Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations

by Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N. T. di Giovanni)

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

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

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

  Death and the Compass

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874)

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

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

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

  The Two Kings and Their Two Labyrinths

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

  The Dead Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The Other Death

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

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

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

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

  Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth

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

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

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

  The Man on the Threshold

  I have previously written of this story:

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

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

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

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

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

  The Challenge

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

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

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

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

  The Captive

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

  Borges and Myself

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