Collected Fictions

by Borges, Jorge Luis

  Contempsit caros dum nos amat ille parentes,

  Hanc patriam reputans esse, Ravenna, suam

  Droctulft was not a traitor; traitors seldom inspire reverential epitaphs. He was an illuminatus, a convert. After many generations, the Longobards who had heaped blame upon the turncoat did as he had done; they became Italians, Lombards, and one of their number—Aldiger—may have fathered those who fathered Alighieri.... There are many conjectures one might make about Droctulft's action; mine is the most economical; if it is not true as fact, it may nevertheless be true as symbol.

  When I read the story of this warrior in Croce's book, I found myself enormously moved, and I was struck by the sense that I was recovering, under a different guise, something that had once been my own.

  I fleetingly thought of the Mongol horsemen who had wanted to make China an infinite pasture land, only to grow old in the cities they had yearned to destroy; but that was not the memory I sought. I found it at last—it was a tale I had heard once from my English grandmother, who is now dead.

  In 1872 my grandfather Borges was in charge of the northern and western borders of Buenos Aires province and the southern border of Santa Fe. The headquarters was in Junin; some four or five leagues farther on lay the chain of forts; beyond that, what was then called "the pampas" and also "the interior."

  One day my grandmother, half in wonder, half in jest, remarked upon her fate—an Englishwoman torn from her country and her people and carried to this far end of the earth. The person to whom she made the remark told her she wasn't the only one, and months later pointed out an Indian girl slowly crossing the town square. She was barefoot, and wearing two red ponchos; the roots of her hair were blond. A soldier told her that another Englishwoman wanted to talk with her. The woman nodded; she went into the headquarters without fear but not without some misgiving. Set in her coppery face painted with fierce colors, her eyes were that half-hearted blue that the English call gray. Her body was as light as a deer's; her hands, strong and bony. She had come in from the wilderness, from "the interior," and everything seemed too small for her—the doors, the walls, the furniture.

  Perhaps for one instant the two women saw that they were sisters; they were far from their beloved island in an incredible land. My grandmother, enunciating carefully, asked some question or other; the other woman replied haltingly, searching for the words and then repeating them, as though astonished at the old taste of them. It must have been fifteen years since she'd spoken her native language, and it was not easy to recover it. She said she was from Yorkshire, that her parents had emigrated out to Buenos Aires, that she had lost them in an Indian raid, that she had been carried off by the Indians, and that now she was the wife of a minor chieftain—she'd given him two sons; he was very brave. She said all this little by little, in a clumsy sort of English interlarded with words from the Araucan or Pampas tongue,*

  and behind the tale one caught glimpses of a savage and uncouth life: tents of horsehide, fires fueled by dung, celebrations in which the people feasted on meat singed over the fire or on raw viscera, stealthy marches at dawn; the raid on the corrals, the alarm sounded, the plunder, the battle, the thundering roundup of the stock by naked horsemen, polygamy, stench, and magic. An Englishwoman, reduced to such barbarism! Moved by outrage and pity, my grandmother urged her not to go back. She swore to help her, swore to rescue her children. The other woman answered that she was happy, and she returned that night to the desert. Francisco Borges was to die a short time later, in the Revolution of '74; perhaps at that point my grandmother came to see that other woman, torn like herself from her own kind and transformed by that implacable continent, as a monstrous mirror of her own fate....

  Every year, that blond-haired Indian woman had come into the pulperías* in Junin or Fort Lavalle, looking for trinkets and "vices"; after the conversation with my grandmother, she never appeared again. But they did see each other one more time. My grandmother had gone out hunting; alongside a squalid hut near the swamplands, a man was slitting a sheep's throat. As though in a dream, the Indian woman rode by on horseback. She leaped to the ground and drank up the hot blood. I cannot say whether she did that because she was no longer capable of acting in any other way, or as a challenge, and a sign.

  Thirteen hundred years and an ocean lie between the story of the life of the kidnapped maiden and the story of the life of Droctulft. Both, now, are irrecoverable. The figure of the barbarian who embraced the cause of Ravenna, and the figure of the European woman who chose the wilderness—they might seem conflicting, contradictory. But both were transported by some secret impulse, an impulse deeper than reason, and both embraced that impulse that they would not have been able to explain. It may be that the stories I have told are one and the same story. The obverse and reverse of this coin are, in the eyes of God, identical.

  For Ulrike von Kühlmann

  [1] Gibbon also records these lines, in the Decline and Fall, Chapter XLV.

  A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829—1874)

  I'm looking for the face I had Before the world was made.

  Yeats, "The Winding Stair"

  On February 6, 1829, the montoneros*—who by this time were being hounded by Lavalle*—were marching northward to join López' divisions; they halted at a ranch whose name they did not know, three or four leagues from the Pergamino. Toward dawn, one of the men had a haunting nightmare: in the gloom of the large bunkhouse, his confused cry woke the woman that was sleeping with him. No one knows what his dream was because the next day at four o'clock the montoneros were put to rout by Suárez' cavalry* and the pursuit went on for nine leagues, all the way to the now-dusky stubble fields, and the man perished in a ditch, his skull split by a saber from the wars in Peru and Brazil. The woman was named Isidora Cruz; the son she bore was given the name Tadeo Isidoro.

  It is not my purpose to repeat the story of his life. Of the days and nights that composed it, I am interested in only one; about the rest, I will recount nothing but that which is essential to an understanding of that single night. The adventure is recorded in a very famous book—that is, in a book whose subject can be all things to all men (I Corinthians 9:22), for it is capable of virtually inexhaustible repetitions, versions, perversions. Those who have commented upon the story of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz, and there are many, stress the influence of the wide plains on his formation, but gauchos just like to him were born and died along the forested banks of the Paraná and in the eastern mountain ranges. He did live in a world of monotonous barbarity—when he died in 1874 of the black pox, he had never seen a mountain or a gas jet or a windmill. Or a city: In 1849, he helped drive a herd of stock from Francisco Xavier Acevedo's ranch to Buenos Aires; the drovers went into the city to empty their purses; Cruz, a distrustful sort, never left the inn in the neighborhood of the stockyards. He spent many days there, taciturn, sleeping on the ground, sipping his mate, getting up at dawn and lying down again at orisons. He realized (beyond words and even beyond understanding) that the city had nothing to do with him. One of the peons, drunk, made fun of him. Cruz said nothing in reply, but during the nights on the return trip, sitting beside the fire, the other man's mockery continued, so Cruz (who had never shown any anger, or even the slightest resentment) killed him with a single thrust of his knife. Fleeing, he took refuge in a swamp; a few nights later, the cry of a crested screamer warned him that the police had surrounded him. He tested his knife on a leaf. He took off his spurs, so they wouldn't get in his way when the time came—he would fight before he gave himself up. He was wounded in the forearm, the shoulder, and the left hand; he gravely wounded the bravest of the men who'd come to arrest him. When the blood ran down between his fingers, he fought more courageously than ever; toward dawn, made faint by the loss of blood, he was disarmed. Back then, the army served as the country's prison: Cruz was sent to a small fort on the northern frontier. As a low private, he took part in the civil wars; sometimes he fought for his native province, sometimes against it. On Jan
uary 23,1856, at the Cardoso Marshes, he was one of the thirty Christian men who, under the command of Sgt. Maj. Eusebio Laprida, battled two hundred Indians.*

  He was wounded by a spear in that engagement.

  There are many gaps in his dark and courageous story. In about 1868, we come across him again on the Pergamino: married or domesticated, the father of a son, the owner of a parcel of land. In 1869 he was made sergeant of the rural police. He had set his past right; at that point in his life, he should have considered himself a happy man, though deep down he wasn't. (In the future, secretly awaiting him, was one lucid, fundamental night— the night when he was finally to see his own face, the night when he was finally to hear his own true name. Once fully understood, that night encompasses his entire story—or rather, one incident, one action on that night does, for actions are the symbol of our selves.) Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment —the moment when a man knows forever more who he is. It is said that Alexander of Macedonia saw his iron future reflected in the fabulous story of Achilles; Charles XII of Sweden, in the story of Alexander. It was not a book that revealed that knowledge to Tadeo Isidoro Cruz, who did not know how to read; he saw himself in a hand-to-hand cavalry fight and in a man. This is how it happened:

  During the last days of June in the year 1870, an order came down for the capture of an outlaw wanted for two murders. The man was a deserter from the forces on the border under the command of Col. Benito Machado;in one drunken spree he had killed a black man in a whorehouse; in another, a resident of the district ofRojas. The report added that he came from Laguna Colorada. It was at Laguna Colorada, forty years earlier, that the montoneros had gathered for the catastrophe that had left their flesh for birds and dogs; Laguna Colorado was where Manuel Mesa's career began, before he was executed in the Plazade la Victoria as the snare drums rolled to drown out the sound of the man's fury*; Laguna Colorada was where the unknown man who fathered Cruz had been born, before he died in a ditch with his skull split by a saber from the battles in Peru and Brazil. Cruz had forgotten the name of the place; with a slight but inexplicable sense of uneasiness he recognized it.... On horseback, the outlaw, harried by the soldiers, wove a long labyrinth of turns and switchbacks, but the soldiers finally cornered him on the night of July 12. He had gone to ground in a field of stubble. The darkness was virtually impenetrable; Cruz and his men, cautiously and on foot, advanced toward the brush in whose trembling depths the secret man lurked, or slept. A crested screamer cried; Tadeo Isidoro Cruz had the sense that he had lived the moment before. The outlaw stepped out from his hiding place to fight them. Cruz glimpsed the terrifying apparition—the long mane of hair and the gray beard seemed to consume his face. A well-known reason prevents me from telling the story of that fight; let me simply recall that the deserter gravely wounded or killed several of Cruz' men. As Cruz was fighting in the darkness (as his body was fighting in the darkness), he began to understand. He realized that one destiny is no better than the next and that every man must accept the destiny he bears inside himself. He realized that his sergeant's epaulets and uniform were hampering him. He realized his deep-rooted destiny as a wolf, not a gregarious dog; he realized that the other man was he himself. Day began to dawn on the lawless plain; Cruz threw his cap to the ground, cried that he was not going to be a party to killing a brave man, and he began to fight against the soldiers, alongside the deserter Martín Fierro.*

  Emma Zunz

  On January 14, 1922, when Emma Zunz returned home from the Tarbuch & Loewenthal weaving mill, she found a letter at the far end of the entryway to her building; it had been sent from Brazil, and it informed her that her father had died. She was misled at first by the stamp and the envelope; then the unknown handwriting made her heart flutter. Nine or ten smudgy lines covered almost the entire piece of paper; Emma read that Sr. Maier had accidentally ingested an overdose of veronal and died on the third inst. in the hospital at Bagé.*The letter was signed by a resident of the rooming house in which her father had lived, one Fein or Fain, in Rio Grande; he could not have known that he was writing to the dead man's daughter.

  Emma dropped the letter. The first thing she felt was a sinking in her stomach and a trembling in her knees; then, a sense of blind guilt, of unreality, of cold, of fear; then, a desire for this day to be past.

  Then immediately she realized that such a wish was pointless, for her father's death was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening, endlessly, forever after. She picked up the piece of paper and went to her room. Furtively, she put it away for safekeeping in a drawer, as though she somehow knew what was coming. She may already have begun to see the things that would happen next; she was already the person she was to become.

  In the growing darkness, and until the end of that day, Emma wept over the suicide of Manuel Maier, who in happier days gone by had been Emanuel Zunz. She recalled summer outings to a small farm near Gualeguay,* she recalled (or tried to recall) her mother, she recalled the family's little house in Lanus* that had been sold at auction, she recalled the yellow lozenges of a window, recalled the verdict of prison, the disgrace, the anonymous letters with the newspaper article about the "Embezzlement of Funds by Teller," recalled (and this she would never forget) that on the last night, her father had sworn that the thief was Loewenthal—Loewenthal, Aaron Loewenthal, formerly the manager of the mill and now one of its owners. Since 1916, Emma had kept the secret. She had revealed it to no one, not even to Elsa Urstein, her best friend. Perhaps she shrank from it out of profane incredulity; perhaps she thought that the secret was the link between herself and the absent man. Loewenthal didn't know she knew; Emma Zunz gleaned from that minuscule fact a sense of power.

  She did not sleep that night, and by the time first light defined the rectangle of the window, she had perfected her plan. She tried to make that day (which seemed interminable to her) be like every other. In the mill, there were rumors of a strike; Emma declared, as she always did, that she was opposed to all forms of violence. At six, when her workday was done, she went with Elsato a women's club that had a gymnasium and a swimming pool. They joined; she had to repeat and then spell her name; she had to applaud the vulgar jokes that accompanied the struggle to get it correct. She discussed with Elsa and the younger of the Kronfuss girls which moving picture they would see Sunday evening. And then there was talk of boyfriends; no one expected Emma to have anything to say. In April she would be nineteen, but men still inspired in her an almost pathological fear.... Home again, she made soup thickened with manioc flakes and some vegetables, ate early, went to bed, and forced herself to sleep. Thus passed Friday the fifteenth—a day of work, bustle, and trivia—the day before the day.

  On Saturday, impatience wakened her. Impatience, not nervousness or second thoughts—and the remarkable sense of relief that she had reached this day at last. There was nothing else for her to plan or picture to herself; within a few hours she would have come to the simplicity of the fait accompli. She read in La Prensa that the Nordstjärnan, from Malmö, was to weigh anchor that night from Pier 3; she telephoned Loewenthal, insinuated that she had something to tell him, in confidence, about the strike, and promised to stop by his office at nightfall. Her voice quivered; the quiver befitted a snitch. No other memorable event took place that morning. Emma worked until noon and then settled with Perla Kronfuss and Eisa onthe details of their outing on Sunday. She lay down after lunch and with her eyes closed went over the plan she had conceived. She reflected that the final step would be less horrible than the first, and would give her, she had no doubt of it, the taste of victory, and of justice. Suddenly, alarmed, she leaped out of bed and ran to the dressing table drawer. She opened it; under the portrait of Milton Sills, where she had left it night before last, she found Pain's letter. No one could have seen it; she began to read it, and then she tore it up.

  To recount with some degree of reality the events of that evening would be difficult,
and perhaps inappropriate. One characteristic of hell is its unreality, which might be thought to mitigate hell's terrors but perhaps makes them all the worse. How to make plausible an act in which even she who was to commit it scarcely believed? How to recover those brief hours of chaos that Emma Zunz's memory today repudiates and confuses? Emma lived in Amalgro,* on Calle Liniers*; we know that that evening she went down to the docks. On the infamous Paseo de Julio* she may have seen herself multiplied in mirrors, made public by lights, and stripped naked by hungry eyes—but it is more reasonable to assume that at first she simply wandered, unnoticed, through the indifferent streets.... She stepped into two or three bars, observed the routine or the maneuvers of other women. Finally she ran into some men from the Nordstjärnan. One of them, who was quite young, she feared might inspire in her some hint of tenderness, so she chose a different one—perhaps a bit shorter than she, and foul-mouthed—so that there might be no mitigation of the purity of the horror. The man led her to a door and then down a gloomy entryway and then to a tortuous stairway and then into a vestibule (with lozenges identical to those of the house in Lanús) and then down a hallway and then to a door that closed behind them. The most solemn of events are outside time—whether because in the most solemn of events the immediate past is severed, as it were, from the future or because the elements that compose those events seem not to be consecutive.

  In that time outside time, in that welter of disjointed and horrible sensations, did Emma Zunz think even once about the death that inspired the sacrifice? In my view, she thought about it once, and that was enough to endanger her desperate goal. She thought (she could not help thinking) that her father had done to her mother the horrible thing being done to her now. She thought it with weak-limbed astonishment, and then, immediately, took refuge in vertigo. The man—a Swede or Finn—did not speak Spanish; he was an instrument for Emma, as she was for him—but she was used for pleasure, while he was used for justice.