Jorge Luis Borges - Collected Fictions Part 18

Marino achieved that epiphany on the eve of his death, and Homer and Dante may have achieved it as well.

The Witness

In a stable that stands almost in the shadow of the new stone church, a man with gray eyes and gray beard, lying amid the odor of the animals, humbly tries to will himself into death, much as a man might will himself to sleep. The day, obedient to vast and secret laws, slowly s.h.i.+fts about and mingles the shadows in the lowly place; outside lie plowed fields, a ditch clogged with dead leaves, and the faint track of a wolf in the black clay where theUneof woods begins. The man sleeps and dreams, forgotten.

The bells for orisons awaken him. Bells are now one of evening's customs in the king- doms of England, but as a boy the man has seen the face of Woden, the sa- cred horror and the exultation, the clumsy wooden idol laden with Roman coins and ponderous vestments, the sacrifice of horses, dogs, and prisoners. Before dawn he will be dead, and with him, the last eyewitness images of pagan rites will perish, never to be seen again. The world will be a little poorer when this Saxon man is dead.

Things, events, that occupy s.p.a.ce yet come to an end when someone dies may make us stop in wonder -and yet one thing, or an infinite number of things, dies with every man's or woman's death, unless the universe itself has a memory, as theosophists have suggested. In the course of time there was one day that closed the last eyes that had looked on Christ; the Battle of Junin and the love of Helen died with the death of one man. What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonia Fernandez, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano andCharcas,a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a ma- hogany desk?

Martin Fierro

Out of this city marched armies that seemed grand, and that in later dayswere grand, thanks to the magnifying effects of glory. After many years, one of the soldiers returned, and in a foreign accent told stories of what had happened to him in places calledItuzaingoor Ayacucho.* These things are now as though they had never been.

There have been two tyrannies in this land. During the first, a wagon pulled out of La Plata market; as the wagon pa.s.sed through the streets, some men on the driver's seat cried out their wares, hawking white and yellow peaches; a young boy lifted the corner of the canvas that covered them and saw the heads of Unitarians, their beards b.l.o.o.d.y.* The second meant, for many, prison and death; for all, it meant discomfort, endless humiliation, a taste of shamefulness in the actions of every day. These things are now as though they had never been.

A man who knew all the words looked with painstaking love at the plants and birds of this land and defined them, perhaps forever, and in metaphors of metal wrote the vast chronicle of its tumultuous sunsets and the shapes of its moon.* These things are now as though they had never been.

Also in this land have generations known those common yet some- how eternal vicissitudes that are the stuff of art. These things are now as though they had never been, but in a hotel room in eighteen-hundred sixty-something a man dreamed of a knife fight.A gaucholifts a black man oft" the ground with the thrust of his knife, drops him like a bag of bones, watches him writhe in pain and die, squats down to wipe off his knife, un- ties his horse's bridle and swings up into the saddle slowly, so no one will think he's running away from what he's done. This thing that was once, returns again, infinitely; the visible armies have goneand what is left is a com- mon sort of knife fight; one man's dream is part of all men's memory.

Mutations

In a hallway I saw a sign with an arrow pointing the way, and I was struck by the thought that that inoffensive symbol had once been a thing of iron, an inexorable, mortal projectile that had penetrated the flesh of men and lions and clouded the sun of Thermopylae and bequeathed toHarald Sigurdson,for all time, six feet of English earth.

Several days later, someone showed me a photograph of a Magyar horse- man; a coil of rope hung about his mount's chest. I learned that the rope, which had once flown through the air and la.s.soed bulls in the pasture, was now just an insolent decoration on a rider's Sunday riding gear.

In the cemetery on the Westside I saw a runic cross carved out of red marble; its arms splayed and widened toward the ends and it was bounded by a circle. That circ.u.mscribed and limited cross was a figure of the cross with unbound arms that is in turn the symbol of the gallows on which a G.o.d was tortured-that "vile machine" decried byLucianof Samosata.

Cross, rope, and arrow: ancient implements of mankind, today re- duced, or elevated, to symbols. I do not know why I marvel at them so, when there is nothing on earth that forgetfulness does not fade, memory al- ter, and when no one knows what sort of image the future may translate it into.

Parable of Cervantes and theQuixote

Weary of his land of Spain, an old soldier of the king's army sought solace in the vast geographies of Ariosto, in that valley of the moon in which one finds the time that is squandered by dreams, and in the golden idol of Muhammad stolen byMontalban.

In gentle self-mockery, this old soldier conceived a credulous man-his mind unsettled by the reading of all those wonders-who took it into his head to ride out in search of adventures and enchantments in prosaic places with names such asEl TobosoandMontici.

Defeated by reality, by Spain, don Quixote died in 1614 in the town of his birth. He was survived only a short time by MigueldeCervantes.

For both the dreamer and the dreamed, that entire adventure had been the clash of two worlds; the unreal world of romances and the common everyday world of the seventeenth century.

They never suspected that the years would at last smooth away the dis- cord, never suspected that in the eyes of the future,La ManchaandMonticiand the lean figure of the Knight of Mournful Countenance would be no less poetic than the adventures of Sindbad or the vast geographies of Ariosto.

For in the beginning of literature there is myth, as there is also in the end of it.

DevotoClinic January 1955

Paradiso,x.x.xI,108

Diodorus Sicul.u.s.tells thestoryof a G.o.d that is cut into pieces and scattered over the earth. Which of us, walking through the twilight or retracing some day in our past, has never felt that we have lost some infinite thing?

Mankind has lost a face, an irrecoverable face, and all men wish they could be that pilgrim (dreamed in the empyrean, under the Rose) who goes to Rome and looks upon the veil of St. Veronica and murmurs in be- lief:My Lord Jesus Christ, very G.o.d, is this, indeed, Thy likeness in such fash- ion wrought?*There is a face in stone beside a path, and an inscription that readsThe True Portrait of the Holy Face of the Christ ofJaen.If we really knew what that face looked like, we would possess the key to the parables, and know whether the son of the carpenter was also the Son of G.o.d.

Paul saw the face as a light that struck him to the ground; John, as the sun when it s.h.i.+nes forth in all its strength; Teresade Jesus,many times, bathed in serene light, although she could never say with certainty what the color of its eyes was.

Those features are lost to us, as a magical number created from our cus- tomary digits can be lost, as the image in a kaleidoscope is lost forever. We can see them and yet notgrasp them. A Jew's profile in the subway might be the profile of Christ; the hands that give us back change at a ticket booth may mirror those that soldiers nailed one day to the cross.

Some feature of the crucified face may lurk in every mirror; perhaps the face died, faded away, so that G.o.d might be all faces.

Who knows but that tonight we may see it in the labyrinths of dream, and not know tomorrow that we saw it.

Parable of the Palace

That day the Yellow Emperor showed his palace to the poet. Little by little, step by step, they left behind, in long procession, the first westward-facing terraces which, like the jaggedhemicyclesof an almost unbounded am- phitheater, stepped down into a paradise, a garden whose metal mirrors and intertwined hedges of juniper werea prefigurationof the labyrinth. Cheer- fully they lost themselves in it-at first as though condescending to a game, but then not without some uneasiness, because its straightallees suffered from a very gentle but continuous curvature, so that secretly the avenues were circles. Around midnight, observation of the planets and the oppor- tune sacrifice of a tortoise allowed them to escape the bonds of that region that seemed enchanted, though not to free themselves from that sense of being lost that accompanied them to the end. They wandered next through antechambers and courtyards and libraries, and then through a hexagonal room with a water clock, and one morning, from a tower, they made out a man of stone, whom later they lost sight of forever. In canoes hewn from sandalwood, they crossed many gleaming rivers-or perhaps a single river many times. The imperial entourage would pa.s.s and people would fall to their knees and bow their heads to the ground, but one day the courtiers came to an island where one man did not do this, for he had never seen the Celestial Son before, and the executioner had to decapitate him. The eyes of the emperor and poet looked with indifference on black tresses and black dances and golden masks; the real merged and mingled with the dreamed-or the real, rather, was one of the shapes the dream took. It seemed impossible that the earth should be anything but gardens, foun- tains, architectures, and forms of splendor. Every hundred steps a tower cut the air, to the eye, their color was identical, but the first of them was yellow and the last was scarlet; that was how delicate the gradations were and how long the series.

It was at the foot of the penultimate tower that the poet (who had ap- peared untouched by the spectacles which all the others had so greatly mar- veled at) recited the brief composition that we link indissolubly to his name today, the words which, as the most elegant historians never cease repeat- ing, garnered the poet immortality and death. The text has been lost; there are those who believe that it consisted of but a single line; others, of a single word.

What we do know-however incredible it may be-is that within the poem lay the entire enormous palace, whole and to the least detail, with every venerable porcelain it contained and every scene on every porcelain, all the lights and shadows of its twilights, and every forlorn or happy moment of the glorious dynasties of mortals, G.o.ds, and dragons that had lived within it through all its endless past.

Everyone fell silent; then the emperor spoke. "You have stolen my palace!" he cried, and the executioner's iron scythe mowed down the poet's life.

Others tell the story differently. The world cannot contain two things that are identical; no sooner, theysay, had the poet uttered his poem than the palace disappeared, as though in a puff of smoke, wiped from the face of the earth by the final syllable.

Such legends, of course, are simply literary fictions. The poet was the emperor's slave and died a slave; his composition fell into oblivion because it merited oblivion, and his descendants still seek, though they shall never find, the word for the universe.

Everything and Nothing*

There was no one inside him; behind his face (which even in the bad paint- ings of the time resembles no other) and his words (which were mult.i.tudi- nous, and of a fantastical andagitated turn) there was no more than a slight chill, a dream someone had failed to dream. At first he thought that every- one was like him, but the surprise and bewilderment of an acquaintance to whom he began to describe that hollowness showed him his error, and also let him know, forever after, that an individual ought not to differ from its species. He thought at one point that books might hold some remedy for his condition, and so he learned the "little Latin and less Greek" that a con- temporary would later mention. Then he reflected that what he was looking for might be found in the performance of an elemental ritual of humanity, and so he allowed himself to be initiated by Anne Hathaway one long eve- ning in June.

At twenty-something he went off to London. Instinctively, he had al- ready trained himself to the habit of feigning that he was somebody, so that his "n.o.bodiness" might not be discovered. In London he found the calling he had been predestined to; he became an actor, that person who stands upon a stage and plays at being another person, for an audience of people who play at taking him for that person. The work of a thespian held out a remarkable happiness to him-the first, perhaps, he had ever known; but when the last line was delivered and the last dead man applauded off the stage, the hated taste of unreality would a.s.sail him. He would cease being Ferrex or Tamerlane and return to being n.o.body.

Haunted, hounded, he be- gan imagining other heroes, other tragic fables. Thus while his body, in wh.o.r.ehouses and taverns around London, lived its life as body, the soul that lived inside it would beCa.s.sar,who ignores the admonition of the sibyl, and Juliet, who hates the lark, and Macbeth, who speaks on the moor with the witches who are also the Fates, the Three Weird Sisters. No one was as many men as that man-that man whose repertoire, like that of the Egyptian Pro- teus, was all the appearances of being. From time to time he would leave a confession in one corner or another of the work, certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard says that inside himself, he plays the part of many, andlagosays, with curious words,Iam not what I am. The funda- mental ident.i.ty of living, dreaming, and performing inspired him to fa- mous pa.s.sages.

For twenty years he inhabited that guided and directed hallucination, but one morning he was overwhelmed with the surfeit and horror of being so many kings that die by the sword and so many unrequited lovers who come together, separate, and melodiously expire. That very day, he decided to sell his theater. Within a week he had returned to his birthplace, where he recovered the trees and the river of his childhood and did not a.s.sociate them with those others, fabled with mythological allusion and Latin words, that his muse had celebrated. He had to be somebody; he became a retired businessman who'd made a fortune and had an interest in loans, lawsuits, and petty usury. It was in that role that he dictated the arid last will and tes- tament that we know today, from which he deliberately banished every trace of sentiment or literature. Friends from London would visit his re- treat, and he would once again play the role of poet for them.

History adds that before or after he died, he discovered himself stand- ing before G.o.d, and said to Him:I , who have been so many men in vain, wish to be one,to be myself. G.o.d's voice answered him out of a whirlwind:I,too, am not I; Idreamed the world as you, Shakespeare, dreamed your own work, and among the forms of my dream are you, who like me are many, yet no one.

Ragnarok

The images in dreams, wrote Coleridge, figure forth the impressions that our intellect would call causes; we do not feel horror because we are haunted by a sphinx, we dream a sphinx in order to explain the horror that we feel. If that is true, how might a mere chronicling of its forms transmit the stupor, the exultation, the alarms, the dread, and the joy that wove together that night's dream? I shall attempt that chronicle, nonetheless; perhaps the fact that the dream consisted of but a single scene may erase or soften the essen- tial difficulty.

The place was the College of Philosophy and Letters; the hour, nightfall. Everything (as is often the case in dreams) was slightly different; a slight magnification altered things. We chose authorities; I would speak with Pe- dro Henriquez Urefta,* who in waking life had died many years before. Sud- denly, we were dumbfounded by a great noise ofdemonstrators or street musicians. From the Underworld, we heard the cries of humans and ani- mals. A voice cried:Here they come! and then:The G.o.ds! the G.o.ds!

Four or five individuals emerged from out of the mob and occupied the dais of the auditorium. Everyone applauded, weeping; it was the G.o.ds, returning after a banishment of many centuries. Looming larger than life as they stood upon the dais, their heads thrown back and their chests thrust forward, they haughtily received our homage. One of them was holding a branch (which belonged, no doubt, to the simple botany of dreams); another, with a sweeping gesture, held out a hand that was a claw; one of Ja.n.u.s' faces looked mistrustfully at Thoth's curved beak. Perhaps excited by our ap- plause, one of them, I no longer remember which, burst out in a triumphant, incredibly bitter clucking that was half gargle and half whistle. From that point on, things changed.

It all began with the suspicion (perhaps exaggerated) that the G.o.ds were unable to talk. Centuries of a feral life of flight had atrophied that part of them that was human; the moon of Islam and the cross of Rome had been implacable with these fugitives. Beetling brows, yellowed teeth, the spa.r.s.e beard of a mulatto or a Chinaman, and beastlike dewlaps were testaments to the degeneration of the Olympian line.

The clothes they wore were not those of a decorous and honest poverty, but rather of the criminal luxury of the Underworld's gambling dens and houses of ill repute. A carnation bled from a b.u.t.tonhole; under a tight suitcoat one could discern the outline of a knife. Suddenly, we felt that they were playing their last trump, that they were cunning, ignorant, and cruel, like aged predators, and that if we allowed our- selves to be swayed by fear or pity, they would wind up destroying us.

We drew our heavy revolvers (suddenly in the dream there were re- volvers) and exultantly killed the G.o.ds.

Inferno,I, 32

From the half-light of dawn to the half-light of evening, the eyes of a leop- ard, in the last years of the twelfth century, looked upon a few wooden boards, some vertical iron bars, some varying men and women, a blank wall, and perhaps a stone gutter littered with dry leaves. The leopard did not know, could not know, that it yearned for love and cruelty and the hot plea- sure of tearing flesh and a breeze with the scent of deer, but something in- side it was suffocating and howling in rebellion, and G.o.d spoke to it in a dream:You shall live and die in this prison, so that a man that I have knowl- edge of may see you a certain number of times and never forget you and put your figure and your symbol into a poem, which has its exact place in the weft of the universe. You suffer captivity, but you shall have given a word to the poem. In the dream, G.o.d illuminated the animal's rude understanding and the animal grasped the reasons and accepted its fate, but when it awoke there was only an obscure resignation in it, a powerful ignorance, because the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of a savagebeast.

Years later, Dante was to die in Ravenna, as unjustified and alone as any other man. In a dream, G.o.dtold him the secret purpose of his life andwork; Dante, astonished, learned at last who he was and what he was, and he blessed the bitternesses of his life. Legend has it that when he awoke, he sensed that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something he would never be able to recover, or even to descry from afar, because the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of men.

Borgesand I

It'sBorges,the other one, that things happen to. I walk through Buenos Aires and I pause-mechanically now, perhaps-to gaze at the arch of an entryway and its inner door; news...o...b..rgesreaches me by mail, or I see his name on a list of academics or in some biographical dictionary. My taste runs to hourgla.s.ses, maps, seventeenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson;Borgesshares those preferences, but in a vain sort of way that turns them into the accou- trements of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that our relation- s.h.i.+p is hostile-I live, I allow myself to live, so thatBorgescan spin out his literature, and that literature is my justification. I willingly admit that he has written a number of sound pages, but those pages will not saveme, perhaps because the good in them no longer belongs to any individual, not even to that other man, but rather to language itself, or to tradition. Beyond that, I am doomed-utterly and inevitably-to oblivion, and fleeting moments will be all of me that survives in that other man. Little by little, I have been turning everything over to him, though I know the perverse way he has of distorting andmagnifying everything. Spinoza believed that all things wish to go on being what they are-stone wishes eternally to be stone, and tiger, to be tiger. I shall endure inBorges,not in myself (if, indeed, I am anybody at all), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others', or in the tedious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him, and I moved on from the mythologies of the slums and outskirts of the city to games with time and infinity, but those games belong toBorgesnow, and I shall have to think up other things. So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away-and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man. I am not sure which of us it is that's writing this page.

MUSEUM.

On Exact.i.tude in Science

... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Use- less, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, LibroIV,Cap. XLV, Lerida,1658

In Memoriam, J.F.K.

This bullet is an old one.

In 1897, it was fired at the president of Uruguay by a young man from Montevideo,AvelinoArredondo,*who had spent long weeks without see- ing anyone so that the world might know that he acted alone. Thirty years earlier, Lincoln had been murdered by that same ball, by the criminal or magical hand of an actor transformed by the words of Shakespeare into Marcus Brutus, Caesar's murderer. In the mid-seventeenth century, ven- geance had employed it for the a.s.sa.s.sination of Sweden's Gustavus Adolphus, in the midst of the public hecatomb of a battle.

In earlier times, the bullet had been other things, because Pythagorean metempsychosis is not reserved for humankind alone. It was the silken cord given to viziers in the East, the rifles and bayonets that cut down the de- fenders of the Alamo, the triangular blade that slit a queen's throat, the wood of the Cross and the dark nails that pierced the flesh of the Redeemer, the poison kept by the Carthaginian chief in an iron ring on his finger, the serene goblet that Socrates drank down one evening.

In the dawn of time it was the stone that Cain hurled at Abel, and in the future it shall be many things that we cannot even imagine today, but that will be able to put an end to men and their wondrous, fragile life.