‘The Russian master,’ he pronounced, ‘has seen better than anyone else into the labyrinth of the Slavic soul.’ This attempt at rhetoric seemed to me proof that he had regained his composure. I asked what other volumes of the master he had read. He mentioned two or three, among them The Double. I then asked him if on reading them he could clearly distinguish the characters, as you could in Joseph Conrad, and if he thought of going on in his study of Dostoevski’s work.
‘Not really,’ he said with a certain surprise.
I asked what he was writing and he told me he was putting together a book of poems that would be called Red Hymns. He said he had also considered calling it Red Rhythms.
‘And why not?’ I said. ‘You can cite good antecedents. Rubén Darío’s blue verse and Verlaine’s grey song.’
Ignoring this, he explained that his book would celebrate the brotherhood of man. The poet of our time could not turn his back on his own age, he went on to say. I thought for a while and asked if he truly felt himself a brother to everyone to all funeral directors, for example, to all post-men, to all deep-sea divers, to all those who lived on the even-numbered side of the street, to all those who were aphonic, and so on. He answered that his book referred to the great mass of the oppressed and alienated.
‘Your mass of oppressed and alienated is no more than an abstraction,’ I said. ‘Only individuals exist if it can be said that anyone exists. “The man of yesterday is not the man of today,” some Greek remarked. We two, seated on this bench in Geneva or Cambridge, are perhaps proof of this.’
Except in the strict pages of history, memorable events stand in no need of memorable phrases. At the point of death, a man tries to recall an engraving glimpsed in childhood; about to enter battle, soldiers speak of the mud or of their sergeant. Our situation was unique and, frankly, we were unprepared for it. As fate would have it, we talked about literature; I fear I said no more than the things I usually say to journalists. My alter ego believed in the invention, or discovery, of new metaphors; I, in those metaphors that correspond to intimate and obvious affinities and that our imagination has already accepted. Old age and sunset, dreams and life, the flow of time and water. I put forward this opinion, which years later he would put forward in a book. He barely listened to me. Suddenly, he said, ‘If you have been me, how do you explain the fact that you have forgotten your meeting with an elderly gentleman who in 1918 told you that he, too, was Borges?’
I had not considered this difficulty. ‘Maybe the event was so strange I chose to forget it,’ I answered without much conviction.
Venturing a question, he said shyly, ‘What’s your memory like?’
I realized that to a boy not yet twenty a man of over seventy was almost in the grave. ‘It often approaches forgetfulness,’ I said, ‘but it still finds what it’s asked to find. I study Old English, and I am not at the bottom of the class.’
Our conversation had already lasted too long to be that of a dream. A sudden idea came to me. ‘I can prove at once that you are not dreaming me,’ I said. ‘Listen carefully to this line, which, as far as I know, you’ve never read.’
Slowly I intoned the famous verse, ‘L’hydre-univers tordant son corps écaillé d’astres.’ I felt his almost fearful awe. He repeated the line, low-voiced, savouring each resplendent word.
‘It’s true,’ he faltered. ‘I’ll never be able to write a line like that.’
Victor Hugo had brought us together.
Before this, I now recall, he had fervently recited that short piece of Whitman’s in which the poet remembers a night shared beside the sea when he was really happy. ‘If Whitman celebrated that night,’ I remarked, ‘it’s because he desired it and it did not happen. The poem gains if we look on it as the expression of a longing, not the account of an actual happening.’
He stared at me open-mouthed. ‘You don’t know him!’ he exclaimed. ‘Whitman is incapable of telling a lie.’
Half a century does not pass in vain. Beneath our conversation about people and random reading and our different tastes, I realized that we were unable to understand each other. We were too similar and too unalike.
We were unable to take each other in, which makes conversation difficult. Each of us was a caricature copy of the other. The situation was too abnormal to last much longer. Either to offer advice or to argue was pointless, since, unavoidably, it was his fate to become the person I am.
All at once, I remembered one of Coleridge’s fantasies.
Somebody dreams that on a journey through paradise he is given a flower. On awaking, he finds the flower. A similar trick occurred to me. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Have you any money?’
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I have about twenty francs. I’ve invited Simon Jichlinski to dinner at the Crocodile tonight.’
‘Tell Simon that he will practice medicine in Carouge and that he will do much good. Now, give me one of your coins.’
He drew out three large silver pieces and some small change. Without understanding, he offered me a five-franc coin. I handed him one of those not very sensible American bills that, regardless of their value, are all the same size. He examined it avidly.
‘It can’t be,’ he said, his voice raised. ‘It bears the date 1964. All this is a miracle, and the miraculous is terrifying.
Witnesses to the resurrection of Lazarus must have been horrified.’
We have not changed in the least, I thought to myself. Ever the bookish reference. He tore up the bill and put his coins away. I decided to throw mine into the river. The arc of the big silver disk losing itself in the silver river would have conferred on my story a vivid image, but luck would not have it so. I told him that the supernatural, if it occurs twice, ceases to be terrifying. I suggested that we plan to see each other the next day, on this same bench, which existed in two times and in two places. He agreed at once and, without looking at his watch, said that he was late. Both of us were lying and we each knew it of the other. I told him that someone was coming for me.
‘Coming for you?’ he said.
‘Yes. When you get to my age, you will have lost your eyesight almost completely. You’ll still make out the colour yellow and lights and shadows. Don’t worry. Gradual blindness is not a tragedy. It’s like a slow summer dusk.’
We said goodbye without having once touched each other. The next day, I did not show up. Neither would he. I have brooded a great deal over that meeting, which until now I have related to no one. I believe I have discovered the key. The meeting was real, but the other man was dreaming when he conversed with me, and this explains how he was able to forget me; I conversed with him while awake, and the memory of it still disturbs me. The other man dreamed me, but he did not dream me exactly. He dreamed, I now realize, the date on the dollar bill.
Ulrike
He took the sword Gram and laid it naked between them.
The Saga of the Volsungs, 29
My story will be true to reality or, in any case, to my personal memory of reality, which amounts to the same thing. The events took place only a short time ago, but I know that literary habit is also the habit of adding circumstantial details and of underlining high points. I want to give an account of my meeting with Ulrike (I never knew her surname and perhaps never shall) in the city of York. The narrative will encompass one night and a morning.
It would be easy to say that I saw her for the first time by the Five Sisters of York Minster, those stained-glass windows which, pure of any image, Cromwell’s iconoclasts respected, but the fact is that we met in the small lounge of The Northern Inn, which lies outside the city walls.
We were a handful, and Ulrike stood with her back to us. Someone offered her a drink and she refused it.
‘I am a feminist,’ she said. ‘I am not out to ape men. I dislike their tobacco and their alcohol.’
The remark was meant to be witty, and I guessed that this was not the first time she had delivered it. I later found out that it was not typical of her, but what we sa
y is not always like us. She mentioned that she had arrived at the museum too late, but that they let her in when they learned she was a Norwegian.
One of those present remarked, ‘It’s not the first time the Norwegians have entered York.’
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘England was once ours and we lost it if one can have anything or if anything can be lost.’ It was at this point that I looked at her. A line in Blake speaks of girls of mild silver or of furious gold, but in Ulrike were both gold and mildness. She was tall and slender, with sharp features and grey eyes. Less than by her face, I was impressed by her air of calm mystery. She smiled easily, and the smile seemed to withdraw her from the company. She was dressed in black, which is strange for northern lands, which try to liven the drab surroundings with vivid colours. She spoke a crisp, precise English, rolling her r’s slightly. I am not much of an observer; these things I discovered bit by bit.
We were introduced. I told her that I was a professor at the University of the Andes, in Bogotá. I explained that I was a Colombian.
She asked me in a thoughtful way, ‘What does it mean to be a Colombian?’
‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘It’s an act of faith.’
‘Like being Norwegian,’ she affirmed.
I can remember no more of what was said that night.
The next day, I came down to the dining room early. Through the windows I saw that it had snowed; in the early morning light the moors faded away. We were the only ones there. Ulrike invited me to her table. She told me that she liked going out for solitary walks.
Recalling a joke of Schopenhauer’s, I said, ‘So do I. The two of us could go out together.’
We walked away from the inn on the new-fallen snow.
There was not a soul about. I suggested that we go on to Thorgate, a few miles down the river. I know that I was already in love with Ulrike; I could never have wanted any other person by my side.
All at once, I heard the distant howling of a wolf. I had never before-heard a wolf howl, but I knew it was a wolf. Ulrike was impassive.
A while later she said, as if thinking aloud, ‘The few poor swords I saw yesterday in York Minster moved me more than the great ships in the Oslo museum.’ Our paths had crossed. That evening Ulrike would continue her journey on to London; I to Edinburgh.
‘In Oxford Street,’ she told me, ‘I shall follow De Quincey’s footsteps in search of his Ann, lost amid the crowds of London.’
‘De Quincey stopped looking for her,’ I replied. ‘All my life, I never have.’
‘Maybe you’ve found her,’ Ulrike said, her voice low.
I realized that an unexpected thing was not forbidden me, and I kissed her on the mouth and eyes. She drew away firmly but gently and then declared, ‘I’ll be yours in the inn at Thorgate. Until then, I ask you not to touch me. It is better that way.’
To a bachelor well along in years, the offer of love is a gift no longer expected. The miracle has a right to impose conditions. I thought back on my youth in Popayán and on a girl in Texas, as fair and slender as Ulrike, who once denied me her love.
I did not make the mistake of asking Ulrike whether she loved me. I realized that this was not her first time nor would it be her last. The adventure, perhaps my last, would be one of many for that splendid, determined follower of Ibsen. Hand in hand, we walked on.
‘All this is like a dream, and I never dream,’ I said.
‘Like that king who never dreamed until a wizard made him sleep in a pigsty,’ Ulrike replied. Then she added, ‘Listen. A bird is about to sing.’
A moment or two later we heard the song.
‘In these lands,’ I said, ‘it’s thought that a person about to die sees into the future.’
‘And I am about to die,’ she said.
I looked at her in astonishment. ‘Let’s cut through the woods,’ I urged. ‘We’ll reach Thorgate sooner.’
‘The woods are dangerous,’ she said. We continued along the moors.
‘I should like this moment to last forever,’ I murmured.
‘“Forever” is a word forbidden to men,’ Ulrike said and, to soften the force of this, she asked me to repeat my name, which she had not caught.
‘Javier Otálora,’ I said.
She tried to pronounce it and couldn’t. I failed, equally, with the name Ulrike.
‘I shall call you Sigurd,’ she said with a smile.
‘If I am Sigurd,’ I replied, ‘you will be Brynhild.’
She had slowed her step.
‘Do you know the saga?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘The tragic story spoiled by the Germans with their late Nibelungs.’
Not wishing to argue the point, I answered, ‘Brynhild, you’re walking as if you wished a sword lay between us in bed.’
Suddenly we stood before the inn. It did not surprise me that, like the other one, it was called The Northern Inn.
From the top of the stairs, Ulrike called down to me, ‘Did you hear the wolf? There are no longer any wolves in England. Hurry.'
Climbing to the upper floor, I noticed that the walls were papered in the style of William Morris, in a deep red, with a design of fruit and birds intertwined. Ulrike went on ahead. The dark room was low, with a slanted ceiling. The awaited bed was duplicated in a dim mirror, and the polished mahogany reminded me of the looking glass of Scriptures. Ulrike had already undressed. She called me by my real name Javier. I felt that the snow was falling faster. Now there were no longer any mirrors or furniture. There was no sword between us. Time passed like the sands. In the darkness, centuries old, love flowed, and for the first and last time I possessed Ulrike’s image.
The Congress
. . . ils s’acheminèrent vers un château immense, au frontispice duquel on lisait: ‘Je n’appartiens à personne et j’appartiens à tout le monde. Vous y étiez avant que d’y entrer, et vous y serez encore quand vous en sortirez.’
Diderot, Jacques le Fataliste et son Maître
Buenos Aires, 1955
Alejandro Ferri is my name. Martial echoes may be heard in it, but neither the metals of glory nor the great shadow of the Macedonian the words belong to the poet of The Marble Pillars, who honoured me with his friendship has any kinship with the nearly anonymous man who strings together these lines on the upper floor of a hotel on Santiago del Estero Street, on the south side of town, which is no longer the old Southside. Any day now, I’ll turn seventy-one or seventy-two; I am still teaching English to a handful of students. Out of indecision or carelessness, or for some other reason, I never married, and now I live alone. Loneliness does not worry me ; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits. I realize I am getting on in years. An unmistakable symptom of this is the fact that novelties maybe because I feel they hold nothing essentially new and are really no more than timid variations neither interest nor distract me. When I was a young man, I was fond of sunsets, the city’s sprawling slums, and of unhappiness; now I prefer mornings and downtown and peace. I no longer play at being Hamlet. I have become a member of the Conservative Party and of a chess club, which I usually attend as an onlooker sometimes an absentminded onlooker. Anyone who is curious may dig up from some out-of-the-way nook of the National Library, on Mexico Street, a copy of my Short Study of John Wilkins’ Analytical Language, a work that sadly stands in need of a new edition, if only to correct or to lessen its many mistakes. The library’s new director, I am told, is a literary man who dedicates himself to the study of ancient languages (as if modern ones were not sufficiently rudimentary) and to the demagogic exaltation of an imaginary Buenos Aires of knife fighters. I have never cared to meet him. I came to this city in 1899, and only once did chance bring me face to face with a knife fighter or with an individual who had a reputation as such. Further on, should the occasion present itself, I shall relate the episode.
I have already said that I live alone. Several days ago, a fellow-roomer, who had heard me speak of Fer
mín Eguren, told me that he had died in Punta del Este.
The death of this man, who was certainly never a friend of mine, has unaccountably saddened me. I know that I am alone; I know that in the whole world I am the only keeper of that secret event the Congress whose memory I can no longer share. I am now the last member of that Congress. It is undeniable that all men are members of that Congress that there is not a single being on earth who is not but I know I am a member in a very different way. I know that I am, and that’s what sets me apart from my numberless colleagues, present and future. It is undeniable that on the seventh of February, 1904, we swore by what is most holy (is there anything holy on earth, or anything that is not?) never to reveal the history of the Congress, but it is no less undeniable that my now committing perjury is also part of the Congress. This last statement is sufficiently dim, but it may whet the curiosity of my eventual readers.
At any rate, the task I have taken upon myself is not an easy one. I have never before attempted the art of narration not even in its epistolary form and, what is doubtless even more important, the story itself is unbelievable. The pen of José Fernández Irala, the undeservedly forgotten author of The Marble Pillars, was the one destined for this work, but now it is too late. I shall not deliberately falsify the real facts, although I foresee that laziness and incompetence will more than once lead me into error. Exact dates are of no account. Let it be recalled that I came from Santa Fe, my native province, in 1899. I have never gone back. I have grown accustomed to Buenos Aires, a city I am not fond of, in the same way that a man grows accustomed to his own body or to an old ailment. Without much caring, I am aware that I am going to die soon; I must, consequently, control my digressive tendencies and get on with my story.
The years do not change our essential selves if one has an essential self. The impulse that would one night lead me to the Congress of the World was the same that first brought me to the staff of Última Hora. To a poor boy from the provinces, becoming a newspaperman was a romantic fate, just as to a poor city boy the life of a gaucho or a farmhand is romantic. I feel no shame at having once wanted to be a journalist, an occupation that now seems trivial to me. I remember having heard my colleague Fernández Irala say that newspapermen wrote for oblivion but that his ambition was to write for time and for memory. He had already chiseled (the verb was then in common use) some of those perfect sonnets that were later to reappear, with one or two minor touches, in the pages of The Marble Pillars.
Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations Page 27