Collected Fictions

by Jorge Luis Borges

  "Iceland! Sea-girt Iceland!"

  "In Rome, you will once more recite the poetry of Keats, whose name, like all men's names, was writ in water."

  "I've never been in Rome."

  "There are other things. You will write our best poem—an elegy."

  "On the death of..." I began. I could not bring myself to say the name.

  "No. She will outlive you."

  We grew silent. Then he went on:

  "You will write the book we've dreamed of for so long. In 1979 you will see that your supposed career has been nothing but a series of drafts, miscellaneous drafts, and you will give in to the vain and superstitious temptation to write your great book—the superstition that inflicted upon us Goethe's Faust, and Salammbô, and Ulysses. I filled, incredible to tell, many, many pages."

  "And in the end you realized that you had failed."

  "Worse. I realized that it was a masterpiece in the most overwhelming sense of the word. My good intentions hadn't lasted beyond the first pages; those that followed held the labyrinths, the knives, the man who thinks he's an image, the reflection that thinks it's real, the tiger that stalks in the night, the battles that are in one's blood, the blind and fatal Juan Murana, the voice of Macedonie Fernández, the ship made with the fingernails of the dead, Old English repeated in the evening."

  "That museum rings a bell," I remarked sarcastically.

  "Not to mention false recollections, the doubleness of symbols, the long catalogs, the skilled handling of prosaic reality, the imperfect symmetries that critics so jubilantly discover, the not always apocryphal quotations."

  "Did you publish it?"

  "I toyed, without conviction, with the melodramatic possibility of destroying the book, perhaps by fire.

  But I wound up publishing it in Madrid, under a pseudonym. I was taken for a clumsy imitator of Borges

  —a person who had the defect of not actually being Borges yet of mirroring all the outward appearances of the original."

  "I'm not surprised," I said. "Every writer sooner or later becomes his own least intelligent disciple."

  "That book was one of the roads that led me to this night. The others... The humiliation of old age, the conviction of having already lived each day..."

  "I will not write that book," I said.

  "You will, though. My words, which are now your present, will one day be but the vaguest memory of a dream."

  I found myself annoyed by his dogmatic tone, the tone that I myself no doubt use in my classes. I was annoyed by the fact that we resembled each other so much and that he was taking advantage of the impunity lent him by the nearness of death.

  "Are you so sure," I said, to get back at him a bit, "that you're going to die?"

  "Yes," he replied. "I feel a sort of sweetness and relief I’ve never felt before. I can't describe it; all words require a shared experience. Why do you seem so annoyed at what I'm saying?"

  "Because we're too much like each other. I loathe your face, which is a caricature of mine, I loathe your voice, which is a mockery of mine, I loathe your pathetic syntax, which is my own."

  "So do I," he smiled. "Which is why I decided to kill myself."

  A bird sang from the garden.

  "It's the last one," the other man said.

  He motioned me toward him. His hand sought mine. I stepped back; I was afraid the two hands would merge.

  "The Stoics teach," he said to me, "that we should not complain of life—the door of the prison is open. I have always understood that; I myself saw life that way, but laziness and cowardice held me back. About twelve days ago, I was giving a lecture in La Plata on Book VI of the ÄLneid. Suddenly, as I was scanning a hexameter, I discovered what my path was to be. Imade this decision—and since that moment, I have felt myself invulnerable. You shall one day meet that fate—you shall receive that sudden revelation, in the midst of Latin and Virgil, yet you will have utterly forgotten this curious prophetic dialogue that is taking place in two times and two places. When you next dream it, you shall be who I am, and you shall be my dream."

  "I won't forget it—I'm going to write it down tomorrow."

  "It will lie in the depths of your memory, beneath the tides of your dreams. When you write it, you will think that you're weaving a tale of fantasy. And it won't be tomorrow, either—it will be many years from now."

  He stopped talking; I realized that he had died. In a way, I died with him—in grief I leaned over his pillow, but there was no one there anymore.

  I fled the room. Outside, there was no patio, no marble staircase, no great silent house, no eucalyptus trees, no statues, no gazebo in a garden, no fountains, no gate in the fence surrounding the hotel in the town of Adrogué.

  Outside awaited other dreams.

  Blue Tigers

  A famous poem by Blake paints the tiger as a fire burning bright and an eternal archetype of Evil; I prefer the Chesterton maxim that casts the tiger as a symbol of terrible elegance. Apart from these, there are no words that can rune the tiger, that shape which for centuries has lived in the imagination of mankind. I have always been drawn to the tiger. I know that as a boy I would linger before one particular cage at the zoo; the others held no interest for me. I would judge encyclopedias and natural histories by their engravings of the tiger. When the Jungle Books were revealed to me I was upset that the tiger, Shere Khan, was the hero's enemy. As the years passed, this strange fascination never left me; it survived my paradoxical desire to become a hunter as it did all common human vicissitudes. Until not long ago (the date feels distant but it really is not), it coexisted peacefully with my day-to-day labors at the University of Lahore. I am a professor of Eastern and Western logic, and I consecrate my Sundays to a seminar on the philosophy of Spinoza. I should add that I am a Scotsman; it may have been my love of tigers that brought me from Aberdeen to Punjab. The outward course of my life has been the common one, but in my dreams I always saw tigers. Now it is other forms that fill them.

  I have recounted all these facts more than once, until now they seem almost to belong to someone else. I let them stand, however, since they are required by my statement.

  Toward the end of 1904, I read that in the region of the Ganges delta a blue variety of the species had been discovered. The news was confirmed by subsequent telegrams, with the contradictions and incongruities that one expects in such cases. My old love stirred once more. Nevertheless, I suspected some error, since the names of colors are notoriously imprecise. I remembered having once read that in Icelandic, Ethiopia was "Blaland," Blue Land or the Land of Black Men. The blue tiger might well be a black panther. Nothing was mentioned of stripes; the picture published by the London press, showing a blue tiger with silver stripes, was patently apocryphal. Similarly, the blue of the illustration looked more like that of heraldry than reality. In a dream, I saw tigers of a blue I had never seen before, and for which I could find no word. I know it was almost black, but that description of course does scant justice to the shade I saw.

  Some months later, a colleague of mine told me that in a certain village miles from the Ganges he had heard talk of blue tigers. I was astonished by that piece of news, because tigers are rare in that area.

  Once again I dreamed of the blue tiger, throwing its long shadow as it made its way over the sandy ground. I took advantage of the end of term to make a journey to that village, whose name (for reasons that will soon be clear) I do not wish to recall.

  I arrived toward the end of the rainy season. The village squatted at the foot of a hill (which looked to me wider than it was high) and was surrounded and menaced by the jungle, which was a dark brown color. Surely one of the pages of Kipling contains that village of my adventure, since all of India, all the world somehow, can be found there. Suffice it to report that a ditch, and swaying cane-stalk bridges, constituted the huts' fragile defense. Toward the south there were swamps and rice fields and a ravine with a muddy river whose name I never learned, and beyond that, again, the jungle.<
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  The people who lived in the village were Hindus. I did not like this, though I had foreseen it. I have always gotten along better with Muslims, though Islam, I know, is the poorest of the religions that spring from Judaism.

  We feel ordinarily that India teems with humanity; in the village I felt that India teemed with jungle. It crept virtually into the huts. The days were oppressive, and the nights brought no relief.

  I was greeted upon my arrival by the elders, with whom I sustained a tentative conversation constructed of vague courtesies. I have mentioned the poverty of the place, but I know that it is an axiom of every man's belief that the land he lives in and owes his allegiance to possesses some unique distinction, and so I praised in glowing terms the dubious habitations and the no less dubious delicacies served me, and I declared that the fame of that region had reached Lahore. The expressions on the men's faces changed; I immediately sensed that I had committed a faux pas I might come to regret. I sensed that these people possessed a secret they would not share with a stranger. Perhaps they worshiped the blue tiger, perhaps they were devotees of a cult that my rash words had profaned.

  I waited until the next morning. When the rice had been consumed and the tea drunk down, I broached my subject. Despite the previous night's experience, I did not understand—was incapable of understanding—what took place then. The entire village looked at me with stupefaction, almost with terror, but when I told them that my purpose was to capture the beast with the curious skin, they seemed almost relieved at my words. One of them said he had seen the animal at the edge of the jungle.

  In the middle of the night, they woke me. A boy told me that a goat had escaped from the corral and that as he'd gone to look for it, he'd seen the blue tiger on the far bank of the river. I reflected that the scant light of the new moon would hardly have allowed him to make out the color, but everyone confirmed the tale; one of them, who had been silent up until that moment, said he had seen it, too. We went out with the rifles and I saw, or thought I saw, a feline shadow slink into the shadows of the jungle.

  They did not find the goat, but the creature that had taken it might or might not have been my blue tiger.

  They emphatically pointed out to me other traces—which of course proved nothing.

  After a few nights I realized that these false alarms were a sort of routine. Like Daniel Defoe, the men of the village were skilled at inventing circumstantial details. The tiger might be glimpsed at any hour, out toward the rice fields to the south or up toward the jungle to the north, but it did not take me long to realize that there was a suspicious regularity in the way the villagers seemed to take turns spotting it. My arrival upon the scene of the sighting invariably coincided with the precise instant that the tiger had just run off. I was always shown a trail, a paw mark, some broken twig, but a man's fist can counterfeit a tiger's prints. Once or twice I witnessed a dead dog. One moonlit night we staked out a goat as a lure, but we watched fruitlessly until dawn. I thought at first that these daily fables were meant to encourage me to prolong my stay, for it did benefit the village—the people sold me food and did domestic chores for me. To verify this conjecture, I told them that I was thinking of moving on to another region, downstream, in quest of the tiger. I was surprised to find that they welcomed my decision. I continued to sense, however, that there was a secret, and that everyone was keeping a wary eye on me.

  I mentioned earlier that the wooded hill at whose foot the village sprawled was not really very high; it was flat on top, a sort of plateau. On the other side of the mountain, toward the west and north, the jungle began again. Since the slope was not a rugged one, one afternoon I suggested that we climb it.

  My simple words threw the villagers into consternation. One exclaimed that the mountainside was too steep. The eldest of them said gravely that my goal was impossible to attain, the summit of the hill was sacred, magical obstacles blocked the ascent to man. He who trod the peak with mortal foot was in danger of seeing the godhead, and of going blind or mad.

  I did not argue, but that night, when everyone was asleep, I stole soundlessly from my hut and began to climb the easy hillside.

  There was no path, and the undergrowth held me back. The moon was just at the horizon. I took note of everything with singular attentiveness, as though I sensed that this was to be an important day, perhaps the most important day of all my days. I still recall the dark, almost black, shadings of the leaves and bushes. It was close to dawn, and the sky was beginning to turn pale, but in all the jungle around, not one bird sang.

  Twenty or thirty minutes' climb brought me to the summit. It took me very little effort to imagine that it was cooler there than in the village, which sweltered down below. I had been right that this was not a peak, but rather a plateau, a sort of terrace, not very broad, and that the jungle crept up to it all around, on the flanks of the hill. I felt free, as though my residence in the village had been a prison. I didn't care that the villagers had tried to fool me; I felt they were somehow children.

  As for the tiger ... Constant frustration had exhausted my curiosity and my faith, but almost mechanically I looked for tracks.

  The ground was cracked and sandy. In one of the cracks—which by the way were not deep, and which branched into others—I caught a glimpse of a color. Incredibly, it was the same color as the tiger of my dreams. I wish I had never laid eyes on it. I looked closely. The crevice was full of little stones, all alike, circular, just a few centimeters in diameter and very smooth. Their regularity lent them an air almost of artificiality, as though they were coins, or buttons, or counters in some game.

  I bent down, put my hand into the crevice, and picked out some of the stones. I felt a faint quivering. I put the handful of little stones in the right pocket of my jacket, where there were a small pair of scissors and a letter from Allahabad. Those two chance objects have their place in my story.

  Back in my hut, I took off my jacket. I lay down and dreamed once more of the tiger. In my dream I took special note of its color; it was the color of the tiger I had dreamed of, and also of the little stones from the plateau. The late-morning sun in my face woke me. I got up. The scissors and the letter made it hard to take the disks out of the pocket; they kept getting in the way. I pulled out a handful, but felt that there were still two or three I had missed. A tickling sensation, the slightest sort of quivering, imparted a soft warmth to my palm. When I opened my hand, I saw that it held thirty or forty disks; I'd have sworn I'd picked up no more than ten. I left them on the table and turned back to get the rest out of the pocket.

  I didn't need to count them to see that they had multiplied. I pushed them together into a single pile, and tried to count them out one by one.

  That simple operation turned out to be impossible. I would look fixedly at any one of them, pick it up with my thumb and index finger, yet when I had done that, when that one disk was separated from the rest, it would have become many. I checked to see that I didn't have a fever (which I did not), and then I performed the same experiment, over and over again. The obscene miracle kept happening. I felt my feet go clammy and my bowels turn to ice; my knees began to shake. I do not know how much time passed.

  Without looking at the disks, I scooped them into a pile and threw them out the window. With a strange feeling of relief, I sensed that their number had dwindled. I firmly closed the door and lay down on my bed. I tried to find the exact position I had lain in before, hoping to persuade myself that all this had been a dream. So as not to think about the disks yet somehow fill the time, I repeated, with slow precision, aloud, the eight definitions and seven axioms of Ethics. I am not sure they helped.

  In the midst of these exorcistic exercises, a knock came at my door. Instinctively fearing that I had been overheard talking to myself, I went to the door and opened it.

  It was the headman of the village, Bhagwan Dass. For a second his presence seemed to restore me to everyday reality. We stepped outside. I harbored some hope that the disks mig
ht have disappeared, but there they were, on the ground. I no longer can be sure how many there were.

  The elder looked down at them and then looked at me.

  "These stones are not from here. They are stones from up there," he said, in a voice that was not his own.

  "That's true," I replied. I added, not without some defiance, that I had found them up on the plateau, but I was immediately ashamed of myself for feeling that I owed anyone an explanation. Bhagwan Dass ignored me; he continued to stare in fascination at the stones. I ordered him to pick them up. He did not move.

  I am grieved to admit that I took out my revolver and repeated the order, this time in a somewhat more forceful tone of voice.

  "A bullet in the breast is preferable to a blue stone in the hand," stammered Bhagwan Dass.

  "You are a coward," said I.

  I was, I believe, no less terrified than he, but I closed my eyes and picked up a handful of stones with my left hand. I tucked the pistol in my belt and dropped the stones one by one into the open palm of my right hand. Their number had grown considerably.

  I had unwittingly become accustomed to those transformations. They now surprised me less than Bhagwan Dass' cries.

  "These are the stones that spawn!" he exclaimed. "There are many of them now, but they can change.

  Their shape is that of the moon when it is full, and their color is the blue that we are permitted to see only in our dreams. My father's father spoke the truth when he told men of their power,"

  The entire village crowded around us.

  I felt myself to be the magical possessor of those wondrous objects. To the astonishment of all, I picked up the disks, raised them high, dropped them, scattered them, watched them grow and multiply or mysteriously dwindle.