Collected Stories

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

  The Disinterested Killer

  Bill Harrigan

  An image of the desert wilds of Arizona, first and foremost, an image of the desert wilds of Arizona and New Mexico a country famous for its silver and gold camps, a country of breathtaking open spaces, a country of monumental mesas and soft colours, a country of bleached skeletons picked clean by buzzards. Over this whole country, another image that of Billy the Kid, the hard rider firm on his horse, the young man with the relentless six-shooters, sending out invisible bullets which (like magic) kill at a distance.

  The desert veined with precious metals, arid and blinding-bright. The near child who on dying at the age of twenty-one owed to the justice of grown men twenty-one deaths ‘not counting Mexicans.’

  The Larval Stage

  Along about 1859, the man who would become known to terror and glory as Billy the Kid was born in a cellar room of a New York City tenement. It is said that he was spawned by a tired-out Irish womb but was brought up among Negroes. In this tumult of lowly smells and woolly heads, he enjoyed a superiority that stemmed from having freckles and a mop of red hair. He took pride in being white; he was also scrawny, wild, and coarse. At the age of twelve, he fought in the gang of the Swamp Angels, that branch of divinities who operated among the neighbourhood sewers. On nights redolent of burnt fog, they would clamber out of that foul-smelling labyrinth, trail some German sailor, do him in with a knock on the head, strip him to his underwear, and afterward sneak back to the filth of their starting place. Their leader was a grey-haired Negro, Gas House Jonas, who was also celebrated as a poisoner of horses.

  Sometimes, from the upper window of a waterfront dive, a woman would dump a bucket of ashes upon the head of a prospective victim. As he gasped and choked, Swamp Angels would swarm him, rush him into a cellar, and plunder him.

  Such were the apprentice years of Billy Harrigan, the future Billy the Kid. Nor did he scorn the offerings of Bowery playhouses, enjoying in particular (perhaps without an inkling that they were signs and symbols of his destiny) cowboy melodramas.

  Go West!

  If the jammed Bowery theatres (whose top-gallery riffraff shouted ‘Hoist that rag!’ when the curtain failed to rise promptly on schedule) abounded in these blood and thunder productions, the simple explanation is that America was then experiencing the lure of the Far West. Beyond the sunset lay the goldfields of Nevada and California. Beyond the sunset were the redwoods, going down before the axe; the buffalo’s huge Babylonian face; Brigham Young’s beaver hat and plural bed; the red man’s ceremonies and his rampages; the clear air of the deserts; endless-stretching range land; and the earth itself, whose nearness quickens the heart like the nearness of the sea. The West beckoned. A slow, steady rumour populated those years that of thousands of Americans taking possession of the West. On that march, around 1872, was Bill Harrigan, treacherous as a bull rattler, in flight from a rectangular cell.

  The Demolition of a Mexican

  History (which, like certain film directors, proceeds by a series of abrupt images) now puts forward the image of a danger-filled saloon, located as if on the high seas out in the heart of the all-powerful desert. The time, a blustery night of the year 1873; the place, the Staked Plains of New Mexico. All around, the land is almost uncannily flat and bare, but the sky, with its storm-piled clouds and moon, is full of fissured cavities and mountains. There are a cow’s skull, the howl and the eyes of coyotes in the shadows, trim horses, and from the saloon an elongated patch of light. Inside, leaning over the bar, a group of strapping but tired men drink a liquor that warms them for a fight; at the same time, they make a great show of large silver coins bearing a serpent and an eagle. A drunk croons to himself, poker-faced. Among the men are several who speak a language with many s’s, which must be Spanish, for those who speak it are looked down on. Bill Harrigan, the red-topped tenement rat, stands among the drinkers. He has downed a couple of aguardientes and thinks of asking for one more, maybe because he hasn’t a cent left. He is somewhat overwhelmed by these men of the desert. He sees them as imposing, boisterous, happy, and hatefully wise in the handling of wild cattle and big horses. All at once there is dead silence, ignored only by the voice of the drunk, singing out of tune. Someone has come in a big, burly Mexican, with the face of an old Indian squaw. He is endowed with an immense sombrero and with a pair of six-guns at his side. In awkward English, he wishes a good evening to all the gringo sons of bitches who are drinking. Nobody takes up the challenge. Bill asks who he is, and they whisper to him, in fear, that the Dago that is, the Diego is Belisario Villagrán, from Chihuahua. At once, there is a resounding blast. Sheltered by that wall of tall men, Bill has fired at the intruder. The glass drops from Villagrán’s hand; then the man himself drops. He does not need another bullet. Without deigning to glance at the showy dead man, Bill picks up his end of the conversation. ‘Is that so?’ he drawled. ‘Well, I’m Billy the Kid, from New York.’ The drunk goes on singing, unheeded. One may easily guess the apotheosis. Bill gives out handshakes all around and accepts praises, cheers, and whiskies. Someone notices that there are no notches on the handle of his revolver and offers to cut one to stand for Villagrán’s death. Billy the Kid keeps this someone’s razor, though he says that ‘ It’s hardly worthwhile noting down Mexicans.’ This, perhaps, is not quite enough. That night, Bill lays out his blanket beside the corpse and with great show sleeps till daybreak.

  Deaths for Deaths’ Sake

  Out of that lucky blast (at the age of fourteen), Billy the Kid the hero was born, and the furtive Bill Harrigan died. The boy of the sewer and the knock on the head rose to become a man of the frontier. He made a horseman of himself, learning to ride straight in the saddle Wyoming or Texas-style and not with his body thrown back, the way they rode in Oregon and California. He never completely matched his legend, but he kept getting closer and closer to it. Something of the New York hoodlum lived on in the cowboy; he transferred to Mexicans the hate that had previously been inspired in him by Negroes, but the last words he ever spoke were (swear) words in Spanish. He learned the art of the cowpuncher’s maverick life. He learned another, more difficult art how to lead men. Both helped to make him a good cattle rustler. From time to time, Old Mexico’s guitars and whorehouses pulled on him.

  With the haunting lucidity of insomnia, he organized populous orgies that often lasted four days and four nights. In the end, glutted, he settled accounts with bullets. While his trigger finger was unfailing, he was the most feared man (and perhaps the most anonymous and most lonely) of that whole frontier. Pat Garrett, his friend, the sheriff who later killed him, once told him, ‘I’ve had a lot of practice with the rifle shooting buffalo.’

  ‘I’ve had plenty with the six-shooter,’ Billy replied modestly. ‘Shooting tin cans and men.’

  The details can never be recovered, but it is known that he was credited with up to twenty-one killings—’not counting Mexicans.’ For seven desperate years, he practiced the extravagance of utter recklessness.

  The night of the twenty-fifth of July 1880, Billy the Kid came galloping on his piebald down the main, or only, street of Fort Sumner. The heat was oppressive and the lamps had not been lighted; Sheriff Garrett, seated on a porch in a rocking chair, drew his revolver and sent a bullet through the Kid’s belly. The horse kept on; the rider tumbled into the dust of the road. Garrett got off a second shot. The townspeople (knowing the wounded man was Billy the Kid) locked their window shutters tight. The agony was long and blasphemous. In the morning, the sun by then high overhead, they began drawing near, and they disarmed him. The man was gone. They could see in his face that used-up look of the dead.

  He was shaved, sheathed in ready-made clothes, and displayed to awe and ridicule in the window of Fort Sumner’s biggest store. Men on horseback and in buckboards gathered for miles and miles around. On the third day, they had to use make-up on him. On the fourth day, he was buried with rejoicing.

  The Insulting Master of
Etiquette Kôtsuké no Suké

  The infamous subject of this tale is the insulting master of etiquette Kira Kôtsuké no Suké, the unfortunate court official who brought on the degradation and death of the lord of the castle of Akô and later refused to perform hara-kiri (which, as a nobleman, was his duty) when menaced by the vengeance he deserved. He is a man worthy of the thanks of all humankind, for he awakened keen loyalties and provided the necessary black occasion for an immortal undertaking. A hundred or so novels, studies, doctoral dissertations, and operas commemorate the deed to say nothing of the effusions in porcelain, spangled lapis lazuli, and lacquer work. The story is served even by the versatile silver screen, since ‘The Learned History of the Forty-seven Retainers’ such is its name is the Japanese film’s most frequently recurring inspiration. The painstakingly documented renown which these burning attentions confirm is something more than justified it strikes any person at once as just.

  I follow A. B. Mitford’s account, which, in leaving out distracting intrusions of local colour, is more concerned with the glorious episode’s whole narrative sweep. These missing Oriental touches lead me to suspect that we are dealing with a version straight from the Japanese.

  The Untied Ribbon

  Sometime in the vanished spring of 1702, it happened that Asano Takumi no Kami, the distinguished lord of the castle of Akô, was appointed to receive and feast an imperial envoy. Twenty-three hundred years (some of them mythological) of polished manners had nervously defined the ceremonies to be observed upon the occasion. The envoy represented the Mikado, but by way of allusion or symbol a subtlety one has to be careful neither to overdo nor to neglect. In order to prevent blunders that could easily prove fatal, a high official from the court of Yedo preceded the envoy in the capacity of master of etiquette. At a remove from the comfort of the court and condemned to a rustic holiday which must have seemed to him a form of exile, Kira Kôtsuké no Suké took no pains in the instruction of his charge. Sometimes he exaggerated his lofty tone to the point of insolence. His pupil, the lord of the castle, tried to ignore this ridicule. He did not know how to reply to it, and a strict sense of duty held him back from all violence. Nevertheless, one day the ribbon of the master’s sock had come untied and he asked the lord to tie it up for him. Although burning with rage, Takumi no Kami patiently submitted. The rude master of etiquette told him that, in truth, he was unteachable and that only a boor could tie a knot so clumsily. The lord of the castle drew his dirk and aimed a blow at the master’s head. Kôtsuké no Suké ran away, his forehead barely marked with a faint thread of blood.

  A few days later, the deliberations of the military council were completed, and Takumi no Kami was sentenced to commit suicide. In the central courtyard of the castle of Akô, a platform covered in red felt was erected, and on it the doomed man appeared. Having been handed a golden dagger with a jeweled handle, he publicly confessed his guilt, stripped to the waist, and, disemboweling himself with the two ritual wounds, died like a samurai. Because of the red felt the more distant spectators were unable to see blood. A grey-haired, painstaking man he was the councilor Oishi Kuranosuke, the condemned man’s second severed the head with a stroke of his sword.

  The Simulator of Infamy

  Takumi no Kami’s castle was confiscated, his retainers were disbanded, his family was brought to ruin, and his tarnished name became the object of curses. Rumour has it that on the very night that he killed himself, forty-seven of his retainers, forming a league, met in a mountain fastness and planned to the last detail what eventually came to pass a year later. The truth is that they were forced to proceed step by step and with great caution, and some of their meetings took place not on an inaccessible mountaintop but in a chapel in a small forest a kind of shabby pavilion of white wood, with no other adornment than a rectangular box containing a mirror. They craved vengeance, and vengeance must have seemed to them beyond reach.

  Kira Kôtsuké no Suké, the hated master of etiquette, had fortified his house, and a crowd of archers and swordsmen guarded his palanquin. He could also count on his spies, who were incorruptible, scrupulous, and stealthy. They watched and spied on no one as much as they did on the presumed ringleader of the avengers, the councilor Kuranosuké. It was only by chance that he found out, but he built his scheme for vindication upon this fact.

  Kuranosuké moved to Kyoto, a city unmatched in all the empire for its autumn colours. He gave himself up to gambling dens, taverns, and houses of the worst repute. In spite of greying hair, he rubbed elbows with harlots and poets, and with even sorrier sorts. Once, thrown out of some low haunt, he fell down and spent the night asleep in the street, his head wallowing in his own vomit.

  It happened that a Satsuma man saw this, and he said sadly and angrily: ‘Is not this, by chance, Oishi Kuranosuké, who was a councilor of Asano Takumi no Kami, who assisted his lord in death, and who, not having the heart to avenge him, gives himself up to pleasure and shame? You are unworthy the name of a samurai!’

  And he trod on Kuranosuké’s sleeping face, and spat upon it. When the spies reported this bit of debauchery, Kôtsuké no Suké was greatly relieved.

  Things did not come to rest there. The councilor sent away his wife and younger son, and he bought himself a concubine in a brothel. This famous act of infamy gladdened his enemy’s heart and made him relax in watchfulness. So it was that Kôtsuké no Suké packed off half his guard.

  On one of the bitterest nights of the winter of 1703, the forty-seven retainers met in a bare, windswept garden on the outskirts of Yedo, next to a bridge and a playing-card factory. From there, they marched forth with the banners of their lord. But before launching their raid, they sent a message to their enemy’s neighbours, announcing that they were neither night robbers nor ruffians but were engaged in a military action in the name of strict justice.

  The Scar

  Two bands attacked Kira Kôtsuké no Suké’s palace. The councilor led the first, which assaulted the front gate; the second was led by his older son, who was about to turn sixteen and who died that night. All history knows the different moments of that vivid nightmare; the tricky, dangling descent into the courtyard on rope ladders; the drum signaling the attack; the rush of the defenders; the archers posted on the four sides of the roof; the arrows’ swift mission to a man’s vital organs; the porcelains smeared with blood; death, burning and then icy; the wantonness and turmoil of the slaughter. Nine retainers laid down their lives; the defenders were no less brave, and they refused to give ground. Shortly after midnight, however, all resistance came to an end.

  Kira Kôtsuké no Suké, the despicable root of this display of loyalty, did not turn up. Every nook and cranny of the palace was searched for him, but women and children weeping were all to be seen. At this, when the retainers began to despair of ever finding him, the councilor noticed that the quilts of the master’s bed were still warm. Renewing their search, they discovered a narrow window hidden under a bronze mirror. From down below in a gloomy little courtyard, a man dressed in white stared up at them. In his right hand, he held a trembling sword. When they climbed down, the man gave himself up without a struggle. His forehead still bore a scar the old etching of Takumi no Kami’s dirk.

  The bloodstained band then went down on their knees before their hated adversary, and they told him they were the retainers of the lord of the castle of Akô, for whose loss and end the master of etiquette was to blame, and they entreated him to commit suicide, as a samurai was obliged to do.

  Offering this honour to such a cringing spirit was pointless. Kôtsuké no Suké was a man to whom honour was inaccessible. As the day dawned, they were forced to cut his throat.

  Testimony

  Their vengeance now satisfied (but without anger or commotion or pity), the retainers make their way to the temple that holds their lord’s remains.

  In a bucket they carry Kira Kôtsuké no Suké’s unbelievable head, taking turns looking after it. They cross the countryside a
nd the province by the full light of day. Along the way, people flock to them with blessings and tears. The Prince of Sendai invites them to his table, but they decline, replying that their lord has been waiting for nearly two years. They come to his obscure tomb and lay their enemy’s head before it as an offering.

  The Supreme Court passes sentence. It is what the retainers expect they are granted the privilege of committing suicide. They all do so, some with ardent serenity, and they are laid to rest at their lord’s side. Men, women, and children gather to pray at the graves of these faithful men.

  The Satsuma Man

  Among those who come is a boy, dusty and weary, who must have traveled a long way. He prostrates himself before Oishi Kuranosuké’s tombstone and says aloud: ‘I saw you lying drunk by the door of a brothel in Kyoto, and I did not think you were plotting to avenge your lord; I thought you to be a faithless soldier, and I spat in your face. Now I have come to offer atonement.’ So saying, he performed hara-kiri.

  The abbot of the temple, feeling sympathy for his deed, buried him alongside the retainers.

  This is the end of the story of the forty-seven loyal men except that it has no end, for the rest of us, who are not loyal perhaps but will never wholly give up the hope of being so, will go on honouring them with words.