The Book of Sand
BORGES 1 — — W^S^^^0^^W^m.. TRANSLATED BY n Thomas di Giovanni THE BOOK OF SAND Jorge Luis Borges TRANSLATED BY Norman Thomas di Giovanni The short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, written more than twenty years ago, have become classics of contemporary literature. In The Book of Sand are thirteen brand-new stories rivaling those famous stories that established Borges' world-wide reputation. Borges him- self considers two of the stories— the title story and "The Congress"— to be among his greatest achievements in short fiction. Like the distinctive stories in Ficciones and The Aleph, these stories artfully blend ele- ments from many literary genres: the essay, science fiction, detective fiction, fantasy, lit- erary criticism and autobiography. The sub- ject matter, which Borges makes so uniquely his own, ranges from philosophic musings on the nature of time to deft satire on the role-playing of contemporary authors. The Book of Sand is an important addition to Borges' works, a welcome and unexpected gift for Borges' host of admirers. PRINT BORGES, Jorge Luis F The book of sand t Copy 1 PRINT F BORGES, Jorge Luis The book of sand c!977 Copy 1 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from National Federation of the Blind (NFB) http://www.archive.org/details/bookofsandOOjorg BY THE SAME AUTHOR Ficciones Labyrinths Dream tigers Other Inquisitions 1937-1952 A Personal Anthology The Book of Imaginary Beings The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969 Doctor Brodie's Report Selected Poems 1923-1967 A Universal History of Infamy In Praise of Darkness Chronicles of Bustos Domecq (with Adolfo Bioy-Casares) JORGE LUIS BORGES n TRANSLATED BY NORMAN THOMAS Dl GIOVANNI n a E. P. DUTTON NEW YORK Published 1977 by E. P. Dutton, a Division of Sequoia-Elsevier Publishing Company, Inc., New York Copyright © 1971, 1975, 197b, 1977 by Emece Editores, S.A., and Norman Thomas di Giovanni. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. The original title of this book is El libro de arena, Copyright © 1975 by Emece Editores, S.A., Buenos Aires. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system now known or to be in- vented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a re- viewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. Published simultaneously in Canada by Clarke, Irwin & Company Limited, Toronto and Vancouver. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Borges, Jorge Luis The book of sand. Translation of El libro de arena. CONTENTS: The other.— Ulrike.— The Congress, [etc.] I. Tide. PZ3.B64818B0 [PQ7797.B635] 863 77-8418 ISBN: 0-525-06992-5 These stories first appeared in the following periodicals: The Antiocb Review. "The Bribe" The Atlantic Monthly: "There Are More Things" The New Yorker: "The Congress," "Utopia of a Tired Man," "The Disk," "The Book of Sand," "The Mirror and the Mask," "Avelino Arredondo," "Undr," "The Night of the Gifts" The New York Times Magazine: "The Sect of the Thirty," "Ulrike" Playboy: "The Other" "The Congress" has also been published in a limited edition by Enithar- mon Press, London, 1974. 10 98765432 1 First Edition Contents Author's Note 7 The Other 1 1 Ulrike 2 1 The Congress 27 There Are More Things 51 The Sect of the Thirty 61 The Night of the Gifts 67 The Mirror and the Mask 75 Undr 81 Utopia of a Tired Man 89 The Bribe 97 Avelino Arredondo 105 The Disk 1 13 The Book of Sand 117 Afterword 123 Author's Note At my age (I was born in 1899), I cannot promise — I cannot even promise myself — more than these few variations on favorite themes. As everyone knows, this is the classic recourse of ir- reparable monotony. Allow me, nevertheless, to point out one or two details. The volume includes thirteen stories. The number is accidental, or fatal — here the two words are strictly synonymous — and not magical. If of all my stories I had to save one, I would probably save "The Congress," which at the same time is the most autobiographical (the one richest in memo- ries) and the most imaginative. Nor shall I hide a predilection for "The Book of Sand." There is also a love story, a "psychological" story, and the story of a dramatic episode in South American history. In these blind man's exercises, I have tried to be faithful to the example of H. G. Wells in combin- ing a plain and at times almost colloquial style with a fantastic plot. To Wells' name the reader may add those of Swift and of Poe, who, around 1838, gave up a very rich style in order to bequeath us the admirable final chapters of his Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic en- tity known as "The Masses." Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time. *JA? tJjfYAf'/ ,//7Mf/ The Other It was in Cambridge, back in February, 1969, that the event took place. I made no attempt to record it at the time, because, fearing for my mind, my initial aim was to forget it. Now, some years later, I feel that if I commit it to paper others will read it as a story and, I hope, one day it will become a story for me as well. I know it was horrifying while it lasted — and even more so during the sleepless nights that followed — but this does not mean that an account of it will necessarily move anyone else. It was about ten o'clock in the morning. I sat on a bench facing the Charles River. Some five hundred yards distant, on my right, rose a tall building whose name I never knew. Ice floes were borne along on the gray water. Inevitably, the river made me think about time — Heraclitus' mil- lennial image. I had slept well; my class on the pre- vious afternoon had, I thought, managed to hold the interest of my students. Not a soul was in sight. All at once, I had the impression (according to psychologists, it corresponds to a state of fatigue) of having lived that moment once before. Some- 1 1 one had sat down at the other end of the bench. I would have preferred to be alone, but not wish- ing to appear unsociable I avoided getting up abruptly. The other man had begun to whistle. It was then that the first of the many disquieting things of that morning occurred. What he whis- tled, what he tried to whistle (I have no ear for music), was the tune of "La tapera," an old milonga by Elias Regules. The melody took me back to a certain Buenos Aires patio, which has long since disappeared, and to the memory of my cousin Alvaro Melian Lafinur, who has been dead for so many years. Then came the words. They were those of the opening line. It was not Alvaro's voice but an imitation of it. Recognizing this, I was taken aback. "Sir," I said, turning to the other man, "are you an Uruguayan or an Argentine?" "Argentine, but I've lived in Geneva since 1914," he replied. There was a long silence. "At number seventeen Malagnou — across from the Orthodox church?" I asked. He answered in the affirmative. "In that case," I said straight out, "your name is Jorge Luis Borges. I, too, am Jorge Luis Borges. This is 1969 and we're in the city of Cambridge." "No," he said in a voice that was mine but a bit removed. He paused, then became insistent. "I'm here in Geneva, on a bench, a few steps from the Rhone. The strange thing is that we resemble each other, but you're much older and your hair is gray." "I can prove I'm not lying," I said. "I'm going to tell you things a stranger couldn't possibly know. 12 At home we have a silver mate cup with a base in the form of entwined serpents. Our great-grand- father brought it from Peru. There's also a silver washbasin that hung from his saddle. In the ward- robe of your room are two rows of books: the three volumes of Lane's Thousand and One Nights, with steel engravings and with notes in small type at the end of each chapter; Quicherat's Latin dictionary; Tacitus' Germania in Latin and also in Gordon's English translation; a Don Quixote published by Gamier; Rivera Indarte's Tabids de Sangre, inscribed by the author; Carlyle's Sartor Resartus; a biography of Amiel; and, hidden be- hind the other volumes, a book in paper covers about sexual customs in the Balkans. Nor have I forgotten one evening on a certain second floor of the Place Dubourg." "Dufour," he corrected. "Very well — Dufour. Is this enough now?" "No," he said. "These proofs prove nothing. If I am dreaming you, it's natural that you know what I know. Your catalog, for all its length, is com- pletely worthless." His objection was to the point. I said, "If this morning and this meeting are dreams, each of us has to believe that he is the dreamer. Perhaps we have stopped dreaming, perhaps not. Our obvious duty, meanwhile, is to accept the dream just as we accept the world and being born and seeing and breathing." "And if the dream should go on?" he said anx- iously. To calm him and to calm myself, I feigned an air of assurance that I certainly did not feel. "My dream has lasted seventy years now," I said. "After »3all, there isn't a person alive who, on waking, does not find himself with himself.
It's what is happen- ing to us now — except that we are two. Don't you want to know something of my past, which is the future awaiting you?" "Very well — Dufour. Is this enough now?" "No," he said. "These proofs prove nothing. If I am dreaming you, it's natural that you know what I know. Your catalog, for all its length, is com- pletely worthless." His objection was to the point. I said, "If this morning and this meeting are dreams, each of us has to believe that he is the dreamer. Perhaps we have stopped dreaming, perhaps not. Our obvious duty, meanwhile, is to accept the dream just as we accept the world and being born and seeing and breathing." "And if the dream should go on?" he said anx- iously. To calm him and to calm myself, I feigned an air of assurance that I certainly did not feel. "My dream has lasted seventy years now," I said. "After »3all, there isn't a person alive who, on waking, does not find himself with himself.
It's what is happen- ing to us now — except that we are two. Don't you want to know something of my past, which is the future awaiting you?" He assented without a word. I went on, a bit lost. "Mother is healthy and well in her house on Charcas and Maipti, in Buenos Aires, but Father died some thirty years ago. He died of heart trouble. Hemiplegia finished him; his left hand, placed on his right, was like the hand of a child on a giant's. He died impatient for death but without complaint. Our grandmother had died in the same house. A few days before the end, she called us all together and said, 'I'm an old woman who is dying very, very slowly. Don't anyone become upset about such a common, everyday thing.' Your sis- ter, Norah, married and has two sons. By the way, how is everyone at home?" "Very well — Dufour. Is this enough now?" "No," he said. "These proofs prove nothing. If I am dreaming you, it's natural that you know what I know. Your catalog, for all its length, is com- pletely worthless." His objection was to the point. I said, "If this morning and this meeting are dreams, each of us has to believe that he is the dreamer. Perhaps we have stopped dreaming, perhaps not. Our obvious duty, meanwhile, is to accept the dream just as we accept the world and being born and seeing and breathing." "And if the dream should go on?" he said anx- iously. To calm him and to calm myself, I feigned an air of assurance that I certainly did not feel. "My dream has lasted seventy years now," I said. "After »3 all, there isn't a person alive who, on waking, does not find himself with himself. It's what is happen- ing to us now — except that we are two. Don't you want to know something of my past, which is the future awaiting you?" He assented without a word. I went on, a bit lost. "Mother is healthy and well in her house on Charcas and Maipti, in Buenos Aires, but Father died some thirty years ago. He died of heart trouble. Hemiplegia finished him; his left hand, placed on his right, was like the hand of a child on a giant's. He died impatient for death but without complaint. Our grandmother had died in the same house. A few days before the end, she called us all together and said, 'I'm an old woman who is dying very, very slowly. Don't anyone become upset about such a common, everyday thing.' Your sis- ter, Norah, married and has two sons. By the way, how is everyone at home?" He assented without a word. I went on, a bit lost. "Mother is healthy and well in her house on Charcas and Maipti, in Buenos Aires, but Father died some thirty years ago. He died of heart trouble. Hemiplegia finished him; his left hand, placed on his right, was like the hand of a child on a giant's. He died impatient for death but without complaint. Our grandmother had died in the same house. A few days before the end, she called us all together and said, 'I'm an old woman who is dying very, very slowly. Don't anyone become upset about such a common, everyday thing.' Your sis- ter, Norah, married and has two sons. By the way, how is everyone at home?" "Quite well. Father makes his same antireligious jokes. Last night he said that Jesus was like the gauchos, who don't like to commit themselves, and that's why he preached in parables." He hesitated and then said, "And you?" "I don't know the number of books you'll write, but I know they'll be too many. You'll write poems that will give you a pleasure that others won't share and stories of a somewhat fantastic nature. Like your father and so many others of our family, you will teach." It pleased me that he did not ask about the suc- cess or failure of his books. I changed my tone and went on. "As for history, there was another war, almost among the same antagonists. France was not long in caving in; England and America H fought against a German dictator named Hitler — the cyclical battle of Waterloo. Around 1946, Buenos Aires gave birth to another Rosas, who bore a fair resemblance to our kinsman. In 1955, the province of Cordoba came to our rescue, as Entre Rios had in the last century. Now things are going badly. Russia is taking over the world; America, hampered by the superstition of democ- racy, can't make up its mind to become an empire. With every day that passes, our country becomes more provincial. More provincial and more pre- tentious— as if its eyes were closed. It wouldn't sur- prise me if the teaching of Latin in our schools were replaced by that of Guarani." I could tell that he was barely paying attention. The elemental fear of what is impossible and yet what is so dismayed him. I, who have never been a father, felt for that poor boy — more intimate to me even than a son of my flesh — a surge of love. Seeing that he clutched a book in his hands, I asked what it was. "The Possessed, or, as I believe, The Devils, by Fedor Dostoevski," he answered, not without van- ity. "It has faded in my memory. What's it like?" As soon as I said this, I felt that the question was a blasphemy. "The Russian master," he pronounced, "has seen better than anyone else into the labyrinth of the Slavic soul." This attempt at rhetoric seemed to me proof that he had regained his composure. I asked what other volumes of the master he had read. He men- tioned two or three, among them The Doable. I then asked him if on reading them he could !5 clearly distinguish the characters, as you could in Joseph Conrad, and if he thought of going on in his study of Dostoevski's work. "Not really," he said with a certain surprise. I asked what he was writing and he told me he was putting together a book of poems that would be called Red Hymns. He said he had also consid- ered calling it Red Rhythms. "And why not?" I said. "You can cite good ante- cedents. Ruben Dario's blue verse and Verlaine's gray song." Ignoring this, he explained that his book would celebrate the brotherhood of man. The poet of our time could not turn his back on his own age, he went on to say. I thought for a while and asked if he truly felt himself a brother to everyone — to all funeral directors, for example, to all postmen, to all deep-sea divers, to all those who lived on the even-numbered side of the street, to all those who were aphonic, and so on. He answered that his book referred to the great mass of the oppressed and alienated. "Your mass of oppressed and alienated is no more than an abstraction," I said. "Only individ- uals exist — if it can be said that anyone exists. 'The man of yesterday is not the man of today,' some Greek remarked. We two, seated on this bench in Geneva or Cambridge, are perhaps proof of this." Except in the strict pages of history, memorable events stand in no need of memorable phrases. At the point of death, a man tries to recall an engrav- ing glimpsed in childhood; about to enter battle, soldiers speak of the mud or of their sergeant. Our situation was unique and, frankly, we were unprepared for it. As fate would have it, we talked 16 about literature; I fear I said no more than the things I usually say to journalists. My alter ego believed in the invention, or discovery, of new metaphors; I, in those metaphors that correspond to intimate and obvious affinities and that our imagination has already accepted. Old age and sunset, dreams and life, the flow of time and water. I put forward this opinion, which years later he would put forward in a book. He barely listened to me. Suddenly, he said, "If you have been me, how do you explain the fact that you have forgotten your meeting with an elderly gen- tleman who in 1918 told you that he, too, was Borges?" I had not considered this difficulty. "Maybe the event was so strange I chose to forget it," I an- swered without much conviction. Venturing a question, he said shyly, "What's your memory like?" I realized that to a boy not yet twenty a man of over seventy was almost in the grave. "It often approaches forgetfulness," I said, "but it still finds what it's asked to find. I study Old English, and I am not at the bottom of the class." Our conversation had already lasted too long to be that of a dream. A sudden idea came to me. "I can prove at once that you are not dreaming me," I said. "Listen carefully to this line, which, as far as I know, you've never read." Slowly I entoned the famous verse, "L'hydre- univers tordant son corps ecaille d'astres." I felt his al- most fearful awe. He repeated the line, low- voiced, savoring each resplendent word. "It's true," he faltered. "I'll never be able to write a line like that." 17 Victor Hugo had brought us together. Before this, I now recall, he had fervently re- cited that short piece of Whitman's in which the poet remembers a night shared beside the sea when he was really happy. "If Whitman celebrated that night," I remarked, "it's because he desired it and it did not happen. The poem gains if we look on it as the expression of a longing, not the account of an actual happen- ing." He stared at me open-mouthed. "You don't know him!" he exclaimed. "Whitman is incapable of telling a lie." Half a century does not pass in vain. Beneath our conversation about people and random read- ing and our different tastes, I realized that we were unable to understand each other. We were too similar and too unalike. We were unable to take each other in, which makes conversation dif- ficult. Each of us was a caricature copy of the other. The situation was too abnormal to last much longer. Either to offer advice or to argue was pointless, since, unavoidably, it was his fate to become the person I am. All at once, I remembered one of Coleridge's fantasies. Somebody dreams that on a journey through paradise he is given a flower. On awak- ing, he finds the flower. A similar trick occurred to me. "Listen," I said. "Have you any money?" "Yes," he replied. "I have about twenty francs. I've invited Simon Jichlinski to dinner at the Croc- odile tonight." "Tell Simon that he will practice medicine in Carouge and that he will do much good. Now, give me one of your coins." 18 He drew out three large silver pieces and some small change. Without understanding, he offered me a five-franc coin. I handed him one of those not very sensible American bills that, regardless of their value, are all the same size. He examined it avidly. "It can't be," he said, his voice raised. "It bears the date 1964. All this is a miracle, and the mirac- ulous is terrifying. Witnesses to the resurrection of Lazarus must have been horrified." We have not changed in the least, I thought to myself. Ever the bookish reference. He tore up the bill and put his coins away. I decided to throw mine into the river. The arc of the big silver disk losing itself in the silver river would have con- ferred on my story a vivid image, but luck would not have it so. I told him that the supernatural, if it occurs twice, ceases to be terrifying. I suggested that we plan to see each other the next day, on this same bench, which existed in two times and in two places. He agreed at once and, without looking at his watch, said that he was late. Both of us were lying and we each knew it of the other. I told him that someone was coming for me. "Coming for you?" he said. "Yes. When you get to my age, you will have lost your eyesight almost completely. You'll still make out the color yellow and lights and shadows. Don't worry. Gradual blindness is not a tragedy. It's like a slow summer dusk." We said goodbye without having once touched each other. The next day, I did not show up. Nei- ther would he. I have brooded a great deal over that meeting, which until now I have related to no one. I believe !9 I have discovered the key. The meeting was real, but the other man was dreaming when he con- versed with me, and this explains how he was able to forget me; I conversed with him while awake, and the memory of it still disturbs me. The other man dreamed me, but he did not dream me exactly. He dreamed, I now realize, the date on the dollar bill. 20 Ulrike He took the sword Gram and laid it naked between them. The Saga of the Volsungs, 29 My story will be true to reality or, in any case, to my personal memory of reality, which amounts to the same thing. The events took place only a short time ago, but I know that literary habit is also the habit of adding circumstantial details and of un- derlining high points. I want to give an account of my meeting with Ulrike (I never knew7 her sur- name and perhaps never shall) in the city of York. The narrative will encompass one night and a morning. It would be easy to say that I saw her for the first time by the Five Sisters of York Minster, those stained-glass windows which, pure of any image, Cromwell's iconoclasts respected, but the fact is that we met in the small lounge of The Northern Inn, which lies outside the city walls. We were a handful, and Ulrike stood with her back to us. Someone offered her a drink and she refused it. "I am a feminist," she said. "I am not out to ape men. I dislike their tobacco and their alcohol." The remark was meant to be witty, and I guessed that this was not the first time she had de- 21 livered it. I later found out that it was not typical of her, but what we say is not always like us. She mentioned that she had arrived at the museum too late, but that they let her in when they learned she was a Norwegian. One of those present remarked, "It's not the first time the Norwegians have entered York." "That's right," she said. "England was once ours and we lost it — if one can have anything or if any- thing can be lost." It was at this point that I looked at her. A line in Blake speaks of girls of mild silver or of furious gold, but in Ulrike were both gold and mildness. She was tall and slender, with sharp features and gray eyes. Less than by her face, I was impressed by her air of calm mystery. She smiled easily, and the smile seemed to withdraw her from the com- pany. She was dressed in black, which is strange for northern lands, which try to liven the drab sur- roundings with vivid colors. She spoke a crisp, precise English, rolling her r's slightly. I am not much of an observer; these things I discovered bit by bit. We were introduced. I told her that I was a professor at the University of the Andes, in Bogota. I explained that I was a Colombian. She asked me in a thoughtful way, "What does it mean to be a Colombian?" "I don't know," I replied. "It's an act of faith." "Like being Norwegian," she affirmed. I can remember no more of what was said that night. The next day, I came down to the dining room early. Through the windows I saw that it had snowed; in the early morning light the moors faded away. We were the only ones there. Ulrike 22 invited me to her table. She told me that she liked going out for solitary walks. Recalling a joke of Schopenhauer's, I said, "So do I. The two of us could go out together." We walked away from the inn on the new-fallen snow. There was not a soul about. I suggested that we go on to Thorgate, a few miles down the river. I know that I was already in love with Ulrike; I could never have wanted any other person by my side. All at once, I heard the distant howling of a wolf. I had never before heard a wolf howl, but I knew it was a wolf. Ulrike was impassive. A while later she said, as if thinking aloud, "The few poor swords I saw yesterday in York Minster moved me more than the great ships in the Oslo museum." Our paths had crossed. That evening Ulrike would continue her journey on to London; I to Edinburgh. "In Oxford Street," she told me, "I shall follow De Quincey's footsteps in search of his Ann, lost amid the crowds of London." "De Quincey stopped looking for her," I replied. "All my life, I never have." "Maybe you've found her," Ulrike said, her voice low. I realized that an unexpected thing was not for- bidden me, and I kissed her on the mouth and eyes. She drew away firmly but gently and then declared, "I'll be yours in the inn at Thorgate. Until then, I ask you not to touch me. It is better that way." To a bachelor well along in years, the offer of love is a gift no longer expected. The miracle has a 23 right to impose conditions. I thought back on my youth in Popayan and on a girl in Texas, as fair and slender as Ulrike, who once denied me her love. I did not make the mistake of asking Ulrike whether she loved me. I realized that this was not her first time nor would it be her last. The adven- ture, perhaps my last, would be one of many for that splendid, determined follower of Ibsen. Hand in hand, we walked on. "All this is like a dream, and I never dream," I said. "Like that king who never dreamed until a wiz- ard made him sleep in a pigsty," Ulrike replied. Then she added, "Listen. A bird is about to sing." A moment or two later we heard the song. "In these lands," I said, "it's thought that a per- son about to die sees into the future." "And I am about to die," she said. I looked at her in astonishment. "Let's cut through the woods," I urged. "We'll reach Thorgate sooner." "The woods are dangerous," she said. We continued along the moors. "I should like this moment to last forever," I murmured. " 'Forever' is a word forbidden to men," Ulrike said and, to soften the force of this, she asked me to repeat my name, which she had not caught. "Javier Otalora," I said. She tried to pronounce it and couldn't. I failed, equally, with the name Ulrike. "I shall call you Sigurd," she said with a smile. "If I am Sigurd," I replied, "you will be Bryn- hild." 24 She had slowed her step. "Do you know the saga?" I asked. "Of course," she said. "The tragic story spoiled by the Germans with their late Nibelungs." Not wishing to argue the point, I answered, "Brynhild, you're walking as if you wished a sword lay between us in bed." Suddenly we stood before the inn. It did not surprise me that, like the other one, it was called The Northern Inn. From the top of the stairs, Ulrike called down to me, "Did you hear the wolf? There are no longer any wolves in England. Hurry." Climbing to the upper floor, I noticed that the walls were papered in the style of William Morris, in a deep red, with a design of fruit and birds in- tertwined. Ulrike went on ahead. The dark room was low, with a slanted ceiling. The awaited bed was duplicated in a dim mirror, and the polished mahogany reminded me of the looking glass of Scriptures. Ulrike had already undressed. She called me by my real name — Javier. I felt that the snow was falling faster. Now there were no longer any mirrors or furniture. There was no sword be- tween us. Time passed like the sands. In the dark- ness, centuries old, love flowed, and for the first and last time I possessed Ulrike's image. 25 The Congress . . . its s'acheminerent vers un chateau immense, au frontispice duquel on lisait: "Je nappartiens a personne et fappartiens a tout le monde. Vous y etiez avant que d'y en- trer, et vous y serez encore quand vous en sortirez." — Diderot, Jacques le Fataliste et son Maitre Buenos Aires, 1955 Alejandro Ferri is my name. Martial echoes may be heard in it, but neither the metals of glory nor the great shadow of the Macedonian — the words belong to the poet of The Marble Pillars, who hon- ored me with his friendship — has any kinship with the nearly anonymous man who strings together these lines on the upper floor of a hotel on San- tiago del Estero Street, on the south side of town, which is no longer the old Southside. Any day now, I'll turn seventy-one or seventy-two; I am still teaching English to a handful of students. Out of indecision or carelessness, or for some other rea- son, I never married, and now I live alone. Loneli- ness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits. I realize I am getting on in years. An unmistakable symptom of this is the fact that novelties — maybe because I feel they hold nothing essentially new and are really no more than timid varia- tions— neither interest nor distract me. When I was a young man, I was fond of sunsets, the city's sprawling slums, and of unhappiness; now I 27 prefer mornings and downtown and peace. I no longer play at being Hamlet. I have become a member of the Conservative Party and of a chess club, which I usually attend as an onlooker — some- times an absentminded onlooker. Anyone who is curious may dig up from some out-of-the-way nook of the National Library, on Mexico Street, a copy of my Short Study of John Wilkins Analytical Language, a work that sadly stands in need of a new edition, if only to correct or to lessen its many mistakes. The library's new director, I am told, is a literary man who dedicates himself to the study of ancient languages (as if modern ones were not suf- ficiently rudimentary) and to the demogogic exal- tation of an imaginary Buenos Aires of knife fight- ers. I have never cared to meet him. I came to this city in 1899, an<^ only once did chance bring me face to face with a knife fighter or with an individ- ual who had a reputation as such. Further on, should the occasion present itself, I shall relate the episode. I have already said that I live alone. Several days ago, a fellow-roomer, who had heard me speak of Fermin Eguren, told me that he had died in Punta del Este. The death of this man, who was certainly never a friend of mine, has unaccountably saddened me. I know that I am alone; I know that in the whole world I am the only keeper of that secret event — the Congress — whose memory I can no longer share. I am now the last member of that Congress. It is undeniable that all men are members of that Congress — that there is not a single being on earth who is not — but I know I am a member in a very different way. I know that I am, and that's what 28 sets me apart from my numberless colleagues, present and future. It is undeniable that on the seventh of February, 1904, we swore by what is most holy (is there anything holy on earth, or any- thing that is not?) never to reveal the history of the Congress, but it is no less undeniable that my now committing perjury is also part of the Congress. This last statement is sufficiently dim, but it may whet the curiosity of my eventual readers. At any rate, the task I have taken upon myself is not an easy one. I have never before attempted the art of narration — not even in its epistolary form — and, what is doubtless even more impor- tant, the story itself is unbelievable. The pen of Jose Fernandez Irala, the undeservedly forgotten author of The Marble Pillars, was the one destined for this work, but now it is too late. I shall not de- liberately falsify the real facts, although I foresee that laziness and incompetence will more than once lead me into error. Exact dates are of no account. Let it be recalled that I came from Santa Fe, my native province, in 1899. I have never gone back. I have grown accus- tomed to Buenos Aires, a city I am not fond of, in the same way that a man grows accustomed to his own body or to an old ailment. Without much car- ing, I am aware that I am going to die soon; I must, consequently, control my digressive tenden- cies and get on with my story. The years do not change our essential selves — if one has an essential self. The impulse that would one night lead me to the Congress of the World was the same that first brought me to the staff of Ultima Hora. To a poor boy from the provinces, 29 becoming a newspaperman was a romantic fate, just as to a poor city boy the life of a gaucho or a farmhand is romantic. I feel no shame at having once wanted to be a journalist, an occupation that now seems trivial to me. I remember having heard my colleague Fernandez Irala say that newspaper- men wrote for oblivion but that his ambition was to write for time and for memory. He had already chiseled (the verb was then in common use) some of those perfect sonnets that were later to reap- pear, with one or two minor touches, in the pages of The Marble Pillars. I cannot quite recall the first time I heard the Congress spoken of. Maybe it was on that same evening the cashier paid me my first month's sal- ary and, to celebrate this proof that Buenos Aires had taken me to its bosom, I suggested to Irala that we dine together. He excused himself, saying he could not miss the Congress. I understood at once that he was not referring to the rather pomp- ous, domed building at the foot of an avenue peo- pled by Spaniards but to something more secret and far more important. People spoke of the Con- gress, some with open scorn, others with lowered voices, still others with alarm or curiosity — all, I believe, without knowing anything about it. A few Saturdays later, Irala invited me to go along with him. It must have been nine or ten o'clock at night. On our way, in a streetcar, he told me these pre- liminary meetings took place every Saturday and that don Alejandro Glencoe, the president of the Congress, perhaps struck by my name, had al- ready signed his approval of my attendance. We went to the Gas-Lamp Coffee House. Some fifteen 3° or twenty members of the Congress sat around a long table; I don't know if there was a dais or if memory adds it. I immediately recognized the president, whom I had never seen before. Don Alejandro was a gentleman, already well along in years, with a high forehead and thinning hair, gray eyes, and a graying reddish beard. I always saw him dressed in a dark frock coat, and he usually held his hands locked together over the head of his cane. He was portly and tall. To his left sat a much younger man, also with red hair. Its violent color suggested fire, while the color of Mr. Glencoe's beard suggested autumn leaves. To his right was a long-faced young man with an unu- sually low forehead and dressed like a dandy. Ev- eryone had ordered coffee, and several absinthe. What first caught my attention was the presence of a woman — the only woman among so many men. At the other end of the table sat a boy of about ten, dressed in a sailor suit, who was not long in falling asleep. There were also a Protestant minis- ter, two unmistakable Jews, and a Negro, who, with a white silk handkerchief around his neck and very tight-fitting clothes, was dressed like a street-corner hoodlum. In front of the Negro and the boy were cups of chocolate. I do not re- member any of the other people except for a Mr. Marcelo del Mazo, a man of great politeness and fine conversation, whom I never saw again. (I still have a faded, poorly done photograph of one of the gatherings, but I shall not publish it, since the dress, the long hair, and the mustaches of that period would make the whole thing look bur- lesque and even shabby.) All groups tend to create their own dialects and 31 rites; the Congress, which always had something dreamlike about it, seemed to want its members to discover — at leisure and for themselves — its real aim and even the names and surnames of its mem- bers. I was not long in realizing that I was duty- bound not to ask questions, and I refrained even from asking any of Fernandez Irala, who never told me a thing. I did not miss a single Saturday, but a good month or two went by before I reached this understanding. From the second meeting on, my neighbor was Donald Wren, an engineer on the Southern Railways, who was to give me English lessons. Don Alejandro spoke very little. The rest did not address themselves directly to him, but I felt that their words were meant for him and that ev- eryone was after his approval. One gesture of his slow hand was enough to change the topic of dis- cussion. I came to find out, little by little, that the red-haired man to his left bore the strange name of Twirl. I remember that fragile look of his, which, as though their stature made them dizzy and forced them to hunch forward, is character- istic of some very tall people. His hand, I recall, often played with a copper compass case, which from time to time he set on the table. At the end of 1914, he was killed as an infantryman in an Irish regiment. The person who always sat to the right, the young man with the low forehead, was Fermin Eguren, the president's nephew. Putting no faith in the methods of realism (a most artificial school if there ever was one), I shall declare right off what I learned only little by little. Beforehand, I want to remind the reader of my situation at the time. I was a poor boy from Ca- 32 silda, a farmer's son, who had come to the capital and suddenly found himself — this was the way I felt — in the intimate heart of Buenos Aires and perhaps (who knows?) of the whole world. After half a century, I still feel those first dazzling mo- ments, which certainly were not to be the last. Here are the facts. I shall tell them as briefly as I can. Don Alejandro Glencoe, the president, was an Uruguayan rancher and owner of a large spread of land bordering on Brazil. His father, a native of Aberdeen, had established himself on this conti- nent around the middle of the last century. He brought with him some hundred books — the only books, I venture to say, that don Alejandro read in the course of his life. (I speak of these assorted books, which I have had in my hands, because in one of them lies the root of my story.) The elder Mr. Glencoe, on dying, left a daughter and a son. The son was later to become our president; the daughter married an Eguren and was Fermin's mother. Don Alejandro at one time aspired to the Uruguayan National Congress, but the political bosses barred his way. Rankled, he decided to found another Congress and on a vaster scale. He remembered having read in the volcanic pages of Carlyle the fate of Anacharsis Clootz, that worshiper of the goddess Reason who, at the head of thirty-six foreigners, addressed a Paris assembly as "mankind's spokesman." Moved by this ex- ample, don Alejandro conceived the idea of calling together a Congress of the World that would rep- resent all men of all nations. The center for the preliminary meetings was the Gas-Lamp Coffee House; the formal act of inauguration, which would take place within some four years, would be 33 held at don Alejandro's ranch. Like so many Uruguayans, don Alejandro — who was no lover of Uruguay's now national hero, Artigas — was fond of Buenos Aires, but he nonetheless decided that the Congress must eventually meet in his own country. Oddly enough, the four-year planning period was carried out with a precision that was al- most magical. In the beginning, we were paid a considerable sum as a per diem, but the zeal that enflamed us prompted Fernandez Irala — who was as poor as I was — to renounce his, and all the rest of us fol- lowed suit. This measure was healthy, since it served to separate the wheat from the chaff; the number of members was reduced, and only the faithful remained. The one paid position was that of the secretary, Nora Erfjord, who lacked other means of support and whose work at the same time was staggering. To set up a worldwide orga- nization is no trifling enterprise. Letters came and went, and so did cables and telegrams. Potential delegates wrote from Peru, Denmark, and India. A Bolivian wrote that his country's lack of access to the sea should be a matter of prime consideration in our first meetings. Twirl, who had a farseeing mind, remarked that the Congress involved a problem of a philosophical nature. Planning an as- sembly to represent all men was like fixing the exact number of platonic types — a puzzle that had taxed the imagination of thinkers for centuries. Twirl suggested that, without going farther afield, don Alejandro Glencoe might represent not only cattlemen but also Uruguayans, and also human- ity's great forerunners, and also men with red 34 beards, and also those who are seated in arm- chairs. Nora Erfjord was Norwegian. Would she represent secretaries, Norwegian womanhood, or — more obviously — all beautiful women? Would a single engineer be enough to represent all engineers — including those of New Zealand? It was then, I believe, that Fermin broke in. "Ferri represents the gringos," he said in a flood of laughter. Don Alejandro looked at him severely and, in an even voice, said, "Mr. Ferri is representative of the immigrants whose labor is building up this coun- try." " Fermin Eguren never could bear the sight of me. He took pride in an assortment of things: in being Uruguayan; in coming from old stock; in at- tracting women; in having chosen an expensive tailor; and, God knows why, in his Basque origin — a people who throughout history have done little else than milk cows. An incident of the most trivial sort sealed our enmity. After one of the meetings, Eguren sug- gested that we pay a visit to one of the Junin Street brothels. The plan did not attract me, but, in order not to make myself the butt of his jokes, I accepted. We went with Fernandez Irala. On leav- ing the establishment, we ran into a huge specimen of a man. Eguren, who may have been a bit drunk, gave him a shove. The stranger quickly barred our way and told us, "Whoever wants to leave is going to have to pass by this knife." I remember the glint of the blade in the dark- ness of the long entranceway. Eguren drew back, visibly afraid. I wasn't too sure of myself, but my hatred got the best of my fright. I reached into my 35 armpit, as if to draw out a weapon, and said in a firm voice, "We'll settle this out on the street." The stranger answered — with another voice now, "That's the kind of man I like. I wanted to test you, friend." Then he began to laugh in a cor- dial way. "As to 'friend,' " I answered him, "that's what you think." The three of us made our way past him. The man with the knife entered the brothel. I heard later that his name was Tapia, or Paredes, or something of the kind, and that he had a repu- tation for brawling. Out on the sidewalk, Irala, who had kept cool, slapped me on the back and said, impressively, "Among us three, we had a musketeer. Hail, d'Artagnan!" Fermin Eguren never forgave me for having witnessed his backing down. I feel that now, and only now, my story begins. The preceding pages have set down no more than the conditions that chance or fate required so that the unbelievable event — perhaps the single event of my whole life — might take place. Don Alejan- dro Glencoe was always at the center of the Con- gress, but over a period of time we felt, not with- out misgiving, that the real president was Twirl. This singular character, with the flaming mus- tache, fawned on Glencoe and even on Fermin Eguren — but in such an exaggerated way that those present would think he was actually mocking the two. By so doing, he never once compromised his integrity. Glencoe labored under the pride of his vast fortune; Twirl discovered that in order to get anything done it was enough to suggest that its 36 cost might prove beyond the president's means. It is my suspicion that at the outset the Congress had been nothing more than a haphazard sort of name. Twirl was continually proposing new areas of expansion, and don Alejandro always accepted. It was like being at the middle of a spreading cir- cle, which grows ever larger and always farther away. Twirl said, for example, that the Congress could not get along without a reference library, and Nierenstein, who worked in a bookshop, went about ordering us the atlases of Justus Perthes and several extensive encyclopedias — all the way from Pliny's Natural History and Beauvais' Speculum down to the pleasant mazes (I reread these words with Fernandez Irala's voice) of the illustrious French Encyclopedists, of the Bi itannica, of Pierre Larousse, of Brockhaus, of Larsen, and of Mon- taner y Simon. I recall how I reverently fondled the silky volumes of a certain Chinese en- cyclopedia whose finely brushed characters seemed to me more mysterious than the spots on a leopard's skin. As yet, I will say nothing of what lay in store for them and which certainly I do not regret. Don Alejandro, maybe because we were the only ones who did not try to flatter him, had grown quite fond of Fernandez Irala and me. He invited us to spend a few days at his ranch, La Caledonia, where he had a crew of stonemasons already at work. At the end of a long trip upriver by steamer and a ferry crossing on a raft, we set foot one morning on the Uruguay shore. We then had to spend suc- cessive nights in run-down country saloons, while 37 opening and shutting dozens of gateways all day along back roads in the Cuchilla Negra. We made our way in a light carriage; the countryside seemed wider and lonelier to me than the small farm where I was born. I still hold my two images of the ranch — the one I brought with me and the one my eyes finally saw. Absurdly, I had imagined, as in a dream, an im- possible combination of the flat plains of Santa Fe and of the rather gaudy Victorian Buenos Aires Waterworks. La Caledonia was a long adobe build- ing with a thatched saddle roof and a brick-paved gallery. It appeared to be built for hardship and endurance. The rough walls were nearly a yard thick and the doors were narrow. Nobody had ever thought of planting a tree. The sun's first and last rays beat down on the place. The corrals were of stone; the cattle were many, scrawny and long- horned; the horses' switching tails reached the ground. For the first time in my life, I knew the taste of freshly slaughtered meat. Some sacks of sea biscuit were brought out; a few days later, the foreman told me he had never eaten bread in his life. Irala asked where the bathroom was, and, with a sweeping gesture, don Alejandro indicated the entire continent. It was a moonlit night; I went out to stretch my legs, and I surprised Irala being watched by an ostrich. The heat, which the night had not dispelled, was unbearable, and everyone praised the coolness. The rooms were low-ceilinged and many, and seemed to me barely furnished; we were given one, facing south, in which there were two cots and a dresser with a silver washbasin and pitcher. The floor was dirt. 38 The second day, I came across the library and the volumes of Carlyle, and I found the pages dedicated to mankind's spokesman, Anacharsis Clootz, who had led me to that morning and to that loneliness. After breakfast, which was iden- tical with dinner, don Alejandro showed us the building under construction. We rode three or four miles on horseback out in the wide open. Irala, whose horsemanship was shaky, had an ac- cident; unsmiling, the foreman remarked, "You Argentines really know how to dismount." From way off, we could see the construction site. Some twenty men were at work building a kind of tumbledown amphitheater. I recall a series of stages and ladders and stone tiers with stretches of sky showing between. More than once, I tried to speak with the gau- chos, but my efforts failed. In some way, they knew they were different. Among themselves, they used a spare, guttural Brazilianized Spanish. It was obvious that both Indian and Negro blood ran in their veins. They were short and strong; at La Caledonia, I became a tall man — something that had never happened to me until then. Almost all of them dressed with their legs wrapped in the chiripd, and a few wore the wide, baggy bombachas. They had little or nothing in common with the complaining heroes found in the books of Hernandez or of Rafael Obligado. Under the stimulus of Saturday-night alcohol, they were easily moved to violence. There wasn't a single woman around, and I never once heard a guitar. I was more interested in the change that had come over don Alejandro than I was in these border-country men. In Buenos Aires, he was a 39 pleasant, reserved gentleman; at La Caledonia, like his fathers before him, he became the stern chief of a clan. Sunday mornings, he read Holy Scripture to the hands, who did not understand a single word. One night, the foreman, a youngish man who had inherited the job from his father, re- ported to us that one of the day laborers and one of the regular help were having it out with knives. Don Alejandro got up, unruffled. When he came to the circle of onlookers, he drew out the weapon he always carried, handed it to the foreman (who appeared to me to cringe), and stepped between the knives. At once, I heard the order, "Drop those knives, boys." With the same calm voice, he added, "Now shake hands and behave yourselves. I don't want any brawling around here." The two men obeyed. The next day, I learned that don Alejandro had fired the foreman. I felt the loneliness ringing me in, and I began fearing I'd never get back to Buenos Aires. I wonder whether Fernandez Irala shared that fear. We talked a lot about Argentina and what we'd do when we returned. I missed the stone lions of a certain gateway on Jujuy Street, near the Plaza del Once, and the light of a particular old bar in some dim part of town, but not my familiar haunts. Always a good rider, I fell into the habit of going out on horseback and riding long distances. I still remember the particular piebald I used to saddle up myself. On some afternoon or on some night or other, I probably was in Brazil, since the border was nothing but a line traced out by widely spaced markers. Then, at the close of a day exactly like all the rest, don Alejandro told us, "We'll turn in early. Tomorrow we'll be off while it's still cool." 40 Once down the river, I felt so happy that I was even able to think back to La Caledonia with affec- tion. We took up our Saturday meetings again. At the first one, Twirl asked for the floor. He said, with his usual flowers of rhetoric, that the library of the Congress of the World could not be limited to ref- erence books alone, and that the classical works of all nations and all languages were a veritable store- house that we could not safely afford to ignore. The suggestion was approved on the spot; Fer- nandez Irala and Dr. Ignacio Cruz, who was a teacher of Latin, accepted the job of selecting the appropriate texts. Twirl had already talked things over with Nierenstein. In those days, there wasn't a single Argentine whose Utopia was not Paris. Perhaps the most en- thusiastic of us was Fermin Eguren; next, for quite different reasons, came Fernandez Irala. To the poet of The Marble Pillars, Paris was Verlaine and Leconte de Lisle, while to Eguren it was an im- proved version of Junin Street. I suspect that he had come to some understanding with Twirl. At a subsequent meeting, Twirl brought up the ques- tion of what language the members of the Congress would use, arguing the feasibility of sending delegates to London and Paris to gather information. Feigning impartiality, he first put up my name, and then, as an apparent afterthought, that of his friend Eguren. As always, don Alejan- dro agreed. I think I have written that, in exchange for some lessons in Italian, Wren had initiated me into the study of the inexhaustible English language. 41 As far as possible, we did away with grammar and with those exercises concocted for the beginner, and we found our way directly into poetry, whose forms demand brevity. My first contact with the language that was to fill out my life was Steven- son's brave "Requiem." Then came the ballads that Percy revealed to the dignified eighteenth century. A short while before leaving for London, I was dazzled by Swinburne — an experience that made me begin to doubt (and to feel guilty about it) the eminence of Irala's alexandrines. I reached London early in January, 1902; I re- member the soft touch of falling snow, which I had never before seen and for which I was grate- ful. Luckily, Eguren and I had traveled separately. I roomed at a modest boarding house behind the British Museum, where mornings and afternoons I studied in the library in search of a language worthy of the Congress of the World. I did not overlook universal languages, investigating both Esperanto — which Lugones qualifies as "impartial, simple, and economical" — and Volaptik, which, declining verbs and conjugating nouns, attempts to work out all linguistic possibilities. I also weighed the arguments in favor of and against the revival of Latin, a nostalgia for which has endured down through the centuries. I even dwelled on an examination of John Wilkins' analytical language, in which the definition of each word is to be found in the letters that spell it out. It was beneath the high dome of the reading room that I first met Beatrice. This is meant to be a general history of the Congress of the World, not of Alejandro Ferri, but 42 the former takes in the latter, just as it takes in all other histories. Beatrice was tall, trim, with fine features and a head of red hair that might have reminded me — but never did — of the shady Twirl. She was not yet twenty. She had come down from one of the northern counties to study literature at the university. Her background, like mine, was humble. At that time, to be of Italian stock in Buenos Aires was still to be looked down on, but in London I found out that being Italian was to many people a romantic attribute. Within a few evenings, we were lovers; I asked her to marry me, but Beatrice Frost, like Nora Erfjord, was a fol- lower of the faith preached by Ibsen, and she did not want to tie herself down to anyone. From her lips came the word I never dared speak. O nights, O darkness warm and shared, O love that flows in shadows like some secret river, O that instant of ecstasy when each is both, O that ecstasy's purity and innocence, O the coupling in which we be- came lost so as then to lose ourselves in sleep, O the first light of dawn, and I watching her. On the rough Brazil border, I had been plagued by homesickness; not so in London's red labyrinth, which gave me so many things. Despite the pre- texts I dreamed up to delay my departure, I had to return home at the end of the year. Beatrice and I celebrated Christmas together. I assured her that don Alejandro would invite her to join the Congress; she answered, in an offhand way, that she had always wanted to visit the Southern Hemi- sphere, and that a cousin of hers, a dentist, had settled in Tasmania. Beatrice did not want to come to the boat. Goodbyes, to her way of thinking, were too dra- 43 matic, were a senseless feast of unhappiness, and she detested dramatics. We parted in the library, where we had met the winter before. As a man, I'm a coward; to avoid the anguish of waiting for letters, I did not leave her my address. Return trips are shorter, I have always noticed, but that crossing of the Atlantic, heavy with mem- ories and anxieties, seemed unusually long. Noth- ing hurt me as much as thinking that, in a parallel with my life, Beatrice would go on living hers, minute by minute and night by night. I wrote a lengthy letter, destroying it as we left Montevideo. When I reached Argentina — it was on a Thursday — Irala was waiting for me at the dock. I went back to my old place on Chile Street; that day and the next he and I spent together talking and taking long walks. I wanted to recover Buenos Aires again. It was a relief to find out that Fermin Eguren was staying on in Paris; I knew the fact of my having come back before him would in some way make up for my long absence. Irala was downcast. Fermin was squandering huge sums in Europe and had more than once dis- obeyed the order to return home. This was to have been foreseen. I was more disturbed by other news. Twirl, in spite of the opposition of Irala and Cruz, had invoked the Younger Pliny, according to whom there is no book so bad it does not con- tain some good, and had proposed the indiscrim- inate purchase of bound volumes of the daily press, of thirty-four hundred copies of Don Quixote in various editions, of the complete works of Gen- eral Mitre, of Ph.D. theses, of old account books, of bulletins, and of theater programs. Everything 44 gives witness, he had said. Nierenstein backed him; don Alejandro, "after three resounding Sat- urdays" (as Irala put it), approved the motion. Nora Erfjord had resigned her position as secre- tary; it was taken over by a new member, Kar- linski, who was a tool of Twirl's. The bulky pack- ages began piling up now, without files or catalogs, in the back rooms and in the wine cellar of don Alejandro's rambling old town house. Early in Juh, Irala spent a week back at La Caledonia, where the masons had broken off their work. The foreman, upon questioning, explained that that was what the boss had ordered, and that there would always be time enough tomorrow. In London, I had drafted a report that there is now no point in going into. That Friday, I went to pay a visit to don Alejandro and to deliver a copy of what I had written. Fernandez Irala came with me. It was early evening, and the cold south wind blew into the house. At the front gate, on Alsina Street, a delivery wagon, pulled by three horses, stood waiting. I remember that the deliverymen were weighed down under the loads they went about piling up in the last patio. Twirl was imperi- ous, giving them orders. Also present, indoors, as if they had had an inkling of something, were Nora Erfjord and Nierenstein and Cruz and Don- ald Wren and a few other members of the Con- gress. Nora threw her arms around me and kissed me, and that embrace and that kiss made me re- member others. The Negro, brimming over with good nature and happiness, kissed my hand. In one of the rooms, the square trapdoor to the cellar was wide open; some masonry steps plunged down into darkness. Suddenly we heard footsteps. 45 Before laying eyes on him, I knew it was don Ale- jandro. He came almost on the run. His voice was different. It was not the voice of the deliberate gentleman who presided over our Saturdays, nor that of the feudal landowner who had put a stop to a knife duel and who preached the word of God to his gauchos — but it seemed more like this latter. Without looking at anyone, he ordered, "Get ev- erything out that's packed away down there. I don't want a single book left in that cellar." The work went on for nearly an hour. Outside, on the earth floor of the last patio, we made a pile that was taller than the tallest head. All of us marched back and forth; the only person who failed to move was don Alejandro. Then came the order, "Now set fire to that heap." Twirl went pale. Nierenstein blurted, "How can the Congress of the World do without this valuable material I've collected with so much love?" "The Congress of the World?" said don Alejan- dro. He laughed scornfully. I had never before heard him laugh. There is a mysterious pleasure in destruction. The flames crackled brightly, and we all had to press back against the walls or move indoors. Darkness, ashes, and an odor of burning were left behind in the patio. I remember some undamaged pages lying white against the ground. Nora Erf- jord, who felt for don Alejandro that love which young women often feel for older men, said, with- out really understanding, "Don Alejandro knows what he's doing." Irala, always true to literature, attempted an epi- 46 gram. "Every few centuries," he said, "the Library of Alexandria must be burned down." Then the revelation was made to us. "It has taken me four years to understand what I am about to say," don Alejandro began. "My friends, the undertaking we have set for ourselves is so vast that it embraces — I now see — the whole world. Our Congress cannot be a group of charla- tans deafening each other in the sheds of an out- of-the-way ranch. The Congress of the World began with the first moment of the world and it will go on when we are dust. There's no place on earth where it does not exist. The Congress is the books we've burned. The Congress is Job on the ash heap and Christ on the Cross. The Congress is that worthless boy who squanders my substance on whores." I could not hold myself back. "Don Alejandro," I broke in, "I, too, am to blame. I had finished my report, which I now hand you, but I stayed on and on in England, throwing your money away on a woman." Don Alejandro went on. "I had already guessed as much, Ferri. The Congress is my cattle. The Congress is the cattle I have sold and the miles of land that are no longer mine." A horror-stricken voice was raised — Twirl's. "You don't mean to say you've sold La Caledonia?" "Yes," don Alejandro said calmly, "I've sold it. I haven't a square foot of land to my name, but I do not regret it, because now I see things as they are. Perhaps we shall never meet again, for the Congress stands in no need of us. But this last night we will all go out together to see the true Congress." 47 Drunk with victory, he overwhelmed us with his resolution and faith. No one — not for a single sec- ond— thought he was mad. In the square, we climbed into an open carriage. I squeezed myself onto the driver's seat beside the coachman, and don Alejandro ordered, "Maestro, let's have a turn around the city. Take us any- where you like." The Negro, perched on the running board, never stopped smiling. I'll never know whether or not he realized what was going on. Words are symbols that assume a shared mem- ory. The memory I now want to set down is mine alone; all those who share it have died. The mys- tics invoke a rose, a kiss, a bird that is all birds, a sun that is all the stars and the sun, a jug of wine, a garden, or the sexual act. Of these metaphors, none will serve me for that long, joyous night, which left us, tired out and happy, at the borders of dawn. We barely spoke while the wheels and the horses' hooves clattered over the cobblestones. Before daybreak, beside a dark, humble body of water that may have been the Maldonado or the Riachuelo, Nora Erfjord's high voice sang the bal- lad of Sir Patrick Spens, and don Alejandro, in a low voice and out of tune, chimed in with a few verses. The English words did not bring me Bea- trice's image. At my back, Twirl muttered, "I wanted to do evil and I have done good." Something of what we glimpsed lives on — the reddish wall of the Recoleta cemetery, the yellow wall of a jail, a couple of men dancing together at a right-angled street corner, a church courtyard with black and white tiles and a grilled iron fence, 48 a railway gate crossing, my house, a marketplace, the damp unfathomable night — but none of these fleeting things, which may have been others, now matter. What really matters is having felt that our plan, which more than once we made a joke of, re- ally and secretly existed and was the world and ourselves. Down through the years, without much hope, I have sought the taste of that night; a few times I thought I had recaptured it in music, in love, in untrustworthy memories, but it has never come back to me except once in a dream. When we swore not to say a word to anyone, it was al- ready Saturday morning. I never saw any of them again, outside of Irala. He and I never spoke about the Congress; any- thing we might have said would have been a dese- cration. In 1914, don Alejandro Glencoe died and was buried in Montevideo. Irala had already passed away the year before. Once, I ran across Nierenstein on Lima Street, and we pretended not to see each other. 49 There Are More Things To the memory of H. P. Lovecraft On the point of taking my last examination at the University of Texas, in Austin, I learned that my uncle Edwin Arnett had died of an aneurysm at the far end of the South American continent. I felt what we all feel when someone dies — the remorse, now pointless, for not having been kinder. We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men. My course of study was philosophy. I remembered that it was my uncle, at the Casa Colorada, his home near Lomas, on the edge of Buenos Aires, who, without invoking a single proper name, had first revealed to me philoso- phy's beautiful perplexities. One of the after- dinner oranges was his aid in initiating me into Berkeley's idealism; a chessboard was enough to il- lustrate the paradoxes of the Eleatics. Years later, he was to lend me Hinton's treatises which attempt to demonstrate the reality of four-dimensional space and which the reader is meant to imagine by means of complicated exercises with multicolored cubes. I shall never forget the prisms and pyra- mids that we erected on the floor of his study. 51 My uncle was an engineer. Before retiring from his job with the railroad, he decided to build him- self a house in Turdera, which offered the advan- tages of almost countrylike solitude and of prox- imity to the city. Nothing was more predictable than that the architect should be his close friend Alexander Muir. This uncompromising man fol- lowed the uncompromising teachings of John Knox. My uncle, like almost all the gentlemen of his day, had been a freethinker or, rather, an ag- nostic, but he was interested in theology, just as he was interested in Hinton's unreal cubes and in the well-constructed nightmares of the young H. G. Wells. He liked dogs, and he had a great sheepdog that he had named Samuel Johnson, in memory of Lichfield, his far-off birthplace. The Casa Colorada stood on a height of land, bordered on the west by sun-blackened fields. In- side its fence, the araucarias did nothing to soften its air of gloom. Instead of a flat roof, there was a slate-tiled saddle roof and a square tower with a clock. These seemed to oppress the walls and the meager windows. As a boy, I used to accept all this ugliness, just as one accepts those incompatible things which, only because they coexist, are called the world. I returned home in 1921. To avoid legal compli- cations, the house had been auctioned off. It was bought by a foreigner, a Max Preetorius, who paid double what was offered by the highest bidder. No sooner was the deed signed than he arrived, late one afternoon, with two helpers and they carted off to a rubbish dump, not far from the old Dro- ver's Road, all the furniture, all the books, and all the utensils of the house. (I sadly recalled the dia- 52 grams in the Hinton volumes and the great globe.) The next day, Preetorius went to Muir and pro- posed certain alterations that the architect indig- nantly rejected. In the end, a firm from Buenos Aires took charge of the work. The local carpen- ters refused to furnish the house again. Finally, a certain Mariani, from Glew, accepted the condi- tions laid down by Preetorius. For an entire fort- night he had to labor by night behind closed doors. It was also bv night that the new owner of the Casa Colorada moved in. The windows no longer opened, but chinks of light could be made out in the dark. One morning, the milkman found the sheepdog dead on the walk, headless and mutila- ted. That winter they felled the araucarias. No- body saw Preetorius again. News of these events, as may be imagined, left me uneasy. I know that my most obvious trait is curiosity — that same curiosity that brought me together with a woman completely different from me only in order to find out who she was and what she was like, to take up (without appreciable re- sults) the use of laudanum, to explore transfinite numbers, and to undertake the hideous adventure that I am about to tell. Ominously, I decided to look into the matter. My first step was to see Alexander Muir. I re- membered him as tall-standing and dark, with a wiry build that suggested strength. Now the years had stooped him and his black beard had gone gray. He received me at his Temperley house, which, foreseeably, was like my uncle's, since both houses followed the solid standards of the good poet and bad builder William Morris. Conversation was spare — Scotland's symbol, 53 after all, is the thistle. I had the feeling, nonethe- less, that the strong Ceylon tea and the equally generous plate of scones (which my host broke in two and buttered for me as if I were still a boy) were, in fact, a frugal Calvinistic feast offered to the nephew of his friend. His theological dif- ferences with my uncle had been a long game of chess, demanding of each player the collaboration of his opponent. Time passed and I was no nearer my business. There was an uncomfortable silence and Muir spoke. "Young man," he said, "you have not come all this way to talk about Edwin or the United States, a country that I have little interest in. What's troubling you is the sale of the Casa Co- lorada and its odd buyer. They do me, too. Frankly, the story displeases me, but I'll tell you what I can. It will not be much." After a while he went on, unhurriedly. "Before Edwin died, the mayor called me into his office. He was with the parish priest. They asked me to draw the plans for a Catholic chapel. My work would be well paid. On the spot, I answered no. I am a servant of God and I cannot commit the abomination of erecting altars to idols." Here he stopped. "Is that all?" I finally dared ask. "No. This whelp of a Jew Preetorius wanted me to destroy my work and in its place get up a mon- strous thing. Abomination comes in many shapes." He pronounced these words gravely and got to his feet. Outside, on turning the corner, I was ap- proached by Daniel Iberra. We knew one another the way people in small towns do. He suggested 54 that we accompany each other back to Turdera. I have never been keen on hoodlums, and I ex- pected a sordid litany of violent and more or less apocryphal back-room stories, but I gave in and accepted his invitation. It was nearly nightfall. On seeing the Casa Colorada come into view from a few blocks off, Iberra made a detour. I asked him why. His reply was not what I anticipated. "I am don Felipe's right arm," he said. "Nobody has ever called me soft. That young Urgoiti who took the trouble to come looking for me all the way from Merlo — you probably remember what happened to him. Look. A few nights ago, I was returning from a party. A hundred yards or so from that house I saw something. My horse reared up, and if I hadn't had a good grip on him and made him turn down an alley, maybe I wouldn't be telling this story now. What I saw justified the horse's fright." Angrily, Iberra added a swear word. That night I did not sleep. Around dawn, I dreamed about an engraving that I had never seen before or that I had seen and forgotten; it was in the style of Piranesi, and it had a labyrinth in it. It was a stone amphitheater ringed by cypresses, above whose tops it reached. There were neither doors nor windows; rather, it displayed an endless row of narrow vertical slits. With a magnifying glass, I tried to see the Minotaur inside. At last, I made it out. It was a monster of a monster, more bison than bull, and, its human body stretched out on the ground, it seemed to be asleep and dream- ing. Dreaming of what or of whom? That evening, I passed by the Casa Colorada. The iron gate was shut and some of its bars were 55 bent. What once was garden was now overgrown with weeds. To the right, there was a shallow ditch and its outer edges were trampled. There was only one move left, but for days I kept putting it off — not because I felt it to be al- together a waste, but because it would drag me to the inevitable, to the last. Without much hope, I went to Glew. Mariani, the carpenter, was a stout, pink-faced Italian, com- mon and cordial and now somewhat advanced in years. A glance at him was enough for me to dismiss the stratagems I had contrived the night before. I handed him my card, which he pomp- ously spelled out aloud with a certain reverential stumbling when he reached the "Ph.D." I told him I was interested in the furniture made by him for the house in Turdera that had been my uncle's. The man spoke on and on. I shall not try to tran- scribe his torrent of words and gestures, but he told me that his motto was to satisfy his customer's every demand, no matter how outlandish it was, and that he had carried out his work to the letter. After rummaging in various drawers he showed me some papers that I could make neither head nor tail of; they were signed by the elusive Pree- torius. (Doubtless, Mariani mistook me for a law- yer.) On saying goodbye, he confided to me that even for all the world's gold he would never again set foot in Turdera, let alone that house. He added that the customer is sacred, but that in his humble opinion Mr. Preetorius was crazy. Then he grew quiet, obviously repentant. I was unable to worm anything more out of him. I had allowed for this failure, but it is one thing to allow for something and quite another to see it 56 happen. Time and again, I said to myself that the solution of this enigma did not concern me and that the one true enigma was time, that seamless chain of past, present, and future, of the ever and the never. Such reflections turned out to be use- less, however; after whole afternoons devoted to the study of Schopenhauer or Royce, night after night I would walk the dirt roads ringing the Casa Colorada. Sometimes I caught a glimpse upstairs of a very white light; other times, I thought I heard a moaning. It went on this way until the nineteenth of January. It was one of those Buenos Aires days when a man feels himself not only bullied and insulted by the summer but even debased by it. At around eleven o'clock at night the storm broke. First came the south wind, and then the water in torrents. I wandered about looking for a tree. In the sudden glare of a lightning flash I found myself a few steps from the fence. Whether out of fear or hope I don't know, but I tried the gate. Unexpectedly, it opened. I made my way, pushed along by the storm. Sky and earth threatened me. The door of the house was also open. A squall of rain lashed my face and I went in. Inside, the floor tiles had been torn up and I stepped on matted grass. A sweet, sickening smell filled the house. Right or left, I'm not sure which, I tripped on a stone ramp. Quickly, I went up. Al- most unawares, I turned on the light switch. The dining room and the library of my memo- ries were now, with the wall between them torn down, a single great bare room containing one or two pieces of furniture. I shall not try to describe them, since I am not altogether sure — in spite of 57 the cruel white light — of having seen them. Let me explain myself. To see a thing one has to compre- hend it. An armchair presupposes the human body, its joints and limbs; a pair of scissors, the act of cutting. What can be said of a lamp or a car? The savage cannot comprehend the missionary's Bible; the passenger does not see the same rigging as the sailors. If we really saw the world, maybe we would understand it. None of the meaningless shapes that that night granted me corresponded to the human figure or, for that matter, to any conceivable use. I felt revul- sion and terror. In one of the corners, I found a ladder which led to the upper floor. The spaces between the iron rungs, which were no more than ten, were wide and irregular. That ladder, imply- ing hands and feet, was comprehensible, and in some way this relieved me. I put out the light and waited for some time in the dark. I did not hear the least sound, but the presence there of in- comprehensible things disquieted me. In the end, I made up my mind. Once upstairs, my fearful hand switched on the light a second time. The nightmare that had fore- shadowed the lower floor came alive and flowered on the next. Here there were either many objects or a few linked together. I now recall a sort of long operating table, very high and in the shape of a U, with round hollows at each end. I thought that maybe it was the bed of the house's inhabi- tant, whose monstrous anatomy revealed itself in this way, implicitly, like an animal's or a god's by its shadow. From some page or other of Lucan there came to my lips the word "amphisbaena," which hinted at, but which certainly did not ex- 58 haust, what my eyes were later to see. I also re- member a V of mirrors that became lost in the upper darkness. What would the inhabitant be like? What could it be looking for on this planet, no less hideous to it than it to us? From what secret regions of as- tronomy or time, from what ancient and now in- calculable dusk can it have reached this South American suburb and this particular night? I felt an intruder in the chaos. Outside, the rain had stopped. I looked at my watch and saw with astonishment that it was almost two o'clock. I left the light on and carefully began climbing down. To get down the way I had come up was not im- possible— to get down before the inhabitant re- turned. I guessed that it had not locked the doors because it did not know how. My feet were touching the next to last rung of the ladder when I felt that something, slow and oppressive and twofold, was coming up the ramp. Curiosity overcame my fear, and I did not shut my eyes. 59 The Sect of the Thirty The original manuscript may be consulted at the University of Leiden; the text is in Latin, but one or two Hellenisms justify the conjecture that it was translated from the Greek. According to Lei- segang, it dates from the fourth century a.d. Gib- bon mentions it in passing in one of the footnotes to the fifteenth chapter of his Decline and Fall. The anonymous author has recorded: . . . The Sect was never large, and now its pros- elytes number but a scant few. Decimated by sword and fire, they sleep by the wayside or, since it is forbidden them to build any form of dwelling place, among the ruins spared by war. They also journey about quite naked. These facts are com- mon knowledge. My aim here is to leave a written record of what it has been vouchsafed me to dis- cover of the Sect's beliefs and customs. I have argued at length with its masters and have met with little success in converting them to the Faith of Our Lord. The first thing about the Sect that drew my at- 61 tention was the variousness of its notions regard- ing the dead. Among the most ignorant, for ex- ample, it is held that the burial of those who have departed this life is entrusted to their spirits; oth- ers, the unorthodox, maintain that Jesus' admoni- tion to "let the dead bury their dead" is meant to condemn the pompous vanity of our funeral rites. The advice to sell what one has and give to the poor is closely followed by every sectarian; those so benefited give to others and these, in turn, to still others. This should suffice to explain their in- digence and nakedness, which, in addition, brings them nearer the state of paradise. Fervently they repeat the words, "Behold the ravens of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor have they barns or sheds; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?" Their teaching forbids all saving: "Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? There- fore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink?" The judgment "whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart" is a piece of straightforward advice about maintaining purity. Yet, many are the members of the Sect who point out that if there is not one man on earth who has not looked upon a woman to lust after her all men have com- mitted adultery. Since the desire is as sinful as the act, the righteous may without risk indulge in the most outrageous lust. The Sect shuns temples; its elders preach in the 62 open air, from the top of a hill or a wall, or some- times from a boat on the shore. The Sect's name has given rise to persistent con- jectures. One such suggests that it refers to the number to which the faithful have been reduced, which is ridiculous and yet prophetic, because, due to its perverse set of beliefs, the Sect is destined to die out. Another conjecture is that the name derives from the height of the Ark, which was thirty cubits; another, which distorts the calendar, from the number of nights that make up a lunar month; another, from the Savior's age at baptism; another, from Adam's years when he rose out of the red dust of the ground. All are equally untrue. No less deceiving is the list of thirty godheads or thrones, of which one is Abraxas, portrayed by a cock's head, the arms and torso of a man, and the tail of an entwined serpent. The priceless gift of communicating Truth has not been granted me. One knows the Truth but is unable to argue it. May others more gifted than I save the members of the Sect by preaching — by preaching or by fire, for it is better to be put to death than to commit suicide. I shall therefore limit myself to giving an account of the abomina- ble heresy. The Word was made flesh to become a man among men, who would deliver Him up to the cross and be redeemed by Him. He was born of the womb of a woman of the chosen people not only to preach Love, but to suffer martyrdom. It was necessary that events be unforgettable. The death of a human being by the sword or by drinking hemlock was not enough to move the 63 imagination of mankind to the end of time. The Lord arranged things in a dramatic way. This ac- counts for the Last Supper, for Jesus' words that foretold his betrayal, for the repeated warning to one of the disciples, for the blessing of the bread and wine, for Peter's pledges, for the solitary vigil in the garden of Gethsemane, for the sleep of the twelve disciples, for the Son of God's human prayer, for the sweat like blood, for the multitude with swords and staves, for the kiss of betrayal, for Pilate's washing his hands, for the scourging, for the mocking, for the crown of thorns, for the pur- ple robe and reed scepter, for the vinegar with gall, for the cross on the summit of a hill, for the promise to the repentant thief, for the earth that shook and the darkness over all the land. Divine Providence, to which I owe so many bless- ings, has allowed me to discover the real and se- cret reason for the Sect's name. In Kerioth, where in all likelihood it originated, there survives a con- venticle known as the Thirty Coins. This was the earliest name, and it gives us the clue. In the drama of the Cross (I mean this with due rever- ence) there were intentional and unintentional ac- tors— all of them indispensable, all of them fatal. Unintentional were the priests who handed out the pieces of silver, unintentional was the multi- tude that asked for Barabbas, unintentional was the Governor of Judea, unintentional were the Roman soldiers who erected the cross of His mar- tyrdom and nailed the nails and cast lots for His garments. The intentional actors were only two — the Redeemer and Judas. The latter cast down the thirty pieces of silver that were the price of Salva- tion and went and hanged himself. At the time, 64 like the Son of Man, he was thirty-three years old. The Sect worships them equally and absolves all the others. There is no one culprit. Everyone, un- witting or not, is an agent in the scheme laid down by Divine Wisdom. All of them now share the Glory. My hand trembles to set down yet another abomination. In order to follow the example of their masters, the believers, upon attaining the designated age, have themselves mocked and cru- cified on the summit of a hill. This criminal viola- tion of the Fifth Commandment must be brought to an end with all the severity that human and divine laws have always demanded. May the curses of the skies, may the hatred of the angels . . . No more of the manuscript has been unearthed. 65 The Night of the Gifts It was many years ago in the old Confiteria del Aguila, on Florida Street up around Piedad, that we heard this story. The problem of knowledge was being discussed. Someone invoked the pla- tonic theory that we have already seen everything in a previous world, so that to know is to know again. My father, I believe, said that Bacon had written that if to learn is to remember, not to know is in fact to have forgotten. Another person, a man getting on in years, who was probably a bit lost in metaphysics, decided to enter in. Speaking slowly and deliberately, this is what he told us: Frankly, I don't understand all this talk of pla- tonic archetypes. Nobody remembers the first time he saw the color yellow or black, or the first time he tasted a certain fruit — maybe because he was small then and had no way of knowing he was ini- tiating a very long series. Of course, there are other first times that no one forgets. I can tell you what a certain night of my life gave me, one I often recall — the night of the thirtieth of April, 1874. 67 Summer holidays were much longer then, but I don't know why we stayed away from Buenos Aires until that late date. We were at the ranch of some cousins, the Dornas, not far from Lobos. During that time, one of the cowhands, Rufino, initiated me into country things. I was approach- ing thirteen; he was somewhat older and had a reputation as a daredevil. He was quick, agile. When the younger hands played at knife-fighting with burnt sticks, the one who always got his face marked was Rufino's opponent. One Friday, Ru- fino suggested we go into town the next night to have a little fun. Of course, I leaped at the chance, but without really knowing what it was all about. I warned him I didn't know how to dance. Dancing was easy to learn, he said. After dinner on Saturday, at around seven- thirty, we set off. Rufino had rigged himself out like someone going to a party, and he wore a silver knife in his belt. I had a little knife like it, but I didn't bring mine for fear of being laughed at. It was not long before we glimpsed the first houses. I don't suppose any of you has ever been to Lobos. Not that it matters. There's no small town in the Argentine that isn't exactly like all the others — even to the point of thinking itself different. Each has the same unpaved alleys, the same empty lots, the same one-story houses — all of which make a man on horseback seem more important. We dismounted at a certain street corner in front of a house painted sky-blue or pink, with a sign saying "La Estrella." Tied to the hitching post were some horses with good saddles. Through the half-open street door I saw a shaft of light. At the end of the entranceway was a large room with 68 wooden benches on either side and, between the benches, a number of dark doors that opened who knew where. A little mongrel with yellow fur ran up barking to welcome me. Quite a few people were about, and a half dozen or so women in floral dressing gowns came and went. A respec- table-looking lady, dressed in black from head to foot, seemed to be the owner of the house. Rufino greeted her, saying, "I've brought a new friend, but he's not much of a rider." "Don't worry," the woman answered. "He'll learn soon enough." I felt ashamed. To draw their attention away, or to make them see that I was a boy, I began playing with the dog at the end of one of the benches. On a table in the kitchen burned some cheap candles in bottles, and I also remember a small brazier in a corner to the rear. On the whitewashed wall op- posite was a picture of Our Lady of Mercy. Somebody, between one joke and another, was tuning a guitar that gave him a lot of trouble. Out of sheer timidity I did not refuse a gin, which burned my mouth like a red-hot coal. Among the women I noticed one" who seemed different from the others. They called her La Cautiva — the Cap- tive. There was something Indian about her, but her features were like a picture and her eyes very sad. Her braided hair reached her waist. Rufino saw that I was looking at her. "Let's hear about the raid again — to refresh our memories," he said to her. The girl spoke as if she were alone, and in some way I felt that she was unable to think of anything else and that the story she told us was the only thing that had happened to her in her life. 69 "I was very young when they brought me from Catamarca," she said. "What did I know about In- dian raids? At Santa Irene we didn't even mention such things, we were so scared. As if unraveling a secret, I gradually found out that Indians could descend like a cloud and kill people and steal their stock. Women they carried off into the pampa, and they did everything to them. I tried as hard as I could not to believe any of this. My brother Lucas — the Indians later put a spear through him — swore it was all lies, but when a thing is true it has to be said only once for you to know it's so. The government hands out strong drink and yerba to keep the Indians happy, but they have very clever wizards telling them what to do. At the word of one of their chiefs, it's nothing for them to attack a ranch somewhere out between the forts, which are far apart. Just from thinking about it so much, I almost wished they would come, and I knew how to look for them out to- ward the setting sun. I don't know how much time went by, but there were frosts and summers and roundups and the death of the foreman's son be- fore the raid." She paused for a moment or two, lost in thought, then went on. "It was as if the south wind brought them. I saw a thistle in a ditch, and that night I dreamed of Indians. It happened at day- break. The animals knew it before we did — the same as when there's an earthquake. The cattle were restless and birds wheeled in the sky. We ran to look in the direction I always looked." "Who warned you?" someone asked. Distant as ever, the girl repeated her last sen- tence. "We ran to look in the direction I always 70 looked. It was as if the whole desert had begun to move. Through the bars of the window grille we saw the cloud of dust before we saw them. It was a raiding party. They beat their hands over their mouths, whooping. We had some rifles at Santa Irene, but all they were good for was making noise and turning the Indians even more savage." La Cautiva spoke like someone saying a prayer she had learned by heart, but out in the street I heard the desert Indians and their war cries. There was an eruption and, as if riding in on horseback in the fragments of some dream, they were there in the room. They were local toughs and they were drunk. Now, in my memory, I see them as very tall. The one who came in at the head of them elbowed past Rufino, who stood by the door. Rufino changed color and got out of the way. The lady in black, who had not stirred from her place, rose to her feet. "It's Juan Moreira!" she said. After so much time, I no longer know whether I remember the man of that night — the outlaw Moreira — or somebody else I was later often to see around cattle fairs. The long, thick hair and black beard of stage characters based on Moreira come to mind, but I also recall a ruddy face pitted by smallpox. The little dog scurried forward to give him a welcome. With a single whiplash, Moreira left it in a sprawl on the floor. It lay on its back and died pawing the air. This is where my story really begins. Without a sound I made my way to one of the doors, which opened into a narrow passageway and a staircase. On the upper floor, I hid myself in a dark room. Apart from the bed, which was very 71 low, I never knew what other furniture was there. I was trembling. Below, the shouting did not let up, and there was a shattering of glass. I heard a woman's footsteps coming up the stairs and I saw a momentary slit of light. Then La Cautiva's voice called out to me in a whisper. "I'm here to serve — but to serve peaceable people," she said. "Come closer, I'm not going to hurt you." She had taken off her dressing gown. I lay be- side her and felt for her face with my hands. I have no idea how much time passed. We ex- changed neither a word nor a kiss. I untied her braid, and my hands played with her hair, which was very straight, and then they played with her. We did not see each other again after that, and I never learned her real name. A shot startled us. La Cautiva said, "You can leave by the other stairway." I did, and I found myself out in the dirt alley. It was a moonlit night. A police sergeant, Andres Chirino, stood on watch by the wall with a rifle and fixed bayonet. He laughed, saying to me, "I see you're an early riser." I must have answered something, but he paid me no attention. A man was lowering himself over the wall. With a bound, the sergeant buried the steel in his flesh. The man dropped to the ground, where he lay on his back, moaning and bleeding to death. I remembered the dog. To finish the man off once and for all, Chirino sank the bayonet in again. "You didn't make it this time, Moreira," he said almost joyously. From every side came uniformed men, who had surrounded the house, and then the neighbors. 72 The sergeant had a struggle to pull out the bayo- net. Everybody wanted to shake his hand. "The fancy footwork's all over for this hood- lum," Rufino said with a laugh. I went from group to group, telling people what I had seen. Then, all at once, I felt very tired; maybe I was even feverish. Slipping away, I found Rufino and we started home. From our horses, we saw the pale dawn light. More than tired, I felt dazed by that torrent of events. "By the great river of that night," my father said when the man had finished. "That's right," he agreed. "In the bare space of a few hours I had known love and had looked on death. All things are revealed to all men — or, any- way, all those things it's granted a man to know — but to me two fundamental things were revealed in a single night. The years pass and I've told this story so many times I no longer know whether I remember it as it was or whether it's only my words I'm remembering. Maybe the same thing happened to La Cautiva with her Indian raid. It doesn't matter now whether it was I or someone else who saw Moreira killed." 73 The Mirror and the Mask The battle of Clontarf over, in which the Nor- wegians met defeat, the High King of Ireland spoke to his court poet. "The greatest deeds lose their luster if they are not coined in words," the king said. "I want you to sing my victory and my praise. I will be Aeneas; you will be my Virgil. Do you think yourself capable of this task, which will make us both immortal?" "Yes, my lord," said the bard. "I am Ollan. For twelve winters I have trained in the disciplines of prosody. I know by heart the three hundred and sixty legends that form the basis of true poetry. The cycles of Ulster and Munster are in the strings of my harp. The laws authorize me to be lavish in using the oldest words of our tongue and the most complex metaphors. I have mastered the secret of writing, which protects our art from the undis- cerning eyes of the common herd. I can celebrate loves, cattle thieves, voyages, and wars. I know the mythological lineages of all the royal houses of Ireland. I possess a knowledge of judicial astrol- ogy, mathematics, canon law, and the powers of 75 plants. I have defeated my rivals in public contest. I have made myself skilled in satire, which causes infirmities of the skin, including leprosy. I know how to wield a sword, as I proved in your battle. I am ignorant of only one thing — how to thank you for the gift you make me." The king, who was easily tired by long speeches, especially those of others, said with relief, "I know these things quite well. I have been told that the nightingale recently sang in England. When the rains and snows pass, and the nightingale returns from its southern lands, you will sing your praises before the court and before the School of Bards. I grant you a whole year. You will polish each word and letter. Reward, as you know by now, will not be unworthy of my royal custom nor of the sleep- less nights of your inspiration." "O king, what greater reward than to see your face!" said the poet, who was also a courtier. He bowed and withdrew, already glimpsing one or two verses. When the year came round — it had been a time of epidemics and uprisings — the poet presented his panegyric. He declaimed it slowly, confidently, without a glance at the manuscript. With his head the king showed his approval. Everyone imitated his gesture, even those thronging the doorways, who were unable to make otit a single word. At the end the king spoke. "I accept your labor," he said. "It is another vic- tory. You have given each word its true meaning, and each substantive the epithet given it by the poets of old. In your whole panegyric there is not a single image unknown to the classics. War is the beautiful web of men, and blood is the sword's 76 water. The sea has its gods and the clouds foretell the future. You have skillfully handled rhyme, allit- eration, assonance, quantities, the artifices of learned rhetoric, the wise variation of meters. If all the literature of Ireland were to perish — absit omen — it could be reconstructed without loss from your classic ode. Thirty scribes shall copy it twelve times each." There was a silence, then he went on. "All is well and yet nothing has happened. In our veins the blood runs no faster. Our hands have not sought the bow. No one has turned pale. No one uttered a battle cry or set his breast against the Vikings. Before a year is out, poet, we shall applaud an- other ode. As a sign of our approval, take this mir- ror, which is of silver." "I give thanks and I understand," said the bard. The stars in the sky went on in their bright course. Once more the nightingale sang in the Saxon forests, and the poet came back with his manuscript, which was shorter than the one be- fore. He did not repeat it from memory but read it, obviously hesitant, omitting certain passages as if he himself did not completely understand them or did not wish to profane them. The ode was strange. It was not a description of the battle — it was the battle. In its warlike chaos there struggled with one another the God that is Three and is One, Ireland's pagan deities, and those who would wage war hundreds of years later at the beginning of the Elder Edda. The form was no less odd. A singular noun governed a plural verb. The prepo- sitions were alien to common usage. Harshness al- ternated with sweetness. The metaphors were ar- bitrary, or so they seemed. 77 The king exchanged a few words with the men of letters who stood around him, then spoke to the bard. "Your first ode I could declare was an apt compendium of all that has been sung in Ireland," the king said. "This one outdoes, and even makes as nothing, whatever came before it. It astounds, it dazzles, it causes wonderment. The ignorant will be unworthy of it, but not so the learned, the few. An ivory casket will be the resting place of its sin- gle copy. Of the pen that has produced so eminent a work we may expect one still more lofty." He added with a smile, "We are the figures of a fable, and it is good to remember that in fables the number three prevails." "The wizard's three gifts, triads, and the un- questionable Trinity," the bard made bold to mur- mur. The king continued, "As a token of our ap- proval, take this golden mask." "I give thanks and I have understood," said the bard. The anniversary came round again. The palace sentries noticed that the poet carried no manu- script. In amazement, the king looked at him; the bard was like another man. Something other than time had furrowed and transformed his features. His eyes seemed to stare into the distance or to be blind. The bard begged to be allowed a few words with the king. The slaves left the chamber. "Have you not written the ode?" asked the king. "Yes," the bard sadly replied. "But would that Christ Our Lord had prevented me!" "Can you repeat it?" "I dare not." 78 "I will give you the courage you lack," said the king. The bard recited the poem. It consisted of a single line. Not venturing to repeat it aloud, the poet and his king savored it as if it were a secret prayer or a blasphemy. The king was as awestricken and over- come as the bard. The two looked at each other, very pale. "In my youth," said the king, "I sailed toward the sunset. On one island I saw silver hounds that dealt death to golden boars. On another we fed ourselves on the fragrance of magic apples. On a third I saw walls of fire. On the farthest island of all an arched and hanging river cut across the sky and in its waters went fishes and boats. These are wonders, but they do not compare with your poem, which in some way encompasses them all. What bewitchery gave it to you?" "In the dawn I woke up speaking words I did not at first understand," said the bard. "Those words were a poem. I felt I had committed a sin, perhaps one the Holy Ghost does not forgive." "The one we two now share," the king said in a whisper. "The sin of having known Beauty, which is a gift forbidden to men. Now it behooves us to expiate it. I gave you a mirror and a golden mask; here is my third present, which will be the last." In the bard's right hand he placed a dagger. Of the poet, we know that he killed himself upon leaving the palace; of the king, that he is a beggar wandering the length and breadth of Ire- land— which was once his kingdom — and that he has never repeated the poem. 79 Undr The reader should be forewarned that the follow- ing pages will not be found in the Libellus (1615) of Adam of Bremen, who, as everyone knows, was born and died in the eleventh century. They were unearthed by Lappenberg in a manuscript in the Bodleian, at Oxford, and, given the wealth of cir- cumstantial details, he judged them a late in- terpolation, but he published them as a curiosity in his Analecta Germanica (Leipzig, 1894). The opin- ion of a mere Argentine amateur is of little ac- count; let the reader judge these pages for him- self. My translation is faithful, but it is not literal. Adam of Bremen wrote: . . . Of the peoples who live on the edge of the wilderness that stretches away on the other shore of the Barbarian Gulf, beyond the lands where the wild horse breeds, the worthiest of mention are the Urns. The uncertain or invented information of traders, the dangers of the route, and the plun- dering of nomads prevented me from reaching their territory. It is clear, however, that their rudi- 81 mentary, unfrequented villages are located in the lowlands of the Vistula. Unlike the Swedes, the Urns profess the true faith of Christ, untainted by Arianism or by the bloodthirsty worship of devils, from which the royal houses of England and other northern nations trace their lineages. The Urns are herdsmen, ferrymen, shamans, forgers of swords, and harness makers. Owing to the rigors of war, they barely till the soil. One invariably comes to resemble one's enemies, and the steppe and the tribes that roam it have made the Urns very skilled in the handling of horse and bow. Their spears, since they are used by horsemen and not foot soldiers, are longer than ours. As may be imagined, the Urns are unfamiliar with pen, inkhorn, and parchment. They carve their characters as our ancestors carved the runes which Odin revealed to them after having hung from the ash tree — Odin given to Odin — through nine days and nights. To this general information I add an account of what I was told by a traveler from Iceland, Ulf Sigurdsson, a man of grave and measured words. We met in Uppsala, near the temple. The wood fire had died, and the cold and the dawn entered through the uneven chinks in the wall. Outside, the gray wolves, which eat the flesh of the hea- thens sacrificed to the three gods, left their wary tracks in the snow. Our conversation began in Latin, as is usual with churchmen, but we were not long in slipping into the tongue of the north, which extends from Thule all the way to the mar- ketplaces of Asia. The man said: As I am of the race of the skalds, to learn that the poetry of the Urns consists of a single word 82 was enough for me to set out in search of them and the way that would lead to their land. Not without exhaustion and hardship did I arrive there after a year-long journey. It was night, and all those I came upon shot me odd looks, and one or two stones were hurled at me. Seeing the light of a blacksmith's forge, I ap- proached it. The smith, whose name was Orm, of- fered me lodging for the night. His language was more or less ours. We exchanged a few words. From his lips I heard for the first time the name of the reigning king- — Gunnlaug. I learned that after his last war he looked with suspicion upon strangers and that it was his custom to crucify them. To avoid that fate, which is less fitting to a man than a god, I undertook the composition of a drdpa, or ode, that celebrated the victories, the fame, and the mercy of the king. I had barely committed it to memory when two men came searching for me. I did not want to surrender my sword to them, but I let myself be led away. There were still stars in the sky. We crossed the first of several stretches of open ground with huts on every side. I had been led to expect pyramids, but what I saw in the middle of this square was a yellow wooden post. At the top of it I made out the black figure of a fish. Orm, who had accom- panied us, said that the fish was the Word. In the next opening, I saw a red post marked with a disk. Orm said that this was the Word. I asked him to tell me it. He was a simple artisan, he said, and he did not know. In the third opening, which was the last, I saw a post painted black, with a design on it that I have forgotten. On the far side of the square was a long, straight wall whose ends I could 83 not catch sight of. Later I found out that it was circular, that it supported a mud roof, that it en- closed a single chamber, and that it stretched around the whole city. The horses tied to the hitching post outside were of small stature and had long manes. The blacksmith was not allowed entrance. Inside there were armed men, all standing. Gunnlaug, the king, who was ailing, lay with his eyes half shut on some camel hides on a kind of dais. He was a wasted, yellowish man, a sacred and almost forgot- ten thing; old scars spanned the width of his chest. One of the soldiers opened a way for me. Some- one had brought a harp. Kneeling, I intoned the drdpa in a low voice. There was no lack of the rhe- torical figures, the alliterations, and the stresses that the form demands. I do not know whether the king understood it, but he gave me a silver ring, which I still preserve. Under his pillow, I glimpsed the edge of a dagger. To his right was a chessboard with a hundred squares and a handful of scattered pieces. The guard shoved me to the rear. A man took my place before the king but did not kneel. He plucked the harp as if tuning it, and in a low voice he uttered the word that I had come in search of and had not yet fathomed. "It no longer means anything now," someone said reverently. I saw tears. The man raised or modulated his voice, and his scarcely varying chords were monot- onous or, still better, infinite. I would have liked his song to go on forever and to be my life. Abruptly, it stopped. I heard the noise the harp made when the singer, no doubt in utter exhaus- 84 tion, threw it down. We all went out in disorder. I was one of the last. In astonishment I saw that the light was waning on another day. I walked a few steps, when a hand on my shoulder made me pause. "The king's ring was your talisman," I was told, "but you will not be long in meeting your death, because you have heard the Word. I, Bjarni Thor- kelsson, will save you. I am of the race of the skalds. In your ode you called blood the sword's water and a battle the web of men. I remember having heard those figures from my father's fa- ther. You and I are poets, and I will save you. Nowadays, we do not define each thing that our song quickens; we express it in a single word, which is the Word." "I was unable to hear it," I said. "I beg you to tell me what it is." He paused for a moment or two and replied, "I have sworn not to divulge it. Besides, nobody can teach anything. You must find it out for yourself. But let's hurry; your life is in danger. I'll hide you in my house, where no one will dare look for you. If the wind is favorable, tomorrow you will sail southward on the river." So began the adventure that was to last so many winters. I shall not go into all that befell me, nor shall I try to give an orderly account of my shifting fortunes. I was an oarsman, slave dealer, slave, woodcutter, highwayman, singer, and taster of deep waters and metals. I suffered captivity, and spent a year in the quicksilver mines, which loosen one's teeth. I fought side by side with men of Swe- den in the Varangian guard at MikligarSr [Con- stantinople]. On the shores of the Sea of Azov I 85 was loved by a woman whom I shall never forget; I left her or she left me — it amounts to the same thing. I betrayed and I was betrayed. More than once fate made me kill. A Greek soldier chal- lenged me and gave me the choice between two swords. One was a hand's breadth longer than the other. Knowing he was out to intimidate me, I chose the shorter. He asked me why. I replied that with either the distance from my hand to his heart was the same. At the edge of the Black Sea stands the runic epitaph I carved for my comrade in arms, Leif Arnarson. I have fought the Blue Men of Serkland, the Saracens. In the course of time I have been many men; it was a whirlwind, a long dream, but all the while the main thing was the Word. From time to time I disbelieved in it. I kept telling myself that to renounce the beautiful game of combining beautiful words was senseless, and that there was no reason to search for a single, and perhaps imaginary, word. Such reasoning was vain. A missionary suggested the word "God," which I rejected. One early dawn, along the banks of a river that widened into a sea, I believed I had come upon the revelation. Returning to the land of the Urns, I had some trouble finding the singer's house. When I did, I entered and spoke my name. By that time, night had fallen. From the floor, Thorkelsson told me to light a candle in the bronze candlestick. His face had aged so much that I could not help thinking that I, too, was old. As is the custom, I asked about his king. "The king is no longer called Gunnlaug," he said. "His name is now another. Tell me all about your travels." 86 I did so in exact order and with a great many details that I shall omit here. Before I had fin- ished, he asked me, "Did you often sing in those lands?" The question took me by surprise. "At first, I sang to earn my living," I said. "Later, overcome by a fear I do not understand, I was estranged from my harp and my song." "All right," he said. "You may go on with your story now." I obeyed. After I had finished, a long silence fol- lowed. "The first woman you had — what did she give you?" he asked. "Everything," I said. "Life gave me everything as well. Life gives ev- erything to everyone, but most men are unaware of it. My voice is tired and my fingers weak, but lis- ten to me." He took up his harp and uttered the word "undr," which means "wonder." The dying man's song held me rapt, but in it and in his chords I recognized my own verses, the slave woman who gave me my first love, the men I had killed, the chill of dawn, daybreak over the water, the oars. I took up the harp and sang to a different word. "All right," the other man said, and I had to draw close to hear him. "You have understood." 87 Utopia of a Tired Man He called it Utopia, a Greek word meaning there is no such place. — Qiievedo No two hills are alike, but everywhere on earth plains are one and the same. I was making my way in such country, asking myself, not that it really mattered, if this were Oklahoma or Texas or the part of the Argentine that literary men called the pampa. Neither to right nor left did I see a fence. As on other occasions, I slowly repeated these lines by the poet Emilio Oribe: At the heart of the endless awesome plain and close by the border of Brazil, which keep growing and ever expanding. The road was uneven. Rain began to fall. Some two or three hundred yards off I saw light from a house, which was low and rectangular and sur- rounded by trees. The door was opened by a man so tall he almost gave me a fright. He was dressed in gray. I felt he was waiting for someone. There was no lock on the door. We went into a long room with wooden walls, a table, and chairs. A lamp giving off a yellowish 89 light hung from the ceiling. The table, for some reason, seemed strange to me. On it stood an hourglass, the first, outside of some steel engrav- ing or other, I had ever laid eyes on. The man mo- tioned me to one of the chairs. I tried out various languages, and we did not understand each other. When at last he spoke, he did so in Latin. I dusted off what I remembered from my now distant school days, readying myself for conversation. "By your clothes, I see you come from another century," he said. "A diversity of tongues favored a diversity of peoples and even of wars. The world has fallen back on Latin. There are those who fear it may degenerate again into French, Lemosi, or Papiamento, but that is not an immediate risk. Be that as it may, neither the past nor the future in- terests me." I said nothing, and he added, "If you don't mind watching somebody else eat, will you join me?" Seeing that he noticed my uneasiness, I said yes. We went down a corridor, with doors on either hand, that led to a small kitchen in which every- thing was made of metal. We came back with our dinner on a tray — bowls of cornflakes, a bunch of grapes, an unfamiliar fruit whose taste reminded me of figs, and a big pitcher of water. If I re- member correctly, there was no bread. My host's features were sharp, and there was something un- usual about his eyes. I won't forget his pale, aus- tere face, which I shall never see again. He made no gestures when he spoke. Having to converse in Latin inhibited me, but at last I said, "Doesn't my sudden appearance amaze you?" 9° "No," he said. "We receive such visits from cen- tury to century. They don't last long. Tomorrow, at the latest, you'll be home again." The certainty in his voice was reassuring. I thought it proper to introduce myself. "I am Eu- doro Acevedo. I was born in 1897, in the city of Buenos Aires. I am seventy years old. I am a pro- fessor of English and American literatures and a writer of imaginative tales." "I remember having read, not without pleasure, two tales of an imaginative nature," he said. "Travels of a Captain Lemuel Gulliver, which many people take to be true, and the Summa Theo- logiae. But let's not speak of facts. Facts matter to no one anymore. They are mere points of depar- ture for invention and reasoning. In our schools we are taught doubt and the art of forgetting — above all, the forgetting of what is personal and local. We live in time, which is successive, but we try to live sub specie aeternitatis. Of the past we retain a few names, which language tends to lose. We shun pointless details. We have neither dates nor history. Nor have we statistics. You said your name is Eudoro. I can't tell you my name, because I'm simply called Someone." "And what was your father's name?" "He had none." On one of the walls I saw a shelf. I opened a book at random; the letters were clean and un- decipherable, and they were written by hand. Their angular lines reminded me of the runic al- phabet, which, however, was only used for writing inscriptions. I reflected that these men of the fu- ture were not only taller but were more skilled. In- stinctively, I looked at the man's long, fine fingers. 91 "Now you are going to see something you've never seen," he said. He handed me a copy of Thomas More's Utopia, printed in Basel in the year 1518; leaves and pages were missing. Somewhat foolishly, I answered, "It's a printed book. At home, I had over two thousand of them, though they were neither as old nor as valuable as this one." I read the title aloud. The man laughed. "No one can read two thou- sand books. In the four centuries I have lived, I haven't read more than half a dozen. Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts. Printing — which is now abolished, since it tended to multiply unnecessary texts to the point of dizziness — was one of man's worst evils." "In my strange past," I said, "the superstition prevailed that every day, between evening and morning, certain acts occur which it is a shame to be ignorant of. The planet was populated by col- lective ghosts — Canada, Brazil, the Swiss Congo, and the Common Market. Almost no one knew anything of the history that preceded those pla- tonic entities, but, of course, they knew every last detail of the most recent congress of pedagogues, or of imminent breakdowns in diplomatic rela- tions, or of statements issued by presidents, drawn up by the secretary of a secretary and containing all the carefully worded haziness appropriate to the genre. These things were read to be forgotten, for, only hours later, other trivialities would blot them out. Of all offices, that of politician was with- out doubt the most public. An ambassador or a Cabinet minister was a kind of cripple whom it was necessary to cart around in long, noisy vehicles, ringed by motorcyclists and military escorts and 92 awaited by eager photographers. It seems that their feet have been cut off, my mother used to say. Pictures and the printed word were more real than the things they stood for. Only what was pub- lished had any reality. Esse est percipi (to be is to be photographed) was the beginning, middle, and end of our singular idea of the world. In that past of mine, people were naive; they believed that cer- tain merchandise was good because its own makers claimed so over and over again. Robberies were also frequent, though everyone knew that the pos- session of money brings no greater happiness or peace of mind." "Money?" the man echoed. "No one any longer suffers poverty, which must have been unbearable, or wealth, which must have been the most uncom- fortable form of vulgarity. Everyone has a calling." "Like the rabbis," I said. He appeared not to understand and went on. "Nor are there cities anymore. To judge by the ruins of Bahia Blanca, which I once explored, not much has been lost. There are no personal posses- sions now, there are no inheritances. At the age of a hundred, when a man matures, he is ready to come face to face with himself and his loneliness. By then he will have fathered a child." "One child?" I asked. "Yes. Only one. There is no reason to carry on the human race. Some people think man is an organ of the godhead for universal consciousness, but nobody knows for sure whether such a god- head exists. The advantages and disadvantages of gradual or simultaneous suicide by every man and woman on earth are, I believe, now being argued. But let's get back to what we were saying." 93 I agreed. "Having reached a hundred, the individual no longer stands in need of love or friendship. Evils and involuntary death are no threat to him. He practices one of the arts or philosophy or mathe- matics or he plays a game of solitary chess. When he wants to, he kills himself. Man is master of his life. He is also master of his death." "Is that a quotation?" I asked. "Of course. Quotations are all we have now. Language is a system of quotations." "And the great adventure of my time — space travel?" I asked. "It's centuries ago now that those travels were given up. They were certainly to be admired, but we could never rid ourselves of a here and now." With a smile, he added, "Besides, all travel is spa- tial. To go from one planet to another is like going to the farm across the way. When you entered this room, you were carrying out a voyage through space." "That's right," I said. "And one also used to speak of chemical substances and animals." The man now turned his back to me and looked outside. Beyond the windows, the plain was white with silent snow and moonlight. I got up my courage to ask, "Are there still mu- seums and libraries?" "No. We try to forget the past, except for the writing of elegies. There are no commemorations or anniversaries or effigies of dead men now. Each of us must himself produce the arts and sciences he needs." "Then everyone must be his own Bernard Shaw, his own Jesus Christ, his own Archimedes." 94 He agreed without a word. "What happened to governments?" "According to tradition, they fell into gradual disuse," he said. "They called elections, declared wars, collected taxes, confiscated fortunes, ordered arrests, and tried to impose censorship, but no- body on earth obeyed them. The press stopped publishing the news and photographs of govern- ment leaders. Politicians had to find honest work; some of them made good comedians or good faith healers. What actually happened was probably far more complex than this summary." He went on in a changed tone. "I built this house, which is the same as all others. I carved this furniture and these utensils. I worked these fields, which will be improved by people unknown to me. May I show you a few things?" I followed him into an adjoining room. He lit a lamp like the first one; it, too, hung from the ceil- ing. In a corner I saw a harp with few strings. On the walls were rectangular canvases in which yel- low tones predominated. The work did not seem that of the same hand. "This is what I do," he said. I examined the canvases, stopping before the smallest one, which represented, or suggested, a sunset and which encompassed something infinite. "If you like it, you can have it as a keepsake of a future friend," he said matter-of-factly. I thanked him, but there were a few canvases that left me uneasy. I won't say that they were blank, but they were nearly so. "They're painted in colors that your eyes of the past can't see," he said. A moment later, when his delicate hands 95 plucked the strings of the harp, I barely caught an occasional sound. Just then a knock was heard. A tall woman and three or four men entered the house. One would have said that they were brothers and sisters or that time had made them alike. My host spoke to the woman first. "I knew you wouldn't fail to come tonight. Have you seen Nils?" "Off and on. He's as devoted to his painting as ever." "Let's hope with more success than his father." The dismantling began. Manuscripts, pictures, furnishings, utensils — we left nothing in the house. The woman worked alongside the men. I was ashamed of my weakness, which scarcely al- lowed me to be of any help. No one shut the door and we went out, loaded with things. I noticed that the house had a saddle roof. After a fifteen-minute walk, we turned left. In the distance I made out a kind of tower, crowned with a cupola. "It's the crematory," someone said. "Inside it is the lethal chamber. It's said to have been invented by a philanthropist whose name, I think, was Adolf Hitler." The caretaker, whose stature by now did not as- tonish me, opened the gate to us. My host ex- changed a few words with him. Before stepping into the enclosure, he waved goodbye. "It looks like more snow," the woman said. In my study on Mexico Street, in Buenos Aires, I have the canvas that someone will paint, thou- sands of years from now, with substances today scattered over the whole planet. 96 The Bribe My story is about two men or, rather, about an ep- isode involving two men. The actual affair, in itself neither singular nor even out of the ordinary, matters less than the character of its protagonists. Each of them sinned out of vanity, but in different ways and with different results. The events giving rise to the anecdote (for really it is not much more) took place a short time ago. To my mind, it could only have happened where it did — in America. I had occasion at the University of Texas, in Austin, to speak at length to one of the two, Dr. Ezra Winthrop. This was toward the end of 1961. Winthrop was a professor of Old English (he did not approve of the term "Anglo-Saxon," which to him suggested an artifact made of two parts). I can remember that without once contradicting me he corrected my many mistakes and rash assumptions about the language. I was told that in his examina- tions he never asked a single question but invited his students to expatiate upon this or that topic, leaving the choice up to them. Of old Puritan 97 stock, a native of Boston, Winthrop had found it hard getting used to the habits and prejudices of the South. He missed the snow, but it is my obser- vation that Northerners are conditioned to the cold, much as we Argentines are to the heat. I still preserve the image, now dim, of a rather tall man with gray hair, less agile than strong. Clearer is my memory of his colleague, Herbert Locke, who gave me a copy of his book Toward a History of the Kenning, in which one reads that the Saxons were not long in dispensing with those somewhat too mechanical metaphors ("whale's road" for "the sea," "falcon of battle" for "the eagle"), whereas the skalds went on combining and interweaving them to the point of inextricability. I mention Herbert Locke because he is an integral part of my story. I now come to the Icelander, Eric Einarsson, who is perhaps the true protagonist. I never set eyes on him. He arrived in Texas in 1969, when I was in Cambridge, but the letters of a mutual friend, Ramon Martinez Lopez, have left me feel- ing I know Einarsson intimately. I know that he was impetuous, energetic, and cold, and that in a land of tall men he was tall. Given his red hair, it was inevitable that his students dub him Eric the Red. In his opinion, the use of slang by a for- eigner was forced and mistaken, making him an intruder, so he never condescended even to an oc- casional "okay." A serious scholar of the Nordic languages, of English, of Latin, and — although he would not admit it — of German, he found no dif- ficulty in making his way in American universities. Einarsson's first work of any consequence was a study of the four articles that De Quincey wrote 98 on the Danish origins of Cumbrian dialect. This was followed by a study of one of the rural dialects of Yorkshire. Both publications were well re- ceived, but Einarsson felt his career needed a boost. In 1970, the Yale University Press pub- lished his lengthy critical edition of the Battle of Maldon. The scholarship of Einarsson's notes was undeniable; in the introduction, however, certain of his hypotheses stirred up controversy in the al- most secret circles of academics. There he stated, for example, that in style the poem has an af- finity— even if a remote one — with the heroic Finnsburh fragment and not with the deliberate rhetoric of Beowulf, and that its handling of mov- ing circumstantial details strangely foreshadows the methods which, not unjustly, we admire in the Icelandic sagas. He also emended a number of readings in Elphinston's text. Einarsson was made full professor at Texas the same year he arrived. As everyone knows, scholarly conferences are popular in American universities. Dr. Winthrop, in his turn, had given a paper at one of the impor- tant Germanic symposia the year before, at Michigan State. His department head, who was getting ready to go off on sabbatical, asked Winthrop to choose a delegate to deliver a paper at the next conference, to be held at Wisconsin. There were only two real candidates — Herbert Locke and Eric Einarsson. Winthrop, like Carlyle, had renounced the Puri- tan faith of his ancestors but not its ethics. His duty was clear, and he did not decline to give his advice. Herbert Locke, going back to 1954, had been unstinting in his assistance to him, particu- larly with regard to a certain annotated edition of 99 Beowulf which, in a number of universities, had replaced Klaeber's edition. Locke was now com- piling a very useful work for the Germanic special- ist— an English-Anglo-Saxon dictionary that would save readers from the often useless exami- nation of etymological dictionaries. The Icelander was considerably younger; his insolence had earned him everyone's dislike, including Winthrop's. Einarsson's critical edition of Maldon had contributed a good deal to spreading his name. He was a master of polemic, and at the sym- posium he would cut a better figure than the shy, taciturn Locke. Winthrop was in the midst of these consider- ations when there appeared in the review columns of the Yale Philological Quarterly a long article on the teaching of Anglo-Saxon. The piece was signed with the giveaway initials "E. E." and, as if to allay any doubt, under them it read "University of Texas." Written in a foreigner's correct English, the article, while not admitting of the least in- civility, embodied a certain violence. It argued that to begin Anglo-Saxon by studying Beowulf, the work of an early period but in a pseudo-Virgilian, rhetorical style, was as arbitrary as to begin the study of English with the elaborate poetry of Mil- ton. Its author advised an inversion of chronolog- ical order, starting, say, with the eleventh-century poem "The Grave," in which the everyday lan- guage comes through, and then going back to the origins. As for Beowulf, some excerpt from its te- dious aggregate of over three thousand lines was enough — for example, the funeral rites of Scyld, who came from the sea and returns to the sea. There was no mention of Winthrop's name in the 100 article, but nonetheless he felt himself stiffly at- tacked. This mattered less to him, however, than the fact that his teaching method had been im- pugned. Only a few days were left. Wanting to be fair, Winthrop could not allow Einarsson's article, which was being widely commented upon, to influence his decision. The choice between Locke and the Icelander gave him no small trouble. Winthrop spoke to Lee Rosenthal, the department chairman, one morning, and that same afternoon Einarsson was officially named to make the trip to Wisconsin. On the eve of his departure, Einarsson pre- sented himself in Ezra Winthrop's office. He had come to say goodbye and to thank Winthrop. One of the windows opened onto a tree-lined side street, and the two men were surrounded by shelves of books. Einarsson was quick to recognize a first edition of the Edda Islandorum, bound in parchment. Winthrop told him that he was sure Einarsson would do a good job and that he had nothing to thank him for. Their conversation, if I am not mistaken, was long. "Let's speak frankly," said Einarsson. "Everyone knows that in honoring me with representing the university, Rosenthal is acting upon your advice. I am a good Germanic scholar; I'll do my best not to disappoint him. The tongue of my childhood is the tongue of the sagas, and I pronounce Anglo- Saxon better than my British colleagues. My stu- dents say 'cyning,' not 'cunning.' They also know that smoking is absolutely forbidden in my classes and that they cannot come to them rigged out as hippies. As regards my unsuccessful rival, it would be in very bad taste were I to criticize him. In his 101 book on the kenning he demonstrates not only his research into original sources but also into the per- tinent works of Meissner and Marquardt. But let's put all this nonsense aside. I owe you a personal explanation." Einarsson paused, gave a glance out the win- dow, and resumed. "I left my country at the end of 1964," he said. "When someone decides to emi- grate to a distant land, he fatally imposes upon himself the duty of getting on in that land. My first two small works, whose nature was strictly philological, had no other object than to demon- strate my ability. That, obviously, was not enough. I had always been interested in the Battle of Mal- don, which I can repeat from memory — with an occasional slip or two. I managed to get Yale to publish my critical edition of it. The poem records a Norse victory, as you know, but as regards the notion that it may have influenced the later Ice- landic sagas, I judge that inadmissible and absurd. I hinted at this merely to flatter English-speaking readers." The Icelander held Winthrop in his gaze. "I come now to the heart of the matter — my polemi- cal piece in the Quarterly. As you are aware, it jus- tifies, or tries to justify, my system, but it deliber- ately exaggerates the drawbacks of yours, which, in exchange for imposing on the student the bore- dom of three thousand consecutive lines of in- tricate verse that narrate a confused story, endows him with a large vocabulary, allowing him to enjoy — if by then he has not given it up — the en- tire corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature. To go to Wisconsin was my real aim. You and I, my dear friend, know that these conferences are foolish 102 and that they entail pointless expense but that they can prove useful in one's career." Winthrop looked at him in surprise. The New Englander was an intelligent man, but he tended to take things seriously — including conferences and the world, which may very well be a cosmic joke. "You perhaps remember our first conversation," Einarsson went on. "I had arrived from New York. It was a Sunday. The university dining halls were closed, and we had lunch at the Nighthawk. I learned a great deal from that meeting. As a good European, I had always supposed that the Ameri- can Civil War was a crusade against slave owners; you argued that the South was within its rights to wish to secede from the Union and to maintain its own institutions. To lend greater strength to what you were saying, you told me that you were a Northerner and that one of your forebears had fought in that war in the ranks of Henry Halleck. You also praised the courage of the Confederates. I have an unusual flair for making instant assess- ments. That morning was enough for me. I real- ized, my dear Winthrop, that you are governed by the curious American passion for impartiality. You want, above all, to be fair-minded. Precisely be- cause you are a Northerner, you attempt to under- stand and justify the South's cause. As soon as I knew that my trip to Wisconsin depended on what you might say to Rosenthal, I pressed the Quarterly to get my article into print, knowing that to criti- cize your teaching methods was the best means of getting your vote." There was a long silence. Winthrop was the first to break it. "I'm an old friend of Herbert's, whose °3 work I esteem," he said. "Directly or indirectly, you attacked me. To have denied you my vote would have been a sort of reprisal. I assessed his merits and yours, and the result you already know." He added, as if thinking aloud, "Maybe I gave in to the vanity of not seeking revenge. As you see, your stratagem worked." "Stratagem is the right word," Einarsson re- plied, "but I do not regret what I did. I shall always act in the best interests of our department. Be that as it may, I was determined to go to Wis- consin." "My first Viking," said Winthrop, looking Ein- arsson straight in the eye. "Another romantic superstition. It is not enough to be a Scandinavian to have descended from Vik- ings. My forefathers were good pastors of the Evangelical church; at the beginning of the tenth century, my ancestors may have been good priests of Thor. In my family, as far as I know, there were never any seafarers." "There were many in mine," Winthrop said. "Still, we aren't so different. One sin is common to us both — vanity. You pay me this visit to boast of your clever stratagem; I backed you to boast that I am an upright man." "Another thing is common to us," said Einars- son. "Nationality. I am an American citizen. My destiny is here, not in Ultima Thule. You would say that a passport does not change a man's na- ture." Then, shaking hands, they took leave of each other. 104 Avelino Arredondo The event took place in Montevideo in 1897. Every Saturday, in the way of the honest poor who know they cannot invite people home or else are trying to escape home, a group of young men occupied the same side table at the Cafe del Globo. They were all from Montevideo, and they had found it hard at first to make friends with Arredondo, a man from the interior, who neither confided in others nor encouraged others to confide in him. A little over twenty years old, he was lean and dark, rather short, and maybe a bit clumsy. His would have been an almost anonymous face had his eyes — at one and the same time sleepy and lively — not rescued it. He worked as a clerk in a drygoods store on Buenos Aires Street, studying law in his spare time. When the others condemned the war that ravaged the country and that, according to general opinion, the president was prolonging for unworthy reasons, Arredondo remained silent. He also remained silent when they made fun of him for being stingy. A short while after the battle of Cerros Blancos, IOt Arredondo told his companions that they would not be seeing him for a time, since he had to travel to Mercedes. The news stirred no one. Somebody told him to watch out for the gaucho rabble of Aparicio Saravia, the rebel leader of the Whites. With a smile, Arredondo answered that he was not afraid of the Whites. The other man, who was a W7hite himself, said nothing. His goodbye to Clara, his fiancee, Arredondo found harder. He made it in almost the same words he had used with his friends, warning her not to expect letters, as he would be very busy. Clara, who was not in the habit of writing, ac- cepted the explanation without a protest. The two were very much in love. Arredondo lived on the outskirts of town. He was looked after by a mulatto woman who bore the same surname as he, since her forebears had been slaves of his family many years earlier, at the time of the Great War. Clementina was completely trustworthy, and he ordered her to tell anyone who came looking for him that he was away in the country. He had already collected his last pay from the drygoods store. He moved into a back room of his house — one that opened onto the earth-paved third patio. It was a pointless measure, but it helped him to initi- ate his self-imposed reclusion. From the narrow iron bed, in which he was beginning to take naps again, he looked with a touch of melancholy at a bare shelf. He had sold his books — even his text- books. All he had left was a Bible that he had never read before and that he would never finish reading. He leafed through it page by page — sometimes 106 out of interest, sometimes out of boredom — and he took upon himself the task of learning by heart some chapter or other of Exodus and the end of Ecclesiastes. He made no effort to understand what he read. He was a freethinker, but he never let a single night pass without saying the Lord's Prayer, which, on coming to Montevideo, he had promised his mother he would do. To fail in this filial promise, he thought, might bring him bad luck. Arredondo knew that his goal was the morning of the twenty-fifth of August. He knew the exact number of days he had to get through. Once his goal was attained, time would cease, or, rather, nothing that happened after that would matter. He awaited the date like someone awaiting a boon or a liberation. He had let his clock run down so as not to be forever looking at it, but every night, on hearing the twelve dark strokes of midnight on a town clock, he tore a leaf out of the calendar and thought, One day less. In the beginning he worked to build up a rou- tine— brewing mate, smoking Turkish cigarettes that he rolled himself, reading and rereading a set number of pages, trying to converse with Clemen- tina when she brought him his meals on a tray, and, before putting out the candle, repeating and embellishing the speech he planned to give. Talk- ing to Clementina, a woman well along in years, was not at all easy, for her memory had remained rooted in the countryside and in its daily life. Ar- redondo also laid out a chessboard, on which he played haphazard games that never came to a con- clusion. He was missing a rook, which he replaced with a bullet or with a two-cent coin. 107 To fill time, he cleaned his room every morning, chasing away spiders with a dustcloth and broom. The mulatto woman did not like his doing these menial tasks, which were her domain and which, in addition, he was not especially good at. He would have preferred waking with the sun already high, but his habit of getting up at dawn was stronger than his will. He missed his friends a good deal but, without feeling bitter about it, he knew that, given his invincible reserve, they were not missing him. One evening, one of them came to ask for him and was turned away from the door. Clementina did not know the caller, and Ar- redondo never learned who it was. He had been an avid reader of newspapers, and now he found it hard giving up these museums of ephemeral tid- bits. He was not a man cut out for deep thinking or for deliberating. His days and his nights were all the same, but Sundays weighed most on him. Toward the mid- dle of July, he suspected that it had been a mistake to parcel out time, which in some way bears us along. Presently, he let his imagination wander over the length and breadth of Uruguay, then running with blood — over the rolling fields of Santa Irene, where he had flown kites; over a cer- tain pinto, which by now would be dead; over the dust raised by cattle when they are herded by drovers; over the weary stagecoach that came from Fray Bentos once a month with its hoard of trinkets; over the bay of La Agraciada, where the Thirty-Three, the country's national heroes, had disembarked; over the Hervidero; over the hill ranges, the woods, and the rivers; over the Cerro, where he had climbed up to the lighthouse, think- 108 ing that on either bank of the Plate there was no other hill like it. From this hill overlooking the bay of Montevideo his thoughts passed on to the hill of the Uruguayan national emblem, and he fell asleep. Every night the breeze off the sea brought a coolness propitious to sleep. He was never wake- ful. He loved his fiancee completely, but it had been said that a man should not think about women — above all when they are not there. Life in the country had accustomed him to chastity. As for this other business, he tried to think as little as possible about the man he hated. The din of the rain on the flat roof kept him company. To a man in jail or to a blind man, time flows downstream, as if along an easy slope. Halfway through his reclusion, Arredondo experienced more than once that almost timeless time. In the first of the house's three patios there was a cistern with a frog in it. It never occurred to Arredondo to think that the frog's time, which borders on eternity, was what he himself sought. When the date was not far off,- his impatience began again. One night, unable to bear it any longer, he went out into the street. Everything seemed different, larger. Turning a corner, he saw a light and entered a saloon. To justify his presence, he ordered a bitter rum. Some soldiers, leaning on the wooden bar, were holding forth. "You know it's absolutely forbidden to give out news of battles," one of them said. "Listen to what happened yesterday evening. This will amuse you. A few of us were passing by La Razon, when we heard a voice inside defying the order. Losing no time, we marched in. The office was pitch-dark, 109 but we riddled with bullets whoever was doing the talking. We wanted to drag him out by the heels. When it was quiet, we searched the place for him, but what we found was one of those machines they call a phonograph, which speaks by itself." All of them laughed. "What do you think of a dodge like that, farmer?" the soldier said to Ar- redondo, who had been eavesdropping. Arre- dondo kept silent. The uniformed man brought his face close to Arredondo's and said, "Quick! Let me hear you shout, 'Long live the president of our country — Juan Idiarte Borda!' " Arredondo did not disobey, and amid mocking applause he managed to reach the door. He was in the street when a final insult was hurled at him. "Fear's no fool," he heard. "It kills anger." Ar- redondo had behaved like a coward, but he knew he was not one. Slowly he made his way back home. On the twenty-fifth of August, Avelino Ar- redondo woke up at a little after nine. He thought first of Clara and only later of the date. "Goodbye to waiting," he told himself then, relieved. "To- day's the day." He shaved without hurrying, and in the mirror he found his everyday face. He chose a red necktie and put on his best clothes. He ate a late lunch. The overcast sky threatened drizzle. He had always imagined the sky would be bright and blue. A touch of sadness came over him as he left his damp room for the last time. In the arched en- tranceway he met Clementina and gave her his few remaining pesos. On the sign over the hardware store he saw the colored diamond shapes, meaning 1 10 paint was sold there, and he reflected that for over two months he had not given them a thought. He walked toward Sarandi Street. It was a holiday and very few people were about. The clock had not struck three when he reached the Plaza Matriz. The "Te Deum" was already over. A group of dignitaries — government of- ficials, Army officers, and prelates — was coming down the slow steps of the church. At first sight, the tall hats — some still in hand — the uniforms, the gold braid, the arms, and the tunics created the illusion that the group was large; in reality, there were no more than about thirty people. Ar- redondo, who felt no fear, was filled with a kind of respect. He asked someone which was the presi- dent. "You see the archbishop, with his miter and cro- sier— the one beside him," he was told. Arredondo drew a revolver and opened fire. Idiarte Borda took one or two steps, fell headlong, and said distinctly, "I've been shot!" Arredondo gave himself up to the authorities. Later he was to declare, "I am a Colorado, a Red, and I say it with pride. I've killed the president, who betrayed and tainted our party. I broke with my friends and my fiancee, so as not to implicate them. I did not look at the newspapers, so that no- body could say they had incited me. I claim this act of justice as my own. Now — let me be judged." This is the way it probably happened, although in a more involved fashion; this is the way I imag- ine it happened. 1 1 1 The Disk I am a woodcutter. My name does not matter. The hut where I was born and where I shall probably soon die stands at the edge of the forest. It is said of the forest that it stretches as far as the sea, which rings the whole earth and on which wooden huts like mine wend their way. Never hav- ing seen this sea, I don't know. Nor have I ever seen the other side of the forest. When we were boys my elder brother made me vow that between us we would chop down the entire woods until not a single tree was left. My brother died, and what I seek now — and what I shall go on seeking — is something else. To the west runs a stream that I know how to fish with my hands. In the forest there are wolves, but wolves do not scare me, and my axe has never been untrue to me. Of my years I have never kept count. I know they are many. My eyes no longer see. In the vil- lage, where I venture no more, since I would lose my way, I am known as a miser. But how much treasure can a mere woodcutter have laid up? To keep snow out, I shut tight the door of my 1!3 house with a stone. One evening long ago, I heard labored footsteps approach, and then a knock. I opened, and a stranger came in. He was old and tall, and he was wrapped in a threadbare blanket. A scar marked his face. His years seemed to have given him more authority than frailty, but I no- ticed that he was unable to get about without the aid of a staff. We exchanged a few words that I no longer remember. At the end, he said, "I am homeless and sleep wherever I can. I have trav- eled the length and breadth of this land of the Saxons." These words testified to his years. My father had always spoken of the Saxon land, which nowadays people call England. I had bread and fish. We did not speak a word during the meal. Rain began to fall. With a few skins I made him a pallet on the earth floor, where my brother had died. When night fell, we went to sleep. Day was dawning when we left the hut. The rain had stopped and the ground was covered with new-fallen snow. My companion's staff slipped from his hand and he ordered me to pick it up. "Why must I obey you?" I asked him. "Because I am a king," he answered. I thought him mad. Picking up the staff, I handed it to him. He spoke with a different voice. "I am king of the Secgens," he said. "Often in hard-pitched battle I carried my people to victory, but at the fateful hour I lost my kingdom. My name is Isern and I am of the race of Odin." "I do not worship Odin," I said. "I worship Christ." 114 He went on as if he had not heard me. "I travel the paths of exile, but I am still king, for I have the disk. Do you want to see it?" He opened the palm of his bony hand. There was nothing in it. Only then did I recall that he had always kept the hand closed. Staring hard at me, he said, "You may touch it." With a certain misgiving, I touched my finger- tips to his palm. I felt something cold, and saw a glitter. The hand closed abruptly. I said nothing. The man went on patiently, as if speaking to a child. "It is Odin's disk," he said, "It has only one side. In all the world there is nothing else with only one side. As long as the disk remains mine, I shall be king." "Is it golden?" I said. "I don't know. It is Odin's disk and it has only one side." Then and there I was overcome with greed to own the disk. If it were mine, I could trade it for an ingot of gold and I would be a king. I said to the vagabond, whom to this day I go on hating, "In my hut I have buried a box of coins. They are of gold and they shine like an axe. If you give me Odin's disk, I'll trade you the box." He said stubbornly, "I don't want to." "Then," I said, "you may continue on your path." He turned his back to me. One blow with the axe at the back of his neck was more than enough to bring him down, but as he fell his hand opened, and in the air I saw the glitter. I took care to mark the spot with my axe, and dragged the dead man "5 to the stream, which was running high. There I threw him in. Coming back to my hut, I searched for the disk. I did not find it. That was years ago, and I am searching still. 116 The Book of Sand Thy rope of sands . . . — George Herbert The line is made up of an infinite number of points; the plane of an infinite number of lines; the volume of an infinite number of planes; the hypervolume of an infinite number of volumes. . . . No, unquestionably this is not — more geome- trico — the best way of beginning my story. To claim that it is true is nowadays the convention of every made-up story. Mine, however, is true. I live alone in a fourth-floor apartment on Bel- grano Street, in Buenos Aires. Late one evening, a few months back, I heard a knock at my door. I opened it and a stranger stood there. He was a tall man, with nondescript features — or perhaps it was my myopia that made them seem that way. Dressed in gray and carrying a gray suitcase in his hand, he had an unassuming look about him. I saw at once that he was a foreigner. At first, he struck me as old; only later did I realize that I had been misled by his thin blond hair, which was, in a Scandinavian sort of way, almost white. During the course of our conversation, which was not to last an hour, I found out that he came from the Ork- neys. 117 I invited him in, pointing to a chair. He paused awhile before speaking. A kind of gloom ema- nated from him — as it does now from me. "I sell Bibles," he said. Somewhat pedantically, I replied, "In this house are several English Bibles, including the first — John Wiclif's. I also have Cipriano de Valera's, Luther's — which, from a literary viewpoint, is the worst — and a Latin copy of the Vulgate. As you see, it's not exactly Bibles I stand in need of." After a few moments of silence, he said, "I don't only sell Bibles. I can show you a holy book I came across on the outskirts of Bikaner. It may interest you." He opened the suitcase and laid the book on a table. It was an octavo volume, bound in cloth. There was no doubt that it had passed through many hands. Examining it, I was surprised by its unusual weight. On the spine were the words "Holy Writ" and, below them, "Bombay." "Nineteenth century, probably," I remarked. "I don't know," he said. "I've never found out." I opened the book at random. The script was strange to me. The pages, which were worn and typographically poor, were laid out in double col- umns, as in a Bible. The text was closely printed, and it was ordered in versicles. In the upper corners of the pages were Arabic numbers. I no- ticed that one left-hand page bore the number (let us say) 40,514 and the facing right-hand page 999. I turned the leaf; it was numbered with eight digits. It also bore a small illustration, like the kind used in dictionaries — an anchor drawn with pen and ink, as if by a schoolboy's clumsy hand. It was at this point that the stranger said, "Look 118 at the illustration closely. You'll never see it again." I noted my place and closed the book. At once, I reopened it. Page by page, in vain, I looked for the illustration of the anchor. "It seems to be a version of Scriptures in some Indian language, is it not?" I said to hide my dismay. "No," he replied. Then, as if confiding a secret, he lowered his voice. "I acquired the book in a town out on the plain in exchange for a handful of rupees and a Bible. Its owner did not know how to read. I srspect that he saw the Book of Books as a talisman. He was of the lowest caste; nobody but other untouchables could tread his shadow with- out contamination. He told me his book was called the Book of Sand, because neither the book nor the sand has any beginning or end." The stranger asked me to find the first page. I laid my left hand on the cover and, trying to put my thumb on the flyleaf, I opened the book. It was useless. Every time I tried, a number of pages came between the cover and my thumb. It was as if they kept growing from the book. "Now find the last page." Again I failed. In a voice that was not mine, I barely managed to stammer, "This can't be." Still speaking in a low voice, the stranger said, "It can't be, but it is. The number of pages in this book is no more or less than infinite. None is the first page, none the last. I don't know why they're numbered in this arbitrary way. Perhaps to suggest that the terms of an infinite series admit any number." Then, as if he were thinking aloud, he said, "If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time." •'9 His speculations irritated me. "You are re- ligious, no doubt?" I asked him. "Yes, I'm a Presbyterian. My conscience is clear. I am reasonably sure of not having cheated the na- tive when I gave him the Word of God in ex- change for his devilish book." I assured him that he had nothing to reproach himself for, and I asked if he were just passing through this part of the world. He replied that he planned to return to his country in a few days. It was then that I learned that he was a Scot from the Orkney Islands. I told him I had a great personal affection for Scotland, through my love of Steven- son and Hume. "You mean Stevenson and Robbie Burns," he corrected. While we spoke, I kept exploring the infinite book. With feigned indifference, I asked, "Do you intend to offer this curiosity to the British Mu- seum?" "No. I'm offering it to you," he said, and he stipulated a rather high sum for the book. I answered, in all truthfulness, that such a sum was out of my reach, and I began thinking. After a minute or two, I came up with a scheme. "I propose a swap," I said. "You got this book for a handful of rupees and a copy of the Bible. I'll offer you the amount of my pension check, which I've just collected, and my black-letter Wiclif Bible. I inherited it from my ancestors." "A black-letter Wiclif!" he murmured. I went to my bedroom and brought him the money and the book. He turned the leaves and studied the title page with all the fervor of a true bibliophile. 120 "It's a deal," he said. It amazed me that he did not haggle. Only later was I to realize that he had entered my house with his mind made up to sell the book. Without count- ing the money, he put it away. We talked about India, about Orkney, and about the Norwegian jails who once ruled it. It was night when the man left. I have not seen him again, nor do I know his name. I thought of keeping the Book of Sand in the space left on the shelf by the Wiclif, but in the end I decided to hide it behind the volumes of a bro- ken set of The Thousand and One Nights. I went to bed and did not sleep. At three or four in the morning, I turned on the light. I got down the im- possible book and leafed through its pages. On one of them I saw engraved a mask. The upper corner of the page carried a number, which I no longer recall, elevated to the ninth power. I showed no one my treasure. To the luck of owning it was added the fear of having it stolen, and then the misgiving that it might not truly be infinite. These twin preoccupations intensified my old misanthropy. I had only a few friends left; I now stopped seeing even them. A prisoner of the book, I almost never went out anymore. After studying its frayed spine and covers with a magni- fying glass, I rejected the possibility of a contriv- ance of any sort. The small illustrations, I verified, came two thousand pages apart. I set about listing them alphabetically in a notebook, which I was not long in filling up. Never once was an illustration repeated. At night, in the meager intervals my in- somnia granted, I dreamed of the book. Summer came and went, and I realized that the book was monstrous. What good did it do me to think that I, who looked upon the volume with my eyes, who held it in my hands, was any less mon- strous? I felt that the book was a nightmarish ob- ject, an obscene thing that affronted and tainted reality itself. I thought of fire, but I feared that the burning of an infinite book might likewise prove infinite and suffocate the planet with smoke. Somewhere I recalled reading that the best place to hide a leaf is in a forest. Before retirement, I worked on Mexico Street, at the Argentine National Library, which contains nine hundred thousand volumes. I knew that to the right of the entrance a curved staircase leads down into the basement, where books and maps and periodicals are kept. One day I went there and, slipping past a member of the staff and trying not to notice at what height or distance from the door, I lost the Book of Sand on one of the basement's musty shelves. 122 Afterword Prefacing stories a reader has not yet read, since it demands the analysis of plots that it may be incon- venient to deal with in advance, is a somewhat im- possible task. I therefore prefer an afterword. The book's first story takes up the old theme of the double, which several times moved Robert Louis Stevenson's ever-fortunate pen. In England, its name is "fetch" or, more bookishly, "wraith of the living"; in Germany, "Doppelganger." One of its earliest names, I suspect, was "alter ego." This ghostly apparition probably came from mirrors of metal or from reflections in water or simply from memory, which makes of anyone both a spectator and an actor. In "The Other," I had to ensure that the speakers were sufficiently different to be two persons and alike enough to be one. Is it worth stating that the idea for the story came to me in Cambridge on the banks of the Charles River, whose cold course reminded me of the far-off course of the Rhone? The theme of love is quite common in my poems but not in my prose, which offers no other 123 example than "Ulrike." The reader will notice its formal affinity with "The Other." "The Congress" is perhaps the most ambitious of the tales in this book; its subject is that of an en- terprise so vast that in the end it becomes con- fused with the world itself and with the sum of daily life. Its opaque beginning tries to imitate that of a Kafka story; its end tries, doubtless in vain, to match the ecstasies of Chesterton and John Bun- yan. I have never been worthy of such a revela- tion, but I have managed to dream one up. I have woven into the story — as is my habit — a number of autobiographical elements. Life, which everyone knows is inscrutable, left me no peace until I perpetrated a posthumous story by H. P. Lovecraft, a writer whom I have always considered an unconscious parodist of Poe. In the end, I gave in; the lamentable fruit is en- titled "There Are More Things." "The Sect of the Thirty" salvages, without a shred of documentation, the tale of a possible heresy. "The Night of the Gifts" is perhaps the most in- nocent, most violent, and most exalted story of- fered by this collection. An earlier story of mine, "The Lottery of Babel" (1941), imagines an infinite number of books; "Undr" and "The Mirror and the Mask," cen- turies-old literatures that are made up of a single line or word. "Utopia of a Tired Man" is in my judgment the most honest and melancholy piece in the collec- tion. I have always been amazed by the ethical obses- 124 sion of Americans. "The Bribe" attempts to reflect this trait. In spite of John Felton, Charlotte Corday, the well-known opinion of Rivera Indarte ("It is a holy act to kill Rosas"), and the Uruguayan National Anthem ("If they are tyrants, Brutus' dagger"), I do not approve of political assassination. Be that as it may, readers of Avelino Arredondo's solitary crime might wish to know the story's outcome. The historian Luis Melian Lafinur asked for Ar- redondo's pardon, but his judges Carlos Fein and Cristobal Salvanach sentenced him to a month in solitary confinement and five years' imprisonment. One of the streets of Montevideo now bears Ar- redondo's name. Two opposite and inconceivable concepts are the subjects of the last two stories. "The Disk" is about the Euclidean circle, which has only one side; "The Book of Sand," a volume of incalcula- ble pages. I hope that these hasty notes I have just dictated do not exhaust this book and that its dreams go on branching out in the hospitable imagination of those who now close it. J. L. B. Buenos Aires, February 3, 1975 !25 JORGE LUIS BORGES is the author of many distinguished volumes of short fiction, poetry and essays, including The Aleph and Other Stories 7933-7969, In Praise of Darkness, and The Universal History of Infamy. He has been awarded the Jerusalem Prize, the Interna- tional Literary Prize and dozens of honorary degrees. Now in his late seventies and almost totally blind, Borges continues to write, to travel and to lecture. He lives in Buenos Aires and frequently visits the United States. NORMAN THOMAS Dl GIOVANNI, who to date has produced English versions of eight books by Borges, lives in Devon, England. He worked with Borges in Buenos Aires from 1968 to 1972. jacket design by Randall Richmond E.P. Dutton 201 Park Avenue South, New York, N.Y. 10003 Jacobus tenBroek Library 101264 BY JORGE LUIS BORGES IN PRAISE OF DARKNESS A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INFAMY DOCTOR BRODIE'S REPORT THE ALEPH AND OTHER STORIES 1933-1969 THE BOOK OF IMAGINARY BEINGS CHRONICLES OF BUSTOS DOMECQ (with Adolfo Bioy-Casares) ^BN: 0-525-06992-5 1077