Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations

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

  On the sixteenth of January 1867 Roger Charles Tichborne announced his presence in that same hotel. He was preceded by his respectful manservant, Ebenezer Bogle. The winter day was bright with sunshine; Lady Tichborne’s weary eyes were veiled with tears. The Negro threw open wide the window blinds, the light created a mask, and the mother, recognizing her prodigal son, drew him into her eager embrace. Now that she really had him back, she could relinquish his diary and the letters he had sent from Brazil those cherished reflections that had nourished her through fourteen years of solitude. She handed them back with pride. Not a scrap was missing.

  Bogle smiled to himself. Now he had a way to flesh out the compliant ghost of Roger Charles.

  Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam

  This glad reunion which seems somehow to belong to a tradition of the classical stage might well have crowned our story, rendering certain, or at least probable, the happiness of three parties: the real mother, the spurious son, the successful plotter. Fate (such is the name we give the infinite, ceaseless chain of thousands of intertwined causes) had another end in store. Lady Tichborne died in 1870, and her relatives brought suit against Arthur Orton for false impersonation. Unburdened by solitude or tears though not by greed they had never believed in the obese and nearly illiterate prodigal son who appeared, straight out of the blue, from the wilds of Australia. Orton counted on the support of his numerous creditors who, anxious to be paid what was owed them, were determined that he was Tichborne.

  He also counted on the friendship of the family solicitor, Edward Hopkins, and of Francis J. Baigent, an antiquary intimately acquainted with the Tichborne family history. This, however, was not enough. Bogle reasoned that, to win the game, public opinion would have to be marshaled in their favour. Assuming a top hat and rolled umbrella, he went in search of inspiration along the better streets of London. It was early evening. Bogle perambulated about until a honey-coloured moon repeated itself in the rectangular basins of the public fountains. The expected visitation was paid him. Hailing a cab, he asked to be driven to Baigent’s flat. Baigent sent a long letter to the Times certifying that the supposed Tichborne was a shameless impostor. He signed it with the name of Father Goudron of the Society of Jesus. Other equally papist accusations soon followed. Their effect was immediate: decent people everywhere were quick to discover that Sir Roger Charles was the target of an unscrupulous Jesuitical plot.

  The Hansom Cab

  The trial lasted one hundred and ninety days. Something like a hundred witnesses swore that the defendant was Tichborne among them, four fellow officers in the 6th Dragoon Guards. The claimant’s supporters kept on repeating that he was not an impostor, for, had he been one, he would have made some effort to ape his model’s youthful portraits. Furthermore, Lady Tichborne had identified him, and obviously a mother cannot be wrong. All went well, or more or less well, until a former sweetheart of Orton’s took the stand to testify. Bogle was unshaken by this treacherous maneuver on the part of the ‘relatives’; assuming top hat and umbrella, he once again took to the London streets in search of a visitation. We will never know whether he found it. Shortly before reaching Primrose Hill, there loomed out of the dark the dreaded vehicle that had been in pursuit of him down through the years. Bogle saw it coming, he cried out, but salvation eluded him. Dashed violently against the stone pavement, his skull was split by the dizzying hoofs.

  The Spectre

  Tom Castro was the ghost of Roger Charles Tichborne, but he was a sorry ghost animated by someone else’s genius. On hearing the news of Bogle’s death, he collapsed. He went on lying, but with failing conviction and obvious discrepancies. It was not hard to foresee the end.

  On the twenty-seventh of February 1874 Arthur Orton, alias Tom Castro, was sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude. In prison, he got himself liked; this was Orton’s calling. Good behaviour won him a four-year reduction of sentence. When this last touch of hospitality prison was behind him, he toured the hamlets and centres of the United Kingdom, giving little lectures in which he alternately pleaded his innocence or his guilt. Modesty and ingratiation were so deep-seated in him that many a night he would begin by exoneration and end by confession, always disposed to the leanings of his audience. On 2 April 1898, he died.

  The Widow Ching, Lady Pirate

  Any mention of pirates of the fair sex runs the immediate risk of awakening painful memories of the neighbourhood production of some faded musical comedy, with its chorus line of obvious housewives posing as pirates and hoofing it on a briny deep of unmistakable cardboard. Nonetheless, lady pirates there have been women skilled in the handling of ships, in the captaincy of brutish crews, and in the pursuit and plunder of sea-going vessels. One such was Mary Read, who once declared that the profession of pirate was not for everyone, and that to engage in it with dignity one had, like her, to be a man of courage. At the flamboyant outset of her career, when as yet she captained no crew, one of her lovers was wronged by the ship’s bully. Challenging the fellow to a duel, Mary took him on with both hands, according to the time-honoured custom of the West Indies unwieldy and none-too-sure flintlock in the left, trusty cutlass in the right. The pistol misfired, but the sword behaved as it should . . .

  Along about 1720, Mary Read’s daring career was cut short by a Spanish gallows at St Jago de la Vega, in Jamaica.

  Another lady buccaneer of those same seas was Anne Bonney, a good-looking, boisterous Irishwoman, with high breasts and fiery red hair, who was always among the first to risk her neck boarding a prize. She was a shipmate and, in the end, gallowsmate of Mary Read; Anne’s lover, Captain John Rackam, sported a noose on that occasion, too. Contemptuous of him, Anne came up with this harsh variant of Aisha’s reproach of Boabdil: ‘If you had fought like a Man, you need not have been hang’d like a Dog.’

  A third member of this sisterhood, more venturesome and longer-lived than the others, was a lady pirate who operated in Asian waters, all the way from the Yellow Sea to the rivers of the Annam coast. I speak of the veteran widow Ching.

  The Apprentice Years

  Around 1797, the shareholders of the many pirate squadrons of the China seas formed a combine, to which they named as admiral a man altogether tried and true a certain Ching. So severe was this Ching, so exemplary in his sacking of the coasts, that the terror-stricken inhabitants of eighty seaboard towns, with gifts and tears, implored imperial assistance. Their pitiful appeal did not go unheard: they were ordered to put their villages to the torch, forget their fishing chores, migrate inland, and there take up the unfamiliar science of agriculture. All this they did, so that the thwarted invaders found nothing but deserted coasts. As a result, the pirates were forced to switch to preying on ships, a form of depredation which, since it seriously hampered trade, proved even more obnoxious to the authorities than the previous one. The imperial government was quick to act, ordering the former fishermen to abandon plough and yoke and mend their nets and pars. True to their old fears, however, these fishermen rose up in revolt, and the authorities set upon another course that of pardoning Ching by appointing him Master of the Royal Stables. Ching was about to accept the bribe. Finding this out in time, the shareholders made their righteous indignation evident in a plate of poisoned greens, cooked with rice. The morsel proving deadly, the onetime admiral and would-be Master of the Royal Stables gave up his ghost to the gods of the sea. His widow, transfigured by this twofold double-dealing, called the pirate crews together, explained to them the whole involved affair, and urged them to reject both the emperor’s deceitful pardon and the unpleasant service rendered by the poison-dabbling shareholders. She proposed, instead, the plundering of ships on their own account and the election of a new admiral.

  The person chosen was the widow Ching. She was a slinking woman, with sleepy eyes and a smile full of decayed teeth. Her blackish, oiled hair shone brighter than her eyes. Under her sober orders, the ships embarked upon danger and the high seas.

  The Command

 
Thirteen years of systematic adventure ensued. Six squadrons made up the fleet, each flying a banner of a different colour red, yellow, green, black, purple, and one (the flagship’s) emblazoned with a serpent. The captains were known by such names as ‘Bird and Stone’, ‘Scourge of the Eastern Sea’, ‘Jewel of the Whole Crew’, ‘Wave with Many Fishes’, and ‘Sun on High’. The code of rules, drawn up by the widow Ching herself, is of an unappealable severity, and its straightforward, laconic style is utterly lacking in the faded flowers of rhetoric that lend a rather absurd loftiness to the style of Chinese officialdom, of which we shall presently offer an alarming specimen or two. For now, I copy out a few articles of the widow’s code:

  All goods transshipped from enemy vessels will be entered in a register and kept in a storehouse. Of this stock, the pirate will receive for himself out of ten parts, only two; the rest shall belong to the storehouse, called the general fund. Violation of this ordinance will be punishable by death.

  The punishment of the pirate who abandons his post without permission will be perforation of the ears in the presence of the whole fleet; repeating the same, he will suffer death.

  Commerce with captive women taken in the villages is prohibited on deck; permission to use violence against any woman must first be requested of the ship’s purser, and then carried out only in the ship’s hold. Violation of this ordinance will be punishable by death.

  Information extracted from prisoners affirms that the fare of these pirates consisted chiefly of ship biscuits, rats fattened on human flesh, and boiled rice, and that, on days of battle, crew members used to mix gunpowder with their liquor. With card games and loaded dice, with the metal square and bowl of fan-tan, with the little lamp and the pipe dreams of opium, they whiled away the time. Their favourite weapons were a pair of short swords, used one in each hand. Before seizing another ship, they sprinkled their cheekbones and bodies with an infusion of garlic water, which they considered a certain charm against shot. Each crewman traveled with his wife, but the captain sailed with a harem, which was five or six in number and which, in victory, was always replenished.

  Kia-king, the Young Emperor, Speaks

  Somewhere around the middle of 1809, there was made public an imperial decree, of which I transcribe the first and last parts. Its style was widely criticized. It ran:

  Men who are cursed and evil, men capable of profaning bread, men who pay no heed to the clamour of the tax collector or the orphan, men in whose undergarments are stitched the phoenix and the dragon, men who deny the great truths of printed books, men who allow their tears to run toward the North all these are disrupting the commerce of our rivers and the age-old intimacy of our seas. In unsound, unseaworthy craft, they are tossed by storms both night and day. Nor is their object one of benevolence: they are not and never were the true friends of the seafarer. Far from lending him their aid, they swoop down on him most viciously, inviting him to wrack and ruin, inviting him to death. In such wise do they violate the natural laws of the Universe that rivers overflow their banks, vast acreages are drowned, sons are pitted against fathers, and even the roots of rain and drought are altered . . .

  . . . In consequence, Admiral Kwo-lang, I leave to your hand the administration of punishment. Never forget that clemency is a prerogative of the throne and that it would be presumptuous of a subject to endeavour to assume such a privilege. Therefore, be merciless, be impartial, be obeyed, be victorious.

  The incidental reference to unseaworthy vessels was, of course, false. Its aim was to encourage Kwo-lang’s expedition. Some ninety days later, the forces of the widow Ching came face to face with those of the Middle Kingdom. Nearly a thousand ships joined battle, fighting from early morning until late evening. A mixed chorus of bells, drums, curses, gongs, and prophecies, along with the report of the great ordnance, accompanied the action. The emperor’s forces were sundered. Neither the proscribed clemency nor the recommended cruelty had occasion to be exercised. Kwo-lang observed a rite that our present-day military, in defeat, choose to ignore suicide.

  The Terrorized Riverbanks

  The proud widow’s six hundred war junks and forty thousand victorious pirates then sailed up the mouths of the Si-kiang, and to port and starboard they multiplied fires and loathsome revels and orphans. Entire villages were burned to the ground. In one of them alone, the number of prisoners passed a thousand. A hundred and twenty women who sought the confused refuge of neighbouring reedfields and paddies were betrayed by a crying baby and later sold into slavery in Macao. Although at some remove, the tears and bereavement wreaked by this depredation came to the attention of Kia-king, the Son of Heaven. Certain historians contend that this outcry pained him less than the disaster that befell his punitive expedition. The truth is that he organized a second expedition, awesome in banners, in sailors, in soldiers, in the engines of war, in provisions, in augurs, and in astrologers. The command this time fell upon one Ting-kwei. The fearful multitude of ships sailed into the delta of the Si-kiang, closing off passage to the pirate squadron. The widow fitted out for battle. She knew it would be difficult, even desperate; night after night and month after month of plundering and idleness had weakened her men. The opening of battle was delayed. Lazily, the sun rose and set upon the rippling reeds. Men and their weapons were waiting. Noons were heavy, afternoons endless.

  The Dragon and the Fox

  And yet, each evening, high, shiftless flocks of airy dragons rose from the ships of the imperial squadron and came gently to rest on the enemy decks and surrounding waters. They were lightweight constructions of rice paper and strips of reed, akin to comets, and their silvery or reddish sides repeated identical characters. The widow anxiously studied this regular stream of meteors and read in them the long and perplexing fable of a dragon which had always given protection to a fox, despite the fox’s long ingratitude and repeated transgressions. The moon grew slender in the sky, and each evening the paper and reed figures brought the same story, with almost imperceptible variants. The widow was distressed, and she sank deep into thought. When the moon was full in the sky and in the reddish water, the story seemed to reach its end.

  Nobody was able to predict whether limitless pardon or limitless punishment would descend upon the fox, but the inexorable end drew near. The widow came to an understanding. She threw her two short swords into the river, kneeled in the bottom of a small boat, and ordered herself rowed to the imperial flagship. It was dark; the sky was filled with dragons this time, yellow ones. On climbing aboard, the widow murmured a brief sentence. ‘The fox seeks the dragon’s wing’, she said.

  The Apotheosis

  It is a matter of history that the fox received her pardon and devoted her lingering years to the opium trade. She also left off being the widow, assuming a name which in English means ‘Luster of Instruction’.

  From this period [wrote one Chinese chronicler lyrically], ships began to pass and repass in tranquility. All became quiet on the rivers and tranquil on the four seas. Men sold their weapons and bought oxen to plough their fields. They buried sacrifices, said prayers on the tops of hills, and rejoiced themselves by singing behind screens during the day-time.

  Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities

  Those of This America

  Standing out sharply against a background of blue walls or open sky, two hoodlums dressed in close-fitting suits of sober black and wearing thick-heeled shoes dance a deadly dance a ballet of matching knives until a carnation starts from the ear of one of them as a knife finds its mark in him, and he brings the unaccompanied dance to a close on the ground with his death. Satisfied, the other adjusts his high-crowned hat and spends his final years recounting the story of this clean duel. That, in sum and substance, is the history of our old-time Argentine underworld. The history of New York’s old underworld is both more dizzying and more clumsy.

  Those of the Other

  The history of the gangs of New York (revealed in 1928 by Herbert Asbury in a solid volume of four hundred
octavo pages) contains all of the confusion and cruelty of the barbarian cosmogonies, and much of their giant-scale ineptitude cellars of old breweries honeycombed into Negro tenements; a ramshackle New York of three-storey structures; criminal gangs like the Swamp Angels, who rendezvoused in a labyrinth of sewers; criminal gangs like the Daybreak Boys, who recruited precocious murderers of ten and eleven; loners, like the bold and gigantic Plug Uglies, who earned the smirks of passersby with their enormous plug hats, stuffed with wool and worn pulled down over their ears as helmets, and their long shirttails, worn outside the trousers, that flapped in the Bowery breeze (but with a huge bludgeon in one hand and a pistol peeping out of a pocket); criminal gangs like the Dead Rabbits, who entered into battle under the emblem of a dead rabbit impaled on a pike; men like Dandy Johnny Dolan, famous for the oiled forelock he wore curled and plastered against his forehead, for his cane whose handle was carved in the likeness of a monkey, and for the copper device he invented and used on the thumb for gouging out an adversary’s eyes; men like Kit Burns, who for twenty-five cents would decapitate a live rat with a single bite; men like Blind Danny Lyons, young and blond and with immense dead eyes, who pimped for three girls, all of whom proudly walked the streets for him; rows of houses showing red lanterns in the windows, like those run by seven sisters from a small New England village, who always turned their Christmas Eve proceeds over to charity; rat pits, where wharf rats were starved and sent against terriers; Chinese gambling dives; women like the repeatedly widowed Red Norah, the vaunted sweetheart of practically the entire Gopher gang; women like Lizzie the Dove, who donned widow’s weeds when Danny Lyons was executed for murder, and who was stabbed in the throat by Gentle Maggie during an argument over whose sorrow for the departed blind man was the greater; mob uprisings like the savage week of draft riots in 1863, when a hundred buildings were burned to the ground and the city was nearly taken over; teeming street fights in which a man went down as at sea, trampled to death; a thief and horse poisoner like Yoske Nigger. All these go to weave underworld New York’s chaotic history. And its most famous hero is Edward Delaney, alias William Delaney, alias Joseph Marvin, alias Joseph Morris, alias Monk Eastman boss of twelve hundred men.