Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - the Giovanni Translations (And Others) by Jorge Luis Borges
That evening, I passed by the Casa Colorada. The iron gate was shut and some of its bars were bent. What once was garden was now overgrown with weeds. To the right, there was a shallow ditch and its outer edges were trampled.
There was only one move left, but for days I kept putting it off not because I felt it to be altogether a waste, but because it would drag me to the inevitable, to the last. Without much hope, I went to Glew. Mariani, the carpenter, was a stout, pink-faced Italian, common and cordial and now somewhat advanced in years. A glance at him was enough for me to dismiss the stratagems I had contrived the night before. I handed him my card, which he pompously spelled out aloud with a certain reverential stumbling when he reached the ‘Ph.D.’ I told him I was interested in the furniture made by him for the house in Turdera that had been my uncle’s. The man spoke on and on. I shall not try to transcribe his torrent of words and gestures, but he told me that his motto was to satisfy his customer’s every demand, no matter how outlandish it was, and that he had carried out his work to the letter. After rummaging in various drawers he showed me some papers that I could make neither head nor tail of; they were signed by the elusive Preetorius. (Doubtless, Mariani mistook me for a lawyer.) On saying goodbye, he confided to me that even for all the world’s gold he would never again set foot in Turdera, let alone that house. He added that the customer is sacred, but that in his humble opinion Mr. Preetorius was crazy. Then he grew quiet, obviously repentant. I was unable to worm anything more out of him.
I had allowed for this failure, but it is one thing to allow for something and quite another to see it happen. Time and again, I said to myself that the solution of this enigma did not concern me and that the one true enigma was time, that seamless chain of past, present, and future, of the ever and the never. Such reflections turned out to be useless, however; after whole afternoons devoted to the study of Schopenhauer or Royce, night after night I would walk the dirt roads ringing the Casa Colorada. Sometimes I caught a glimpse upstairs of a very white light; other times, I thought I heard a moaning. It went on this way until the nineteenth of January.
It was one of those Buenos Aires days when a man feels himself not only bullied and insulted by the summer but even debased by it. At around eleven o’clock at night the storm broke. First came the south wind, and then the water in torrents. I wandered about looking for a tree. In the sudden glare of a lightning flash I found myself a few steps from the fence. Whether out of fear or hope I don’t know, but I tried the gate. Unexpectedly, it opened. I made my way, pushed along by the storm. Sky and earth threatened me. The door of the house was also open. A squall of rain lashed my face and I went in.
Inside, the floor tiles had been torn up and I stepped on matted grass. A sweet, sickening smell filled the house. Right or left, I’m not sure which, I tripped on a stone ramp. Quickly, I went up. Almost unawares, I turned on the light switch.
The dining room and the library of my memories were now, with the wall between them torn down, a single great bare room containing one or two pieces of furniture. I shall not try to describe them, since I am not altogether sure in spite of the cruel white light of having seen them. Let me explain myself. To see a thing one has to comprehend it. An armchair presupposes the human body, its joints and limbs; a pair of scissors, the act of cutting. What can be said of a lamp or a car? The savage cannot comprehend the missionary’s Bible; the passenger does not see the same rigging as the sailors. If we really saw the world, maybe we would understand it.
None of the meaningless shapes that that night granted me corresponded to the human figure or, for that matter, to any conceivable use. I felt revulsion and terror. In one of the corners, I found a ladder which led to the upper floor. The spaces between the iron rungs, which were no more than ten, were wide and irregular. That ladder, implying hands and feet, was comprehensible, and in some way this relieved me. I put out the light and waited for some time in the dark. I did not hear the least sound, but the presence there of incomprehensible things disquieted me. In the end, I made up my mind.
Once upstairs, my fearful hand switched on the light a second time. The nightmare that had foreshadowed the lower floor came alive and flowered on the next. Here there were either many objects or a few linked together.
I now recall a sort of long operating table, very high and in the shape of a U, with round hollows at each end. I thought that maybe it was the bed of the house’s inhabitant, whose monstrous anatomy revealed itself in this way, implicitly, like an animal’s or a god’s by its shadow.
From some page or other of Lucan there came to my lips the word ‘amphisbaena’, which hinted at, but which certainly did not exhaust, what my eyes were later to see. I also remember a V of mirrors that became lost in the upper darkness.
What would the inhabitant be like? What could it be looking for on this planet, no less hideous to it than it to us? From what secret regions of astronomy or time, from what ancient and now incalculable dusk can it have reached this South American suburb and this particular night?
I felt an intruder in the chaos. Outside, the rain had stopped. I looked at my watch and saw with astonishment that it was almost two o’clock. I left the light on and carefully began climbing down. To get down the way I had come up was not impossible to get down before the inhabitant returned. I guessed that it had not locked the doors because it did not know how.
My feet were touching the next to last rung of the ladder when I felt that something, slow and oppressive and two-fold, was coming up the ramp. Curiosity overcame my fear, and I did not shut my eyes.
The Sect of the Thirty
The original manuscript may be consulted at the University of Leiden; the text is in Latin, but one or two Hellenisms justify the conjecture that it was translated from the Greek. According to Leisegang, it dates from the fourth century a.d. Gibbon mentions it in passing in one of the footnotes to the fifteenth chapter of his Decline and Fall. The anonymous author has recorded:
. . . The Sect was never large, and now its proselytes number but a scant few. Decimated by sword and fire, they sleep by the wayside or, since it is forbidden them to build any form of dwelling place, among the ruins spared by war. They also journey about quite naked. These facts are common knowledge. My aim here is to leave a written record of what it has been vouchsafed me to discover of the Sect’s beliefs and customs. I have argued at length with its masters and have met with little success in converting them to the Faith of Our Lord.
The first thing about the Sect that drew my attention was the variousness of its notions regarding the dead. Among the most ignorant, for example, it is held that the burial of those who have departed this life is entrusted to their spirits; others, the unorthodox, maintain that Jesus’ admonition to ‘let the dead bury their dead’ is meant to condemn the pompous vanity of our funeral rites.
The advice to sell what one has and give to the poor is closely followed by every sectarian; those so benefited give to others and these, in turn, to still others. This should suffice to explain their indigence and nakedness, which, in addition, brings them nearer the state of paradise. Fervently they repeat the words, ‘Behold the ravens of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor have they barns or sheds; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?’ Their teaching forbids all saving: ‘Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink?’
The judgment ‘whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart’ is a piece of straightforward advice about maintaining purity. Yet, many are the members of the Sect who point out that if there is not one man on earth who has not looked upon a woman to lust after her all men have committed adultery. Since the desire is as sinful as the act, the righteous may without risk indulge in the most outrageous lust.
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The Sect’s name has given rise to persistent conjectures. One such suggests that it refers to the number to which the faithful have been reduced, which is ridiculous and yet prophetic, because, due to its perverse set of beliefs, the Sect is destined to die out. Another conjecture is that the name derives from the height of the Ark, which was thirty cubits; another, which distorts the calendar, from the number of nights that make up a lunar month; another, from the Saviour’s age at baptism; another, from Adam’s years when he rose out of the red dust of the ground. All are equally untrue. No less deceiving is the list of thirty godheads or thrones, of which one is Abraxas, portrayed by a cock’s head, the arms and torso of a man, and the tail of an entwined serpent.
The priceless gift of communicating Truth has not been granted me. One knows the Truth but is unable to argue it. May others more gifted than I save the members of the Sect by preaching or by fire, for it is better to be put to death than to commit suicide. I shall therefore limit myself to giving an account of the abominable heresy.
The Word was made flesh to become a man among men, who would deliver Him up to the cross and be redeemed by Him. He was born of the womb of a woman of the chosen people not only to preach Love, but to suffer martyrdom.
It was necessary that events be unforgettable. The death of a human being by the sword or by drinking hemlock was not enough to move the imagination of mankind to the end of time. The Lord arranged things in a dramatic way. This accounts for the Last Supper, for Jesus’ words that foretold his betrayal, for the repeated warning to one of the disciples, for the blessing of the bread and wine, for Peter’s pledges, for the solitary vigil in the garden of Gethsemane, for the sleep of the twelve disciples, for the Son of God’s human prayer, for the sweat like blood, for the multitude with swords and staves, for the kiss of betrayal, for Pilate’s washing his hands, for the scourging, for the mocking, for the crown of thorns, for the purple robe and reed sceptre, for the vinegar with gall, for the cross on the summit of a hill, for the promise to the repentant thief, for the earth that shook and the darkness over all the land.
Divine Providence, to which I owe so many blessings, has allowed me to discover the real and secret reason for the Sect’s name. In Kerioth, where in all likelihood it originated, there survives a conventicle known as the Thirty Coins. This was the earliest name, and it gives us the clue. In the drama of the Cross (I mean this with due reverence) there were intentional and unintentional actors; all of them indispensable, all of them fatal. Unintentional were the priests who handed out the pieces of silver, unintentional was the multitude that asked for Barabbas, unintentional was the Governor of Judea, unintentional were the Roman soldiers who erected the cross of His martyrdom and nailed the nails and cast lots for His garments. The intentional actors were only two: the Redeemer and Judas. The latter cast down the thirty pieces of silver that were the price of Salvation and went and hanged himself. At the time, like the Son of Man, he was thirty-three years old. The Sect worships them equally and absolves all the others. There is no one culprit. Everyone, unwitting or not, is an agent in the scheme laid down by Divine Wisdom. All of them now share the Glory.
My hand trembles to set down yet another abomination. In order to follow the example of their masters, the believers, upon attaining the designated age, have themselves mocked and crucified on the summit of a hill. This criminal violation of the Fifth Commandment must be brought to an end with all the severity that human and divine laws have always demanded. May the curses of the skies, may the hatred of the angels . . .
No more of the manuscript has been unearthed.
The Night of the Gifts
It was many years ago in the old Confitería del Águila, on Florida Street up around Piedad, that we heard this story. The problem of knowledge was being discussed. Someone invoked the platonic theory that we have already seen everything in a previous world, so that to know is to know again. My father, I believe, said that Bacon had written that if to learn is to remember, not to know is in fact to have forgotten. Another person, a man getting on in years, who was probably a bit lost in metaphysics, decided to enter in. Speaking slowly and deliberately this is what he told us:
Frankly, I don’t understand all this talk of platonic archetypes. Nobody remembers the first time he saw the colour yellow or black, or the first time he tasted a certain fruit maybe because he was small then and had no way of knowing he was initiating a very long series. Of course, there are other first times that no one forgets. I can tell you what a certain night of my life gave me, one I often recall the night of the thirtieth of April, 1874.
Summer holidays were much longer then, but I don’t know why we stayed away from Buenos Aires until that late date. We were at the ranch of some cousins, the Dornas, not far from Lobos. During that time, one of the cowhands, Rufino, initiated me into country things.
I was approaching thirteen; he was somewhat older and had a reputation as a daredevil. He was quick, agile. When the younger hands played at knife-fighting with burnt sticks, the one who always got his face marked was Rufino’s opponent. One Friday, Rufino suggested we go into town the next night to have a little fun. Of course, I leaped at the chance, but without really knowing what it was all about. I warned him I didn’t know how to dance. Dancing was easy to learn, he said.
After dinner on Saturday, at around seven-thirty, we set off. Rufino had rigged himself out like someone going to a party, and he wore a silver knife in his belt. I had a little knife like it, but I didn’t bring mine for fear of being laughed at. It was not long before we glimpsed the first houses. I don’t suppose any of you has ever been to Lobos. Not that it matters. There’s no small town in the Argentine that isn’t exactly like all the others even to the point of thinking itself different. Each has the same unpaved alleys, the same empty lots, the same one-story houses all of which make a man on horseback seem more important.
We dismounted at a certain street corner in front of a house painted sky-blue or pink, with a sign saying ‘La Estrella’. Tied to the hitching post were some horses with good saddles. Through the half-open street door I saw a shaft of light. At the end of the entranceway was a large room with wooden benches on either side and, between the benches, a number of dark doors that opened who knew where. A little mongrel with yellow fur ran up barking to welcome me. Quite a few people were about, and a half dozen or so women in floral dressing gowns came and went. A respectable-looking lady, dressed in black from head to foot, seemed to be the owner of the house. Rufino greeted her, saying, ‘I’ve brought a new friend, but he’s not much of a rider.’
‘Don’t worry,’ the woman answered. ‘He’ll learn soon enough.’
I felt ashamed. To draw their attention away, or to make them see that I was a boy, I began playing with the dog at the end of one of the benches. On a table in the kitchen burned some cheap candles in bottles, and I also remember a small brazier in a corner to the rear. On the whitewashed wall opposite was a picture of Our Lady of Mercy. Somebody, between one joke and another, was tuning a guitar that gave him a lot of trouble. Out of sheer timidity I did not refuse a gin, which burned my mouth like a red-hot coal. Among the women I noticed one who seemed different from the others. They called her La Cautiva — the Captive. There was something Indian about her, but her features were like a picture and her eyes very sad. Her braided hair reached her waist. Rufino saw that I was looking at her.
‘Let’s hear about the raid again to refresh our memories,’ he said to her.
The girl spoke as if she were alone, and in some way I felt that she was unable to think of anything else and that the story she told us was the only thing that had happened to her in her life.
‘I was very young when they brought me from Catamarca,’ she said. ‘What did I know about Indian raids? At Santa Irene we didn’t even mention such things, we were so scared. As if unraveling
At the word of one of their chiefs, it’s nothing for them to attack a ranch somewhere out between the forts, which are far apart. Just from thinking about it so much, I almost wished they would come, and I knew how to look for them out towards the setting sun. I don’t know how much time went by, but there were frosts and summers and roundups and the death of the foreman’s son before the raid.’
She paused for a moment or two, lost in thought, then went on. ‘It was as if the south wind brought them. I saw a thistle in a ditch, and that night I dreamed of Indians. It happened at daybreak. The animals knew it before we did the same as when there’s an earthquake. The cattle were restless and birds wheeled in the sky. We ran to look in the direction I always looked.’
‘Who warned you?’ someone asked.
Distant as ever, the girl repeated her last sentence. ‘We ran to look in the direction I always looked. It was as if the whole desert had begun to move. Through the bars of the window grille we saw the cloud of dust before we saw them. It was a raiding party. They beat their hands over their mouths, whooping. We had some rifles at Santa Irene, but all they were good for was making noise and turning the Indians even more savage.’