‘Ashgrove?’ I asked some boys outside the window.
‘Ashgrove,’ they replied.
I got down. A street lamp lit up the platform, but the boys’ faces remained in shadow.
‘Are you going to Dr Albert’s house?’ one of them asked.
Before I could reply, another said, ‘It’s a good distance from here, but if you take the first road on the left and then left again at each turning, you can’t go wrong.’
I tossed them a coin (my last), made my way down some stone steps, and set off along the lonely road. It descended slowly, its surface unmade. Branches met overhead, and a low full moon seemed to keep company with me.
For a moment, I thought that Richard Madden had somehow fathomed my desperate plan, but soon I realized this was impossible. It occurred to me that the advice to keep taking a left turn was the normal way to reach the central point of certain mazes. I know something about labyrinths. Not for nothing am I the great-grandson of the famous Ts’ui Pên, who was governor of Yunnan and who renounced office in order to write a novel that teemed with more characters than the Hung Lu Meng and to construct a maze in which all mankind might lose its way. Thirteen years he dedicated to these diverse labours, but a stranger’s hand struck him down, and his novel proved meaningless and no one ever found the maze.
Under English trees I contemplated that lost labyrinth, imagining it pristine and inviolate in a mountain fastness. I imagined it obliterated by paddies or under water; I pictured it endless, no longer consisting of octagonal pavilions and of paths that turn back on themselves but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms. I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of a meandering, ever-growing labyrinth that would encompass the past and future and would somehow take in the heavenly bodies. Absorbed in these imaginings, I forgot my predicament as a hunted man. For untold moments, I felt I was a detached observer of the world. The living, twilit fields, the moon, the remains of the evening were playing on me; as was the easy slope of the road, which removed any chance of tiring. The evening was intimate, infinite. The road descended and branched across now shadowy pastures. A high-pitched, almost syllabic music drifted in, blurred by leaves and distance, and then moved off on wafting breezes. I reflected that a man can be an enemy of other men, of other moments of other men, but not of a country—not of fireflies, words, gardens, waterways, sunsets.
I came to a high, rusty gate. Through its bars I made out an avenue and a sort of pavilion. At once, I grasped two things. The first was trivial, the second almost beyond belief. The music came from the pavilion, and the music was Chinese. This was why I had accepted it, without paying it any special heed. I do not remember whether there was a bellpull or a button or whether I called by clapping my hands. The scratchy music went on.
From the inner depths of the house came a light, whose beam the trees intersected and sometimes blotted out. Shaped like a drum, the paper lantern was the colour of the moon. It was carried by a tall man, whose face I could not see, because the light blinded me. Opening the gate, he said slowly, in my language, ‘I see that the pious Hsi P’êng feels bound to correct my solitude. You have no doubt come to inspect the garden?’
I recognized the name of one of our consuls and echoed, baffled, ‘The garden?’
‘The garden of branching paths.’
Something stirred in my memory, and with utter conviction I said, ‘The garden of my ancestor Ts’ui Pên.’
‘Your ancestor? Your illustrious ancestor? Step inside.’
The damp path zigzagged as in my childhood. We entered a library of Eastern and Western books. I recognized, bound in yellow silk, some manuscript volumes of the Lost Encyclopedia compiled for the Third Emperor of the Luminous Dynasty but never printed. A gramophone record still revolved beside a bronze phoenix. I also remember a famille rose vase and another, many centuries older, in that shade of blue copied by our potters from Persian craftsmen.
Dr Albert watched me, smiling. He was, as I have said, tall, with sharp features, grey eyes, and grey whiskers. There was something of the priest and also the sailor about him. He told me he had been a missionary in Tientsin ‘before aspiring to become a Sinologist.’
We sat down—I on a long, low divan, he with his back to the window and to a grandfather clock. I worked out that my pursuer, Richard Madden, would not appear for at least an hour. My irrevocable plan could wait.
‘A strange fate, Ts’ui Pên’s,’ said Stephen Albert. ‘Governor of his native province, a learned astronomer and astrologer, a tireless interpreter of the canonical books, a chess player, a famous poet and calligrapher—he gave up everything to write a book and build a maze. He renounced the pleasures of oppression, justice, the plural bed, banquets, and even learning to cloister himself for thirteen years in the Pavilion of Limpid Solitude. Upon his death, his heirs found nothing but a chaos of manuscripts. The family, as you must know, wanted to consign them to the flames, but his executor—a Taoist or Buddhist monk—insisted on their publication.’
‘Ts’ui Pên’s blood kin still curse that monk,’ I replied. ‘The publication was pointless. The book is an indecisive pile of contradictory drafts. I have examined it on a couple of occasions. In the third chapter the hero dies, in the fourth he is alive. As for Ts’ui Pên’s other enterprise, his labyrinth— ’
‘Here it is,’ Dr Albert said, pointing to a high, lacquered writing cabinet.
‘An ivory labyrinth!’ I exclaimed. ‘A miniature labyrinth.’
‘A labyrinth of symbols,’ he corrected. ‘An invisible labyrinth of time. It has been granted to me, a barbarous Englishman, to unravel this delicate mystery. After more than a hundred years, the details are irrecoverable, but it is not difficult to surmise what took place. Ts’ui Pên may once have said, “I am retiring to write a book.” And on another occasion, “I am retiring to build a maze.” Everyone imagined these to be two works; nobody thought that book and labyrinth were one and the same. The Pavilion of Limpid Solitude stood in the centre of what was perhaps an elaborately laid-out garden. This may have suggested a physical labyrinth. Ts’ui Pên died, and no one in his vast domains ever found the labyrinth. The confusion of the novel suggested to me that it was the labyrinth. Two facts corroborated this. One, the curious story that the maze Ts’ui Pên had planned was specifically infinite. The second, my discovery of a fragment of a letter.’
Albert got up. For several moments he stood with his back to me, opening a drawer of the black-and-gold writing cabinet. He turned and held out a squarish piece of paper that had once been crimson and was now pink and brittle. The script was the renowned calligraphy of Ts’ui Pên himself. Uncomprehending but with deep emotion, I read these words written with a tiny brush by a man of my own blood: ‘I leave to various futures (but not all) my garden of branching paths.’ In silence, I handed back the page.
‘Before unearthing this letter,’ Albert went on, ‘I wondered how a book could be infinite. I came up with no other conclusion than that it would have to be a cyclical, or circular, volume—one whose last page was the same as its first, and with the potential to go round and round for ever. I recalled the night in the middle of the Thousand and One Nights, in which Queen Scheherazade—having distracted the scribe by a trick of magic—starts to recount the history of the Thousand and One Nights, thereby running the risk of coming back full circle to this same night and continuing forever more. I also imagined an archetypal, hereditary work handed down from father to son, wherein each new heir would add a chapter or, piously, rewrite a page of his forebears. These speculations engaged my mind, but none seemed even remotely relevant to Ts’ui Pên’s contradictory chapters. In my perplexity, I received from Oxford the manuscript you have just seen. One sentence caught my attention: “I leave to various futures (but not all) my garden of branching paths.” Almost at once, light dawned. The garden of branching paths was the chaotic novel; the phrase ‘to various futures (but not all)’ conjured up an image of a branching in time, not i
n space. A re-reading of the book confirmed this theory. In all works of fiction, each time the writer is confronted with choices, he opts for one and discards the rest. In the inextricable Ts’ui Pên, he opts—at one and the same time—for all the alternatives. By so doing, he creates several futures, several times over, and in turn these proliferate and branch off. Hence, his novel’s contradictions. Fang, let us say, has a secret. A stranger calls at his door; Fang decides to kill him. Naturally, there are several possible outcomes. Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, both can be spared, both can die, and so forth. In Ts’ui Pên’s novel, all of these happen, and each is a point of departure for other branchings off. Now and again, the paths of this labyrinth converge. For example, in one possible past you come to this house as an enemy, in another as a friend. If you can bear my incurable pronunciation, we shall read some pages.’
In the bright circle of lamplight, his face was clearly that of an old man, yet with something unconquerable and even immortal about it. Slowly, precisely, he read two forms of the same epic chapter. In the first, an army marches into battle across a bare mountain; dread of the rocks and the darkness makes the troops hold life cheap, and they easily win a victory. In the second, the same army storms a palace, which is in the midst of festivities; the resplendent battle seems to them an extension of the revelry, and they are victorious. I listened with seemly veneration to these old tales, which were perhaps less of a marvel than the fact that my blood had contrived them and that a man from a distant empire had restored them to me while I was engaged in a desperate assignment on an island in the West. I remember the concluding words, repeated at the end of each version like a secret watchword: ‘So battled the heroes, their stout hearts calm, their swords violent, each man resigned to kill and to die.’
From that moment, I felt around me and within my dark body an invisible, intangible swarming. Not that of diverging, parallel, and finally converging armies but a more inaccessible, more intimate turmoil, which these armies somehow foreshadowed.
‘I do not think your illustrious ancestor toyed idly with different versions,’ Stephen Albert went on. ‘I do not consider it likely that he would sacrifice thirteen years to the endless compilation of a rhetorical experiment. In your country, the novel is a lesser genre; at that time, it was a genre that was not respected. Ts’ui Pên was a novelist of genius, but he was also a man of letters who certainly did not look on himself as a mere novelist. The testimony of his contemporaries proclaims—and his life confirms—his metaphysical and mystical leanings. Philosophical argument usurps a good part of his novel. I know that of all quandaries, none so troubled or exercised him as the fathomless quandary of time. But, then, time is the only problem that does not appear in the pages of his Garden. He does not even use the word that means “time”. How do you explain this deliberate omission?’
I put forward several suggestions, all inadequate. We discussed them.
‘In a riddle about chess,’ Stephen Albert concluded, ‘what is the one forbidden word?’
I thought for a moment and replied, ‘The word “chess”.’
‘Exactly,’ said Albert. ‘The Garden of Branching Paths is a vast riddle, or parable, about time. This is the hidden reason that prevents Ts’ui Pên from using the word. To omit a particular word in all instances, to resort to clumsy metaphors and obvious circumlocutions, is probably the surest way of calling attention to it. This was the convoluted method that the oblique Ts’ui Pên chose in each meandering of his unrelenting novel. I have studied hundreds of manuscripts, I have corrected the mistakes introduced by careless copyists, I have deduced the plan behind that chaos, I have reestablished—I believe I have re-established—its original order, and I have translated the whole work. I can guarantee that he does not use the word “time” even once. The explanation is plain—The Garden of Branching Pathsis an incomplete but not false picture of the world as Ts’ui Pên perceived it. Unlike Newton or Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing and dizzying web of diverging and converging and parallel times. This mesh of times that merge, split apart, break, and for centuries are unaware of each other, embraces all possibilities. In most of these times, we do not exist; in some, you exist but not I; in others, I but not you; in still others, both of us. In our present time, granted me by a lucky chance, you have come to my house; in another, on making your way across the garden, you find me dead; in still another, I speak these same words, but I am a delusion, a ghost.’
‘In all,’ I said, not without a shudder, ‘I thank you and honour you for your re-creation of Ts’ui Pên’s garden.’
‘Not in all,’ he murmured, smiling. ‘Time keeps branching into countless futures. In one of them, I am your enemy.’
I felt again that swarming of which I have spoken. It seemed to me that the dank garden around the house was utterly saturated with invisible beings. These were Albert and myself, secret and busy and in numberless guises, in other dimensions of time. I lifted my gaze, and the tenuous nightmare fled. In the yellow and black garden, stood one man alone. But the man was strong as a statue, and he was coming towards me down the path. He was Captain Richard Madden.
‘The future is already here,’ I replied, ‘but I’m your friend. May I see the letter again?’
Albert got up. Tall, he opened the drawer of the writing cabinet, and for a moment his back was to me. I had drawn my revolver. I fired with great care; Albert collapsed instantly, without a groan. I swear his death was immediate, a thunderbolt.
The rest is unreal, meaningless. Madden burst in and seized me. I have been condemned to hang. Horrible to say, I won. I passed on to Berlin the secret name of the city to be attacked. Yesterday the Germans shelled it; I read this in the same newspapers that reported to all England the curious case of the learned Sinologist Stephen Albert, who had been murdered by a perfect stranger, one Yu Tsun. My commander solved the riddle. He knew that my dilemma was how—in the noise and confusion of war—to signal the name of the place to be targeted and that the only way I could find was to kill someone named Albert. My superior knows nothing—nor can anyone—of my unceasing remorse and weariness.
A
Universal
History of Infamy
Jorge Luis Borges
A Universal
History of Infamy
Translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni
Penguin Books
A Universal History of Infamy
Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and was educated in Europe. One of the major writers of our time, he has published many collections of poems, essays, and short stories. In 1961, Borges shared the International Publishers’ Prize with Samuel Beckett. The Ingram Merrill Foundation granted him its Annual Literary Award in 1966 for his ‘outstanding contribution to literature’. Recently, he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, from both Columbia and Oxford, and the same year won the fifth biennial Jerusalem Prize. Time has called him ‘the greatest living writer in the Spanish language today’, while the New York Herald Tribune has described him as ‘unquestionably the most brilliant South American writing today’. He is Director of the Argentine National Library.
Norman Thomas di Giovanni is an American now living in Scotland. He worked with Borges in Buenos Aires from 1968 to 1972, and, to date, has produced six volumes of Borges’s verse and prose in English.
Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-90 Wairau Road,
Auckland 10, New Zealand
Copyright © Emecé Editores, S.A., and
Norman Thomas di Giovanni, 1970, 1971, 1972
The original title of this book is Historia universal de la infamia,
Copyright © Emecé Editores, S.A., Buenos Aires, 1954.
First pu
blished in the United States of America by
E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., New York, 1972 and simultaneously
in Canada by Clarke, Irwin & Co. Ltd, Toronto and Vancouver
Published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 1973
Published in Penguin Books 1975
Made and printed in Great Britain by
Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd, Aylesbury, Bucks
Set in Monotype Garamond
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
Assistance for the translation of this volume was given by the Ingram Merrill Foundation
A Grateful acknowledgement is made to Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte Press for permission to reprint ‘The Generous Enemy’, Copyright © Emecé Editores, S.A., and Norman Thomas di Giovanni, 1968, 1972, and to Jonathan Cape Ltd, publishers of The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969, for permission to print ‘Streetcorner Man’, which appears here in a new translation.
Parts of this book have appeared in the following places:
The Antioch Review: ‘Of Exactitude in Science’; Esquire: ‘The Widow Ching, Lady Pirate’;
Harper’s Magazine: ‘Tom Castro, the Implausible Impostor’;
Intellectual Digest: ‘The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan’;
Collected Stories Page 28
