Streetcorner Man



Fancy your coming out and asking me, of all people, about the
late Francisco Real. Sure, I knew him, even though he wasn't
from around here. He was a big shot on the North-side--that
whole stretch from the Guadalupe pond to the old Artillery
Barracks. I never laid eyes on the guy above three times and
these three times were all the same night. But nights like
that you don't forget. It was when La Lujanera got it in her
head to come around to my shack and bed down with me, and Ros-
endo Juarez took off from the Maldonado for good. Of course,
you're not the kind that name would mean much to. But around
Villa Santa Rita, Rosendo Juarez--the Slasher we called him--had
a reputation for being pretty tough. He was one of don Nicolas
Paredes' boys, the same as Paredes was one of Morel's gang,
and he'd earned respect for the way he handled a knife. Sharp
dresser too. Always rode up to the whorehouse on a dark horse,
his riding gear decked out with silver. There wasn't a man or
dog around didn't hold him in regard--and that goes for the wo-
men as well. Everyody knew he had at least a couple of kill-
ings to his name. He'd have on one of those soft hats with a
narrow brim and tall crown, and it would sit there kind of
cocky on his long thick hair he wore slicked straight back.
Lady luck smiled on him, like they say, and around Villa
all us younger guys used to ape him even to the way he spit.
But then one night we got a good look at what this Rosendo
was made of.

All this might seem made-up, but the story of what hap-
pened that particular night starts when this flashy red-
wheeled buggy--jamful of men--comes barreling its way down
those hard-packed dirt roads out between the brick kilns
and the empty lots. Two guys in black were making a big
racket twanging away on guitars, and the driver kept crack-
ing his whip at the stray dogs snapping at the legs of the
horse. Sitting all quiet in the middle was one guy wrapped
in a poncho. This was the famous Butcher--he'd picked that
name up working in the stockyards--and he was out for a
good fight and maybe a killing. The night was cool and wel-
come. A couple of them sat up on the folded hood just like
they were parading along some downtown avenue in Carnival.
A lot more things happened that night, but it was only later
on we got wind of this first part. Our gang was there at
Julia's pretty early. This dance hall of hers, between the
Gauna road and the river, was really just a big shed made
out of sheets of corrugated iron. You could spot the place
from two or three blocks off either by the red lamp hanging
out front or by trouble to run things right--there was al-
ways plenty of fiddlers and good booze and dancing partners
ready to go all night. But La Lujancra--she was Rosendo's
woman--had the others all beat by a mile. She's dead now,
and I can tell you years go by when I don't give her a
thought anymore. But in her day you ought to have seen her
--what eyes she had! One look at her was enough to make a
man lose sleep.

The rum, the music, the women, Rosendo with that rough talk
pouring out of his mouth and a slap on the back for each of
us that I tried to take for a sign of real friendship--the
thing is, I was happy as they come. I was lucky too. I had
me a partner who could follow my steps just like she knew
ahead of time which way I was going to turn. The tango took
hold of us, driving us along and then splitting us up and
then bringing us back together again. There we were in the
middle of all this fun, like in some kind of dream, when
all of a sudden I feel the music kind of getting louder.
Turns out it was those two guitar pickers riding in the bug-
gy, coming closer and closer, their music getting mixed up
with ours. Then the breeze shifted, you couldn't hear them
anymore, and my mind went back to my own steps and my part-
ner's, and to the ins and outs of the dance. A good half
hour later there was this pounding on the door and a big
voice calling out like it could have been the cops. Every-
thing went silent. Then somebody out there starts shoulder-
ing the door and the next thing we know a guy busts in. Fun-
ny thing is he looked exactly like his voice.

To us he wasn't Francisco Real--not yet--but just some big
hefty guy. He was all in black from head to toe, except for
this reddish-brown scarf draped over one shoulder. I remember
his face. There was something Indian and kind of angular
about it.

When the door come flying in it smacked right into me. Before
I even knew what I was doing I was on top of the guy, throwing
him a left square in the teeth while my right goes inside my
vest for my knife. But I never got a chance. Steadying him-
self, he puts his arms out and shoves me aside like he's
brushing something out of the way. There I was down on my
ass--back of him now--my hand still inside the jacket grabb-
ing for the knife. And him wading forward like nothing hap-
pened. Just wading forward, a whole head taller than all
these guys he's pushing his way through--and acting like he
never even saw them. The first of our guys--bunch of gaping
wops--just back out of his way, scared as hell. But only the
first. In the next bunch the Redhead was waiting for him, and
before the newcomer could lay a hand on his shoulder, Red's
knife was out and he let him have one across the face with
the flat of the blade. Soon as they saw that they all jumped
the guy. The hall was pretty long, maybe more than nine or
ten yards, and they drove him from one end almost to the
other--like Christ in one of the Stations--roughing him
up, hooting at him, spitting all over him. First they let
him have it with their fists, then, seeing he didn't bother
shielding the blows, they started slapping him openhanded
and flicking the fringes of their scarves at him, mocking
him. At the same time they were saving him for Rosendo,
who all this time was standing with his back against the
far wall and not moving a muscle, not saying a word. All
he did was puff on his cigarette, a little worried-looking,
like he already knew what came clear to the rest of us only
later on. The Butcher, who was hanging on but was beginning
to bleed here and there--that whole hooting pack behind him
--got pushed closer and closer to Rosendo. Laughed at, lash-
ed at, spit on, he only started talking when the two of them
came face to face. Then he looked at Rosendo and, wiping his
face on his sleeve, said something like this:

"I'm Francisco Real and I come from the Northside. People call
me the Butcher. I let all these punks lay their hands on me
just now because what I'm looking for is a lousy mudflats sup-
posed to be pretty good with a knife. They call him the Slasher
and they say he's pretty tough. I'd like to meet up with the
guy. Maybe he can teach a nobody like me how a man with guts
handles himself."

He had his say looking straight at Rosendo, and all at once
this big knife he must have had up his sleeve was flashing in
his hand. Instead of pressing in, now everyone ...starts open-
ing up space for a fight--at the same time staring at the two
of them in dead silence. Even the thick lips of the blind nig-
ger playing the fiddle were turned that way.

Right then I hear this commotion behind me and in the frame of
the door I get me a glimpse of six or seven men who must have
been the Butcher's gang. The oldest, a leathery-faced guy with
a big gray moustache, who looked like a hick, comes in a few
steps and, going all goggle-eyed at the women and the lights,
takes off his hat, respectful. The rest of them kept their eyes
peeled, ready to swing into action if anything underhanded went
on.

What was the matter with Rosendo all this time, not bouncing
that loudmouth the hell out? He was still keeping quiet, not e-
ven raising his eyes. I don't know if he spit his cigarette out
or if it fell from his mouth. Finally he manages to come up
with a couple of words, but so low the rest of us at the other
end of the dance floor didn't get what he said. Francisco Real
challenged him again, and again Rosendo refused. At this point,
the youngest of the newcomers lets out a whistle. La Lujanera
gave the guy a look that went right through him. Then, her
hair swinging down over her shoulders, she wedged her way
through the crowd and, going up to her man, slips his knife
out and hands it to him.

"Rosendo," she says to him, "I think you're going to need this."

Way up under the roof was this kind of long window that open-
ed out over the river. Rosendo took the knife in his two hands
and turned it over like he never laid eyes on it before. Then
all of a sudden he raises his arms up over his head and flips
the knife behind him out the window into the Maldonado. I felt
a chill go through me.

"The only reason I don't carve you up is cause you sicken me,"
the Butcher says then, making to let Rosendo have it. That split
second La Lujanera threw her arms around the Butcher's neck, giv-
ing him one of those looks of hers, and says to him, mad as hell,
"Let the bastard alone--making us think he was a man."

For a minute Francisco Real couldn't figure it out. Then wrap-
ping his arms around her like it was forever, he calls to the
musicians to play loud and strong and orders the rest of us to
dance. The music went like wildfire from one end of the hall to
the other. Real danced sort of stiff but held his partner up
tight, and in nothing flat he had her charmed. When they got
near the door he shouted, "Make way, boys, she's all mine now!"
and out they went, cheek to cheek, like the tango was floating
them off.

I must have turned a little red with shame. I took a couple of
turns with some woman, then dropped her cold. On account of the
heat and the jam, I told her, then edged my way around the room
toward the door. It was a nice night out--but for who? There was
their buggy at the corner of the alley with two guitars standing
straight up on the seat like men. Boy, it galled me seeing that--
it was as much as saying we weren't even good enough to dip a
lousy guitar. The thought that we were a bunch of nobodys really
had me burned up, and I snatched the carnation from behind my ear
and threw it in a puddle. I stood there a while staring at it,
trying to take my mind off things. I wished it was already tomor-
row--I wished that night were over. Then the next thing I knew
there's this elbow shoving me aside and it almost came like a re-
lief. It was Rosendo --all by himself, slinking off

"You're always getting in the way, kid," he says to me half snarl-
ing. I couldn't tell if he was just getting something off his chest
or what. He disappeared in the dark toward the Maldonado. I never
laid eyes on him again.

I stood there looking at the things I'd seen all my life--the big
wide sky, the river going on down there in its own blind way, a
horse drowsing, the dirt roads, the kilns --and it came to me that
in the middle of this ragweed and all these dump heaps and this
whole stinking place, I'd grown up just another weed myself. What
else was going to come out of this crap but us--lots of lip but
soft inside, all talk but no standing up to anyone? Then I thought
no, the worse the neighborhood the tougher it had to be. Crap?
Back toward the dance hall the music was still going strong, and
on the breeze came a smell of honeysuckle. Nice night, but so what?
There were so many stars, some right on top of others, it made you
dizzy just looking at them. I tried hard to tell myself that what
happened meant nothing to me, but I just couldn't get over Rosendo's
yellow streak and the newcomer's plain guts. Real even managed to
get hold of a woman for the night --for that night and a lot of
nights and maybe forever, I thought, because La Lujanera was really
something. God knows which way they headed. They couldn't have wan-
dered very far. By then the two of them were probably going at it
in some ditch.

When I got back, the dance was in full swing. I slipped into the
crowd, quiet as I could, noticing that some of our boys had taken
off and that the Northside bunch were dancing along with everyone
else. There was no shoving, no rough stuff. Everybody was watching
out and on good behavior. The music sounded sleepy, and the girls
tangoing away with the outsiders didn't have much to say.

I was on the lookout for something, but not for what happened.
Outside there were sounds of a woman crying and then that voice
we all knew by then--but real low, almost too low, like somehow
it didn't belong to anyone anymore.

"Go on in, you slut," it was telling her--then more tears. After
that the voice sounded desperate.

"Open the door, you understand me? Open it, you lousy tramp. Open
it, bitch."

At that point the shaky door opens and in comes La+ Lujanera, all
alone. Just like someone's herding her.

"Must be a ghost out there behind her," said the Redhead.

"A dead man, friend." It was the Butcher, and he staggers in,
his face like a drunk's, and in the space we opened up for him
he takes .a couple of reeling steps--tall, hardly seeing?then
all at once goes down like a log. One of his friends rolled
him over and fixed him a pillow with his scarf, but all this
fussing only got him smeared with blood. We could see there
was a big gash in his chest. The blood was welling up and
blackening a bright red neckerchief I hadn't noticed before be-
cause his scarf covered it. For first aid one of the women
brought rum and some scorched rags. The man was in no shape
to explain. La Lujanera looked at him in a daze, her arms hanging
by her sides. There was one question on everyone's face and fi-
nally she got out an answer. She said after leaving with the
Butcher they went to a little field and at that point someone
she didn't know turned up and challenged him to fight and then
gave him this stab. She swore she didn't know who it was, but
that it wasn't Rosendo. Was anyone going to believe that?

The man at our feet was dying. It looked to me like the hand
that done the job done it well. Just the same, the man hung on.
When he knocked that second time Julia was brewing some mates.
The cup went clear around the circle and back to me before he
died. When the end came, he said in a low voice, "Cover my
face." All he had left was pride and he didn't want us gaping
at him while his face went through its agony. Someone put his
hat over him and that's how he died--without a sound?under that
high black crown. It was only when his chest stopped heaving
they dared uncover him. He had that worn-out look dead men
have. In his day, from the Artillery Barracks all the way to
the Southside, he was one of the scrappiest men around. When
I knew he was dead and couldn't talk, I stopped hating him.

"All it takes to die is being alive," says one of the girls
in the crowd. And in the same way another one says, "A man's
so full of pride and now look--all he's good for is gathering
flies."

Right then the Northside gang starts talking to each other in
low voices. Then two of them come out together saying, "The
woman killed him." After that, in a real loud voice, one of
them threw the accusation in her face, and they all swarmed
in around her. Forgetting I had to be careful, I was on them
like a light. I don't know what kept me from reaching for my
knife. There were a lot of eyes watching--maybe everybody's--
and I said, putting them down, "Look at this woman's hands.
How could she get the strength or the nerve to knife a man?"

Then, kind of offhand, I added, "Whoever would have dreamed
the deceased, who--like they say--was a pretty tough guy in
his own neck of the woods, would end up this way? And in a
place sleepy as this, where nothing ever happens till some
outsider comes around trying to show us a little fun and for
all his pains only gets himself spit on?"

Nobody offered his hide for a whipping.

Right then, in the dead silence, you could make out the ap-
proach of riders. It was the law. Everybody--some more,
some less--had his own good reason for staying clear of the
police. The best thing was to dump the body in the Maldonado.
You remember that long window the knife went flying out of?
Well, that's where the man in black went. A bunch of guys
lifted him up. There were hands stripping him of every cent
and trinket he had, and someone even hacked off one of his
fingers to steal his ring. They helped themselves, all right
--real daring bunch with a poor defenseless stiff once a bet-
ter guy already straightened him out. One good heave and the
current did the rest. To keep him from floating, they maybe
even tore out his guts. I don't know--I didn't want to look.
The old-timer with the gray moustache never took his eyes
off me. Making the best of all the commotion, La Lujanera
slipped away.

When the lawmen came in for a look, the dance was going
good again. That blind fiddler could really scrape some lively
numbers on that violin of his--the kind of thing you never
hear anymore. It was beginning to get light outside. The
fence posts on a nearby slope seemed to stand alone, the
strands of wire still invisible in the early dawn.

Nice and easy, I walked the two or three blocks back to my
shack. A candle was burning in the window, then all at once
went out. Let me tell you, I hurried when I saw that. Then,
Borges, I put my hand inside my vest--here by the left arm-
pit where I always carry it--and took my knife out again. I
turned the blade over, real slow. It was as good as new,
innocent-looking, and you couldn't see the slightest trace
of blood on it.




The Two Kings and Their Two Labyrinths



[This is the story the Reverend Allaby tells from
the pulpit in "Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His
Labyrinth."]


Chroniclers worthy of trust have recorded (but only Allah
is All-Knowing) that in former times there was a king of
the isles of Babylon who called together his architects
and his wizards and set them to build him a labyrinth so
intricate that no wise man would dare enter inside, and so
subtle that those who did would lose their way. This under-
taking was a blasphemy, for confusion and marvels belong to
God alone and not to man. With the passage of time there
came to his court a king of the Arabs, and the king of Bab-
ylon (wishing to mock his guest's simplicity) allowed him
to set foot in his labyrinth, where he wandered in humili-
ation and bewilderment until the coming of night. It was
then that the second king implored the help of God and soon
after came upon the door. He suffered his lips to utter no
complaint, but he told the king of Babylon that he, too,
had a labyrinth in his land and that, God willing, he would
one day take pleasure in showing it to his host. Then he re-
turned to Arabia, gathered his captains and his armies, and
overran the realms of Babylon with so fair a fortune that he
ravaged its castles, broke its peoples, and took captive the
king himself. He bound him onto a swift camel and brought
him into the desert. Three days they rode, and then the cap-
tor said, "O king of time and crown of the century! In Bab-
ylon you lured me into a labyrinth of brass cluttered with
many stairways, doors, and walls; now the Almighty has
brought it to pass that I show you mine, which has no stair-
ways to climb, nor doors to force, nor unending galleries to
wear one down, nor walls to block one's way."

He then loosened the bonds of the first king and left him in
the heart of the desert to die of thirst and hunger. Glory
be to the Living, who dieth not.




The Other Death



I have mislaid the letter, but a couple of years or so
ago Gannon wrote me from his ranch up in Gualeguaychu
saying he would send me a translation, perhaps the very
first into Spanish, of Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem 'The
Past," and adding in a P.S. that don Pedro Damian, whom
I might recall, had died of a lung ailment a few nights
earlier. The man (Gannon went on), wasted by fever, had
in his delirium relived the long ordeal of the battle of
Masoller. It seemed to me there was nothing unreasonable
or out of the ordinary about this news since don Pedro,
when he was nineteen or twenty, had been a follower of
the banners of Aparicio Saravia. Pedro Damiln had been
working as a hand up north on a ranch in Rio Negro or
Paysandu when the 1904 revolution broke out. Although he
was from Gualeguaychu, in the province of Entre Rios, he
went along with his friends and, being as cocky and ig-
norant as they were, joined the rebel army. He fought in
one or two skirmishes and in the final battle. Returned
home in 1905, Damiln, with a kind of humble stubbornness,
once more took up his work as a cowhand. For all I know,
he never left his native province again. He spent his last
thirty years living in a small lonely cabin eight or ten miles
from Nancay. It was in that out-of-the-way place that
I spoke with him one evening (that I tried to speak with
him one evening) back around 1942; he was a man of few
words, and not very bright. Masoller, it turned out, was
the whole of his personal history. And so I was not sur-
prised to find out that he had lived the sound and fury
of that battle over again at the hour of his death. When
I knew I would never see Damian another time, I wanted to
remember him, but so poor is my memory for faces that all
I could recall was the snapshot Gannon had taken of him.
There is nothing unusual in this fact, considering that
I saw the man only once at the beginning of 1942, but
had looked at his picture many times. Gannon sent me the
photograph and it, too, has been misplaced. I think now
that if I were to come across it, I would feel afraid.

The second episode took place in Montevideo, months later.
Don Pedro's fever and his agony gave me the idea for a
tale of fantasy based on the defeat at Masoller; Emir
Rodriguez Monegal, to whom I had told the plot, wrote me
an introduction to Colonel Dionisio Tabares, who had
fought in that campaign. The Colonel received me one eve-
ning after dinner. From a rocking chair out in the side
yard, he recalled the old days with great feeling but at
the same time with a faulty sense of chronology. He spoke
of ammunition that never reached him and of reserves of
horses that arrived worn out, of sleepy dust-covered men
weaving labyrinths of marches, of Saravia, who might have
ridden into Montevideo but who passed it by "because the
gaucho has a fear of towns," of throats hacked from ear
to ear, of a civil war that seemed to me less a military
operation than the dream of a cattle thief or an outlaw.
Names of battles kept coming up: Illescas, Tupambad, Mas-
oller. The Colonel's pauses were so effective and his man-
ner so vivid that I realized he had told and retold these
same things many times before, and I feared that behind
his words almost no true memories remained. When he stop-
ped for a breath, I managed to get in Damian's name.

"Damian? Pedro Damian?" said the Colonel. "He served with
me. A little half-breed. I remember the boys used to call
him Dayman--after the river." The Colonel let out a burst
of loud laughter, then cut it off all at once. I could not
tell whether his discomfort was real or put on.

In another voice, he stated that war, like women, served
as a test of men, and that nobody knew who he really was
until he had been under fire. A man might think himself a
coward and actually be brave. And the other way around,
too, as had happened to that poor Damian, who bragged his
way in and out of saloons with his white ribbon marking
him as a Blanco, and later on lost his nerve at Masoller.
In one exchange of gunfire with the regulars, he handled
himself like a man, but then it was something else again
when the two armies met face to face and the artillery be-
gan pounding away and every man felt as though there were
five thousand other men out there grouping to kill him.
That poor kid. He'd spent his life on a farm dipping sheep,
and then all of a sudden he gets himself dragged along and
mixed up in the grim reality of war. .

For some absurd reason Tabares' version of the story made
me uncomfortable. I would have preferred things to have hap-
pened differently. Without being aware of it, I had made
a kind of idol out of old Damian--a man I had seen only
once on a single evening many years earlier. Tabares' story
destroyed everything. Suddenly the reasons for Damian's a-
loofness and his stubborn insistence on keeping to himself
were clear to me. They had not sprung from modesty but
from shame. In vain, I told myself that a man pursued by
an act of cowardice is more complex and more interesting
than one who is merely courageous. The gaucho Martin Fier-
ro, I thought, is less memorable then Lord Jim or Razumov.
Yes, but Damian, as a gaucho, should have been Martin Fier-
ro--especially in the presence of Uruguayan gauchos. In
what Tabares left unsaid, I felt his assumption (perhaps
undeniable) that Uruguay is more primitive than Argentina
and therefore physically braver. I remember we said goodbye
to each other that night with a cordiality that was a bit
marked.

During the winter, the need of one or two details for my
story (which somehow was slow in taking shape) sent me back
to Colonel Tabares again. I found him with another man of
his own age, a Dr. Juan Francisco Amaro from Paysandfi,
who had also fought in Saravia's revolution. They spoke,
naturally, of Masoller.

Amaro told a few anecdotes, then slowly added, in the man-
ner of someone who is thinking aloud, "We camped for the
night at Santa Irene, I recall, and some of the men from
around there joined us. Among them a French veterinarian,
who died the night before the battle, and a boy, a sheep-
shearer from Entre Rios. Pedro Damian was his name."

I cut him off sharply. "Yes, I know," I said. "The Argen-
tine who couldn't face the bullets."

I stopped. The two of them were looking at me, puzzled.

"You are mistaken, sir," Amaro said after a while. "Pedro
Damian died as any man might wish to die. It was about
four o'clock in the afternoon. The regular troops had dug
themselves in on the top of a hill and our men charged
them with lances. Damian rode at the head, shouting, and
a bullet struck him square in the chest. He stood up in
his stirrups, finished his shout, and then rolled to the
ground, where he lay under the horses' hooves. He was dead,
and the whole last charge of Masoller trampled over him.
So fearless, and barely twenty."

He was speaking, doubtless, of another Damian, but some-
thing made me ask what it was the boy had shouted.

"Filth," said the Colonel. "That's what men shout in
action."

"Maybe," said Amaro, "but he also cried out, 'Long live
Urquiza!' "

We were silent. Finally the Colonel murmured, "Not as if
we were fighting at Masoller, but at Cagancha or India
Muerta a hundred years ago." He added, genuinely bewilder-
ed, "I commanded those troops, and I could swear it's the
first time I've ever heard of this Damian."

We had no luck in getting the Colonel to remember him.

Back in Buenos Aires, the amazement that his forgetful-
ness produced in me repeated itself. Browsing through
the eleven pleasurable volumes of Emerson's works in the
basement of Mitchell's, the English bookstore, I met Pat-
ricio Gannon one afternoon. I asked him for his transla-
tion of "The Past." He told me that he had no translation
of it in mind, and that, besides, Spanish literature was
so boring it made Emerson quite superfluous. I reminded
him that he had promised me the translation in the same
letter in which he wrote me of Damian's death. He asked
me who was Damian. I told him in vain. With rising terror,
I noticed that he was listening to me very strangely, and
I took refuge in a literary discussion on the detractors
of Emerson, a poet far more complex, far more skilled,
and truly more extraordinary than the unfortunate Poe.

I must put down some additional facts. In April, I had a
letter from Colonel Dionisio Tabares; his mind was no
longer vague and now he remembered quite well the boy
from Entre Rios who spearheaded the charge at Masoller
and whom his men buried that night in a grave at the
foot of the hill. In July, I passed through Gualeguay-
chil; I did not come across Damian's cabin, and nobody
there seemed to remember him now. I wanted to question
the foreman Diego Abaroa, who saw Damian die, but Ab-
aroa had passed away himself at the beginning of the
winter. I tried to call to mind Damian's features;
months later, leafing through some old albums, I found
that the dark face I had attempted to evoke really be-
longed to the famous tenor Tamberlik, playing the role
of Othello.

Now I move on to conjectures. The easiest, but at the
same time the least satisfactory, assumes two Damian:
the coward who died in Entre Rios around 1946, and the
man of courage who died at Masoller in 1904. But this
falls apart in its inability to explain what are real-
ly the puzzles: the strange fluctuations of Colonel
Tabares' memory, for one, and the general forgetful-
ness, which in so short a time could blot out the im-
age and even the name of the man who came back. (I can-
not accept, I do not want to accept, a simpler possi-
bility—-that of my having dreamed the first man.)
Stranger still is the supernatural conjecture thought
up by Ulrike von Kuhlmann. Pedro Damian, said Ulrike,
was killed in the battle and at the hour of his death
asked God to carry him back to Entre Rios. God hesi-
tated a moment before granting the request, but by then
the man was already dead and had been seen by others to
have fallen. God, who cannot unmake the past but can af-
fect its images, altered the image of Damidn's violent
death into one of falling into a faint. And so it was
the boy's ghost that came back to his native province.
Came back, but we must not forget that it did so as a
ghost. It lived in isolation without a woman and without
friends; it loved and possessed everything, but from a
distance, as from the other side of a mirror; ultimately
it "died" and its frail image just disappeared, like water
in water. This conjecture is faulty, but it may have been
responsible for pointing out to me the true one (the
one I now believe to be true), which is at the same
time simpler and more unprecedented. In a mysterious
way I discovered it in the treatise De Omnipotentia
by Pier Damiani, after having been referred to him by
two lines in Canto XXI of the Paradiso, in which the
problem of Damiani's identity is brought up. In the fifth
chapter of that treatise, Pier Damiani asserts—against
Aristotle and against Fredegarius de Tours—that it is
within God's power to make what once was into some-
thing that has never been. Reading those old theologi-
cal discussions, I began to understand don Pedro Dam-
ian's tragic story.


This is my solution. Damian handled himself like a cow-
ard on the battlefield at Masoller and spent the rest
of his life setting right that shameful weakness. He
returned to Entre Rios; he never lifted a hand against
another man, he never cut anyone up, he never sought
fame as a man of courage. Instead, living out there in
the hill country of Nancay and struggling with the
backwoods and with wild cattle, he made himself tough,
hard. Probably without realizing it, he was preparing
the way for the miracle. He thought from his innermost
self, If destiny brings me another battle, I'll be ready
for it. For forty years he waited and waited, with an
inarticulate hope, and then, in the end, at the hour of
his death, fate brought him his battle. It came in the
form of delirium, for, as the Greeks knew, we are all
shadows of a dream. In his final agony he lived his bat-
tle over again, conducted himself as a man, and in head-
ing the last charge he was struck by a bullet in the mid-
dle of the chest. And so, in 1946, through the working
out of a long, slow-burning passion, Pedro Damidn died in
the defeat at Masoller, which took place between winter
and spring in 1904.

In the Summa Theologiae, it is denied that God can un-
make the past, but nothing is said of the complicated
concatenation of causes and effects which is so vast
and so intimate that perhaps it might prove impossible
to annul a single remote fact, insignificant as it may
seem, without invalidating the present. To modify the
past is not to modify a single fact; it is to annul the
consequences of that fact, which tend to be infinite.
In other words, it involves the creation of two univer-
sal histories. In the first, let us say, Pedro Damian
died in Entre Rios in 1946; in the second, at Masoller in
1904. It is this second history that we are living now,
but the suppression of the first was not immediate and
produced the odd contradictions that I have related.
It was in Colonel Dionisio Tabares that the different
stages took place. At first, he remembered that Damian
acted as a coward; next, he forgot him entirely; then
he remembered Damian's fearless death. No less illumi-
nating is the case of the foreman Abaroa; he had to die,
as I understand it, because he held too many memories
of don Pedro Damian.

As for myself, I do not think I am running a similar risk.
I have guessed at and set down a process beyond man's un-
derstanding, a kind of exposure of reason; but there are
certain circumstances that lessen the dangers of this pri-
vilege of mint. For the present, I am not sure of having
always written the truth. I suspect that in my story there
are a few false memories. It is my suspicion that Pedro
Damian (if he ever existed) was not called Pedro Damian
and that I remember him by that name so as to believe
someday that the whole story was suggested to me by Pier
Damiani's thesis. Something similar happens with the poem
I mentioned in the first paragraph, which centers around
the irrevocability of the past. A few years from now, I
shall believe I made up a fantastic tale, and I will act-
ually have recorded an event that was real, just as some
two thousand years ago in all innocence Virgil believed
he was setting down the birth of a man and foretold the
birth of Christ.

Poor Damian! Death carried him off at the age of twenty
in a local battle of a sad and little-known war, but in
the end, he got what he longed for in his heart, and he
was a long time getting it, and perhaps there is no great-
er happiness.




Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth


... like the spider, which builds itself a feeble house.

The Koran, XXIX, 40



"This," said Dunraven with a sweeping gesture that did
not fail to embrace the misty stars while it took in the
bleak moor, the sea, the dunes, and an imposing, tumble-
down building that somehow suggested a stable long since
fallen into disrepair, "this is the land of my forebears."

Unwin, his companion, drew the pipe out of his mouth and
made some faint sounds of approval. It was the first sum-
mer evening of 1914; weary of a world that lacked the
dignity of danger, the two friends set great value on
these far reaches of Cornwall. Dunraven cultivated a dark
beard and thought of himself as the author of a substant-
ial epic, which his contemporaries would barely be able
to scan and whose subject had not yet been revealed to
him; Unwin had published a paper on the theory supposed
to have been written by Fermat in the margin of a page of
Diophantus. Both men--need it be said?--were young, dreamy,
and passionate.

"It's about a quarter of a century ago now," said Dunra-
ven, "that Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, chief or king of I don't
know what Nilotic tribe, died in the central room of this
house at the hands of his cousin Zaid. After all these
years, the facts surrounding his death are still unclear."

Unwin, as was expected of him, asked why.

"For several reasons," was the answer. "In the first
place, this house is a labyrinth. In the second place,
it was watched over by a slave and a lion. In the third
place, a hidden treasure vanished. In the fourth place,
the murderer was dead when the murder happened. In the
fifth place--"

Tired out, Unwin stopped him.

"Don't go on multiplying the mysteries," he said. "They
should be kept simple. Bear in mind Poe's purloined letter,
bear in mind Zangwill's locked room."

"Or made complex," replied Dunraven. "Bear in mind the un-
iverse."

Climbing the steep dunes, they had reached the labyrinth.
It seemed to them, up close, a straight and almost end-
less wall of unplastered brick, barely higher than a man's
head. Dunraven said that the building had the shape of a
circle, but so wide was this circle that its curve was al-
most invisible. Unwin recollected Nicholas of Cusa, to
whom a straight line was the are of an infinite circle.
They walked on and on, and along about midnight discovered
a narrow opening that led into a blind, unsafe passage.
Dunraven said that inside the house were many branching
ways but that, by turning always to the left, they would
reach the very center of the network in little more than
an hour. Unwin assented. Their cautious footsteps resound-
ed off the stone-paved floor; the corridor branched into
other, narrower corridors. The roof was very low, making
the house seem to want to imprison them, and they had to
walk one behind the other through the complex dark. Unwin
went ahead, forced to slacken the pace because of the rough
masonry and the many turns. The unseen wall flowed on by
his hand, endlessly. Unwin, slow in the blackness, heard
from his friend's lips the tale of the death of Ibn Hakkan.
"Perhaps the oldest of my memories," Dunraven said, "is
the one of Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari in the port of Pentrcath.
At his heels followed a black man with a lion--unquestion-
ably they were the first black man and the first lion my
eyes had ever seen, outside of engravings from the Bible.
I was a boy then, but the beast the color of the sun and
the man the color of night impressed me less than Ibn
Hakkan himself. To me, he seemed very tall; he was a man
with sallow skin, half-shut black eyes, an insolent nose,
fleshy lips, a saffron-colored beard, a powerful chest,
and a way of walking that was self-assured and silent. At
home, I said, 'A king has come on a ship.' Later, when the
bricklayers were at work here, I broadened his title and
dubbed him King of Babel.

"The news that this stranger would settle in Pentreath was
received with welcome, but the scale and shape of his house
aroused disapproval and bewilderment. It was not right that
a house should consist of a single room and of miles and
miles of corridors. 'Among foreigners such houses might be
common,' people said, 'but hardly here in England.' Our
rector, Mr. Allaby, a man with out-of-the-way reading hab-
its, exhumed an Eastern story of a king whom the Divinity
had punished for having built a labyrinth, and he told this
story from the pulpit. The very next day, Ibn Hakkan paid
a visit to the rectory; the circumstances of the brief in-
terview were not known at the time, but no further sermon
alluded to the sin of pride, and the Moor was able to go
on contracting masons. Years afterward, when lbn Hakkan
was dead, Allaby stated to the authorities the substance of
their conversation.

"Ibn Hakkan, refusing a chair, had told him these or sim-
ilar words: 'No man can place judgment upon what I am do-
ing now. My sins are such that were I to invoke for hund-
reds upon hundreds of years the Ultimate Name of God, this
would be powerless to set aside the least of my torments;
my sins are such that were Ito kill you, Reverend Allaby,
with these very hands, my act would not increase even
slightly the torments that Infinite Justice holds in store
for me. There is no land on earth where my name is unknown.
I am Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, and in my day I ruled over the
tribes of the desert with a rod of iron. For years and
years, with the help of my cousin Zaid, I trampled them
underfoot until God heard their outcry and suffered them
to rebel against me. My armies were broken and put to the
sword; I succeeded in escaping with the wealth I had ac-
cumulated during my reign of plunder. Zaid led me to the
tomb of a holy man, at the foot of a stone hill. I ordered
my slave to watch the face of the desert. Zaid and I went
inside with our chest of gold coins and slept, utterly
worn out. That night, I believed that a tangle of snakes
had trapped me. I woke up in horror. By my side, in the
dawn, Zaid lay asleep; a spider web against my flesh had
made me dream that dream. It pained me that Zaid, who
was a coward, should be sleeping so restfully. I reflected
that the wealth was not infinite and that Zaid might wish
to claim part of it for himself. In my belt was my silver-
handled dagger; I slipped it from its sheath and pierced
his throat with it. In his agony, he muttered words I could
not make out. I looked at him. He was dead, but, fearing
that he might rise up, I ordered my slave to obliterate the
dead man's face with a heavy rock. Then we wandered under
the sun, and one day we spied a sea. Very tall ships plowed
a course through it. I thought that a dead man would be un-
able to make his way over such waters, and I decided to seek
other lands. The first night after we sailed, I dreamed that
I killed Zaid. Everything was exactly the same, but this
time I understood his words. He said: "As you now kill me,
I shall one day kill you, wherever you may hide." I have
sworn to avert that threat. I shall bury myself in the heart
of a labyrinth so that Zaid's ghost will lose its way.'

"After having said this, he went away. Allaby did his best
to think that the Moor was mad and that his absurd laby-
rinth was a symbol and a clear mark of his madness.. Then
he reflected that this explanation agreed with the extra-
vagant building and with the extravagant story but not
with the strong impression left by the man Ibn Hakkan.
Who knew whether such tales might not be common in the
sand wastes of Egypt, who knew whether such queer things
corresponded (like Pliny's dragons) less to a person than
to a culture? On a visit to London, Allaby combed back
numbers of the Times; he verified the fact of the upris-
ing and of the subsequent downfall of al-Bokhari and of
his vizier, whose cowardice was well known.

"Al-Bokhari, as soon as the bricklayers had finished, in-
stalled himself in the center of the labyrinth. He was
not seen again in the town; at times, Allaby feared that
Zaid had caught up with the king and killed him. At night,
the wind carried to us the growling of the lion, and the
sheep in their pens pressed together with an ancient fear.

"It was customary for ships from Eastern ports, bound for
Cardiff or Bristol, to anchor in the little bay. The slave
used to go down from the labyrinth (which at that time, I
remember, was not its present rose color but was crimson)
and exchange guttural-sounding words with the ships' crews,
and he seemed to be looking among the men for the vizier's
ghost. It was no secret that these vessels carried cargoes
of contraband, and if of alcohol or of forbidden ivories,
why not of dead men as well?

"Some three years after the house was finished, the Rose
of Sharon anchored one October morning just under the
bluffs. I was not among those who saw this sailing ship,
and perhaps the image of it I hold in my mind is influenc-
ed by forgotten prints of Aboukir or of Trafalgar, but I
believe it was among that class of ships so minutely de-
tailed that they seem less the work of a shipbuilder than
of a carpenter, and less of a carpenter than of a cabinet-
maker. It was (if not in reality, at least in my dreams)
polished, dark, fast, and silent, and its crew was made
up of Arabs and Malayans.

"It anchored at dawn, and in the late afternoon of that
same day Ibn Hakkan burst into the rectory to see Allaby.
He was dominated--completely dominated--by a passion of
fear, and was scarcely able to make it clear that Zaid
had entered the labyrinth and that his slave and his
lion had already been killed. He asked in all serious-
ness whether the authorities might be able to help him.
Before Allaby could say a word, al-Bokhari was gone--as
if torn away by the same terror that had brought him for
the second and last time to the rectory. Alone in his
library, Allaby reflected in amazement that this fear-
ridden man had kept down Sudanese tribes by the knife,
knew what a battle was, and knew what it was to kill.
Allaby found out the next day that the boat had already
set sail (bound for the Red Sea port of Suakin, he later
learned). Feeling it was his duty to verify the death of
the slave, he made his way up to the labyrinth. Al-Bok-
hari's breathless tale seemed to him utterly fantastic,
but at one turn of the corridor he came upon the lion,
and the lion was dead, and at another turn there was the
slave, who was also dead, and in the central room he
found al-Bokhari--with his face obliterated. At the
man's feet was a small chest inlaid with mother-of-
pearl; the lock had been forced, and not a single coin
was left."

Dunraven's final sentences, underlined by rhetorical
pauses, were meant to be impressive; Unwin guessed that
his friend had gone over them many times before, always
with the same confidence--and with the same flatness
of effect. He asked, in order to feign interest, "How
were the lion and the slave killed?"

The relentless voice went on with a kind of gloomy sat-
isfaction, 'Their faces were also bashed in."

A muffled sound of rain was now added to the sound of
the men's steps. Unwin realized that they would have to
spend the night in the labyrinth, in the central cham-
ber, but that in time this uncomfortable experience
could be looked back on as an adventure. He kept silent.
Dunraven could not restrain himself, and asked, in the
manner of one who wants to squeeze the last drop, "Can
this story be explained?"

Unwin answered, as though thinking aloud, "I have no
idea whether it can be explained or not. I only know
it's a lie."

Dunraven broke out in a torrent of strongly flavored
language and said that all the population of Pentreath
could bear witness to the truth of what he had told and
that if he had to make up a story, he was a writer af-
ter all and could easily have invented a far better
one. No less astonished than Dunraven, Unwin apologized.
Time in the darkness seemed more drawn out; both men
began to fear they had gone astray, and were feeling
their tiredness when a faint gleam of light from over-
head revealed the lower steps of a narrow staircase.
They climbed up and came to a round room that lay in
ruin. Two things were left that attested to the fear
of the ill-starred king: a slit of a window that look-
ed out onto the moors and the sea, and a trapdoor in
the floor that opened above the curve of the stairway.
The room, though spacious, had about it something of
a prison cell.

Less because of the rain than because of a wish to have
a ready anecdote for friends, the two men spent the
night in the labyrinth. The mathematician slept sound-
ly; not so the poet, who was hounded by verses that
his judgment knew to be worthless:

Faceless the sultry and overpowering lion,
Faceless the stricken slave, faceless the king.

Unwin felt that the story of al-Bokhari's death had left
him indifferent, but he woke up with the conviction of hav-
ing unraveled it. All that day, he was preoccupied and un-
sociable, trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together,
and two nights later he met Dunraven in a pub back in Lon-
don and said to him these or similar words: "In Cornwall,
I said your story was a lie. The facts were true, or
could be thought of as true, but told the way you told
them they were obviously lies. I will begin with the great-
est lie of all with the unbelievable labyrinth. A fugitive
does not hide himself in a maze. He does not build himself
a labyrinth on a bluff overlooking the sea, a crimson lab-
yrinth that can be sighted from afar by any ship's crew.
He has no need to erect a labyrinth when the whole world
already is one. For anyone who really wants to hide away,
London is a better labyrinth than a lookout tower to which
all the corridors of a building lead. The simple observa-
tion I have just propounded to you came to me the night be-
fore last while we were listening to the rain on the roof
and were waiting for sleep to fall upon us. Under its in-
fluence, I chose to put aside your absurdities and to think
about something sensible."

"About the theory of series, say, or about a fourth dimen-
sion of space?" asked Dunraven.

"No," said Unwin, serious. "I thought about the labyrinth
of Crete. The labyrinth whose center was a man with the
head of a bull."

Dunraven, steeped in detective stories, thought that the
solution of a mystery is always less impressive than the
mystery itself. Mystery has something of the supernatural
about it, and even of the divine; its solution, however,
is always tainted by sleight of hand. He said, to put off
the inevitable, "On coins and in sculpture the Minotaur
has a bull's head. Dante imagined it as having the body
of a bull and a man's head."

"That version also fits my solution," Unwin agreed. 'What
matters is that both the dwelling and the dweller be mon-
strous. The Minotaur amply justifies its maze. The same
can hardly be said of a threat uttered in a dream. The Min-
otaur's image once evoked (unavoidably, of course, in a
mystery in which there is a labyrinth), the problem was
virtually solved. Nonetheless, I confess 1 did not fully
understand that this ancient image held the key, but in
your story I found a detail I could use--the spider web."

"The spider web?" repeated Dunraven, baffled.

"Yes. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the spider web
(the Platonic spider web--let's keep this straight) may
have suggested to the murderer (for there is a murder-
er) his crime. You remember that al-Bokhari, in the
tomb, dreamed about a tangle of snakes, and upon waking
found that a spider web had prompted his dream. Let us
go back to that night in which al-Bokhari had that
dream. The defeated king and the vizier and the slave
are escaping over the desert with treasure. They take
shelter for the night in a tomb. The vizier, whom we
know to be a coward, sleeps; the king, whom we know to
be a brave man, does not sleep. In order not to share
the treasure, the king knifes the vizier. Several nights
later, the vizier's ghost threatens the king in a dream.
All this is unconvincing. To my understanding, the e-
vents took place in another way. That night, the king,
the brave man, slept, and Zaid, the coward, lay awake.
To sleep is to forget all things, and this particular
forgetfulness is not easy when you know you are being
hunted down with drawn swords. Zaid, greedy, bent over
the sleeping figure of his king. He thought about kill-
ing him (maybe he even played with his dagger), but he
did not dare. He woke the napping slave, they buried
part of the treasure in the tomb, and they fled to Suak-
in and to England. Not to hide themselves from al-Bokha-
ri but to lure him and to kill him, they built--like the
spider its web--the crimson labyrinth on the high dunes
in sight of the sea. The vizier knew that ships would
carry to Nubian ports the tale of the red-bearded man,
of the slave, and of the lion, and that sooner or later
al-Bokhari would come in search of them in their laby-
rinth. In the last passageway of the maze, the trap lay
waiting. Al-Bokhari had always underrated Zaid, and now
did not lower himself to take the slightest precaution.
At last, the wished-for day came; Ibn Hakkan landed in
England, went directly to the door of the maze, made
his way into its blind corridors, and perhaps had al-
ready set foot on the first steps when his vizier kill-
ed him--I don't know whether with a bullet--from the
trapdoor in the ceiling. The slave would finish off the
lion and another bullet would finish off the slave. Then
Zaid crushed the three faces with a rock. He had to do
it that way; one dead man with his face bashed in would
have suggested a problem of identity, but the beast, the
black man, and the king formed a series, and, given the
first two terms, the last one would seem natural. It is
not to be wondered at that he was driven by fear when
he spoke to Allaby; he had just finished his awful job
and was about to flee England and unearth the treasure."

A thoughtful silence, or disbelief, followed Unwin's
words. Dunraven asked for another tankard before giving
his judgment.

"I admit," he said, "that my Ibn Hakkan could have been
Zaid. Such metamorphoses are classic rules of the game,
are accepted conventions demanded by the reader. What I
am unwilling to admit is your conjecture that a part of
the treasure remained in the Sudan. Remember that Zaid
fled from the king and from the king's enemies both;
it is easier to picture him stealing the whole hoard
than taking the time to bury a portion of it. At the
very end, perhaps no coins were found in the chest be-
cause no coins were left. The bricklayers would have
eaten up a fortune that, unlike the red gold of the
Nibelungs, was not inexhaustible. And so we have Ibn
Hakkan crossing the seas in order to recover a trea-
sure already squandered."

"I shouldn't say squandered," Unwin said. "The vizier
invested it, putting together on an island of infid-
els a great circular trap made of brick and destined
not only to lure a king but to be his grave. Zaid, if
your guess is correct, acted out of hate and fear,
and not out of greed. He stole the treasure, and only
later found that he was really after something else.
He really wanted to see Ibn Hakkan dead. He pretended
to be Ibn Hakkan, he killed Ibn Hakkan, and in the end
he became Ibn Hakkan."

"Yes," agreed Dunraven. "He was a good-for-nothing
who, before becoming a nobody in death, wanted one day
to look back on having been a king or having been tak-
en for a king."




The Man on the Threshold



Bioy-Casares brought back with him from London a strange
dagger with a triangular blade and a hilt in the shape
of an H; a friend of ours, Christopher Dewey of the Brit-
ish Council, told us that such weapons were commonly
used in India. This statement prompted him to mention
that he had held a job in that country between the two
wars. ("Ultra Auroram et Gangen," I recall his saying in
Latin, misquoting a line from Juvenal.) Of the stories he
entertained us with that night, I venture to set down the
one that follows. My account will be faithful; may Allah
deliver me from the temptation of adding any circumstan-
tial details or of weighing down the tale's Oriental char-
acter with interpolations from Kipling. It should be re-
marked that the story has a certain ancient simplicity
that it would be a pity to lose--something perhaps straight
out of the Arabian Nighu.


The precise geography [Dewey said) of the events I am go-
ing to relate is of little importance. Besides, what would
the names of Amritsar or Oudh mean in Buenos Aires? Let me
only say, then, that in those years there were disturbances
in a Muslim city and that the central government sent out
one of their best people to restore order. He was a Scots-
man from an illustrious clan of warriors, and in his blood
he bore a tradition of violence. Only once did I lay eyes
on him, but I shall not forget his deep black hair, the prom-
inent cheekbones, the somehow avid nose and mouth, the broad
shoulders, the powerful set of a Viking. David Alexander
Glencairn is what he'll be called in my story tonight; the
names are fitting, since they belonged to kings who ruled
with an iron scepter. David Alexander Glencairn (as I shall
have to get used to calling him) was, I suspect, a man who
was feared; the mere news of his coming. was enough to quell
the city. This did not deter him from putting into effect
a number of forceful measures. A few years passed. The city
and the outlying district were at peace; Sikhs and Muslims
had laid aside their ancient enmities, and suddenly Glen-
cairn disappeared. Naturally enough, there was no lack of
rumors that he had been kidnapped or murdered.

These things I learned from my superior, for the censorship
was strict and the newspapers made no comment on (nor did
they even record, for all I recall) Glencairn's disappearance.
There's a saying that India is larger than the world; Glen-
cairn, who may have been all powerful in the city to which
he was destined by a signature scrawled across the bottom
of some document, was no more than a cog in the administra-
tion of Empire. The inquiries of the local police turned up
nothing; my superior felt that a civilian might rouse less
suspicion and achieve greater results. Three or four days
later (distances in India are generous), I was appointed to
my mission and was working my way without hope of success
through the streets of the commonplace city that had somehow
whisked away a man.

I felt, almost at once, the invisible presence of a con-
spiracy to keep Glencairn's fate hidden. There's not a soul
in this city (I suspected) who is not in on the secret and
who is not sworn to keep it. Upon being questioned, most
people professed an unbounded ignorance; they did not know
who Glencairn was, had never seen him, had never. heard
anyone speak of him. Others, instead, had caught a glimpse
of him only a quarter of an hour before talking to So-and-
So, and they even accompanied me to the house the two had
entered and in which nothing was known of them, or which
they had just that moment left. Some of those meticulous
liars I went so far as to knock down. Witnesses approved
my outbursts, and made up other lies. I did not believe
them, but neither did I dare ignore them. One afternoon, I
was handed an envelope containing a slip of paper on which
there was an address.

The sun had gone down when I got there. The quarter was
poor but not rowdy; the house was quite low; from the street
I caught a glimpse of a succession of unpaved inner court-
yards, and somewhere at the far end an opening. There, some
kind of Muslim ceremony was being held; a blind man entered
with a lute made of a reddish wood.

At my feet, motionless as an object, an old, old man squat-
ted on the threshold. I'll tell what he was like, for he is
an essential part of the story. His many years had worn him
down and polished him as smooth as water polishes a stone,
or as the generations of men polish a sentence. Long rags
covered him, or so it seemed to me, and the cloth he wore
wound around his head was one rag more. In the dusk, he lift-
ed a dark face and a white beard. I began speaking to him
without preamble, for by now I had given up all hope of ever
finding David Alexander Glencairn. The old man did not un-
derstand me (perhaps he did not hear me), and I had to
explain that Glencairn was a judge and that I was looking
for him. I felt, on speaking these words, the pointlessness
of questioning this old man for whom the present was hardly
more than a dim rumor. This man might give me news of the
Mutiny or of Akbar (I thought) but not of Glencairn. What he
told me confirmed this suspicion.

"A judge!" he cried with weak surprise. "A judge who has got
himself lost and is being searched for. That happened when I
was a boy: I have no memory for dates, but Nikal Seyn (Nich-
olson) had not yet been killed before the wall of Delhi. Time
that has passed stays on in memory; I may be able to summon
back what happened then. God, in his wrath, had allowed people
to fall into corruption; the mouths of men were full of blas-
phemy and of deceit and of fraud. Yet not all were evil, and
when it was known that the queen was about to send a man
who would carry out in this land the law of England, those who
were less evil were cheered, for they felt that law is bet-
ter than disorder. The Christian came to us, but it was not
long before he too was deceiving and oppressing us, conceal-
ing abominable crimes, and selling decisions. We did not
blame him in the beginning; the English justice he admini-
stered was not familiar to anyone, and the apparent excesses
of the new judge may have obeyed certain valid arcane reason-
ing. Everything must have a justification in his book, we
wished to think, but his kinship with all evil judges the
world over was too obvious to be overlooked, and at last we
were forced to admit that he was simply a wicked man. He
turned out to be a tyrant, and the unfortunate people (in or-
der to avenge themselves for the false hopes they had once
placed in him) began to toy with the idea of kidnapping him
and submitting him to judgment. To talk was not enough;
from plans they had to move to action. Nobody, perhaps,
save the very foolish or the very young, believed that
that rash scheme could be carried out, but thousands of
Sikhs and Muslims kept their word and one day they execut-
ed--incredulous--what to each of them had seemed impossible.
They sequestered the judge and held him prisoner in a farm-
house beyond the outskirts of the town. Then they called
together all those who had been wronged by him, or, in some
cases, orphans and widows, for during those years the exe-
cutioner's sword had not rested. In the end--this was per-
haps the most difficult--they sought and named a judge to
judge the judge."

At this point, the old man was interrupted by some women
who were entering the house. Then he went on, slowly.

"It is well known that there is no generation that does not
include in it four upright men who are the secret pillars
of the world and who justify it before the Lord: one of
these men would have made the perfect judge. But where are
they to be found if they themselves wander the world lost
and nameless, and do not know each other when they meet,
and are unaware of the high destiny that is theirs? Some-
one then reasoned that if fate forbade us wise men, we
should seek out the witless. This opinion prevailed. Stu-
dents of the Koran, doctors of law, Sikhs who bear the
name of lions and who worship one God, Hindus who worship
a multitude of gods, Mahavira monks who teach that the
shape of the universe is that of a man with his legs
spread apart, worshipers of fire, and black Jews made up
the court, but the final ruling was entrusted to a madman."

Here he was interrupted by people who were leaving the
ceremony.

"To a madman," he repeated, "so that God's wisdom might
speak through his mouth and shame human pride. His name
has been forgotten, or was never known, but he went nak-
ed through the streets, or was clothed in rags, counting
his fingers with a thumb and mocking at the trees."

My common sense rebelled. I said that to hand over the
verdict to a madman was to nullify the trial.

"The defendant accepted the judge," was his answer, "see-
ing, perhaps, that because of the risk the conspirators
would run if they set him free, only from a man who was
mad might he not expect a sentence of death. I heard that
he laughed when he was told who the judge was. The trial
lasted many days and nights, drawn out by the swelling of
the number of witnesses."

The old man stopped. Something was troubling him. In or-
der to bridge the lapse, I asked him how many days. "At
least nineteen," he replied.

People who were leaving the ceremony interrupted him a-
gain; wine is forbidden to Muslims. but the faces and
voices were those of drunkards. One, on passing, shouted
something to the old man.

"Nineteen days--exactly," he said, setting matters
straight. "The faithless dog heard sentence passed, and
the knife feasted on his throat."

He had spoken fiercely, joyfully. With a different voice
now he brought the story to an end. "He died without fear;
in the most vile of men there is some virtue."

"Where did all this happen?" I asked him. "In a farm-
house?"

For the first time, he looked into my eyes. Then he made
things clear, slowly, measuring his words. "I said that
he had been confined in a farmhouse, not that he was tried
there. He was tried in this city, in a house like any
other, like this one. One house differs little from ano-
ther; what is important to know is whether the house is
built in hell or in heaven."

I asked him about the fate of the conspirators.

"I don't know," he told me patiently. 'These things took
place and were forgotten many years ago now. Maybe what
they did was condemned by men, but not by the Lord."
Having said this, he got up. I felt his words as a dis-
missal, and from that moment I no longer existed for him.
Men and women from all the corners of the Punjab swarmed
over us, praying and intoning, and nearly swept us away.
I wondered how, from courtyards so narrow they were lit-
tle more than long passageways, so many persons could be
pouring out. Others were coming from the neighboring
houses; it seems they had leaped over the walls. By shov-
ing and cursing, I forced my way inside. At the heart of
the innermost courtyard I came upon a naked man, crowned
with yellow flowers, whom everyone kissed and caressed,
with a sword in his hand. The sword was stained, for it
had dealt Glencairn his death. I found his mutilated body
in the stables out back.




The Challenge



All over the Argentine runs a story that may belong to
legend or to history or (which may be just another way
of saying it belongs to legend) to both things at once.
Its best recorded versions are to be found in the unjust-
ly forgotten novels about outlaws and desperadoes writ-
ten in the last century by Eduardo Gutierrez; among its
oral versions, the first one I heard came from a neigh-
borhood of Buenos Aires bounded by a penitentiary, a riv-
er, and a cemetery, and nicknamed Tierra del Fuego. The
hero of this version was Juan Murano, a wagon driver and
knife fighter to whom are attributed all the stories of
daring that still survive in what were once the outskirts
of the city's Northside. That first version was quite
simple. A man from the Stockyards or from Barracas, know-
ing about Murana's reputation (but never having laid eyes
on him), sets out all the way across town from the South-
side to take him on. He picks the fight in a corner saloon,
and the two move into the street to have it out. Each is
wounded, but in the end Murano slashes the other man's
face and tells him, "I'm letting you live so you'll come
back looking for me again."

What impressed itself in my mind about the duel was that
it had no ulterior motive. In conversation thereafter (my
friends know this only too well), I grew fond of retell-
ing the anecdote. Around 1927, I wrote it down, giving it
the deliberately laconic title "Men Fought." Years later,
this same anecdote helped me work out a lucky story--
though hardly a good one--called "Streetcorner Man."
Then, in I950, Adolfo Bioy-Casares and I made use of it
again to plot a film script that the producers turned
down and that would have been called On the Outer Edge.
It was about hard-bitten men like Murana who lived on
the outskirts of Buenos Aires before the turn of the cen-
tury. I thought, after such extensive labors, that I had
said farewell to the story of the disinterested duel.
Then, this year, out in Chivilcoy, I came across a far
better version. I hope this is the true one, although
since fate seems to take pleasure in a thing's happening
many times over, both may very well be authentic. Two
quite bad stories and a script that I still think of as
good came out of the poorer first version; out of the se-
cond, which is complete and perfect, nothing can come.
Without working in metaphors or details of local color,
I shall tell it now as it was told to me. The story took
place to the west, in the district of Chivilcoy, sometime
back in the 1870's.

The hero's name is Wenceslao Suarez. He earns his wages
braiding ropes and making harnesses, and lives in a
small adobe hut. Forty or fifty years old, he's a man
who has won a reputation for courage, and it is quite
likely (given the facts of the story) that he has a kill-
ing or two to his credit. But these killings, because
they were in fair fights, neither trouble his conscience
nor tarnish his good name.

One evening, something out of the ordinary happens in
the routine life of this man: at a crossroads saloon,
he is told that a letter has come for him. Don Wence-
slao does not know how to read; the saloonkeeper puz-
zles out word by word an epistle certainly not written
by the man who sent it. In the name of certain friends,
who value dexterity and true composure, an unknown cor-
respondent sends his compliments to don Wenceslao,
whose renown has crossed over the Arroyo del Medio
into the Province of Santa' Fe, and extends him the
hospitality of his humble home in a town of the said
province. Wenceslao Suarez dictates a reply to the
saloonkeeper. Thanking the other man for his express-
ion of friendship, and explaining that he dare not
leave his mother--who is well along in years--alone,
he invites the other man to his own place in Chivilcoy,
where a barbecue and a bottle or so of wine may be
looked forward to. The months drag by, and one day a
man riding a horse harnessed and saddled in a style
unknown in the area inquires at the saloon for the
way to Suarez' house. Suarez, who has come to the sa-
loon to buy meat, overhears the question and tells
the man.who he is. The stranger reminds him of the
letters they exchanged some time back. Suarez shows
his pleasure that the other man has gone to the trou-
ble of making the journey; then the two of them go off
into a nearby field and Suarez prepares the barbecue.
They eat and drink and talk at length. About what? I
suspect about subjects involving blood and cruelty--
but with each man on his guard, wary.

They have eaten, and the oppressive afternoon heat
weighs over the land when the stranger invites don Wen-
ceslao to join in a bit of harmless knife play. To say
no would dishonor the host They fence, and at first
they only play at fighting, but it's not long before
Wenceslao feels that the stranger is out to kill him.
Realizing at last what lay behind the ceremonious letter,
Wenceslao regrets having eaten and drunk so much.
He knows he will tire before the other man, on whom
he has a good nine or ten years. Out of scorn or po-
liteness, the stranger offers him a short rest. Don
Wenceslao agrees and, as soon as they take up their
dueling again, he allows the other man to wound him
on the left hand, in which he holds his rolled poncho.
The knife slices through his wrist, the hand dangles
loose. Suarez, springing back, lays the bleeding hand
on the ground, clamps it down under his boot, tears
it off, feints a thrust at the amazed stranger's chest,
then rips open his belly with a solid stab. So the story
ends, except that, according to one teller, the man
from Santa Fe is left lifeless, while to another (who
withholds from him the dignity of death) he rides back
to his own province. In this latter version, Suarez gives
him first aid with the rum remaining from their lunch.

In this feat of Manco (One Hand) Wenceslao--as Suarez
is now known to fame--certain touches of mildness or
politeness (his trade as harness and rope maker, his
qualms about leaving his mother alone, the exchange of
flowery letters, the two men's leisurely conversation,
the lunch) happily tone down and make the barbarous
tale more effective. These touches lend it an epic and
even chivalrous quality that we hardly find, for exam-
ple--unless we have made up our minds to do so--in the
drunken brawls of Martin Fierro or in the closely re-
lated but poorer story of Juan Murana and the man from
the Southside. A trait common to the two may, perhaps,
be significant. In both of them, the challenger is de-
feated. This may be due to the mere and unfortunate nec-
essity for the local champion to triumph, but also (and
this is preferable) to a tacit disapproval of aggression,
or (which would be best of all) to the dark and tragic
suspicion that man is the worker of his own downfall,
like Ulysses in Canto XXVI of the Inferno or like that
other doomed captain in Moby Dick.

Something fundamental in the brutal story just told saves
it from falling into unalloyed barbarousness--an episode
out of La Terre or Hemingway. I speak of a religious
core. "His beliefs," said the poet Lugones of the gau-
cho, "could be reduced to a few superstitions, which
had no great bearing on his everyday life." He then adds,
"The one thing he respected was courage, which he cul-
tivated with a chivalrous passion." I would say that the
gaucho, without realizing it, forged a religion--the
hard and blind religion of courage--and that this faith
(like all others) had its ethic, its mythology, and its
martyrs. On the plains and out on the raw edges of the
city, men who led extremely elementary lives--herders,
stockyard workers, drovers, outlaws, and pimps--redisco-
vered in their own way the age-old cult of the gods of
iron. In a thirteenth-century saga, we read:

　　　"Tell me, what do you believe in?" said the earl.
　　　"I believe in my own strength," said Sigmund.

Wenceslao Suarez and his nameless antagonist, and many
others whom myth has forgotten or has absorbed in these
two, doubtless held this manly faith, and in all like-
lihood it was no mere form of vanity but rather an a-
wareness that God may be found in any man.




The Intruder



... passing the love of women.

2 Samuel I : 26


People say (but this is unlikely) that the story was first
told by Eduardo, the younger of the Nelsons, at the wake
of his elder brother Cristian, who died in his sleep some-
time back in the nineties out in the district of Moron. The
fact is that someone got it from someone else during the
course of that drawn-out and now dim night, between one sip
of mate and the next, and told it to Santiago Dabove, from
whom I heard it. Years later, in Turdera, where the story
had taken place, I heard it again. The second and more ela-
borate version closely followed the one Santiago told, with
the usual minor variations and discrepancies. I set down the
story now because I see in it, if I'm not mistaken, a brief
and tragic mirror of the character of those hard-bitten men
living on the edge of Buenos Aires before the turn of the
century. I hope to do this in a straightforward way, but I
see in advance that I shall give in to the writer's tempta-
tion of emphasizing or adding certain details.

In Turdera, where they lived, they were called the Nilsens.
The priest there told me that his predecessor remembered
having seen in the house of these people--somewhat in amaze-
ment--a worn Bible with a dark binding and black-letter type;
on the back flyleaf he caught a glimpse of names and dates
written in by hand. It was the only book in the house--the
roaming chronicle of the Nilsens, lost as one day all things
will be lost. The rambling old house, which no longer stands,
was of unplastered brick; through the arched entranceway you
could make out a patio paved with red tiles and beyond it a
second one of hard-packed earth. Few people, at any rate, e-
ver set foot inside; the Nilsens kept to themselves. In their
almost bare rooms they slept on cots. Their extravagances
were horses, silver-trimmed riding gear, the short-bladed
dagger, and getting dressed up on Saturday nights, when they
blew their money freely and got themselves into boozy brawls.
They were both tall, I know, and wore their red hair long.
Denmark or Ireland, which they probably never heard of, ran
in the blood of these two Argentine brothers. The neighbor-
hood feared the Redheads; it is likely that one of them, at
least, had killed his man. Once, shoulder to shoulder, they
tangled with the police. It is said that the younger brother
was in a fight with Juan Iberia in which he didn't do too bad-
ly, and that, according to those in the know, is saying some-
thing. They were drovers, teamsters, horse thieves, and, once
in a while, professional gamblers. They had a reputation for
stinginess, except when drink and cardplaying turned them into
spenders. Of their relatives or where they themselves came
from, nothing is known. They owned a cart and a yoke of oxen.

Their physical makeup differed from that of the rest of the
toughs who gave the Costa Brava its unsavory reputation. This,
and a lot that we don't know, helps us understand the close
ties between them. To fall out with one of them was to reckon
with two enemies.

The Nilsens liked carousing with women, but up until then
their amorous escapades had always been carried out in dark-
ened passageways or in whorehouses. There was no end of talk,
then, when Cristian brought Juliana Burgos to live with him.
Admittedly, in this way he gained a servant, but it is also
true that he took to squandering on her the most hideous junk
jewelry and showing her off at parties. At those dingy parties
held in tenements, where suggestive dance steps were strictly
forbidden and where, at that time, partners still danced with
a good six inches of light showing between them. Juliana was
a dark girl and her eyes had a slight slant to them; all any-
one had to do was look at her and she'd break into a smile.
For a poor neighborhood, where drudgery and neglect wear women
out, she was not bad-looking.

In the beginning, Eduardo went places with them. Later, at one
point, he set out on a journey north to Arrecifes on some bus-
iness or other, returning home with a girl he had picked up a-
long the way. But after a few days he threw her out. He turned
more sullen; he took to drinking alone at the corner saloon and
kept completely to himself. He had fallen in love with Crist-
iin's woman. The whole neighborhood, which may have realized it
before he did, maliciously and cheerfully looked forward to the
enmity about to break out between the two brothers.

Late one night, on coming home from the corner, Eduardo saw
Cristian's horse, a big bay, tied to the hitching post. Inside
in the patio, dressed in his Sunday best, his older brother
was waiting for him. The woman shuttled in and out serving mate.
Cristian said to Eduardo, "I'm on my way over to Farfas' place,
where they're throwing a party. Juliana stays here with you; if
you want her, use her."

His tone was half commanding, half friendly. Eduardo stood
there a while staring at him, not knowing what to do. Cristian
got up, said goodbye--to his brother, not to Juliana, who was no
more than an object--mounted his horse, and rode off at a jog,
casually.

From that night on they shared her. Nobody will ever know the
details of this strange partnership which outraged even the
Costa Brava's sense of decency. The arrangement went well for
several weeks, but it could not last. Between them the brothers
never mentioned her name, not even to call her, but they kept
looking for, and finding, reasons to be at odds. They argued
over the sale of some hides, but what they were really arguing
about was something else. Cristian took to raising his voice,
while Eduardo kept silent. Without knowing it, they were watch-
ing each other. In tough neighborhoods a man never admits to
anyone--not even to himself--that a woman matters beyond lust
and possession, but the two brothers were in love. This, in
some way, made them feel ashamed.

One afternoon, in the square in Lomas, Eduardo ran into Juan
Iberra, who congratulated him on this beauty he'd got hold of.
It was then, I believe, that Eduardo let him have it. Nobody--
not to his face--was going to poke fun at Cristian.

The woman attended both men's wants with an animal submission,
but she was unable to keep hidden a certain preference, pro-
bably for the younger man, who had not refused sharing her
but who had not proposed it either.

One day, they ordered Juliana to bring two chairs out into
the first patio and then not show her face for a while be-
cause they had things to talk over. Expecting a long session
between them, she lay down for a nap, but before very long
they woke her up. She was to fill a sack with all her be-
longings, including her glass-bead rosary and the tiny cru-
cifix her mother had left her. Without any explanation,
they lifted her onto the oxcart and set out on a long, tire-
some, and silent journey. It had rained; the roads were hea-
vy with mud and it was nearly daybreak before they reached
Moron. There they sold her to the woman who ran the whore-
house. The terms had already been agreed to; Cristian pock-
eted the money and later on split it with his brother.

Back in Turdera, the Nilsens, up till then trapped in the
web (which was also a routine) of this monstrous love affair,
tried to take up their old life of men among men. They went
back to cardplaying, to cockfights, to their Saturday night
binges. At times, perhaps, they felt they were saved, but
they often indulged--each on his own--in unaccountable or
only too accountable absences. A little before the year was
out, the younger brother said he had business in the city.
Immediately, Cristian went off to Moron; at the hitching
post of the whorehouse he recognized Eduardo's piebald.
Cristian walked in; there was his brother, sure enough, wait-
ing his turn. It is said that Cristian told him, "If we go
on this way, we'll wear out the horses. We'd be better off
keeping her close at hand."

He spoke with the owner of the place, drew a handful of
coins out of his money belt, and they took the girl away.
Juliana rode with Cristian. Eduardo dug his spurs into his
horse, not wanting to see them together.

They went back to what has already been told. Their solution
had ended in failure, for the two had fallen into cheating.
Cain was on the loose here, but the affection between the
Nilsens was great--who knows what hard times and what dan-
gers they may have faced together•--and they preferred tak-
ing their feelings out on others. On strangers, on the dogs,
on Juliana, who had set this wedge between them.

The month of March was coming to a close and there was no
sign of the heat's letting up. One Sunday (on Sundays peo-
ple go to bed early), Eduardo, on his way home from the cor-
ner saloon, saw that Cristian was yoking the oxen. Cristian
said to him, "Come on. We have to leave some hides off at
Pardo's place. I've already loaded them; let's make the
best of the night air."

Pardo's warehouse lay, I believe, farther south; they took
the old cattle trail, then turned down a side road. As night
fell, the countryside seemed wider and wider.

They skirted a growth of tall reeds; Cristian threw down the
cigar he had just lit and said evenly, "Let's get busy, bro-
ther. In a while the buzzards will take over. This after-
noon I killed her. Let her stay here with all her trinkets,
she won't cause us any more harm."

They threw their arms around each other, on the verge of
tears. One more link bound them now--the woman they had cru-
elly sacrificed and their common need to forget her.




The Immortals


And see, no longer blinded by our eyes.

RUPERT BROOKE


Whoever could have foreseen, way back in that innocent
summer of 1923, that the novelette The Chosen One by Cami-
lo N. Huergo, presented to me by the author with his per-
sonal inscription on the flyleaf (which I had the decorum
to tear out before offering the volume for sale to suc-
cessive men of the book trade), hid under the thin varn-
ish of fiction a prophetic truth. Huergo's photograph,
in an oval frame, adorns the cover. Each time I look at
it, I have the impression that the snapshot is about to
cough, a victim of that lung disease which nipped in the
bud a promising career. Tuberculosis, in short, denied
him the happiness of acknowledging the letter I wrote
him in one of my characteristic outbursts of generosity.

The epigraph prefixed to this thoughtful essay has been
taken from the aforementioned novelette; I requested Dr.
Montenegro, of the Academy, to render it into Spanish,
but the results were negative. To give the unprepared
reader the gist of the matter, I shall now sketch, in
condensed form, an outline of Huergo's narrative, as fol-
lows:

The storyteller pays a visit, far to the south in Chubut,
to the English rancher don Guillermo Blake, who devotes
his energies not only to the breeding of sheep but also
to the ramblings of the world-famous Plato and to the
latest and more freakish experiments in the field of sur-
gical medicine. On the basis of his reading, don Guillermo
concludes that the five senses obstruct or deform the ap-
prehension of reality and that, could we free ourselves
of them, we would see the world as it is--endless and
timeless. He comes to think that the eternal models of
things lie in the depths of the soul and that the organs
of perception with which the Creator has endowed us are,
grosso modo, hindrances. They are no better than dark
spectacles that blind us to what exists outside, divert-
ing our attention at the same time from the splendor we
carry within us.

Blake begets a son by one of the farm girls so that the
boy may one day become acquainted with reality. To anes-
thetize him for life, to make him blind and deaf and dumb,
to emancipate him from the senses of smell and taste,
were the father's first concerns. He took, in the same
way, all possible measures to make the chosen one unaware
of his own body. As to the rest, this was arranged with
contrivances designed to take over respiration, circula-
tion, nourishment, digestion, and elimination. It was a
pity that the boy, fully liberated, was cut off from all
human contact.

Owing to the press of practical matters, the narrator
goes away. After ten years, he returns. Don Guillermo has
died; his son goes on living after his fashion, with nat-
ural breathing, heart regular, in a dusty shack cluttered
with mechanical devices. The narrator, about to leave for
good, drops a cigarette butt that sets fire to the shack
and he never quite knows whether this act was done on pur-
pose or by pure chance. So ends Huergo's story, strange
enough for its time but now, of course, more than out-
stripped by the rockets and astronauts of our men of
science.

Having dashed off this disinterested compendium of the
tale of a now dead and forgotten author--from whom I have
nothing to gain--I steer back to the heart of the matter.
Memory restores to me a Saturday morning in 1964 when I
had an appointment with the eminent gerontologist Dr.
Raul Narbondo. The sad truth is that we young bloods of
yesteryear are getting on; the thick mop begins to thin,
one or another ear stops up, the wrinkles collect grime,
molars grow hollow, a cough takes root, the backbone hunch-
es up, the foot trips on a pebble, and, to put it plainly,
the paterfamilias falters and withers. There was no doubt
about it, the moment had come to see Dr. Narbondo for a
general checkup, particularly considering the fact that he
specialized in the replacement of malfunctioning organs.

Sick at heart because that afternoon the Palermo Juniors
and the Spanish Sports were playing a return match and
maybe I could not occupy my place in the front row to bol-
ster my team, I betook myself to the clinic on Corrientes
Avenue near Pasteur. The clinic, as its fame betrays, oc-
cupies the fifteenth floor of the Adamant Building. I went
up by elevator (manufactured by the Electra Company). Eye
to eye with Narbondo's brass shingle, I pressed the bell,
and at long last, taking my courage in both hands, I slip-
ped through the partly open door and entered into the wait-
ing room proper. There, alone with the latest issues of
the Ladies' Companion and Jumbo, I whiled away the passing
hours until a cuckoo clock struck twelve and sent me leap-
ing from my armchair. At once, I asked myself, What hap-
pened? Planning my every move now like a sleuth, I took a
step or two toward the next room, peeped in, ready, admit-
tedly, to fly the coop at the slightest sound. From the
streets far below came the noise of horns and traffic, the
cry of a newspaper hawker, the squeal of brakes sparing
some pedestrian, but, all around me, a reign of silence.
I crossed a kind of laboratory, or pharmaceutical back room,
furnished with instruments and flasks of all sorts. Stimu-
lated by the aim of reaching the men's room, I pushed open
a door at the far end of the lab.

Inside, I saw something that my eyes did not understand.
The small enclosure was circular, painted white, with a
low ceiling and neon lighting, and without a single win-
dow to relieve the sense of claustrophobia. The room was
inhabited by four personages, or pieces of furniture.
Their color was the same as the walls, their material
wood, their form cubic. On each cube was another small
cube with a latticed opening and below it a slot as in a
mailbox. Carefully scrutinizing the grilled opening, you
noted with alarm that from the interior you were being
watched by something like eyes. The slots emitted, from
time to time, a chorus of sighs or whisperings that the
good Lord himself could not have made head or tail of.
The placement of these cubes was such that they faced
each other in the form of a square, composing a kind of
conclave. I don't know how many minutes lapsed. At this
point, the doctor came in and said to me, "My pardon,
Bustos, for having kept you waiting. I was just out get-
ting myself an advance ticket for today's match between
the Palermo Juniors and the Spanish Sports." He went on,
indicating the cubes, "Let me introduce you to Santiago
Silberman, to retired clerk-of-court Luduena, to Aquiles
Molinari, and to Miss Bugard."

Out of the furniture came faint rumbling sounds. I quick-
ly reached out a hand and, without the pleasure of shak-
ing theirs, withdrew in good order, a frozen smile on my
lips. Reaching the vestibule as best I could, I managed
to stammer, "A drink. A stiff drink."

Narbondo came out of the lab with a graduated beaker fill-
ed with water and dissolved some effervescent drops into
it. Blessed concoction--the wretched taste brought me to
my senses. Then, the door to the small room closed and
locked tight, came the explanation:

"I'm glad to see, my dear Bustos, that my immortals have
made quite an impact on you. Whoever would have thought
that Homo sapiens, Darwin's barely human ape, could a-
chieve such perfection? This, my house, I assure you, is
the only one in all Indo-America where Dr. Eric Staple-
don's methodology has been fully applied. You recall, no
doubt, the consternation that the death of the late lam-
ented doctor, which took place in New Zealand, occasioned
in scientific circles. I flatter myself, furthermore, for
having implemented his precursory labors with a few Ar-
gentinean touches. In itself, the thesis--Newton's apple
all over again--is fairly simple. The death of the body
is a result, always, of the failure of some organ or o-
ther, call it the kidney, lungs, heart, or what you like.
With the replacement of the organism's various components,
in themselves perishable, with other corresponding stain-
less or polyethylene parts, there is no earthly reason
whatever why the soul, why you yourself --Bustos Domecq--
should not be immortal. None of your philosophical nice-
ties here; the body can be vulcanized and from time to
time recaulked, and so the mind keeps going. Surgery
brings immortality to mankind. Life's essential aim has
been attained--the mind lives on without fear of cessa-
tion. Each of our immortals is comforted by the certain-
ty, backed by our firm's guarantee, of being a witness
in aeternum. The brain, refreshed night and day by a sys-
tem of electrical charges, is the last organic bulwark
in which ball bearings and cells collaborate. The rest
is Formica, steel, plastics. Respiration, alimentation,
generation, mobility--elimination itself!--belong to the
past. Our immortal is real estate. One or two minor
touches are still missing, it's true. Oral articulation,
dialogue, may still be improved. As for the costs, you
need not worry yourself. By means of a procedure that
circumvents legal red tape, the candidate transfers his
property to us, and the Narbondo Company, Inc. --I, my
son, his descendants--guarantees your upkeep, in statu
quo, to the end of time. And, I might add, a money-back
guarantee."

It was then that he laid a friendly hand on my shoulder.
I felt his will taking power over me. "Ha-ha! I see
I've whetted your appetite, I've tempted you, dear Bust-
os. You'll need a couple of months or so to get your af-
fairs in order and to have your stock portfolio signed
over to us. As far as the operation goes, naturally, as
a friend, I want to save you a little something. Instead
of our usual fee of ten thousand dollars, for you, ninety-
five hundred--in cash, of Course. The rest is yours. It
goes to pay your lodging, care, and service. The medical
procedure in itself is painless. No more than a question
of amputation and replacement. Nothing to worry about.
On the eve, just keep yourself calm, untroubled. Avoid
heavy meals, tobacco, and alcohol, apart from your accust-
omed and imported, I hope, Scotch or two. Above all, re-
frain from impatience."

"Why two months?" I asked him. "One's enough, and then
some. I come out of the anesthesia and I'm one more of
your cubes. You have my address and phone number. We'll
keep in touch. I'll be back next Friday at the latest."

At the escape hatch he handed me the card of Nemirovski,
Nemirovski, & Nemirovski, Counsellors at Law, who would
put themselves at my disposal for all the details of
drawing up the will. With perfect composure I walked to
the subway entrance, then took the stairs at a run. I
lost no time. That same night, without leaving the slight-
est trace behind, I moved to the New Impartial, in whose
register I figure under the assumed name of Aquiles Sil-
berman. Here, in my bedroom at the far rear of this modest
hotel, wearing a false beard and dark spectacles, I am
setting down this account of the facts.




The Meeting



Anyone leafing his way through the morning paper does so
either to escape his surroundings or to provide himself
with small talk for later in the day, so it is not to be
wondered at that no one any longer remembers--or else re-
members as in a dream--the famous and once widely discuss-
ed case of Maneco Uriarte and of Duncan. The event took
place, furthermore, back around 1910, the year of the
comet and the Centennial, and since then we have had and
have lost so many things. Both protagonists are now dead;
those who witnessed the episode solemnly swore silence. I,
too, raised my hand for the oath, feeling the importance
of the ritual with all the romantic seriousness of my nine
or ten years. I do not know whether the others noticed that
I had given my word; I do not know whether they kept theirs.
Anyway, here is the story, with all the inevitable varia-
tions brought about by time and by good or bad writing.

My cousin Lafinur took me to a barbecue that evening at a
country house called The Laurels, which belonged to some
friends of his. I cannot fix its exact location; let us take
any of those suburban towns lying just to the north, shad-
ed and quiet, that slope down to the river and that have
nothing in common with sprawling Buenos Aires and its
surrounding prairie. The journey by train lasted long e-
nough to seem endless to me, but time for children--as is
well known--flows slowly. It was already dark when we pass-
ed through the villa's main gate. Here, I felt, were all
the ancient, elemental things: the smell of meat cooking
golden brown, the trees, the dogs, the kindling wood, and
the fire that brings men together.

The guests numbered about a dozen; all were grown-ups.
The eldest, I learned later, was not yet thirty. They were
also--this I was soon to find out--well versed in matters
about which I am still somewhat backward: race horses, the
right tailors, motorcars, and notoriously expensive women.
No one ruffled my shyness, no one paid any attention to
me. The lamb, slowly and skillfully prepared by one of the
hired men, kept us a long time in the big dining room. The
dates of vintages were argued back and forth. There was a
guitar; my cousin, if I remember correctly, sang a couple
of Elias Regules' ballads about gauchos in the back count-
ry of Uruguay and some verses in dialect, in the incipient
lunfardo of those days, about a knife fight in a brothel
on Junin Street. Coffee and Havana cigars were brought in.
Not a word about getting back. I felt (in the words of the
poet Lugones) the fear of what is suddenly too late. I dar-
ed not look at the clock. In order to disguise my boyish
loneliness among grown-ups, I put away--not really liking
it--a glass or two of wine. Uriarte, in a loud voice, propos-
ed to Duncan a two-handed game of poker. Someone objected
that that kind of play made for a poor game and suggested a
hand of four. Duncan agreed, but Uriarte, with a stubborn-
ness that I did not understand and that I did not try to
understand, insisted on the first scheme. Outside of truco--
a game whose real aim is to pass time with mischief and
verses--and of the modest mazes of solitaire, I never en-
joyed cards. I slipped away without anyone's noticing. A
rambling old house, unfamiliar and dark (only in the din-
ing room was there light), means more to a boy than a new
country means to a traveler. Step by step, I explored the
rooms; I recall a billiard room, a long gallery with rect-
angular and diamond-shaped panes, a couple of rocking
chairs, and a window from which you could just make out
a summerhouse. In the darkness I lost my way; the owner
of the house, whose name, as I recall after all these
years, may have been Acevedo or Acebal, finally came a-
cross me somehow. Out of kindness or perhaps out of a col-
lector's vanity, he led me to a display cabinet. On light-
ing a lamp, I saw the glint of steel. It was a collection
of knives that had once been in the hands of famous fight-
ers. He told me that he had a bit of land somewhere to the
north around Pergamino, and that he had been picking up
these things on his travels back and forth across the pro-
vince. He opened the cabinet and, without looking at what
was written on the tags, he began giving me accounts of
each item; they were more or less the same except for
dates and place names. I asked him whether among the wea-
pons he might have the dagger of Juan Morcira, who was in
that day the archetype of the gaucho, as later Martin Fie-
rro and Don Segundo Sombra would be. He had to confess that
he hadn't but that he could show me one like it, with a U-
shaped crosspiece in the hilt. He was interrupted by the
sound of angry voices. At once he shut the cabinet and turn-
ed to leave; I followed him.

Uriarte was shouting that his opponent had tried to cheat
him. All the others stood around the two players. Duncan,
I remember, was a taller man than the rest of the company,
and was well built, though somewhat round-shouldered; his
face was expressionless, and his hair was so light it was
almost white. Maneco Uriarte was nervous, dark, with perhaps
a touch of Indian blood, and wore a skimpy, petulant mou-
stache. It was obvious that everybody was drunk; I do not
know whether there were two or three emptied bottles on the
floor or whether an excess of movies suggests this false
memory to me. Uriarte's insults did not let up; at first
sharp, they now grew obscene. Duncan appeared not to hear,
but finally, as though weary, he got up and threw a punch.
From the floor, Uriarte snarled that he was not going to
take this outrage, and he challenged Duncan to fight.

Duncan said no, and added, as though to explain, "The trou-
ble is I'm afraid of you."

Everybody howled with laughter.

Uriarte, picking himself up, answered, "I'm going to have
it out with you, and right now."

Someone--may he be forgiven for it--remarked that weapons
were not lacking.

I do not know who went and opened the glass cabinet. Maneco
Uriarte picked out the showiest and longest dagger, the one
with the U-shaped crosspiece; Duncan, almost absentmindedly,
picked a wooden-handled knife with the stamp of a tiny tree
on the blade. Someone else said it was just like Maneco to
play it safe, to choose a sword. It astonished no one that
his hand began shaking; what was astonishing is that the
same thing happened with Duncan:

Tradition demands that men about to fight should respect
the house in which they are guests, and step outside. Half
on a spree, half seriously, we all went out into the damp
night. I was not drunk--at least, not on wine--but I was
reeling with adventure; I wished very hard that someone
would be killed, so that later I could tell about it and
always remember it. Maybe at that moment the others were
no more adult than I was. I also had the feeling that an
overpowering current was dragging us on and would drown us.
Nobody believed the least bit in Mancco's accusation; ev-
eryone saw it as the fruit of an old rivalry, exacerbated
by the wine.

We pushed our way through a clump of trees, leaving behind
the summerhouse. Uriarte and Duncan led the way, wary of
each other. The rest of us strung ourselves out around the
edge of an opening of lawn. Duncan had stopped there in the
moonlight and said, with mild authority, "This looks like
the right place."

The two men stood in the center, not quite knowing what to
do. A voice rang out: "Let go of all that hardware and use
your hands!"

But the men were already fighting. They began clumsily, al-
most as if they were afraid of hurting each other; they be-
gan by watching the blades, but later their eyes were on one
another. Uriarte had laid aside his anger, Duncan his con-
tempt or aloofness. Danger, in some way, had transfigured
them; these were now two men fighting, not boys. I had ima-
gined the fight as a chaos of steel; instead, I was able to
follow it, or almost follow it, as though it were a game of
chess. The intervening years may, of course, have exaggerat-
ed or blurred what I saw. I do not know how long it lasted;
there are events that fall outside the common measure of time.

Without ponchos to act as shields, they used their fore-arms
to block each lunge of the knife. Their sleeves, soon hang-
ing in shreds, grew black with blood. I thought that we had
gone wrong in supposing that they knew nothing about this
kind of fencing. I noticed right off that they handled them-
selves in different ways. Their weapons were unequal. Duncan,
in order to make up for his disadvantage, tried to stay in
close to the other man; Uriarte kept stepping back to be able
to lunge out with long, low thrusts. The same voice that had
called attention to the display cabinet shouted out now:
"They're killing each other! Stop them!"

But no one dared break it up. Uriarte had lost ground; Duncan
charged him. They were almost body to body now. Uriarte's wea-
pon sought Duncan's face. Suddenly the blade seemed shorter,
for it was piercing the taller man's chest. Duncan lay stretch-
ed out on the grass. It was at this point that he said, his
voice very low. "How strange. All this is like a dream."

He did not shut his eyes, he did not move, and I had seen a
man kill another man.

Maneco Uriarte bent over the body, sobbing openly, and beg-
ged to be forgiven. The thing he had just done was beyond him.
I know now that he regretted less having committed a crime
than having carried out a senseless act.

I did not want to look anymore. What I had wished for so much
had happened, and it left me shaken. Lafinur told me later
that they had had to struggle hard to pull out the weapon. A
makeshift council was formed. They decided to lie as little
as possible and to elevate this duel with knives to a duel
with swords. Four of them volunteered as seconds, among them
Acebal. In Buenos Aires anything can be fixed; someone always
has a friend.

On top of the mahogany table where the men had been playing,
a pack of English cards and a pile of bills lay in a jumble
that nobody wanted to look at or to touch.

In the years that followed, I often considered revealing the
story to some friend, but always I felt that there was a great-
er pleasure in being the keeper of a secret than in telling it.
However, around 1929, a chance conversation suddenly moved me
one day to break my long silence. The retired police captain,
don Jose Olave, was recalling stories about men from the tough
riverside neighborhood of the Retiro who had been handy with
their knives; he remarked that when they were out to kill their
man, scum of this kind had no use for the rules of the game,
and that before all the fancy playing with daggers that you saw
now on the stage, knife fights were few and far between. I said
I had ,witnessed one, and gave him an account of what had hap-
pened nearly twenty years earlier.

He listened to me with professional attention, then said,
"Are you sure Uriarte and What's-His-Name never handled a
knife before? Maybe they had picked up a thing or two around
their fathers' ranches."

"I don't think so," I said. "Everybody there that night knew
one another pretty well, and I can tell you they were all am-
azed at the way the two men fought."

Olave went on in his quiet manner, as if thinking aloud. "One
of the weapons had a U-shaped crosspiece in the handle. There
were two daggers of that kind which became quite famous—More-
ira's and Juan Almada's. Almada was from down south, in Tapal-
quen."

Something seemed to come awake in my memory. Olave continued.
"You also mentioned a knife with a wooden handle, one with
the Little Tree brand. There are thousands of them, but there
was one—"

He broke off for a moment, then said, "Senor Acevedo had a big
property up around Pergamino. There was another of these famous
toughs from up that way--Juan Almanza was his name. This was
along about the turn of the century. When he was fourteen, he
killed his first man with one of these knives. From then on,
for luck, he stuck to the same one. Juan Almanza and Juan Al-
mada had it in for each other, jealous of the fact that many
people confused the two. For a long time they searched high
and low for one another, but they never met. Juan Almanza was
killed by a stray bullet during some election brawl or other.
The other man, I think, died a natural death in a hospital bed
in Las Flores."

Nothing more was said. Each of us was left with his own con-
clusions.

Nine or ten men, none of whom is any longer living, saw what
my eyes saw--that sudden stab and the body under the night sky
--but perhaps what we were really seeing was the end of another
story, an older story. I began to wonder whether it was Maneco
Uriarte who killed Duncan or whether in some uncanny way it
could have been the weapons, not the men, which fought. I still
remember how Uriarte's hand shook when he first gripped his
knife, and the same with Duncan, as though the knives were com-
ing awake after a long sleep side by side in the cabinet. Even
after their gauchos were dust, the knives--the knives, not
their tools, the men--knew how to fight. And that night they
fought well.

Things last longer than people; who knows whether these knives
will meet again, who knows whether the story ends here.




Pedro Salvadores



I want to leave a written record (perhaps the first to be at-
tempted) of one of the strangest and grimmest happenings in
Argentine history. To meddle as little as possible in the tell-
ing, to abstain from picturesque details or personal conject-
ures is, it seems to me, the only way to do this.

A man, a woman, and the overpowering shadow of a dictator are
the three characters. The man's name was Pedro Salvadores; my
grandfather Acevedo saw him days or weeks after the dictator's
downfall in the battle of Caseros. Pedro Salvadores may have
been no different from anyone else, but the years and his fate
set him apart. He was a gentleman like many other gentlemen of
his day. He owned (let us suppose) a ranch in the country and,
opposed to the tyranny, was on the Unitarian side. His wife's
family name was Planes; they lived together on Suipacha Street
near the corner of Temple in what is now the heart of Buenos
Aires. The house in which the event took place was much like
any other, with its street door, long arched entranceway, inner
grillwork gate, its rooms, its row of two or three patios. The
dictator, of course, was Rosas.

One night, around 1842, Salvadores and his wife heard the grow-
ing, muffled sound of horses' hooves out on the unpaved street
and the riders shouting their drunken vivas and their threats.
This time Rosas' henchmen did not ride on. After the shouts
came repeated knocks at the door; while the men began forcing
it, Salvadores was able to pull the dining-room table aside,
lift the rug, and hide himself down in the cellar. His wife drag-
ged the table back in place. The mazorca broke into the house;
they had come to take Salvadores. The woman said her husband
had run away to Montevideo. The men did not believe her; they
flogged her, they smashed all the blue chinaware (blue was the
Unitarian color), they searched the whole house, but they never
thought of lifting the rug. At midnight they rode away, swear-
ing that they would soon be back.

Here is the true beginning of Pedro Salvadores' story. He liv-
ed nine years in the cellar. For all we may tell ourselves
that years are made of days and days of hours and that nine
years is an abstract term and an impossible sum, the story is
nonetheless gruesome. I suppose that in the darkness, which his
eyes somehow learned to decipher, he had no particular thoughts,
not even of his hatred or his danger. He was simply there--in
the cellar--with echoes of the world he was cut off from some-
times reaching him from overhead: his wife's footsteps, the
bucket clanging against the lip of the well, a heavy rainfall
in the patio. Every day of his imprisonment, for all he knew,
could have been the last.

His wife let go all the servants, who could possibly have in-
formed against them, and told her family that Salvadores was
in Uruguay. Meanwhile, she earned a living for them both sew-
ing uniforms for the army. In the course of time, she gave
birth to two children; her family turned from her, thinking
she had a lover. After the tyrant's fall, they got down on
their knees and begged to be forgiven.

What was Pedro Salvadores? Who was he? Was it his fear, his
love, the unseen presence of Buenos Aires, or--in the long run--
habit that held him prisoner? In order to keep him with her,
his wife would make up news to tell him about whispered plots
and rumored victories. Maybe he was a coward and she loyally
hid it from him that she knew. I picture him in his cellar
perhaps without a candle, without a book. Darkness probably
sank him into sleep. His dreams, at the outset, were probably
of that sudden night when the blade sought his throat, of the
streets he knew so well, of the open plains. As the years went
on, he would have been unable to escape even in his sleep;
whatever he dreamed would have taken place in the cellar. At
first, he may have been a man hunted down, a man in danger of
his life; later (we will never know for certain), an animal at
peace in its burrow or a sort of dim god.

All this went on until that summer day of 1852 when Rosas
fled the country. It was only then that the secret man came
out into the light of day; my grandfather spoke with him.
Flabby, overweight, Salvadores was the color of wax and could
not speak above a low voice. He never got back his confiscated
lands; I think he died in poverty.

As with so many things, the fate of Pedro Salvadores strikes
us as a symbol of something we are about to understand, but
never quite do.




Rosendo's Tale



It was about eleven o'clock at night; I had entered the old
grocery store-bar (which today is just a plain bar) at the
corner of Bolivar and Venezuela. From off on one side a man
signaled me with a "psst." There must have been something
forceful in his manner because I heeded him at once. He was
seated at one of the small tables in front of an empty glass,
and I somehow felt he had been sitting there for a long time.
Neither short nor tall, he had the appearance of a common work-
ingman or maybe an old farmhand. His thin moustache was gray-
ing. Fearful of his health, like most people in Buenos Aires,
he had not taken off the scarf that draped his shoulders. He
asked me to have a drink with him. I sat down and we chatted.
All this took place sometime back in the early thirties. This
is what the man told me.

----------

You don't know me except maybe by reputation, but I know who
you are. I'm Rosendo Juarez. The late Paredes must have told
you about me. The old man could pull the wool over people's
eyes and liked to stretch a point--not to cheat anybody, mind
you, but just in fun. Well, seeing you and I have nothing bet-
ter to do, I'm going to tell you exactly what happened that
night. The night the Butcher got killed. You put all that down
in a storybook, which I'm not equipped to pass judgment on,
but I want you to know the truth about all that trumped-up
stuff.

Things happen to you and it's only years later you begin un-
derstanding them. What happened to me that night really had
its start a long time back. I grew up in the neighborhood of
the Maldonado, way out past Floresta. The Maldonado was just
a ditch then, a kind of sewer, and it's a good thing they've
covered it over now. I've always been of the opinion that the
march of progress can't be held back--not by anybody. Anyway,
a man's born where he's born. It never entered my head to find
out who my father was. Clementina Juarez--that was my mother--
was a decent woman who earned a living doing laundry. As far
as I know, she was from Entre Rfos or Uruguay; anyhow, she al-
ways talked about her relatives from Concepcion del Uruguay.
I grew up like a weed. I first learned to handle a knife the
way everyone else did, fencing with a charred stick. If you
jabbed your man, it left a mark. Soccer hadn't taken us over
yet--it was still in the hands of the English.

One night at the corner bar a young guy named Garmendia began
taunting me, trying to pick a fight. I played deaf, but this
other guy, who'd had a few, kept it up. We stepped out. Then
from the sidewalk he swung open the door and said back inside
to the people, "Don't anybody worry, I'll be right back."

I somehow got hold of a knife. We went off toward the brook,
slow, our eyes on each other. He had a few years on me. We'd
played at that fencing game a number of times together, and I
had the feeling he was going to cut me up in ribbons. I went
down the right-hand side of the road and he went down the left.
He stumbled on some dry clods of mud. That moment was all I
needed. I got the jump on him, almost without thinking, and
opened a slice in his face. We got locked in a clinch, there
was a minute when anything might have happened, and in the
end I got my knife in and it was all over. Only later on did
I find out I'd been cut up too. But only a few scratches.
That night I saw how easy it was to kill a man or to get kill-
ed. The water in the brook was pretty low; stalling for time,
I half hid him behind one of the brick kilns. Fool that I was,
I went and slipped off that fancy ring of his that he always
wore with the nice stone in it. I put it on, I straightened
my hat, and I went back to the bar. I walked in nonchalant,
saying to them, "Looks like the one who came back was me."

I asked for a shot of rum and, to tell the truth, I needed
it bad. It was then somebody noticed the blood on my sleeve.

I spent that whole night tossing and turning on my cot, and
it was almost light outside before I dropped off and slept.
Late the next day two cops came looking for me. My mother
(may she rest in peace) began shrieking. They herded me a-
long just like I was some kind of criminal. Two nights and
two days I had to wait there in the cooler. Nobody came to
see me, either, outside of Luis Irala--a real friend--only
they wouldn't let him in. Then the third morning the police
captain sent for me. He sat there in his chair, not even look-
ing at me, and said, "So you're the one who took care of Gar-
mendia, are you?"

"If that's what you say," I answered.

"You call me sir. And don't get funny or try beating a-
round the bush. Here are the sworn statements of witnesses
and the ring that was found in your house. Just sign this
confession and get it over with."

He dipped the pen in the inkwell and handed it to me.

"Let me do some thinking, Captain sir," I came out with.

"I'll give you twenty-four hours where you can do some hard
thinking--in the cooler. I'm not going to rush you. If you
don't care to see reason, you can get used to the idea of a
little vacation up on Las Heras--the penitentiary."

As you can probably imagine, I didn't understand.

"Look," he said, "if you come around, you'll only get a few
days. Then I'll let you out, and don Nicolas Paredes has al-
ready given me his word he'll straighten things up for you."

Actually, it was ten days. Then at last they remembered me.
I signed what they wanted and one of the two cops took me
around to Paredes' house on Cabrera Street.

Horses were tied to the hitching post, and in the entrance-
way and inside the place there were more people than around
a whorehouse. It looked to me like the party headquarters.
Don Nicolas, who was sipping his mate, finally got around to
me. Taking his good time, he told me he was sending me out
to Moron, where they were getting ready for the elections.
He was putting me in touch with Mr. Laferrer, who would try
me out. He had the letter written by some kid all dressed in
black, who, from what I heard, made up poems about tenements
and filth--stuff that no refined public would dream of read-
ing. I thanked Paredes for the favor and left. When I got to
the corner, the cop wasn't tailing me any more.

Providence knows what it's up to; everything had turned out
for the best. Garmendia's death, which at first had caused me
a lot of worry, now opened things up for me. Of course, the
law had me in the palm of their hands. If I was no use to the
party they'd clap me back inside, but I felt pretty good and
was counting on myself.

Mr. Laferrer warned me I was going to have to walk the
straight and narrow with him, and said if I did I might even
become his bodyguard. I came through with what was expected
of me. In Moron, and later on in my part of town, I earned
the trust of my bosses. The cops and the party kept on build-
ing up my reputation as a tough guy. I turned out to be pretty
good at organizing the vote around the polls here in the cap-
ital and out in the province. I won't take up your time going
into details about brawls and bloodletting, but let me tell
you, in those days elections were lively affairs. I could never
stand the Radicals, who down to this day are still hanging
onto the beard of their chief Alem. There wasn't a soul around
who didn't hold me in respect. I got hold of a woman, La Luj-
anera, and a fine-looking sorrel. For years I tried to live
up to the part of the outlaw Moreira, who, in his time--the way
I figure it--was probably trying to play the part of some other
gaucho outlaw. I took to cards and absinthe.

An old man has a way of rambling on and on, but now I'm coming
to the part I want you to hear. I wonder if I've already men-
tioned Luis Irala. The kind of friend you don't find every day.
Irala was a man already well along in years. He never was a-
fraid of work, and he took a liking to me. In his whole life
he never had anything to do with politics. He was a carpenter
by trade. He never caused anyone trouble and never allowed an-
yone to cause him trouble. One morning he came to see me and
he said, "Of course, you've heard by now that Casilda's left
me. Rufino Aguilera took her away from me."

I'd known that customer around Moron. I answered, "Yes, I know
all about him. Of all the Aguileras, he's the least rotten."

"Rotten or not, now he'll have to reckon with me."

I thought that over for a while and told him, "Nobody takes
anything away from anybody. If Casilda kft you, it's because
she cares for Rufino and you mean nothing to her."

"And what are people going to say? That I'm a coward?"

"My advice is don't get yourself mixed up in gossip about what
people might say or about a woman who has no use for you."

"It's not her I'm worried about. A man who thinks five minutes
straight about a woman is no man, he's a queer. Casilda has no
heart. The last night we spent together she told me I wasn't
as young as I used to be."

"Maybe she was telling you the truth."

"That's what hurts. What matters to me now is Rufino." "Be care-
ful there. I've seen Rufino in action around the polls in Merlo.
He's a flash with a knife."

"You think I'm afraid of him?"

"I know you're not afraid of him, but think it over. One of two
things--if you kill him, you get put away; if he kills you, you
go six feet under."

"Maybe so. What would you do in my shoes?"

"I don't know, but my own life isn't exactly a model. I'm only a
guy who became a party strong-arm man trying to cheat a jail sen-
tence."

"I'm not going to be the strong-arm guy for any party, I'm only
out to settle a debt."

"So you're going to risk your peace and quiet for a man you don't
know and a woman you don't love any more?"

He wouldn't hear me out. He just left. The next day the news came
that he challenged Rufino in a saloon in Moron and Rufino killed
him. He was out to kill and he got killed--but a fair fight, man
to man. I'd given him my honest advice as a friend, but somehow I
felt guilty just the same. .

A few days after the wake, I went to a cockfight. I'd never been
very big on cockfights, and that Sunday, to tell the truth, I had
all I could do to stomach the thing. What is it in these animals,
I kept thinking, that makes them .gouge each other's eyes like
that?

The night of my story, the night of the end of my story, I had
told the boys I'd show up at Blackie's for the dance. So many
years ago now and that dress with the flowers my woman was wear-
ing still comes back to me. The party was out in the backyard.
Of course, there was the usual drunk or two trying to raise hell,
but I took good care to see that things went off the way they
ought to. It wasn't twelve yet when these strangers put in an ap-
pearance. One of them--the one they called the Butcher and who
got himself stabbed in the back that same night--stood us all to
a round of drinks. The odd thing was that the two of us looked a
lot alike. Something was in the air; he drew up to me and began
praising me up and down. He said he was from the Northside, where
he'd heard a thing or two about me. I let him go on, but I was
already sizing him up. He wasn't letting the gin alone, either,
maybe to work up his courage, and finally he came out and asked
me to fight. Then something happened that nobody ever understood.
In that big loudmouth I saw myself, the same as in a mirror, and
it made me feel ashamed. I wasn't scared; maybe if I'd been scared
I'd have fought with him. I just stood there as if nothing happen-
ed. This other guy, with his face just inches away from mine, be-
gan shouting so everyone could hear, "The trouble is you're nothing
but a coward."

"Maybe so," I said. "I'm not afraid of being taken for a coward.
If it makes you feel good, why don't you say you've called me a
son of a bitch, too, and that I've let you spit all over me. Now--
are you any happier?"

La Lujancra took out the knife I always carried in my vest lining
and, burning up inside, she shoved it into my hand. To clinch it,
she said, "Rosendo, I think you're going to need this."

I let it drop and walked out, but not hurrying. The boys made way
for me. They were stunned. What did it matter to me what they
thought.

To make a clean break with that life, I took off for Uruguay, where
I found myself work as a teamster. Since coming back to Buenos Aires
I've settled around here. San Telmo always was a respectable neigh-
borhood.




An Autobiographical Essay



FAMILY AND CHILDHOOD


I cannot tell whether my first memories go back to the
eastern or to the western bank of the muddy, slow-moving
Rio de la Plata--to Montevideo, where we spent long,
lazy holidays in the villa of my uncle Francisco Haedo,
or to Buenos Aires. I was born there, in the very heart
of that city, in 1899, on Tucuman Street, between Suipa-
cha and Esmeralda, in a small, unassuming house belonging
to my maternal grandparents. Like most of the houses of
that day, it had a flat roof; a long, arched entranceway,
called a zaguhn; a cistern where we got our water; and
two patios. We must have moved out to the suburb of Pal-
ermo quite soon, because there I have my first memories
of another house with two patios, a garden with a tall
windmill pump, and on the other side of the garden an
empty lot. Palermo at that time--the Palermo where we
lived, Serrano and Guatemala--was on the shabby northern
outskirts of town, and many people, ashamed of saying
they lived there, spoke in a dim way of living on the
Northside. We lived in one of the few two-story homes
on our street; the rest of the neighborhood was made
up of low houses and vacant lots. I have often spo-
ken of this area as a slum, but I do not quite mean that
in the American sense of the word. In Palermo lived shab-
by, genteel people as well as more undesirable sorts. There
was also a Palermo of hoodlums, called compadritos, famed
for their knife fights, but this Palermo was only later
to capture my imagination, since we did our best—our suc-
cessful best—to ignore it. Unlike our neighbor Evaristo
Carriego, however, who was the first Argentine poet to ex-
plore the literary possibilities that lay there at hand.
As for myself, I was hardly aware of the existence of
compadritos, since I lived essentially indoors.

My father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, worked as a lawyer.
He was a philosophical anarchist—a disciple of Spencer—
and also a teacher of psychology at the Normal School for
Modern Languages, where he gave his course in English,
using as his text William James’s shorter book of psych-
ology. My father’s English came from the fact that his
mother, Frances Haslam, was born in Staffordshire of
Northumbrian stock. A rather unlikely set of circumstances
brought her to South America. Fanny Haslam’s elder sis-
ter married an Italian-Jewish engineer named Jorge Suárez,
who brought the first horse-drawn tramcars to Argentina,
where he and his wife settled and sent for Fanny. I rem-
ember an anecdote concerning this venture. Suárez was a
guest at General Urquiza’s “palace” in Entre Ríos,
and very improvidently won his first game of cards with
the General, who was the stern dictator of that province
and not above throat-cutting. When the game was over,
Suárez was told by alarmed fellow-guests that if he want-
ed the license to run his tramcars in the province, it
was expected of him to lose a certain amount of gold
coins each night. Urquiza was such a poor player that
Suárez had a great deal of trouble losing the appointed
sums.

It was in Paraná, the capital city of Entre Ríos, that
Fanny Haslam met Colonel Francisco Borges. This was in
1870 or 1871, during the siege of the city by the
montoneros, or gaucho militia, of Ricardo López Jordán.
Borges, riding at the head of his regiment, commanded the
troops defending the city. Fanny Haslam saw him from the
flat roof of her house; that very night a ball was given to
celebrate the arrival of the government relief forces. Fanny
and the Colonel met, danced, fell in love, and eventually
married.

My father was the younger of two sons. He had been born
in Entre Ríos and used to explain to my grandmother,
a respectable English lady, that he wasn’t really an
Entrerriano, since “I was begotten on the pampa.” My
grandmother would say, with English reserve, “I’m sure I
don’t know what you mean.” My father’s words, of course,
were true, since my grandfather was, in the early 1870’s,
Commander-in-Chief of the northern and western frontiers
of the Province of Buenos Aires. As a child, I heard many
stories from Fanny Haslam about frontier life in those
days. One of these I set down in my “Story of the Warrior
and the Captive.” My grandmother had spoken with a
number of Indian chieftains, whose rather uncouth names
were, I think, Simón Coliqueo, Catriel, Pincén, and Nam-
uncurá. In 1874, during one of our civil wars, my grand-
father, Colonel Borges, met his death. He was fortyone
at the time. In the complicated circumstances surround-
ing his defeat at the battle of La Verde, he rode out slowly
on horseback, wearing a white poncho and followed by ten
or twelve of his men, toward the enemy lines, where he was
struck by two Remington bullets. This was the first time
Remington rifles were used in the Argentine, and it tickles
my fancy to think that the firm that shaves me every
morning bears the same name as the one that killed my
grandfather.

Fanny Haslam was a great reader. When she was over eight-
y, people used to say, in order to be nice to her, that
nowadays there were no writers who could vie with Dickens
and Thackeray. My grandmother would answer, “On the
whole, I rather prefer Arnold Bennett, Galsworthy, and
Wells.” When she died, at the age of ninety, in 1935, she
called us to her side and said, in English (her Spanish was
fluent but poor), in her thin voice, “I am only an old
woman dying very, very slowly. There is nothing remarkable
or interesting about this.” She could see no reason
whatever why the whole household should be upset, and she
apologized for taking so long to die.

My father was very intelligent and, like all intelligent
men, very kind. Once, he told me that I should take a good
look at soldiers, uniforms, barracks, flags, churches, priests,
and butcher shops, since all these things were about to
disappear, and I could tell my children that I had actually
seen them. The prophecy has not yet come true, unfortu-
nately. My father was such a modest man that he would
have liked being invisible. Though he was very proud of his
English ancestry, he used to joke about it, saying with
feigned perplexity, “After all, what are the English? Just a
pack of German agricultural laborers.” His idols were
Shelley, Keats, and Swinburne. As a reader, he had two
interests. First, books on metaphysics and psychology
(Berkeley, Hume, Royce, and William James). Second, lit-
erature and books about the East (Lane, Burton, and Payne).
It was he who revealed the power of poetry to me—the fact
that words are not only a means of communication but also
magic symbols and music. When I recite poetry in English
now, my mother tells me I take on his very voice. He also,
without my being aware of it, gave me my first lessons in
philosophy. When I was still quite young, he showed me,
with the aid of a chessboard, the paradoxes of Zeno—
Achilles and the tortoise, the unmoving flight of the arrow,
the impossibility of motion. Later, without mentioning
Berkeley’s name, he did his best to teach me the rudiments
of idealism.

My mother, Leonor Acevedo de Borges, comes of old Argen-
tine and Uruguayan stock, and at ninety-four is still
hale and hearty and a good Catholic. When I was growing
up, religion belonged to women and children; most men in
Buenos Aires were freethinkers—though, had they been
asked, they might have called themselves Catholics. I think
I inherited from my mother her quality of thinking the best
of people and also her strong sense of friendship. My
mother has always had a hospitable mind. From the time
she learned English, through my father, she has done most
of her reading in that language. After my father’s death,
finding that she was unable to keep her mind on the printed
page, she tried her hand at translating William Saroyan’s
The Human Comedy in order to compel herself to concentrate.
The translation found its way into print, and she was
honored for this by a society of Buenos Aires Armenians.
Later on, she translated some of Hawthorne’s stories and
one of Herbert Read’s books on art, and she also produced
some of the translations of Melville, Virginia Woolf, and
Faulkner that are considered mine. She has always been a
companion to me—especially in later years, when I went
blind—and an understanding and forgiving friend. For years,
until recently, she handled all my secretarial work, an-
swering letters, reading to me, taking down my dictation,
and also traveling with me on many occasions both at home
and abroad. It was she, though I never gave a thought to it
at the time, who quietly and effectively fostered my literary
career.