Collected Fictions

by Jorge Luis Borges

  When the rains and snow have passed, when the nightingale has returned from its journey to the lands of the south, you shall recite your verses before the court and the Guild of Poets assembled. I give you one full year. Every letter and every word, you shall burnish to a fine gleam. The recompense, as you know, shall not be unworthy of my royal wont, nor of the hours you spend in sleepless inspiration."

  "My lord, my greatest recompense is the sight of your face," said the poet, who was something of a courtier as well.

  He bowed and retired, a verse or two already beginning to creep into his head.

  When the allotted period had passed, a time filled with plague and rebellion, the panegyric was sung.

  The poet declaimed his verses with slow assurance, and without a glance at his manuscript. In the course of it, the king often nodded approvingly. Everyone imitated his gesture, even those who, crowding in at the doors, could not make out a word of it.

  At last the king spoke.

  "I accept this labor. It is another victory. You have given to each word its true meaning, to each noun the epithet bestowed upon it by the first poets. In all the work there is not an image which the classics did not employ. War is 'the fair cloth wov'n of men' and blood is 'sword-drink.' The sea has its god and the clouds foretell the future. You have marshaled rhyme, alliteration, assonance, scansion, the artifices of erudite rhetoric, the wise alternation of meters, and all with greatest skillfulness. If the whole of the literature of Ireland should— omen absit—be lost, well might it all be reconstructed, without loss, from your classic ode. Thirty scribes shall transcribe it, twelve times each."

  There was a silence. Then the king went on:

  "All that is well, and yet nothing has happened. In our veins the blood has beat no faster. Our hands have not gone for our bows. No one's cheeks have paled. No one has bellowed out a battle cry, no one has stood to meet the Viking attack. In one year, poet, we shall gather to applaud another poem. As a sign of our thanks, take this mirror, which is of silver."

  "I thank you," said the poet, "and I understand and obey."

  The stars of the sky once more journeyed their bright course. Once more sang the nightingale in the Saxon forests, and the poet returned with his scroll—shorter this time than before. He did not recite it from memory; he read it, visibly unsure, omitting certain passages, as though he himself did not entirely understand them, or did not wish to profane them. The verses were strange. They were not a description of the battle, they were the battle. In the warlike chaos of the lines there stirred the God Who Is Three Yet One, the pagan noumena of Ireland, and those who would war, centuries after, at the beginning of the Elder Edda. The poem's form was no less strange. A singular noun might govern a plural verb. The prepositions were foreign to common usage. Harshness vied with sweetness. The metaphors were arbitrary, or so they seemed.

  The king exchanged a few words with the men of letters assembled about him, and he spoke in this way:

  "Of your first hymn I was able to say that it was a happy summation of all that has been written in Ireland.

  This poem surpasses all that has gone before, and obliterates it. It holds one in thrall, it thrills, it dazzles.

  It will pass over the heads of the ignorant, and their praises will not be yours, but the praises of the few, the learned—ah! An ivory chest shall hold the only copy. From the pen that has penned such a lofty work, we may expect one that is more elevated yet...."

  Then he added, smiling:

  "We are figures in a fable, and it is only right that we recall that in fables, the number three is first above all others."

  "The three gifts of the wizard, the triads, and the indubitable Trinity," was all that the poet dared allow himself to murmur.

  The king went on:

  "As a token of our thanks, take this mask. It is of gold."

  "I thank you, and I understand and obey," the poet said.

  The anniversary returned. The palace sentinels noticed that this time the poet did not bring a manuscript.

  Not without dismay did the king look upon the poet: he was greatly changed. Something, which was not simply time, had furrowed and transformed his features. His eyes seemed to stare far into the distance, or to have been rendered blind. The poet begged to be allowed to speak to the king. The slaves cleared the hall.

  "Have you not composed the ode?" asked the king.

  "I have," said the poet sadly. "Would that Christ our Lord had forbade it."

  "Can you recite it?"

  "I dare not."

  "I charge you with the courage that you need," the king declared.

  The poet spoke the poem. It was a single line.

  Unable to summon the courage to speak it again aloud, the poet and his king mouthed the poem, as though it were a secret supplication, or a blasphemy. The king was no less astounded and cowed than the poet. The two men, very pale, looked at each other.

  "In the years of my youth," said the king, "I sailed toward the setting sun. On an island there, I saw silver greyhounds that hunted golden boars to their death. On another we were feted with the fragrance of magic apples.

  On yet another I saw walls of fire. On the most remote of all, there was a vaulted river that hung from the sky, and in its waters swam fish and sailing ships. Those were marvels, but they do not compare with your poem, which somehow contains them all. What sorcery has given you this?"

  "At dawn," said this poet, "I awoke speaking words that at first I did not understand. Those words are the poem. I felt I had committed some sin, perhaps that sin which the Holy Spirit cannot pardon."

  "The sin the two of us now share," mused the king. "The sin of having known Beauty, which is a gift forbidden mankind. Now we must atone for it. I gave you a mirror and a golden mask; here is the third gift, which shall be the last."

  He laid in the poet's right hand a dagger.

  Of the poet, we know that he killed himself when he left the palace; of the king, that he is a beggar who wanders the roads of Ireland, which once was his kingdom, and that he has never spoken the poem again.

  "Undr"

  I must inform the reader that the pages I translate and publish here will be sought in vain in the Libellus (1615) of Adam of Bremen, who, as we all know, was born and died in the eleventh century. Lappenberg found the text within a manuscript in the Bodleian, at Oxford; given its wealth of circumstantial detail, he judged it to be a late interpolation, but he did publish it as a curiosity in his Anakcta Germanica(Leipzig, 1894). The opinion of a mere Argentine amateur is worth very little; readers may judge these pages as they will. My translation is not literal, but it is faithful. Thus writes Adam of Bremen:

  ... Of the several nations that border the wide desert which lies on the far shore of the Gulf, beyond the lands where the wild horse mates, that one most worthy of mention is the nation of the Urns. The imprecise or fabulous reports of merchants, the difficulty of the road, and the depredations of nomads prevented me from ever reaching its borders. I know, however, that its precarious and remote villages lie within the lowlands of the Wisla River. Unlike the Swedes, the Urns profess the true faith in Christ, unsullied by the Arianism and bloody worship of devils from which the royal houses of England and the other nations of the North draw their lineage. They are shepherds, ferrymen, sorcerers, swordsmiths, and ropemakers. The severity of their wars almost entirely prevents them from tilling their lands. The plains and the tribes that roam them have made the Urns skillful with horse and bow. In time, one inevitably comes to resemble one's enemies. Their lances are longer than ours, for theirs are made for horsemen, not for infantry.

  As one might imagine, the use of pen, inkhorn, and parchment is unknown to them. They carve their characters in stone, as our forebears carved the runes revealed to them by Odin, after having hung from the ash tree—Odin sacrificed to Odin—for nine long nights.

  To these general bits of knowledge I will add the story of my conversation with the Icelander UlfSigurdarson, a man of
grave and measured speech. We had met in Uppsala, near the temple. The wood fire had died; the cold and the dawn light were seeping in through the uneven chinks in the walls. Outside, the gray wolves that devour the flesh of pagans sacrificed to the three gods were leaving their cautious spoor upon the snow. Our talk had begun in Latin, as is the habit between members of the clergy, but soon we had passed into the language of the North, known from Ultima Thule to the markets of Asia. This is what the man told me:

  "I am of the line of skalds; the moment I learned that the poetry of the Urns is a poetry of a single word, I went in quest of them, in quest of the route that would lead me to their land. Not without weariness and labor did I reach it, one year later. It was night; I noticed that the men I met along my way regarded me curiously, and I could not fail to note that I was struck by an occasional stone. I saw the glow of a smith's forge, and I entered.

  "The smith offered me shelter for the night. His name, he said, was Orm, and his language was more or less our own. We exchanged a few words. It was from his lips that I first heard the name of the king who then ruled over them—Gunnlaug. I learned that he had fought in their last war, that he looked with suspicion upon foreigners, and that it was his custom to crucify them. In order to avoid that fate, which was more fitting for a God than for a man, I undertook to write a drapa, a laudatory composition— z sort of eulogy praising the king's victories, his fame, and his mercy. No sooner had I committed the poem to memory than two men came for me. I refused to relinquish my sword, but I allowed myself to be led away.

  "The stars were still in the sky. We traveled through a stretch of land with huts scattered here and there along the way. I had heard tales of pyramids; what I saw in the first square we came to was a stake of yellow wood. On its sharp point I could make out the black figure of a fish. Orm, who had accompanied us, told me that the fish was the Word. In the next square I saw a red stake, with a disk. Orm said once more that this was the Word. I asked him to tell me what word it was; he replied that he was but a simple artisan, and did not know.

  "In the third square, which was the last, I saw a stake painted black, bearing a design I no longer remember. On the far side of the square there was a long straight wall, whose ends I could not see. I later found that it wascircular, roofed with clay, without interior doors, and that it girded the entire city.

  The horses tied to a wooden post were compact and thick-maned.

  "The smith was not allowed to enter. There were armed men inside, all standing. Gunnlaug, the king, who was suffering under some great affliction, was lying with half-closed eyes upon a kind of dais; his pallet was of camel skins. He was a worn, yellow man, a sacred and almost forgotten object; long, time-blurred scars made a tracery across his chest. One of the soldiers made way for me. Someone had brought a harp. I knelt and softly intoned the drapa. It was adorned with the tropes, alliterations, and accents required by the genre. I am not certain that the king understood it, but he gave me a silver ring, which I still possess. Under his pillow I glimpsed the blade of a dagger. To his right there was a chessboard of a hundred or more squares and several scattered pieces.

  "The king's guards pushed me back. A man took my place, but he stood as he offered his own poem.

  He plucked at the harp's strings as though tuning them, and then very softly repeated the word that I wish I might have caught, but did not. Someone reverently said Now, meaningless.

  "I saw tears here and there. The man would raise his voice or it would grow distant; the nearly identical chords were monotonous, or, more precisely, infinite. I wished the chant could go on forever, I wished it were my life. Suddenly, it ended. I heard the sound of the harp when the singer, no doubt exhausted, cast it to the floor. We made our way in disorder from the room. I was one of the last. I saw with astonishment that the light was fading.

  "I walked a few steps. A hand upon my shoulder detained me. A voice said to me:

  " 'The king's ring was a talisman bestowed upon you, yet soon your death shall come, for you have heard the Word. I, Bjarni Thorkelsson, will save you. I am of the lineage of the skalds. In your dithyramb you called blood "sword-drink" and battle "man-battle." I remember hearing those tropes from my father's father. You and I are poets; I shall save you. Now we do not name every thing or event that fires our song; we encode it in a single word, which is the Word.'

  " 'I could not hear it,' I replied to him. 'I beg you to tell me what word it is.'”

  He hesitated for a moment, and then said:

  " 'I am sworn not to reveal it. And besides, no one can teach another anything. You must seek it on your own. We must hurry, for your life is in danger. I will hide you in my house, where they will not dare come to look for you. If the wind is with you, you shall sail tomorrow to the South.'

  "Thus began the adventure that was to last for so many winters. I shall not tell its hazards, nor shall I attempt to recall the true order of its vicissitudes. I was oarsman, slave merchant, slave, woodcutter, robber of caravans, cantor, assayer of deep water and of metals. I suffered a year's captivity in the mercury mines, which loosens the teeth. I fought with men from Sweden in the militia of Mikligarthr—Constantinople. On the banks of the Azov I was loved by a woman I shall never forget; I left her, or she left me, which is the same. I betrayed and was betrayed. More than once fate made me kill. A Greek soldier challenged me to fight him, and offered me the choice of two swords. One was a handspan longer than the other. I realized that he was trying to intimidate me, so I chose the shorter. He asked me why. I told him that the distance from my hand to his heart did not vary. On the shore of the Black Sea sits the runic epitaph I carved for my comrade Leif Arnarson. I have fought with the Blue Men of Serkland, the Saracens. In the course of time I have been many men, but that whirlwind of events was one long dream. The essential thing always was the Word. There were times when I did not believe in it.

  I would tell myself that renouncing the lovely game of combining lovely words was foolish, that there was no reason to seek the single, perhaps illusory, One. That argument failed. A missionary suggested the word God, which I rejected. One sunrise, on the banks of a river that widened into the sea, I believed that the revelation had been vouchsafed me.

  "I returned to the land of the Urns, and with difficulty found the poet's house.

  "I entered and said my name. Night had fallen. Thorkelsson, from his place upon the ground, told me to light the candle in the bronze candelabrum. His face had aged so greatly that I could not help thinking that I myself was now old. As was the custom, I asked after the health of the king.

  " 'His name is no longer Gunnlaug,' he replied. 'Now his name is other. Tell me of your travels.'

  "I did so in the best order I could, and in verbose detail, which I shall here omit. Before I came to the end, the poet interrupted me.

  " 'Did you often sing in those lands?' he asked.

  "The question took me by surprise.

  " 'At first," I said, 'I sang to earn my bread. Then, from a fear that I do not understand, I grew distant from the singing and the harp.'

  " 'Hmm.' He nodded. 'Now, go on with your story.'

  "I complied. Then there fell a long silence.

  " 'What were you given by the first woman you slept with?' he asked.

  " 'Everything,' I answered.

  " 'I, too, have been given everything, by life. Life gives all men everything, but most men do not know this. My voice is tired and my fingers weak, but listen to me....'

  "He spoke the word Uñar, which means wonder.

  "I was overwhelmed by the song of the man who lay dying, but in his song, and in his chord, I saw my own labors, the slave girl who had given me her first love, the men I had killed, the cold dawns, the northern lights over the water, the oars. I took up the harp and sang—a different word.

  " 'Hmm,' said the poet, and I had to draw close to hear him. 'You have understood me.' "

  A Weary Man's Utopia

  He called it "Utopia," a Greek wordr />
  which means "there is no such place."

  Quevedo

  No two mountain peaks are alike, but anywhere on earth the plains are one and the same. I was riding down a road across the plains. I asked myself without much curiosity whether I was in Oklahoma or Texas or the region that literary men call "the pampas." There was not a fence to left or right. As on other occasions, I slowly murmured these lines, more or less from Emilio Oribe: Riding through the ongoing, ongoing and interminable Terrifying plains, near the frontier of Brazil...

  The road was rutted and uneven. Rain began to fall. Some two or three hundred yards down the road, I saw the light of a house. It was squat and rectangular and surrounded by trees. The door was opened by a man so tall it almost frightened me. He was dressed in gray. I sensed that he was waiting for someone.

  There was no latch or lock on the door.

  We went inside, into a long room with walls of exposed wood. From the ceiling hung a lamp that gave a yellowish light. The table seemed odd, somehow. There was a water clock on the table, the first I'd ever seen, save for the occasional steel engraving in dictionaries and encyclopedias. The man motioned me to one of the chairs.

  I tried several languages, but we couldn't make ourselves understood to each other. When he spoke, it was in Latin. I gathered my recollections of my distant student days and girded myself for conversation.

  "By your clothing," he said, "I can see that you have come from another time. The diversity of languages encouraged the diversity of nations, and even encouraged war; the earth has returned to Latin. There are those who fear that it will degenerate into French, Limousine, or Papiamento, but the danger is not imminent. And in any case, neither that which has been nor that which is to be holds any interest for me."

  I said nothing; the man went on.

  "If it does not repulse you to see another person eat, would you like to join me?"