Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (23 page)

The Maker

This story may be thought of as autobiographical—Homer as an exaltation of myself, his blindness as my blindness, his acceptance of darkness as my acceptance. On the other hand, the departures from autobiography are striking. Blindness came to me as a slow twilight, not as a revelation; no Iliads and no Odysseys ever awaited me. When I first conceived this piece, I hesitated between Homer and Milton. Milton, however, is almost a contemporary, and also—as Dr. Johnson felt—a not very lovable figure. But Homer, as old as Western civilization itself, is a myth and so may quite easily be made into another myth. Eleven years after writing “The Maker,” I seem to have recast my fable—without being aware of it—into a more narrowly autobiographical poem called “In Praise of Darkness.” As for Milton, I have paid due tribute to him in a sonnet entitled “A Rose and Milton.”

An early translator was worried that there was no strict English equivalent for the words “El hacedor,” my Spanish title. I could only inform him that “
hacedor
” was my own translation of the English “maker,” as used by Dunbar in his “Lament.”

Ever since 1934, the writing of short prose pieces—fables, parables, brief narratives—has given me a certain mysterious satisfaction. I think of such pages as these as I think of coins— small material objects, hard and bright, tokens of something else.

The Intruder

In the fall of 1965, the Buenos Aires bibliophile Gustavo Fillol Day asked me for a short story to be published by him in one of those fine and secret editions meant for the happy few. Around that time I had been rereading Kipling’s
Plain Tales from the Hills
, and I told Fillol that I had a story in mind. The brevity and straightforwardness of the young Kipling tempted me, since I had always written very involved and many-faceted narratives. A few months later I was ready to get down to work, and at the beginning of 1966 I dictated “The Intruder” to my mother.

Without my suspecting it, the hint for this story—perhaps the best I have ever written—came out of a chance conversation with my friend don Nicolás Paredes sometime back in the late twenties. Commenting on the decadence of tango lyrics, which even then went in for “loud self-pity” among sentimental
compadritos
betrayed by their wenches, Paredes remarked dryly, “Any man who thinks five minutes straight about a woman is no man—he’s a queer.” Love among such people was obviously ruled out; I knew that their real passion would be friendship. Out of this rather abstract set of ideas I evolved my story. I placed it in an almost nameless town to the south of Buenos Aires more than seventy years ago so that nobody could dispute the details. Really there are only two characters—the two brothers. Of them, we are allowed to hear only what the elder brother says; it is he who takes all the decisions, even the last one. I made them brothers for the sake of likelihood and, of course, to avoid unsavory implications.

I was stuck at the end of the story, unsure of the words

Cristián would say. My mother, who from the outset thoroughly

disliked the tale, at that point gave me the words I needed without a moment’s hesitation.

“The Intruder” was, by the way, the first of my new ventures into straightforward storytelling. From this beginning I went on to write many others, ultimately collecting them under the title
El informe de Brodie
(Doctor Brodie’s Report).

The Immortals

Blake wrote that were our senses closed—were we made blind, deaf, dumb, and so forth—we should see all things as they are: endless. “The Immortals” came out of that strange idea and also out of Rupert Brooke’s derivative line, “And see, no longer blinded by our eyes.” We acknowledge this first debt by calling one of the characters don Guillermo Blake.

Thrice over I attempted writing the story. First with Marta Mosquera Eastman and later with Alicia Jurado. They may still have copies of those early drafts. The story was to have been called “The Chosen One.” For some reason or other, each of these schemes was dropped. Then, in 1966, I took the story up again with Bioy-Casares. By that time, Bioy and I had invented a new way of telling gruesome and uncanny tales. It lay in understating the grimness and essential horror while playing up certain humorous aspects—a kind of graft between Alfred Hitchcock and the Marx Brothers. This not only made for more amusing and less pretentious writing, but at the same time underlined the horror. We developed the technique in our comic detective saga,
Six Problems for don Isidro Parodi
, and, more openly, in the first of the
Two Memorable Fantasies
, “The Witness.” In fact, some of the personages in “The Immortals” are taken from the
Six Problems
, and in the present story are fated to a terrible eternity. Another detail may be pointed out, the circumstance that all the characters—including the very Frankenstein of the story, the maker of monsters Dr. Narbondo—are also blatant fools and indulge in a silly jargon all their own.

The story deals in its own way with the problem of immortality. Since our only proof of personal death is statistical, and inasmuch as a new generation of deathless men may be already on its way, I have for years lived in fear of never dying. Such an idea as immortality would, of course, be unbearable. In “The Immortals” we are face to face with people who are only immortal and nothing else, and the prospect, I trust, is appalling. I think that this joint story (I can say this without undue vanity because I wrote it with someone else) is among my very best and that, despite its having been overlooked by Argentine critics, it may yet come into its own.

The Meeting

I seem to be telling the same story over and over again. Obviously, “The Meeting” is at heart the identical tale I have told in another new story of mine, “Juan Muraña.” It is also linked to a fairly recent sonnet called “Allusion to a Shadow of the Nineties,” which is about Muraña’s knife, and to a short prose poem, “The Dagger,” written I think in the late forties. Perhaps not so obvious is the fact that when I wrote these things I was quite unaware of repeating myself or of attempting variations. Precisely what takes over my mind in these cases, I do not know.

Spinoza’s doctrine of things having a life of their own, or of wanting to persist in their own being, has struck me as particularly true of those things, such as weapons, meant for quite specific ends. A dagger, for example, has to fulfill a destiny. In the story, the two knives have a will of their own, ruling the hapless young men who are supposed to be wielding them. Duncan and Uriarte are gentlemen, but the knives turn them into gauchos. In order to make this sufficiently clear, I have given Uriarte, who is a coward, the victory.

Back of all this lies my personal—or perhaps Argentine—obsession with knives. In the United States or in England, where men tend to square off with their fists, people think of fighting as something to be done bare-handed. In Western or gangster films, we often see men throw down their arms and resort to their fists. To me this seems highly unnatural and even unconvincing, since there is no earthly reason for a cowboy or a gangster also to be something of a boxer. Among
compadritos
, if a man struck another he did it with the back of his hand, as a mere provocation, and then the real fighting began. To me there is real intimacy in the knife; in fact, in one of my poems, the last line runs: “and across my throat the intimate knife.” Firearms, of course, stand for marksmanship rather than courage. Fistfighting seems both harmless and undignified to an Argentine, while knife dueling has what Dr. Johnson said of the lives of sailors and seamen—“the dignity of danger.”

A few minor autobiographical elements have found their way into “The Meeting.” Álvaro Melián Lafinur was a childhood idol of mine and really was my cousin. He wore a dagger and a cloak and used to play the guitar, singing the Uruguayan ballads of Elias Regules which I mention, Álvaro was a quite bad poet and, as to be expected, an academician. It is in this latter role that I introduced him into “The Aleph.”

Pedro Salvadores

I think the tale of Pedro Salvadores is summed up fully enough in its last paragraph. I might therefore take this opportunity to say something about the way it was written. At first, I played with the idea of attempting historical research, but I soon realized that for aesthetic purposes oral tradition is truer than mere facts. (The early version of Chevy Chase seems clumsier than the later.) I perhaps first heard this story from my grandfather when I was five or six. I set it down, in part, as my mother recalled it. I recently learned that the nineteenth-century novelist Eduardo Gutiérrez had already recorded the story—I think in a book called
El puñal del tirano
—and that the man’s real name was José María Salvadores. As to Unitarians and Federals, these words should not be taken at face value. The Unitarians, as Sarmiento and Echeverría well knew, represented civilization, while the Federals stood for the barbarism of caudillo clans. Honorably, my own forebears on both sides were Unitarians.

Our own time has furnished us with many destinies like that of Pedro Salvadores; Anne Frank’s is perhaps the best known of them.

Rosendo’s Tale

This story is, obviously, a sequel and an antidote to “Streetcorner Man.” The earlier story was mistakenly read as realistic; the present one is a deliberate surmise as to how events might actually have happened on the night Francisco Real was murdered. When I wrote “Streetcorner Man,” I was—as I pointed out at the time—fully aware of its stagy unreality. As the years went by, however, and that story became embarrassingly popular, I wanted people to understand that I was not quite the fool I was being admired for.

I had been rereading my Browning and knew from
The
Ring
and the
Book
that a story could be told from different
points of view. Rosendo Juárez, the seeming coward of the first version, might perhaps be allowed to have his own say. So, instead of the braggart of “Streetcorner Man,” we get a Shavian character who sees through the romantic nonsense and childish vanity of dueling, and finally attains manhood and sanity. In the first telling, Francisco Real is mortally wounded in the chest; sadly and realistically enough, he was really stabbed in the back while fornicating with La Lujanera in a ditch.

In the days when the story took place, toughs and killers were aided and abetted by the authorities, since most of them were official bodyguards of leading political figures. They were also used during elections to intimidate voters, knowing very well that because of police support they could act with impunity. Seldom outlaws, they were simply strong-arm men. I recall an anecdote told me by a priest in Adrogué. He walked up to the polling booth during one election and was politely and firmly informed by the local Rosendo Juárez, “Father, you have already cast your vote.”

Incidentally, the reference to the young man dressed in black, who wrote Paredes’ letter for him, is to the poet Evaristo Carriego.

A Universal History of Infamy

Preface to the 1954 Edition

Preface to the First Edition

A Universal History of Infamy

The Dread Redeemer Lazarus Morell

Tom Castro, the Implausible Impostor

The Widow Ching, Lady Pirate

Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities

The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan

The Insulting Master of Etiquette Kôtsuké no Suké

The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv

Etcetera

A Theologian in Death

The Chamber of Statues

Tale of the Two Dreamers

The Wizard Postponed

The Mirror of Ink

A Double for Mohammed

The Generous Enemy

Of Exactitude in Science