Collected Fictions

by Jorge Luis Borges

s. I am no great observer; I discovered these things gradually.

  We were introduced. I told her I was a professor at the University of the Andes, in Bogotá. I clarified that I myself was Colombian.

  "What is 'being Colombian'?"

  "I'm not sure," I replied. "It's an act of faith."

  "Like being Norwegian," she said, nodding.

  I can recall nothing further of what was said that night. The next day I came down to the dining room early. I saw through the windows that it had snowed; the moors ran on seamlessly into the morning.

  There was no one else in the dining room. Ulrikke invited me to share her table. She told me she liked to go out walking alone.

  I remembered an old quip of Schopenhauer's.

  "I do too. We can go out alone together," I said.

  We walked off away from the house through the newly fallen snow. There was not a soul abroad in the fields. I suggested we go downriver a few miles, to Thorgate. I know I was in love with Ulrikke; there was no other person on earth I'd have wanted beside me.

  Suddenly I heard the far-off howl of a wolf. I have never heard a wolf howl, but I know that it was a wolf. Ulrikke's expression did not change.

  After a while she said, as though thinking out loud:

  "The few shabby swords I saw yesterday in York Minster were more moving to me than the great ships in the museum at Oslo."

  Our two paths were briefly crossing: that evening Ulrikke was to continue her journey toward London; I, toward Edinburgh.

  "On Oxford Street," she said, "I will retrace the steps of de Quincey, who went seeking his lost Anna among the crowds of London."

  "De Quincey," I replied, "stopped looking. My search for her, on the other hand, continues, through all time."

  "Perhaps," Ulrikke said softly, "you have found her."

  I realized that an unforeseen event was not to be forbidden me, and I kissed her lips and her eyes. She pushed me away with gentle firmness, but then said:

  "I shall be yours in the inn at Thorgate. I ask you, meanwhile, not to touch me. It's best that way."

  For a celibate, middle-aged man, proffered love is a gift that one no longer hopes for; a miracle has the right to impose conditions. I recalled my salad days in Popayán and a girl from Texas, as bright and slender as Ulrikke, who had denied me her love.

  I did not make the mistake of asking her whether she loved me. I realized that I was not the first, and would not be the last. That adventure, perhaps the last for me, would be one of many for that glowing, determined disciple of Ibsen.

  We walked on, hand in hand.

  "All this is like a dream," I said, "and I never dream."

  "Like that king," Ulrikke replied, "who never dreamed until a sorcerer put him to sleep in a pigsty."

  Then she added:

  "Ssh! A bird is about to sing."

  In a moment we heard the birdsong.

  "In these lands," I said, "people think that a person who's soon to die can see the future."

  "And I'm about to die," she said.

  I looked at her, stunned.

  "Lets cut through the woods," I urged her. "We'll get to Thorgate sooner."

  "The woods are dangerous," she replied.

  We continued across the moors.

  "I wish this moment would last forever," I murmured.

  "Forever is a word mankind is forbidden to speak," Ulrikke declared emphatically, and then, to soften her words, she asked me to tell her my name again, which she hadn't heard very well.

  "Javier Otárola,"I said.

  She tried to repeat it, but couldn't. I failed, likewise, with Ulrikke.

  "I will call you Sigurd," she said with a smile.

  "And if I'm to be Sigurd," I replied, "then you shall be Brunhild."

  Her steps had slowed.

  "Do you know the saga?" I asked.

  "Of course," she said. "The tragic story that the Germans spoiled with their parvenu Nibelungen."

  I didn't want to argue, so I answered:

  "Brunhild, you are walking as though you wanted a sword to lie between us in our bed."

  We were suddenly before the inn. I was not surprised to find that it, like the one we had departed from, was called the Northern Inn.

  From the top of the staircase, Ulrikke called down to me: "Did you hear the wolf? There are no wolves in England anymore. Hurry up."

  As I climbed the stairs, I noticed that the walls were papered a deep crimson, in the style of William Morris, with intertwined birds and fruit. Ulrikke entered the room first. The dark chamber had a low, peaked ceiling. The expected bed was duplicated in a vague glass, and its burnished mahogany reminded me of the mirror of the Scriptures. Ulrikke had already undressed. She called me by my true name, Javier. I sensed that the snow was coming down harder. Now there was no more furniture, no more mirrors. There was no sword between us. Like sand, time sifted away. Ancient in the dimness flowed love, and for the first and last time, I possessed the image of Ulrikke.

  The Congress

  Ils s'acheminèrent vers un château immense, au frontispice duquel on lisait: "Je n'appartiens à personne et j'appartiens à tout le monde. Vous y étiez avant que d'y entrer, et vous y serez encore quand vous en sortirez."Diderot: Jacques Le Fataliste et son Maître (1769)

  My name is Alexander Ferri. There are martial echoes in the name, but neither the trumpets of glory nor the great shadow of the Macedonian (the phrase is borrowed from the author of Los mármoles, whose friendship I am honored to claim) accord very well with the gray, modest man who weaves these lines on the top floor of a hotel on Calle Santiago del Estero in a Southside that's no longer the Southside it once was. Any day now will mark the anniversary of my birth more than seventy years ago; I am still giving English lessons to very small classes of students. Indecisiveness or oversight, or perhaps other reasons, led to my never marrying, and now I am alone. I do not mind solitude; after all, it is hard enough to live with oneself and one's own peculiarities. I can tell that I am growing old; one unequivocal sign is the fact that I find novelty neither interesting nor surprising, perhaps because I see nothing essentially new in it—it's little more than timid variations on what's already been. When I was young, I was drawn to sunsets, slums, and misfortune; now it is to mornings in the heart of the city and tranquility. I no longer play at being Hamlet. I have joined the Conservative Party and a chess club, which I attend as a spectator—sometimes an absentminded one. The curious reader may exhume, from some obscure shelf in the National Library on Calle México, a copy of my book A Brief Examination of the Analytical Language of John Wilkins, a work which ought to be republished if only to correct or mitigate its many errors. The new director of the library, I am told, is a literary gentleman who has devoted himself to the study of antique languages, as though the languages of today were not sufficiently primitive, and to the demagogical glorification of an imaginary Buenos Aires of knife fighters. I have never wished to meet him. I arrived in this city in 1899, and fate has brought me face to face with a knife fighter, or an individual with a reputation as one, exactly once. Later, if the occasion presents itself, I will relate that incident.

  I have said that I am alone; a few days ago, a fellow resident here in the hotel, having heard me talk about Fermín Eguren, told me that he had recently died, in Punta del Este.

  I find my sadness over the death of that man (who most emphatically was never my friend) to be curiously stubborn. I know that I am alone; I am the world's only custodian of the memory of that geste that was the Congress, a memory I shall never share again. I am now its only delegate. It is true that all mankind are delegates, that there is not a soul on the planet who is not a delegate, yet I am a member of the Congress in another way— I know I am; that is what makes me different from all my innumerable colleagues, present and future. It is true that on February 7,1904, we swore by all that's sacred—is there anything on earth that is sacred, or anything that's not?—that we would never reveal the story of the Congress, but it
is no less true that the fact that I am now a perjurer is also part of the Congress. That statement is unclear, but it may serve to pique my eventual readers' curiosity.

  At any rate, the task I have set myself is not an easy one. I have never attempted to produce narrative prose, even in its epistolary form; to make matters worse, no doubt, the story I am about to tell is not believable. It was the pen of José Fernández Irala, the undeservedly forgotten poet of Losmármoles, that fate had destined for this enterprise, but now it is too late. I will not deliberately misrepresent the facts, but I can foresee that sloth and clumsiness will more than once lead me into error.

  The exact dates are of no importance. I would remind the reader that I came here from Santa Fe, the province of my birth, in 1899. I have never gone back; I have grown accustomed to Buenos Aires (a city I am not, however, particularly fond of) like a person grown accustomed to his own body, or an old ache. I sense, though I find little interest in the fact, that my death is near; I should, therefore, hold in check my tendency to digress, and get on with telling the story.

  Years do not change our essence, if in fact we have an essence; the impulse that led me one night to the Congress of the World was that same impulse that had initially betaken me to the city room of the newspaper Ultima Hora* For a poor young man from the provinces, being a newspaperman can be a romantic life, much as a poor young man from the big city might conceive a gaucho's life to be romantic, or the life of a peon on his little piece of land. I am not embarrassed to have wanted to be a journalist, a profession which now strikes me as trivial. I recall having heard my colleague Fernández Irala say that the journalist writes to be forgotten, while he himself wanted to write to be remembered, and to last. By then he had already sculpted (the word was in common use) some of the perfect sonnets that were to appear sometime later, with the occasional slight re-touching, in the pages of Los mármoles.

  I cannot put my finger on the first time I heard someone mention the Congress. It may have been that evening when the paymaster paid me my monthly salary and to celebrate that proof that I was now a part of Buenos Aires I invited Irala to have dinner with me. Irala said he was sorry, he couldn't that night, he couldn't miss the Congress. I immediately realized that he was not referring to that pompous, dome-capped building at the far end of an avenue on which so many Spaniards chose to live, but rather to something more secret, and more important. People talked about the Congress—some with open contempt, others with lowered voices, still others with alarm or curiosity; all, I believe, in ignorance. A few Saturdays later, Irala invited me to go with him. He had seen, he said, to all the necessary arrangements.

  It was somewhere between nine and ten at night. On the trolley, Irala told me that the preliminary meetings took place on Saturday and that don Alejandro Glencoe, perhaps inspired by my name, had already given leave for me to attend. We went into the Confiteríadel Gas.* The delegates, some fifteen or twenty I would say, were sitting around a long table; I am not certain whether there was a raised dais or whether memory has added it. I recognized the chairman immediately, though I had never seen him before. Don Alejandro was a gentleman of dignified air, well past middle age, with a wide, frank forehead, gray eyes, and a red beard flecked generously with white. I never saw him in anything but a dark frock coat; he tended to sit with his crossed hands resting on his walking stick. He was tall, and robust-looking. To his left sat a much younger man, likewise with red hair; the violent color of this latter fellow's hair suggested fire, however, while the color of Glencoe's beard was more like autumn leaves.

  To Glencoe's right sat a young man with a long face and a singularly low forehead, and quite the dandy.

  Everyone had ordered coffee; one and another had also ordered absinthe. The first thing that caught my attention was the presence of a woman, the only one among so many men. At the other end of the table there was a boy about ten years old, dressed in a sailor suit; he soon fell asleep. There were also a Protestant minister, two unequivocal Jews, and a Negro with a silk kerchief and very tight clothing in the style street corner toughs affected in those days. Before the Negro and the boy there sat cups of chocolate. I cannot recall the others, except for one Sr. Marcelodel Mazo, a man of exquisite manners and cultured conversation, whom I never saw again. I still have a blurred and unsatisfactory photograph of one of the meetings, though I shan't publish it because the clothing of the period, the hair and mustaches, would leave a comical and even seedy impression that would misrepresent the scene. All organizations tend to create their own dialects and their own rituals; the Congress, which was always slightly dreamlike to me, apparently wanted its delegates to discover gradually, and without haste, the goal that the Congress sought, and even the Christian names and patronymics of their colleagues. I soon realized that I was under an obligation not to ask questions, and so I abstained from questioning Fernández Irala, who for his own part volunteered nothing. I missed not a single Saturday, but a month or two passed before I understood. From the second meeting on, the person who sat next to me was Donald Wren, an engineer for the Southern Railway, who would later give me English lessons.

  Don Alejandro spoke very little; the others did not address him directly, but I sensed that they were speaking for his benefit and sought his approval. A wave of his slow hand sufficed to change the subject of discussion. Little by little I discovered that the red-haired man to his left bore the odd name Twirl. I recall the impression of frailty he gave—the characteristic of certain very tall men, as though their height gave them vertigo and made them stoop. His hands, I recall, often toyed with a copper compass, which from time to time he would set on the table. He died in late 1914, an infantryman in an Irish regiment.

  The man who always sat at don Alejandro's right was the beetle-browed young man, Fermín Eguren, the chairman's nephew. I am not a believer in the methods of realism, an artificial genre if ever there was one; I prefer to reveal from the very beginning, and once and for all, what I only gradually came to know. But before that, I want to remind the reader of my situation at that time: I was a poor young man from Casilda, the son of farmers; I had made my way to Buenos Aires and suddenly found myself, or so I felt, at the very center of that great city—perhaps, who can say, at the center of the world. A half century has passed, yet I still feel that first sense of dazzled bewilderment—which would by no means be the last. These, then, are the facts; I will relate them very briefly: Don Alejandro Glencoe, the chairman, was a rancher from the eastern province,* the owner of a country estate on the border with Brazil. His father, originally from Aberdeen, had settled in South America in the middle of the last century. He had brought with him some hundred or so books— the only books, I daresay, that don Alejandro had ever read in his life. (I mention these heterogeneous books, which I have held in my own hands, because one of them contained the seed from which my tale springs.) When the elder Glencoe died, he left a daughter and a son; the son would grow up to be our chairman. The daughter, who married a man named Eguren, was Fermin's mother. Don Alejandro ran once for the House of Deputies, but political bosses barred his way to the Uruguayan Congress. This rebuff rankled him, and he resolved to found another Congress—a Congress of enormously grander scope. He recalled having read in one of Carlyle's volcanic pages of the fate of that Anacharsis Cloots, worshiper of the goddess Reason, who stood at the head of thirty-six foreigners and spoke, as the "spokesman for the human race," before an assembly in Paris. Inspired by Cloots' example, don Alejandro conceived the idea of establishing a Congress of the World, which would represent all people of all nations. The headquarters for the organizational meetings was the Confitería del Gas; the opening ceremonies, set for four years thence, would take place at don Alejandro's ranch. He, like so many Uruguayans, was no follower of Artigas,* and he loved Buenos Aires, but he was determined that the Congress should meet in his homeland. Curiously, the original date for that first meeting would be met with almost magical exactness.

  At first we received a
not inconsiderable honorarium for the meetings we attended, but the zeal that inflamed us all caused Fernández Irala, who was as poor as I was, to renounce his, and we others all followed suit. That gesture turned out to be quite salutary, as it separated the wheat from the chaff; the number of delegates dropped, and only the faithful remained. The only salaried position was that of the secretary, Nora Erfjord, who had no other means of subsistence and whose work was overwhelming.

  Keeping tabs on an entity which embraced the entire planet was no trivial occupation. Letters flew back and forth, as did telegrams. Messages of support came in from Peru, Denmark, and Hindustan. A Bolivian gentleman pointed out that his country was totally landlocked, with no access to the sea whatsoever, and suggested that that deplorable condition should be the topic of one of our first debates.

  Twirl, a man of lucid intelligence, remarked that the Congress presented a problem of a philosophical nature. Designing a body of men and women which would represent all humanity was akin to fixing the exact number of Platonic archetypes, an enigma that has engaged the perplexity of philosophers for centuries. He suggested, therefore, that (to take but one example) don Alejandro Glencoe might represent ranchers, but also Uruguayans, as well as founding fathers and red-bearded men and men sitting in armchairs. Nora Erfjord was Norwegian. Would she represent secretaries, Norwegians, or simply all beautiful women? Was one engineer sufficient to represent all engineers, even engineers from New Zealand?

  It was at that point, I believe, that Fermín interrupted.

  "Ferrican represent wops,"* he said with a snort of laughter.

  Don Alejandro looked at him sternly.

  "Sr. Ferri," don Alejandro said serenely, "represents immigrants, whose labors are even now helping to build the nation."