Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - the Giovanni Translations (And Others) by Jorge Luis Borges
I follow A. B. Mitford’s account, which, in leaving out distracting intrusions of local colour, is more concerned with the glorious episode’s whole narrative sweep. These missing Oriental touches lead me to suspect that we are dealing with a version straight from the Japanese.
The Untied Ribbon
Sometime in the vanished spring of 1702, it happened that Asano Takumi no Kami, the distinguished lord of the castle of Akô, was appointed to receive and feast an imperial envoy. Twenty-three hundred years (some of them mythological) of polished manners had nervously defined the ceremonies to be observed upon the occasion. The envoy represented the Mikado, but by way of allusion or symbol a subtlety one has to be careful neither to overdo nor to neglect. In order to prevent blunders that could easily prove fatal, a high official from the court of Yedo preceded the envoy in the capacity of master of etiquette. At a remove from the comfort of the court and condemned to a rustic holiday which must have seemed to him a form of exile, Kira Kôtsuké no Suké took no pains in the instruction of his charge. Sometimes he exaggerated his lofty tone to the point of insolence. His pupil, the lord of the castle, tried to ignore this ridicule. He did not know how to reply to it, and a strict sense of duty held him back from all violence. Nevertheless, one day the ribbon of the master’s sock had come untied and he asked the lord to tie it up for him. Although burning with rage, Takumi no Kami patiently submitted. The rude master of etiquette told him that, in truth, he was unteachable and that only a boor could tie a knot so clumsily. The lord of the castle drew his dirk and aimed a blow at the master’s head. Kôtsuké no Suké ran away, his forehead barely marked with a faint thread of blood.
A few days later, the deliberations of the military council were completed, and Takumi no Kami was sentenced to commit suicide. In the central courtyard of the castle of Akô, a platform covered in red felt was erected, and on it the doomed man appeared. Having been handed a golden dagger with a jeweled handle, he publicly confessed his guilt, stripped to the waist, and, disemboweling himself with the two ritual wounds, died like a samurai. Because of the red felt the more distant spectators were unable to see blood. A grey-haired, painstaking man he was the councilor Oishi Kuranosuke, the condemned man’s second severed the head with a stroke of his sword.
The Simulator of Infamy
Takumi no Kami’s castle was confiscated, his retainers were disbanded, his family was brought to ruin, and his tarnished name became the object of curses. Rumour has it that on the very night that he killed himself, forty-seven of his retainers, forming a league, met in a mountain fastness and planned to the last detail what eventually came to pass a year later. The truth is that they were forced to proceed step by step and with great caution, and some of their meetings took place not on an inaccessible mountaintop but in a chapel in a small forest a kind of shabby pavilion of white wood, with no other adornment than a rectangular box containing a mirror. They craved vengeance, and vengeance must have seemed to them beyond reach.
Kira Kôtsuké no Suké, the hated master of etiquette, had fortified his house, and a crowd of archers and swordsmen guarded his palanquin. He could also count on his spies, who were incorruptible, scrupulous, and stealthy. They watched and spied on no one as much as they did on the presumed ringleader of the avengers, the councilor Kuranosuké. It was only by chance that he found out, but he built his scheme for vindication upon this fact.
Kuranosuké moved to Kyoto, a city unmatched in all the empire for its autumn colours. He gave himself up to gambling dens, taverns, and houses of the worst repute. In spite of greying hair, he rubbed elbows with harlots and poets, and with even sorrier sorts. Once, thrown out of some low haunt, he fell down and spent the night asleep in the street, his head wallowing in his own vomit.
It happened that a Satsuma man saw this, and he said sadly and angrily: ‘Is not this, by chance, Oishi Kuranosuké, who was a councilor of Asano Takumi no Kami, who assisted his lord in death, and who, not having the heart to avenge him, gives himself up to pleasure and shame? You are unworthy the name of a samurai!’
And he trod on Kuranosuké’s sleeping face, and spat upon it. When the spies reported this bit of debauchery, Kôtsuké no Suké was greatly relieved.
Things did not come to rest there. The councilor sent away his wife and younger son, and he bought himself a concubine in a brothel. This famous act of infamy gladdened his enemy’s heart and made him relax in watchfulness. So it was that Kôtsuké no Suké packed off half his guard.
On one of the bitterest nights of the winter of 1703, the forty-seven retainers met in a bare, windswept garden on the outskirts of Yedo, next to a bridge and a playing-card factory. From there, they marched forth with the banners of their lord. But before launching their raid, they sent a message to their enemy’s neighbours, announcing that they were neither night robbers nor ruffians but were engaged in a military action in the name of strict justice.
The Scar
Two bands attacked Kira Kôtsuké no Suké’s palace. The councilor led the first, which assaulted the front gate; the second was led by his older son, who was about to turn sixteen and who died that night. All history knows the different moments of that vivid nightmare; the tricky, dangling descent into the courtyard on rope ladders; the drum signaling the attack; the rush of the defenders; the archers posted on the four sides of the roof; the arrows’ swift mission to a man’s vital organs; the porcelains smeared with blood; death, burning and then icy; the wantonness and turmoil of the slaughter. Nine retainers laid down their lives; the defenders were no less brave, and they refused to give ground. Shortly after midnight, however, all resistance came to an end.
Kira Kôtsuké no Suké, the despicable root of this display of loyalty, did not turn up. Every nook and cranny of the palace was searched for him, but women and children weeping were all to be seen. At this, when the retainers began to despair of ever finding him, the councilor noticed that the quilts of the master’s bed were still warm. Renewing their search, they discovered a narrow window hidden under a bronze mirror. From down below in a gloomy little courtyard, a man dressed in white stared up at them. In his right hand, he held a trembling sword. When they climbed down, the man gave himself up without a struggle. His forehead still bore a scar the old etching of Takumi no Kami’s dirk.
The bloodstained band then went down on their knees before their hated adversary, and they told him they were the retainers of the lord of the castle of Akô, for whose loss and end the master of etiquette was to blame, and they entreated him to commit suicide, as a samurai was obliged to do.
Offering this honour to such a cringing spirit was pointless. Kôtsuké no Suké was a man to whom honour was inaccessible. As the day dawned, they were forced to cut his throat.
Testimony
Their vengeance now satisfied (but without anger or commotion or pity), the retainers make their way to the temple that holds their lord’s remains.
In a bucket they carry Kira Kôtsuké no Suké’s unbelievable head, taking turns looking after it. They cross the countryside and the province by the full light of day. Along the way, people flock to them with blessings and tears. The Prince of Sendai invites them to his table, but they decline, replying that their lord has been waiting for nearly two years. They come to his obscure tomb and lay their enemy’s head before it as an offering.
The Supreme Court passes sentence. It is what the retainers expect they are granted the privilege of committing suicide. They all do so, some with ardent serenity, and they are laid to rest at their lord’s side. Men, women, and children gather to pray at the graves of these faithful men.
The Satsuma Man
Among those who come is a boy, dusty and weary, who must have traveled a long way. He prostrates himself before Oishi Kuranosuké’s tombstone and says aloud: ‘I saw you lying drunk by the door of a brothel in Kyoto, and I did not think you were plotting to avenge your lord; I thought you to be a faithless soldier, and I spat in your face. Now I have come to offer atonement.?
The abbot of the temple, feeling sympathy for his deed, buried him alongside the retainers.
This is the end of the story of the forty-seven loyal men except that it has no end, for the rest of us, who are not loyal perhaps but will never wholly give up the hope of being so, will go on honouring them with words.
The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv
To Angélica Ocampo
If I am not mistaken, the chief sources of information concerning Mokanna, the Veiled (or, literally, Masked) Prophet of Khurasan, are only four in number: a) those passages from the History of the Caliphs culled by Baladhuri; b) the Giant's Handbook, or Book of Precision and Revision, by the official historian of the Abbasids, Ibn abi Tahir Taifur; c) the Arabic codex entitled The Annihilation of the Rose, wherein we find a refutation of the abominable heresies of the Dark Rose, or Hidden Rose, which was the Prophet’s holy book; and d) some barely legible coins unearthed by the engineer Andrusov during excavations for the Trans-Caspian Railway. These coins, now on deposit in the Numismatic Collection at Tehran, preserve certain Persian distichs which abridge or emend key passages of the Annihilation. The original Rose is lost, for the manuscript found in 1899 and published all too hastily by the Morgenlandisches Archiv has been pronounced a forgery first by Horn, and afterwards by Sir Percy Sykes.
The Prophet’s fame in the West is owed to a longwinded poem by Thomas Moore, laden with all the sentimentality of an Irish patriot.
The Scarlet Dye
Along about the year 120 of the Hegira (a.d. 736), the man Hakim, whom the people of that time and that land were later to style the Prophet of the Veil, was born in Turkestan. His home was the ancient city of Merv, whose gardens and vineyards and pastures sadly overlook the desert. Midday there, when not dimmed by the clouds of dust that choke its inhabitants and leave a greyish film on the clusters of black grapes, is white and dazzling.
Hakim grew up in that weary city. We know that a brother of his father apprenticed him to the trade of dyer that craft of the ungodly, the counterfeiter, and the shifty, who were to inspire him to the first imprecations of his unbridled career. In a famous page of the Annihilation, he is quoted as saying:
My face is golden but I have steeped my dyes, dipping uncarded wool on second nights and soaking treated wool on third nights, and the emperors of the islands still compete for this scarlet cloth. Thus did I sin in the days of my youth, tampering with the true colours of God’s creation. The Angel told me that the ram was not the colour of the tiger, the Satan told me that the Almighty wanted them to be, and that He was availing Himself of my skill and my dye stuffs. Now I know that the Angel and the Satan both strayed from the truth, and that all colours are abominable.
In the year 146 of the Hegira, or Flight, Hakim was seen no more in Merv. His caldrons and dipping vats, along with a Shirazi scimitar and a bronze mirror, were found destroyed.
The Bull
At the end of the moon of Sha’ban, in the year 158, the desert air was very clear, and from the gate of a caravan halting place on the way to Merv a group of men sat gazing at the evening sky in search of the moon of Ramadan, which marks the period of continence and fasting. They were slaves, beggars, horse dealers, camel thieves, and butchers of livestock. Huddled solemnly on the ground, they awaited the sign. They looked at the sunset, and the colour of the sunset was the colour of the sand.
From the other end of the shimmering desert (whose sun engenders fever, just as its moon engenders chills), they saw three approaching figures, which seemed to be of gigantic size. They were men, and the middle one had the head of a bull. When they drew near, it was plain that this man was wearing a mask and that his companions were blind.
Someone (as in the tales of the Arabian Nights) pressed him for the meaning of this wonder. ‘They are blind,’ the masked man said, ‘because they have looked upon my face.’
The Leopard
It is recorded by the Abbasids’ official chronicler that the man from the desert (whose voice was singularly sweet, or so it seemed in contrast to his brutish mask) told the caravan traders that they were awaiting the sign of a month of penance, but that he was the preacher of a greater sign that of a lifetime of penance and a death of martyrdom. He told them that he was Hakim, son of Osman, and that in the year 146 of the Flight a man had made his way into his house and, after purification and prayer, had cut off his head with a scimitar and taken it to heaven. Held in the right hand of the stranger (who was the angel Gabriel), his head had been before the Lord in the highest heaven who entrusted it with the mission of prophesying, taught it words so ancient that their mere utterance could burn men’s mouths, and endowed it with a radiance that mortal eyes could not bear. Such was his justification of the mask. When all men on earth professed the new law, the Face would be revealed to them and they could worship it openly as the angels already worshipped it. His mission proclaimed, Hakim exhorted them to a holy war a jihad and to their forthcoming martyrdom.
The slaves, beggars, horse dealers, camel thieves, and butchers of livestock shunned his call. One voice shouted out ‘Sorcerer!’ and another ‘Impostor!’ Someone had a leopard with him a specimen, perhaps, of that sleek, bloodthirsty breed that Persian hunters train and it happened that the animal broke free of its bonds. Except for the masked prophet and his two acolytes, the rest of them trampled each other to escape. When they flocked back, the prophet had blinded the beast. Before its luminous dead eyes, the men worshipped Hakim and acknowledged his supernatural powers.
The Veiled Prophet
It is with scant enthusiasm that the historian of the Abbasid caliphs records the rise of the Veiled Hakim in Khurasan. That province much disturbed by the failure and crucifixion of its most famous chieftain embraced the teachings of the Shining Face with fervour and desperation, and it laid down in tribute its blood and gold. (By then, Hakim had set aside his brutish effigy, replacing it with a fourfold veil of white silk embossed with precious stones. The symbolic colour of the ruling dynasty, the Banu Abbas, was black; for his Protective Veil, for his banners and turbans, Hakim chose the very opposite colour white.) The campaign began well. In the Book of Precision, of course, the armies of the Caliph are everywhere victorious; but as the invariable result of these victories is the removal of generals or the withdrawal from impregnable fortresses, the chary reader can surmise actual truth. At the end of the moon of Rajab, in the year 161, the famed city of Nishapur opened its metal gates to the Masked One; at the beginning of 162, the city of Asterabad did the same. Hakim’s military activity (like that of a more fortunate prophet) was limited to praying in a tenor voice, elevated toward the Divinity on the back of a reddish camel, in the very thick of battle. Arrows whistled all around without ever once striking him. He seemed to court danger. On the night a group of hated lepers gathered around his palace, he had them let in, kissed them, and given them silver and gold.
The petty tasks of government were delegated to six or seven devotees. Ever mindful of serenity and meditation, the Prophet kept a harem of a hundred and fourteen blind women, who did their best to satisfy the needs of his divine body.
The Abominable Mirrors
However indiscreet or threatening they may be, so long as their words are not in conflict with orthodox faith, Islam is tolerant of men who enjoy an intimacy with God. The Prophet himself, perhaps, might not have scorned this leniency, but his followers, his many victories, and the outspoken wrath of the Caliph who was Mohammed al-Mahdi drove him at last into heresy. This discord, though it led to his undoing, also made him set down the tenets of a personal creed, in which borrowings from old Gnostic beliefs are nonetheless detectable.
At the root of Hakim’s cosmogony is a spectral god. This godhead is as majestically devoid of origin as of name or face. It is an unchanging god, but its image cast nine shadows which, condescending to creation, conceived and presided over a first heaven. Out of this first demiurgic crown there issued a second, with its own angel
The world we live in is a mistake, a clumsy parody. Mirrors and fatherhood, because they multiply and confirm the parody, are abominations. Revulsion is the cardinal virtue. Two ways (whose choice the Prophet left free) may lead us there: abstinence or the orgy, excess of the flesh or its denial. Hakim’s personal heaven and hell were no less hopeless:
Those who deny the Word, those who deny the Veil and the Face [runs a curse from the Hidden Rose], are promised a wondrous Hell: for each lost soul shall hold sway over 999 empires of fire; and in each empire, over 999 mountains of fire; and in each mountain, over 999 castles of fire; and in each castle, over 999 chambers of fire; and in each chamber, over 999 beds of fire; and in each bed he will find himself everlastingly tormented by 999 shapes of fire, which will have his face and his voice.
This is confirmed in another surviving versicle:
In this life, ye suffer in a single body; in death and Retribution, in numberless numbers of bodies.