Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (38 page)

The Book of Sand

Thy rope of sands . . .

George Herbert

The line is made up of an infinite number of points; the plane of an infinite number of lines; the volume of an infinite number of planes; the hypervolume of an infinite number of volumes . . . No, unquestionably this is not
more geometrico
the best way of beginning my story. To claim that it is true is nowadays the convention of every made-up story. Mine, however,
is
true.

I live alone in a fourth-floor apartment on Belgrano Street, in Buenos Aires. Late one evening, a few months back, I heard a knock at my door. I opened it and a stranger stood there. He was a tall man, with nondescript features or perhaps it was my myopia that made them seem that way. Dressed in grey and carrying a grey suitcase in his hand, he had an unassuming look about him. I saw at once that he was a foreigner. At first, he struck me as old; only later did I realize that I had been misled by his thin blond hair, which was, in a Scandinavian sort of way, almost white. During the course of our conversation, which was not to last an hour, I found out that he came from the Orkneys.

I invited him in, pointing to a chair. He paused awhile before speaking. A kind of gloom emanated from him as it does now from me.

‘I sell Bibles,’ he said.

Somewhat pedantically, I replied, ‘In this house are several English Bibles, including the first John Wiclif’s. I also have Cipriano de Valera’s, Luther’s which, from a literary viewpoint, is the worst and a Latin copy of the Vulgate. As you see, it’s not exactly Bibles I stand in need of.’

After a few moments of silence, he said, ‘I don’t only sell Bibles. I can show you a holy book I came across on the outskirts of Bikaner. It may interest you.’

He opened the suitcase and laid the book on a table. It was an octavo volume, bound in cloth. There was no doubt that it had passed through many hands. Examining it, I was surprised by its unusual weight. On the spine were the words ‘Holy Writ’ and, below them, ‘Bombay’.

‘Nineteenth-century, probably,’ I remarked.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve never found out.’

I opened the book at random. The script was strange to me. The pages, which were worn and typographically poor, were laid out in double columns, as in a Bible. The text was closely printed, and it was ordered in versicles. In the upper corners of the pages were Arabic numbers. I noticed that one left-hand page bore the number (let us say) 40,514 and the facing right-hand page 999. I turned the leaf; it was numbered with eight digits. It also bore a small illustration, like the kind used in dictionaries an anchor drawn with pen and ink, as if by a schoolboy’s clumsy hand.

It was at this point that the stranger said, ‘Look at the illustration closely. You’ll never see it again.’

I noted my place and closed the book. At once, I re-opened it. Page by page, in vain, I looked for the illustration of the anchor. ‘It seems to be a version of Scriptures in some Indian language, is it not?’ I said to hide my dismay.

‘No,’ he replied. Then, as if confiding a secret, he lowered his voice. ‘I acquired the book in a town out on the plain in exchange for a handful of rupees and a Bible. Its owner did not know how to read. I suspect that he saw the Book of Books as a talisman. He was of the lowest caste; nobody but other untouchables could tread his shadow without contamination. He told me his book was called the Book of Sand, because neither the book nor the sand has any beginning or end.’

The stranger asked me to find the first page.

I laid my left hand on the cover and, trying to put my thumb on the flyleaf, I opened the book. It was useless. Every time I tried, a number of pages came between the cover and my thumb. It was as if they kept growing from the book.

‘Now find the last page.’

Again I failed. In a voice that was not mine, I barely managed to stammer, ‘This can’t be.’

Still speaking in a low voice, the stranger said, ‘It can’t be, but it
is.
The number of pages in this book is no more or less than infinite. None is the first page, none the last. I don’t know why they’re numbered in this arbitrary way. Perhaps to suggest that the terms of an infinite series admit any number.’

Then, as if he were thinking aloud, he said, ‘If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time.’

His speculations irritated me. ‘You are religious, no doubt?’ I asked him.

‘Yes, I’m a Presbyterian. My conscience is clear. I am reasonably sure of not having cheated the native when I gave him the Word of God in exchange for his devilish book.’

I assured him that he had nothing to reproach himself for, and I asked if he were just passing through this part of the world. He replied that he planned to return to his country in a few days. It was then that I learned that he was a Scot from the Orkney Islands. I told him I had a great personal affection for Scotland, through my love of Stevenson and Hume.

‘You mean Stevenson and Robbie Burns,’ he corrected. While we spoke, I kept exploring the infinite book. With feigned indifference, I asked, ‘Do you intend to offer this curiosity to the British Museum?’

‘No. I’m offering it to you,’ he said, and he stipulated a rather high sum for the book.

I answered, in all truthfulness, that such a sum was out of my reach, and I began thinking. After a minute or two, I came up with a scheme.

‘I propose a swap,’ I said. ‘You got this book for a handful of rupees and a copy of the Bible. I’ll offer you the amount of my pension cheque, which I’ve just collected, and my black-letter Wiclif Bible. I inherited it from my ancestors.’

‘A black-letter Wiclif!’ he murmured.

I went to my bedroom and brought him the money and the book. He turned the leaves and studied the title page with all the fervour of a true bibliophile.

‘It’s a deal,’ he said.

It amazed me that he did not haggle. Only later was I to realize that he had entered my house with his mind made up to sell the book. Without counting the money, he put it away.

We talked about India, about Orkney, and about the Norwegian jarls who once ruled it. It was night when the man left. I have not seen him again, nor do I know his name.

I thought of keeping the Book of Sand in the space left on the shelf by the Wiclif, but in the end I decided to hide it behind the volumes of a broken set of The Thousand and One Nights. I went to bed and did not sleep. At three or four in the morning, I turned on the light. I got down the impossible book and leafed through its pages. On one of them I saw engraved a mask. The upper corner of the page carried a number, which I no longer recall, elevated to the ninth power.

I showed no one my treasure. To the luck of owning it was added the fear of having it stolen, and then the misgiving that it might not truly be infinite. These twin preoccupations intensified my old misanthropy. I had only a few friends left; I now stopped seeing even them. A prisoner of the book, I almost never went out anymore. After studying its frayed spine and covers with a magnifying glass, I rejected the possibility of a contrivance of any sort. The small illustrations, I verified, came two thousand pages apart. I set about listing them alphabetically in a notebook, which I was not long in filling up. Never once was an illustration repeated. At night, in the meagre intervals my insomnia granted, I dreamed of the book.

Summer came and went, and I realized that the book was monstrous. What good did it do me to think that I, who looked upon the volume with my eyes, who held it in my hands, was any less monstrous? I felt that the book was a nightmarish object, an obscene thing that affronted and tainted reality itself.

I thought of fire, but I feared that the burning of an infinite book might likewise prove infinite and suffocate the planet with smoke. Somewhere I recalled reading that the best place to hide a leaf is in a forest. Before retirement, I worked on Mexico Street, at the Argentine National Library, which contains nine hundred thousand volumes. I knew that to the right of the entrance a curved staircase leads down into the basement, where books and maps and periodicals are kept. One day I went there and, slipping past a member of the staff and trying not to notice at what height or distance from the door, I lost the Book of Sand on one of the basement’s musty shelves.

Afterword

Prefacing stories a reader has not yet read, since it demands the analysis of plots that it may be inconvenient to deal with in advance, is a somewhat impossible task. I therefore prefer an afterword.

The book’s first story takes up the old theme of the double, which several times moved Robert Louis Stevenson’s ever-fortunate pen. In England, its name is ‘fetch’ or, more bookishly, ‘wraith of the living’; in Germany, ‘
Doppelgänger
’. One of its earliest names, I suspect, was mirrors of metal or from reflections in water or simply from memory, which makes of anyone both a spectator and an actor. In ‘The Other’, I had to ensure that the speakers were sufficiently different to be two persons and alike enough to be one. Is it worth stating that the idea for the story came to me in Cambridge on the banks of the Charles River, whose cold course reminded me of the far-off course of the Rhone?

The theme of love is quite common in my poems but not in my prose, which offers no other example than ‘Ulrike’. The reader will notice its formal affinity with ‘The Other’.

‘The Congress’ is perhaps the most ambitious of the tales in this book; its subject is that of an enterprise so vast that in the end it becomes confused with the world itself and with the sum of daily life. Its opaque beginning tries to imitate that of a Kafka story; its end tries, doubtless in vain, to match the ecstasies of Chesterton and John Bunyan. I have never been worthy of such a revelation, but I managed to dream one up. I have woven into the story as is my habit a number of autobiographical elements. Life, which everyone knows is inscrutable, left me no peace until I perpetrated a posthumous story by H. P. Lovecraft, a writer whom I have always considered an unconscious parodist of Poe. In the end, I gave in; the lamentable fruit is entitled ‘There Are More Things’.

‘The Sect of the Thirty’ salvages, without a shred of documentation, the tale of a possible heresy. ‘The Night of the Gifts’ is perhaps the most innocent, most violent, and most exalted story offered by this collection.

An earlier story of mine, ‘The Library of Babel’ (1941), imagines an infinite number of books; ‘Undr’ and ‘The Mirror and the Mask’, centuries-old literatures that are made up of a single line or word.

‘Utopia of a Tired Man’ is in my judgment the most honest and melancholy piece in the collection.

I have always been amazed by the ethical obsession of Americans. ‘The Bribe’ attempts to reflect this trait.

In spite of John Felton, Charlotte Corday, the well-known opinion of Rivera Indarte (‘It is a holy act to kill Rosas’), and the Uruguayan National Anthem (‘If they are tyrants, Brutus’ dagger’), I do not approve of political assassination. Be that as it may, readers of Avelino Arredondo’s solitary crime might wish to know the story’s outcome. The historian Luis Melián Lafinur asked for Arredondo’s pardon, but his judges Carlos Fein and Cristóbal Salvanach sentenced him to a month in solitary confinement and five years’ imprisonment. One of the streets of Montevideo now bears Arredondo’s name.

Two opposite and inconceivable concepts are the subjects of the last two stories. ‘The Disk’ is about the Euclidean circle, which has only one side; ‘The Book of Sand’, a volume of incalculable pages.

I hope that these hasty notes I have just dictated do not exhaust this book and that its dreams go on branching out in the hospitable imagination of those who now close it.

Buenos Aires, 3 February 1975

J. L. B.

The Anthropologist

This story was told to me in Texas, but it took place in another of the Southwestern states. It has one character only, except for the fact that in any story there are thousands of characters, seen and unseen, living and dead. His name, I believe, was Fred Murdock. He was lanky, was neither light nor dark, had a hatchet face, and wasted few words. There was nothing out of the ordinary about him, not even that wish to be out of the ordinary common to most young men. Naturally respectful, he never questioned what he read or what his teachers told him. He was at that age when, not yet knowing who he is, a man is ready to go whichever way a chance wind blows— into Persian Sufism or the unknown beginnings of Hungarian, the adventures of war or of algebra, puritanism or the orgy. At the university, he was advised to take up the study of aboriginal languages. Among a few tribes of the Southwest, certain unexplained rites still survived; his adviser, a man getting along in years, suggested that he go live on a reservation, where he might be initiated into tribal ceremonies, and try to uncover the medicine man’s secret. On his return, he would prepare a thesis that the university press would undertake to publish. Murdock jumped at the chance. One of his forebears had been killed by Indians in a frontier raid; this old family bloodshed was now a link. No doubt he foresaw the difficulties that were in store for him; he would have to do his best to get the red men to accept him as one of them.

Murdock undertook the arduous adventure. He lived over two years in the desert in adobe huts or out in the open. He would get up before the dawn, he would go to sleep at nightfall, and he came to dream in a language that was not the language of his fathers. His palate became accustomed to new tastes, he dressed in strange clothes, he forgot his friends and the city, he came to see things in a way his reason rejected. During the first months of his training, he took secret notes that later he was to burn—maybe not to arouse suspicion, maybe because he no longer needed them. At the end of a period of many months, after he had at last undergone certain exercises of a moral and physical nature, the medicine man took him aside and told him that from then on he must remember his dreams and relate them to him every morning. Murdock found out that on nights when the moon was full he dreamed of mustangs. He confided these repeated dreams to his teacher; in time, the teacher taught him the secret. One day without saying goodbye to anyone, Murdock went away.

Back in the city, he felt homesick for those first evenings out in the desert when, a long time before, he had felt homesick for the city. He made his way to his adviser’s office and told him that he now knew the secret and that he had made up his mind not to reveal it.

“Are you sworn to an oath?” asked the professor.

“That’s not my reason,” answered Murdock. “I found out something off there in the desert that I can’t tell.”

“Do you mean to say the English language is inadequate?” the professor may have said.

“No, that’s not it, sir. Now that I have the secret, I could explain it in a hundred different and even contradictory ways. I don’t really know how to tell you, but the secret means a great deal to me. Compared to it, science—our science—seems not much more than a trifle.” He added, after a pause, “The secret, I should tell you, is not as valuable as the steps that brought me to it. Those steps have to be taken, not told.”

The professor said coldly, “Very well, I shall report your decision to the board. Are you thinking of living among the Indians?”

Murdock answered, “No. Maybe I won’t be going back to the reservation. What I learned there I can apply anyplace on earth and under any circumstances.”

That, substantially, is what was said.

Fred married, was divorced, and is now a librarian at Yale.