Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (77 page)

The Salamander

Not only is it a small dragon that lives in fire, it is also (according to one dictionary) ‘an insectivorous batrachian with intensely black smooth skin and yellow spots’. Of these two characters, the better known is the imaginary, and the Salamander’s inclusion in this book will surprise no one. In Book X of his
Natural History
, Pliny states that the Salamander ‘is so intensely cold as to extinguish fire by its contact, in the same way that ice does’; later he thinks this over, observing sceptically that if what magicians said about the Salamander were true, it would be used to put out house fires. In Book XI, he speaks of a four-footed, winged insect called the ‘pyrallis’ or ‘pyrausta’ living ‘in the copper-smelting furnaces of Cyprus, in the very midst of the fire’; if it comes out into the air and flies a short distance, it will instantly die. The Salamander in man’s memory has incorporated this now forgotten animal.

The phoenix was used as an argument by theologians to prove the resurrection of the flesh; the Salamander, as a proof that bodies can live in fire. In Book XXI of the
City of God
by St Augustine, there is a chapter called
Whether an earthly body may possibly be incorruptible by fire
, and it opens in this way:

What then shall I say unto the unbelievers, to prove that a body carnal and living may endure undissolved both against death and the force of eternal fire. They will not allow us to ascribe this unto the power of God, but urge us to produce it to them by some example. We shall answer them that there are some creatures that are indeed corruptible, because mortal, and yet do live untouched in the middle of the fire.

Poets, also, flock to the Salamander and phoenix as devices of rhetorical emphasis. Quevedo in the sonnets of the fourth book of his Spanish Parnassus, which ‘celebrates the exploits of love and beauty’, writes:

Hago verdad la Fénix en la ardiente Llama, en que renaciendo me renuevo; Y la virilidad del fuego pruebo,Y que es padre y que tiene descendiente.La Salamandra fría, que desmiente Noticia docta, a defender me atrevo, Cuando en incendios, que sediento bebo, Mi corazón habita y no los siente.[I testify to the truth of the Phoenix in burning flames, since I also burn and renew myself, and I prove the maleness of fire, which can be a father and have offspring.I dare as well defend the cold Salamander, refuted by men of learning, since my heart dwells in fires, which thirstily I drink, and feels no pain.]  

In the middle of the twelfth century, a forged letter supposedly sent by Prester John, the king of kings, to the Emperor of Byzantium, made its way all over Europe. This epistle, which is a catalogue of wonders, speaks of gigantic ants that dig gold, and of a River of Stones, and of a Sea of Sand with living fish, and of a towering mirror that reflects whatever happens in the kingdom, and of a sceptre carved of a single emerald, and of pebbles that make a man invisible or that light up the night. One of its paragraphs states: ‘Our realm yields the worm known as the salamander. Salamanders live in fire and make cocoons, which our court ladies spin and use to weave cloth and garments. To wash and clean these fabrics, they throw them into flames.’

Of these indestructible linens or textiles, which are cleansed by fire, there is mention in Pliny (XIX, 4) and in Marco Polo (I, 39). The latter attests that the Salamander is a substance, not an animal. Nobody, at first, believed him; goods woven of asbestos and sold as the skins of Salamanders were an unanswerable proof of the Salamander’s existence.

Somewhere in his Autobiography, Benvenuto Cellini writes that at the age of five he saw a tiny animal like a lizard playing in the fire. He told this to his father, who said that the animal was a Salamander and gave his son a sound beating so that the remarkable vision, seldom vouchsafed to man, would stick forever in the boy’s memory.

To the alchemists the Salamander was the spirit of the element fire. In this symbol and in an argument of Aristotle’s, preserved for us by Cicero in the first book of his
On the Nature of the Gods
, we find the reason why men believed in the Salamander of legend. The Sicilian physician Empedocles of Agrigentum had formulated the proposition of the four ‘roots’, or elements of matter, whose opposition and affinity, governed by Discord and Love, made up the cosmic process. There is no death; there are only particles of ‘roots’, which the Romans were to call ‘elements’, and which are either falling apart or coming together. These elements are fire, earth, air, and water. They are eternal and none is stronger than any other. Now we know (now we think we know) that this doctrine is false, but men once thought it valuable, and it is generally held that it was on the whole beneficial. Theodor Gomperz has written that ‘The four elements which make up and support the world, and which still survive in poetry and in popular imagination, have a long and glorious history.’ The system demanded parity: since there were animals of earth and water, animals of fire were needed. For the dignity of science it was essential that Salamanders exist. In a parallel fashion, Aristotle speaks of animals of the air.

Leonardo da Vinci had it that the Salamander fed on fire and in this way renewed its skin.