The Book of Fantasy

by Jorge Luis Borges

  We continued like a buzzing insect between green, yellow and purple sheets of basalt and granite along a dangerous road. Balsa asked me, ‘Is your family in Buenos Aires?’

  ‘I don’t have a family.’

  ‘Ah, I understand,’ he replied, because for them there was always the possibility of not understanding, not even that.

  ‘And do you intend staying here long?’ (Balsocci).

  ‘I don’t know; the contract mentioned the construction of unspecified monumental hotels, which naturally could go on for an indefinite period.’

  ‘As long as the height doesn’t bother you . . .’ (Balsocci, hopeful).

  ‘You don’t even notice 2,400 metres, specially not if you’re young.’ (Balsa, equally hopeful).

  The luxurious skies were changing into blankets of clouds squashed in between the hills: soon it was raining amongst rainbows, then the rain turned into snow. We stopped for a white coffee at the house of a 50-year-old Slav friend of theirs, married to a 20-year-old Argentine woman, in charge of the maintenance of the railway and swapping the rails around, those futile jobs of the poor. This painfully thin woman seemed to suffer merely from living, but filled me with such desire that I had to step outside in order not to stare at her like a monkey. I sank my feet into the fresh snow; I took off my gloves and squeezed a ball, tested it with my lips, bit it with my teeth, tore pieces of bark off the branches, urinated, slipped and fell on a frozen ditch.

  When we left, the snow was feathering the car windows and the damp penetrated my boots. At times we went alongside the river and at others we would catch sight of it at the bottom of a precipice.

  ‘Those who fall into the water are dragged far away, to be found naked and skinned’ (Balsa).

  ‘Why? (Me).

  ‘Because the water beats them against the rocks’ (Balsa).

  ‘The water rushes by at seven metres per second. A few days ago a foreman, Antonio, fell from the footbridge; his wife is in Mendoza waiting for his body and we can’t find him’ (Balsocci).

  ‘True, we should have a look now and then and see if we can see him’ (Balsa). At the bottom of the valley a simple picture unveiled itself in the sunshine On one side, Uspallata with poplars and leafless willows, on the other the road which continued upwards along a red gorge between solitary rivers.

  Those rivers of the Andes, rapid, clearer than air, with their round pebbles, green, purple, yellow and marbled, always washed clean, with neither bugs nor nymphs amongst ageless blocks which some strange thing brought and left behind—modern rivers, because they have no history. Sometimes I listen to them standing on a rock, under the invisible sky, cloudless and birdless; amongst springs, hearing torrents, thinking of nothing.

  They have the names of colours, Blanco, Colorado and Negro; some appear in front of you, some jump out at you (they say there are guanacos, but so far I haven’t seen any); they all come to the valley and in the summer they swell, changing places and colours, carrying incredible quantities of mud.

  We pass a geologically interesting yellow alluvial elevation called Paramillo de Juan Pobre and reach the site at lunch-time. It’s not exactly in Punta de Vacas but some two kilometres before; this annoyed me because I thought that in winter the snow might leave me stranded without a woman, assuming I fancied any of them. Later I calmed down as I understood that in any case I could always walk there, even though the moraines fell—these are cones of mineral detritus which periodically slide down, covering roads and railways.

  The building occupies a sort of platform a good way away from the landslides. The ground is sloping, bordered on one side by a stream which after forming a respectable seven-metre waterfall, falls pathetically into the valley like a trickle from a tap. In this place anything that didn’t get here on wheels is basalt, slate or arum and similar weeds. A hill like a red saw or the roof of a church, or rather that of St Pancras Station in London, closes the other side of the gorge; the sky is so narrow here that the sun appears at nine thirty and sets at four thirty, quickly, as though embarrassed by the cold and wind which will follow.

  The wind! How will the rich women of Buenos Aires manage to live here, always so careful with their hairdos, with these winds which make rocks roll as though they were nothing? I can just hear them saying what a headache it gives them, and that in some way encourages me to finish the first hotel soon and develop a kind of simple window which once opened cannot be closed. In a few days’ time we shall be opening the temporary section, if that pain Enrique doesn’t turn up.

  After lunch the two engineers showed me the plans and the site. They were very pleased that no architect had been involved, and had commissioned the decoration of the building from a marble-cutter in Mendoza with whom there is a disagreement over a batch of a hundred and twenty-eight crosses destined for the bedrooms, whose size is not stipulated in any of the specifications. The crosses sent are in black granite and one metre high; I, who had thought of them, insist on putting them there, but Balsocci fears them. The truth is I went over the top, but so far, poor things, they have let themselves be horribly manipulated and, not counting the underaged girl at the post-office and this chronicle, I was finding it difficult to keep myself amused: I managed to insert the inner tube of a football into one of the main concrete columns in the staff annexe when they were filling it, but when the shuttering was removed, you could see where the inner tube had rested against the wood; they had to inject cement into the gap, and the incident has become a confused legend which periodically occasions the dismissal of someone on the staff. The ball belonged to Balsocci.

  We went back to the office and my colleagues tackled the secret part of my initiation. I had no need to pretend any curiosity since I was interested in hearing them talk about it.

  II

  BALSOCCI. Haven’t you noticed anything strange lately in Buenos Aires?

  ME. No, nothing.

  BALSA. Let’s not beat about the bush (as though he suddenly decided to delve amongst the branches of a leafy skull). Have you never heard of the donguys?

  ME. No. What are they?

  BALSA. You must have seen in the underground from Constitución to Boedo that the train doesn’t reach Boedo station because it’s unfinished, it stops at a temporary station with wooden flooring. The tunnel continues and where the digging was interrupted, the hole has been boarded up.

  BALSOCCI. The donguys appeared through that hole.

  ME. What are they?

  BALSA. I’ll tell you . . .

  BALSOCCI. They say it is the animal destined to replace man on Earth.

  BALSA. Let me explain. There are certain leaflets, whose circulation has been banned, which analyse the opinion of foreign and Argentine experts. I’ve read them. They say that during different eras, different animals predominated in the world, for whatever reason. Now man predominates because he has a highly developed nervous system which allows him to impose himself over the rest. But this new animal called donguy . . .

  BALSOCCI. They call it donguy because it was first studied by a French biologist, Donneguy (he writes it down and shows it to me) and in England they called it the Donneguy Pig, but everyone calls it donguy.

  ME. Is it a pig?

  BALSA. It looks like a semi-transparent hog.

  ME. And what does the donguy do?

  BALSA. Its digestive system is so advanced that these animals can eat anything, even earth, iron, cement, jellyfish, whatever, they swallow everything in sight. What a nasty creature!

  BALSOCCI. They’re blind, deaf, live in the dark, a sort of worm like a transparent hog.

  ME. Do they reproduce?

  BALSA. Like flies. Through shoots, just think.

  ME. And they’re from Boedo?

  BALSOCCI. That’s where they started, but then they also started in other stations, especially those with dead-end tunnels or underground depots; Constitución is riddled with them, in Palermo there are loads of them in the tunnel which was begun for the extension to Belgrano.
But afterwards they started in the other lines, they must have dug a tunnel, the Chacarita, Primera junta lines. You should see the Plaza Once tunnel.

  BALSA. And abroad! Wherever there was a tunnel, it became riddled with donguys. In London they were even laughing, apparently, because they have so many miles of tunnels; in Paris, in New York, in Madrid. As though they spread seeds.

  BALSOCCI. They weren’t allowing ships arriving from an infected port to dock there, they were afraid they’d be bringing donguys in the hold. But that didn’t save them, they’re even better off than we are.

  BALSA. In our country they try not to scare people, that’s why they never say anything, it’s a secret told only to the professionals, and also to a few non-professionals.

  BALSOCCI. They must be killed, but who can kill them? If they’re given poison they may eat it or not, either way, but it does nothing to them, they eat it quite happily just like any other mineral. If they’re gassed, the bastards block the tunnels and escape by another route. They dig tunnels everywhere, you cannot attack them directly. You can’t flood them or demolish the tunnels because the city’s foundations might subside. Needless to say, they wander about the basement and sewers as though they owned them . . .

  BALSA. You must have heard of those buildings collapsing these last few months. The Lanús depots, for instance—that was their work. They want to dominate man.

  BALSOCCI. Oh! man isn’t dominated that easily, nobody can dominate him, but if they eat him . . .

  ME. They eat him?

  BALSOCCI. And how! Five donguys can eat a person in a minute, everything, bones, clothes, shoes, teeth, even his identity card, if you’ll forgive the exaggeration.

  BALSA. They like them. It’s their favourite food, most unfortunate.

  ME. Are there any proven cases?

  BALSOCCI. Cases? Ha, ha. In a Welsh coal-mine they ate 550 miners in one night; they blocked their exit.

  BALSA. In the capital, they ate a team of eight workmen who were repairing the railway between Loria and Medrano. They closed in on them.

  BALSOCCI. My suggestion is that we infect them with some disease.

  BALSA. So far, there’s no solution. I don’t see how they can inoculate a disease into a jellyfish.

  BALSOCCI. Those wise men! I suppose the inventor of the hydrogen bomb against us could also invent something, a few wretched little blind pigs. The Russians, for instance, who are so intelligent.

  BALSA. Yes, do you know what the Russians are doing? Trying to create a light-resistant strain of donguy.

  BALSOCCI. Their problem.

  BALSA. Yes, theirs. But they don’t matter. We would disappear. It can’t be true. It must be a rumour like so many others. I don’t believe a word of what I’ve just told you.

  BALSOCCI. First we thought of solving the problem by constructing buildings on piles, but on one hand there’s the cost, and on the other they can always demolish them from below.

  BALSA. That’s why we build our monumental hotels here. I bet they can’t dig under the Andes! And those who are in the know are dying to come here. We’ll see how long they last.

  BALSOCCI. They could also dig under the rocks, but they’d take ages; and meanwhile I suppose somebody will do something.

  BALSA. Don’t breathe a word of this. Anyway, you’ve no family in Buenos Aires. That’s why we limit excavations for the foundations to a minimum and none of the planned hotels have basements or a top floor.

  III

  The air in Buenos Aires has a special colloidal quality for transmitting false rumours intact. In other places, the atmosphere deforms what it hears, but by the river lies are cleanly transmitted. In his days of extroversion, every human being can make up specific rumours without the need to proclaim them on a corner in order for them to come back unchanged a week later.

  That’s why when I heard about the donguys two and a half years ago I consigned them to the level of flying saucers, but a friend with varied interests who had just come from Europe and had it on good authority confirmed the news. Right from the first I found them charming and looked forward to a profitable association.

  At the time my interest in Virginia, a sales assistant in a silk shop, was in parabolic decline, and my next interest in a black woman called Colette was growing. My detachment from Virginia took the form of nights in Lezama Park, although her stupidity was provoking an unseemly prolongation of the procedure.

  One of those nights when I was suffering most at witnessing suffering, we were caressing on the twin steps over some store in the park where the gardeners keep their tools. The door to one of these storerooms was open; in the dark void I suddenly saw eight or ten nervous donguys which didn’t dare come out because of a hint of lousy light. They were the first I’d seen; I approached with Virginia and showed them to her. Virginia was wearing a light-coloured skirt with a pattern of large pots of chrysanthemums: I remember it because she fainted in my arms with fright and luckily stopped crying that night for the first time. I took her unconscious to the open door and threw her in.

  The donguy’s mouth is a cylinder lined with horn-like teeth, and shredding in a helical motion. I watched with natural curiosity; in the dark I could make out the chrysanthemum skirt and on it the epileptic movement of the huge masticating slugs. I went home disgusted but happy; I was singing as I left the park.

  That deserted, damp park with broken statues and a thousand modern vulgarities for the ignorami, with flowers like stars and only one good fountain, almost a South American park: how many liaisons of people who call plumbago jasmine has it seen die away under its dusty palm trees.

  There I got rid of Colette, of a Polish woman who lent me the money for my motorbike, an untrustworthy minor, and finally Rosa, putting them to sleep with a special sweet. But Rosa at one point excited me so much that I was reckless enough to give her my telephone number, and although she promised to destroy the scrap of paper and learn it by heart, her brother once saw her call me and saw the number she was dialing, such that soon after her disappearance Enrique turned up and started pestering me. That’s why I accepted this job, temporarily giving up all enjoyment like the prehistoric kings who had to fast for forty days in the mountains.

  I find distraction from this vow of chastity in my own way, solving hieroglyphs and preparing things for Enrique. For instance, when I arrived, the footbridge over the river Mendoza was nothing but one of those scattered by the deluge in the thirties, which twisted the bridges, and a cable along the side to hold on to. A certain Antonio fell from there, and on that pretext I had the cable removed and replaced by a long pipe hooked onto a pole at each end. Now it’s easier to hold on to when you cross and, to unhook the pipe when somebody else is crossing.

  Other distractions might be setting fire with a match to the bushes surrounding the workmen’s tents when it’s cold, because they are so resinous that they burn on their own. Once I organized a one-person picnic which consisted of always going up and up with several ham, egg and lettuce sandwiches, but I got so fed up with climbing that I turned back at midday. That morning I saw inexplicably dirty glaciers and on the boulders above found black flowers, the first I’ve seen. As there was no earth, only sharp, loose stones, I was interested in seeing the roots; the flower measured some five centimetres, but clearing the stones I uncovered some two metres of soft stem which disappeared into the rubble like a smooth black string; I thought it would continue for another hundred metres and I found it rather disgusting.

  Another time I saw a black sky over fluorescent snow which absorbed all the light of the moon; it looked like a negative of the world and was worth seeing.

  Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime

  A Study of Duty

  Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Irish-born poet, dramatist and writer of stories and fables, who enjoyed brilliant success with plays like Lady Windermere’s Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest. A homosexual scandal wrecked his life, but produced masterpieces in The Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profund
is.

  I

  It was Lady Windermere’s last reception before Easter, and Bentinck House was even more crowded than usual. Six Cabinet Ministers had come on from the Speaker’s Levée in their stars and ribands, all the pretty women wore their smartest dresses, and at the end of the picture-gallery stood the Princess Sophia of Carlsrühe, a heavy Tartar-looking lady, with tiny black eyes and wonderful emeralds, talking bad French at the top of her voice, and laughing immoderately at everything that was said to her. It was certainly a wonderful medley of people. Gorgeous peeresses chatted affably to violent Radicals, popular preachers brushed coat-tails with eminent sceptics, a perfect bevy of bishops kept following a stout prima-donna from room to room, on the staircase stood several Royal Academicians, disguised as artists, and it was said that at one time the supper-room was absolutely crammed with geniuses. In fact, it was one of Lady Windermere’s best nights, and the Princess stayed till nearly half-past eleven.

  As soon as she had gone, Lady Windermere returned to the picture-gallery, where a celebrated political economist was solemnly explaining the scientific theory of music to an indignant virtuoso from Hungary, and began to talk to the Duchess of Paisley. She looked wonderfully beautiful with her grand ivory throat, her large blue forget-me-not eyes, and her heavy coils of golden hair. Or pur they were—not that pale straw colour that nowadays usurps the gracious name of gold, but such gold as is woven into sunbeams or hidden in strange amber; and they gave to her face something of the frame of a saint, with not a little of the fascination of a sinner. She was a curious psychological study. Early in life she had discovered the important truth that nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion; and by a series of reckless escapades, half of them quite harmless, she had acquired all the privileges of a personality. She had more than once changed her husband; indeed, Debrett credits her with three marriages; but as she had never changed her lover, the world had long ago ceased to talk scandal about her. She was now forty years of age, childless, and with that inordinate passion for pleasure which is the secret of remaining young.