Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (30 page)

The Other

It was in Cambridge, back in February, 1969, that the event took place. I made no attempt to record it at the time, because, fearing for my mind, my initial aim was to forget it. Now, some years later, I feel that if I commit it to paper others will read it as a story and, I hope, one day it will become a story for me as well. I know it was horrifying while it lasted and even more so during the sleepless nights that followed but this does not mean that an account of it will necessarily move anyone else.

It was about ten o’clock in the morning. I sat on a bench facing the Charles River. Some five hundred yards distant, on my right, rose a tall building whose name I never knew. Ice floes were borne along on the grey water. Inevitably, the river made me think about time Heraclitus’ millennial image. I had slept well; my class on the previous afternoon had, I thought, managed to hold the interest of my students. Not a soul was in sight.

All at once, I had the impression (according to psychologists, it corresponds to a state of fatigue) of having lived that moment once before. Someone had sat down at the other end of the bench. I would have preferred to be alone, but not wishing to appear unsociable I avoided getting up abruptly. The other man had begun to whistle. It was then that the first of the many disquieting things of that morning occurred. What he whistled, what he tried to whistle (I have no ear for music), was the tune of ‘La tapera’, an old milonga by Elías Regules. The melody took me back to a certain Buenos Aires patio, which has long since disappeared, and to the memory of my cousin Álvaro Melián Lafinur, who has been dead for so many years. Then came the words. They were those of the opening line. It was not Álvaro’s voice but an imitation of it. Recognizing this, I was taken aback.

‘Sir,’ I said, turning to the other man, ‘are you an Uruguayan or an Argentine?’

‘Argentine, but I’ve lived in Geneva since 1914,’ he replied.

There was a long silence. ‘At number seventeen Malagnou across from the Orthodox church?’ I asked.

He answered in the affirmative.

‘In that case,’ I said straight out, ‘your name is Jorge Luis Borges. I, too, am Jorge Luis Borges. This is 1969 and we’re in the city of Cambridge.’

‘No,’ he said in a voice that was mine but a bit removed.

He paused, then became insistent. ‘I’m here in Geneva, on a bench, a few steps from the Rhone. The strange thing is that we resemble each other, but you’re much older and your hair is grey.’

‘I can prove I’m not lying,’ I said. ‘I’m going to tell you things a stranger couldn’t possibly know. At home we have a silver maté cup with a base in the form of entwined serpents. Our great-grandfather brought it from Peru. There’s also a silver washbasin that hung from his saddle. In the wardrobe of your room are two rows of books: the three volumes of Lane’s Thousand and One Nights, with steel engravings and with notes in small type at the end of each chapter; Quicherat’s Latin dictionary; Tacitus’
Germania
in Latin and also in Gordon’s English translation; a
Don Quixote
published by Garnier; Rivera Indarte’s
Tablas de Sangre
, inscribed by the author; Carlyle’s
Sartor Resartus
; a biography of Amiel; and, hidden behind the other volumes, a book in paper covers about sexual customs in the Balkans. Nor have I forgotten one evening on a certain second floor of the Place Dubourg.’

‘Dufour,’ he corrected.

‘Very well Dufour. Is this enough now?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘These proofs prove nothing. If I am dreaming you, it’s natural that you know what I know. Your catalogue, for all its length, is completely worthless.’

His objection was to the point. I said, ‘If this morning and this meeting are dreams, each of us has to believe that he is the dreamer. Perhaps we have stopped dreaming, perhaps not. Our obvious duty, meanwhile, is to accept the dream just as we accept the world and being born and seeing and breathing.’

‘And if the dream should go on?’ he said anxiously.

To calm him and to calm myself, I feigned an air of assurance that I certainly did not feel. ‘My dream has lasted seventy years now,’ I said. ‘After all, there isn’t a person alive who, on waking, does not find himself with himself. It’s what is happening to us now except that we are two. Don’t you want to know something of my past, which is the future awaiting you?’

He assented without a word. I went on, a bit lost.

‘Mother is healthy and well in her house on Charcas and Maipú, in Buenos Aires, but Father died some thirty years ago. He died of heart trouble. Hemiplegia finished him; his left hand, placed on his right, was like the hand of a child on a giant’s. He died impatient for death but without complaint. Our grandmother had died in the same house. A few days before the end, she called us all together and said, “I’m an old woman who is dying very, very slowly. Don’t anyone become upset about such a common, everyday thing.” Your sister, Norah, married and has two sons. By the way, how is everyone at home?’

‘Quite well. Father makes his same antireligious jokes. Last night he said that Jesus was like the gauchos, who don’t like to commit themselves, and that’s why he preached in parables.’ He hesitated and then said, ‘And you?’

‘I don’t know the number of books you’ll write, but I know they’ll be too many. You’ll write poems that will give you a pleasure that others won’t share and stories of a somewhat fantastic nature. Like your father and so many others of our family, you will teach.’

It pleased me that he did not ask about the success or failure of his books. I changed my tone and went on.

‘As for history, there was another war, almost among the same antagonists. France was not long in caving in; England and America fought against a German dictator named Hitler the cyclical battle of Waterloo. Around 1946, Buenos Aires gave birth to another Rosas, who bore a fair resemblance to our kinsman. In 1955, the province of Córdoba came to our rescue, as Entre Ríos had in the last century. Now things are going badly. Russia is taking over the world; America, hampered by the superstition of democracy, can’t make up its mind to become an empire. With every day that passes, our country becomes more provincial. More provincial and more pretentious as if its eyes were closed. It wouldn’t surprise me if the teaching of Latin in our schools were replaced by that of Guaraní.’

I could tell that he was barely paying attention. The elemental fear of what is impossible and yet what is so dismayed him. I, who have never been a father, felt for that poor boy more intimate to me even than a son of my flesh a surge of love. Seeing that he clutched a book in his hands, I asked what it was.

‘The Possessed
, or, as I believe,
The Devils,
by Fëdor Dostoevski,’ he answered, not without vanity.

‘It has faded in my memory. What’s it like?’ As soon as I said this, I felt that the question was a blasphemy.

‘The Russian master,’ he pronounced, ‘has seen better than anyone else into the labyrinth of the Slavic soul.’ This attempt at rhetoric seemed to me proof that he had regained his composure. I asked what other volumes of the master he had read. He mentioned two or three, among them
The Double.
I then asked him if on reading them he could clearly distinguish the characters, as you could in Joseph Conrad, and if he thought of going on in his study of Dostoevski’s work.

‘Not really,’ he said with a certain surprise.

I asked what he was writing and he told me he was putting together a book of poems that would be called
Red Hymns
. He said he had also considered calling it
Red Rhythms
.

‘And why not?’ I said. ‘You can cite good antecedents. Rubén Darío’s blue verse and Verlaine’s grey song.’

Ignoring this, he explained that his book would celebrate the brotherhood of man. The poet of our time could not turn his back on his own age, he went on to say. I thought for a while and asked if he truly felt himself a brother to everyone to all funeral directors, for example, to all post-men, to all deep-sea divers, to all those who lived on the even-numbered side of the street, to all those who were aphonic, and so on. He answered that his book referred to the great mass of the oppressed and alienated.

‘Your mass of oppressed and alienated is no more than an abstraction,’ I said. ‘Only individuals exist if it can be said that anyone exists. “The man of yesterday is not the man of today,” some Greek remarked. We two, seated on this bench in Geneva or Cambridge, are perhaps proof of this.’

Except in the strict pages of history, memorable events stand in no need of memorable phrases. At the point of death, a man tries to recall an engraving glimpsed in childhood; about to enter battle, soldiers speak of the mud or of their sergeant. Our situation was unique and, frankly, we were unprepared for it. As fate would have it, we talked about literature; I fear I said no more than the things I usually say to journalists. My alter ego believed in the invention, or discovery, of new metaphors; I, in those metaphors that correspond to intimate and obvious affinities and that our imagination has already accepted. Old age and sunset, dreams and life, the flow of time and water. I put forward this opinion, which years later he would put forward in a book. He barely listened to me. Suddenly, he said, ‘If you have been me, how do you explain the fact that you have forgotten your meeting with an elderly gentleman who in 1918 told you that he, too, was Borges?’

I had not considered this difficulty. ‘Maybe the event was so strange I chose to forget it,’ I answered without much conviction.

Venturing a question, he said shyly, ‘What’s your memory like?’

I realized that to a boy not yet twenty a man of over seventy was almost in the grave. ‘It often approaches forgetfulness,’ I said, ‘but it still finds what it’s asked to find. I study Old English, and I am not at the bottom of the class.’

Our conversation had already lasted too long to be that of a dream. A sudden idea came to me. ‘I can prove at once that you are not dreaming me,’ I said. ‘Listen carefully to this line, which, as far as I know, you’ve never read.’

Slowly I intoned the famous verse, ‘
L’hydre-univers
tordant son corps écaillé d’astres
.’ I felt his almost fearful awe. He repeated the line, low-voiced, savouring each resplendent word.

‘It’s true,’ he faltered. ‘I’ll never be able to write a line like that.’

Victor Hugo had brought us together.

Before this, I now recall, he had fervently recited that short piece of Whitman’s in which the poet remembers a night shared beside the sea when he was really happy. ‘If Whitman celebrated that night,’ I remarked, ‘it’s because he desired it and it did not happen. The poem gains if we look on it as the expression of a longing, not the account of an actual happening.’

He stared at me open-mouthed. ‘You don’t know him!’ he exclaimed. ‘Whitman is incapable of telling a lie.’

Half a century does not pass in vain. Beneath our conversation about people and random reading and our different tastes, I realized that we were unable to understand each other. We were too similar and too unalike.

We were unable to take each other in, which makes conversation difficult. Each of us was a caricature copy of the other. The situation was too abnormal to last much longer. Either to offer advice or to argue was pointless, since, unavoidably, it was his fate to become the person I am.

All at once, I remembered one of Coleridge’s fantasies.

Somebody dreams that on a journey through paradise he is given a flower. On awaking, he finds the flower. A similar trick occurred to me. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Have you any money?’

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I have about twenty francs. I’ve invited Simon Jichlinski to dinner at the Crocodile tonight.’

‘Tell Simon that he will practice medicine in Carouge and that he will do much good. Now, give me one of your coins.’

He drew out three large silver pieces and some small change. Without understanding, he offered me a five-franc coin. I handed him one of those not very sensible American bills that, regardless of their value, are all the same size. He examined it avidly.

‘It can’t be,’ he said, his voice raised. ‘It bears the date 1964. All this is a miracle, and the miraculous is terrifying.

Witnesses to the resurrection of Lazarus must have been horrified.’

We have not changed in the least, I thought to myself. Ever the bookish reference. He tore up the bill and put his coins away. I decided to throw mine into the river. The arc of the big silver disk losing itself in the silver river would have conferred on my story a vivid image, but luck would not have it so. I told him that the supernatural, if it occurs twice, ceases to be terrifying. I suggested that we plan to see each other the next day, on this same bench, which existed in two times and in two places. He agreed at once and, without looking at his watch, said that he was late. Both of us were lying and we each knew it of the other. I told him that someone was coming for me.