The Book of Fantasy

by Jorge Luis Borges

  ‘But of course! The land belongs to the Arcadinis, an old family who are travelling around Europe whilst a villain is managing it for them . . . Whoever buys it will become rich, land with a future, my dear Cambaceres . . .’

  At that moment someone in a hurry consulted his watch. ‘Good grief! Twenty past seven already!’

  What! Rearte had let the scraggy beats go at their own pace, interested in the comments, and suddenly realized how behind schedule he was . . . He had to reach the Bajo del Retiro at seven thirty for the extra horses . . .

  He whipped the horses enthusiastically and they galloped round the bend in Maipú at risk of derailing, and straightened up to head northwards.

  Where Juan Pedro Rearte jumps 30 years

  A formidable crash of glass and boards was drowning out the passengers’ conversations. Spurred on by a nightmarish impatience, Rearte was desperately sounding his horn and crossing the intersections like a whirlwind. The gendarmes, in kepis and white shakos and spats, greeted him ironically as he went by, and from the high driver’s seats of their coupés, the coachmen with long moustaches and pointed beards were encouraging him to go faster.

  Proud of his horses, Rearte paid no attention to the passengers’ desperate ringing of the bell . . .

  Suddenly his vision blurred and, like a balloon bursting, the familiar landscape disappeared: the gendarmes in their kepis and white spats, the bearded coachdrivers, the maize-pudding carts, the Basque milkmen on horseback, the ladies in shawls and the gentlemen in top hats . . . Even the double row of low houses became lost on the horizon, merging like the last stretches of a railway line.

  Rearte closed his eyes in resigned sadness so as not to see the last ghosts of his world annihilated: a lamplighter who disappeared elastically with his pole over his shoulder and a water cart dragged heavily by three small mules.

  When he reopened them, he found himself lying by a doorway in the shadow of a seven-storey house. He was surrounded by a circle of people through whose legs he could see on the road the remains of the carriage and the inert bodies of the two nags lying in a pool of blood.

  Next to him a fair-haired gendarme, notebook and pencil in hand like a diligent reporter, was questioning a pale and talkative motorman.

  Rearte realized he had crashed into a electric tram, and by the already familiar symptoms he knew he had just broken his other leg.

  On recovering consciousness, together with the pain, the only thing he was worried about was what day it was. ‘What day is it?’ he asked anxiously.

  ‘July 26th,’ the nurse who was feeling his ankle replied.

  ‘What year?’ insisted Rearte.

  ‘1918,’ answered the nurse, and added, as though to himself, ‘The tibia appears to be broken in three places.’

  ‘It’s not much for a 30-year jump . . .’ the old driver remarked philosophically.

  Because thirty years earlier—on 26th July 1888—the horses had bolted on the same stretch and, according to the doctor, he had almost broken his shinbone.

  After that stoical reflection, Juan Pedro Rearte closed his eyes, pretending to faint. He was ashamed at having become the object of public curiosity and having to answer policemen’s urgent questions. He would have liked to have been questioned by one of those gendarmes with kepis and shakos, so arbitrary and so good-natured at the same time, the gendarmes of his youth. The present ones seemed foreign to him, and to make a statement to them seemed to him like abdicating his nationality.

  And he was irritated above all by the amazement of the motorman, who didn’t stop repeating, ‘But how is it possible that this contraption could have crossed the whole of the city at this time and the wrong way? How is that possible?’

  Rearte knew how it had been possible, because in the clashes between the deluded and reality, they have the ineffable key to the mystery. But how could he explain that to the common servant of a machine?

  Fate is a fool . . .

  Once in the ambulance, with the loquaciousness induced by the morphine, Rearte explained the mystery. ‘The thing is, Fate is a rogue and a fool like the “gringos” . . . It was ordained by God, ever since I first got into a tram, that I had to break my left leg. I should have broken it thirty years ago, but I was saved by a miracle. In ‘90, at Lavalle and Paraná, the first day of the revolution, three bullets crossed the platform at knee height, without even brushing past my trousers. Later, when I crashed into the cart, Fate made a mistake and broke my right leg. And now, through fear that I would escape, it has set this trap to have it its own way. It’s a real devil, isn’t it!’

  An Actual Authentic Ghost

  Thomas Carlyle, Scots historian and essayist. Born in Ecclefechan in 1795; died in London in 1881. Author of The French Revolution (1837), Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841); Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (1845); Latter Day Pamphlets (1850); History of Frederick the Great (1851), and many essays and lectures.

  Again, could anything be more miraculous than an actual authentic Ghost?

  The English Johnson longed, all his life, to see one; but could not, though he went to Cock Lane, and thence to the church-vaults, and tapped on coffins. Foolish Doctor! Did he, never, with the mind’s eye as well as with the body’s, look round him into that full tide of human Life he so loved; did he never so much as look into Himself? The good Doctor was a Ghost, as actual and authentic as heart could wish; well-nigh a million of Ghosts were travelling the streets by his side. Once more I say, sweep away the illusion of Time; compress the threescore years into three minutes: what else was he, what else are we? Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air and invisibility?’

  The Red King’s Dream

  Lewis Carroll (pen-name of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) English writer and mathematician. Born at Daresbury in 1832, died at Guildford in 1898. Author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Phantasmagoria (1876), The Hunting of the Snark (1876) and Sylvie and Bruno (1889). He published his Curiosa Mathematica (1888-93) and Symbolic Logic (1896), both mathematical treatises, under his own name.

  ‘It’s only the red King snoring,’ said Tweedledee.

  ‘Come and look at him!’ the brothers cried, and they each took one of Alice’s hands, and let her up to where the King was sleeping.

  ‘Isn’t he lovely sight?’ said Tweedledum.

  Alice couldn’t say honestly that he was. He had a tall red night-cap on, with a tassel, and he was lying crumpled up into a sort of untidy heap, snoring loud—‘fit to snore his head off!’ as Tweedledum remarked.

  ‘I’m afraid he’ll catch cold with lying on the damp grass,’ said Tweedledee: ‘and what do you think he’s dreaming about?’

  Alice said ‘Nobody can guess that.’

  ‘Why, about you!’ Tweedledee exclaimed, capping his hand triumphantly. ‘And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?

  ‘Where I am now, of course,’ said Alice.

  ‘Not you!’ Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. ‘You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!’

  ‘If that there King was to wake,’ added Tweedledum, ‘you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!’

  ‘I shouldn’t!’ Alice exclaimed indignantly. ‘Besides, if I’m only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?’

  ‘Ditto,’ said Tweedledum.

  ‘Ditto,’ ditto!’ cried Tweedledee.

  He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn’t help saying, ‘Hush! You’ll be waking him, I’m afraid, if you make so much noise.’

  ‘Well, it’s no use your talking about waking him,’ said Tweedledum, ‘when you’re only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you’re not real.’

  ‘I am real!’ said Alice, and began to cry.

  ‘You won’t make yourself a bit realler by crying,’ Tweedledee remarked: ‘there’s nothing to cry about.’

>   ‘If I wasn’t real,’ Alice said—half-laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous—‘I shouldn’t be able to cry.’

  ‘I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?’ Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.

  ‘I know they’re talking nonsense,’ Alice thought to herself: ‘and it’s foolish to cry about it.’ So she brushed away her tears, and went on as cheerfully as she could, ‘At any rate I’d better be getting out of the wood, for really it’s coming on very dark. Do you think it’s going to rain?’

  Tweedledum spread a large umbrella over himself and his brother, and looked up into it. ‘No, I don’t think it is,’ he said: ‘at least—not under here. Nohow.’

  The Tree of Pride

  G. K. Chesterton, English essayist, novelist and poet. Born in London in 1874; died in 1936. He published a vast amount of work, always lucid yet ardent. He wrote and revived various literary styles including novels, literary criticism, lyric poetry, biography, polemics, and detective stories. He is the author of essays on Robert Browning (1903) G. F. Watts (1904), and Charles Dickens (1906). His books include Heretics (1905); The Man Who Was Thursday (1908); Orthodoxy (1908); Manalive (1912); Magic (1913); The Crimes of England (1915); A Short History of England (1917); The Uses of Diversity (1920); Father Brown Stories (1927); Collected Poems (1927); The Poet and the Lunatics (1929); Four Faultless Felons (1930); Autobiography (1937); and The Paradoxes of Mr Pond (1936).

  If you go down to the Barbary Coast, where the last wedge of the forest narrows down between the desert and the great tideless sea, you will find the natives still telling a strange story about a saint of the Dark Ages. There, on the twilight border of the Dark Continent, you feel the Dark Ages. I have only visited the place once, though it lies so to speak, opposite to the Italian city where I lived for years, and yet you would hardly believe how the topsy-turveydom and transmigration of this myth somehow seemed less mad than they really are, with the wood loud with lions at night and that dark red solitude beyond. They say that the hermit St. Securis, living there among trees, grew to love them like companions; since, though great giants with many arms like Briareus, they were the mildest and most blameless of the creatures; they did not devour like the lions, but rather opened their arms to all the little birds. And he prayed that they might be loosened from time to time to walk like other things. And the trees were moved upon the prayers of Securis, as they were at the songs of Orpheus. The men of the desert were stricken from afar with fear, seeing the saint walking with a walking grove, like a schoolmaster with his boys. For the trees were thus freed under strict conditions of discipline. They were to return at the sound of the hermit’s bell, and, above all, to copy the wild beasts in walking only—to destroy and devour nothing. Well, it is said that one of the trees heard a voice that was not the saint’s; that, in the warm green twilight of one summer evening it became conscious of something sitting and speaking in its branches in the guise of a great bird, and it was that which once spoke from a tree in the guise of a great serpent. As the voice grew louder among its murmuring leaves the tree was torn with a great desire to stretch out and snatch at the birds that flew harmlessly about their nests, and pluck them to pieces. Finally, the tempter filled the tree-top with his own birds of pride, the starry pageant of the peacocks. And the spirit of the brute overcame the spirit of the tree, and it rent and consumed the blue-green birds till not a plume was left, and returned to the quiet tribe of trees. But they say that when spring came all the other trees put forth leaves, but this put forth feathers of a strange hue and pattern. And by that monstrous assimilation the saint knew of the sin and he rooted that one tree to the earth with a judgement so that evil should fall on any who removed it again.

  The Tower of Babel

  ‘. . . the story about that hole in the ground, that goes down nobody knows where, has always fascinated me rather. It’s Mahomedan in form now; but I shouldn’t wonder if the tale is a long way older than Mahomet. It’s all about somebody they call the Sultan Aladin; not our friend of the lamp, of course, but rather like him in having to do with genii or giants or something of that sort. They say he commanded the giants to build him a sort of pagoda rising higher and higher above all the stars. The Utmost for the Highest, as the people said when they built the Tower of Babel. But the builders of the Tower of Babel were quite modest and domestic people, like mice, compared with old Aladdin. They only wanted a tower that would reach heaven, a mere trifle. He wanted a tower that would pass heaven, and rise above it, and go on rising for ever and ever. And Allah cast him down to earth with a thunderbolt, which sank into the earth, boring a hole, deeper and deeper, till it made a well that was without a bottom as the tower was to have been without a top. And down that inverted tower of darkness the soul of the proud Sultan is falling for ever and ever.’

  The Dream of the Butterfly

  Chuang Tzu, (c. 369-286 b.c.), Chinese taoist philosopher. His work is full of allegorical tales, of which only thirty-three have survived. They were translated into English by Herbert A. Giles and published in 1926.

  The philosopher Chuang Tzu dreamed he was a butterfly, and when he woke up he said he did not know whether he was Chuang Tzu who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming that it was Chuang Tzu.

  The Look of Death

  Jean Cocteau (1891-1963), Outstanding and amazingly prolific French writer. Of his books, the following is a selection. Poetry: L’Opéra, L’Ange Heurtebise; novels: Le Grand Écart, Les Enfants Térribles; criticism: Le Rappel à l’ordre, Le Mystére Laye, Portraits-Souvenirs. Plays include: La Voix Humaine, Les Parents Térribles, Les Monstres Sacrés.

  A young Persian gardener said to his Prince:

  ‘Save me! I met Death in the garden this morning, and he gave me a threatening look. I wish that tonight, by some miracle, I might be far away, in Ispahan.’

  The Prince lent him his swiftest horse.

  That afternoon, as he was walking in the garden, the Prince came face to face with Death. ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘did you give my gardener a threatening look this morning?’

  ‘It was not a threatening look,’ replied Death. ‘It was an expression of surprise. For I saw him here this morning, and I knew that I would take him in Ispahan tonight.’

  House Taken Over

  Julio Cortazar (1914-84), Argentinian writer, who lived and worked in Europe. Author of Los reyes (1949); Bestiario (1951); Final del juego (1956); La armas secretas (1959); Los premios (translated into English as The Winners, 1965; Historias de cronopios y famas (1962); Rayuela (1963; translated into English as Hopscotch, 1966).

  We liked the house because, apart from its being old and spacious (in a day when old houses go down for a profitable auction of their construction materials), it kept the memories of great-grandparents, our paternal grandfather, our parents and the whole of childhood.

  Irene and I got used to staying in the house by ourselves, which was crazy: eight people could have lived in that place and not have gotten in each other’s way. We rose at seven in the morning and got the cleaning done, and about eleven I left Irene to finish off whatever rooms and went to the kitchen. We lunched at noon precisely; then there was nothing left to do but a few dirty plates. It was pleasant to take lunch and commune with the great hollow, silent house, and it was enough for us just to keep it clean. We ended up thinking, at times, that that was what had kept us from marrying. Irene turned down two suitors for no particular reason, and María Esther went and died on me before we could manage to get engaged. We were easing into our forties with the unvoiced concept that the quiet, simple marriage of sister and brother was the indispensable end to a line established in this house by our grandparents. We would die here someday, obscure and distant cousins would inherit the place, have it torn down, sell the bricks and get rich on the building plot; or more justly and better yet, we would topple it ourselves before it was too late.

  Irene never bothered anyone. Once the morning housework wa
s finished, she spent the rest of the day on the sofa in her bedroom, knitting. I couldn’t tell you why she knitted so much; I think women knit when they discover that it’s a fat excuse to do nothing at all. But Irene was not like that, she always knitted necessities, sweaters for winter, socks for me, handy morning robes and bedjackets for herself. Sometimes she would do a jacket, then unravel it the next moment because there was something that didn’t please her; it was pleasant to see a pile of tangled wool in her knitting basket fighting a losing battle for a few hours to retain its shape. Saturdays I went downtown to buy wool; Irene had faith in my good taste, was pleased with the colours and never a skein got to be returned. I took advantage of these trips to make the rounds of the bookstores, uselessly asking if they had anything new in French literature. Nothing worthwhile had arrived in Argentina since 1939.

  But it’s the house I want to talk about, the house and Irene; I’m not very important. I wonder what Irene would have done without her knitting. One can reread a book, but once a pullover is finished you can’t do it over again, it’s some kind of disgrace. One day I found that the drawer at the bottom of the chiffonier, replete with moth-balls, was filled with shawls, white, green, lilac. Stacked amid a great smell of camphor—it was like a shop; I didn’t have the nerve to ask her what she planned to do with them. We didn’t have to earn our living—there was plenty coming in from the farms each month, even piling up. But Irene was only interested in the knitting and showed a wonderful dexterity, and for me the hours slipped away watching her, her hands like silver sea-urchins, needles flashing, and one or two knitting baskets on the floor, the balls of yarn jumping about. It was lovely.

  How not to remember the layout of that house. The dining room, a living room with tapestries, the library and three large bedrooms in the section most recessed, the one that faced toward Rodríguez Peña. Only a corridor with its massive oak door separated that part from the front wing, where there was a bath, the kitchen, our bedrooms and the hall. One entered the house through a vestibule with enamelled tiles, and a wrought-iron grated door opened on to the living room. You had to come in through the vestibule and open the gate to go into the living room; the doors to our bedrooms were on either side of this, and opposite it was the corridor leading to the back section; going down the passage, one swung open the oak door beyond which was the other part of the house; or just before the door, one could turn to the left and go down a narrower passageway which led to the kitchen and the bath. When the door was open, you became aware of the size of the house; when it was closed, you had the impression of an apartment, like the ones they build today, with barely enough room to move around in. Irene and I always lived in this part of the house and hardly ever went beyond the oak door except to do the cleaning. Incredible how much dust collected on the furniture. It may be Buenos Aires is a clean city, but she owes it to her population and nothing else. There’s too much dust in the air, the slightest breeze and it’s back on the marble console tops and in the diamond patterns of the tooled-leather desk set. It’s a lot of work to get it off with a feather duster; the motes rise and hang in the air, and settle again a minute later on the pianos and the furniture.