The Book of Fantasy

by Jorge Luis Borges

  ‘My dear girl, we haven’t time,’ he said. ‘It’s waste of our priceless moments.’

  She persisted. ‘There’s something wrong about it all if we can’t talk to each other.’

  He was irritated. ‘Woman never seem to consider that a man can get all the talk he wants from other men. What’s wrong is our meeting in this unsatisfactory way. We ought to live together. It’s the only sane thing. I would, only I don’t want to break up Muriel’s home and make her miserable.’

  ‘I thought you said she wouldn’t care.’

  ‘My dear, she cares for her home and her position and the children. You forget the children.’

  Yes. She had forgotten the children. She had forgotten Muriel. She had left off thinking of Oscar as a man with a wife and children and a home.

  He had a plan. His mother-in-law was coming to stay with Muriel in October and he would get away. He would go to Paris, and Harriott should come to him there. He could say he went on business. No need to lie about it; he had business in Paris.

  He engaged rooms in an hotel in the rue de Rivoli. They spent two weeks there.

  For three days Oscar was madly in love with Harriott and Harriott with him. As she lay awake she would turn on the light and look at him as he slept at he side. Sleep made him beautiful and innocent; it laid a fine, smooth tissue over his coarseness; it made his mouth gentle; it entirely hid his eyes.

  In six days reaction had set in. At the end of the tenth day, Harriott, returning with Oscar from Montmartre, burst into a fit of crying. When questioned, she answered wildly that the Hotel Saint Pierre was too hideously ugly; it was getting on her nerves. Mercifully Oscar explained her state as fatigue following excitement. She tried hard to believe that she was miserable because her love was purer and more spiritual than Oscar’s; but all the time she knew perfectly well she had cried from pure boredom. She was in love with Oscar, and Oscar bored her. Oscar was in love with her, and she bored him. At close quarters, day in and day out, each was revealed to the other as an incredible bore.

  At the end of the second week she began to doubt whether she had ever been really in love with him.

  Her passion returned for a little while after they got back to London. Freed from the unnatural strain which Paris had put on them, they persuaded themselves that their romantic temperaments were better fitted to the old life of casual adventure.

  Then, gradually, the sense of danger began to wake in them. They lived in perpetual fear, face to face with all the chances of discovery. They tormented themselves and each other by imagining possibilities that they would never have considered in their first fine moments. It was as though they were beginning to ask themselves if it were, after all, worth while running such awful risks, for all they go out of it. Oscar still swore that if he had been free he would have married her. He pointed out that his intentions at any rate were regular. But she asked herself: Would I marry him? Marriage would be the Hotel Saint Pierre all over again, without any possibility of escape. But, if she wouldn’t marry him, was she in love with him? That was the test. Perhaps it was a good thing he wasn’t free. Then she told herself that these doubts were morbid, and that the question wouldn’t arise.

  One evening Oscar called to see her. He had come to tell her that Muriel was ill.

  ‘Seriously ill?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. It’s pleurisy. May turn to pneumonia. We shall know one way or another in the next few days.’

  A terrible fear seized upon Harriott. Muriel might die of her pleurisy; and if Muriel died, she would have to marry Oscar. He was looking at her queerly, as if he knew what she was thinking, and she could see that the same thought had occurred to him and that he was frightened too.

  Muriel got well again; but their danger had enlightened them. Muriel’s life was now inconceivably precious to them both; she stood between them and that permanent union, which they dreaded and yet would not have the courage to refuse.

  After enlightenment the rupture.

  It came from Oscar, one evening when he sat with her in her drawing-room.

  ‘Harriott,’ he said, ‘do you know I’m thinking seriously of settling down?’

  ‘How do you mean, settling down?’

  ‘Patching it up with Muriel, poor girl . . . Has it never occurred to you that this little affair of ours can’t go on forever?’

  ‘You don’t want it to go on?’

  ‘I don’t want to have any humbug about it. For God’s sake, let’s be straight. If it’s done, it’s done. Let’s end it decently.’

  ‘I see. You want to get rid of me.’

  ‘That’s a beastly way of putting it.’

  ‘Is there any way that isn’t beastly? The whole thing’s beastly. I should have thought you’d have stuck to it now you’ve made it what you wanted. When I haven’t an ideal, I haven’t a single illusion, when you’ve destroyed everything you didn’t want.’

  ‘What didn’t I want?’

  ‘The clean, beautiful part of it. The part I wanted.’

  ‘My part at least was real. It was cleaner and more beautiful than all that putrid stuff you wrapped it up in. You were a hypocrite, Harriott, and I wasn’t. You’re a hypocrite now if you say you weren’t happy with me.’

  ‘I was never really happy. Never for one moment. There was always something I missed. Something you didn’t give me. Perhaps you couldn’t.’

  ‘No. I wasn’t spiritual enough,’ he sneered.

  ‘You were not. And you made me what you were.’

  ‘Oh, I noticed that you were always very spiritual after you’d got what you wanted.’

  ‘What I wanted?’ she cried. ‘Oh, my God—’

  ‘If you ever knew what you wanted.’

  ‘What—I—wanted,’ she repeated, drawing out her bitterness.

  ‘Come,’ he said, ‘why not be honest? Face facts. I was awfully gone on you. You were awfully gone on me—once. We got tired of each other and it’s over. But at least you might own we had a good time while it lasted.’

  ‘A good time?’

  ‘Good enough for me.’

  ‘For you, because for you love only means one thing. Everything that’s high and noble in it you dragged down to that, till there’s nothing left for us but that. That’s what you made of love.’

  Twenty years passed.

  It was Oscar who died first, three years after the rupture. He did it suddenly one evening, falling down in a fit of apoplexy.

  His death was an immense relief to Harriott. Perfect security had been impossible as long as he was alive. But now there wasn’t a living soul who knew her secret.

  Still, in the first moment of shock Harriott told herself that Oscar dead would be nearer to her than ever. She forgot how little she had wanted him to be near her, alive. And long before the twenty years had passed she had contrived to persuade herself that he had never been near to her at all. It was incredible that she had ever known such a person as Oscar Wade. As for their affair, she couldn’t think of Harriott Leigh as the sort of woman to whom such a thing could happen. Schnebler’s and the Hotel Saint Pierre ceased to figure among prominent images of her past. Her memories, if she had allowed herself to remember, would have clashed disagreeably with the reputation for sanctity which she had now acquired.

  For Harriott at fifty-two was the friend and helper of the Reverend Clement Farmer, Vicar of St. Mary the Virgin’s, Maida Vale. She worked as a deaconess in his parish, wearing the uniform of a deaconess, the semi-religious gown, the cloak, the bonnet and veil, the cross and rosary, the holy smile. She was also secretary to the Maida Vale and Kilburn Home for Fallen Girls.

  Her moments of excitement came when Clement Farmer, the lean, austere likeness of Stephen Philpotts, in his cassock and lace-bordered surplice, issued from the vestry, when he mounted the pulpit, when he stood before the altar rails and lifted up his arms in the Benediction; her moments of ecstasy when she received the Sacrament from his hands. And she had moments of calm happiness when
his study door closed on their communion. All these moments were saturated with a solemn holiness.

  And they were insignificant compared with the moment of her dying.

  She lay dozing in her white bed under the black crucifix with the ivory Christ. The basins and medicine bottles had been cleared from the table by her pillow; it was spread for the last rites. The priest moved quietly about the room, arranging the candles, the Prayer Book and the Holy Sacrament. Then he drew a chair to her bedside and watched with her, waiting for her to come up out of her doze.

  She woke suddenly. Her eyes were fixed upon him. She had a flash of lucidity. She was dying, and her dying made her supremely important to Clement Farmer.

  ‘Are you ready?’ he asked.

  ‘Not yet. I think I’m afraid. Make me not afraid.’

  He rose and lit the two candles on the altar. He took down the crucifix from the wall and stood it against the foot-rail of the bed.

  She sighed. That was not what she had wanted.

  ‘You will not be afraid now,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not afraid of the hereafter. I suppose you get used to it. Only it may be terrible just at first.’

  ‘Our first state will depend very much on what we are thinking of at our last hour.’

  ‘There’ll be my—confession,’ she said.

  ‘And after it you will receive the Sacrament. Then you will have your mind fixed firmly upon God and your Redeemer . . . Do you feel able to make your confession now, Sister? Everything is ready.’

  Her mind went back over her past and found Oscar Wade there. She wondered: Should she confess to him about Oscar Wade? One moment she thought it was possible; the next she knew that she couldn’t. She could not. It wasn’t necessary. For twenty years he had not been part of her life. No. She wouldn’t confess about Oscar Wade. She had been guilty of other sins.

  She made a careful selection.

  ‘I have cared too much for the beauty of this world . . . I have failed in charity to my poor girls. Because of my intense repugnance to their sin . . . I have thought, often, about—people I love, when I should have been thinking about God.’

  After that she received the Sacrament.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘there is nothing to be afraid of.’

  ‘I won’t be afraid if—if you would hold my hand.’

  He held it. And she lay still a long time, with her eyes shut. Then he heard her murmuring something. He stopped close.

  ‘This—is—dying. I thought it would be horrible. And it’s bliss . . . Bliss.’

  The priest’s hand slackened, as if at the bidding of some wonder. She gave a weak cry.

  ‘Oh—don’t let me go.’

  His grasp tightened.

  ‘Try,’ he said, ‘to think about God. Keep on looking at the crucifix.’

  ‘If I look,’ she whispered, ‘you won’t let go my hand?’

  ‘I will not let you go.’

  He held it till it was wrenched from him in the last agony.

  She lingered for some hours in the room where these things had happened.

  Its aspects was familiar and yet unfamiliar, and slightly repugnant to her. The altar, the crucifix, the lighted candles, suggested some tremendous and awful experience the details of which she was not able to recall. She seemed to remember that they had been connected in some way with the sheeted body on the bed; but the nature of the connection was not clear; and she did not associate the dead body with herself. When the nurse came in and laid it out, she saw that it was the body of a middle-aged woman. Her own living body was that of a young woman of about thirty-two.

  Her mind had no past and no future, no sharp-edged, coherent memories, and no idea of anything to be done next.

  Then, suddenly, the room began to come apart before her eyes, to split into shafts of floor and furniture and ceiling that shifted and were thrown by their commotion into different planes. They leaned slanting at every possible angle; they crossed and overlaid each other with a transparent mingling of dislocated perspectives, like reflections fallen on an interior seen behind glass.

  The bed and the sheeted body slid away somewhere out of sight. She was standing by the door that still remained in position.

  She opened it and found herself in the street, outside a building of yellowish-grey brick and freestone, with a tall slated spire. Her mind came together with a palpable click of recognition. This object was the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Maida Vale. She could hear the droning of the organ. She opened the door and slipped in.

  She had gone back into a definite space and time, and recovered a certain limited section of coherent memory. She remembered the rows of pitch-pine benches, with their Gothic peaks and mouldings; the stone-coloured walls and pillars with their chocolate stencilling; the hanging rings of lights along the aisles of the nave; the high altar with its lighted candles, and the polished brass cross, twinkling. These things were somehow permanent and real, adjusted to the image that now took possession of her.

  She knew what she had come there for. The service was over. The choir had gone from the chancel; the sacristan moved before the altar, putting out the candles. She walked up the middle aisle to a seat that she knew under the pulpit. She knelt down and covered her face with her hands. Peeping sideways through her fingers, she could see the door of the vestry on her left at the end of the north aisle. She watched it steadily.

  Up in the organ loft the organist drew out the Recessional, slowly and softly, to its end in the two solemn, vibrating chords.

  The vestry door opened and Clement Farmer came out, dressed in his black cassock. He passed before her, close, close outside the bench where she knelt. He paused at the opening. He was waiting for her. There was something he had to say.

  She stood up and went towards him. He still waited. He didn’t move to make way for her. She came close, closer than she had ever come to him, so close that his features grew indistinct. She bent her head back, peering short-sightedly, and found herself looking into Oscar Wade’s face.

  He stood still, horribly still, and close, barring her passage.

  She drew back; his heaving shoulders followed her. He leaned forward, covering her with his eyes. She opened her mouth to scream and no sound came.

  She was afraid to move lest he should move with her. The heaving of his shoulders terrified her.

  One by one the lights in the side aisles were going out. The lights in the middle aisle would go next. They had gone. If she didn’t get away she would be shut up with him there, in the appalling darkness.

  She turned and moved towards the north aisle, groping, steadying herself by the book ledge.

  When she looked back, Oscar Wade was not there.

  Then she remembered that Oscar Wade was dead. Therefore, what she had seen was not Oscar; it was his ghost. He was dead; dead seventeen years ago. She was safe from him for ever.

  When she came out on the steps of the church she saw that the road it stood in had changed. It was not the road she remembered. The pavement on this side was raised slightly and covered in. It ran under a succession of arches. It was a long gallery walled with glittering shop windows on one side; on the other a line of tall grey columns divided it from the street.

  She was going along the arcades of the rue de Rivoli. Ahead of her she could see the edge of an immense grey pillar jutting out. That was the porch of the Hotel Saint Pierre. The revolving glass doors swung forward to receive her; she crossed the grey, sultry vestibule under the pillared arches. She knew it. She knew the porter’s shining, wine-coloured, mahogany pen on her left, and the shining, wine-coloured, mahogany barrier of the clerk’s bureau on her night; she made straight for the great grey carpeted staircase; she climbed the endless flights that turned round and round the caged-in shaft of the well, past the latticed doors of the lift, and came up on to a landing that she knew, and into the long, ash-grey, foreign corridor lit by a dull window at one end.

  It was there that the horror of the place came on he
r. She had no longer any memory of St. Mary’s Church, so that she was unaware of her backward course through time. All space and time were here.

  She remembered she had to go to the left, the left.

  But there was something there; where the corridor turned by the window; at the end of all the corridors. If she went the other way she would escape it.

  The corridor stopped there. A blank wall. She was driven back past the stairhead to the left.

  At the corner, by the window, she turned down another long ash-grey corridor on her right, and to the right again where the night-light spluttered on the table-flap at the turn.

  This third corridor was dark and secret and depraved. She knew the soiled walls, and the warped door at the end. There was a sharp-pointed streak of light at the top. She could see the number on it now, 107.

  Something had happened there. If she went in it would happen again.

  Oscar Wade was in the room waiting for her behind the closed door. She felt him moving about in there. She leaned forward, her ear to the keyhole, and listened. She could hear the measured, deliberate, thoughtful footsteps. They were coming from the bed to the door.

  She turned and ran; her knees gave way under her; she sank and ran on, down the long grey corridors and the stairs, quick and blind, a hunted beast seeking for cover, hearing his feet coming after her.

  The revolving doors caught her and pushed her out into the street.

  The strange quality of her state was this, that it had no time. She remembered dimly that there had once been a thing called time; but she had forgotten altogether what it was like. She was aware of things happening and about to happen; she fixed them by the place they occupied, and measured their duration by the space she went through.

  So now she thought: If I could only go back and get to the place where it hadn’t happened.