Collected Fictions (84 page)

* Juan Muraña:
As noted in "The Encounter," at one point Juan
Moreira
was the very model of the gaucho and therefore of a certain kind of swaggering masculinity; Juan Muraña's name so closely resembles Moreira's that one suspects that JLB is trading on it to create the shade that so literarily haunts this story. In the dream, especially, Muraña has the look of the gaucho:dressed all in black, with long hair and mustache, etc. Nor, one suspects, is it pure coincidence that the story"Juan Muraña"immediately follows the story in which Juan Moreira's ghost plays such a large part.

*
Around the time of the Centennial:
The Centennial of the Argentine Declaration of Independence, signed 1810, so the story takes place around 1910.

*
A man named Luchessi:
Luchessi's name marks him too as a "native" of Palermo, though he has now moved into a district in southern Buenos Aires, near the bustling (if "somewhat dilapidated" [Fishburn and Hughes]) Plaza de la Constitución and its railway station.

*
Barracas:
Fishburn and Hughes gloss this as a "working-class district in southern Buenos Aires near La Boca and Constitución [see note just above] and bordering the Riachuelo."

* Wop:
See note to "Little Sheeny," p. 355, above. In Spanish,
gringo
was the word used to refer to Italian immigrants; see A Note on the Translation.

*
Calle Thames:
In Palermo.

*
Wars of independence:
For the independence not only of Argentina but of the entire continent. During this period there were many famous generals and leaders, many named in the first pages of this story. Thus Rubiois associated with the grand forces of continental self-determination that battled in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century.

*
Chacabuco, Cancha Rayada, Maipú, Arequipa:
Chacabuco (Chile,1817): The Army of the Andes under General José San Martín fought the Spanish royalist forces under General Marcò del Pont and won. Cancha Rayada (Chile, March 1818): San Martin's army was defeated by the royalists and independence was now very uncertain. Maipú(Chile, April 1818): San Martin's army decisively defeated the royalist forces and secured the independence of Chile. Arequipa ( Peru, 1825): General Antonio José de Sucre, leading Bolivar's army, accepted Spain's surrender of the city after a siege; this, after the Battle of Ayacucho (see below), meant the full independence of Peru.

*
He and José de Olavarría exchanged swords:
Olavarría (1801-1845) was an Argentine military leader who fought at the battles just mentioned and perhaps at the great Battle of Ayacucho, which determined the full independence of Peru. Exchanging swords was a "romantic custom among generals, and Borges recalls that his own grandfather had exchanged swords with Gen. Mansilla on the eve of a battle" (Fishburn and Hughes). Olavarría and Lavalle (see below) are probably the models for Rubio.

* The famous battle of Cerro Alto ... Cerro Bermejo:
However famous this battle may be, I confess I have not been able to locate it. I hope (for the good name of the humble research that has gone into these notes) that this is an example of Borges' famous put-ons (see A Note on the Translation). I feel that it may well be; this is the bird's-eye statement given in the
Penguin History of Latin America
(Edwin Williamson, New York/London: Penguin, 1992), p. 228, of the years 1823-1824 as they apply to Bolivar (who is mentioned as winning this battle): "Arriving in Peru in September 1823, Bolivar began to prepare for the final offensive against the royalists. By the middle of 1824 he launched his campaign, winning an important battle at Junin, which opened to him the road to Lima, the ultimate prize. In December, while Bolivar was in Lima, Marshal Sucre defeated Viceroy De la Serna's army at the battle of Ayacucho. Spanish power in America had been decisively broken and the Indies were at last free." Thus, it appears that in April of 1823 Bolivar was planning battles, not fighting them. If it is a real battle, I ask a kind reader to inform me of the date and location so that future editions, should there be any, may profit from the knowledge.

*
Ayacucho:
In Peru between Lima and Cuzco (1824). Here Sucre's Peruvian forces decisively defeated the Spanish royalists.

*
Ituzaingó:
In the province of Corrientes (1827). Here the Argentine and Uruguayan forces defeated the Brazilians.

*
Carlos Maria Alvear:
Alvear (1789-1852) had led the Argentine revolutionary forces against the Spanish forces in Montevideo in 1814 and defeated them. When he conspired against the Unitarian government, however, he was forced into exile in Uruguay, but was recalled from exile to lead the republican army of Argentina against the Brazilians. He defeated the Brazilians at Ituzaingó, ending the war. He was a diplomat for the Rosas government.

*
Rosas:
Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793-1877), tyrannical ruler of Argentina from 1835 to 1852. See note to Foreword, p. 345.

*
Rubio was a Lavalle man:
Juan Galo Lavalle (1797-1841), chosen to lead the Unitarians against the Federalists under Rosas, whom Lavalle defeated in 1828. Lavalle was defeated in turn by Rosas in 1829; then "after ten years in Montevideo he returned to lead the Unitarians in another attempt to oust Rosas" (Fishburn and Hughes). Thus he spent his life defending the policies and the principles of the Buenos Aires political party against those of the gaucho party headed by Rosas.

*
The
montonero
insurgents:
These were gaucho guerrillas who fought under their local caudillo against the Buenos Aires-based Unitarian forces. While it is claimed that they would have had no particular political leanings, just a sense of resistance to the centralizing tendencies of the Unitarians, the effect would have been that they were in alliance with the Federalists, led by Rosas, etc.

*
Oribe's White army:
The White party, or Blancos, was "a Uruguayan political party founded by the followers of Oribe,... [consisting] of rich landowners who supported the Federalist policy of Rosas in Buenos Aires___The Blancos are now known

as the Nationalists and represent the conservative classes" (Fishburn and Hughes). Manuel Oribe (1792-1856) was a hero of the Wars of Independence and fought against the Brazilian invasion of Uruguay. He served as minister of war and the navy under Rivera; then, seeking the presidency for himself, he sought the support of Rosas. Together they attacked Montevideo in a siege that lasted eight days. (This information, Fishburn and Hughes). See also note to p. 386, "Battle of Manantiales,"in the story "The Other Duel."

*
The tyrant:
Rosas (see various notes above).

*
Pavónand Cepeda:
Cepeda (Argentina, 1859) and Pavón (Argentina, 1861) were battles between the Confederation forces under Urquiza and the Buenos Aires-based Porteño forces (basically Unitarian) under Mitre, fought to determine whether Buenos Aires would join the Argentine Confederation or would retain its autonomy. Buenos Aires lost at Cepeda but won at Pavón, enabling Mitre to renegotiate the terms of association between the two entities, with more favorable conditions for Buenos Aires.

*
Yellow fever epidemic:
1870-1871.

*
Married ... one Saavedra, who was a clerk in the Ministry of Finance:
Fishburn and Hughes tell us that "employment in the Ministry of Finance is considered prestigious, and consistent with the status of a member of an old and well-established family." They tie "Saavedra" to Corneliode Saavedra, a leader in the first criollo government of Argentina, in 1810, having deposed the Spanish viceroy. This is a name, then, that would have had resonances among the Argentines similar to a Jefferson, Adams, or Marshall among the Americans, even if the person were not directly mentioned as being associated with one of the founding families. "Saavedra" will also invariably remind the Spanish-language reader of Miguel de Cervantes, whose second (maternal) surname was Saavedra.

*
She still abominated Artigas, Rosas, and Urquiza:
Rosas has appeared in these notes several times. Here he is the archenemy not only of the Buenos Aires Unitarians but of the family as well, because he has confiscated their property and condemned them to "shabby gentility," as Borges would have put it. José Gervasio Artigas (1764-1850) fought against the Spaniards for the liberation of the Americas but was allied with the gauchos and the Federalist party against the Unitarians; in 1815 he defeated the Buenos Aires forces but was later himself defeated by help from Brazil. Justo José Urquiza (1801-1870) was president of the Argentinian Confederation from 1854 to 1860, having long supported the Federalists (and Rosas) against the Unitarians. As a military leader he often fought against the Unitarians, and often defeated them. In addition, he was governor (and caudillo) of Entre Ríos province.

* Easterners
instead of
Uruguayans: Before Uruguay became a country in 1828, it was a Spanish colony which, because it lay east of the Uruguay River, was called the Banda Oriental ("eastern shore"). (The Uruguay meets the Paranáto create the huge estuary system called the Río de la Plata, or River Plate; Montevideo is on the eastern bank of this river, Buenos Aires on the west.)
La Banda Oriental
is an old-fashioned name for the country, then, and
orientales
("Easterners") is the equally old-fashioned name for those who live or were born there. Only the truly "elderly" have a right to use this word.

*
Plaza del Once:
Pronounced
óhn-say,
not
wunce.
This is generally called Plaza Once, but the homonymy of the English and Spanish words make it advisable, the translator thinks, to modify the name slightly in order to alert the English reader to the Spanish ("eleven"), rather than English ("onetime" or "past"), sense of the word. Plaza Once is one of Buenos Aires' oldest squares, "associated in Borges's memory with horse-drawn carts" (Fishburn and Hughes), though later simply a modern square.

*
Barracas:
Once a district virtually in the country, inhabited by the city's elite, now a "working-class district" in southern Buenos Aires, near the Plaza Constitución (Fishburn and Hughes).

*
Sra. Figueroa's car and driver.
Perhaps the Clara Glencairn de Figueroa of the next story in this volume, "The Duel"; certainly the social sphere in which these two Sras. Figueroa move is the same.

*
Benzoin:
Probably used, much as we use aromatic preparations today, to clear the nasal passages and give a certain air of health to the elderly. An aromatic preparation called
alcoholado
(alcohol and bay leaves, basically) is much used in Latin America as a kind of cureall for headaches and various aches and pains and for "refreshing" the head and skin; one presumes this "benzoin" was used similarly.

*
One of Rosas' posses:
The Mazorca ("corncob," so called [or so folk etymology has it] for the Federalist party's agrarian ties), a private secret police force-c«m-army employed by Rosas to intimidate and terrorize the Unitarians after his rise to Federalist power. The Mazorcas beat and murdered many people, and so the elderly lady is right to have been shocked and frightened. (See also the story "Pedro Salvadores"in
In Praise of Darkness.)

*
Clara Glencairn de Figueroa:
Clara's name is given here as Christian name + patronymic or family (father's) name +
de
indicating "belonging to" or, less patriarchally, "married to" + the husband's last name. This indication of a character by full name, including married name, underscores Clara's equivocal position in life and in the world of art that she aspires to: a woman of some (limited) talent in her own right, with a "career" or at least a calling in which she is entitled to
personal
respect, versus the "wife of the ambassador." This tension is noted a couple of pages later, when "Mrs." Figueroa, having won a prize, now wants to return to Cartagena "in her own right," not as the ambassador's wife that she had been when she had lived there before. It is hard for the English reader, with our different system of naming, to perceive the subtleties of JLB's use of the conventions of naming in Hispanic cultures.

*
Juan Crisóstomo Lafinur:
Lafinur (1797-1824), a great-uncle of Borges', was the holder of the chair of philosophy "at the newly-formed Colegio de la Unión del Sud" (Fishburnand Hughes) and thus a "personage."

*
Colonel Pascual Pringles:
Pringles (1795-1831) was a distinguished Unitarian military leader from the province of San Luis. "[Rather than surrender his sword to the enemy" in defeat, Fishburn and Hughes tell us, "he broke it and threw himself into the river."

*
The solid works of certain nineteenth-century Genoese bricklayers:
This snide comment refers to the Italian immigrant laborers and construction foremen who built those "old houses of Buenos Aires" that Marta paints; she is influenced, that is, not by an Italian school of painting (which would be acceptable, as "European" was good; see the first line of the next paragraph in the text) but by Italian immigrant (and therefore, in Buenos Aires society hierarchy, "undesirable" or "inferior") artisans. Note in "The Elderly Lady" the narrator's mild bigotry in the statement that one of the daughters married a "Sr. Molinari, who though of Italian surname was a professor of Latin and a very well-educated man." The social lines between the old criollo families (descendants of European, especially Spanish, colonists), the newer immigrant families, those with black or Indian blood, etc. were clear, especially in the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth.

*
Mrs. Figueroa:
Here, clear in the Spanish, though difficult to convey in the English, the judge slights Clara Glencairn de Figueroa by referring to her by her married name (Figueroa's
wife)
rather than by her "personal" and "professional" name, Clara Glencairn. She is looked down on, as the story subtly shows, for her social standing, which is in contrast to the
vie bohème
that she would like to think she had lived and the reputation as a painter she would like to think she had earned for herself. Note "Clara Glencairn" throughout the paragraph on p. 383, for the more "professional" or "personally respectful" mode of naming, and note the way the story swings between the two modes as one or another of Clara's "statuses" is being emphasized.