Jorge Luis Borges - Collected Fictions Part 10

Maurice Abramowicz observes:"Jesus, d'apres cescandinave, atoujours le beau role; ses deboires, grace a la science des typographes, jouissent d'une reputation poly- glotte; sa residence de trente-trois ans parmi les humains ne fut, en somme, qu'une villegiature."In Appendix III to hisChristeligeDogmatik,Erfjord rebuts this pa.s.sage. He notes that the crucifixion of G.o.d has not ended, because that which happened once in time is repeated endlessly in eternity. Judas, now, continues to hold out his hand for the silver, continues to kiss Jesus' cheek, continues to scatter the pieces of sil - ver in the temple, continues to knot the noose on the field of blood. (In order to jus- tify this statement, Erfjord cites the last chapter of the first volume of Jaromir Hladik'sVindication of Eternity.) To claim that He was man, and yet was incapable of sin, is to fall into contradiction; the attributes impeccabilitas andhumanitas are in- compatible. Kemnitz will allow that the Redeemer could feel weariness, cold, distress, hunger, and thirst; one might also allow Him to be able to sin and be condemned to d.a.m.nation. For many, the famous words in Isaiah 53: 2-3,He shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief, are a foreshadowing of the Crucified Christ at the hour of His death. For some (HansLa.s.sen Martensen,for ex- ample), they are a refutation of the lovelinessthat the vulgar consensus at- tributes to Christ; forRuneberg,they are the detailed prophecy not of a moment but of the entire horrendous future, in Time and in Eternity, of the Word made Flesh. G.o.d was made totally man, but man to the point of iniq- uity, man to the point of reprobation and the Abyss. In order to save us, He could have chosenany of the lives that weave the confused web of history: He could have been Alexander or Pythagoras or Rurik or Jesus; he choseanabject existence: He was Judas.

In vain did the bookstores of Stockholm and Lund offer readers this revelation. The incredulous considered it,a priori, a vapid and tedious theological game; theologians disdained it.Runebergsensed in that ec.u.menical indifference an almost miraculous confirmation. G.o.d had ordered that indifference; G.o.d did not want His terrible secret spread throughout the earth.Runebergrealized that the hour was not yet come. He felt that an- cient, divine curses were met in him. He recalled Elijah and Moses, who covered their faces upon the mountain so as not to look upon G.o.d; Isaiah, who was terrified when his eyes beheld the One whose glory fills the earth; Saul, whose eyes were blinded on the road to Damascus; the rabbi Simeon benAzai,who saw the Garden and died; the famous wizard John of Viterbo, who went mad when the Trinity was revealed to him; the Midras.h.i.+m, who abominate those who speak th.e.s.h.em Hamephorash, the Secret Name of G.o.d. Was it not that dark sin that he,Runeberg, wasguilty of? Might not that be the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost (Matthew 12:31) which shall not be forgiven? Valerius Sora.n.u.s died for revealing the hidden name of Rome; what infinite punishment would be Runeberg's for having discov- ered and revealed the terrible name of G.o.d?

Drunk with sleeplessness and his dizzying dialectic, NilsRunebergwandered the streets ofMalmo,crying out for a blessing-that he be al- lowed to share the Inferno with the Redeemer.

He died of a ruptured aneurysm on March i, 1912. Heresiologists will perhaps remember him; he added to the concept of the Son, which might have been thought long spent, the complexities of misery and evil.

1944.

The End

Lying on his back, Recabarren opened his eyes a bit and saw the sloping ceil- ing of thick cane. From the other room there came the strumming of a guitar, like some inconsequential labyrinth, infinitely tangling and untangling.... Little by little, reality came back to him, the ordinary things that now would always be justthese ordinary things. He looked down without pity at his great useless body, the plain wool poncho that wrapped his legs. Outside, beyond the thick bars at his window, spread the flatland and the evening; he had slept, but the sky was still filled with light. He groped with his left arm until he found the bra.s.s cowbell that hung at the foot of the cot. He shook it once or twice; outside his door, the una.s.suming chords continued.

The guitar was being played by a black man who had shown up one night flattering himself that he was a singer; he had challenged another stranger to a song contest, the way traveling singers did. Beaten, he went on showing up at the general-store-and-bar night after night, as though he were waiting for someone. He spent hours with the guitar, but he never sang again; it could be that the defeat had turned him bitter. People had grown used to the inoffensive man. Recabarren, the owner of the bar, would never forget that contest; the next day, as he was trying to straighten some balesofyerba,his right side had suddenly gone dead on him, and he discov- ered that he couldn't talk. From learning to pity the misfortunes of the he- roes of our novels, we wind up feeling too much pity for our own; but not Recabarren, who accepted his paralysis as he had earlier accepted the se- verity and the solitudes of the Americas. A man in the habit of living in the present, as animals do, he now looked up at the sky and reflected that the red ring around the moon was a sign of rain.

A boy with Indian-like features (Recabarren's son, perhaps) opened the door a crack. Recabarren asked him with his eyes whether anybody was around; the boy, not one to talk much, made a motion with his hand to say there wasn't-the black man didn't count. Then the prostrate man was left alone; his left hand played awhile with the bell, as though exercising some power.

The plains, in the last rays of the sun, were almost abstract, as though seen in a dream. A dot waveredon the horizon, then grew until it became a horseman riding, or so it seemed, toward the house.

Recabarren could make out the broad-brimmed hat, the dark poncho, the piebald horse, but not the face of the rider, who finally reined in the horse and came toward the house at an easy trot. Some two hundred yards out, he veered off to the side. At that, the man was out of Recabarren's line of sight, but Recabarren heard him speak, get down off his horse, tie it to the post, and with a firm step en- ter the bar.

Without raising his eyes from the guitar, where he seemed to be looking for something, the black man spoke.

"Iknew I could count on you, sir," he softly said.

"And I knew I could count on you, old n.i.g.g.e.r," the other man replied, his voice harsh. "A heap of days I've made you wait, but here I am."

There was a silence. Then the black man spoke again.

"I'm getting used to waiting. I've been waiting now for seven years."

Unhurried, the other man explained: "It'd been longer than seven years that I'd gone without seeing my chil- dren. 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."*

"I understood that," the black man said. "I hope they were all in good health."

The stranger, who had sat down at the bar, gave a hearty laugh at that. He ordered a drink and took a sip or two, but didn't finish it.

"I gave them some advice," he said, "which is something you can never get too much of and doesn't cost a lot. I told them, among other things, that a man ought not to go spilling another man's blood."

A slow chord preceded the black man's response: "Good advice, too. That way they won't grow up to be like us."

"Not like me, anyway," said the stranger, who then added, as though thinking out loud: "Fate would have it that I kill, and now it's put a knife in my hand again."

"Fall's coming on," the black man observed, as though he hadn't heard, "and the days are getting shorter."

"The light that's left will be enough for me," replied the other man, get- ting to his feet.

Hestood square before the black man and in a tired voice said to him, "Leave that guitar alone, now- you've got another kind of contest to try to win today."

The two men walked toward the door. As the black man stepped out- side, he murmured, "Could be this one goes as badf 'rme as the other one did."

"It's not that the first one went bad for you," the other man answered, serious. "It's that you couldn't hardly wait to get to the second one."

They walked beside each other until they got some distance from the houses. One place on the plains was much like another, and the moon was bright. Suddenly they looked at each other, stopped, and the stranger took off his spurs. They already had their ponchos wrapped around their fore- arms when the black man spoke.

"One thing I want to ask you before we get down to it. I want you to put all your courage and all your skill into this, like you did seven years ago when you killed my brother."

For perhaps the first time in their exchange,Martin Fierroheard the hatred. His blood felt it, like a sharp prod. They circled, clashed, and sharp steel marked the black man's face.

There is an hour just at evening when the plains seem on the verge of saying something; they never do, or perhaps they do-eternally-though we don't understand it, or perhaps we do understand but what they say is as un- translatable as music.... From his cot, Recabarren saw the end. A thrust, and the black man dodged back, lost his footing, feigned a slash to his oppo- nent's face, and then lunged out with a deep jab that buried the knife in his belly. Then came another thrust, which the storekeeper couldn't see, andFierrodid not get up. Unmoving, the black man seemed to stand watch over the agonizing death. He wiped off the b.l.o.o.d.y knife in the gra.s.s and walked slowly back toward the houses, never looking back.

His work of vengeance done, he was n.o.body now. Or rather, he was the other one: there was neither destination nor destiny on earth for him, and he had killed a man.

The Cult of the Phoenix

Those who write that the cult of the Phoenix had its origin in Heliopolis, and claim that it derives from the religious restoration that followed the death of the reformer Amenhotep IV, cite the writings of Herodotus and Tacitus and the inscriptions on Egyptian monuments, but they are un- aware, perhaps willfully unaware, that the cult's designation as "the cult of the Phoenix" can be traced back no farther than to Hraba.n.u.s Maurus and that the earliest sources (theSaturnalia, say, orFlavius Josephus)speak only of "the People of the Practice" or "the People of the Secret." In the conventi- cles ofFerrara, Gregoroviusobserved that mention of the Phoenix was very rare in the spoken language; in Geneva, I have had conversations with arti- sans who did not understand me when I asked whether they were men of the Phoenix but immediately admitted to being men of the Secret. Unless I am mistaken, much the same might be said about Buddhists: The name by which the world knows them is not the name that they themselves p.r.o.nounce.

On one altogether too famous page, Moklosich has equated the mem- bers of the cult of the Phoenix with the gypsies. In Chile and in Hungary, there are both gypsies and members of the sect; apart from their ubiquity, the two groups have very little in common. Gypsies are horse traders, pot-makers, blacksmiths, and fortune-tellers; the members of the cult of the Phoenix are generally contented pract.i.tioners of the "liberal professions." Gypsies are of a certain physical type, and speak, or used to speak, a secret language; the members of the cult are indistinguishable from other men, and the proof of this is that they have never been persecuted. Gypsies are picturesque, and often inspire bad poets; ballads, photographs, and boleros fail to mention the members of the cult.... MartinBubersays that Jews areessentially sufferers; not all the members of the cult are, and some actively abhor pathos. That public and well-known truth suffices to refute the vul- gar error (absurdly defended by Urmann) which sees the roots of the Phoenix as lying in Israel. People's reasoning goes more or less this way: Ur- mann was a sensitive man; Urmann was a Jew; Urmann made a habit of vis- iting the members of the cult in the Jewish ghettos of Prague; the affinity that Urmann sensed proves a real relations.h.i.+p. In all honesty, I cannot con - cur with that conclusion. That the members of the cult should, in a Jewish milieu, resemble Jews proves nothing; what cannot be denied is that they, like Hazlitt's infinite Shakespeare, resemble every man in the world. They are all things to all men, like the Apostle; a few days ago, Dr. Juan FranciscoAmaro,ofPaysandu,pondered the ease with which they a.s.similate, the ease with which they "naturalize" themselves.

I have said that the history of the cult records no persecutions. That is true, but since there is no group of human beings that does not include ad- herents of the sect of the Phoenix, it is also true that there has been no per- secution or severity that the members of the cult have not sufferedand carried out. In the wars of the Western world and in the distant wars of Asia, their blood has been spilled for centuries, under enemy flags; it is hardly worth their while to identify themselves with every nation on the globe.

Lacking a sacred book to unite them as the Scriptures unite Israel, lack- ing a common memory, lacking that other memory that is a common lan- guage, scattered across the face of the earth, diverse in color and in feature, there is but one thing-the Secret-that unites them, and thatwill unite them until the end of time. Once, in addition to the Secret there was a leg- end (and perhapsa cosmogoniemyth), but the superficial men of the Phoenix have forgotten it, and today all that is left to them is the dim and obscure story of a punishment. A punishment, or a pact, or a privilege- versions differ; but what one may dimly see in all of them is the judgment of a G.o.d who promises eternity to a race of beings if its men, generation upon generation, perform a certain ritual. I have compared travelers' re- ports, I have spoken with patriarchs and theologians; I can attest that the performance of that ritual is the only religious practice observed by the members of the cult. The ritual is, in fact, the Secret. The Secret, as I have said, is transmitted from generation to generation, but tradition forbids a mother from teaching it to her children, as it forbids priests from doing so; initiation into the mystery is the task of the lowest individuals of the group. A slave, a leper, or a beggar plays the role of mystagogue. A child, too, may catechizeanother child. The act itself is trivial, the matter of a moment'stime, and it needs no description. The materials used are cork, wax, or gum arabic. (In the liturgy there is mention of "slime"; pond slime is often used as well.) There are no temples dedicated expressly to the cult's wors.h.i.+p, but ruins, cellars, or entryways are considered appropriate sites. The Secret is sacred, but that does not prevent its being a bit ridiculous; the performance of it is furtive, even clandestine, and its adepts do not speak of it. There are no decent words by which to call it, but it is understood that all words somehow name it, or rather, that they inevitably allude to it-and so I have said some insignificant thing in conversation and have seen adepts smile or grow uncomfortable because they sensed I had touched upon the Secret. In Germanic literatures there are poems written by members of the cult whose nominal subject is the sea or twilight; more than once I have heard people say that these poems are, somehow, symbols of the Secret.Orbis terrarumestspeculumLudi,goes an apocryphal saying reported bydu Gange inhis Glossary. A kind of sacred horror keeps some of the faithful from perform- ing that simplest of rituals; they are despised by the other members of the sect, but they despise themselves even more. Those, on the other hand, who deliberately renounce the Practice and achieve direct commerce with the Deity command great respect; such men speak of that commerce using fig- ures from the liturgy, and so we find that John of the Rood wrote as follows:

Let the Nine Firmaments be told That G.o.d is delightful as the Cork and Mire.

On three continents I have merited the friends.h.i.+p of many wors.h.i.+pers of the Phoenix; I know that the Secret at first struck them as ba.n.a.l, shameful, vulgar, and (stranger still) unbelievable. They could not bring themselves to admit that their parents had ever stooped to such acts. It is odd that the Se- cret did not die out long ago; but in spite of the world's vicissitudes, in spite of wars and exoduses, it does, in its full awesomeness, come to all the faithful. Someone has even dared to claim that by now it is instinctive.

The South

The man that stepped off the boat in Buenos Aires in 1871 was a minister of the Evangelical Church; his name was Johannes Dahlmann. By 1939, one of his grandsons, Juan Dahlmann, was secretary of a munic.i.p.al library onCalle Cordobaand considered himself profoundly Argentine. His maternal grandfather had been FranciscoFlores,of the 2nd Infantry of the Line, who died on the border of Buenos Aires* from a spear wielded by the Indians under Catriel.* In the contrary pulls from his two lineages, Juan Dahlmann (perhaps impelled by his Germanic blood) chose that of his romantic an- cestor, or that of a romantic death. That slightly willful but never ostenta- tious "Argentinization" drew sustenance from an old sword, a locket containing the daguerreotype of a bearded, inexpressive man, the joy and courage of certain melodies, the habit of certain verses inMartin Fierro,the pa.s.sing years, a certain lack of spiritedness, and solitude. At the price of some self-denial, Dahlmann had managed to save the sh.e.l.l of a large coun- try house in the South that had once belonged to theFloresfamily; one of the touchstones of his memory was the image of the eucalyptus trees and the long pink-colored house that had once been scarlet. His work, and per- haps his indolence, held him in the city. Summer after summer he con- tented himself with the abstract idea of possession and with the certainty that his house was waiting for him, at a precise place on the flatlands. In late February, 1939, something happened to him.

Though blind to guilt, fate can be merciless with the slightest distrac- tions. That afternoon Dahlmann had come upon a copy (from which some pages were missing) of Weil'sArabian Nights; eager to examine his find, he did not wait for the elevator-he hurriedly took the stairs. Something in the dimness brushed his forehead-a bat? a bird? On the face of the womanwho opened the door to him, he saw an expression of horror, and the hand he pa.s.sed over his forehead came back red with blood. His brow had caught the edge of a recently painted cas.e.m.e.nt window that somebody had forgot- ten to close.Dahlmann managed to sleep, but by the early hours of morn- ing he was awake, and from that time on, the flavor of all things was monstrous to him. Fever wore him away, and ill.u.s.trations from theArabian Nights began to illuminate nightmares. Friends and members of his family would visit him and with exaggerated smiles tell him how well he looked. Dahlmann, in a kind of feeble stupor, would hear their words, and it wouldamaze him that they couldn't see he was in h.e.l.l. Eight days pa.s.sed, like eight hundred years. One afternoon, his usual physician appeared with a new man, and they drove Dahlmann to a sanatorium onCalleEcuador; he needed to have an X ray. Sitting in the cab they had hired to drive them, Dahlmann reflected that he might, at last, in a room that was not his own, be able to sleep. He felt happy, he felt like talking, but the moment they ar- rived, his clothes were stripped from him, his head was shaved, he was strapped with metal bands to a table, he was blinded and dizzied with bright lights, his heart and lungs were listened to, and a man in a surgical mask stuck a needle in his arm. He awoke nauseated, bandaged, in a cell much like the bottom of a well, and in the days and nights that followed, he realized that until then he had been only somewhere on the outskirts of h.e.l.l. Ice left but the slightest trace of coolness in his mouth. During these days, Dahlmann hated every inch of himself; he hated his ident.i.ty, his bodi- ly needs, his humiliation, the beard that p.r.i.c.kled his face. He stoically suf- fered the treatments administered to him, which were quite painful, but when the surgeon told him he'd been on the verge of death fromsep- ticemia,Dahlmann, suddenly self-pitying, broke down and cried. The physical miseries, the unending antic.i.p.ation of bad nights had not allowed him to think about anything as abstract as death. The next day, the surgeon told him he was coming right along, and that he'd soon be able to go out to the country house to convalesce. Incredibly, the promised day arrived.

Reality is partial to symmetries and slight anachronisms; Dahlmann had come to the sanatorium in a cab, and it was a cab that took him to the station at PlazaConst.i.tucion.The first cool breath of autumn, after the op- pression of the summer, was like a natural symbol of his life brought back from fever and the brink of death. The city, at that seven o'clock in the morning, had not lost that look of a ramshackle old house that cities take on at night; the streets were like long porches and corridors, the plazas like interior courtyards. After his long stay in hospital, Dahlmann took it all inwith delight and a touch of vertigo; a few seconds before his eyes registered them, he would recall the corners, the marquees, the modest variety of Buenos Aires. In the yellow light of the new day, it all came back to him.

Everyone knows that the South begins on the other side ofAvenida Rivadavia. Dahlmann had often said that that was no mere saying, that by crossing Rivadavia one entered an older and more stable world.

From the cab, he sought among the new buildings the window barred with wrought iron, the door knocker, the arch of a doorway, the long entryway, the almost-secret courtyard.

In the grand hall of the station he saw that he had thirty minutes before his train left. He suddenly remembered that there wasa cafe onCalle Brasil(a few yards from Yrigoyen's house) where there was a huge cat that would let people pet it, like some disdainful deity. He went in. There was the cat, asleep.

He ordered a cup of coffee, slowly spooned sugar into it, tasted it (a pleasure that had been forbidden him in the clinic), and thought, while he stroked the cat's black fur, that this contact was illusory, that he and the cat were separated as though by a pane of gla.s.s, because man lives in time, in successiveness, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant.

The train, stretching along the next-to-last platform, was waiting. Dahlmann walked through the cars until he came to one that was almost empty. He lifted his bag onto the luggage rack; when the train pulled out, he opened his bag and after a slight hesitation took from it the first volume ofThe Arabian Nights. To travel with this book so closely linked to the history of his torment was an affirmation that the torment was past, and was a joy- ous, secret challenge to the frustrated forces of evil.

On both sides of the train, the city unraveled into suburbs; that sight, and later the sight of lawns and large country homes, led Dahlmann to put aside his reading. The truth is, Dahlmann read very little; the lodestone mountain and the genie sworn to kill the man who released him from the bottle were, as anyone will admit, wondrous things, but not much more wondrous than this morning and the fact of being. Happiness distracted him from Scheherazade and her superfluous miracles; Dahlmann closed the book and allowed himself simply to live.

Lunch (with bouillon served in bowls of s.h.i.+ning metal, as in the now-distant summers of his childhood)was another quiet, savored pleasure.

Tomorrow I will wake up at my ranch,he thought, and it was as though he were two men at once: the man gliding along through the autumn day and the geography of his native land, and the other man, imprisoned in asanatorium and subjected to methodical attentions. He saw unplastered brick houses, long and angular, infinitely watching the trains go by; he saw hors.e.m.e.n on the clod-strewn roads; he saw ditches and lakes and pastures; he saw long glowing clouds that seemed made of marble, and all these things were fortuitous, like some dream of the flat prairies. He also thought he recognized trees and crops that he couldn't have told one the name of- his direct knowledge of the country was considerably inferior to his nostalgic, literary knowledge.

From time to time he nodded off, and in his dreams there was the rush- ing momentum of the train. Now the unbearable white sun of midday was the yellow sun that comes before nightfall and that soon would turn to red. The car was different now, too; it was not the same car that had pulled out of the station in Buenos Aires-the plains and the hours had penetrated and transfigured it. Outside, the moving shadow of the train stretched out toward the horizon. The elemental earth was not disturbed by settlements or any other signs of humanity. All was vast, but at the same time intimate and somehow secret. In all the immense countryside, there would some- times be nothing but a bull. The solitude was perfect, if perhaps hostile, and Dahlmann almost suspected that he was traveling not only into the South but into the past.

From that fantastic conjecture he was distracted by the conductor, who seeing Dahlmann's ticket informed him that the train would not be leaving him at the usual station, but at a different one, a little before it, that Dahlmann barely knew. (The man added an explanation that Dahlmann didn't try to understand, didn't even listen to, because the me- chanics of it didn't matter.) The train came to its laborious halt in virtually the middle of the countryside. The station sat on the other side of the tracks, and was hardly more than a covered platform. They had no vehicle there, but the station-master figured Dahlmann might be able to find one at a store he directed him to-ten or twelve blocks away.

Dahlmann accepted the walk as a small adventure. The sun had sunk below the horizon now, but one final splendor brought a glory to the living yet silent plains before they were blotted out by night. Less to keep from tiring himself than to make those things last, Dahlmann walked slowly, inhaling with grave happiness the smell of clover.

The store had once been bright red, but the years had tempered its vio- lent color (to its advantage).

There was something in its sorry architecture that reminded Dahlmann of a steel engraving, perhaps from an old edition ofPaulet Virginie.There were several horses tied to the rail in front. Inside,Dahlmann thought he recognized the owner; then he realized that he'd been fooled by the man's resemblance to one of the employees at the sana- torium. When the man heard Dahlmann's story, he said he'd have the calash harnessed up; to add yet another event to that day, and to pa.s.s the time, Dahlmann decided to eat there in the country store.

At one table some rough-looking young men were noisily eating and drinking; at first Dahlmann didn't pay much attention. On the floor, curled against the bar, lay an old man, as motionless as an object. The many years had worn him away and polished him, as a stone is worn smooth by run- ning water or a saying is polished by generations of humankind. He was small, dark, and dried up, and he seemed to be outside time, in a sort of eternity. Dahlmann was warmed by the Tightness of the man's hairband, the baize poncho he wore, hisgauchotrousers,* and the boots made out of the skin of a horse's leg, and he said to himself, recalling futile arguments with people from districts in the North, or fromEntre Rios,that only in the South didgauchoslike that exist anymore.

Dahlmann made himself comfortable near the window. Little by little, darkness was enveloping the countryside, but the smells and sounds of the plains still floated in through the thick iron grate at the window. The store- keeper brought him sardines and then roast meat; Dahlmann washed them down with more than one gla.s.s of red wine. Idly, he savored the harsh bou- quet of the wine and let his gaze wander over the store, which by now had turned a little sleepy. The kerosene lantern hung from one of the beams. There were three customers at the other table: two looked like laborers; the other, with coa.r.s.e, Indian-like features, sat drinking with his wide-brimmed hat on. Dahlmann suddenly felt something lightlybrush his face. Next to the tumbler of cloudy gla.s.s, on one of the stripes in the tablecloth, lay a lit- tle ball of wadded bread. That was all, but somebody had thrown it at him.

The drinkers at the other table seemed unaware of his presence. Dahlmann, puzzled, decided that nothing had happened, and he opened the volume ofThe Arabian Nights, as though to block out reality.

Another wad of bread hit him a few minutes later, and this time the laborers laughed. Dahlmann told himself he wasn't scared, but that it would be madness for him, a sick man, to be dragged by strangers into some chaotic bar fight. He made up his mind to leave; he was already on his feet when the storekeeper came over and urged him, his voice alarmed: "Sr. Dahlmann, ig- nore those boys over there- they're just feeling their oats."

Dahlmann did not find it strange that the storekeeper should know his name by now but he sensed that the man's conciliatory words actually made the situation worse. Before, the men's provocation had been directed at an accidental face, almost at n.o.body; now it was aimed at him, at his name, and the men at the other table would know that name. Dahlmann brushed the storekeeper aside, faced the laborers, and asked them what their prob- lem was.

The young thug with the Indian-looking face stood up, stumbling as he did so. At one pace from Dahlmann, he shouted insults at him, as though he were far away. He was playacting, exaggerating his drunkenness, and the ex- aggeration produced an impression both fierce and mocking. Amid curses and obscenities, the man threw a long knife into the air, followed it with his eyes, caught it, and challenged Dahlmann to fight. The storekeeper's voice shook as he objected that Dahlmann was unarmed. At that point, some- thing unforeseeable happened.

From out of a corner, the motionless oldgauchoin whom Dahlmann had seen a symbol of the South (the South that belonged to him) tossed him a naked dagger-it came to rest at Dahlmann's feet. It was as though the South itself had decided that Dahlmann should accept the challenge. Dahlmann bent to pick up the dagger, and as he did he sensed two things: first, that that virtually instinctive action committed him to fight, and sec- ond, that in his clumsy hand the weapon would serve less to defend him than to justify the other man's killing him. He had toyed with a knife now and then, as all men did, but his knowledge of knife fighting went no fur- ther than a vague recollection that thrusts should be aimed upward, and with the blade facing inward.They'd never have allowed this sortofthingto happen in the sanatorium,he thought.

"Enough stalling," the other man said. "Let's go outside."

They went outside, and while there was no hope in Dahlmann, there was no fear, either. As he crossed the threshold, he felt that on that first night in the sanatorium, when they'd stuck that needle in him, dying in a knife fight under the open sky, grappling with his adversary, would have been a liberation, a joy, and a fiesta. He sensed that had he been able to choose or dream his death that night, this is the death he would have dreamed or chosen.

Dahlmann firmly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to manage, and steps out into the plains.

The Aleph (1949).

The Immortal Solomon saith:There is no new thing upon the earth.

So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance;so Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.

Francis Bacon:Essays, LVIII

In London, in early June of the year 1929, the rare book dealer Joseph Cartaphilus, of Smyrna, offered the princessde Lucingethe six quarto minor volumes (1715-1720) of Pope'sIliad. The princess purchased them; when she took possession of them, she exchanged a few words with the dealer. He was, she says, an emaciated, grimy man with gray eyes and gray beard and singularly vague features. He expressed himself with untutored and uncorrected fluency in several languages; within scant minutes he s.h.i.+fted from French to English and from English to an enigmatic cross between the Spanish of Salonika and the Portuguese of Macao. In October, the princess heard from a pa.s.senger on theZeus that Cartaphilus had died at sea while returning to Smyrna, and that he had been buried on the island oflos.

Inthe last volume of theIliad she found this ma.n.u.script.

It is written in an English that teems with Latinisms; this is a verbatim transcription of the doc.u.ment.

I.

As I recall, my travails began in a garden in hundred-gated Thebes, in the time of the emperor Diocletian. I had fought (with no glory) in the recent Egyptian wars and was tribune of a legion quartered in Berenice, on the banks of the Red Sea; there, fever and magic consumed many men who magnanimously coveted the steel blade. The Mauritanians were defeated;the lands once occupied by the rebel cities were dedicatedinternitatemto the Plutonian G.o.ds; Alexandria, subdued, in vain sought Caesar's mercy; within the year the legions were to report their triumph, but I myself barely glimpsed the face of Mars. That privation grieved me, and was perhaps why I threw myself into the quest, through vagrant and terrible deserts, for the secret City of the Immortals.

My travails, I have said, began in a garden in Thebes. All that night I did not sleep, for there was a combat in my heart. I rose at last a little before dawn. My slaves were sleeping; the moon was the color of the infinite sand. A b.l.o.o.d.y rider was approaching from the east, weak with exhaustion. A few steps from me, he dismounted and in a faint, insatiable voice asked me, in Latin, the name of the river whose waters laved the city's walls. I told him it was the Egypt, fed by the rains."It is another river that I seek," he replied morosely,"the secret river that purifies men of death." Dark blood was welling from his breast. He told me that the country of his birth was a mountain that lay beyond the Ganges; it was rumored on that mountain, he told me, that if one traveled westward, to the end of the world, one would come to the river whose waters give immortality. He added that on the far sh.o.r.e of that river lay the City of the Immortals, a city rich in bulwarks and amphitheaters and temples. He died before dawn, but I resolved to go in quest of that city and its river. When interrogated by the torturer, some of the Mauritanian prisoners confirmed the traveler's tale: One of them re- called the Elysian plain, far at the ends of the earth, where men's lives are everlasting; another, the peaks from which the Pactolus flows, upon which men live for a hundred years. In Rome, I spoke with philosophers who felt that to draw out the span of a man's life was to draw out the agony of his dying and multiply the number of his deaths. I am not certain whether I ever believed in the City of the Immortals; I think the task of finding it was enough for me.Flavius,the Getulian proconsul, entrusted two hundred sol- diers to me for the venture; I also recruited a number of mercenaries who claimed they knew the roads, and who were the first to desert.

Subsequent events have so distorted the memory of our first days that now they are impossible to put straight. We set out fromArsinoeand en- tered the ardent desert. We crossed the lands of the Troglodytes, who de- vour serpents and lack all verbal commerce; the land of the Garamantas, whose women are held in common and whose food is lions; the land of the Augiles, who wors.h.i.+p only Tartarus.

We ranged the width and breadth of other deserts-deserts of black sand, where the traveler must usurp thehours of the night, for the fervency of the day is unbearable. From afar I made out the mountainwhich gives its name to the Ocean; on its slopes grows the euphorbia, an antidote to poisons, and on its peak live the Satyrs, a nation of wild and rustic men given to lasciviousness. That the bosom of those barbaric lands, where the Earth is the mother of monsters, might suc- cor a famous city-such a thing seemed unthinkable to us all. Thus we con- tinued with our march, for to have regressed would have been to dishonor ourselves. Some of the men, those who were most temerarious, slept with their faces exposed to the moon; soon they burned with fever. With the de- praved water of the watering holes others drank up insanity and death. Then began the desertions; a short time afterward, the mutinies. In repress- ing them I did not hesitate to employ severity. In that I acted justly, but a centurion warned me that the mutineers (keen to avenge the crucifixion of one of their number) were weaving a plot for my death. I fled the camp with the few soldiers who were loyal to me; in the desert, among whirlwinds of sand and the vast night, we became separated. A Cretan arrow rent my flesh. For several days I wandered without finding water-or one huge day multiplied by the sun, thirst, and the fear of thirst. I left my path to the will of my horse. At dawn, the distance bristled with pyramids and towers. I dreamed, unbearably, of a small and orderly labyrinth at whose center lay a well; my hands could almost touch it, my eyes see it, but so bewildering and entangled were the turns that I knew I would die before I reached it.

II.