Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (36 page)

Utopia of a Tired Man

He called it
Utopia
, a Greek word meaning
there is no such place
.

—
Quevedo

No two hills are alike, but everywhere on earth plains are one and the same. I was making my way in such country, asking myself, not that it really mattered, if this were Oklahoma or Texas or the part of the Argentine that literary men called the pampa. Neither to right nor left did I see a fence. As on other occasions, I slowly repeated these lines by the poet Emilio Oribe:
At the heart of the endless awesome plain and close by the border of Brazil....

The road was uneven. Rain began to fall. Some two or three hundred yards off I saw light from a house, which was low and rectangular and surrounded by trees. The door was opened by a man so tall he almost gave me a fright. He was dressed in grey. I felt he was waiting for someone. There was no lock on the door. We went into a long room with wooden walls, a table, and chairs. A lamp giving off a yellowish light hung from the ceiling. The table, for some reason, seemed strange to me. On it stood an hourglass, the first, outside of some steel engraving or other, I had ever laid eyes on. The man motioned me to one of the chairs.

I tried out various languages, and we did not understand each other. When at last he spoke, he did so in Latin. I dusted off what I remembered from my now distant school days, readying myself for conversation.

‘By your clothes, I see you come from another century,’ he said. ‘A diversity of tongues favoured a diversity of peoples and even of wars. The world has fallen back on Latin. There are those who fear it may degenerate again into French, Lemosi, or Papiamento, but that is not an immediate risk. Be that as it may, neither the past nor the future interests me.’

I said nothing, and he added, ‘If you don’t mind watching somebody else eat, will you join me?’

Seeing that he noticed my uneasiness, I said yes. We went down a corridor, with doors on either hand, that led to a small kitchen in which everything was made of metal.

We came back with our dinner on a tray: bowls of cornflakes, a bunch of grapes, an unfamiliar fruit whose taste reminded me of figs, and a big pitcher of water. If I remember correctly, there was no bread. My host’s features were sharp, and there was something unusual about his eyes. I won’t forget his pale, austere face, which I shall never see again. He made no gestures when he spoke. Having to converse in Latin inhibited me, but at last I said, ‘Doesn’t my sudden appearance amaze you?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘We receive such visits from century to century. They don’t last long. Tomorrow, at the latest, you’ll be home again.’

The certainty in his voice was reassuring. I thought it proper to introduce myself. ‘I am Eudoro Acevedo. I was born in 1897, in the city of Buenos Aires. I am seventy years old. I am a professor of English and American literatures and a writer of imaginative tales.’

‘I remember having read, not without pleasure, two tales of an imaginative nature,’ he said. ‘Travels of a Captain Lemuel Gulliver, which many people take to be true, and the
Summa Theologiae.
But let’s not speak of facts. Facts matter to no one any more. They are mere points of departure for invention and reasoning. In our schools we are taught doubt and the art of forgetting above all, the forgetting of what is personal and local. We live in time, which is successive, but we try to live
sub specie aeternitatis
. Of the past we retain a few names, which language tends to lose. We shun pointless details. We have neither dates nor history. Nor have we statistics. You said your name is Eudoro. I can’t tell you my name, because I’m simply called Someone.’

‘And what was your father’s name?’

‘He had none.’

On one of the walls I saw a shelf. I opened a book at random; the letters were clean and undecipherable, and they were written by hand. Their angular lines reminded me of the runic alphabet, which, however, was only used for writing inscriptions. I reflected that these men of the future were not only taller but were more skilled. Instinctively, I looked at the man’s long, fine fingers.

‘Now you are going to see something you’ve never seen,’ he said. He handed me a copy of Thomas More’s
Utopia
, printed in Basel in the year 1518; leaves and pages were missing.

Somewhat foolishly, I answered, ‘It’s a printed book. At home, I had over two thousand of them, though they were neither as old nor as valuable as this one.’ I read the title aloud.

The man laughed. ‘No one can read two thousand books. In the four centuries I have lived, I haven’t read more than half a dozen. Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts. Printing, which is now abolished, since it tended to multiply unnecessary texts to the point of dizziness, was one of man’s worst evils.’

‘In my strange past,’ I said, ‘the superstition prevailed that every day, between evening and morning, certain acts occur which it is a shame to be ignorant of. The planet was populated by collective ghosts Canada, Brazil, the Swiss Congo, and the Common Market. Almost no one knew anything of the history that preceded those platonic entities, but, of course, they knew every last detail of the most recent congress of pedagogues, or of imminent breakdowns in diplomatic relations, or of statements issued by presidents, drawn up by the secretary of a secretary and containing all the carefully worded haziness appropriate to the genre. These things were read to be forgotten, for, only hours later, other trivialities would blot them out. Of all offices, that of politician was without doubt the most public. An ambassador or a Cabinet minister was a kind of cripple whom it was necessary to cart around in long, noisy vehicles, ringed by motorcyclists and military escorts and awaited by eager photographers. It seems that their feet have been cut off, my mother used to say. Pictures and the printed word were more real than the things they stood for. Only what was published had any reality.
Esse est percipi
(to be is to be photographed) was the beginning, middle, and end of our singular idea of the world. In that past of mine, people were naïve; they believed that certain merchandise was good because its own makers claimed so over and over again. Robberies were also frequent, though everyone knew that the possession of money brings no greater happiness or peace of mind.’

‘Money?’ the man echoed. ‘No one any longer suffers poverty, which must have been unbearable, or wealth, which must have been the most uncomfortable form of vulgarity. Everyone has a calling.’

‘Like the rabbis,’ I said.

He appeared not to understand and went on. ‘Nor are there cities anymore. To judge by the ruins of Bahia Blanca, which I once explored, not much has been lost. There are no personal possessions now, there are no inheritances. At the age of a hundred, when a man matures, he is ready to come face to face with himself and his loneliness. By then he will have fathered a child.’

‘One child?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Only one. There is no reason to carry on the human race. Some people think man is an organ of the godhead for universal consciousness, but nobody knows for sure whether such a godhead exists. The advantages and disadvantages of gradual or simultaneous suicide by every man and woman on earth are, I believe, now being argued. But let’s get back to what we were saying.’

I agreed.

‘Having reached a hundred, the individual no longer stands in need of love or friendship. Evils and involuntary death are no threat to him. He practices one of the arts or philosophy or mathematics or he plays a game of solitary chess. When he wants to, he kills himself. Man is master of his life. He is also master of his death.’

‘Is that a quotation?’ I asked.

‘Of course. Quotations are all we have now. Language is a system of quotations.’

‘And the great adventure of my time space travel?’ I asked.

‘It’s centuries ago now that those travels were given up. They were certainly to be admired, but we could never rid ourselves of a here and now.’ With a smile, he added, ‘Besides, all travel is spatial. To go from one planet to another is like going to the farm across the way. When you entered this room, you were carrying out a voyage through space.’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘And one also used to speak of chemical substances and animals.’

The man now turned his back to me and looked outside. Beyond the windows, the plain was white with silent snow and moonlight.

I got up my courage to ask, ‘Are there still museums and libraries?’

‘No. We try to forget the past, except for the writing of elegies. There are no commemorations or anniversaries or effigies of dead men now. Each of us must himself produce the arts and sciences he needs.’

‘Then everyone must be his own Bernard Shaw, his own Jesus Christ, his own Archimedes.’

He agreed without a word.

‘What happened to governments?’

‘According to tradition, they fell into gradual disuse,’ he said. ‘They called elections, declared wars, collected taxes, confiscated fortunes, ordered arrests, and tried to impose censorship, but nobody on earth obeyed them. The press stopped publishing the news and photographs of government leaders. Politicians had to find honest work; some of them made good comedians or good faith healers. What actually happened was probably far more complex than this summary.’ He went on in a changed tone. ‘I built this house, which is the same as all others. I carved this furniture and these utensils. I worked these fields, which will be improved by people unknown to me. May I show you a few things?’

I followed him into an adjoining room. He lit a lamp like the first one; it too, hung from the ceiling. In a corner I saw a harp with few strings. On the walls were rectangular canvases in which yellow tones predominated. The work did not seem that of the same hand.

‘This is what I do,’ he said.

I examined the canvases, stopping before the smallest one, which represented, or suggested, a sunset and which encompassed something infinite.

‘If you like it, you can have it as a keepsake of a future friend,’ he said matter-of-factly.

I thanked him, but there were a few canvases that left me uneasy. I won’t say that they were blank, but they were nearly so.

‘They’re painted in colours that your eyes of the past can’t see,’ he said.

A moment later, when his delicate hands plucked the strings of the harp, I barely caught an occasional sound.

Just then a knock was heard.

A tall woman and three or four men entered the house. One would have said that they were brothers and sisters or that time had made them alike. My host spoke to the woman first.

‘I knew you wouldn’t fail to come tonight. Have you seen Nils?’

‘Off and on. He’s as devoted to his painting as ever.’

‘Let’s hope with more success than his father.’

The dismantling began. Manuscripts, pictures, furnishings, utensils we left nothing in the house. The woman worked alongside the men. I was ashamed of my weakness, which scarcely allowed me to be of any help. No one shut the door and we went out, loaded with things. I noticed that the house had a saddle roof.

After a fifteen-minute walk, we turned left. In the distance I made out a kind of tower, crowned with a cupola.

‘It’s the crematory,’ someone said. ‘Inside it is the lethal chamber. It’s said to have been invented by a philanthropist whose name, I think, was Adolf Hitler.’

The caretaker, whose stature by now did not astonish me, opened the gate to us. My host exchanged a few words with him. Before stepping into the enclosure, he waved goodbye.

‘It looks like more snow,’ the woman said.

In my study on Mexico Street, in Buenos Aires, I have the canvas that someone will paint, thousands of years from now, with substances today scattered over the whole planet.

The Bribe

My story is about two men or, rather, about an episode involving two men. The actual affair, in itself neither singular nor even out of the ordinary, matters less than the character of its protagonists. Each of them sinned out of vanity, but in different ways and with different results. The events giving rise to the anecdote (for really it is not much more) took place a short time ago. To my mind, it could only have happened where it did in America.

I had occasion at the University of Texas, in Austin, to speak at length to one of the two, Dr Ezra Winthrop. This was towards the end of 1961. Winthrop was a professor of Old English (he did not approve of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’, which to him suggested an artifact made of two parts). I can remember that without once contradicting me he corrected my many mistakes and rash assumptions about the language. I was told that in his examinations he never asked a single question but invited his students to expatiate upon this or that topic, leaving the choice up to them. Of old Puritan stock, a native of Boston, Winthrop had found it hard getting used to the habits and prejudices of the South. He missed the snow, but it is my observation that Northerners are conditioned to the cold, much as we Argentines are to the heat. I still preserve the image, now dim, of a rather tall man with grey hair, less agile than strong. Clearer is my memory of his colleague, Herbert Locke, who gave me a copy of his book
Towards a History of the Kenning
, in which one reads that the Saxons were not long in dispensing with those somewhat too mechanical metaphors (‘whale’s road’ for ‘the sea’, ‘falcon of battle’ for ‘the eagle’), whereas the skalds went on combining and interweaving them to the point of inextricability. I mention Herbert Locke because he is an integral part of my story.

I now come to the Icelander, Eric Einarsson, who is perhaps the true protagonist. I never set eyes on him. He arrived in Texas in 1969, when I was in Cambridge, but the letters of a mutual friend, Ramón Martínez López, have left me feeling I know Einarsson intimately. I know that he was impetuous, energetic, and cold, and that in a land of tall men he was tall. Given his red hair, it was inevitable that his students dub him Eric the Red. In his opinion, the use of slang by a foreigner was forced and mistaken, making him an intruder, so he never condescended even to an occasional ‘okay’. A serious scholar of the Nordic languages, of English, of Latin, and although he would not admit it of German, he found no difficulty in making his way in American universities.

Einarsson’s first work of any consequence was a study of the four articles that De Quincey wrote on the Danish origins of Cumbrian dialect. This was followed by a study of one of the rural dialects of Yorkshire. Both publications were well received, but Einarsson felt his career needed a boost. In 1970, the Yale University Press published his lengthy critical edition of the Battle of Maldon. The scholarship of Einarsson’s notes was undeniable; in the introduction, however, certain of his hypotheses stirred up controversy in the almost secret circles of academics. There he stated, for example, that in style the poem has an affinity even if a remote one — with the heroic Finnsburh fragment and not with the deliberate rhetoric of Beowulf, and that its handling of moving circumstantial details strangely foreshadows the methods which, not unjustly, we admire in the Icelandic sagas. He also emended a number of readings in Elphinston’s text. Einarsson was made full professor at Texas the same year he arrived.

As everyone knows, scholarly conferences are popular in American universities. Dr Winthrop, in his turn, had given a paper at one of the important Germanic symposia the year before, at Michigan State. His department head, who was getting ready to go off on sabbatical, asked Winthrop to choose a delegate to deliver a paper at the next conference, to be held at Wisconsin. There were only two real candidates Herbert Locke and Eric Einarsson.

Winthrop, like Carlyle, had renounced the Puritan faith of his ancestors but not its ethics. His duty was clear, and he did not decline to give his advice. Herbert Locke, going back to 1954, had been unstinting in his assistance to him, particularly with regard to a certain annotated edition of Beowulf which, in a number of universities, had replaced Klaeber’s edition. Locke was now compiling a very useful work for the Germanic specialist an English Anglo-Saxon dictionary that would save readers from the often useless examination of etymological dictionaries. The Icelander was considerably younger; his insolence had earned him everyone’s dislike, including Winthrop’s. Einarsson’s critical edition of Maldon had contributed a good deal to spreading his name. He was a master of polemic, and at the symposium he would cut a better figure than the shy, taciturn Locke.

Winthrop was in the midst of these considerations when there appeared in the review columns of the
Yale Phil
o
logical Quarterly
a long article on the teaching of Anglo-Saxon. The piece was signed with the giveaway initials ‘E. E.’ and, as if to allay any doubt, under them it read ‘University of Texas’. Written in a foreigner’s correct English, the article, while not admitting of the least incivility, embodied a certain violence. It argued that to begin Anglo-Saxon by studying Beowulf, the work of an early period but in a pseudo-Virgilian, rhetorical style, was as arbitrary as to begin the study of English with the elaborate poetry of Milton. Its author advised an inversion of chronological order, starting, say, with the eleventh-century poem ‘The Grave’, in which the everyday language comes through, and then going back to the origins. As for Beowulf, some excerpt from its tedious aggregate of over three thousand lines was enough for example, the funeral rites of Scyld, who came from the sea and returns to the sea. There was no mention of Winthrop’s name in the article, but nonetheless he felt himself stiffly attacked. This mattered less to him, however, than the fact that his teaching method had been impugned.

Only a few days were left. Wanting to be fair, Winthrop could not allow Einarsson’s article, which was being widely commented upon, to influence his decision. The choice between Locke and the Icelander gave him no small trouble. Winthrop spoke to Lee Rosenthal, the department chairman, one morning, and that same afternoon Einarsson was officially named to make the trip to Wisconsin.

On the eve of his departure, Einarsson presented himself in Ezra Winthrop’s office. He had come to say goodbye and to thank Winthrop. One of the windows opened onto a tree-lined side street, and the two men were surrounded by shelves of books. Einarsson was quick to recognize a first edition of the
Edda Islandorum,
bound in parchment. Winthrop told him that he was sure Einarsson would do a good job and that he had nothing to thank him for. Their conversation, if I am not mistaken, was long. ‘Let’s speak frankly,’ said Einarsson. ‘Everyone knows that in honouring me with representing the university, Rosenthal is acting upon your advice. I am a good Germanic scholar; I’ll do my best not to disappoint him.

The tongue of my childhood is the tongue of the sagas, and I pronounce Anglo-Saxon better than my British colleagues. My students say “
cyning
”
,
not “
cunning
”
.
They also know that smoking is absolutely forbidden in my classes and that they cannot come to them rigged out as hippies. As regards my unsuccessful rival, it would be in very bad taste were I to criticize him. In his book on the kenning he demonstrates not only his research into original sources but also into the pertinent works of Meissner and Marquardt. But let’s put all this nonsense aside. I owe you a personal explanation.’

Einarsson paused, gave a glance out the window, and resumed. ‘I left my country at the end of 1964,’ he said. ‘When someone decides to emigrate to a distant land, he fatally imposes upon himself the duty of getting on in that land. My first two small works, whose nature was strictly philological, had no other object than to demonstrate my ability. That, obviously, was not enough. I had always been interested in the Battle of Maldon, which I can repeat from memory with an occasional slip or two. I managed to get Yale to publish my critical edition of it. The poem records a Norse victory, as you know, but as regards the notion that it may have influenced the later Icelandic sagas, I judge that inadmissible and absurd. I hinted at this merely to flatter English-speaking readers.’

The Icelander held Winthrop in his gaze. ‘I come now to the heart of the matter my polemical piece in the
Quarterly
. As you are aware, it justifies, or tries to justify,
my system, but it deliberately exaggerates the drawbacks of yours, which, in exchange for imposing on the student the boredom of three thousand consecutive lines of intricate verse that narrate a confused story, endows him with a large vocabulary, allowing him to enjoy if by then he has not given it up the entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature. To go to Wisconsin was my real aim. You and I, my dear friend, know that these conferences are foolish and that they entail pointless expense but that they can prove useful in one’s career.’

Winthrop looked at him in surprise. The New Englander was an intelligent man, but he tended to take things seriously including conferences and the world, which may very well be a cosmic joke.

‘You perhaps remember our first conversation,’ Einarsson went on. ‘I had arrived from New York. It was a Sunday. The university dining halls were closed, and we had lunch at the Nighthawk. I learned a great deal from that meeting. As a good European, I had always supposed that the American Civil War was a crusade against slave owners; you argued that the South was within its rights to wish to secede from the Union and to maintain its own institutions. To lend greater strength to what you were saying, you told me that you were a Northerner and that one of your forebears had fought in that war in the ranks of Henry Halleck. You also praised the courage of the Confederates. I have an unusual flair for making instant assessments. That morning was enough for me. I realized, my dear Winthrop, that you are governed by the curious American passion for impartiality. You want, above all, to be fair-minded. Precisely because you are a Northerner, you attempt to understand and justify the South’s cause. As soon as I knew that my trip to Wisconsin depended on what you might say to Rosenthal, I pressed the
Quarterly
to get my article into print, knowing that to criticize your teaching methods was the best means of getting your vote.’

There was a long silence. Winthrop was the first to break it. ‘I’m an old friend of Herbert’s, whose work I esteem,’ he said. ‘Directly or indirectly, you attacked me. To have denied you my vote would have been a sort of reprisal. I assessed his merits and yours, and the result you already know.’ He added, as if thinking aloud, ‘Maybe I gave in to the vanity of not seeking revenge. As you see, your stratagem worked.’

‘Stratagem is the right word,’ Einarsson replied, ‘but I do not regret what I did. I shall always act in the best interests of our department. Be that as it may, I was determined to go to Wisconsin.’

‘My first Viking,’ said Winthrop, looking Einarsson straight in the eye.

‘Another romantic superstition. It is not enough to be a Scandinavian to have descended from Vikings. My forefathers were good pastors of the Evangelical church; at the beginning of the tenth century, my ancestors may have been good priests of Thor. In my family, as far as I know, there were never any seafarers.’

‘There were many in mine,’ Winthrop said. ‘Still, we aren’t so different. One sin is common to us both — vanity. You pay me this visit to boast of your clever stratagem; I backed you to boast that I am an upright man.’

‘Another thing is common to us,’ said Einarsson. ‘Nationality. I am an American citizen. My destiny is here, not in Ultima Thule. You would say that a passport does not change a man’s nature.’

Then, shaking hands, they took leave of each other.