Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations

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

  On display in my study are an oval portrait of my great-grandfather, who fought in the wars of Independence, and some cabinets containing swords, medals, and flags. I showed Zimmerman those old glorious things, explaining as I went along; his eyes passed over them quickly, like one who is carrying out a duty, and, not without a hint of impoliteness that I believe was involuntary and mechanical, he interrupted and finished my sentences for me. He said, for example:

  “Correct. Battle of Junín. August 6, 1824 Cavalry charge under Juárez.”

  “Under Suárez,” I corrected.

  I suspect his error was deliberate. He spread his arms in an Oriental gesture and exclaimed, “My first mistake, and certainly not my last! I feed on texts and slip up on facts—in you the interesting past lives.” He pronounced his v’s like f’s.

  Such flatteries displeased me. He was far more interested in my books, and let his eyes wander almost lovingly over the titles. I recall his saying, “Ah, Schopenhauer, who always disbelieved in history. This same set, edited by Grisebach, was the one I had in Prague. I thought I’d grow old in the friendship of those portable volumes, but it was history itself, in the flesh of a madman, that evicted me from that house and that city. Now here I am, with you, in South America, in this hospitable house of yours.”

  He spoke inelegantly but fluently, his noticeable German accent going hand in hand with a Spanish lisp. By then we were seated, and I seized upon what he had said in order to take up our subject. “History here in the Argentine is more merciful,” I said. “I was born in this house and I expect to die here. Here my great-grandfather lay down his sword, which saw action throughout the continent. Here I have pondered the past and have compiled my books. I can almost say I’ve never been outside this library, but now I shall go abroad at last and travel to lands I have only traveled in maps.” I cut short with a smile my possible rhetorical.

  “Are you referring to a certain Caribbean republic?” said Zimmerman.

  “So I am,” I answered. “And it’s to this imminent trip that I owe the honor to your visit.” Trinidad served us coffee. I went on slowly and confidently. “You probably know by now that the Minister has entrusted me with the mission of transcribing and writing an introduction to the new Bolívar letters, which have accidentally turned up in Dr. Avellanos’ files. This mission, by a happy stroke, crowns my lifework—the work that somehow runs in my blood.”

  It was a relief having said what I had to say. Zimmerman appeared not to have heard me; his averted eyes were fixed not on my face but on the books at my back. He vaguely assented, and then spoke out, saying, “In your blood. You are the true historian. Your people roamed the length and breadth of this continent and fought in the great battles, while in obscurity mine were barely emerging from the ghetto. You, according to your own eloquent words, carry history in your blood; you have only to listen closely to an inner voice. I, on the other hand, must go all the way to Sulaco and struggle through stacks of perhaps apocryphal papers. Believe me, sir, I envy you.”

  His tone was neither challenging nor mocking; his words were the expression of a will that made of the future something as irrevocable as the past. His arguments hardly mattered. The strength lay in the man himself, not in them. Zimmerman continued, with a schoolteachers deliberation: “In this matter of Bolívar—I beg your pardon, San Martín—your stand, cher maître, is known to all scholars. Votre siège est fait. As yet, I have not examined Bolívar’s pertinent letter, but it is obvious, or reasonable to guess, that it was written as a piece of self-justification. In any case, this much-touted letter will show us only Bolívar’s side of the question, not San Martín’s. Once made public, it should be weighed in the balance, studied, passed through the sieve of criticism, and, if need be, refuted. No one is better qualified for that final judgment than you, with your magnifying glass. The scalpel, the lancet—scientific rigor itself demands them! Allow me at the same time to point out that the name of the editor of the letter will remain linked to the letter. Such a link is hardly going to stand you in good stead. The public at large will never bother to look into these subtleties.”

  I realize now that what we argued after that, in the main, was useless. Maybe I felt it at the time. In order to avoid an outright confrontation I grasped at a detail, and I asked him whether he really thought the letters were fakes.

  “That they are in Bolívar’s own hand,” he said, “does not necessarily mean that the whole truth is to be found in them. For all we know, Bolívar may have tried to deceive the recipient of the letter or, simply, may have deceived himself. You, a historian, a thinker, know far better than I that the mystery lies in ourselves, not in our words.”

  These pompous generalities irritated me, and I dryly remarked that within the riddle that surrounded us, the meeting at Guayaquil—in which General San Martín renounced mere ambition and left the destiny of South America in the hands of Bolívar—was also a riddle possibly not unworthy of our attention.

  “The interpretations are so many,” Zimmerman said. “Some historians believe San Martín fell into a trap; others, like Sarmiento, have it that he was a European soldier at loose ends on a continent he never understood; others again— for the most part Argentines—ascribe to him an act of self-denial; still others, weariness. We also hear of the secret order of who knows what Masonic lodge.”

  I said that, at any rate, it would be interesting to have the exact words spoken between San Martín, the Protector of Peru, and Bolívar, the Liberator. Zimmerman delivered his judgment. “Perhaps the words they exchanged were irrelevant,” he said. “Two men met face to face at Guayaquil; if one of them was master, it was because of his stronger will, not because of the weight of arguments. As you see, I have not forgotten my Schopenhauer.” He added, with a smile, “Words, words, words. Shakespeare, insuperable master of words, held them in scorn. In Guayaquil or in Buenos Aires—in Prague, for that matter—words always count less than persons.”

  At that moment I felt that something was happening between us, or, rather, that something had already happened. In some uncanny way we were already two other people. The dusk entered into the room, and I had not lit the lamps. By chance, I asked, “You are from Prague, Doctor?”

  “I was from Prague,” he answered.

  To skirt the real subject, I said, “It must be an unusual city. I’ve never been there, but the first book I ever read in German was Meyrink’s novel Der Golem.”

  “It’s the only book by Gustav Meyrink worth remembering,” Zimmerman said. “It’s wiser not to attempt the others, compounded as they are of bad writing and worse theosophy. All in all, something of the strangeness of Prague stalks the pages of that book of dreams within dreams. Everything is strange in Prague, or, if you prefer, nothing is strange. Anything may happen there. In London, on certain evenings, I have had the same feeling.”

  “You have spoken of the will,” I said. “In the tales of the Mabinogion, two kings play chess on the summit of a hill, while below them their warriors fight. One of the kings wins the game; a rider comes to him with the news that the army of the other side has been beaten. The battle of the men was a mirror of the battle of the chessboard.”

  “Ah, a feat of magic,” said Zimmerman.

  “Or the display of a will in two different fields,” I said. “Another Celtic legend tells of the duel between two famous bards. One, accompanying himself on the harp, sings from the twilight of morning to the twilight of evening. Then, under the stars or moon, he hands his harp over to his rival. The second bard lays the instrument aside and gets to his feet. The first bard acknowledges defeat.”

  “What erudition, what power of synthesis!” exclaimed Zimmerman. Then he added, more calmly, “I must confess my ignorance, my lamentable ignorance, of Celtic lore. You, like the day, span East and West, while I am held to my little Carthaginian comer, complemented now with a smattering of Latin American history. I am a mere plodder.”

  In his voice were both Jewish and German serv
ility, but I felt, insofar as victory was already his, that it cost him very little to flatter me or to admit I was right. He begged me not to trouble myself over the arrangements for his trip. (“Provisions” was the actual word he used.) On the spot, he drew out of his portfolio a letter addressed to the Minister. In it, I expounded the motives behind my resignation, and I acknowledged Dr. Zimmerman’s indisputable merits. Zimmerman put his own fountain pen in my hand for my signature. When he put the letter away, I could not help catching a glimpse of his passage aboard the next day’s Buenos Aires-Sulaco flight.

  On his way out he paused again before the volumes of Schopenhauer, saying, “Our master, our common master, denied the existence of involuntary acts. If you stay behind in this house—in this spacious, patrician home—it is because down deep inside you want to remain here. I obey, and I thank you for your will.”

  Taking this last pittance without a word, I accompanied him to the front door. There, as we said goodbye, he remarked, “The coffee was excellent.”

  I go over these hasty jottings, which will soon be consigned to the flames. Our meeting had been short. I have the feeling that I shall give up any future writing. Mon siège est fait.

  Doctor Brodie’s Report

  Among the pages of one of the volumes of Lane’s Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (London, 1839), a set of which my dear friend Paul Keins turned up for me, we made the discovery of the manuscript I am about to transcribe below. The neat handwriting—an art which typewriters are now helping us to forget—suggests that it was composed some time around that same date. Lane’s work, as is well known, is lavish with extensive explanatory notes; in the margins of my copy there are a number of annotations, interrogation marks, and now and then emendations written in the same hand as the manuscript. We may surmise that the wondrous tales of Shahrazad interested the annotator less than the customs of the Mohammedans. Of David Brodie, D.D., whose signature adorns the bottom of the last page with a fine flourish, I have been unable to uncover any information except that he was a Scottish missionary, born in Aberdeen, who preached the Christian faith first in the heart of Africa and later on in certain backlying regions of Brazil, a land he was probably led to by his knowledge of Portuguese. I am unaware of the place and date of his death. The manuscript, as far as I know, was never given to the press.

  What follows is a faithful transcription of his report, composed in a rather colorless English, with no other omissions than two or three Bible verses jotted in the margins and a curious passage concerning the sexual practices of the Yahoos, which our good Presbyterian discreetly committed to Latin. The first page is missing.

  . . . of the region infested by Ape-men dwell the “Mlch,” whom I shall call Yahoos so that my readers will be reminded of their bestial nature and also because, given the total absence of vowels in their harsh language, an exact transliteration is virtually impossible. Including the “Nr,” who dwell farther to the south in the thorn-bush, the numbers of the tribe do not, I believe, exceed seven hundred. The cipher which I propose is a mere conjecture, since, save for the king and queen and the witch doctors, the Yahoos sleep in no fixed abode but wherever night overtakes them. Swamp fever and the continual incursions of the Ape-men diminish their number. Only a very few individuals have names. In order to address one another, it is their custom to fling a small handful of mud. I have also noticed Yahoos who, to attract a friend’s attention, throw themselves on the ground and wallow in the dust. Save for their lower foreheads and for having a peculiar copperish hue that reduces their blackness, in other physical respects they do not noticeably differ from the “Kroo.” They take their nourishment from fruits, root-stalks, and the smaller reptiles; they imbibe the milk of cats and of chiropterans; and they fish with their hands. While eating, they normally conceal themselves or else close their eyes. All other physical habits they perform in open view, much the same as the Cynics of old. . . . So as to partake of their wisdom, they devour the raw corpses of their witch doctors and of the royal family. When I admonished them for this evil custom they touched their lips and their bellies, perhaps to indicate that the dead are also edible, or—but this explanation may be farfetched—in order that I might come to understand that everything we eat becomes, in the long run, human flesh. In their warfare they employ stones, which they gather for that purpose, and magical spells and incantations. They go about quite naked, the arts of clothing and tattooing being altogether unknown to them.

  It is worthy of note that, though they have at hand a wide, grassy plateau on which there are springs of clear water and shade-dispensing trees, they prefer to swarm in the marshlands which surround this eminence, as if delighting in the rigors of the hot climate and the general unwholesomeness. The slopes of the plateau are steep and could easily be utilized as a natural bulwark against the onslaughts of the Ape-men. The clans of Scotland, in similar circumstances, erected their castles on the summits of hills; I advised the witch doctors to adopt this simple defensive measure, but my words were of no avail. They allowed me, however, to build a hut for myself on higher ground, where the night air is cooler.

  The tribe is ruled over by a king, whose power is absolute, but it is my suspicion that the true rulers are the witch doctors, who administer to him and who have chosen him. Every male born into the tribe is subjected to a painstaking examination; if he exhibits certain stigmata, the nature of which were not revealed to me, he is elevated to the rank of king of the Yahoos. So that the physical world may not lead him from the paths of wisdom, he is gelded on the spot, his eyes are burned, and his hands and feet are amputated. Thereafter, he lives confined in a cavern called the Castle (“Qzr”), into which only the four witch doctors and the two slave women who attend him and anoint him with dung are permitted entrance. Should war arise, the witch doctors remove him from his cavern, display him to the tribe to excite their courage, and bear him, lifted onto their shoulders after the manner of a flag or a talisman, to the thick of the fight. In such cases, he dies almost immediately under the hail of stones flung at him by the Ape-men.

  In another Castle lives the queen, who is not permitted to see her king. During my sojourn, this lady was kind enough to receive me; she was smiling, young, and insofar as her race allowed, graceful. Bracelets of metalwork and of ivory and necklaces of teeth adorned her nakedness. She inspected me, sniffed me, and, after touching me with a finger, ended by offering herself to me in the presence of all her retinue. My cloth and my ethics, however, forbade me that honor, which commonly she grants only to the witch doctors and to the slave hunters, for the most part Muslims, whose caravans journey across the kingdom. Twice or thrice she sank a gold pin into my flesh; such prickings being tokens of royal favor, the number of Yahoos are more than a few who stick themselves with pins to encourage the belief that the queen herself pricked them. The ornaments she wore, and which I have described, come from other regions. Since they lack the capacity to fashion the simplest object, the Yahoos regard such ornaments as natural. To the tribe my hut was a tree, despite the fact that many of them saw me construct it and even lent me their aid. Amongst a number of other items, I had in my possession a watch, a cork helmet, a mariner’s compass, and a Bible. The Yahoos stared at them, weighed them in their hands, and wanted to know where I had found them. They customarily reached for my cutlass not by the hilt but by the blade, seeing it, undoubtedly, in their own way, which causes me to wonder to what degree they would be able to perceive a chair. A house of several rooms would strike them as a maze, though perhaps they might find their way inside it in the manner of the cat, though the cat does not imagine the house. My beard, which then was red, was a source of wonderment to them all, and it was with obvious fondness that they stroked it.

  The Yahoos are insensitive to pain and pleasure, save for the relishment they get from raw and rancid meat and evil-smelling things. An utter lack of imagination moves them to cruelty.

  I have spoken of the queen and the king; I shall speak now of the witch doctor
s. I have already recorded that they are four, this number being the largest that their arithmetic spans. On their fingers they count thus: one, two, three, four, many. Infinity begins at the thumb. The same, I am informed, occurs among the Indian tribes who roam in the vicinity of Buenos-Ayres on the South American continent. In spite of the fact that four is the highest number at their disposal, the Arabs who trade with them do not swindle them, because in the bartering everything is divided into lots—which each of the traders piles by his side—of one, two, three, and four. Such translations are cumbersome, but they do not admit of error or fraudulence. Of the entire nation of the Yahoos, the witch doctors are the only persons who have aroused my interest. The tribesmen attribute to them the power of transforming into ants or into turtles anyone who so desires; one individual, who detected my disbelief, pointed out an ant-hill to me, as though that constituted a proof.

  Memory is greatly defective among the Yahoos, or perhaps is altogether nonexistent. They speak of the havoc wrought by an invasion of leopards, but do not know who witnessed the event, they or their fathers, nor do they know whether they are recounting a dream. The witch doctors show some signs of memory, albeit to a reduced degree; they are able to recollect in the evening things which took place that morning or the preceding evening. They are also endowed with the faculty of foresight, and can state with quiet confidence what will happen ten or fifteen minutes hence. They convey, for example, that “A fly will graze the nape of my neck” or “In a moment we shall hear the song of a bird.” Hundreds of times I have borne witness to this curious gift, and I have also reflected upon it at length. Knowing that past, present, and future already exist, detail upon detail, in God’s prophetic memory, in His Eternity, what baffles me is that men, while they can look indefinitely backward, are not allowed to look one whit forward. If I am able to remember in all vividness that towering four-master from Norway which I saw when I was scarcely four, why am I taken aback by the fact that man may be capable of foreseeing what is about to happen? To the philosophical mind, memory is as much a wonder as divination; tomorrow morning is closer to us than the crossing of the Red Sea by the Hebrews, which, nevertheless, we remember.