Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (31 page)

Ulrike

He took the sword Gram and laid it naked between them.

The Saga of the Volsungs
, 29

My story will be true to reality or, in any case, to my personal memory of reality, which amounts to the same thing. The events took place only a short time ago, but I know that literary habit is also the habit of adding circumstantial details and of underlining high points. I want to give an account of my meeting with Ulrike (I never knew her surname and perhaps never shall) in the city of York. The narrative will encompass one night and a morning.

It would be easy to say that I saw her for the first time by the Five Sisters of York Minster, those stained-glass windows which, pure of any image, Cromwell’s iconoclasts respected, but the fact is that we met in the small lounge of The Northern Inn, which lies outside the city walls.

We were a handful, and Ulrike stood with her back to us. Someone offered her a drink and she refused it.

‘I am a feminist,’ she said. ‘I am not out to ape men. I dislike their tobacco and their alcohol.’

The remark was meant to be witty, and I guessed that this was not the first time she had delivered it. I later found out that it was not typical of her, but what we say is not always like us. She mentioned that she had arrived at the museum too late, but that they let her in when they learned she was a Norwegian.

One of those present remarked, ‘It’s not the first time the Norwegians have entered York.’

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘England was once ours and we lost it if one can have anything or if anything can be lost.’ It was at this point that I looked at her. A line in Blake speaks of girls of mild silver or of furious gold, but in Ulrike were both gold and mildness. She was tall and slender, with sharp features and grey eyes. Less than by her face, I was impressed by her air of calm mystery. She smiled easily, and the smile seemed to withdraw her from the company. She was dressed in black, which is strange for northern lands, which try to liven the drab surroundings with vivid colours. She spoke a crisp, precise English, rolling her r’s slightly. I am not much of an observer; these things I discovered bit by bit.

We were introduced. I told her that I was a professor at the University of the Andes, in Bogotá. I explained that I was a Colombian.

She asked me in a thoughtful way, ‘What does it mean to be a Colombian?’

‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘It’s an act of faith.’

‘Like being Norwegian,’ she affirmed.

I can remember no more of what was said that night.

The next day, I came down to the dining room early. Through the windows I saw that it had snowed; in the early morning light the moors faded away. We were the only ones there. Ulrike invited me to her table. She told me that she liked going out for solitary walks.

Recalling a joke of Schopenhauer’s, I said, ‘So do I. The two of us could go out together.’

We walked away from the inn on the new-fallen snow.

There was not a soul about. I suggested that we go on to Thorgate, a few miles down the river. I know that I was already in love with Ulrike; I could never have wanted any other person by my side.

All at once, I heard the distant howling of a wolf. I had never before-heard a wolf howl, but I knew it was a wolf. Ulrike was impassive.

A while later she said, as if thinking aloud, ‘The few poor swords I saw yesterday in York Minster moved me more than the great ships in the Oslo museum.’ Our paths had crossed. That evening Ulrike would continue her journey on to London; I to Edinburgh.

‘In Oxford Street,’ she told me, ‘I shall follow De Quincey’s footsteps in search of his Ann, lost amid the crowds of London.’

‘De Quincey stopped looking for her,’ I replied. ‘All my life, I never have.’

‘Maybe you’ve found her,’ Ulrike said, her voice low.

I realized that an unexpected thing was not forbidden me, and I kissed her on the mouth and eyes. She drew away firmly but gently and then declared, ‘I’ll be yours in the inn at Thorgate. Until then, I ask you not to touch me. It is better that way.’

To a bachelor well along in years, the offer of love is a gift no longer expected. The miracle has a right to impose conditions. I thought back on my youth in Popayán and on a girl in Texas, as fair and slender as Ulrike, who once denied me her love.

I did not make the mistake of asking Ulrike whether she loved me. I realized that this was not her first time nor would it be her last. The adventure, perhaps my last, would be one of many for that splendid, determined follower of Ibsen. Hand in hand, we walked on.

‘All this is like a dream, and I never dream,’ I said.

‘Like that king who never dreamed until a wizard made him sleep in a pigsty,’ Ulrike replied. Then she added, ‘Listen. A bird is about to sing.’

A moment or two later we heard the song.

‘In these lands,’ I said, ‘it’s thought that a person about to die sees into the future.’

‘And I am about to die,’ she said.

I looked at her in astonishment. ‘Let’s cut through the woods,’ I urged. ‘We’ll reach Thorgate sooner.’

‘The woods are dangerous,’ she said. We continued along the moors.

‘I should like this moment to last forever,’ I murmured.

‘“Forever” is a word forbidden to men,’ Ulrike said and, to soften the force of this, she asked me to repeat my name, which she had not caught.

‘Javier Otálora,’ I said.

She tried to pronounce it and couldn’t. I failed, equally, with the name Ulrike.

‘I shall call you Sigurd,’ she said with a smile.

‘If I am Sigurd,’ I replied, ‘you will be Brynhild.’

She had slowed her step.

‘Do you know the saga?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘The tragic story spoiled by the Germans with their late Nibelungs.’

Not wishing to argue the point, I answered, ‘Brynhild, you’re walking as if you wished a sword lay between us in bed.’

Suddenly we stood before the inn. It did not surprise me that, like the other one, it was called The Northern Inn.

From the top of the stairs, Ulrike called down to me, ‘Did you hear the wolf? There are no longer any wolves in England. Hurry.'

Climbing to the upper floor, I noticed that the walls were papered in the style of William Morris, in a deep red, with a design of fruit and birds intertwined. Ulrike went on ahead. The dark room was low, with a slanted ceiling. The awaited bed was duplicated in a dim mirror, and the polished mahogany reminded me of the looking glass of Scriptures. Ulrike had already undressed. She called me by my real name Javier. I felt that the snow was falling faster. Now there were no longer any mirrors or furniture. There was no sword between us. Time passed like the sands. In the darkness, centuries old, love flowed, and for the first and last time I possessed Ulrike’s image.

The Congress

. . . ils s’acheminèrent vers un château immense, au frontispice duquel on lisait: ‘Je n’appartiens à personne et j’appartiens à tout le monde. Vous y étiez avant que d’y entrer, et vous y serez encore quand vous en sortirez.’

Diderot,
Jacques le Fataliste et son Maître

Buenos Aires, 1955

Alejandro Ferri is my name. Martial echoes may be heard in it, but neither the metals of glory nor the great shadow of the Macedonian the words belong to the poet of
The Marble Pillars
, who honoured me with his friendship has any kinship with the nearly anonymous man who strings together these lines on the upper floor of a hotel on Santiago del Estero Street, on the south side of town, which is no longer the old Southside. Any day now, I’ll turn seventy-one or seventy-two; I am still teaching English to a handful of students. Out of indecision or carelessness, or for some other reason, I never married, and now I live alone. Loneliness does not worry me ; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits. I realize I am getting on in years. An unmistakable symptom of this is the fact that novelties maybe because I feel they hold nothing essentially new and are really no more than timid variations neither interest nor distract me. When I was a young man, I was fond of sunsets, the city’s sprawling slums, and of unhappiness; now I prefer mornings and downtown and peace. I no longer play at being Hamlet. I have become a member of the Conservative Party and of a chess club, which I usually attend as an onlooker sometimes an absentminded onlooker. Anyone who is curious may dig up from some out-of-the-way nook of the National Library, on Mexico Street, a copy of my
Short Study of John Wilkins’ Analytical Language,
a work that sadly stands in need of a new edition, if only to correct or to lessen its many mistakes. The library’s new director, I am told, is a literary man who dedicates himself to the study of ancient languages (as if modern ones were not sufficiently rudimentary) and to the demagogic exaltation of an imaginary Buenos Aires of knife fighters. I have never cared to meet him. I came to this city in 1899, and only once did chance bring me face to face with a knife fighter or with an individual who had a reputation as such. Further on, should the occasion present itself, I shall relate the episode.

I have already said that I live alone. Several days ago, a fellow-roomer, who had heard me speak of Fermín Eguren, told me that he had died in Punta del Este.

The death of this man, who was certainly never a friend of mine, has unaccountably saddened me. I know that I am alone; I know that in the whole world I am the only keeper of that secret event the Congress whose memory I can no longer share. I am now the last member of that Congress. It is undeniable that all men are members of that Congress that there is not a single being on earth who is not but I know I am a member in a very different way. I
know
that I am, and that’s what sets me apart from my numberless colleagues, present and future. It is undeniable that on the seventh of February, 1904, we swore by what is most holy (is there anything holy on earth, or anything that is not?) never to reveal the history of the Congress, but it is no less undeniable that my now committing perjury is also part of the Congress. This last statement is sufficiently dim, but it may whet the curiosity of my eventual readers.

At any rate, the task I have taken upon myself is not an easy one. I have never before attempted the art of narration not even in its epistolary form and, what is doubtless even more important, the story itself is unbelievable. The pen of José Fernández Irala, the undeservedly forgotten author of
The Marble Pillars
, was the one destined for this work, but now it is too late. I shall not deliberately falsify the real facts, although I foresee that laziness and incompetence will more than once lead me into error. Exact dates are of no account. Let it be recalled that I came from Santa Fe, my native province, in 1899. I have never gone back. I have grown accustomed to Buenos Aires, a city I am not fond of, in the same way that a man grows accustomed to his own body or to an old ailment. Without much caring, I am aware that I am going to die soon; I must, consequently, control my digressive tendencies and get on with my story.

The years do not change our essential selves if one has an essential self. The impulse that would one night lead me to the Congress of the World was the same that first brought me to the staff of
Última Hora
. To a poor boy from the provinces, becoming a newspaperman was a romantic fate, just as to a poor city boy the life of a gaucho or a farmhand is romantic. I feel no shame at having once wanted to be a journalist, an occupation that now seems trivial to me. I remember having heard my colleague Fernández Irala say that newspapermen wrote for oblivion but that his ambition was to write for time and for memory. He had already chiseled (the verb was then in common use) some of those perfect sonnets that were later to reappear, with one or two minor touches, in the pages of
The Marble Pillars
.

I cannot quite recall the first time I heard the Congress spoken of. Maybe it was on that same evening the cashier paid me my first month’s salary and, to celebrate this proof that Buenos Aires had taken me to its bosom, I suggested to Irala that we dine together. He excused himself, saying he could not miss the Congress. I understood at once that he was not referring to the rather pompous, domed building at the foot of an avenue peopled by Spaniards but to something more secret and far more important. People spoke of the Congress, some with open scorn, others with lowered voices, still others with alarm or curiosity all, I believe, without knowing anything about it. A few Saturdays later, Irala invited me to go along with him.

It must have been nine or ten o’clock at night. On our way, in a streetcar, he told me these preliminary meetings took place every Saturday arid that don Alejandro Glencoe, the president of the Congress, perhaps struck by my name, had already signed his approval of my attendance. We went to the Gas-Lamp Coffee House. Some fifteen or twenty members of the Congress sat around a long table; I don’t know if there was a dais or if memory adds it. I immediately recognized the president, whom I had never seen before. Don Alejandro was a gentleman, already well along in years, with a high forehead and thinning hair, grey eyes, and a greying reddish beard. I always saw him dressed in a dark frock coat, and he usually held his hands locked together over the head of his cane. He was portly and tall. To his left sat a much younger man, also with red hair. Its violent colour suggested fire, while the colour of Mr. Glencoe’s beard suggested autumn leaves. To his right was a long-faced young man with an unusually low forehead and dressed like a dandy. Everyone had ordered coffee, and several absinthe. What first caught my attention was the presence of a woman the only woman among so many men.

At the other end of the table sat a boy of about ten, dressed in a sailor suit, who was not long in falling asleep.

There were also a Protestant minister, two unmistakable Jews, and a Negro, who, with a white silk handkerchief around his neck and very tight-fitting clothes, was dressed like a street-corner hoodlum. In front of the Negro and the boy were cups of chocolate. I do not remember any of the other people except for a Mr. Marcelo del Mazo, a man of great politeness and fine conversation, whom I never saw again. (I still have a faded, poorly done photograph of one of the gatherings, but I shall not publish it, since the dress, the long hair, and the moustaches of that period would make the whole thing look burlesque and even shabby.)

All groups tend to create their own dialects and rites; the Congress, which always had something dreamlike about it, seemed to want its members to discover at leisure and for themselves its real aim and even the names and surnames of its members. I was not long in realizing that I was duty-bound not to ask questions, and I refrained even from asking any of Fernández Irala, who never told me a thing. I did not miss a single Saturday, but a good month or two went by before I reached this understanding. From the second meeting on, my neighbour was Donald Wren, an engineer on the Southern Railways, who was to give me English lessons.

Don Alejandro spoke very little. The rest did not address themselves directly to him, but I felt that their words were meant for him and that everyone was after his approval. One gesture of his slow hand was enough to change the topic of discussion. I came to find out, little by little, that the red-haired man to his left bore the strange name of Twirl. I remember that fragile look of his, which, as though their stature made them dizzy and forced them to hunch forward, is characteristic of some very tall people. His hand, I recall, often played with a copper compass case, which from time to time he set on the table. At the end of 1914, he was killed as an infantryman in an Irish regiment. The person who always sat to the right, the young man with the low forehead, was Fermín Eguren, the president’s nephew.

Putting no faith in the methods of realism (a most artificial school if there ever was one), I shall declare right off what I learned only little by little. Beforehand, I want to remind the reader of my situation at the time. I was a poor boy from Casilda, a farmer’s son, who had come to the capital and suddenly found himself this was the way I felt in the intimate heart of Buenos Aires and perhaps (who knows?) of the whole world. After half a century, I still feel those first dazzling moments, which certainly were not to be the last.

Here are the facts. I shall tell them as briefly as I can. Don Alejandro Glencoe, the president, was an Uruguayan rancher and owner of a large spread of land bordering on Brazil. His father, a native of Aberdeen, had established himself on this continent around the middle of the last century. He brought with him some hundred books the only books, I venture to say, that don Alejandro read in the course of his life. (I speak of these assorted books, which I have had in my hands, because in one of them lies the root of my story.) The elder Mr. Glencoe, on dying, left a daughter and a son. The son was later to become our president; the daughter married an Eguren and was Fermín’s mother. Don Alejandro at one time aspired to the Uruguayan National Congress, but the political bosses barred his way. Rankled, he decided to found another Congress and on a vaster scale. He remembered having read in the volcanic pages of Carlyle the fate of Anacharsis Clootz, that worshipper of the goddess Reason who, at the head of thirty-six foreigners, addressed a Paris assembly as ‘mankind’s spokesman’. Moved by this example, don Alejandro conceived the idea of calling together a Congress of the World that would represent all men of all nations. The centre for the preliminary meetings was the Gas-Lamp Coffee House; the formal act of inauguration, which would take place within some four years, would be held at don Alejandro’s ranch. Like so many Uruguayans, don Alejandro who was no lover of Uruguay’s now national hero, Artigas was fond of Buenos Aires, but he nonetheless decided that the Congress must eventually meet in his own country. Oddly enough, the four-year planning period was carried out with a precision that was almost magical.

In the beginning, we were paid a considerable sum as a per diem, but the zeal that enflamed us prompted Fernández Irala who was as poor as I was to renounce his, and all the rest of us followed suit. This measure was healthy, since it served to separate the wheat from the chaff; the number of members was reduced, and only the faithful remained. The one paid position was that of the secretary, Nora Erfjord, who lacked other means of support and whose work at the same time was staggering. To set up a worldwide organization is no trifling enterprise. Letters came and went, and so did cables and telegrams. Potential delegates wrote from Peru, Denmark, and India. A Bolivian wrote that his country’s lack of access to the sea should be a matter of prime consideration in our first meetings. Twirl, who had a farseeing mind, remarked that the Congress involved a problem of a philosophical nature. Planning an assembly to represent all men was like fixing the exact number of platonic types a puzzle that had taxed the imagination of thinkers for centuries. Twirl suggested that, without going farther afield, don Alejandro Glencoe might represent not only cattlemen but also Uruguayans, and also humanity’s great forerunners, and also men with red beards, and also those who are seated in armchairs. Nora Erfjord was Norwegian. Would she represent secretaries, Norwegian womanhood, or more obviously all beautiful women?

Would a single engineer be enough to represent all engineers including those of New Zealand?

It was then, I believe, that Fermín broke in. ‘Ferri represents the gringos,’ he said in a flood of laughter.

Don Alejandro looked at him severely and, in an even voice, said, ‘Mr Ferri is representative of the immigrants whose labour is building up this country.’

Fermín Eguren never could bear the sight of me. He took pride in an assortment of things: in being Uruguayan; in coming from old stock; in attracting women; in having chosen an expensive tailor; and, God knows why, in his Basque origin a people who throughout history have done little else than milk cows.

An incident of the most trivial sort sealed our enmity. After one of the meetings, Eguren suggested that we pay a visit to one of the Junín Street brothels. The plan did not attract me, but, in order not to make myself the butt of his jokes, I accepted. We went with Fernández Irala.