The Book of Fantasy

by Jorge Luis Borges

  I’ll always have a clear memory of it because it happened so simply and without fuss. Irene was knitting in her bedroom, it was eight at night, and I suddenly decided to put the water up for mate. I went down the corridor as far as the oak door, which was a ajar, then turned into the hall toward the kitchen, when I heard something in the library or the dining room. The sound came through muted and indistinct, a chair being knocked over on to the carpet or the muffled buzzing of a conversation. At the same time, or a second later, I heard it at the end of the passage which led from those two rooms toward the door. I hurled myself against the door before it was too late and shut it, leaned on it with the weight of my body; luckily, the key was on our side; moreover, I ran the great bolt into place, just to be safe.

  I went down to the kitchen, heated the kettle, and when I got back with the tray of mate, I told Irene:

  ‘I had to shut the door to the passage. They’ve taken over the back part.’

  She let her knitting fall and looked at me with her tired, serious eyes.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  I nodded.

  ‘In that case,’ she said, picking up her needles again, ‘we’ll have to live on this side.’

  I sipped at the mate very carefully, but she took her time starting her work again. I remember it was a grey vest she was knitting. I liked that vest.

  The first few days were painful, since we’d both left so many things in the part that had been taken over. My collection of French literature, for example, was still in the library. Irene had left several folios of stationery and a pair of slippers that she used a lot in the winter. I missed my briar pipe, and Irene, I think, regretted the loss of an ancient bottle of Hesperidin. It happened repeatedly (but only in the first few days) that we would close some drawer or cabinet and look at one another sadly.

  ‘It’s not here.’

  One thing more among the many lost on the other side of the house.

  But there were advantages, too. The cleaning was so much simplified that, even when we got up late, nine-thirty for instance, by eleven we were sitting around with our arms folded. Irene got into the habit of coming to the kitchen with me to help get lunch. We thought about it and decided on this: while I prepared the lunch, Irene would cook up dishes that could be eaten cold in the evening. We were happy with the arrangement because it was always such a bother to have to leave our bedrooms in the evening and start to cook. Now we made do with the table in Irene’s room and platters of cold supper.

  Since it left her more time for knitting, Irene was content. I was a little lost without my books, but so as not to inflict myself on my sister, I set about reordering papa’s stamp collection; that killed some time. We amused ourselves sufficiently, each with his own thing, almost always getting together in Irene’s bedroom, which was the more comfortable. Every once in a while, Irene might say:

  ‘Look at this pattern I just figured out, doesn’t it look like clover?’

  After a bit it was I, pushing a small square of paper in front of her so that she could see the excellence of some stamp or another from Eupen-et-Malmédy. We were fine, and little by little we stopped thinking. You can live without thinking.

  (Whenever Irene talked in her sleep, I woke up immediately and stayed awake. I never could get used to this voice from a statue or a parrot, a voice that came out of the dreams, not from a throat. Irene said that in my sleep I flailed about enormously and shook the blankets off. We had the living room between us, but at night you could hear everything in the house. We heard each other breathing, coughing, could even feel each other reaching for the light switch when, as happened frequently, neither of us could fall asleep.

  Aside from our nocturnal rumblings, everything was quiet in the house. During the day there were the household sounds, the metallic click of knitting needles, the rustle of stamp-album pages turning. The oak door was massive, I think I said that. In the kitchen or the bath, which adjoined the part that was taken over, we managed to talk loudly, or Irene sang lullabies. In a kitchen there’s always too much noise, the plates and glasses, for there to be interruptions from other sounds. We seldom allowed ourselves silence there, but when we went back to our rooms or to the living room, then the house grew quiet, half-lit, we ended by stepping around more slowly so as not to disturb one another. I think it was because of this that I woke up irremedially and at once when Irene began to talk in her sleep.)

  Except for the consequences, it’s nearly a matter of repeating the same scene over again. I was thirsty that night, and before we went to sleep, I told Irene that I was going to the kitchen for a glass of water. From the door of the bedroom (she was knitting) I heard the noise in the kitchen; if not the kitchen, then the bath, the passage off at that angle dulled the sound. Irene noticed how brusquely I had paused, and came up beside me without a word. We stood listening to the noises, growing more and more sure that they were on our side of the oak door, if not the kitchen then the bath, or in the hall itself at the turn, almost next to us.

  We didn’t wait to look at one another. I took Irene’s arm and forced her to run with me to the wrought-iron door, not waiting to look back. You could hear the noises, still muffled but louder, just behind us. I slammed the grating and we stopped in the vestibule. Now there was nothing to be heard.

  ‘They’ve taken over our section,’ Irene said. The knitting had reeled off from her hands and the yarn ran back toward the door and disappeared under it. When she saw that the balls of yarn were on the other side, she dropped the knitting without looking at it.

  ‘Did you have time to bring anything?’ I asked hopelessly.

  ‘No, nothing.’

  We had what we had on. I remembered fifteen thousand pesos in the wardrobe in my bedroom. Too late now.

  I still had my wrist watch on and saw that it was 11 p.m. I took Irene around the waist (I think she was crying) and that was how we went into the street. Before we left, I felt terrible; I locked the front door up tight and tossed the key down the sewer. It wouldn’t do to have some poor devil decide to go in and rob the house, at that hour and with the house taken over.

  Being Dust

  Santiago Dabove Argentinian author, born in Moron in Argentina in 1889; died in 1951. La muerta y su traje, published posthumously, is a collection of his tales of fantasy.

  Merciless cruelty of circumstance! the doctors who were tending to me had to administer, at my insistent request, my desperate pleas, several injections of morphine and other substances that would file down the claws used to torture me by the unrelenting disease: a cruel trigeminal neuralgia.

  I for my part took more poisons than Mithridates. The point was to dampen that species of voltaic battery or coil which tormented my trigeminal with its current of sharp, painful throbbing. But never let it be said that I have exhausted suffering, that nothing can exceed this pain; there will always be further suffering, further pain, further tears to endure. And don’t take my complaints and expression of bitterness here as anything other than a variation on these singularly harsh words: ‘There is no hope for the heart of man!’ I said my goodbyes to the doctors, taking with me a syringe for hypodermic injections, opium pills and the whole arsenal of my pharmacopoeia.

  I rode on horseback, as usual, across the forty kilometres I had often travelled between towns.

  Just opposite that dusty abandoned cemetery which gave me the impression of a double death, the one it sheltered and its own—it was collapsing into ruins, brick by brick, piece by piece—disaster struck. Right opposite that ruin I met my bane, just like Jacob when the angel touched his thigh in the mist and exhausted him, as it couldn’t actually defeat him. The hemiplegia, the paralysis which had been threatening me for a long time, knocked me off my horse. After I had fallen, the horse grazed for a while, and soon wandered away. I was left abandoned on that solitary route, where sometimes no human being passed by for several days. I did curse my fate; cursing had exhausted itself on my lips and no longer meant anything. Cursing
for me had been the equivalent of the expressions of gratitude to fate made by someone whose life is rich in gifts.

  As the ground on which I fell, on the side of the road, was hard, and as I might have to remain there for quite some time and I could hardly move, I devoted my energies to patiently digging the ground around my body with my pen-knife. The task turned out to be rather easy, because beneath the hard surface, the earth was spongy. I gradually buried myself in a sort of trench, which proved to be a tolerable bed, almost protected by the warm damp. The afternoon fled. My hope and my horse disappeared over the horizon. Night fell, dark and close. I had expected it like that, horrific and sticky with blackness, with the despair of worlds, with a moon and stars. Those first few black nights fear got the better of me. Leagues of fear, despair, memories! No, no, the memories come second! I’m not going to cry for myself, nor for . . . A fine persistent drizzle cried for me. At dawn the following day my body was stuck well into the earth. I devoted time to swallowing, enthusiastically and regularly, ‘specimens’—pill after pill of opium, which must have determined the ‘dream’ preceding ‘my death’.

  It was a strange waking dream and a death-life. My body felt heavier than lead at times; at other times I didn’t feel it at all, except for my head, which preserved its sensitivity.

  Several days, I think, went by in that state and the black pills kept slipping into my mouth and, without being swallowed, slid down, settling below to turn everything into blackness and into earth.

  My head felt and knew it belonged to an earthy body, inhabited by worms and beetles and criss-crossed with corridors frequented by ants. My body was feeling a certain warmth and a certain pleasure in being of mud and in becoming gradually hollower. That’s the way it was, and the extraordinary thing was that my very arms, which initially maintained a certain independence of movement, also adopted a horizontal position. Only my head seemed to remain intact, nourished by the mud just like a plant. But since there is no respite in any condition, it had to gnash in self-defence at the birds of prey which wanted to eat its eyes and the flesh from its face. Judging by the tingling sensation I have inside me, I think I must have an ants’ nest somewhere near my heart. I’m glad, but I feel impelled to walk, and you can’t be made of mud and walk. Everything has to come to me; I shall not go in search of the dawn or the sunset, of any sensation.

  A curious thing: the body is attacked by the gnawing forces of life and it is a hotchpotch in which no anatomist would distinguish anything other than mud, corridors and neat constructions of insects installing their home, and yet the brain preserves its intelligence.

  I realized that my head was receiving the powerful nourishment of the earth, but directly, just like plants. The sap moved slowly up and down, instead of the blood, which nervously drives the heart. But what happens now? Things change. My head was almost happy to become like a bulb, a potato, a tuber, and now it’s full of fear. The fear that one of those palaeontologists who spend their lives sniffing out death will discover it. Or that those political historians, the other funeral directors who turn up after unhumation, should notice the vegetalization of my head. But luckily they didn’t see me.

  . . . How sad! To be almost like the earth and still have hopes of moving, of loving.

  If I want to move, I find I’m stuck, solidified with the earth. I’m diffusing, soon I’m going to be defunct. What a strange plant my head is! It’s uniqueness cannot long remain unknown. Men discover everything, even a muddy two-cent coin.

  My head bent mechanically towards the pocket watch I had placed at my side when I fell. The lid which closed over the clockwork was open and a small string of ants went in and out. I would have liked to clean it and put it away, but in which vestige of my suit, if everything of mine had practically turned into earth?

  I felt that my transition to plant wasn’t progressing much, because I was tormented by a strong desire to smoke. Absurd ideas crossed my mind: I wanted to be a tobacco plant so that I wouldn’t need to smoke!

  . . . The imperative need to move was giving way to the need to be firm and nourished by a rich, protective earth.

  . . . At times I amuse myself watching the clouds float by with interest. How many shapes do they plan to assume before they no longer exist, mere masks of steam? Will they exhaust them all? Clouds amuse those who cannot do anything other than look at the sky, but, when they unsuccessfully repeat unto exhaustion their attempt to take on animal shapes, I feel so disappointed that I could watch impassively as a ploughshare came straight at my head .

  . . . I’m going to be a plant but I don’t feel it, because plants are aware of their ecstatic and selfish life. Their mode of amorous fulfilment and realization, through telegrams of pollen, cannot satisfy us like our close carnal love, but it is a matter of trying, and we’ll see what their voluptuousness is like.

  . . . But it is not easy to be content, and we would rub out what is written in the book of destiny if it hadn’t already happened to us.

  . . . How I’ve come to hate the term ‘family tree’: it reminds me too much of my tragic state of regression to a plant. I do not make an issue of dignity or privileges—the state of planthood is as honourable as animalhood—but, let’s be logical; why don’t they represent human ascendancies with a deer’s antlers? It would be more in tune with the reality and animality of the matter.

  . . . Alone in that desert, the days slowly passed over my sorrow and boredom. I estimated how long I’d been buried by the length of my beard. I noticed it was a bit swollen and, its horny nature just like nails and skin, it would fluff up like plant fibres. I consoled myself thinking that there are trees as expressive as an animal or human being. I remember seeing a poplar, a rope stretching from the sky to the earth. It was a leafy tree with short branches, very tall, prettier than a decorated mast. The wind, depending on its strength, drew from the foliage different expressions: a murmur, a rumour, almost a sound like a violin’s bow, which makes the strings vibrate with graded speed and intensity.

  . . . I heard a man’s footsteps, the soles of a walker perhaps, or, because he couldn’t afford the ticket to come this far, he has put something like a piston on his legs and steam pressure in his chest. He stopped as though he had suddenly braked in front of my bearded face. At first he was frightened and turned to flee; then, overcome by curiosity, he came back and, thinking perhaps of a crime, tried to dig me out with a pen-knife. I didn’t know how to speak to him, because my voice was by then half-silent because of the almost complete absence of lungs. As though in secret, I said to him, ‘Leave me alone, leave me alone! If you dig me out of the ground, as a man I will have nothing functional left and as a plant you will kill me. If you want to preserve my life and not merely be a policeman, don’t kill this mode of existence in which there is actually something pleasant, innocent and desirable.’

  The man didn’t hear me, no doubt accustomed to the great voices of the country, and tried to go on digging. Then I spat in his face. He took offence and hit me with the back of his hand. His simplicity as a peasant, quick to react, no doubt asserted itself over any inclination towards investigation or inquiry. But it seemed to me that a wave of blood was rising to my head, and my choleric eyes were challenging, like those of a fencer buried with his swords and the skilful edge which aim to hurt.

  The expression on the man’s face of a distressed and helpful good person warned me that he wasn’t of that chivalrous and duelling race. He seemed to want to move away without delving any deeper into the mystery . . . and indeed he went, twisting his neck back for a long time to keep on looking . . . But in all this there was something which made me shudder, something about myself.

  A common occurrence with many a man when he becomes angry, my face became flushed. You will have noticed that without a mirror you cannot see much more of your face than the side of your nose and a very small part of your cheek and lip, all very blurred, and only by closing one eye. I, who had closed my left eye as though for a pistol duel, could
glimpse on the right side in the images confused by being so close, in that cheek which had once been so fatigued by pain, I could glimpse, ah! the rising of a ‘green flush’. Would it be sap or blood? If it was the latter, would the chlorophyll of peripheral cells give it an illusory green appearance? I don’t know, but I think that each day I’m becoming less of a man.

  . . . Opposite that old cemetery I was becoming a solitary cactus on which idle youths would test their penknives. With those huge fleshy gloved hands that cacti have, I would pat their sweaty backs and would inhale with pleasure ‘their human smell’. Their smell? By that time, what with? All my senses were becoming duller in geometric progression.