Collected Fictions (80 page)

* Amorim:
Enrique Amorim (1900-1960) was a Uruguayan novelist, related to Borges by marriage. He wrote about the pampas and the gaucho (and gaucho life); Borges thought his
El Paisano Aguilar
"a closer description of gaucho life than Gùiraldes' more famous
Don Segundo Sombra"
(Fishburn and Hughes).

* Local color in Maurice Barresor Rodríguez Larreta:
Barres (1862-1923) was a "French writer whose works include a text on bullfighting entitled
Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort"
(Fishburn and Hughes); one can see what the narrator is getting at in terms of romanticizing the foreign. Enrique Rodriguez Larreta (1875-1961) wrote historical novels; one, set in Avila and Toledo in the time of Philip II (hence the reference to that name in the text) and titled
La
gloriade Don Ramiro,
used an archaic Spanish for the dialogue; clearly this suggests the archaism of Menard's
Quixote.
(Here I paraphrase Fishburn and Hughes.)

* The Siamese Twin Mystery:
A novel by Ellery Queen, published in 1933. Here the literary critic-narrator is lamenting the fact that Quain's novel was overshadowed by the much more popular Queen's.

* Title:
This story has generally appeared under the tide"Funes the Memorious," and it must be the brave (or foolhardy) translator who dares change such an odd and memorable title. Nor would the translator note (and attempt to justify) his choice of a translation except in unusual circumstances. Here, however, the title in the original Spanish calls for some explanation. The title is"Funes el memorioso"; die word
memorioso
is not an odd Spanish word; it is in fact perfectly common, if somewhat colloquial. It simply means "having a wonderful or powerful memory," what in English one might render by the expression "having a memory like an elephant." The beauty of the Spanish is that the entire long phrase is compressed into a single word, a single adjective, used in the original title as an epithet: Funes die Elephant-Memoried. (The reader can see that that translation won't do.) The word "memorisi" is perhaps die closest thing that common English yields up without inventing a new word such as "memorious," which strikes the current translator as vaguely Lewis Carroll-esque, yet "memorisi" has something vaguely show business about it, as though Funes worked vaudeville or the carnival sideshows. The French tide of this story is the lovely eighteenth-century-sounding
"Funesou La Mémoire";
with a nod to JLB's great admirer John Bardi, I have chosen "Funes, His Memory."

* The Banda Oriental:
The "eastern bank" of the River Plate, die old name of Uruguay before it became a country, and a name used for many years afterward by the "old-timers" or as a sort of nickname.

* Pedro Leandro Ipuche:
The Uruguayan Ipuche was a friend of die young ultraist-period Borges (ca.1925), with whom (along with Ricardo Guiraldes, author of the important novel
Don Segundo Sombra)
he worked on the literary magazine
Proa
(Fishburn and Hughes).
Proa
was an influential little magazine, and Borges and friends took it seriously; they were engaged, as Rodriguez Monegal quotes the "Autobiographical Essay" as saying, in "renewing both prose and poetry."

* Fray Bentos:
"A small town on the banks of the Uruguay River, famous for its meat-canning industry. In his youth Borges was a regular visitor to his cousins' ranch near Fray Bentos"(Fishburn and Hughes). Haedo was in fact the family name of these cousins.

* The thirty-three Uruguayan patriots:
The "Thirty-three," as they were called, were a band of determined patriots under the leadership of Juan Antonio Lavalleja who crossed the River Plate from Buenos Aires to Montevideo in order to "liberate" the Banda Oriental (Uruguay) from the Spaniards. Their feat of bravery, under impossible odds, immortalized them in the mythology of the Southern Cone. For fuller detail, see the note to p. 474, for the story"Avelino Arredondo"in the volume
The Book of Sand.

*
Euclides daCunha:
Cunha (1866-1909) was a very wellknown Brazilian writer whose most famous novel is a fictional retelling of an uprising in the state of Bahia. He was moved by the spiritualism (Fishburn and Hughes note its mystical qualities) of the rebels.

*
Antonio Conselheiro:
(1828-1897). Conselheiro was "a Brazilian religious dissident who led a rebellion in Canudos, in the northern state of Bahía. The rebels were peasants ... who lived in a system of communes, working out their own salvation. They rose against the changes introduced by the new Republican government, which they regarded as the Antichrist.... Conselheiro's head was cut off and put on public display" (Fishburn and Hughes). His real name was Antonio Maciel;
conselheiro
means "counselor," and so his messianic, ministerial role is here emphasized.

*
Almafuerte:
The pseudonym of Pedro Bonifacio Palacio (1854-1917), one of Argentina's most beloved poets. A kind of role model and hero to young writers, akin to the phenomenon of Dylan Thomas in Britain and the United States a few years ago, Almafuerte was one of JLB's most admired contemporaries.

* "It'd been longer than seven years that I'd gone without seeing my children. I found them that day, and I
wouldn't have it so's I looked to them like a man on his way to a knife fight":
It is not these words that need noting, but an"intertextual event." It is about here that the Argentine reader will probably realize what this story is about: It is a retelling of the end of José Hernández' famous tale
Martín Fierro.
As Fierrois a knife fighter, and as a black man figures in the poem, and as there is a famous song contest, the reader will put two and two together, no doubt, even before Martin Fierro's name is mentioned a few lines farther on. This is the way Fishburn and Hughes state the situation: "The episode alluded to in 'The End' is the
payada,
or song contest, between Martín Fierro and
el moreno
["the black man"] who was the brother of the murdered negro. In the contest the gauchos discuss metaphysical themes, but towards the end
el moreno
reveals his identity, and his desire for revenge is made clear. In keeping with the more conciliatory tone of pt. 2 [of Hernandez' original poem] a fight is prevented between the two contestants, each going his own way. "The End" is a gloss on this episode, the fight that might have taken place." By this late in the volume, JLB's Preface to the stories, hinting at the coexistence of a "famous book" in this story, may have dimmed in the reader's memory, but for the Latin American reader, the creeping familiarity of the events, like the echoes of Shakespeare in the assassination of Kilpatrick in "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero," should come into the foreground in this section of the story, and the reader, like Ryan in that other story, make the "connection."

* Buenos Aires:
Here the province, not the city. The reference is to the northern border, near Entre Ríos and Santa Fe provinces, on the Paraná River.

* Catriel:
Cipriano Catriel (d. 1874). Catriel was an Indian chieftain who fought against the Argentines in the Indian wars. Later, however, he fought on the side of the revolutionary forces (Fishburn and Hughes).

* His gaucho trousers:
This is the
chiripá,
a triangular worsted shawl tied about the waist with the third point pulled up between the legs and looped into a knot to form a rudimentary pant, or a sort of diaper. It is worn over a pair of pantaloons (ordinarily white) that "stick out" underneath. Sometimes, incredible as it strikes Anglo-Saxons that the extraordinarily
machista
gauchos would wear such clothing (but think of the Scots' kilts), the pantaloons had lace bottoms.

* Rio Grande doSul:
The southernmost state of Brazil, bordering both Argentina and Uruguay on the north. Later in this story, a certain wildness is attributed to this region; JLB often employed the implicit contrast between the more "civilized" city and province of Buenos Aires (and all of Argentina) and the less "developed" city of Montevideo and nation of Uruguay and its "wilderness of horse country," the "plains," "the interior," here represented by Rio Grande do Sul.

* Paso del Molino:
"A lower-to-middle-class district outside Montevideo" (Fishburn and Hughes).

Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden

* The Auracan or Pampas tongue:
The Pampas Indians were a nomadic people who inhabited the plains of the Southern Cone at the time of the Conquest; they were overrun by the Araucans, and the languages and cultures merged; today the two names are essentially synonymous (Fishburn and Hughes). English seems not to have taken the name Pampas for anything but the plains of Argentina.

* Pulpería:
A country store or general store, though not the same sort of corner grocery-store-and-bar, the
esquina
or
almacén,
that Borges uses as a setting in the stories that take place in the city. The
pulpería
would have been precisely the sort of frontier general store that one sees in American westerns.

* Montoneros: Montoneros
were the men of guerrilla militias (generally gauchos) that fought in the civil wars following the wars of independence. They tended to rally under the banner of a leader rather than specifically under the banner of a cause; Fishburn and Hughes put it in the following way: "[T]heir allegiance to their leader was personal and direct, and they were largely indifferent to his political leanings."

*
Lavalle:
Juan GaloLavalle (1797-1841) was an Argentine hero who fought on the side of the Unitarians, the centralizing Buenos Aires forces, against the Federalist
montoneros
of the outlying provinces and territories, whose most famous leader was Juan Manuel de Rosas, the fierce dictator who appears in several of JLB's stories. The mention here of Lavalle and López would indeed locate this story in 1829, a few months before Lavalle was defeated by the combined Rosas and López forces (Fishburn and Hughes). One would assume, then, that the man who fathered Tadeo Isidoro Cruz was fighting with Rosas' forces themselves.

* Suárez' cavalry:
Probably Manuel Isidoro Suárez (1759-1843), JLB's mother's maternal grandfather, who fought on the side of the Unitarians in the period leading up to 1829 (Fishburn and Hughes). Borges may have picked up the protagonist's name, as well, in part from his forebear.

* Thirty
Christian men... Sgt. Ma}. Eusebia Laprida... two hundred Indians:
Eusebio Laprida (1829-1898) led eighty, not thirty, men against a regular army unit of two hundred soldiers, not Indians, in a combat at the Cardoso Marshes on January 25, not 23,1856 (data, Fishburn and Hughes). The defeat of the Indians took place during a raid in 1879. JLB here may be conflating the famous Thirty-three led by Lavalleja against Montevideo (see note to"Avelino Arredondo"in
The Book of Sand),
Laprida's equally heroic exploit against a larger "official" army unit, and Laprida's exploit against the Indians two decades later.

* Manuel Mesa executed in the Plazade la Victoria:
Manuel Mesa (1788-1829) fought on the side of Rosas and the Federalists. In 1829 he organized a force of
montoneros
and friendly Indians and battled Lavalle, losing that engagement. In his retreat, he was met by Manuel Isidoro Suárez and captured. Suárez sent him to Buenos Aires, where he was executed in the Plaza Victoria.

*
The deserter Martín Fierro:
As JLB tells the reader in the Afterword to this volume, this story has been a retelling, from the "unexpected" point of view of a secondary character, of the famous gaucho epic poem
Martín Fierro,
by José Hernández. Since this work is a classic (or
the
classic) of nineteenth-century Argentine literature, every reader in the Southern Cone would recognize "what was coming": Martin Fierro, the put-upon gaucho hero, stands his ground against the authorities, and his friend abandons his uniform to stand and fight with him. This changing sides is a recurrent motif in Borges; see "Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden" in this volume, for instance. It seems to have been more interesting to JLB that one might change sides than that one would exhibit the usual traits of heroism. Borges is also fond of rewriting classics: See "The House of Asterion," also in this volume, and note that the narrator in "The Zahir" retells to himself, more or less as the outline of a story he is writing, the story of the gold of the Nibelungen. One could expand the list to great length.

* Bagé:
A city in southern Rio Grande do Sul province, in Brazil.

*
Gualeguay:
"A rural town and department in the province of Entre Ríos"(Fishburn and Hughes).

*
Lanús:
"A town and middle-class district in Greater Buenos Aires, south-west of the city" (Fishburn and Hughes).

*
Almagro:
A lower-middle-class neighborhood near the center of Buenos Aires.

* Calle Liniers:
As the story says, a street in the Almagro neighborhood.

*
Paseo de Julio:
Now the Avenida Alem. This street runs parallel with the waterfront; at the time of this story it was lined with tenement houses and houses of ill repute.

*
A westbound Lacroze:
The Lacroze Tramway Line served the northwestern area of Buenos Aires at the time; today the city has an extensive subway system.

*
Warnes:
A street in central Buenos Aires near the commercial district of Villa Crespo, where the mill is apparently located.

*
Gualeguay chú:
"A town on the river of the same name in the province of Entre Ríos, opposite the town of Fray Bentos, with which there is considerable interchange" (Fishburn and Hughes).