Collected Stories

by Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by Norman Thomas di Giovanni)

  Commerce with captive women taken in the villages is prohibited on deck; permission to use violence against any woman must first be requested of the ship’s purser, and then carried out only in the ship’s hold. Violation of this ordinance will be punishable by death.

  Information extracted from prisoners affirms that the fare of these pirates consisted chiefly of ship biscuits, rats fattened on human flesh, and boiled rice, and that, on days of battle, crew members used to mix gunpowder with their liquor. With card games and loaded dice, with the metal square and bowl of fan-tan, with the little lamp and the pipe dreams of opium, they whiled away the time. Their favourite weapons were a pair of short swords, used one in each hand. Before seizing another ship, they sprinkled their cheekbones and bodies with an infusion of garlic water, which they considered a certain charm against shot. Each crewman traveled with his wife, but the captain sailed with a harem, which was five or six in number and which, in victory, was always replenished.

  Kia-king, the Young Emperor, Speaks

  Somewhere around the middle of 1809, there was made public an imperial decree, of which I transcribe the first and last parts. Its style was widely criticized. It ran:

  Men who are cursed and evil, men capable of profaning bread, men who pay no heed to the clamour of the tax collector or the orphan, men in whose undergarments are stitched the phoenix and the dragon, men who deny the great truths of printed books, men who allow their tears to run toward the North all these are disrupting the commerce of our rivers and the age-old intimacy of our seas. In unsound, unseaworthy craft, they are tossed by storms both night and day. Nor is their object one of benevolence: they are not and never were the true friends of the seafarer. Far from lending him their aid, they swoop down on him most viciously, inviting him to wrack and ruin, inviting him to death. In such wise do they violate the natural laws of the Universe that rivers overflow their banks, vast acreages are drowned, sons are pitted against fathers, and even the roots of rain and drought are altered . . .

  . . . In consequence, Admiral Kwo-lang, I leave to your hand the administration of punishment. Never forget that clemency is a prerogative of the throne and that it would be presumptuous of a subject to endeavour to assume such a privilege. Therefore, be merciless, be impartial, be obeyed, be victorious.

  The incidental reference to unseaworthy vessels was, of course, false. Its aim was to encourage Kwo-lang’s expedition. Some ninety days later, the forces of the widow Ching came face to face with those of the Middle Kingdom. Nearly a thousand ships joined battle, fighting from early morning until late evening. A mixed chorus of bells, drums, curses, gongs, and prophecies, along with the report of the great ordnance, accompanied the action. The emperor’s forces were sundered. Neither the proscribed clemency nor the recommended cruelty had occasion to be exercised. Kwo-lang observed a rite that our present-day military, in defeat, choose to ignore suicide.

  The Terrorized Riverbanks

  The proud widow’s six hundred war junks and forty thousand victorious pirates then sailed up the mouths of the Si-kiang, and to port and starboard they multiplied fires and loathsome revels and orphans. Entire villages were burned to the ground. In one of them alone, the number of prisoners passed a thousand. A hundred and twenty women who sought the confused refuge of neighbouring reedfields and paddies were betrayed by a crying baby and later sold into slavery in Macao. Although at some remove, the tears and bereavement wreaked by this depredation came to the attention of Kia-king, the Son of Heaven. Certain historians contend that this outcry pained him less than the disaster that befell his punitive expedition. The truth is that he organized a second expedition, awesome in banners, in sailors, in soldiers, in the engines of war, in provisions, in augurs, and in astrologers. The command this time fell upon one Ting-kwei. The fearful multitude of ships sailed into the delta of the Si-kiang, closing off passage to the pirate squadron. The widow fitted out for battle. She knew it would be difficult, even desperate; night after night and month after month of plundering and idleness had weakened her men. The opening of battle was delayed. Lazily, the sun rose and set upon the rippling reeds. Men and their weapons were waiting. Noons were heavy, afternoons endless.

  The Dragon and the Fox

  And yet, each evening, high, shiftless flocks of airy dragons rose from the ships of the imperial squadron and came gently to rest on the enemy decks and surrounding waters. They were lightweight constructions of rice paper and strips of reed, akin to comets, and their silvery or reddish sides repeated identical characters. The widow anxiously studied this regular stream of meteors and read in them the long and perplexing fable of a dragon which had always given protection to a fox, despite the fox’s long ingratitude and repeated transgressions. The moon grew slender in the sky, and each evening the paper and reed figures brought the same story, with almost imperceptible variants. The widow was distressed, and she sank deep into thought. When the moon was full in the sky and in the reddish water, the story seemed to reach its end.

  Nobody was able to predict whether limitless pardon or limitless punishment would descend upon the fox, but the inexorable end drew near. The widow came to an understanding. She threw her two short swords into the river, kneeled in the bottom of a small boat, and ordered herself rowed to the imperial flagship. It was dark; the sky was filled with dragons this time, yellow ones. On climbing aboard, the widow murmured a brief sentence. ‘The fox seeks the dragon’s wing,’ she said.

  The Apotheosis

  It is a matter of history that the fox received her pardon and devoted her lingering years to the opium trade. She also left off being the widow, assuming a name which in English means ‘Luster of Instruction.’

  From this period [wrote one Chinese chronicler lyrically], ships began to pass and repass in tranquility. All became quiet on the rivers and tranquil on the four seas. Men sold their weapons and bought oxen to plough their fields. They buried sacrifices, said prayers on the tops of hills, and rejoiced themselves by singing behind screens during the day-time.

  Monk Eastman,

  Purveyor of Iniquities

  Those of This America

  Standing out sharply against a background of blue walls or open sky, two hoodlums dressed in close-fitting suits of sober black and wearing thick-heeled shoes dance a deadly dance a ballet of matching knives until a carnation starts from the ear of one of them as a knife finds its mark in him, and he brings the unaccompanied dance to a close on the ground with his death. Satisfied, the other adjusts his high-crowned hat and spends his final years recounting the story of this clean duel. That, in sum and substance, is the history of our old-time Argentine underworld. The history of New York’s old underworld is both more dizzying and more clumsy.

  Those of the Other

  The history of the gangs of New York (revealed in 1928 by Herbert Asbury in a solid volume of four hundred octavo pages) contains all of the confusion and cruelty of the barbarian cosmogonies, and much of their giant-scale ineptitude cellars of old breweries honeycombed into Negro tenements; a ramshackle New York of three-storey structures; criminal gangs like the Swamp Angels, who rendezvoused in a labyrinth of sewers; criminal gangs like the Daybreak Boys, who recruited precocious murderers of ten and eleven; loners, like the bold and gigantic Plug Uglies, who earned the smirks of passersby with their enormous plug hats, stuffed with wool and worn pulled down over their ears as helmets, and their long shirttails, worn outside the trousers, that flapped in the Bowery breeze (but with a huge bludgeon in one hand and a pistol peeping out of a pocket); criminal gangs like the Dead Rabbits, who entered into battle under the emblem of a dead rabbit impaled on a pike; men like Dandy Johnny Dolan, famous for the oiled forelock he wore curled and plastered against his forehead, for his cane whose handle was carved in the likeness of a monkey, and for the copper device he invented and used on the thumb for gouging out an adversary’s eyes; men like Kit Burns, who for twenty-five cents would decapitate a live rat with a single bite; men
like Blind Danny Lyons, young and blond and with immense dead eyes, who pimped for three girls, all of whom proudly walked the streets for him; rows of houses showing red lanterns in the windows, like those run by seven sisters from a small New England village, who always turned their Christmas Eve proceeds over to charity; rat pits, where wharf rats were starved and sent against terriers; Chinese gambling dives; women like the repeatedly widowed Red Norah, the vaunted sweetheart of practically the entire Gopher gang; women like Lizzie the Dove, who donned widow’s weeds when Danny Lyons was executed for murder, and who was stabbed in the throat by Gentle Maggie during an argument over whose sorrow for the departed blind man was the greater; mob uprisings like the savage week of draft riots in 1863, when a hundred buildings were burned to the ground and the city was nearly taken over; teeming street fights in which a man went down as at sea, trampled to death; a thief and horse poisoner like Yoske Nigger. All these go to weave underworld New York’s chaotic history. And its most famous hero is Edward Delaney, alias William Delaney, alias Joseph Marvin, alias Joseph Morris, alias Monk Eastman boss of twelve hundred men.

  The Hero

  These shifts of identity (as distressing as a masquerade, in which one is not quite certain who is who) omit his real name presuming there is such a thing as a real name. The recorded fact is that he was born in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn as Edward Osterman, a name later Americanized to Eastman. Oddly enough, this stormy underworld character was Jewish. He was the son of the owner of a kosher restaurant, where men wearing rabbinical beards could safely partake of the bloodless and thrice-cleansed flesh of ritually slaughtered calves. At the age of nineteen, about 1892, his father set him up in business with a bird store. A fascination for animals, an interest in their small decisions and inscrutable innocence, turned into a lifelong hobby. Years afterwards, in a period of opulence, when he scornfully refused the Havana cigars of freckle-faced Tammany sachems or when he paid visits to the best houses of prostitution in that new invention, the automobile (which seemed the bastard offspring of a gondola), he started a second business, a front, that accommodated a hundred cats and more than four hundred pigeons none of which were for sale to anyone. He loved each one, and often he strolled through his neighbourhood with a happy cat under an arm, while several others trailed eagerly behind.

  He was a battered, colossal man. He had a short, bull neck; a barrel chest; long, scrappy arms; a broken nose; a face, although plentifully scarred, less striking than his frame; and legs bowed like a cowboy’s or a sailor’s. He could usually be found without a shirt or coat, but not without a derby hat several sizes too small perched on his bullet-shaped head. Mankind has conserved his memory. Physically, the conventional moving-picture gunman is a copy of him, not of the pudgy, epicene Capone. It is said of Louis Wolheim that Hollywood employed him because his features suggested those of the lamented Monk Eastman. Eastman used to strut about his underworld kingdom with a great blue pigeon on his shoulder, just like a bull with a cowbird on its rump.

  Back in the mid-nineties, public dance halls were a dime a dozen in the city of New York. Eastman was employed in one of them as a bouncer. The story is told that a dance-hall manager once refused to hire him, whereupon Monk demonstrated his capacity for the work by wiping the floor with the pair of giants who stood between him and the job. Single-handed, universally feared, he held the position until 1899. For each troublemaker he quelled, he cut a notch in his brutal bludgeon. One night, his attention drawn to a shining bald pate minding its own business over a bock beer, he laid its bearer out with a blow. ‘I needed one more notch to make fifty,’ he later explained.

  The Territory

  From 1899 on, Eastman was not only famous but, during elections, he was captain of an important ward. He also collected protection money from the houses of prostitution, gambling dives, streetwalkers, pickpockets, and burglars of his sordid domain. Tammany politicians hired him to stir up trouble; so did private individuals. Here are some of his prices:

  Ear chewed off . . . . $15

  Leg or arm broke . . $19

  Shot in leg. . . . . . . $25

  Stab . . . . . . . . . . . $25

  Doing the . . . . . . . $100

  big job

  Sometimes, to keep his hand in, Eastman personally carried out a commission.

  A question of boundaries (as subtle and thorny as any cramming the dockets of international law) brought Eastman into confrontation with Paul Kelly, the well-known chief of a rival gang. Bullets and rough-and-tumble fighting of the two gangs had set certain territorial limits. Eastman crossed these bounds alone one early morning and was assailed by five of Kelly’s men. With his flailing, apelike arms and blackjack, Monk knocked down three of the attackers, but he was ultimately shot twice in the stomach and left for dead. Eastman closed the hot wounds with thumb and index finger and staggered to Gouverneur Hospital. There, for several weeks, life, a high fever, and death vied for him, but his lips refused to name his would-be killer. When he left the hospital, the war was on, and, until the nineteenth of August, 1903 it flowered in one shoot-out after another.

  The Battle of Rivington Street

  A hundred heroes, each a bit different from his photograph fading in police files; a hundred heroes reeking of tobacco smoke and alcohol; a hundred heroes wearing straw boaters with gaily coloured bands; a hundred heroes afflicted, some more, some less, with shameful diseases, tooth decay, complaints of the respiratory tracts or kidneys; a hundred heroes as insignificant or splendid as those of Troy or Bull Run these hundred let loose this black feat of arms under the shadows of the arches of the Second Avenue elevated. The cause was the attempted raid by Kelly’s gunmen on a stuss game operated by a friend of Eastman’s on Rivington Street. One of the gunmen was killed, and the ensuing flurry of shots swelled into a battle of uncounted revolvers. Sheltered behind the pillars of the elevated structure, smooth-shaven men quietly blazed away at each other and became the focus of an awesome ring of rented automobiles loaded with eager reinforcements, each bearing a fistful of artillery.

  What did the protagonists of this battle feel? First (I believe), the brutal conviction that the senseless din of a hundred revolvers was going to cut them down at any moment; second (I believe), the no less mistaken certainty that if the first shots did not hit them they were invulnerable. What is without doubt, however, is that, under cover of the iron pillars and the night, they fought with a vengeance. Twice the police intervened, and twice they were driven off. At the first glimmer of dawn, the battle petered out as if it were obscene or ghostly. Under the great arches of the elevated were left seven critically wounded men, four corpses, and one dead pigeon.

  The Creakings

  The local politicians, in whose ranks Monk Eastman served, always publicly denied that such gangs existed, or else claimed that they were mere sporting clubs. The indiscreet battle of Rivington Street now alarmed them. They arranged a meeting between Eastman and Kelly in order to suggest to them the need for a truce. Kelly (knowing very well that Tammany Hall was more effective than any number of Colts when it came to obstructing police action) agreed at once; Eastman (with the pride of his great, brutish hulk) hungered for more blasting and further frays. He began to refuse, and the politicians had to threaten him with prison. In the end, the two famous gangsters came face to face in an unsavoury dive, each with a huge cigar between his teeth, a hand on his revolver, and his watchful thugs surrounding him. They arrived at a typically American decision: they would settle their dispute in the ring by squaring off with their fists. Kelly was an experienced boxer. The fight took place in a barn up in the Bronx, and it was an extravagant affair. A hundred and forty spectators looked on, among them mobsters with rakish derbies and their molls with enormous coiffures in which weapons were sometimes concealed.

  The pair fought for two hours and it ended in a draw. Before a week was out, the shooting started up again. Monk was arrested for the nth time. With great relief Tammany Hall wash
ed their hands of him; the judge prophesied for him, with complete accuracy, ten years in prison.

  Eastman vs Germany

  When the still puzzled Monk was released from Sing Sing, the twelve hundred members of his gang had broken up into warring factions. Unable to reorganize them, he took to operating on his own. On the eighth of September 1917, he was arrested for creating a disturbance in a public thoroughfare. The next day, deciding to take part in an even larger disturbance, he enlisted in the 106th Infantry of the New York National Guard. Within a few months, he was shipped overseas with his regiment.

  We know about various aspects of his campaign. We know that he violently disapproved of taking prisoners and that he once (with just his rifle butt) interfered with that deplorable practice. We know that he managed to slip out of the hospital three days after he had been wounded and make his way back to the front lines. We know that he distinguished himself in the fighting around Montfaucon. We know that he later held that a number of little dance halls around the Bowery were a lot tougher than the war in Europe.

  The Mysterious, Logical End

  On Christmas Day, 1920, Monk Eastman’s body was found at dawn on one of the downtown streets of New York. It had five bullet wounds in it. Happily unaware of death, an alley cat hovered around the corpse with a certain puzzlement.