Collected Fictions

by Jorge Luis Borges

Gentle socks pamper them by day, and shoes cobbled of leather fortify them, but my toes hardly notice.

  All they're interested in is turning out toenails—semitransparent, flexible sheets of a hornlike material, as defense against— whom? Brutish, distrustful as only they can be, my toes labor ceaselessly at manufacturing that frail armament. They turn their backs on the universe and its ecstasies in order to spin out, endlessly, those ten pointless projectile heads, which are cut away time and again by the sudden snips of a Solingen. By the ninetieth twilit day of their prenatal confinement, my toes had cranked up that extraordinary factory. And when I am tucked away in Recoleta,*in an ash-colored house bedecked with dry flowers and amulets, they will still be at their stubborn work, until corruption at last slows them—them and the beard upon my cheeks.

  Covered Mirrors

  Islam tells us that on the unappealable Day of Judgment, all who have perpetrated images of living things will reawaken with their works, and will be ordered to blow life into them, and they will fail, and they and their works will be cast into the fires of punishment. As a child, I knew that horror of the spectral duplication or multiplication of reality, but mine would come as I stood before large mirrors. As soon as it began to grow dark outside, the constant, infallible functioning of mirrors, the way they followed my every movement, their cosmic pantomime, would seem eerie to me. One of my insistent pleas to God and my guardian angel was that I not dream of mirrors; I recall clearly that I would keep one eye on them uneasily. I feared sometimes that they would begin to veer off from reality; other times, that I would see my face in them disfigured by strange misfortunes. I have learned that this horror is monstrously abroad in the world again. The story is quite simple, and terribly unpleasant.

  In 1927,1 met a grave young woman, first by telephone (because Julia began as a voice without a name or face) and then on a corner at nightfall. Her eyes were alarmingly large, her hair jet black and straight, her figure severe. She was the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Federalists, as I was the grandson and great-grandson of Unitarians,* but that ancient discord between our lineages was, for us, a bond, a fuller possession of our homeland. She lived with her family in a big run-down high-ceiling'd house, in the resentment and savorlessness of genteel poverty. In the afternoons— only very rarely at night—we would go out walking through her neighborhood, which was Balvanera.* We would stroll along beside the high blank wall of the railway yard; once we walked down Sarmiento all the way to the cleared grounds of the Parque Centenario.* Between us there was neither love itself nor the fiction of love; I sensed in her an intensity that was utterly unlike the intensity of eroticism, and I feared it. In order to forge an intimacy with women, one often tells them about true or apocryphal things that happened in one's youth; I must have told her at some point about my horror of mirrors, and so in 1928 I must have planted the hallucination that was to flower in 1931. Now I have just learned that she has gone insane, and that in her room all the mirrors are covered, because she sees my reflection in them—usurping her own—and she trembles and cannot speak, and says that I am magically following her, watching her, stalking her.

  What dreadful bondage, the bondage of my face—or one of my former faces. Its odious fate makes me odious as well, but I don't care anymore.

  Argumentum Ornithologicum

  I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision lasts a second, or perhaps less; I am not sure how many birds I saw. Was the number of birds definite or indefinite? The problem involves the existence of God. If God exists, the number is definite, because God knows how many birds I saw. If God does not exist, the number is indefinite, because no one can have counted. In this case I saw fewer than ten birds (let us say) and more than one, but did not see nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, or two birds. I saw a number between ten and one, which was not nine, eight, seven, six, five, etc. That integer—not-nine, not-eight, not-seven, not-six, not-five, etc.—is inconceivable. Ergo, God exists.

  The Captive

  In Junin or Tapalquén, they tell the story. A young boy disappeared in an Indian raid; people said the Indians had kidnapped him. His parents searched for him without success. Many years went by, and a soldier coming into town from the interior told them about an Indian with sky blue eyes who might well be their son. They finally managed to find this Indian (the story has lost many of its details, and I don't want to invent what I don't know) and thought they recognized him. Shaped by the wilderness and his barbaric life, the man could no longer understand the words of his mother tongue, but he allowed himself to be led—indifferently, docilely—back to the house. There, he stopped (perhaps because the others stopped). He looked at the door, almost uncomprehendingly. Then suddenly he bowed his head, gave an odd cry, rushed down the entryway and through the two long patios, and ran into the kitchen. He thrust his arm unhesitatingly up into the blackened chimney of the stove and took out the little horn-handled knife he had hidden there when he was a boy. His eyes gleamed with happiness and his parents wept, because they had found their son.

  That memory may have been followed by others, but the Indian could not live a life that was hemmed about by walls, and one day he went off in search of his wilderness. I would like to know what he felt in that moment of vertigo when past and present intermingled; I would like to know whether the lost son was reborn and died in that ecstatic moment, and whether he ever managed to recognize, even as little as a baby or a dog might, his parents and the house.

  The Mountebank

  One day in July, 1952, the man dressed in mourning weeds appeared in that little village on the Chaco River.* He was a tall, thin man with vaguely Indian features and the inexpressive face of a half-wit or a mask. The towns-folk treated him with some deference, not because of who he was but because of the personage he was portraying or had by now become. He chose a house near the river; with the help of some neighbor women he laid a board across two sawhorses, and on it he set a pasteboard coffin with a blond-haired mannequin inside. In addition, they lighted four candles in tall candle holders and put flowers all around. The townsfolk soon began to gather. Old ladies bereft of hope, dumbstruck wide-eyed boys, peons who respectfully took off their pith hats—they filed past the coffin and said: My condolences, General. The man in mourning sat sorrowfully at the head of the coffin, his hands crossed over his belly like a pregnant woman. He would extend his right hand to shake the hand extended to him and answer with courage and resignation: It was fate. Everything humanly possible was done. A tin collection box received the two-peso price of admission, and many could not content themselves with a single visit.

  What kind of man, I ask myself, thought up and then acted out that funereal farce—a fanatic? a grief-stricken mourner? a madman? a cynical impostor? Did he, in acting out his mournful role as the macabre widower, believe himself to be Perón? It is an incredible story, but it actually happened—and perhaps not once but many times, with different actors and local variants. In it, one can see the perfect symbol of an unreal time, and it is like the reflection of a dream or like that play within a play in Hamlet.

  The man in mourning was not Perón and the blond-haired mannequin was not the woman Eva Duarte, but then Perón was not Perón, either, nor was Eva, Eva—they were unknown or anonymous persons (whose secret name and true face we shall never know) who acted out, for the credulous love of the working class, a crass and ignoble mythology.

  Delia Elena San Marco

  We said goodbye on one of the corners of the Plaza del Once.*

  From the sidewalk on the other side of the street I turned and looked back; you had turned, and you waved goodbye.

  A river of vehicles and people ran between us; it was five o'clock on no particular afternoon. How was I to know that that river was the sad Acheron, which no one may cross twice?

  Then we lost sight of each other, and a year later you were dead.

  And now I search out that memory and gaze at it and think that it was false, that under the t
rivial farewell there lay an infinite separation.

  Last night I did not go out after dinner. To try to understand these things, I reread the last lesson that Plato put in his teacher's mouth. I read that the soul can flee when the flesh dies.

  And now I am not sure whether the truth lies in the ominous later interpretation or in the innocent farewell.

  Because if the soul doesn't die, we are right to lay no stress on our goodbyes.

  To say goodbye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we'll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.

  One day we will pick up this uncertain conversation again, Delia—on the bank of what river?—and we will ask ourselves whether we were once, in a city that vanished into the plains, Borges and Delia.

  A Dialog Between Dead Men

  The man arrived from the south of England early one winter morning in 1877. As he was a ruddy, athletic, overweight man, it was inevitable that almost everyone should think that he was English, and indeed he looked remarkably like the archetypical John Bull. He wore a bowler hat and a curious wool cape with an opening in the center. A group of men, women, and babes were waiting for him anxiously; many of them had a red line scored across their throats, others were headless and walked with hesitant, fearful steps, as though groping through the dark. Little by little, they encircled the stranger, and from the back of the crowd someone shouted out a curse, but an ancient terror stopped them, and they dared go no further. From out of their midst stepped a sallow-skinned soldier with eyes like glowing coals; his long tangled hair and lugubrious beard seemed to consume his face; ten or twelve mortal wounds furrowed his body, like the stripes on a tiger's skin. When the newcomer saw him, he paled, but then he stepped forward and put out his hand.

  "How grievous it is to see such a distinguished soldier brought low by the instruments of perfidy!" he said, grandiloquently. "And yet what deep satisfaction to have ordered that the torturers and assassins atone for their crimes on the scaffold in the Plazade la Victoria!"

  "If it's Santos Pérez and the Reinafé brothers you're referring to, be assured that I have already thanked them,"' the bloody man said with slow solemnity.

  The other man looked at him as though smelling a gibe or a threat, but Quiroga* went on:

  "You never understood me, Rosas.* But how could you understand me, if our lives were so utterly different? Your fate was to govern in a city that looks out toward Europe and that one day will be one of the most famous cities in the world; mine was to wage war across the solitudes of the Americas, in an impoverished land inhabited by impoverished gauchos. My empire was one of spears and shouts and sandy wastelands and virtually secret victories in godforsaken places. What sort of claim to fame is that?

  I live in people's memory—and will go on living there for many years—because I was murdered in a stagecoach in a place called Barranca Yaco by a gang of men with swords and horses. I owe to you that gift of a valiant death, which I cannot say I was grateful for at the time but which subsequent generations have been loath to forget. You are surely familiar with certain primitive lithographs and that interesting literary work penned by a worthy from San Juan?"

  Rosas, who had recovered his composure, looked at the other man contemptuously.

  "You are a romantic," he said with a sneer." The flattery of posterity is worth very little more than the flattery of one's contemporaries, which is not worth anything, and can be bought with a pocketful of loose change."'

  "I know how you think," replied Quiroga. " In 1852, fate, which is generous, or which wanted to plumb you to the very depths, offered you a man's death, in battle. You showed yourself unworthy of that gift, because fighting, bloodshed, frightened you."

  "Frightened me?" Rosas repeated. "Me, who've tamed horses in the South and then tamed an entire country?"

  For the first time, Quiroga smiled.

  "I know," he slowly said, "from the impartial testimony of your peons and seconds-in-command, that you did more than one pretty turn on horseback, but back in those days, across the Americas—and on horseback, too—other pretty turns were done in places named Chacabuco and Junin and Palma Redondo and Caseros."

  Rosas listened expressionlessly, and then replied.

  '"I had no need to be brave. One of those pretty turns of mine, as you put it, was to manage to convince braver men than I to fight and die for me. Santos Pérez, for example, who was more than a match for you.

  Bravery is a matter of bearing up; some men bear up better than others, but sooner or later, every man caves in."

  "That may be," Quiroga said, "but I have lived and I have died, and to this day I don't know what fear is.

  And now I am going to the place where I will be given a new face and a new destiny, because history is tired of violent men. I don't know who the next man may be, what will be done with me, but I know I won't be afraid."

  "I'm content to be who I am," said Rosas, "and I have no wish to be anybody else."

  "Stones want to go on being stones, too, forever and ever," Quiroga replied. "And for centuries they are stones—until they crumble into dust. When I first entered into death, I thought the way you do, but I've learned many things here since. If you notice, we're both already changing."

  But Rosas paid him no attention; he merely went on, as though thinking out loud:

  "Maybe I'm not cut out to be dead, but this place and this conversation seem like a dream to me, and not a dream that /am dreaming, either. More like a dream dreamed by somebody else, somebody that's not born yet."

  Then their conversation ended, because just then Someone called them.

  The Plot

  To make his horror perfect, Caesar, hemmed about at the foot of a statue by his friends' impatient knives, discovers among the faces and the blades the face of Marcus Junius Brutus, his ward, perhaps his very son—and so Caesar stops defending himself, and cries out Et tu, Brute? Shakespeare and Quevedo record that pathetic cry.

  Fate is partial to repetitions, variations, symmetries. Nineteen centuries later, in the southern part of the province of Buenos Aires, a gaucho is set upon by other gauchos, and as he falls he recognizes a godson of his, and says to him in gentle remonstrance and slow surprise (these words must be heard, not read): Pero, ¡che! Hedies, but he does not know that he has died so that a scene can be played out again.

  A Problem

  Let us imagine that a piece of paper with a text in Arabic on it is discovered in Toledo, and that paleographers declare the text to have been written by that same Cide Hamete Benengeli from whom Cervantes derived Don Quixote. In it, we read that the hero (who, as everyone knows, wandered the roads of Spain armed with a lance and sword, challenging anyone for any reason) discovers, after one of his many combats, that he has killed a man. At that point the fragment breaks off; the problem is to guess, or hypothesize, how don Quixote reacts.

  So far as I can see, there are three possibilities. The first is a negative one: Nothing in particular happens, because in the hallucinatory world of don Quixote, death is no more uncommon than magic, and there is no reason that killing a mere man should disturb one who does battle, or thinks he does battle, with fabled beasts and sorcerers. The second is pathetic: Don Quixote never truly managed to forget that he was a creation, a projection, of Alonso Quijano, reader of fabulous tales. The sight of death, the realization that a delusion has led him to commit the sin of Cain, awakens him from his willful madness, perhaps forever. The third is perhaps the most plausible: Having killed the man, don Quixote cannot allow himself to think that the terrible act is the work of a delirium; the reality of the effect makes him assume a like reality of cause, and don Quixote never emerges from his madness.

  But there is yet another hypothesis, which is alien to the Spanish mind (even to the Western mind) and which requires a more ancient, more complex, and more timeworn setting. Don Quixote
—who is no longer don Quixote but a king of the cycles of Hindustan—senses, as he stands before the body of his enemy, that killing and engendering are acts of God or of magic, which everyone knows transcend the human condition. He knows that death is illusory, as are the bloody sword that lies heavy in his hand, he himself and his entire past life, and the vast gods and the universe.

  The Yellow Rose

  It was neither that afternoon nor the next that Giambattista Marino died— that illustrious man proclaimed by the unanimous mouths of Fame (to use an image that was dear to him) as the new Homer or the new Dante—and yet the motionless and silent act that took place that afternoon was, in fact, the last thing that happened in his life. His brow laureled with years and glory, the man died in a vast Spanish bed with carven pillars. It costs us nothing to picture a serene balcony a few steps away, looking out toward the west, and, below, marbles and laurels and a garden whose terraced steps are mirrored in a rectangular pool. In a goblet, a woman has set a yellow rose; the man murmurs the inevitable lines of poetry that even he, to tell the truth, is a bit tired of by now:

  Porpora de'giardin, pompa de'prato, Gemmadi primavera, occhio d'aprile.. .*

  Then the revelation occurred. Marino saw the rose, as Adam had seen it in Paradise, and he realized that it lay within its own eternity, not within his words, and that we might speak about the rose, allude to it, but never truly express it, and that the tall, haughty volumes that made a golden dimness in the corner of his room were not (as his vanity had dreamed them) a mirror of the world, but just another thing added to the world's contents.