Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (32 page)

On leaving the establishment, we ran into a huge specimen of a man. Eguren, who may have been a bit drunk, gave him a shove. The stranger quickly barred our way and told us, ‘Whoever wants to leave is going to have to pass by this knife.’

I remember the glint of the blade in the darkness of the long entranceway. Eguren drew back, visibly afraid. I wasn’t too sure of myself, but my hatred got the best of my fright. I reached into my armpit, as if to draw out a weapon, and said in a firm voice, ‘We’ll settle this out on the street.’

The stranger answered with another voice now, ‘That’s the kind of man I like. I wanted to test you, friend.’ Then he began to laugh in a cordial way.

‘As to “friend”,’ I answered him, ‘that’s what you think.’ The three of us made our way past him.

The man with the knife entered the brothel. I heard later that his name was Tapia, or Paredes, or something of the kind, and that he had a reputation for brawling. Out on the sidewalk, Irala, who had kept cool, slapped me on the back and said, impressively, ‘Among us three, we had a musketeer. Hail, d’Artagnan!’

Fermín Eguren never forgave me for having witnessed his backing down.

I feel that now, and only now, my story begins. The preceding pages have set down no more than the conditions that chance or fate required so that the unbelievable event perhaps the single event of my whole life might take place. Don Alejandro Glencoe was always at the centre of the Congress, but over a period of time we felt, not without misgiving, that the real president was Twirl. This singular character, with the flaming moustache, fawned on Glencoe and even on Fermín Eguren but in such an exaggerated way that those present would think he was actually mocking the two. By so doing, he never once compromised his integrity. Glencoe laboured under the pride of his vast fortune; Twirl discovered that in order to get anything done it was enough to suggest that its cost might prove beyond the president’s means. It is my suspicion that at the outset the Congress had been nothing more than a haphazard sort of name. Twirl was continually proposing new areas of expansion, and don Alejandro always accepted. It was like being at the middle of a spreading circle, which grows ever larger and always farther away. Twirl said, for example, that the Congress could not get along without a reference library, and Nierenstein, who worked in a bookshop, went about ordering us the atlases of Justus Perthes and several extensive encyclopedias all the way from Pliny’s
Natural History
and Beauvais’
Speculum
down to the pleasant mazes (I reread these words with Fernández Irak’s voice) of the illustrious French Encyclopedists, of the Britannica, of Pierre Larousse, of Brockhaus, of Larsen, and of Montaner y Simón. I recall how I reverently fondled the silky volumes of a certain Chinese encyclopedia whose finely brushed characters seemed to me more mysterious than the spots on a leopard’s skin. As yet, I will say nothing of what lay in store for them and which certainly I do not regret.

Don Alejandro, maybe because we were the only ones who did not try to flatter him, had grown quite fond of Fernández Irala and me. He invited us to spend a few days at his ranch, La Caledonia, where he had a crew of stonemasons already at work.

At the end of a long trip upriver by steamer and a ferry crossing on a raft, we set foot one morning on the Uruguay shore. We then had to spend successive nights in run-down country saloons, while opening and shutting dozens of gateways all day along back roads in the Cuchilla Negra. We made our way in a light carriage; the countryside seemed wider and lonelier to me than the small farm where I was born.

I still hold my two images of the ranch the one I brought with me and the one my eyes finally saw. Absurdly, I had imagined, as in a dream, an impossible combination of the flat plains of Santa Fe and of the rather gaudy Victorian Buenos Aires Waterworks. La Caledonia was a long adobe building with a thatched saddle roof and a brick-paved gallery. It appeared to be built for hardship and endurance. The rough walls were nearly a yard thick and the doors were narrow. Nobody had ever thought of planting a tree. The sun’s first and last rays beat down on the place. The corrals were of stone; the cattle were many, scrawny and long-horned; the horses’ switching tails reached the ground. For the first time in my life, I knew the taste of freshly slaughtered meat. Some sacks of sea biscuit were brought out; a few days later, the foreman told me he had never eaten bread in his life. Irala asked where the bathroom was, and, with a sweeping gesture, don Alejandro indicated the entire continent. It was a moonlit night; I went out to stretch my legs, and I surprised Irala being watched by an ostrich. The heat, which the night had not dispelled, was unbearable, and everyone praised the coolness. The rooms were low-ceilinged and many, and seemed to me barely furnished; we were given one, facing south, in which there were two cots and a dresser with a silver washbasin and pitcher. The floor was dirt.

The second day, I came across the library and the volumes of Carlyle, and I found the pages dedicated to mankind’s spokesman, Anacharsis Clootz, who had led me to that morning and to that loneliness. After breakfast, which was identical with dinner, don Ajelandro showed us the building under construction. We rode three or four miles on horseback out in the wide open. Irala, whose horsemanship was shaky, had an accident; unsmiling, the foreman remarked, ‘You Argentines really know how to dismount.’ From way off, we could see the construction site. Some twenty men were at work building a kind of tumbledown amphitheatre. I recall a series of stages and ladders and stone tiers with stretches of sky showing between.

More than once, I tried to speak with the gauchos, but my efforts failed. In some way, they knew they were different. Among themselves, they used a spare, guttural Brazilianized Spanish. It was obvious that both Indian and Negro blood ran in their veins. They were short and strong; at La Caledonia, I became a tall man something that had never happened to me until then.

Almost all of them dressed with their legs wrapped in the
chiripá
, and a few wore the wide, baggy
bombachas
. They had little or nothing in common with the complaining heroes found in the books of Hernández or of Rafael Obligado. Under the stimulus of Saturday-night alcohol, they were easily moved to violence. There wasn’t a single woman around, and I never once heard a guitar.

I was more interested in the change that had come over don Alejandro than I was in these border-country men. In Buenos Aires, he was a pleasant, reserved gentleman; at La Caledonia, like his fathers before him, he became the stern chief of a clan. Sunday mornings, he read Holy Scripture to the hands, who did not understand a single word. One night, the foreman, a youngish man who had inherited the job from his father, reported to us that one of the day labourers and one of the regular help were having it out with knives. Don Alejandro got up, unruffled. When he came to the circle of onlookers, he drew out the weapon he always carried, handed it to the foreman (who appeared to me to cringe), and stepped between the knives. At once, I heard the order, ‘Drop those knives, boys.’ With the same calm voice, he added, ‘Now shake hands and behave yourselves. I don’t want any brawling around here.’

The two men obeyed. The next day, I learned that don Alejandro had fired the foreman.

I felt the loneliness ringing me in, and I began fearing I’d never get back to Buenos Aires. I wonder whether Fernández Irala shared that fear. We talked a lot about Argentina and what we’d do when we returned. I missed the stone lions of a certain gateway on Jujuy Street, near the Plaza del Once, and the light of a particular old bar in some dim part of town, but not my familiar haunts.

Always a good rider, I fell into the habit of going out on horseback and riding long distances. I still remember the particular piebald I used to saddle up myself. On some afternoon or on some night or other, I probably was in Brazil, since the border was nothing but a line traced out by widely spaced markers. Then, at the close of a day exactly like all the rest, don Alejandro told us, ‘We’ll turn in early. Tomorrow we’ll be off while it’s still cool.’

Once down the river, I felt so happy that I was even able to think back to La Caledonia with affection.

We took up our Saturday meetings again. At the first one, Twirl asked for the floor. He said, with his usual flowers of rhetoric, that the library of the Congress of the World could not be limited to reference books alone, and that the classical works of all nations and all languages were a veritable storehouse that we could not safely afford to ignore. The suggestion was approved on the spot; Fernández Irala and Dr Ignacio Cruz, who was a teacher of Latin, accepted the job of selecting the appropriate texts. Twirl had already talked things over with Nierenstein.

In those days, there wasn’t a single Argentine whose utopia was not Paris. Perhaps the most enthusiastic of us was Fermín Eguren; next, for quite different reasons, came Fernández Irala. To the poet of
The Marble Pillars
, Paris was Verlaine and Leconte de Lisle, while to Eguren it was an improved version of Junín Street. I suspect that he had come to some understanding with Twirl. At a subsequent meeting, Twirl brought up the question of what language the members of the Congress would use, arguing the feasibility of sending delegates to London and Paris to gather information. Feigning impartiality, he first put up my name, and then, as an apparent afterthought, that of his friend Eguren. As always, don Alejandro agreed.

I think I have written that, in exchange for some lessons in Italian, Wren had initiated me into the study of the inexhaustible English language. As far as possible, we did away with grammar and with those exercises concocted for the beginner, and we found our way directly into poetry, whose forms demand brevity. My first contact with the language that was to fill out my life was Stevenson’s brave ‘Requiem’. Then came the ballads that Percy revealed to the dignified eighteenth century. A short while before leaving for London, I was dazzled by Swinburne an experience that made me begin to doubt (and to feel guilty about it) the eminence of Irala’s alexandrines.

I reached London early in January, 1902; I remember the soft touch of falling snow, which I had never before seen and for which I was grateful. Luckily, Eguren and I had traveled separately. I roomed at a modest boarding house behind the British Museum, where mornings and afternoons I studied in the library in search of a language worthy of the Congress of the World. I did not overlook universal languages, investigating both Esperanto which Lugones qualifies as ‘impartial, simple, and economical’ and Volapük, which, declining verbs and conjugating nouns, attempts to work out all linguistic possibilities. I also weighed the arguments in favour of and against the revival of Latin, a nostalgia for which has endured down through the centuries. I even dwelled on an examination of John Wilkins’ analytical language, in which the definition of each word is to be found in the letters that spell it out. It was beneath the high dome of the reading room that I first met Beatrice.

This is meant to be a general history of the Congress of the World, not of Alejandro Ferri, but the former takes in the latter, just as it takes in all other histories. Beatrice was tall, trim, with fine features and a head of red hair that might have reminded me but never did of the shady Twirl. She was not yet twenty. She had come down from one of the northern counties to study literature at the university. Her background, like mine, was humble. At that time, to be of Italian stock in Buenos Aires was still to be looked down on, but in London I found out that being Italian was to many people a romantic attribute. Within a few evenings, we were lovers; I asked her to marry me, but Beatrice Frost, like Nora Erfjord, was a follower of the faith preached by Ibsen, and she did not want to tie herself down to anyone. From her lips came the word I never dared speak. O nights, O darkness warm and shared, O love that flows in shadows like some secret river, O that instant of ecstasy when each is both, O that ecstasy’s purity and innocence, O the coupling in which we became lost so as then to lose ourselves in sleep, O the first light of dawn, and I watching her.

On the rough Brazil border, I had been plagued by homesickness; not so in London’s red labyrinth, which gave me so many things. Despite the pretexts I dreamed up to delay my departure, I had to return home at the end of the year. Beatrice and I celebrated Christmas together. I assured her that don Alejandro would invite her to join the Congress; she answered, in an offhand way, that she had always wanted to visit the Southern Hemisphere, and that a cousin of hers, a dentist, had settled in Tasmania.

Beatrice did not want to come to the boat. Goodbyes, to her way of thinking, were too dramatic, were a senseless feast of unhappiness, and she detested dramatics. We parted in the library, where we had met the winter before. As a man, I’m a coward; to avoid the anguish of waiting for letters, I did not leave her my address.

Return trips are shorter, I have always noticed, but that crossing of the Atlantic, heavy with memories and anxieties, seemed unusually long. Nothing hurt me as much as thinking that, in a parallel with my life, Beatrice would go on living hers, minute by minute and night by night. I wrote a lengthy letter, destroying it as we left Montevideo. When I reached Argentina it was on a Thursday Irala was waiting for me at the dock. I went back to my old place on Chile Street; that day and the next he and I spent together talking and taking long walks. I wanted to recover Buenos Aires again. It was a relief to find out that Fermín Eguren was staying on in Paris; I knew the fact of my having come back before him would in some way make up for my long absence.