me perplexedly.

"I beg your pardon, sir,"Amarosaid, at last. "PedroDamiandied as any man might wish to die. It was about four in the afternoon. The Red in- fantry* had dug in on the peak of the hill; our men charged them with lances;Damianled the charge, yelling, and a bullet got him straight in the chest. He stopped stock-still, finished his yell, and crumpled, and his body was trampled under the hooves of the horses.

He was dead, and the final charge at Masoller rolled right over him. Such a brave man, and not yet twenty."