Collected Fictions (83 page)

*
Battle of Monte Caseros:
At this battle, in 1852, Rosas was defeated by forces commanded by Justo José Urquiza, and his tyranny ended.

*
Unitarian party:
The Unitarian party was a Buenos Aires-based party whose leaders tended to be European-educated liberals who wished to unite Argentina's several regions and economies (the Argentinian Confederation) into a single nation and wished also to unite that new Argentine economy with Europe's, through expanded exports: hence the party's name. The party's color was sky blue; thus the detail, later in the story, of the "sky blue china" in Pedro Salvadores' house.

*
They lived
... on
Calle Suipacha, not far from the corner of Temple:
Thus, in what was at this time a northern suburb of Buenos Aires about a mile north of the Plazade Mayo. This area, later to become the Barrio Norte, was clearly respectable but not yet fashionable (as it was to become after the yellow fever outbreak of 1871 frightened the upper classes out of the area south of the Plaza de Mayo up into the more northern district).

*
The tyrant's posse:
The Mazorca (or "corn cob," so called to stress its agrarian rather than urban roots), Rosas' private army, or secret police. The Mazorca was beyond the control of the populace, the army, or any other institution, and it systematically terrorized Argentina during the Rosas years.

*
Smashed all the sky blue china:
The color of the china used in the house is the color symbolizing the Unitarian party (see above, note to p. 336) and denounces Salvadores as a follower.

*
"In the House of Suddhoo":
Borges often drops hints as to where one might look to find clues not only to the story or essay in question but also to other stories or essays; he gives signposts to his own "intertextuality." In this case, the reader who looks at this Kipling story will find that there is a character in it named Bhagwan Dass; the name, and to a degree the character, reappear in "Blue Tigers," in the volume
Shakespeare's Memory.

*
Hormiga Negra:
"The Black Ant,"a gaucho bandit. Borges includes a note on Hormiga Negrain his essay on
Martín Fierro:
"During the last years of the nineteenth century, Guillermo Hoyo, better known as the 'Black Ant,' a bandit from the department ofSan Nicolás, fought (according to the testimony of Eduardo Gutiérrez) with bolos [stones tied to the ends of rope] and knife"
(Obras completas en colaboración
[Buenos Aires: Emecé,1979], p.546, trans. A. H.).

*
Rosas:
Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793-1877), tyrannical ruler of Argentina from 1835 to 1852, was in many ways a typical Latin American caudillo. He was the leader of the Federalist party and allied himself with the gauchos against the "city slickers" of Buenos Aires, whom he harassed and even murdered once he came to power. Other appearances of Rosas may be found in "Pedro Salvadores"
(In Praise of Darkness)
and "The Elderly Lady" (in this volume).

* And I prefer...
Here the
Obras completas
seems to have a textual error; the text reads
apto
(adjective: "germane, apt, appropriate") when logic would dictate
opto
(verb: "I prefer, I choose, I opt.").

* Hugo Ramirez Moroni:
JLB was fond of putting real people's names into his fictions; of course, he also put "just names" into his fictions. But into his forewords? Nevertheless, the translator has not been able to discover who this person, if person he be, was.

* The golden-pink coat of a certain horse famous in our literature:
The reference is to the
gauchesco
poem "Fausto" by Estanislao del Campo, which was fiercely criticized by Paul Groussac, among others, though praised by Calixto Oyuela ("never charitable with
gauchesco
writers," in JLB's own words) and others. The color of the hero's horse (it was an
overo rosado)
came in for a great deal of attack; Rafael Hernández, for instance, said such a color had never been found in a fast horse; it would be, he said, "like finding a three-colored cat." Lugones also said this color would be found only on a horse suited for farm work or running chores. (This information from JLB,"La poesía gauchesca,"
Discusión
[1932].)

* 2 Reyes 1:26:
This citation corresponds to what in most English Bibles is the Second Book of Samuel (2 Samuel); the first chapter of the "Second Book of Kings" has only eighteen verses, as the reader will note. In the
New
Catholic Bible,
however, 1 and 2 Samuel are indexed in the Table of Contents asiand 2 Kings, with the King James's 1 and 2 Kings bumped to 3 and 4 Kings. Though the translator's Spanish-language Bible uses the same divisions as the King James, one presumes that JLB was working from a "Catholic Bible" in Spanish. In a conversation with Norman Thomas diGiovanni, Borges insisted that this was a "prettier" name than "Samuel," so this text respects that sentiment. The text in question reads: "I am distressed for thee, my brother: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women." (See Daniel Balderston, "The 'Fecal Dialectic': Homosexual Panic and the Origin of Writing in Borges," in
¿Entiendes?:Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings,
ed. Emilie L. Bergmann and Paul Julian Smith [Durham: Duke University Press, 1995]. PP- 29-45, for an intriguing reading of this story and others.)

* Those two criollos:
There is no good word or short phrase for the Spanish word
criollo.
It is a word that indicates race, and so class; it always indicates a white-skinned person (and therefore presumed to be "superior") born in the New World colonies, and generally, though not always, to parents of Spanish descent (another putative mark of superiority). Here, however, clearly that last characteristic does not apply. JLB is saying with this word that the genetic or cultural roots of these men lie in Europe, and that their family's blood has apparently not mixed with black or Indian blood, and that they are fully naturalized as New Worlders and Argentines. The implicit reference to class (which an Argentine would immediately understand) is openly ironic.

* Costa Brava:"A
small town in the district of Ramallo, a province of Buenos Aires, not to be confused with the island of the same name in the Paraná River, scene of various battles, including a naval defeat of Garibaldi" (Fishburn and Hughes).
Bravo/a
means "tough, mean, angry," etc.; in Spanish, therefore, Borges can say the toughs gave Costa Bravaits
name,
while in translation one can only say they gave the town its reputation.

* The Maldonado:
The Maldonado was a stream that formed the northern boundary of the city of Buenos Aires at the turn of the century; the neighborhood around it, Palermo, was known as a rough part of town, and JLB makes reference to it repeatedly in his work. See the story "Juan Murafia," p. 370, for example. Thus, Fischbein and his family lived on the tough outskirts of the city. See also mention of this area on p. 359, below.

* I had started calling myself Santiago ... but there was nothing I could do about the Fischbein:
The terrible thing here, which most Spanish-language readers would immediately perceive, is that the little red-headed Jewish boy has given himself a saint's name: Santiago is "Saint James," and
as
St. James is the patron saint of Spain, Santiago Matamoros, St. James the Moor Slayer. The boy's perhaps unwitting self-hatred and clearly conscious attempt to "fit in" are implicitly but most efficiently communicated by JLB in these few words.

*
Juan Moreira:
Agaucho turned outlaw (1819-1874) who was famous during his lifetime and legendary after death. Like Jesse James and Billy the Kid in the United States, he was seen as a kind of folk hero, handy with (in Moreira's case) a knife, and hunted down and killed by a corrupt police. Like the U. S. outlaws, his fictionalized life, by Eduardo Gutiérrez, was published serially in a widely read magazine,
La Patria Argentina,
and then dramatized, most famously by José de Podestà. See below, in note to "The Encounter," p. 368).

*
Little Sheeny:
Fishburn and Hughes gloss this nickname (in Spanish
el rusito,
literally "Little Russian") as being a "slang term for Ashkenazi Jews ... (as opposed to immigrants from the Middle East, who were known as
turcos,
'Turks')." An earlier English translation gave this, therefore, as "sheeny," and I follow that solution. The slang used in Buenos Aires for ethnic groups was (and is) of course different from that of the English-speaking world, which leads to a barber of Italian extraction being called, strange to our ears, a gringo in the original Spanish version of the story "Juan Muraña" in this volume.

*
Calle Junín:
In Buenos Aires, running from the Plaza del Once to the prosperous northern district of the city; during the early years of the century, a stretch of Junín near the center of the city was the brothel district.

* Lunfardo:
For an explanation of this supposed "thieves' jargon," see the Foreword to this volume, p. 347.

* The corner of Bolivar and Venezuela:
Now in the center of the city, near the Plaza de Mayo, and about two blocks from the National Library, where Borges was the director. Thus the narrator ("Borges") is entering a place he would probably have been known to frequent (in "Guayaquil," the narrator says that "everyone knows" that he lives on Calle Chile, which also is but a block or so distant); the impression the man gives, of having been sitting at the table a good while, reinforces the impression that he'd been waiting for"Borges."But this area, some six blocks south of Rivadavia, the street "where the Southside began," also marks more or less the northern boundary of the neighborhood known as San Telmo, where Rosendo Juárez says he himself lives.

* His neck scarf:
Here Rosendo Juárez is wearing the tough guy's equivalent of a tie, the
chalina,
a scarf worn much like an ascot, doubled over, the jacket buttoned up tight to make a large "bloom" under the chin. This garb marks a certain "type" of character.

*
"You've put the story in a novel":
Here "the man sitting at the table,"Rosendo Juárez, is referring to what was once perhaps JLB's most famous story, "Man on Pink Corner," in
A Universal History of Iniquity,
q.v., though he calls it a novel rather than a story.

*
Neighborhood of the Maldonado:
The Maldonado was the creek marking the northern boundary of the city of Buenos Aires around the turn of the century; Rosendo Juárez"words about the creek are true and mark the story as being told many years after the fact. The neighborhood itself would have been Palermo.

* Calle Cabrera:
In Palermo, a street in a rough neighborhood not far from the center of the city.

* A kid in black that wrote poems:
Probably Evaristo Carriego, JLB's neighbor in Palermo who was the first to make poetry about the "riffraff "—the knife fighters and petty toughs—of the slums. JLB wrote a volume of essays dedicated to Carriego.

* Moreira:
See note to "Unworthy," p. 355.

* Chacarita:
one of the city's two large cemeteries; La Recoleta was where the elite buried their dead, so Chacarita was the graveyard of the "commoners."

* San Telmo:
One of the city's oldest districts, it was a famously rough neighborhood by the time of the story's telling. Fishburn and Hughes associate it with a popular song that boasts of its "fighting spirit" and note that the song would have given "an ironic twist to the last sentence of the story."

* Lunfardo:
For an explanation of this supposed "thieves' jargon," see the Foreword to this volume, p. 347.

* One of those houses on Calle Junín:
See note to "Unworthy," p. 355.

* Moreira:
See note to "Unworthy," p. 355.

*
Martín Fierro and Don Segundo Sombra:
Unlike the real-life Juan Moreira, Martín Fierro and Don Segundo Sombra were fictional gauchos. Martín Fierrois the hero of the famous poem of the same name by José Hernández; the poem is centrally important in Argentine literature and often figures in JLB's work, as a reference, as a subject of meditation in essays, or rewritten (in "The End," in the volume
Fictions,
q.v.); his headstrong bravery and antiauthoritarianism are perhaps the traits that were most approved by the "cult of the gaucho" to which JLB alludes here. Don Segundo Sombra is the protagonist of a novel by Ricardo Gúiraldes; for this novel, see the note, below, to "The Gospel According to Mark," p. 399. It is interesting that JLB notes that the model for the gaucho shifts from a real-life person to fictional characters, perhaps to indicate that the true gaucho has faded from the Argentine scene and that (in a common Borges trope) all that's left is the memory of the gaucho.

* The Podestás and the Gutierrezes:
The Podestà family were circus actors; in 1884, some ten years after the outlaw gaucho Juan Moreira's death, Juande Podestà put on a pantomime version of the life of Moreira."Two years later," Fishburn and Hughes tell us, "he added extracts from the novel [by Eduardo Gutiérrez]to his performance." The plays were extraordinarily successful. Eduardo Gutiérrez was a prolific and relatively successful, if none too "literary," novelist whose potboilers were published serially in various Argentine magazines. His
Juan Moreira,
however, brought himself and Moreira great fame, and (in the words of the
Diccionario Oxford de Literatura Española e Hisf
ano-Americana)
"created the stereotype of the heroic gaucho."The dictionary goes on to say that"Borges claims that Gutiérrezis much superior to Fenimore Cooper."

*
Palermo:
A district in Buenos Aires, populated originally by the Italians who immigrated to Argentina in the nineteenth century. Trapani's name marks him as a "native" of that quarter, while Borges and his family moved there probably in search of a less expensive place to live than the central district where they had been living; Borges always mentioned the "shabby genteel" people who lived in that "shabby genteel" neighborhood (Rodriguez Monegal, pp. 48-55).