Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (72 page)
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Authors: Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N.T. di Giovanni)
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The Leveller
Between 1840 and 1864, the Father of Light (whom we may also call the Inner Voice) granted the Bavarian musician and schoolteacher Jakob Lorber an unbroken series of trustworthy revelations concerning the human population, the fauna, and the flora of the celestial bodies of our solar system. Among the domestic animals we have knowledge of, thanks to these revelations, is found the Leveller, or Ground-Flattener (Bodendrücker), which renders immeasurable services on Miron, the planet identified with Neptune by Lorber’s most recent editors.
The Leveller has ten times the girth of the elephant, to which it bears a striking resemblance. It is provided with a rather stumpy trunk and with long straight tusks; its hide is of a sickly green. Its limbs, pyramid-shaped, widen enormously at the hoof; the apexes of these pyramids appear to be pinned to the body. This noted plantigrade, in advance of builders and bricklayers, is led to the rough terrain of a construction site, where, with the aid of its hooves, its trunk, and its tusks, it proceeds to flatten out and tramp the ground.
The Leveller feeds on roots and herbage and has no enemies outside of one or two species of insects.
Lilith
‘For before Eve was Lilith’, we read in an old Hebrew text. This legend moved the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) to write the poem ‘Eden Bower’. Lilith was a serpent; she was Adam’s first wife and gave him
Shapes that coiled in the woods and waters,
Glittering sons and radiant daughters.
It was later that God created Eve; Lilith, to revenge herself on Adam’s human wife, urged Eve to taste the forbidden fruit and to conceive Cain, brother and murderer of Abel. Such is the early form of the myth followed and bettered by Rossetti. Throughout the Middle Ages the influence of the word layil, Hebrew for ‘night’, gave a new turn to the myth. Lilith is no longer a serpent; she becomes an apparition of the night. At times she is an angel who rules over the procreation of mankind, at times a demon who assaults those who sleep alone or those who travel lonely roads. In popular imagination she is a tall silent woman with long black hair worn loose.
The Lunar Hare
In the blotches of the moon, the English believe they make out the form of a man; in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
there are two or three references to the ‘man in the moon’. Shakespeare mentions its bundle, or bush, of thorn; in the last lines of Canto XX of the Inferno, Dante had already spoken of Cain and of these thorns. The commentary by Tommaso Casini cites the Tuscan fable in which the Lord banished Cain to the moon, condemning him to carry a bundle of thorns to the end of time. Others have seen in the moon the Holy Family; Leopoldo Lugones wrote in his
Lunario sentimental
:
Y está todo: la Virgen con el niño; al flanco, San José (algunos tienen la buena fortuna De ver su vara); y el buen burrito bianco Trota que trota los campos de la luna. [And everything is there: Virgin and Child; by her side, Saint Joseph (some are lucky enough to see his staff); and the good little white donkey that trots and trots over the acres of the moon.]
The Chinese speak of a Lunar Hare. Buddha, in one of his former lives, suffered hunger; in order to feed him, a Hare leaped into a fire. The Buddha in gratitude sent the Hare’s soul to the moon. There, under an acacia, the Hare pounds in a magical mortar the herbs that make up the elixir of life. In the common speech of certain provinces, this Hare is called the Physician or the Precious Hare or the Hare of Jade. The ordinary Hare is believed to live for a thousand years and to turn white in its old age.
Shakespeare, by the way, refers to a dead mooncalf in The Tempest (II, ii). This creature, according to commentators, is an uncouth monster begotten on earth under the moon’s influence.
The Mandrake
Like the barometz, the plant known as the Mandrake borders on the animal kingdom, since it gives a cry when it is torn up; this cry can drive those who hear it mad. We read in Shakespeare (
Romeo and Juliet
, IV, iii):
And shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth, That living mortals, hearing them, run mad . . .
Pythagoras called the plant anthropomorphic; the Roman agronomist Lucius Columella called it semi-human; and Albertus Magnus wrote that the Mandrake is like man himself, down to the distinction between the sexes. Earlier, Pliny had said that the white Mandrake is the male and the black the female. Also, that those who root it out first trace three circles on the ground with a sword and look westward; the smell of its leaves is so strong that ordinarily it can deprive men of the power of speech. To uproot it was to run the risk of terrible calamities. In the last book of his History of the Jewish Wars, Flavius Josephus advises us to employ a trained dog; the plant dug up, the dog dies, but the leaves are useful as a narcotic, a laxative, and for the purposes of magic.
The Mandrake’s supposed human form has suggested the superstition that it grows at the foot of the gallows. Sir Thomas Browne (
Pseudodoxia Epidemica
, 1646) speaks of the grease of hanged men; the once popular German writer Hanns Heinz Ewers wrote a novel (
Alraune
, 1913) around the idea of the hanged man’s seed being injected into a harlot and producing a beautiful witch. In German, ‘mandrake’ is Alraune; earlier it was Alruna, a word that comes originally from ‘rune’, which stood for ‘whisper’ or ‘buzz’. Hence (according to Skeat) it meant ‘a mystery . . . a writing, because written characters were regarded as a mystery known to the few’. Perhaps, more simply, the idea of a visible mark standing for a sound baffled the Nordic mind, and therein lay the mystery.
Genesis (XXX: 14-17) has this strange account of the reproductive powers of the Mandrake:
And Reuben went in the days of wheat harvest, and found mandrakes in the field, and brought them unto his mother Leah. Then Rachel said to Leah, Give me, I pray thee, of thy son’s mandrakes.
And she said unto her, Is it a small matter that thou hast taken my husband? and wouldest thou take away my son’s mandrakes also? And Rachel said, Therefore he shall lie with thee tonight for thy son’s mandrakes.
And Jacob came out of the field in the evening, and Leah went out to meet him, and said, Thou must come in unto me; for surely I have hired thee with my son’s mandrakes. And he lay with her that night.
And God hearkened unto Leah, and she conceived, and bare Jacob the fifth son.
In the twelfth century, a German-Jewish commentator on the Talmud wrote this paragraph:
A kind of cord comes out of a root in the ground and tied to the cord by its navel, like a squash or melon, is the animal known as the yadu’a, but the yadu’a is in all respects like a man: face, body, hands, and feet. It uproots and destroys all things around it as far as the cord reaches. The cord should be cut by an arrow, and the animal dies.
The physician Dioscorides (second century
a
.
d
.
) identified the Mandrake with the circea, or herb of Circe, of which we read in the tenth book of the Odyssey:
At the root it was black, but its flower was like milk. Moly the gods call it, and it is hard for mortal man to dig; but the gods are all-powerful.
The Manticore
Pliny (VIII, 30) informs us that according to Ctesias, the Greek physician of Artaxerxes Mnemon, among the Ethiopians there is an animal found, which he calls the mantichora; it has a triple row of teeth, which fit into each other like those of a comb, the face and ears of a man, and azure eyes, is of the colour of blood, has the body of the lion, and a tail ending in a sting, like that of the scorpion. Its voice resembles the union of the sound of the flute and the trumpet; it is of excessive swiftness, and is particularly fond of human flesh.
Flaubert has improved upon this description, and in the last pages of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, we read:
T
he
M
anticore
a gigantic red lion with a human face and three rows of teeth.
‘The iridescence of my scarlet hide blends into the shimmering brightness of the desert sands. Through my nostrils I exhale the horror of the lonely places of the earth. I spit out pestilence. I consume armies when they venture into the desert.
‘My nails are twisted into talons, like drills, and my teeth are cut like those of a saw; my restless tail prickles with darts, which I shoot left and right, before me, behind. Watch!’
The Manticore shoots the quills of its tail, which spread out like arrows on every hand. Drops of blood drip down, spattering the leaves of the trees.