Jorge Luis Borges - Collected Fictions Part 21

"My advice to you is not to go looking for trouble because of what peo- ple might say, let alone because of a woman that doesn't love you anymore."

"I couldn't care less about her," he said. "A man that thinks longer than five minutes running about a woman is no man, he's a pansy. And Casilda's heartless, anyway. The last night we spent together she told me I was get- ting old."

"She was telling you the truth."

"And it hurts, but it's beside the point-Rufino's the one I'm after now."

"You want to be careful there," I told him. "I've seenRufinoin action, in theMerloelections. He's likegreased lightning."

"You think I'm afraid ofRufino Aguilera?"

" I know you're not afraid of him, but think about it-one of two things will happen: either you kill him and you get sent off to stir, or he kills you and you get sent off toChacarita."*

"One of two things. So tell me, what would you do in my place?"

"I don't know, but then I'm not exactly the best example to follow. I'm a guy that to get his backside out of jail has turned into a gorilla for the party."

"I'm not planning to turn into a gorilla for the party, I'm planning to collect a debt a man owes me."

"You mean you're going to stake your peace of mind on a stranger you've never met and a woman you don't even love anymore?"

But Luis Irala wasn't interested in hearing what I had to say, so he left. The next day we heard that he'd picked a fight withRufinoin some bar over inMoronand thatRufinohad killed him.

He went off to get killed, and he got himself killed right honorably, too-man to man. I'd done the best I could, I'd given him a friend's advice, but I still felt guilty.

A few days after the wake, I went to the c.o.c.kfights. I'd never been all that keen on c.o.c.kfights, but that Sunday, I'll tell you the truth, they made me sick. What in the world's wrong with those animals, I thought, that they tear each other to pieces this way, for no good reason?

The night of this story I'm telling you, the night of the end of the story, the boys and I had all gone to a dance over at the place that a black woman we calledLa Pardaran. Funny-all these years, and I still remember the flowered dress La Lujanera was wearing that night.... The party was out in the patio.

There was the usual drunk trying to pick a fight, but I made sure things went the way they were supposed to go. It was early, couldn't have been midnight yet, when the strangers showed up. One of them-they called him theYardmaster,and he was stabbed in the back and killed that very night, just the way you wrote it, sir-anyway, this one fellow bought a round of drinks for the house. By coincidence thisYardmasterand I were dead ringers for each other. He had something up his sleeve that night: he came up to me and started laying it on pretty thick-he was from up north, he said, and he'd been hearing about me. He couldn't say enough about my reputation. I let him talk, but I was beginning to suspect what was coming, He was. .h.i.tting the gin hard, too, and I figured it was to get his courage up- and sure enough, pretty soon he challenged me to a fight. That was when it happened-what n.o.body wants to understand. I looked at that swaggering drunk just spoiling for a fight, and it was like I was looking at myself in a mirror, and all of a sudden I was ashamed of myself. I wasn't afraid of him; if I had been, I might'vegone outside and fought him. I just stood there. This other guy, thisYardmaster,who by now had his face about this far from mine, raised his voice so everybody could hear him: "You know what's wrong with you? You're yellow, that's what's wrong with you!"

"That may be," I said. "I can live with being called yellow. You can tell people you called me a son of a wh.o.r.e, too, and say I let you spit in my face. Now then, does that make you feel better?"

La Lujanera slipped her hand up my sleeve and pulled out the knife I al- ways carried there and slipped it into my hand. And to make sure I got the message, she also said,"Rosendo,I think you're needing this."

Her eyes were blazing.

I dropped the knife and walked out-taking my time about it. People stepped back to make way for me. They couldn't believe their eyes. What did I care what they thought.

To get out of that life, I moved over to Uruguay and became an oxcart driver. Since I came back, I've made my place here. San Telmo* has always been a peaceful place to live.

The Encounter

ForSusanaBombai Those who read the news each morning do so simply to forget it again, or for the sake of the evening's conversation, and so it should surprise no one that people no longer remember, or remember as though in a dream, the once-famous and much-discussed case of Maneco Uriarte and a man named Duncan.

Of course the event took place in 1910, the year of the comet and the Centennial, and we have had and lost so many things since then-----The protagonists are dead now; those who were witness to the event swore an oath of solemn silence. I too raised my hand to swear, and I felt, with all the romantic seriousness of my nine or ten years, the gravity of that rite. I can't say whether the others noticed that I gave my word; I can't say whether they kept their own. However that may be, this is the story-with the inevitable changes that time, and good (or bad) literature, occasion.

That evening, my cousin Lafinur had taken me to anasado,one of those gatherings of men with the roasting of the fatted calf (or lamb, as it turned out to be), at a country place calledLos Laureles.I cannot describe the topography; we should picture a town in the north of the country- peaceful and shady, and sloping down gently toward the river-rather than some flat, sprawling city. The journey by train lasted long enough for me to find it boring, but childhood's time, as we all know, flows slowly. Dusk had begun to settle when we drove through the gate to the large country house. There, I sensed, were the ancient elemental things: the smell of the meat as it turned golden on the spit, the trees, the dogs, the dry branches, the fire that brings men together.

There were no more than a dozen guests, all adults. (The oldest, Idiscovered later, was not yet thirty.) They were learned, I soon realized, in sub- jects that to this day I am unworthy of: racehorses, tailoring, automobiles, notoriously expensive women. No one disturbed my shyness, no one paid any mind to me.

The lamb, prepared with slow skillfulness by one of the peons that worked on the estate, held us long in the dining room. The dates of the wines were discussed. There was a guitar; my cousin, I think I recall, sangElias Regules'La taperaandEl gauchoand a fewdecimasinLunfardo,*which wasde rigueurback then-versesabout a knife fight in one of those houses onCalle Junin.*Coffee was brought in, and cigars.

Not a word about heading back home. I felt, as Lugones once put it, "the fear of the late- ness of the hour." I couldn't bring myself to look at the clock. To hide the loneliness I felt at being a boy among men, I drank down, without much pleasure, a gla.s.s or two of wine. Suddenly, Uriarte loudly challenged Dun- can to a game of poker, just the two of them,mano a mano.Someone ob- jected that two-handed poker usually was a sorry sort of game, and suggested a table of four. Duncan was in favor of that, but Uriarte, with an obstinacy that I didn't understand (and didn't try to), insisted that it be just the two of them. Outside of truco(whose essential purpose is to fill time with verses and good-natured mischief) and the modest labyrinths of soli- taire, I have never cared much for cards. I slipped out of the room without anyone's noticing.

A big house that one has never been in before, its rooms in darkness (there was light only in the dining room), means more to a boy than an un- explored country to a traveler. Step by step I explored the house; I recall a billiard room, a conservatory with gla.s.s panes of rectangles and lozenges, a pair of rocking chairs, and a window from which there was aglimpse of a gazebo. In the dimness, I became lost; the owner of the house-whose name, after all these years, might have been Acevedo orAcebal-finally found me. Out of kindness, or, being a collector, out of vanity, he led me to a sort of museum case.

When he turned on the light, I saw that it contained knives of every shape and kind, knives made famous by the circ.u.mstances of their use. He told me he had a little place nearPergamino,and that he had gathered his collection over years of traveling back and forth through the province. He opened the case and without looking at the little show cards for each piece he recounted the knives' histories, which were always more or less the same, with differences of place and date. I asked if among his knives he had the dagger that had been carried byMoreira*(at that time the very archetype of thegaucho, as Martin Fierroand DonSegundo Som- bra*would later be). He had to admit he didn't, but he said he could show me one like it, with the same U-shaped cross guard. Angry voices inter- rupted him. He closed the case immediately; I followed him.

Uriarte was shouting that Duncan had been cheating. The others were standing around them. Duncan, Irecall, was taller than the others; he was a st.u.r.dy-looking, inexpressive man a bit heavy in the shoulders, and his hair was so blond that it was almost white. Maneco Uriarte was a man of many nervous gestures and quick movements; he was dark, with features that re- vealed, perhaps, some trace of Indian blood, and a spa.r.s.e, petulant mus- tache. Clearly, they were all drunk; I cannot say for certain whether there were two or three bottles scattered about on the floor or whether the cine-matographer's abuses have planted that false memory in my mind. Uriarte's cutting (and now obscene) insults never ceased. Duncan seemed not to hear him; finally he stood up, as though weary, and hit Uriarte, once, in the face. Uriarte screamed-from the floor where he now lay sprawling-that he was not going to tolerate such an affront, and he challenged Duncan to fight.

Duncan shook his head.

"To tell the truth, I'm afraid of you," he added, by way of explanation.

A general burst of laughter greeted this.

"You're going to fight me, and now," Uriarte replied, once more on his feet.

Someone, G.o.d forgive him, remarked that there was no lack of weapons.

I am not certain who opened thevitrine.Maneco Uriarte selected the longest and showiest knife, the one with the U-shaped cross guard; Duncan, almost as though any one of them would serve as well as any other, chose a wood-handled knife with the figure of a little tree on the blade. Someone said it was like Maneco to choose a sword. No one was surprised that Maneco's hand should be shaking at such a moment; everyone was sur- prised to see that Duncan's was.

Tradition demands that when men fight a duel, they not sully the house they are in, but go outside for their encounter. Half in sport, half serious, we went out into the humid night. I was not drunk from wine, but I was drunk from the adventure; I yearned for someone to be killed, so that I could tell about it later, and remember it. Perhaps just then the others were no more adult than 1.1 also felt that a whirlpool we seemed incapable of resistingwas pulling us down, and that we were about to be lost. No one really took Maneco's accusation seriously; everyone interpreted it as stemming from some old rivalry, tonight exacerbated by the wine.

We walked through the woods that lay out beyond the gazebo. Uriarte and Duncan were ahead of us; I thought it odd that they should watch each other the way they did, as though each feared a surprise move by the other. We came to a gra.s.sy patch.

"This place looks all right," Duncan said with soft authority.

The two men stood in the center indecisively.

"Throw down that hardware-it just gets in the way. Wrestle each other down for real!" a voice shouted.

But by then the men were fighting. At first they fought clumsily, as though afraid of being wounded; at first they watched their opponent's blade, but then they watched his eyes. Uriarte had forgotten about his anger; Duncan, his indifference or disdain. Danger had transfigured them; it was now two men, not two boys, that were fighting. I had imagined a knife fight as a chaos of steel, but I was able to follow it, or almost follow it, as though it were a game of chess. Time, of course, has not failed both to exalt and to obscure whatI saw. I am not sure how long it lasted; there are events that cannot be held to ordinary measures of time.

As their forearms (with no ponchos wrapped around them for protec- tion) blocked the thrusts, their sleeves, soon cut to ribbons, grew darker and darker with their blood. It struck me that we'd been mistaken in a.s.suming they were unfamiliar with the knife. I began to see that the two men han- dled their weapons differently. The weapons were unequal; to overcome that disadvantage, Duncan tried to stay close to the other man, while Uri- arte drew away in order to make long, low thrusts.

"They're killing each other! Stop them!" cried the same voice that had mentioned the showcase.

No one summoned the courage to intervene. Uriarte had lost ground; Duncan then charged him. Their bodies were almost touching now. Uri-arte's blade sought Duncan's face. Abruptly it looked shorter; it had plunged into his chest. Duncan lay on the gra.s.s. It was then that he spoke, his voice barely audible: "How strange. All this is like a dream."

He did not close his eyes, he did not move, and I had seen one man kill another.

Maneco Uriarte leaned down to the dead man and begged him to for- give him. He was undisguisedlysobbing. The act he had just committed overwhelmed and terrified him. I now know that he regretted less having committed a crime than having committed an act of senselessness.

I couldn't watch anymore. What I had longed to see happen had hap- pened, and I was devastated.

Lafinur later told me that they had to wrestle with the body to pull the knife out. A council was held among them, and they decided to lie as little as possible; the knife fight would be elevated to a duel with swords. Four of the men would claim to have been the seconds, among themAcebal.Everything would be taken care of in Buenos Aires; somebody always has a friend....

On the mahogany table lay a confusion of playing cards and bills that no one could bring himself to look at or touch.

In the years that followed, I thought more than once about confiding the story to a friend, but I always suspected that I derived more pleasure from keeping the secret than I would from telling it. In 1929, a casual con- versation suddenly moved me to break the long silence.Jose Olave,the re- tired chief of police, had been telling me stories of the knife fighters that hung out in the tough neighborhoods ofRetiro,down near the docks-ElBajoand that area. He said men such as that were capable of anything- ambush, betrayal, trickery, the lowest and most infamous kind of villainy- in order to get the better of their opponents, and he remarked that before thePodestasand the Gutierrezes,* there'd been very little knife fighting, the hand-to-hand sort of thing. I told him that I'd once actually witnessed such a fight, and then I told the storyofthatnight so many years before.

He listened to me with professional attention, and then he asked me a question: "Are you sure Uriarte and the other man had never used a knife in a fight before? That a stretch in the country at one time or another hadn't taught them something?"

"No," I replied. "Everyone there that night knew everyone else, and none of them could believe their eyes."

Olave went on unhurriedly, as though thinking out loud.

"You say one of those daggers had a U-shaped cross guard___There were two famous daggers like that-the one thatMoreiraused and the one that belonged to Jua.n.a.lmada,out aroundTapalquen."

Something stirred in my memory.

"You also mentioned a wood-handled knife," Olave went on, "with the mark of a little tree on the blade.

There are thousands of knives like that; that was the mark of the company that made them. But there was one..."

He stopped a moment, then went on: "There was an Acevedo that had a country place nearPergamino.And there was another brawler of some repute that made his headquarters in that area at the turn of the century-Juan Almanza. From the first man he killed, at the age of fourteen, he always used one of those short knives, because he said it brought him luck. There was bad blood between Juan Al-manza and Jua.n.a.lmada,because people got them mixed up-their names, you see.... They kept their eyes open for each other a long time, but some - how their paths nevercrossed.Juan Almanza was killed by a stray bullet in some election or other. The other one, I think, finally died of old age in the hospital at LasFlores."

Nothing more was said that afternoon; we both sat thinking.

Nine or ten men, all of them now dead, saw what my eyes saw-the long thrust at the body and the body sprawled beneath the sky-but what they saw was the end of another, older story. ManecoUnarte did not kill Duncan; it was the weapons, not the men, that fought. They had lain sleep- ing, side by side, in a cabinet, until hands awoke them. Perhaps they stirred when they awoke; perhaps that was why Uriarte's hand shook, and Dun- can's as well. The two knew how to fight-the knives, I mean, not the men, who were merely their instruments-and they fought well that night. They had sought each other for a long time, down the long roads of the province, and at last they had found each other; by that time theirgauchoswere dust. In the blades of those knives there slept, and lurked, a human grudge.

Things last longer than men. Who can say whether the story ends here; who can say that they will never meet again.

Juan Murana

For years I said I was brought up in Palermo.* It was, I know now, mere lit- erary braggadocio, because the fact is, I grew up within the precincts of a long fence made of spear-tipped iron lances, in a house with a garden and my father's and grandfather's library. The Palermo of knife fights and gui- tars was to be found (I have been given to understand) on the street corners and in the bars and tenement houses.

In 1930,1 devoted an essay toEvaristo Carriego,our neighbor, a poet whose songs glorified those neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city. A short time after that, chance threwEmilioTrapani inmy way.

I was taking the train toMoron;Trapani,who was sitting beside the window, spoke to me by name. It took me a moment to recognize him; so many years had gone by since we shared a bench in that school onCalleThames. (RobertoG.o.deiwill recall that.)Trapaniand I had never particularly liked each other; time, and reciprocal indifference, had put even greater distance be- tween us. It was he, I now remember, who had taught me the rudiments ofLunfardo-the thieves jargon of the day. There on the train we fell into one of those trivial conversations that are bent upon dredging up pointless in- formation and that sooner or later yield the news of the death of a school- mate who's nothing but a name to us anymore.

Then suddenlyTrapanichanged the subject.

"Somebody lent me your book onCarriego,"he said. "It's full of knife fighters and thugs and underworld types. Tell me,Borges,"he said, looking at me as though stricken with holy terror, "what canyou know about knife fighters and thugs and underworld types?"

"I've read up on the subject," I replied.

" 'Read up on it' is right," he said, not letting me go on. "But I don't need to 'read up'-I know those people."

After a silence, he added, as though sharing a secret with me: "I am a nephew ofJuan Murana."*

Of all the knife fighters in Palermo in the nineties,Muranawas the one that people talked about most.

"Florentina,my mother's sister," he went on, "wasMurana'swife. You might be interested in the story."

Certain rhetorical flourishes and one or another overlong sentence in *Trapani'snarration made me suspect that this was not the first time he had told it.

It was always a source of chagrin to my mother that her sister would marryJuan Murana,whom my mother considered a cold-blooded rogue, though Florentinasaw him as a "man of action." There were many versions of the fate that befell my uncle. There were those who claimed that one night when he'd been drinking he fell off the seat of his wagon as he turned the corner ofCoroneland cracked his skull on the cobblestones. Some said the law was after him and he ran off to Uruguay. My mother, who could never bear her brother-in-law, never explained it to me. I was just a tyke, and I don't really even remember him.

Around the time of the Centennial,* we were living on Russell Alley. It was a long, narrow house we lived in, so while the front door was on Rus- sell, the back door, which was always locked, was on San Salvador. My aunt, who was getting on in years and had become a little odd, lived in a bedroom in the attic. A skinny, bony woman she was, or so she seemed to me-tall, and miserly with her words. She was afraid of fresh air, never went outside, and she wouldn't let us come in her room; more than once I caught her stealing food and hiding it. Around the neighborhood, people would some- times say that Murana'sdeath, or disappearance, had driven her insane. I always picture her dressed in black. She'd taken to talking to herself. The owner of our house was a man named Luchessi* who had a barbershop inBarracas.*My mother, who worked at home as a seamstress, was having a hard time making ends meet. Though I didn't really understand it all, I would overhear certain whispered words:justice of the peace, disposses- sion, eviction for nonpayment. My mother suffered terribly; my aunt would stubbornly say that Juan would never let that wop* throw us out. She would recall the case-which she'd told us about dozens of times-of a scurrilous thug from the Southsidewho'd had the audacity to cast aspersions on her husband's courage. WhenJuan Muranafound out, he'd gone all the way to the other side of the city, found the man, settled the dispute with one thrust of his knife, and thrown the body in theRiachuelo.I can't say whether the story was true; the important thing at the time was that it had been told and believed.

I pictured myself sleeping in the archways onCalleSerrano, or begging, or standing on a corner with a basket of peaches. I half liked the idea of sell- ing peaches-it would get me out of going to school.

I'm not certain how long all the worrying and anguish lasted. Your fa- ther, rest his soul, told us once that time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos andcentavos,because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different. I didn't fully understand what he meant then, but the phrase stayed in my mind.

One night during this time, I had a dream that turned into a nightmare. It was a dream about my uncle Juan. I'd never known him, but in my dream he was a strong, muscular man with Indian features and a spa.r.s.e mustache and long flowing hair. We were riding toward the south, through big quar- ries and stands of underbrush, but those quarries and stands of underbrush were alsoCalleThames.* In my dream, the sun was high in the sky. Uncle Juan was dressed all in black. He stopped in a narrow pa.s.s, near some sort of scaffolding. He had his hand under his coat, over his heart-not like a man who's about to draw his weapon, but like one who's trying to hide it. He said to me, in a voice filled with sadness, "I've changed a great deal." Then he slowly pulled out his hand, and what I saw was a vulture's claw. I woke up screaming in the dark.

The next day my mother told me she was taking me with her to see Luchessi. I knew she was going to ask for more time; she was taking me along, I'm sure, so the landlord could see how pathetic she was.

She didn't say a word to her sister, who would never have allowed her to lower herself that way. I'd never been inBarracas;to my eyes there were more people, more traffic, and fewer vacant lots than where we lived. When we came to a certain corner, we saw policemen and a crowd in front of the number we were looking for. One man who lived there on the street was going from group to group, telling the story of how he'd been awakened at three in the morning by banging noises; he'd heard the door open and somebody step inside. n.o.body had ever closed the door-at dawn Luchessi was found ly- ing in the entryway, half dressed. He'd been stabbed repeatedly. He had livedalone;the police never found the culprit. Nothing had been stolen. Someone recalled that recently the deceased man had been losing his eye- sight. "His time had come," another person said in a voice of authority. That verdict, and the tone with which it was delivered, impressed me; as the years have gone by I've noticed that whenever someone dies, there's always some sententious soul who has the same revelation.

At the wake, somebody brought around coffee and I drank a cup. There was a wax dummy in the coffin instead of the dead man. I mentioned this fact to my mother; one of the mourners laughed and a.s.sured me that the figure dressed in black was indeed Sr. Luchessi. I stood there fascinated, staring at him. My mother had to take me by the arm and pull me away.

For months people talked about nothing else. Crimes were rare then; think of how much talk there was about the Longhair and Squealer and Chairmaker affair. The only person in Buenos Aires utterly unconcerned by the scandal was my auntFlorentina.With the insistence of old age, all she would say when the subject was brought up was, "I told you people that Juan would never stand for that wop putting us out in the street."

One day there was a terrible storm; it seemed as though the sky had opened and the clouds had burst.

Since I couldn't go to school, I started opening doors and drawers and cabinets, rummaging inside the way boys do, to see what secret treasures the house might hide. After a while I went up into the attic.

There was my aunt, sitting with her hands folded in her lap; I sensed that she wasn't even thinking. Her room smelled musty. In one corner stood the iron bed, with a rosary hanging on one of the bedposts; in another, the wooden wardrobe for her clothes. On one of the whitewashed walls there was a lithograph of theVirgendel Carmen. A candlestick sat on the nightstand.

"I know what brings you up here," my aunt said, without raising her eyes. "Your mother sent you. She can't get it through her head that it was Juan that saved us."

"Juan?" I managed to say. "Juan died over ten years ago.""Juan is here," she said. "You want to see him?"

She opened the drawer of the nightstand and took out a dagger.

"Here he is," she said softly. "I knew he'd never leave me. There's never been a man like him on earth.

The wop never had a chance."

It was only then that I understood. That poor foolish, misdirected woman had murdered Luchessi.