The Book of Fantasy

by Jorge Luis Borges

  ‘Don Juan doesn’t like his position to be challenged,’ said the Spaniard. ‘He’d rather the world blew up than have salvation come from someone else. It’s a way of loving humanity.’

  ‘Reluctance at the unknown,’ I commented. ‘Obscurantism.’

  They say that fear sharpens the mind. The truth is that something strange hung over the bar that night, and we were all contributing ideas.

  ‘Courage lads. Let’s do something,’ exhorted Badaracco. ‘For the love of humanity.’

  ‘Why do you have, Mr Badaracco, so much love for humanity?’ asked the Spaniard.

  Blushing, Badaracco stammered, ‘I don’t know. We all know.’

  ‘What do we know, Mr Badaracco? If you think of men, do you find them admirable? I find them the opposite: stupid, cruel, mean, envious,’ declared Villarroel.

  ‘When there are elections,’ agreed Chazarreta, ‘your pretty humanity Is quickly exposed and shows itself just as it is. The worst always wins.’

  ‘Is the love of humanity a hollow phrase?’

  ‘No, Mr Teacher,’ replied Villarroel. ‘Let us call love of humanity compassion for the pain of others and veneration for the works of our great minds, for Cervantes’ Don Quixote, for paintings by Velázquez and Murillo. In neither form is that love worth anything as an argument to postpone the end of the world. Only for men do these works exist, and after the end of the world—the day will come, with the bomb or by natural causes—they will have no justification or excuse, believe me. As to compassion, it’s a winner when the end is nigh . . . Since there is no way anyone will escape death, let it come soon for all of us, so that the sum of pain will be minimal!’

  ‘We’re wasting time with the preciousness of an academic discussion whilst right here, on the other side of this very wall, our last hope is dying,’ I said with an eloquence which I was the first to admire.

  ‘We have to act now,’ observed Badaracco. ‘Soon it will be too late.’

  ‘If we invade his yard, don Juan might get angry,’ suggested Di Pinto.

  Don Pomponio, who had approached without our hearing him and gave us such a start that we jumped, proposed, ‘Why don’t you detail don Tadeíto as advance scout? That would be the prudent thing to do.’

  ‘All right,’ approved Toledo. ‘Don Tadeíto is to connect the sprinkler in the depot and spy, to tell us what the traveller from another planet is like.’

  We rushed out into the night, illuminated by the impassive moon. Practically in tears, Badaracco pleaded, ‘Be generous, lads. No matter that we should put ourselves in danger. The fate of all the mothers and all the children in the world hangs on us.’

  We scrambled in front of the yard; there were marches and countermarches, plottings and to-ings and fro-ings. Finally Badaracco gathered up courage and pushed don Tadeíto inside. My student came back after an endless wait to inform us: ‘The catfish has died.’

  We disbanded sadly. The bookseller came back with me. For some reason I don’t fully understand, his company was a comfort to me.

  Opposite Las Margaritas, whilst the sprinkler monotonously watered the garden, I exclaimed, ‘I blame our lack of curiosity,’ adding, looking absorbed at the constellations, ‘How many Americas and infinite Terranovas have we lost tonight.’

  ‘Don Juan,’ said Villarroel, ‘preferred to live within the constraints of a limited man. I admire his courage. We two, we don’t even dare go in there.’

  I said, ‘It’s late.’

  ‘It’s late’, he repeated.

  Guilty Eyes

  Ah’med Ech Chiruani is a name from a notebook, from a collection of folk tales. Nothing more is known of him.

  A man bought a girl for the sum of four thousand denarii. Looking at her one day, he burst into tears. The girl asked why he wept. He replied: ‘Your eyes are so beautiful that they make me forget to worship God.’ Later, when she was alone, the girl plucked out her eyes. ‘Why do you so disfigure yourself? You have devalued your own worth.’ She replied: ‘I would not wish any part of me to stop you worshipping God.’ That night, the man dreamed and heard a voice telling him: ‘The girl devalued herself in your eyes, but she increased her value in ours and we have taken her from you.’ When he awoke, he found four thousand denarii under his pillow. The girl was dead.

  Anything You Want!…

  Léon Bloy, French writer, born in Perigueux (1846), died at Bourg la Reine (1917). Author of Le Désespére (1887); Christophe Colomb devant les Taureaux (1890); Le Salut par les Juifs (1892); Sueur de Sang La Femme Pauvre (1897); Leon Bloy devant les Cochons (1898); Celle qui Pleure (1906); L’Ame de Napoléon (1912).

  Maxence, weary after an evening of pleasure, arrived at the point where the main road crosses the Ruelle Dupleix, opposite the military academy. The place, merely unpleasant by daylight, had become, at one o’clock in the morning, a little sinister. The dark alley, especially, offered little reassurance: a muddy, neglected thoroughfare where artillerymen and cavalrymen lived and worked for pennies, in unspeakable quarters, which made the night reveller a trifle uneasy.

  Nonetheless, he was contemplating it. A loud clamour could be heard coming from the Boulevard de Grenelle, a street that is was prudent to avoid, and a horror of being caught up in some drunken brawl made him feel inclined to turn into the dirty passage, at the other end of which he knew he would find a quieter street that would be more sympathetic to his amorous reverie.

  He had just left his mistress’s arms, and felt the need to dissipate his lust with a gentle and peaceful walk home, without interruption.

  ‘Well, make your mind up—yes or no?’ cried a horrible voice, trying to make itself sound agreeable.

  Maxence saw, emerging from the shadows of a nearby wall, a gross woman who came towards him to offer the precious gift of her love.

  ‘It won’t cost much. Come with me and I’ll do anything you want, sweetheart.’

  She outlined a possible programme. The wayfarer listened, stock-still, as if hearing the pounding of his own heart. It was ridiculous, but he could not say why that voice moved him. The poor wretch could not have said why to save his life, but the feeling was real enough, and it turned into an unbearable anguish as he felt his mind drifting away on these shameful words, which somehow seemed to carry him back to his earliest days . . . sweet, wonderful memories which, recalled under such circumstances as these, were being horribly desecrated. His memories of childhood were sacred things, in contrast to his present existence which was—alas!—not at all glorious.

  Whenever he needed to recover after a party or drinking-bout, he would call into his mind these memories, which always came rushing back to him, faithful and true, like shivering, abandoned lambs who only wanted to return to their shepherd . . .

  But this time he had not called them. They had come unbidden—or, rather, it was another voice that had summoned them: a voice they clearly heeded as much as his own—and it was terrible not to understand how it could have happened.

  Anything you want! I’ll do anything you fancy, my dear . . . No, no—this was intolerable. His mother was dead, burned alive in a fire. He remembered a calcified hand, the only part of her that they had dared to show him.

  His only sister, fifteen years his senior, who had raised him so tenderly, and from whom he had learned all that was good in him, had come to an equally tragic end. The ocean had swallowed her, together with fifty other passengers, in a notorious shipwreck off one of the most dangerous coastlines of the Gulf of Gascony. Her body had never been recovered.

  These two tragic figures dominated his thoughts whenever he peered over the edge of his memory, as his own life took its course.

  And now! It was horrible, monstrous, that this sow who clutched at him in the street, in this hellish place, had his sister’s voice—the voice of his favourite creature in all the world, who had seemed to him an angel and whose feet, he believed, would have cleansed the filth of Sodom.

  Admittedly, the voice had become immeasurably coars
ened, had fallen from heaven and been dragged through slimy, murderous pits, but it was her voice all the same, and the sound of it made him want to run, screaming and sobbing, away.

  In such ways can the dead mingle with the living—or those who pretend to be alive! Whilst the old whore offered him her vile flesh—and, Oh God!, in such language—he was hearing his sister, devoured by fish a quarter of a century before, enjoining him to worship God and love the poor.

  ‘If you knew how lovely my thighs are!’ said the crone.

  ‘If you knew how lovely Jesus is!’ said the saint.

  ‘Come with me, you rascal; I have a good fire and a strong bed,’ urged the hag.

  ‘Never cause your guardian angel any pain,’ murmured the other.

  Without realizing it, he uttered the words that had filled his childhood out loud.

  Hearing them, the whore was startled, and began to tremble. She raised her old, rheumy, bloodshot eyes—dull mirrors which seemed to reflect every scene of debauchery and every kind of torture—and looked sharply at him, like a drowning man looking for the last time at the sea-green sky through the window of water that is choking him.

  There was a moment of silence.

  ‘Sir,’ she said at last, ‘You must forgive me. I shouldn’t have spoken to you. I’m just a wicked-minded old woman, a clown for the street-urchins to mock, and you should have kicked me into the gutter. Go home, and may God protect you.’

  Maxence, astounded, watched as she disappeared into the shadows.

  But she was right; he must go home. The midnight traveller turned towards the Boulevard de Grenelle, but very slowly. The encounter had completely overwhelmed him.

  He had not gone ten paces when the old whore reappeared, running after him.

  ‘Sir, I beg you, don’t go that way!’

  ‘And why should I not go that way?’ he asked. ‘It is on my way. I live in Vaugirard.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if you return and take a different route altogether, even if it takes an hour longer. You’ll be attacked if you go down that street. If you want to know, half the pimps in Paris are gathered there. They stretch from the abattoirs to the tobacco works. The police have given them the run of the place. There’ll be no one there to look after you, and you’ll walk straight into trouble.’

  Maxence was tempted to reply that he had no need of protection but, fortunately, he realized that such bravado would be misplaced.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘I’ll go back along by Les Invalides. It’s a bit strong, though. I am very tired, and to have to make another detour is extremely annoying. They should send the cavalry in on these scoundrels.’

  ‘There might be another way,’ said the old woman, after a moment’s hesitation.

  ‘Really! And what might that be?’

  Very humbly, she explained that as she was so well known in that delightful district, it would be easy for her to escort someone through . . .

  ‘Only,’ she added, with a surprising softness, ‘people must think that you’re a . . . friend, so you’ll have to let me take your arm.’

  Maxence hesitated too, fearing a trap. But some strange force was at work within him; his reluctance quickly vanished, and he was able to proceed unharmed through the dirty crowd on the arm of his creature, who greeted several villains as they passed, and who would have revolted Sin itself.

  Not a word passed between them. He noticed, however, that she squeezed his arm and pressed against him much more than the situation warranted, and that her grasp seemed almost convulsive. The extraordinary anguish that he had felt lessened now that she was no longer speaking. He soon came to the conclusion that the whole thing had been some kind of hallucination, and everyone knows how useful this precious word can be in explaining any unusual sensation or foreboding.

  When it was time for them to part, Maxence mumbled some banal word of thanks, and took out his purse with the intention of rewarding his strange, silent companion, who may have saved his life, but she stopped him with a gesture:

  ‘No, sir, that’s not what I want.’

  Only then did he see that she was crying, as he had not dared to look at her during the half-hour that they had been walking together.

  ‘What is the matter?’ he asked, very moved. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘If you will let me embrace you,’ she replied, ‘that would be the greatest joy of my life—my disgusting life—and after that I think I should have the strength to die.’

  Seeing that he assented, she threw herself upon him, groaning with love, and hugged him as if she wanted to devour him. A cry from the man she was smothering made her disentangle herself.

  ‘Goodbye, Maxence, my little Maxence, my poor brother. Goodbye forever, and forgive me,’ she cried. ‘Now I can die.’

  She fell before her brother could make any move to help her, and instantly her head was crushed under the wheel of a night wagon that was driving by at lightning speed.

  Maxence no longer has a mistress. He is currently completing his novitiate as a lay brother at the monastery of Grande-Chartreuse.

  Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

  Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) born in Buenos Aires. Argentina’s foremost modern writer and founder of several important periodicals in the 1920s. Author of Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923); El Idioma de los Argentinos (1928); Cuaderno San Martin (1929); Evaristo Carriego (1930); Discussion (1932); Historia Universal de la Infamia (1935), a collection of short stories; Historia de la Eternidad (1936); El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan (1941); Ficciones (1944; translated into English, 1962); El Aleph (1949); Otras inquisiciones (1952); El hacedor (1960; translated into English as Dreamtigers, 1964).

  I

  I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopaedia. The unnerving mirror hung at the end of a corridor in a villa on Calle Goana, in Ramos Mejía; the misleading encyclopedia goes by the name of The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917), and is a literal if inadequate reprint of the 1902 Encyclopaedia Britannica. The whole affair happened some five years ago. Bioy Casares had dined with me that night and talked to us at length about a great scheme for writing a novel in the first person, using a narrator who omitted or corrupted what happened and who ran into various contradictions, so that only a handful of readers, a very small handful, would be able to decipher the horrible or banal reality behind the novel. From the far end of the corridor, the mirror was watching us; and we discovered, with the inevitability of discoveries made late at night, that mirrors have something grotesque about them. Then Bioy Cesares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of man. I asked him the source of that memorable sentence, and he replied that it was recorded in the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, in its article on Uqbar. It so happened that the villa (which we had rented furnished) possessed a copy of that work. In the final pages of Volume XLVI, we ran across an article on Upsala; in the beginning of Volume XLVII, we found one on Ural-Altaic languages; but not one word on Uqbar. A little put out, Bioy consulted the index volumes. In vain he tried every possible spelling—Ukbar, Ucbar, Ooqbar, Ookbar, Oukbahr . . . Before leaving, he informed me it was a region in either Iraq or Asia Minor. I must say that I acknowledged this a little uneasily. I supposed that this undocumented country and its anonymous heresiarch had been deliberately invented by Bioy out of modesty, to substantiate a phrase. A futile examination of one of the atlases of Justus Perthes strengthened my doubt.

  On the following day, Bioy telephoned me from Buenos Aires. He told me that he had in front of him the article on Uqbar, in Volume XLVI of the encyclopedia. It did not specify the name of the heresiarch, but it did note his doctrine, in words almost identical to the ones he had repeated to me, though, I would say, inferior from a literary point of view. He had remembered: ‘Copulation and mirrors are abominable.’ The text of the encyclopedia read: ‘For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illus
ion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.’ I said, in all sincerity, that I would like to see the article. A few days later, he brought it. This surprised me, because the scrupulous cartographic index of Ritter’s Erdkunde completely failed to mention the name of Uqbar.

  The volume which Bioy brought was indeed Volume XLVI of The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia. On the title page and spine, the alphabetical key was the same as in our copy, but instead of 917 pages, it had 921. These four additional pages consisted of the article on Uqbar—not accounted for by the alphabetical cipher, as the reader will have noticed. We ascertained afterwards that there was no other difference between the two volumes. Both, as I think I pointed out, are reprints of the tenth Encyclopaedia Britannica. Bioy had acquired his copy in one of a number of book sales.

  We read the article with some care. The passage remembered by Bioy was perhaps the only startling one. The rest seemed probable enough, very much in keeping with the general tone of the work and, naturally, a little dull. Reading it over, we discovered, beneath the superficial authority of the prose, a fundamental vagueness. Of the fourteen names mentioned in the geographical section, we recognized only three—Khurasan, Armenia, and Erzurum—and they were dragged into the text in a strangely ambiguous way. Among the historical names, we recognized only one, that of the imposter, Smerdis the Magian, and it was invoked in a rather metaphorical sense. The notes appeared to fix precisely the frontiers of Uqbar, but the points of reference were all, vaguely enough, rivers and craters and mountain chains in that same region. We read, for instance, that the southern frontier is defined by the lowlands of Tsai Haldun and the Axa delta, and that wild horses flourish in the islands of that delta. This, at the top of page 918. In the historical section (page 920), we gathered that, just after the religious persecutions of the thirteenth century, the orthodox sought refuge in the islands, where their obelisks have survived, and where it is a common enough occurrence to dig up one of their stone mirrors. The language and literature section was brief. There was one notable characteristic: it remarked that the literature of Uqbar was fantastic in character, and that its epics and legends never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary regions of Mlejnas and Tlön . . . The bibliography listed four volumes, which we have not yet come across, even though the third—Silas Haslam: History of the Land Called Uqbar, 1874—appears in the library catalogues of Bernard Quaritch.[*] The first, Lesbare und lesenswerthe Bemerkungen über das Land Ukkbar in Klein-Asien, is dated 1641, and is a work of Johann Valentin Andreä. The fact is significant; a couple of years later I ran across that name accidentally in the thirteenth volume of De Quincey’s Writings, and I knew that it was the name of a German theologian who, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, described the imaginary community of Rosae Crucis—the community which was later founded by others in imitation of the one he had preconceived.