I cannot quite recall the first time I heard the Congress spoken of. Maybe it was on that same evening the cashier paid me my first month’s salary and, to celebrate this proof that Buenos Aires had taken me to its bosom, I suggested to Irala that we dine together. He excused himself, saying he could not miss the Congress. I understood at once that he was not referring to the rather pompous, domed building at the foot of an avenue peopled by Spaniards but to something more secret and far more important. People spoke of the Congress, some with open scorn, others with lowered voices, still others with alarm or curiosity all, I believe, without knowing anything about it. A few Saturdays later, Irala invited me to go along with him.
It must have been nine or ten o’clock at night. On our way, in a streetcar, he told me these preliminary meetings took place every Saturday arid that don Alejandro Glencoe, the president of the Congress, perhaps struck by my name, had already signed his approval of my attendance. We went to the Gas-Lamp Coffee House. Some fifteen or twenty members of the Congress sat around a long table; I don’t know if there was a dais or if memory adds it. I immediately recognized the president, whom I had never seen before. Don Alejandro was a gentleman, already well along in years, with a high forehead and thinning hair, grey eyes, and a greying reddish beard. I always saw him dressed in a dark frock coat, and he usually held his hands locked together over the head of his cane. He was portly and tall. To his left sat a much younger man, also with red hair. Its violent colour suggested fire, while the colour of Mr. Glencoe’s beard suggested autumn leaves. To his right was a long-faced young man with an unusually low forehead and dressed like a dandy. Everyone had ordered coffee, and several absinthe. What first caught my attention was the presence of a woman the only woman among so many men.
At the other end of the table sat a boy of about ten, dressed in a sailor suit, who was not long in falling asleep.
There were also a Protestant minister, two unmistakable Jews, and a Negro, who, with a white silk handkerchief around his neck and very tight-fitting clothes, was dressed like a street-corner hoodlum. In front of the Negro and the boy were cups of chocolate. I do not remember any of the other people except for a Mr. Marcelo del Mazo, a man of great politeness and fine conversation, whom I never saw again. (I still have a faded, poorly done photograph of one of the gatherings, but I shall not publish it, since the dress, the long hair, and the moustaches of that period would make the whole thing look burlesque and even shabby.)
All groups tend to create their own dialects and rites; the Congress, which always had something dreamlike about it, seemed to want its members to discover at leisure and for themselves its real aim and even the names and surnames of its members. I was not long in realizing that I was duty-bound not to ask questions, and I refrained even from asking any of Fernández Irala, who never told me a thing. I did not miss a single Saturday, but a good month or two went by before I reached this understanding. From the second meeting on, my neighbour was Donald Wren, an engineer on the Southern Railways, who was to give me English lessons.
Don Alejandro spoke very little. The rest did not address themselves directly to him, but I felt that their words were meant for him and that everyone was after his approval. One gesture of his slow hand was enough to change the topic of discussion. I came to find out, little by little, that the red-haired man to his left bore the strange name of Twirl. I remember that fragile look of his, which, as though their stature made them dizzy and forced them to hunch forward, is characteristic of some very tall people. His hand, I recall, often played with a copper compass case, which from time to time he set on the table. At the end of 1914, he was killed as an infantryman in an Irish regiment. The person who always sat to the right, the young man with the low forehead, was Fermín Eguren, the president’s nephew.
Putting no faith in the methods of realism (a most artificial school if there ever was one), I shall declare right off what I learned only little by little. Beforehand, I want to remind the reader of my situation at the time. I was a poor boy from Casilda, a farmer’s son, who had come to the capital and suddenly found himself this was the way I felt in the intimate heart of Buenos Aires and perhaps (who knows?) of the whole world. After half a century, I still feel those first dazzling moments, which certainly were not to be the last.
Here are the facts. I shall tell them as briefly as I can. Don Alejandro Glencoe, the president, was an Uruguayan rancher and owner of a large spread of land bordering on Brazil. His father, a native of Aberdeen, had established himself on this continent around the middle of the last century. He brought with him some hundred books the only books, I venture to say, that don Alejandro read in the course of his life. (I speak of these assorted books, which I have had in my hands, because in one of them lies the root of my story.) The elder Mr. Glencoe, on dying, left a daughter and a son. The son was later to become our president; the daughter married an Eguren and was Fermín’s mother. Don Alejandro at one time aspired to the Uruguayan National Congress, but the political bosses barred his way. Rankled, he decided to found another Congress and on a vaster scale. He remembered having read in the volcanic pages of Carlyle the fate of Anacharsis Clootz, that worshipper of the goddess Reason who, at the head of thirty-six foreigners, addressed a Paris assembly as ‘mankind’s spokesman’. Moved by this example, don Alejandro conceived the idea of calling together a Congress of the World that would represent all men of all nations. The centre for the preliminary meetings was the Gas-Lamp Coffee House; the formal act of inauguration, which would take place within some four years, would be held at don Alejandro’s ranch. Like so many Uruguayans, don Alejandro who was no lover of Uruguay’s now national hero, Artigas was fond of Buenos Aires, but he nonetheless decided that the Congress must eventually meet in his own country. Oddly enough, the four-year planning period was carried out with a precision that was almost magical.
In the beginning, we were paid a considerable sum as a per diem, but the zeal that enflamed us prompted Fernández Irala who was as poor as I was to renounce his, and all the rest of us followed suit. This measure was healthy, since it served to separate the wheat from the chaff; the number of members was reduced, and only the faithful remained. The one paid position was that of the secretary, Nora Erfjord, who lacked other means of support and whose work at the same time was staggering. To set up a worldwide organization is no trifling enterprise. Letters came and went, and so did cables and telegrams. Potential delegates wrote from Peru, Denmark, and India. A Bolivian wrote that his country’s lack of access to the sea should be a matter of prime consideration in our first meetings. Twirl, who had a farseeing mind, remarked that the Congress involved a problem of a philosophical nature. Planning an assembly to represent all men was like fixing the exact number of platonic types a puzzle that had taxed the imagination of thinkers for centuries. Twirl suggested that, without going farther afield, don Alejandro Glencoe might represent not only cattlemen but also Uruguayans, and also humanity’s great forerunners, and also men with red beards, and also those who are seated in armchairs. Nora Erfjord was Norwegian. Would she represent secretaries, Norwegian womanhood, or more obviously all beautiful women?
Would a single engineer be enough to represent all engineers including those of New Zealand?
It was then, I believe, that Fermín broke in. ‘Ferri represents the gringos,’ he said in a flood of laughter.
Don Alejandro looked at him severely and, in an even voice, said, ‘Mr Ferri is representative of the immigrants whose labour is building up this country.’
Fermín Eguren never could bear the sight of me. He took pride in an assortment of things: in being Uruguayan; in coming from old stock; in attracting women; in having chosen an expensive tailor; and, God knows why, in his Basque origin a people who throughout history have done little else than milk cows.
An incident of the most trivial sort sealed our enmity. After one of the meetings, Eguren suggested that we pay a visit to one of the Junín Street brothels. The plan did not attr
act me, but, in order not to make myself the butt of his jokes, I accepted. We went with Fernández Irala.
On leaving the establishment, we ran into a huge specimen of a man. Eguren, who may have been a bit drunk, gave him a shove. The stranger quickly barred our way and told us, ‘Whoever wants to leave is going to have to pass by this knife.’
I remember the glint of the blade in the darkness of the long entranceway. Eguren drew back, visibly afraid. I wasn’t too sure of myself, but my hatred got the best of my fright. I reached into my armpit, as if to draw out a weapon, and said in a firm voice, ‘We’ll settle this out on the street.’
The stranger answered with another voice now, ‘That’s the kind of man I like. I wanted to test you, friend.’ Then he began to laugh in a cordial way.
‘As to “friend”,’ I answered him, ‘that’s what you think.’ The three of us made our way past him.
The man with the knife entered the brothel. I heard later that his name was Tapia, or Paredes, or something of the kind, and that he had a reputation for brawling. Out on the sidewalk, Irala, who had kept cool, slapped me on the back and said, impressively, ‘Among us three, we had a musketeer. Hail, d’Artagnan!’
Fermín Eguren never forgave me for having witnessed his backing down.
I feel that now, and only now, my story begins. The preceding pages have set down no more than the conditions that chance or fate required so that the unbelievable event perhaps the single event of my whole life might take place. Don Alejandro Glencoe was always at the centre of the Congress, but over a period of time we felt, not without misgiving, that the real president was Twirl. This singular character, with the flaming moustache, fawned on Glencoe and even on Fermín Eguren but in such an exaggerated way that those present would think he was actually mocking the two. By so doing, he never once compromised his integrity. Glencoe laboured under the pride of his vast fortune; Twirl discovered that in order to get anything done it was enough to suggest that its cost might prove beyond the president’s means. It is my suspicion that at the outset the Congress had been nothing more than a haphazard sort of name. Twirl was continually proposing new areas of expansion, and don Alejandro always accepted. It was like being at the middle of a spreading circle, which grows ever larger and always farther away. Twirl said, for example, that the Congress could not get along without a reference library, and Nierenstein, who worked in a bookshop, went about ordering us the atlases of Justus Perthes and several extensive encyclopedias all the way from Pliny’s Natural History and Beauvais’ Speculum down to the pleasant mazes (I reread these words with Fernández Irak’s voice) of the illustrious French Encyclopedists, of the Britannica, of Pierre Larousse, of Brockhaus, of Larsen, and of Montaner y Simón. I recall how I reverently fondled the silky volumes of a certain Chinese encyclopedia whose finely brushed characters seemed to me more mysterious than the spots on a leopard’s skin. As yet, I will say nothing of what lay in store for them and which certainly I do not regret.
Don Alejandro, maybe because we were the only ones who did not try to flatter him, had grown quite fond of Fernández Irala and me. He invited us to spend a few days at his ranch, La Caledonia, where he had a crew of stonemasons already at work.
At the end of a long trip upriver by steamer and a ferry crossing on a raft, we set foot one morning on the Uruguay shore. We then had to spend successive nights in run-down country saloons, while opening and shutting dozens of gateways all day along back roads in the Cuchilla Negra. We made our way in a light carriage; the countryside seemed wider and lonelier to me than the small farm where I was born.
I still hold my two images of the ranch the one I brought with me and the one my eyes finally saw. Absurdly, I had imagined, as in a dream, an impossible combination of the flat plains of Santa Fe and of the rather gaudy Victorian Buenos Aires Waterworks. La Caledonia was a long adobe building with a thatched saddle roof and a brick-paved gallery. It appeared to be built for hardship and endurance. The rough walls were nearly a yard thick and the doors were narrow. Nobody had ever thought of planting a tree. The sun’s first and last rays beat down on the place. The corrals were of stone; the cattle were many, scrawny and long-horned; the horses’ switching tails reached the ground. For the first time in my life, I knew the taste of freshly slaughtered meat. Some sacks of sea biscuit were brought out; a few days later, the foreman told me he had never eaten bread in his life. Irala asked where the bathroom was, and, with a sweeping gesture, don Alejandro indicated the entire continent. It was a moonlit night; I went out to stretch my legs, and I surprised Irala being watched by an ostrich. The heat, which the night had not dispelled, was unbearable, and everyone praised the coolness. The rooms were low-ceilinged and many, and seemed to me barely furnished; we were given one, facing south, in which there were two cots and a dresser with a silver washbasin and pitcher. The floor was dirt.
The second day, I came across the library and the volumes of Carlyle, and I found the pages dedicated to mankind’s spokesman, Anacharsis Clootz, who had led me to that morning and to that loneliness. After breakfast, which was identical with dinner, don Ajelandro showed us the building under construction. We rode three or four miles on horseback out in the wide open. Irala, whose horsemanship was shaky, had an accident; unsmiling, the foreman remarked, ‘You Argentines really know how to dismount.’ From way off, we could see the construction site. Some twenty men were at work building a kind of tumbledown amphitheatre. I recall a series of stages and ladders and stone tiers with stretches of sky showing between.
More than once, I tried to speak with the gauchos, but my efforts failed. In some way, they knew they were different. Among themselves, they used a spare, guttural Brazilianized Spanish. It was obvious that both Indian and Negro blood ran in their veins. They were short and strong; at La Caledonia, I became a tall man something that had never happened to me until then.
Almost all of them dressed with their legs wrapped in the chiripá, and a few wore the wide, baggy bombachas. They had little or nothing in common with the complaining heroes found in the books of Hernández or of Rafael Obligado. Under the stimulus of Saturday-night alcohol, they were easily moved to violence. There wasn’t a single woman around, and I never once heard a guitar.
I was more interested in the change that had come over don Alejandro than I was in these border-country men. In Buenos Aires, he was a pleasant, reserved gentleman; at La Caledonia, like his fathers before him, he became the stern chief of a clan. Sunday mornings, he read Holy Scripture to the hands, who did not understand a single word. One night, the foreman, a youngish man who had inherited the job from his father, reported to us that one of the day labourers and one of the regular help were having it out with knives. Don Alejandro got up, unruffled. When he came to the circle of onlookers, he drew out the weapon he always carried, handed it to the foreman (who appeared to me to cringe), and stepped between the knives. At once, I heard the order, ‘Drop those knives, boys.’ With the same calm voice, he added, ‘Now shake hands and behave yourselves. I don’t want any brawling around here.’
The two men obeyed. The next day, I learned that don Alejandro had fired the foreman.
I felt the loneliness ringing me in, and I began fearing I’d never get back to Buenos Aires. I wonder whether Fernández Irala shared that fear. We talked a lot about Argentina and what we’d do when we returned. I missed the stone lions of a certain gateway on Jujuy Street, near the Plaza del Once, and the light of a particular old bar in some dim part of town, but not my familiar haunts.
Always a good rider, I fell into the habit of going out on horseback and riding long distances. I still remember the particular piebald I used to saddle up myself. On some afternoon or on some night or other, I probably was in Brazil, since the border was nothing but a line traced out by widely spaced markers. Then, at the close of a day exactly like all the rest, don Alejandro told us, ‘We’ll turn in early. Tomorrow we’ll be off while it’s still cool.’
Once down the river, I fe
lt so happy that I was even able to think back to La Caledonia with affection.
We took up our Saturday meetings again. At the first one, Twirl asked for the floor. He said, with his usual flowers of rhetoric, that the library of the Congress of the World could not be limited to reference books alone, and that the classical works of all nations and all languages were a veritable storehouse that we could not safely afford to ignore. The suggestion was approved on the spot; Fernández Irala and Dr Ignacio Cruz, who was a teacher of Latin, accepted the job of selecting the appropriate texts. Twirl had already talked things over with Nierenstein.
In those days, there wasn’t a single Argentine whose utopia was not Paris. Perhaps the most enthusiastic of us was Fermín Eguren; next, for quite different reasons, came Fernández Irala. To the poet of The Marble Pillars, Paris was Verlaine and Leconte de Lisle, while to Eguren it was an improved version of Junín Street. I suspect that he had come to some understanding with Twirl. At a subsequent meeting, Twirl brought up the question of what language the members of the Congress would use, arguing the feasibility of sending delegates to London and Paris to gather information. Feigning impartiality, he first put up my name, and then, as an apparent afterthought, that of his friend Eguren. As always, don Alejandro agreed.
I think I have written that, in exchange for some lessons in Italian, Wren had initiated me into the study of the inexhaustible English language. As far as possible, we did away with grammar and with those exercises concocted for the beginner, and we found our way directly into poetry, whose forms demand brevity. My first contact with the language that was to fill out my life was Stevenson’s brave ‘Requiem’. Then came the ballads that Percy revealed to the dignified eighteenth century. A short while before leaving for London, I was dazzled by Swinburne an experience that made me begin to doubt (and to feel guilty about it) the eminence of Irala’s alexandrines.
Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations Page 28