Collected Fictions

by Borges, Jorge Luis

  Light enters the vault; it is then that I am able to see the jaguar.

  I have lost count of the years I have lain in this darkness; I who once was young and could walk about this prison do nothing now but wait, in the posture of my death, for the end the gods have destined for me. With the deep flint blade I have opened the breast of victims, but now I could not, without the aid of magic, lift my own body from the dust.

  On the day before the burning of the Pyramid, the men who got down from their high horses scourged me with burning irons, to compel me to reveal the site of a buried treasure. Before my eyes they toppled the idol to the god, yet the god did not abandon me, and I held my silence through their tortures. They tore my flesh, they crushed me, they mutilated me, and then I awoke in this prison, which I will never leave alive.

  Driven by the inevitability of doing something, of somehow filling time, I tried, in my darkness, to remember everything I knew. I squandered entire nights in remembering the order and the number of certain stone serpents, or the shape of a medicinal tree. Thus did I gradually conquer the years, thus did I gradually come to possess those things I no longer possessed. One night I sensed that a precise recollection was upon me; before the traveler sees the ocean, he feels a stirring in his blood. Hours later, I began to make out the memory; it was one of the legends of the god. On the first day of creation, foreseeing that at the end of time many disasters and calamities would befall, the god had written a magical phrase, capable of warding off those evils. He wrote it in such a way that it would pass down to the farthest generations, and remain untouched by fate. No one knows where he wrote it, or with what letters, but we do know that it endures, a secret text, and that one of the elect shall read it. I reflected that we were, as always, at the end of time, and that it would be my fate, as the last priest of the god, to be afforded the privilege of intuiting those words. The fact that I was bounded within a cell did not prevent me from harboring that hope; I might have seen Qaholom's inscription thousands of times, and need only to understand it.

  That thought gave me spirit, and then filled me with a kind of vertigo. In the wide realm of the world there are ancient forms, incorruptible and eternal forms — any one of them might be the symbol that I sought. A mountain might be the word of the god, or a river or the empire or the arrangement of the stars. And yet, in the course of the centuries mountains are leveled and the path of a river is many times diverted, and empires know mutability and ruin, and the design of the stars is altered. In the firmament there is change. The mountain and the star are individuals, and the life of an individual runs out. I sought something more tenacious, more invulnerable. I thought of the generations of grain, of grasses, of birds, of men. Perhaps the spell was written upon my very face, perhaps I myself was the object of my search.

  Amid those keen imaginings was I when I recalled that one of the names of the god was jaguar — tigre.

  At that, my soul was filled with holiness. I imagined to myself the first morning of time, imagined my god entrusting the message to the living flesh of the jaguars, who would love one another and engender one another endlessly, in caverns, in cane fields, on islands, so that the last men might receive it. I imagined to myself that web of tigers, that hot labyrinth of tigers, bringing terror to the plains and pastures in order to preserve the design. In the other cell, there was a jaguar; in its proximity I sensed a confirmation of my conjecture, and a secret blessing.

  Long years I devoted to learning the order and arrangement of the spots on the tiger's skin. During the course of each blind day I was granted an instant of light, and thus was I able to fix in my mind the black shapes that mottled the yellow skin. Some made circles; others formed transverse stripes on the inside of its legs; others, ringlike, occurred over and over again—perhaps they were the same sound, or the same word. Many had red borders.

  I will not tell of the difficulties of my labor. More than once I cried out to the vault above that it was impossible to decipher that text. Gradually, I came to be tormented less by the concrete enigma which occupied my mind than by the generic enigma of a message written by a god. What sort of sentence, I asked myself, would be constructed by an absolute mind? I reflected that even in the languages of humans there is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe; to say "the jaguar" is to say all the jaguars that engendered it, the deer and turtles it has devoured, the grass that fed the deer, the earth that was mother to the grass, the sky that gave light to the earth. I reflected that in the language of a god every word would speak that infinite concatenation of events, and not implicitly but explicitly, and not linearly but instantaneously. In time, the idea of a divine utterance came to strike me as puerile, or as blasphemous. A god, I reflected, must speak but a single word, and in that word there must be absolute plenitude. No word uttered by a god could be less than the universe, or briefer than the sum of time.

  The ambitions and poverty of human words— all, world, universe— are but shadows or simulacra of that Word which is the equivalent of a language and all that can be comprehended within a language.

  One day or one night—between my days and nights, what difference can there be?—I dreamed that there was a grain of sand on the floor of my cell. Unconcerned, I went back to sleep; I dreamed that I woke up and there were two grains of sand. Again I slept; I dreamed that now there were three. Thus the grains of sand multiplied, little by little, until they filled the cell and I was dying beneath that hemisphere of sand. I realized that I was dreaming; with a vast effort I woke myself. But waking up was useless—I was suffocated by the countless sand. Someone said to me: You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of the grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.

  I felt lost. The sand crushed my mouth, but I cried out: I cannot be killed by sand that I dream — nor is there any such thing as a dream within a dream. A bright light woke me. In the darkness above me, there hovered a circle of light. I saw the face and hands of the jailer, the pulley, the rope, the meat, and the water jugs.

  Little by little, a man comes to resemble the shape of his destiny; a man is, in the long run, his circumstances. More than a decipherer or an avenger, more than a priest of the god, I was a prisoner.

  Emerging from that indefatigable labyrinth of dreams, I returned to my hard prison as though I were a man returning home. I blessed its dampness, I blessed its tiger, I blessed its high opening and the light, I blessed my old and aching body, I blessed the darkness and the stone.

  And at that, something occurred which I cannot forget and yet cannot communicate—there occurred union with the deity, union with the universe (I do not know whether there is a difference between those two words). Ecstasy does not use the same symbol twice; one man has seen God in a blinding light, another has perceived Him in a sword or in the circles of a rose. I saw a Wheel of enormous height, which was not before my eyes, or behind them, or to the sides, but everywhere at once. This Wheel was made of water, but also of fire, and although I could see its boundaries, it was infinite. It was made of all things that shall be, that are, and that have been, all intertwined, and I was one of the strands within that all-encompassing fabric, and Pedrode Alvarado, who had tortured me, was another. In it were the causes and the effects, and the mere sight of that Wheel enabled me to understand all things, without end. O joy of understanding, greater than the joy of imagining, greater than the joy of feeling! I saw the universe and saw its secret designs. I saw the origins told by the Book of the People. I saw the mountains that rose from the water, saw the first men of wood, saw the water jars that turned against the men, saw the dogs that tore at their faces.* I saw the faceless god who is behind the gods. I saw the infinite processes that shape a single happiness, and, understanding all, I also came to understand the writing on the tiger.

  It is a formula of fourteen random (apparently random) word
s, and all I would have to do to become omnipotent is speak it aloud. Speaking it would make this stone prison disappear, allow the day to enter my night, make me young, make me immortal, make the jaguar destroy Alvarado, bury the sacred blade in Spanish breasts, rebuild the Pyramid, rebuild the empire. Forty syllables, fourteen words, and I, Tzinacán, would rule the lands once ruled by Moctezuma. But I know that I shall never speak those words, because I no longer remember Tzinacán.

  Let the mystery writ upon the jaguars die with me. He who has glimpsed the universe, he who has glimpsed the burning designs of the universe, can have no thought for a man, for a man's trivial joys or calamities, though he himself be that man. He was that man, who no longer matters to him. What does he care about the fate of that other man, what does he care about the other man's nation, when now he is no one? That is why I do not speak the formula, that is why, lying in darkness, I allow the days to forget me.

  For Etna Risso Platero

  Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth

  ... is the likeness of the spider who buildeth her a house.

  Qur'an, XXIX: 40

  "This," said Dunraven with a vast gesture that did not blench at the cloudy stars, and that took in the black moors, the sea, and a majestic, tumbledown edifice that looked much like a stable fallen upon hard times, "is my ancestral land."

  Unwin, his companion, removed the pipe from his mouth and uttered modest sounds of approbation. It was the first evening of the summer of 1914; weary of a world that lacked the dignity of danger, the friends prized the solitude of that corner of Cornwall. Dunraven cultivated a dark beard and was conscious of himself as the author of quite a respectable epic, though his contemporaries were incapable of so much as scanning it and its subject had yet to be revealed to him; Unwin had published a study of the theorem that Fermât had not written in the margins of a page by Diophantus. Both men—is there really any need to say this?—were young, absentminded, and passionate.

  "It must be a good quarter century ago now," said Dunraven, "that Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, the chieftain or king or whatnot of some tribe or another along the Nile, died in the central chamber of that house at the hands of his cousin Said. Even after all these years, the circumstances of his death are still not entirely clear."

  Meekly, Unwin asked why.

  "Several reasons," came the answer. "First, that house up there is a labyrinth. Second, a slave and a lion had stood guard over it. Third, a secret treasure disappeared— poof!, vanished. Fourth, the murderer was already dead by the time the murder took place. Fifth ..."

  Vexed a bit, Unwin stopped him.

  "Please—let's not multiply the mysteries," he said. "Mysteries ought to be simple. Remember Poe's purloined letter, remember Zangwill's locked room."

  "Or complex," volleyed Dunraven. "Remember the universe."

  Climbing up steep sandy hills, they had arrived at the labyrinth. Seen at close range, it looked like a straight, virtually interminable wall of unplastered brick, scarcely taller than a man. Dunraven said it made a circle, but one so broad that its curvature was imperceptible. Unwin recalled Nicholas of Cusa, for whom every straight line was the arc of an infinite circle.... Toward midnight, they came upon a ruined doorway, which opened onto a long, perilous entryway whose walls had no other windows or doors. Dunraven said that inside, one came to crossing after crossing in the halls, but if they always turned to the left, in less than an hour they would be at the center of the maze. Unwin nodded. Their cautious steps echoed on the stone floor; at every branching, the corridor grew narrower. They felt they were being suffocated by the house—the ceiling was very low. They were forced to walk in single file through the knotted darkness. Unwin led the way; the invisible wall, cumbered with ruggedness and angles, passed endlessly under his hand. And as he made his way slowly through the darkness, Unwin heard from his friend's lips the story of Ibn-Hakam's death.

  "What well may be my earliest memory," Dunraven began, "is Ibn-Hakam on the docks at Pentreath. He was followed by a black man with a lion—undoubtedly the first black man and the first lion I'd ever set eyes upon, with the exception of those lithographs of Bible stories, I suppose. I was just a boy then, but I'll tell you, that savage sun-colored beast and night-colored man didn't make the impression on me that Ibn-Hakam did. He seemed so tall. He was a sallow-skinned fellow, with black eyes and drooping eyelids, an insolent nose, thick lips, a saffron yellow beard, a broad chest, and a silent, self-assured way of walking. When I got home, I said, 'A king has come in a ship.' Later, when the brickmasons went to work, I expanded upon the title a bit and called him the King of Babel.

  "The news that this outsider was to settle in Pentreath was welcome, I must say; the size and design of his house, though, met with amazement and even outrage. It seemed intolerable that a house should be composed of a single room but yet league upon league of hallways. 'That's all very well for the Moors,' people said, 'but no Christian ever built such a house.' Our rector, Mr. Allaby, a man of curious reading, dug up the story of a king punished by the Deity for having built a labyrinth, and he read it from the pulpit.

  The Monday following, Ibn-Hakam paid a visit to the rectory; the details of their brief interview were not made public at the time, but no sermon afterward ever alluded to the act of arrogance, and the Moor was able to hire his brickmasons. Years later, when Ibn-Hakam was murdered, Allaby gave a statement to the authorities as to the substance of their conversation.

  "The words, he said, that Ibn-Hakam had stood in his study—not sat, mind you, but stood —and spoken to him were these, or words very similar: 'There is no longer any man who can contemn what I do. The sins that bring dishonor to my name are so terrible that even should I repeat the Ultimate Name of God for century upon century I would not succeed in mitigating even one of the torments that shall be mine; the sins that bring dishonor to my name are so terrible that even should I kill you with these very hands, that act would not increase the torments to which infinite Justice has destined me. There is no land ignorant of my name; I am Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, and I have ruled the tribes of the desert with an iron scepter. For many years with the aid of my cousin Sa'id I plundered those tribes, but God hearkened to their cries and suffered them to rise against me. My men were crushed and put to the knife. I managed to flee with the treasure I had hoarded up through my years of pillaging. Sa'id led me to the sepulcher of a saint, which lay at the foot of a stone mountain. I ordered my slave man to stand watch over the face of the desert; Sa'id and I, exhausted, lay down to sleep. That night I dreamt that I was imprisoned within a nest of vipers. I awoke in horror; beside me, in the morning light, Sa'id lay sleeping; the brush of a spider web against my skin had caused me to dream that dream. It pained me that Sa'id, who was a coward, should sleep so soundly. I reflected that the treasure was not infinite, and that he might claim a part of it. In my waistband was my dagger with its silver handle; I unsheathed it and drew it across his throat. As he died he stammered out a few words that I could not understand. I looked at him; he was dead, but I feared that he might yet stand, so I ordered my slave to crush his face with a stone. After that, we wandered under the heavens until one day we glimpsed a sea, with tall ships furrowing its waves. The thought came to me that a dead man cannot travel across the water, so I resolved to seek out other lands. The first night that we were upon the ocean I dreamt that I was murdering Sa'id.

  Everything happened again, just as it had before, but this time I understood his words. He said As you slay me now, so shall I slay you, no matter where you flee. I have sworn to foil that threat; I shall hide myself in the center of a labyrinth, so that his shade may lose its way.'

  "That said, Ibn-Hakam took his leave. Allaby tried to think that the Moor was mad and that that absurd labyrinth of his was a symbol, a clear testament to his madness. Then he reflected that the notion of madness squared with the extravagant house and the extravagant tale, but not with the lively impression that the man Ibn-Hakam himself gave. Perhaps such t
ales were indigenous to the sandy wastes of Egypt, perhaps such oddities like the dragons in Pliny, were attributable less to an individual person than to a whole culture.... In London, Allaby pored through back issues of the Times; he found that such a rebellion had in fact occurred, as had the subsequent defeat of al-Bokhari and his vizier, a man with a reputation as a coward.

  "The moment the brickmasons were done, Ibn-Hakam set up house-keeping in the center of his labyrinth.

  He was never seen again by the townspeople; sometimes Allaby feared that Sa'id had already gotten to him and killed him. At night, the wind would bring us the sound of the lion's roaring, and the sheep in the pen would huddle together in ancestral fear.

  "Ships from Eastern ports would often anchor in our little bay here, bound for Cardiff or Bristol. The slave would come down from the labyrinth (which at that time, I recall, was not pink but bright crimson) and exchange African words with the crews; he seemed to be looking out for the vizier's ghost among the men. Everyone knew that these ships carried contraband, and if they were carrying outlawed ivories or liquors, why not the ghosts of dead men?