Collected Fictions

by Borges, Jorge Luis

  * Easterners instead of Uruguayans: Before Uruguay became a country in 1828, it was a Spanish colony which, because it lay east of the Uruguay River, was called the Banda Oriental ("eastern shore"). (The Uruguay meets the Paranáto create the huge estuary system called the Río de la Plata, or River Plate; Montevideo is on the eastern bank of this river, Buenos Aires on the west.) La Banda Oriental is an old-fashioned name for the country, then, and orientales("Easterners") is the equally old-fashioned name for those who live or were born there. Only the truly "elderly" have a right to use this word.

  * Plaza del Once: Pronounced óhn-say, not wunce. This is generally called Plaza Once, but the homonymy of the English and Spanish words make it advisable, the translator thinks, to modify the name slightly in order to alert the English reader to the Spanish ("eleven"), rather than English ("onetime" or "past"), sense of the word. Plaza Once is one of Buenos Aires' oldest squares, "associated in Borges's memory with horse-drawn carts" (Fishburn and Hughes), though later simply a modern square.

  * Barracas: Once a district virtually in the country, inhabited by the city's elite, now a "working-class district" in southern Buenos Aires, near the Plaza Constitución (Fishburn and Hughes).

  * Sra. Figueroa's car and driver. Perhaps the Clara Glencairn de Figueroa of the next story in this volume, "The Duel"; certainly the social sphere in which these two Sras. Figueroa move is the same.

  * Benzoin: Probably used, much as we use aromatic preparations today, to clear the nasal passages and give a certain air of health to the elderly. An aromatic preparation called alcoholado(alcohol and bay leaves, basically) is much used in Latin America as a kind of cureall for headaches and various aches and pains and for "refreshing" the head and skin; one presumes this "benzoin" was used similarly.

  * One of Rosas' posses: The Mazorca ("corncob," so called [or so folk etymology has it] for the Federalist party's agrarian ties), a private secret police force-c«m-army employed by Rosas to intimidate and terrorize the Unitarians after his rise to Federalist power. The Mazorcas beat and murdered many people, and so the elderly lady is right to have been shocked and frightened. (See also the story "Pedro Salvadores"in In Praise of Darkness.)

  The Duel

  * Clara Glencairn de Figueroa: Clara's name is given here as Christian name + patronymic or family (father's) name + de indicating "belonging to" or, less patriarchally, "married to" + the husband's last name. This indication of a character by full name, including married name, underscores Clara's equivocal position in life and in the world of art that she aspires to: a woman of some (limited) talent in her own right, with a "career" or at least a calling in which she is entitled to personal respect, versus the "wife of the ambassador." This tension is noted a couple of pages later, when "Mrs." Figueroa, having won a prize, now wants to return to Cartagena "in her own right," not as the ambassador's wife that she had been when she had lived there before. It is hard for the English reader, with our different system of naming, to perceive the subtleties of JLB's use of the conventions of naming in Hispanic cultures.

  * Juan Crisóstomo Lafinur: Lafinur (1797-1824), a great-uncle of Borges', was the holder of the chair of philosophy "at the newly-formed Colegio de la Unión del Sud" (Fishburnand Hughes) and thus a "personage."

  * Colonel Pascual Pringles: Pringles (1795-1831) was a distinguished Unitarian military leader from the province of San Luis. "[Rather than surrender his sword to the enemy" in defeat, Fishburn and Hughes tell us, "he broke it and threw himself into the river."

  * The solid works of certain nineteenth-century Genoese bricklayers: This snide comment refers to the Italian immigrant laborers and construction foremen who built those "old houses of Buenos Aires" that Marta paints; she is influenced, that is, not by an Italian school of painting (which would be acceptable, as "European" was good; see the first line of the next paragraph in the text) but by Italian immigrant (and therefore, in Buenos Aires society hierarchy, "undesirable" or "inferior") artisans. Note in "The Elderly Lady" the narrator's mild bigotry in the statement that one of the daughters married a "Sr. Molinari, who though of Italian surname was a professor of Latin and a very well-educated man." The social lines between the old criollo families (descendants of European, especially Spanish, colonists), the newer immigrant families, those with black or Indian blood, etc. were clear, especially in the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth.

  * Mrs. Figueroa: Here, clear in the Spanish, though difficult to convey in the English, the judge slights Clara Glencairn de Figueroa by referring to her by her married name (Figueroa's wife) rather than by her "personal" and "professional" name, Clara Glencairn. She is looked down on, as the story subtly shows, for her social standing, which is in contrast to the vie bohème that she would like to think she had lived and the reputation as a painter she would like to think she had earned for herself. Note "Clara Glencairn" throughout the paragraph on p. 383, for the more "professional" or "personally respectful" mode of naming, and note the way the story swings between the two modes as one or another of Clara's "statuses" is being emphasized.

  The Other Duel

  * Adrogué:In the early years of the century, a town south of Buenos Aires (now simply a suburb or enclave of the city) where Borges and his family often spent vacations; a place of great nostalgia for Borges.

  * Battle of Manantiales: In Uruguay. For many years (ca. i837-ca. 1886) Uruguay was torn by rivalry and armed conflicts between the Blancos (the conservative White party) led by, among others, Manuel Oribe and Timoteo Aparicio (see below), and the Colorados (the more liberal Red party) led by Venancio Flores and Lorenzo Baiile. Manantiales (1871) marked the defeat of Aparicio's Blancos by the Colorado sunder Batlle. Once Cardoso and Silveira are seen joining up with Aparicio's forces, this understated sentence tells the Argentine or Uruguayan reader (or any other Latin American reader familiar, through little more than high school history classes, with the history of the Southern Cone—these dates and places are the very stuff of Latin American history) that their end was fated to be bloody.

  * Cerro Largo: A frontier area in northeast Uruguay, near the Brazilian border. Aparicio had to recruit from all over the countryside, as he was faced by the Triple Alliance of Brazil, Argentina, and the Uruguayan Colorado government.

  * Thirty-three: This in homage to the tiny band of thirty-three soldiers who in 1825 crossed the Uruguay River along with Juan Antonio Lavalleja and Manuel Oribein order to galvanize the Uruguayans to rise up against the Brazilians who at that time governed them. The flag of the Uruguayan rebellion against Brazil carried the motto Libertad o Muerte("Liberty or Death"). Thus Silveira asserts himself as a tough, independent, and yet "patriotic"gaucho.

  * Aparicio's revolution: See the note to p. 386, above.

  * Montoneros:The montoneros were gaucho (Blanco, or White, party) forces, something like quasi-independent armies, organized under local leaders to fight the Unitarians (the Colorados, or Red party) during the civil wars that followed the wars of independence.

  * White badges: To identify them with the Blancos, as opposed to the Colorados (Red party). The armies would have been somewhat ragtag groups, so these badges (or sometimes hatbands) would have been virtually the only way to distinguish ally from enemy in the pitched battles of the civil war.

  * Cut anybody's throat: Here and in many other places in Borges, the slashing of opponents' throats is presented in the most matter-of-fact way. It was a custom of armies on the move not to take prisoners; what would they do with them? So as a matter of course, and following the logic of this type of warfare (however "barbaric" it may seem to us today), losers of battles were summarily executed in this way.

  Guayaquil

  * Guayaquil: The name of this city in Ecuador would evoke for the Latin American reader one of the most momentous turns in the wars of independence, since it was here that Generals Simón Bolívar and José San Martín met to decide on a strategy for the final expulsion of the Spaniards from Peru. After this meeting
, San Martin left his armies under the command of Bolivar, who went on to defeat the Spaniards, but there is no record of what occurred at the meeting or of the reasons that led San Martin to retire from the command of his own army and leave the glory NOTES TO THE FICTIONS of liberation to Bolivar. A long historical controversy has been waged over the possible reasons, which the story briefly recounts. Clearly, the "contest of wills" thought by some to have occurred between the two generals is reflected in the contest of wills between the two modern historians. For a fuller (and very comprehensible) summary of this event and the historiographie controversy surrounding it, see Daniel Balderston, Out of Context: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges(Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 115-131. In this chapter Balderston also discusses Borges' equating of history with fiction, providing us another important way of reading the story. See also, for a brief historical summary, The Penguin History of Latin America (Edwin Williams, New York/ London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 227-228 and passim in that chapter.

  * Gen. José de San Martín: As the note just above indicates, San Martin (1778-1850), an Argentine, was one of the two most important generals of the wars of independence, the other being Simón Bolivar, a Venezuelan. This story is subtly written from the Argentine point of view, because it deals with the reasons—psychological, perhaps, or perhaps military, or, indeed, perhaps other—for which San Martin, after winning extraordinary battles in his own country and in Peru (where he came to be called Protector of Peru), turned his entire army over to Bolivar so that Bolivar could go on to win the independence of the continent from Spain. The enigma of San Martin is one that absorbed the Argentine historical mind for decades, and perhaps still does, so any letters that might have even the slightest, or the most self-serving (if Argentines will forgive me that possible slur on the general's psyche), explanation for his actions would be of supreme importance to Argentine history. This story, then, is filled with those pulls and tugs between one sort of (or nationality of) history and another, one sort of "rationale" and another. Fishburn and Hughes note that the Masonic lodge mentioned in the story (p- 395) is the Logia Lautaro, of which San Martin was indeed a member. Masonic lodges were famed as centers of progressive, not to say revolutionary, thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Modern Freemasonry was founded in the seventeenth century.

  * Calle Chile: It is Fishburn and Hughes's contention that the physical, geographical location of this street is not really important here, though they give that location as "in the southern part of Buenos Aires,... some ten blocks from Plaza Constitución"; their interesting view of this street's mention here is, rather, that it is a symbolic name, linking JLB (that library he had inhabited [see"Juan Muraña"in this volume], the house, and perhaps some of the objets de la gloire that JLB had inherited from his grandfather and other members of his family) with the narrator of "Guayaquil": "The narrator lives in a street called Chile, Borges lived in a street called Maipú and both names are associated in the Argentine mind, since San Martin's great victory in Chile was the battle of Maipú."

  * Baltasar Espinosa: The Spanish reader will sooner or later associate the young man's surname, Espinosa ("thorny") with the Christian "crown of thorns" evoked at the end of this story.

  * Ramos Mejia: "A part of Buenos Aires in which the rich had weekend houses containing an English colony; now an industrial suburb" (Fishburn and Hughes).

  * A couple of chapters of [Don Segundo Sombra]: The next sentence is perhaps not altogether opaque, but both its sense and its humor are clearer if the reader knows the novel in question. Don Segundo Sombra deals with the life ofa gaucho (considerably romanticized by nostalgia) and the customs of life on the pampas. Therefore, Gutre père sees nothing in it for him; indeed, the gauchesco novel was an urban form, a manifestation perhaps of what Marie Antoinette's critics were wont to call nostalgie de la boue, or so "The Gospel According to Mark" would seem to imply. JLB himself makes reference to this "urban nostalgia" in the story titled "The Duel," above, on p. 384.

  Brodie's Report

  * Qzr: The English reader will not, probably, be able to perceive the fine irony here. Brodie has said that these barbarous people do not have vowels, so he will call them Yahoos. He then gives a few words in their language. Here, the word for "citadel," qzr, is the Spanish word for citadel, alcázar, with the vowels removed. But the Spanish derives from the Arabic, which does not have vowels; the vowels are sometimes marked, sometimes not; thus, qzr is a transliteration of a word that any Spanish speaker would recognize as being fully and legitimately Arabic. Thus the Yahoos are, or might be, Arabs. Here Borges'"traveler's satire" is acute: one can find "barbarism" even in the most refined and advanced of societies.

  Notes to The Book of Sand

  The Other

  p. 413: Another Rosas in 1946, much like our kinsman in the first one: The second Rosas, of course, is Juan Domingo Perón, the Fascist military leader who in 1945 was asked to resign all his commissions and retire, and who did so, only (Napoleon-like) to return eight days later to address huge crowds of people and later, in 1946, to be elected president. All this information is from Rodriguez Monegal, who then adds: "he was Argentina's first king" (390-391). As for "our kinsman," the details are a bit blurry, but Borges seems to have been related, on his father's side, to Rosas. Fishburn and Hughes talk about a "relative of Borges's great-great-grandfather."Borges hated and despised both these men.

  p. 416: "Whitman is incapable of falsehood": Daniel Balderston believes that he has identified this poem: "When I heard at the close of the day," in Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America), 1982, pp. 276-277. The essay in which Balderston identifies the poem referred to by the older"Borges"is "The 'Fecal Dialectic': Homosexual Panic and the Origin of Writing in Borges,"in ¿Entiendes?: Queer Readings, Hispanic Writing, ed. Emilie L. Bergmann and Paul Julian Smith (Durham/London: Duke University Press), 1995, pp. 29-45. While these notes are not intended to add "scholarly" information to the text of Borges, this remarkable identification, and the reading that accompanies it, in the translator's view warrants mention. The old man/young man motif, the public/private motif, the issue of "sex in the oeuvre o fBorges,"readings of a number of important stories, and, to a degree, the issue of violence in the fictions—all of these questions are impacted by Balderston's contentions in this essay.

  The Congress

  p. 423: The newspaper Ultima Hora:The title can be translated in two ways, The Eleventh Hour or The Latest News, depending on whether one wishes to give it an apocalyptic reading or a quotidian one.

  p. 424: Confitería del Gas: This pastry shop (see also the note to p. 446,"Café Águila,"in the story "The Night of the Gifts" in this volume, for a further explanation of this sort of establishment) is located on Alsina between Bolivar and Defensa, about two blocks from the Casa de Gobierno (or as most Porteños know it, the Casa Rosada, or Pink House), at the River Plate end of the avenue that runs from the Casa de Gobiernoto the Plaza del Congreso. I have not been able to learn where this cafe's curious name came from, perhaps a gas-company office in the neighborhood; the problem with translating it into something such as Café Gasis, as the English-language reader will immediately perceive, the hint of indigestion that it (the translation and the name) leaves. Nor is it a truck stop. Clearly, in locating the confitería in this neighborhood, JLB is attempting to associate one "congress" with that of the institutionalized government in whose neighborhood it takes up residence. Porteños know this particular confitería as more of a pastry shop than a café perse;we are told that the meringues with crème de Chantilly are the house specialty.

  p. 426: Rancher from the eastern province: Before Uruguay became a country, in 1828, it was a Spanish colony which, because it lay east of the Uruguay River, was called the Banda Oriental, or "eastern shore." (The Uruguay meets the Paranáto create the huge estuary system called the Río de la Plata, or River Plate; Montevideo is
on the eastern bank of this river, Buenos Aires on the west.)"La Banda Oriental" is an old-fashioned name for the country, then, and "orientales," or "Easterners," is the equally old-fashioned name for those who live or were born there. Here, the narrator refers to "the eastern province" because for a very long time the shifting status of Uruguay— colony and protectorate of Spain, annex of Brazil and/or Argentina, etc.—led the nationalistic elements in Buenos Aires to consider it an "eastern province" of Argentina. Uruguay was founded on cattle raising.

  p. 426: Artigas: José Gervasio Artigas (1764-1850), Uruguayan, a political and military leader who opposed first the Spaniards and then the Argentines who wished to keep the Banda Oriental (the east bank of the River Plate) in fealty to one or another of those powers. When Argentina, instead of supporting the Banda Oriental's independence from Spain, asserted Spain's authority over the area (in part to keep the Brazilians/ Portuguese out), Artigas led a huge exodus of citizens out of Montevideo and "into the wilderness." Recognized as a hero in Uruguay, he might not have been so regarded by a cosmopolite such as Glencoe, especially because of his legendary (but perhaps exaggerated) bloodthirstiness and his association with "the provinces" rather than "the city."