Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations

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

  Back in the city, he felt homesick for those first evenings out in the desert when, a long time before, he had felt homesick for the city. He made his way to his adviser’s office and told him that he now knew the secret and that he had made up his mind not to reveal it.

  “Are you sworn to an oath?” asked the professor.

  “That’s not my reason,” answered Murdock. “I found out something off there in the desert that I can’t tell.”

  “Do you mean to say the English language is inadequate?” the professor may have said.

  “No, that’s not it, sir. Now that I have the secret, I could explain it in a hundred different and even contradictory ways. I don’t really know how to tell you, but the secret means a great deal to me. Compared to it, science—our science—seems not much more than a trifle.” He added, after a pause, “The secret, I should tell you, is not as valuable as the steps that brought me to it. Those steps have to be taken, not told.”

  The professor said coldly, “Very well, I shall report your decision to the board. Are you thinking of living among the Indians?”

  Murdock answered, “No. Maybe I won’t be going back to the reservation. What I learned there I can apply anyplace on earth and under any circumstances.”

  That, substantially, is what was said.

  Fred married, was divorced, and is now a librarian at Yale.

  Legend

  Abel and Cain met again after Abel’s death. They were walking in the desert and knew each other from a distance, for both men were very tall. The brothers sat on the ground, made a fire, and ate. For a while, they were untalkative, the way tired men can be after a long day’s work. In the sky, some still unnamed star appeared. By the firelight, Cain made out the mark of the stone on Abel’s forehead, dropped the food he was about to put into his mouth, and asked to be forgiven for his crime.

  “I no longer remember—did you kill me or was it I who killed you?” Abel answered. “Here we are together again, just as we used to be.”

  “Now I know for sure you’ve forgiven me,” said Cain, “because to forget is to have forgiven. I’ll try my best to forget, too.”

  “Yes,” said Abel, speaking slowly, “you’re right. As long as there’s remorse, there’s guilt.”

  A Prayer

  Thousands of times, and in the two languages that are close to me, my lips have said and will go on saying the Lord’s Prayer, but only in part do I understand it. This morning, the first day of July, 1969, I want to attempt a prayer that will be my own, not handed down. I know this is an undertaking that demands an almost super- human sincerity. It is obvious, to begin with, that I may not ask for anything. To ask that darkness not wholly descend on my eyes would be senseless; I know thousands of persons who see and yet are not especially happy, righteous, or wise. The process of time is a network of effects and causes, so that to ask for any gift, however small, is to ask that a link in that iron network be broken. Nobody is worthy of such a miracle. Nor can I beg forgiveness for my mistakes. Forgiving is what someone else does, and only I can save myself; forgiving makes pure the one who has been offended, not the offender, whom it hardly concerns. Free will is perhaps an illusion, but I can always give or dream that I am giving. I can give the courage I lack, the hope I lack; I can teach others the will to learn what I barely know, or only half know. I want to be remembered less as a poet than as a friend; let someone recall a verse of Frost or of Dunbar or of the nameless Saxon who at midnight saw the shining tree that bleeds, the Cross, and let him think he heard it for the first time from my lips. The rest is of little importance; I hope oblivion will not be long in coming. The laws of the universe are unknown to us, but we are somehow sure that to reason clearly and to act righteously is to help those laws, which will never be revealed to us.

  My wish is to die wholly; my wish is to die with this companion, my body.

  His End And His Beginning

  After death, after the wrench and the stark loneliness, he dropped into a deep sleep. When he woke up, every- day habits and places came back to him. Telling himself he must keep his mind off what had happened the night before (and comforted by this decision), he slowly dressed. At the office he went about his work as well as he could, though with that uneasy feeling, usually brought on by fatigue, of repeating something he had done before. He had a suspicion that others were avoiding him, that maybe they knew he was dead. That night his terrible dreams began and, though he never remembered a trace of them, he feared their return. In time this fear prevailed, coming between him and the page he was writing or the book he was trying to read. Letters swarmed and throbbed, faces—familiar faces—began to blur, and men and objects kept drifting away from him. In a frenzy of tenacity, his mind clung to these shifting shapes.

  Strangely enough, he never suspected the truth, but all at once it struck him. He realized that he was unable to recall the shapes or sounds or colors of his dreams—that there were no shapes or sounds or colors—and that they were not dreams. They were his reality, a reality beyond silence or sight and so, beyond memory. This troubled him far more than the fact that after his death he had been struggling against a current of meaningless images. The voices he had heard were no more than echoes; the faces he had seen, masks. Even the fingers of his own hand were shadows; but however dim and unreal, they were familiar, they were something to cling to.

  Still, he somehow felt it his duty to be rid of everything. He belonged to another world now, detached from past, present, or future. Gradually, this world came to enclose him. He suffered agony upon agony, he passed through regions of despair and loneliness—wanderings that he found cruel, frightening, because they went beyond all his former perceptions, memories, and hopes. The horror lay in their utter newness and splendor. He had attained grace; from the moment of death he had been in heaven.

  * * *

  Dr. Brodie's Report

  Foreword

  Preface to the First Edition

  The Gospel According to Mark

  The Unworthy Friend

  The Duel

  The End of the Duel

  Rosendo’s Tale

  The Intruder

  The Meeting

  Juan Muraña

  The Elder Lady

  Guayaquil

  Doctor Brodie’s Report

  Afterword

  Foreword

  The principle we have followed in translating this book is, of course, the same used in our previous Dutton volume, The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969. There our guiding aim had been to make the text read as though it had been written in English; in so doing, we quite soon discovered that the English and Spanish languages are not, as is often taken for granted, a set of interchangeable synonyms but are two possible ways of viewing and ordering reality. We have also continued in the present volume to supply the American reader with historical and geographical details not necessarily known to him.

  One difference between this volume and the last lies in the fact that the writing and the translation were, except in one case, more or less simultaneous. In this way our work was easier for us, since, as we were always under the spell of the originals, we stood in no need of trying to recapture past moods. This seems to us to be the best possible condition under which to practice the craft of translation.

  The Afterword, written directly in English, was prepared especially for this volume.

  Buenos Aires, December 29, 1970

  J. L. B.

  N. T. di G.

  Preface to the First Edition

  Kipling’s last stories were no less tormented and mazelike than the stories of Kafka or Henry James, which they doubtless surpass; but in 1885, in Lahore, the young Kipling began a series of brief tales, written in a straightforward manner, that he was to collect in 1890. Several of them —“In the House of Suddhoo,” “Beyond the Pale,” “The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows”— are laconic masterpieces. It occurred to me that what was conceived and carried out by a young man of genius might modestly be att
empted by a man on the borders of old age who knows his craft Out of that idea came the present volume, which I leave to the reader to judge.

  I have done my best—I don’t know with what success—to write straightforward stories. I do not dare state that they are simple; there isn’t anywhere on earth a single page or single word that is, since each thing implies the universe, whose most obvious trait is complexity. I want to make it quite clear that I am not, nor have I ever been, what used to be called a preacher of parables or a fabulist and is now known as a committed writer. I do not aspire to be Aesop. My stories, like those of the Thousand and One Nights, try to be entertaining or moving but not persuasive. Such an intention does not mean that I have shut myself up, according to Solomon’s image, in an ivory tower. My political convictions are quite well known; I am a member of the Conservative Party—this in itself is a form of skepticism—and no one has ever branded me a Communist, a nationalist, an anti-Semite, a follower of Billy the Kid or of the dictator Rosas. I believe that some day we will deserve not to have governments. I have never kept my opinions hidden, not even in trying times, but neither have I ever allowed them to find their way into my literary work, except once when I was buoyed up in exultation over the Six-Day War. The art of writing is mysterious; the opinions we hold are ephemeral, and I prefer the Platonic idea of the Muse to that of Poe, who reasoned, or feigned to reason, that the writing of a poem is an act of the intelligence. It never fails to amaze me that the classics hold a romantic theory of poetry, and a romantic poet a classical theory.

  Apart from the text that gives this book its title and that obviously derives from Lemuel Gulliver’s last voyage, my stories are—to use the term in vogue today—realistic. They follow, I believe, all the conventions of that school, which is as conventional as any other and of which we shall soon grow tired if we have not already done so. They are rich in the required invention of circumstances. Splendid examples of this device are to be found in the tenth century Old English ballad of Maldon and in the later Icelandic sagas. Two stories—I will not give their names—hold the same fantastic key. The curious reader will notice certain dose affinities between them. The same few plots, I am sorry to say, have pursued me down through the years; I am decidedly monotonous.

  I owe to a dream of Hugo Rodríguez Moroni the general outline of the story—perhaps the best of this collection—called “The Gospel According to Mark.” I fear having spoiled it with the changes that my fancy or my reason judged fitting. But after all, writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

  I have given up the surprises inherent in a baroque style as well as the surprises that lead to an unforeseen ending. I have, in short, preferred to satisfy an expectation rather than to provide a startling shock. For many years, I thought it might be given me to achieve a good page by means of variations and novelties; now, having passed seventy, I believe I have found my own voice. Slight rewording neither spoils nor improves what I dictate, except in cases of lightening a clumsy sentence or toning down an exaggeration. Each language is a tradition, each word a shared symbol, and what an innovator can change amounts to a trifle; we need only remember the splendid but often unreadable work of a Mallarmé or a Joyce. It is likely that this all-too-reasonable reasoning is only the fruit of weariness. My now advanced age has taught me to resign myself to being Borges.

  I am impartially indifferent to both the dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy—dont chaque édition fait regretter la précédente, according to the sad observation of Paul Groussac—and those weighty Argentine dictionaries of local usage. All, I find—those of this and those of the other side of the ocean—have a tendency to emphasize differences and to fragment the Spanish language. In connection with this, I recall that when it was held against the novelist Roberto Arlt that he had no knowledge of Buenos Aires slang, he replied, “I grew up in Villa Luro, among poor people and hoodlums, and I really had no time to learn that sort of thing.” Our local slang, in fact, is a literary joke concocted by writers of popular plays and tango lyrics, and the people who are supposed to use it hardly know what it means, except when they have been indoctrinated by phonograph records.

  I have set my stories some distance off in time and in space. The imagination, in this way, can operate with greater freedom. Who, in 1970, is able to remember with accuracy what at the end of the last century the outskirts of Buenos Aires around Palermo and Lomas were like? Unbelievable as it may seem, there are those who go to the length of playing policeman and looking for a writer’s petty slips. They remark, for example, that Martín Fierro would have spoken of a “bag” and not a “sack” of bones, and they find fault, perhaps unjustly, with the roan piebald coat of a certain horse famous in our literature.

  God spare thee, reader, long prefaces. The words are Quevedo’s, who, careful not to fall into an anachronism which in the long run would have been detected, never read those of Bernard Shaw.

  Buenos Aires, April 19, 1970

  J. L. B.

  The Gospel According to Mark

  These events took place at La Colorada ranch, in the southern part of the township of Junín, during the last days of March, 1928. The protagonist was a medical student named Baltasar Espinosa. We may describe him, for now, as one of the common run of young men from Buenos Aires, with nothing more noteworthy about him than an almost unlimited kindness and a capacity for public speaking that had earned him several prizes at the English school in Ramos Mejía. He did not like arguing, and preferred having his listener rather than himself in the right. Although he was fascinated by the probabilities of chance in any game he played, he was a bad player because it gave him no pleasure to win. His wide intelligence was undirected; at the age of thirty-three, he still lacked credit for graduation, by one course—the course to which he was most drawn. His father, who was a freethinker (like all the gentlemen of his day), had introduced him to the lessons of Herbert Spencer, but his mother, before leaving on a trip for Montevideo, once asked him to say the Lord’s Prayer and make the sign of the cross every night. Through the years, he had never gone back on that promise.

  Espinosa was not lacking in spirit; one day, with more indifference than anger, he had exchanged two or three punches with a group of fellow-students who were trying to force him to take part in a university demonstration. Owing to an acquiescent nature, he was full of opinions, or habits of mind, that were questionable: Argentina mattered less to him than a fear that in other parts of the world people might think of us as Indians; he worshiped France but despised the French; he thought little of Americans but approved the fact that there were tall buildings, like theirs, in Buenos Aires; he believed the gauchos of the plains to be better riders than those of hill or mountain country. When his cousin Daniel invited him to spend the summer months out at La Colorada, he said yes at once—not because he was really fond of the country, but more out of his natural complacency and also because it was easier to say yes than to dream up reasons for saying no.

  The ranch’s main house was big and slightly run-down; the quarters of the foreman, whose name was Gutre, were close by. The Gutres were three: the father, an unusually uncouth son, and a daughter of uncertain paternity. They were tall, strong, and bony, and had hair that was on the reddish side and faces that showed traces of Indian blood. They were barely articulate. The foreman’s wife had died years before.

  There in the country, Espinosa began learning things he never knew, or even suspected— for example, that you do not gallop a horse when approaching settlements, and that you never go out riding except for some special purpose. In time, he was to come to tell the birds apart by their calls.

  After a few days, Daniel had to leave for Buenos Aires to close a deal on some cattle. At most, this bit of business might take him a week. Espinosa, who was already somewhat weary of hearing about his cousin’s incessant luck with women and his tireless interest in the minute details of men’s fashions, preferred staying on at the ranch with his textbooks. But the heat was unbearable
, and even the night brought no relief. One morning at daybreak, thunder woke him. Outside, the wind was rocking the Australian pines. Listening to the first heavy drops of rain, Espinosa thanked God. All at once, cold air rolled in. That afternoon, the Salado overflowed its banks.

  The next day, looking out over the flooded fields from the gallery of the main house, Baltasar Espinosa thought that the stock metaphor comparing the pampa to the sea was not altogether false—at least, not that morning—though W. H. Hudson had remarked that the sea seems wider because we view it from a ship’s deck and not from a horse or from eye level.

  The rain did not let up. The Gutres, helped or hindered by Espinosa, the town dweller, rescued a good part of the livestock, but many animals were drowned. There were four roads leading to La Colorada; all of them were under water. On the third day, when a leak threatened the foreman’s house, Espinosa gave the Gutres a room near the tool shed, at the back of the main house. This drew them all closer; they ate together in the big dining room. Conversation turned out to be difficult. The Gutres, who knew so much about country things, were hard put to it to explain them. One night, Espinosa asked them if people still remembered the Indian raids from back when the frontier command was located there in Junín. They told him yes, but they would have given the same answer to a question about the beheading of Charles I.