Collected Stories

by Jorge Luis Borges

  The Manticore shoots the quills of its tail, which spread out like arrows on every hand. Drops of blood drip down, spattering the leaves of the trees.

  The Mermecolion

  The Mermecolion is an inconceivable animal defined by Flaubert in this way: ‘lion in its foreparts, ant in its hindparts, with the organs of its sex the wrong way.’ The history of this monster is also strange. In the Scriptures (Job IV: II) we read: ‘The old lion perisheth for lack of prey.’ The Hebrew text has layish for lion; this word, an uncommon one for the lion, seems to have produced an equally uncommon translation. The Septuagint version, harking back to an Arabian lion that Aelian and Strabo call myrmex, forged the word Mermecolion. After centuries, the origin of this was forgotten. Myrmex, in Greek, means ant; out of the puzzling words The ant-lion perisheth for lack of prey’ grew a fantasy (translated below by T. H. White) that medieval bestiaries succeeded in multiplying:

  The Physiologus said: It had the face (or fore-part) of a lion and the hinder parts of an ant. Its father eats flesh, but its mother grains. If then they engender the ant-lion, they engender a thing of two natures, such that it cannot eat flesh because of the nature of its mother, nor grains because of the nature of its father. It perishes, therefore, because it has no nutriment.

  The Minotaur

  The idea of a house built so that people could become lost in it is perhaps more unusual than that of a man with a bull’s head, but both ideas go well together and the image of the labyrinth fits with the image of the Minotaur. It is equally fitting that in the centre of a monstrous house there be a monstrous inhabitant.

  The Minotaur, half bull and half man, was born of the furious passion of Pasiphae, Queen of Crete, for a white bull that Neptune brought out of the sea. Daedalus, who invented the artifice that carried the Queen’s unnatural desires to gratification, built the labyrinth destined to confine and keep hidden her monstrous son. The Minotaur fed on human flesh and for its nourishment the King of Crete imposed on the city of Athens a yearly tribute of seven young men and seven maidens. Theseus resolved to deliver his country from this burden when it fell to his lot to be sacrificed to the Minotaur’s hunger. Ariadne, the King’s daughter, gave him a thread so that he could trace his way out of the windings of the labyrinth’s corridors; the hero killed the Minotaur and was able to escape from the maze.

  Ovid in a line that is meant to be clever speaks of the Semibovemque virum, semivirumque bovem (‘the man half bull, the bull half man’). Dante, who was familiar with the writings of the ancients but not with their coins or monuments, imagined the Minotaur with a man’s head and a bull’s body (Inferno, XII, 1-30).

  The worship of the bull and of the two-headed axe (whose name was labrys and may have been at the root of the word labyrinth) was typical of pre-Hellenic religions, which held sacred bullfights. Human forms with bull heads figured, to judge by wall paintings, in the demonology of Crete. Most likely the Greek fable of the Minotaur is a late and clumsy version of far older myths, the shadow of other dreams still more full of horror.

  The Monkey of the Inkpot

  This animal, common in the north, is four or five inches long; its eyes are scarlet and its fur is jet black, silky, and soft as a pillow. It is marked by a curious instinct the taste for India ink. When a person sits down to write, the monkey squats cross-legged near by with one forepaw folded over the other, waiting until the task is over. Then it drinks what is left of the ink, and afterwards sits back on its haunches, quiet and satisfied.

  Wang Tai-hai (1791)

  The Monster Acheron

  Only one person, one time, ever saw the monster Acheron; this took place in the twelfth century in the Irish town of Cork. The original version of the story, written in Gaelic, is now lost, but a Benedictine monk from Regensburg (Ratisbon) translated it into Latin, and from this translation the tale passed into a number of languages, among them Swedish and Spanish. Of the Latin version there are some fifty-odd manuscripts extant, agreeing in all the essentials. Visio Tundali (Tundal’s Vision) is the story’s name, and it has been considered one of the sources of Dante’s poem. Let us begin with the word ‘Acheron.’ In the tenth book of the Odyssey it is one of the rivers of hell, flowing somewhere on the western borders of the inhabited world. Its name is reechoed in the Aeneid, in Lucan’s Pharsalia, and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Dante engraves it in a line: Su la trista riviera d’Acheronte (‘On the sad shores of the Acheron’).

  In one myth, Acheron is a Titan suffering punishment; in another, dating earlier, he is placed close to the South Pole, below the constellations of the antipodes. The Etruscans had ‘books of fate’ that taught divination and ‘books of Acheron’ that taught the ways of the soul after bodily death. In time, Acheron came to stand for hell.

  Tundal was an Irish gentleman, well-mannered and brave, but of hardly irreproachable habits. He once fell ill while at the home of a lady friend, and for three days and nights was taken for dead, except for a bit of warmth in his heart. When he recovered his senses, he told that his guardian angel had shown him the lands beyond this world. Of the many wonders he saw, the one which interests us here is the monster Acheron. He is bigger than any mountain. His eyes flame and his mouth is so large that nine thousand persons could fit in it. Two damned men, like pillars or atlantes, prop it open; one stands on his feet, the other on his head. Three throats lead inside and belch undying fire. From deep in the beast’s belly comes the continuous wailing of the countless lost souls who are being devoured. Devils tell Tundal that the monster is called Acheron. His guardian angel deserts him, and Tundal is swept inside with the others. There he finds himself in the midst of tears, darkness, gnashing teeth, fire, unbearable burning, icy cold, dogs, bears, lions, and snakes. In this legend, hell is a beast with other beasts inside it.

  In 1758, Emanuel Swedenborg wrote: ‘It has not been granted me to perceive Hell’s general shape, but I have been told that in the same way that Heaven has a human shape. Hell has the shape of a devil.’

  The Mother of Tortoises

  Twenty-two centuries before the Christian era, the good emperor Yü the Great travelled and measured with his steps the Nine Mountains, the Nine Rivers, and the Nine Marshes, and divided the land into Nine Provinces fit for virtue and agriculture. In this way he held back the Waters that threatened to flood Heaven and Earth, and left us this account of his Public Works (Legge’s translation):

  I mounted my four conveyances (carts, boats, sledges, and spiked shoes), and all along the hills hewed down the woods, at the same time, along with Yi, showing the multitudes how to get flesh to eat. I opened passages for the streams throughout the nine provinces, and conducted them to the sea. I deepened the channels and canals, and conducted them to the streams, at the same time, along with Chi, sowing grain, and showing the multitudes how to procure the food of toil in addition to flesh meat.

  Historians tell that the manner in which he divided his territory was revealed to him by a supernatural or sacred Tortoise that arose from the bed of a river. There are those who claim that this amphibious creature, the mother of all Tortoises, was made of water and fire; others attribute a less common substance to it: starlight of the constellation Sagittarius. On the Tortoise’s shell could be read a cosmic treatise called the Hong Fan (Universal Rule), or a diagram made of black and white dots of the Nine Subdivisions of that treatise.

  To the Chinese, the heavens are hemispherical and the earth quadrangular, and so, in the Tortoise with its curved upper shell and flat lower shell, they find an image or model of the world. Moreover, Tortoises share in cosmic longevity; it is therefore fitting that they should be included among the spiritually endowed creatures (together with the unicorn, the dragon, the phoenix, and the tiger) and that soothsayers read the future in the pattern of their shells.

  Than-Qui (Tortoise-Spirit) is the name of the creature that revealed the Hong Fan to the emperor.

  The Nagas

  Nagas belong to the mythology
of India. They are serpents but often take the form of a man.

  In one of the books of the Mahabharata, Arjuna is pursued by Ulupi, the daughter of a Naga king, and firmly but gently has to remind her of his vow of chastity; the maiden tells him that his duty lies in soothing the unhappy. The hero grants her a night. The Buddha, meditating under a fig tree, is chastised by the wind and the rain; a Naga out of pity coils itself around him in a sevenfold embrace and opens over him its seven heads so as to form a kind of umbrella. The Buddha converts him to the Faith.

  Kern in his Manual of Indian Buddhism, speaks of the Nagas as cloudlike serpents. They live underground in deep palaces. Believers in the Greater Vehicle tell that the Buddha preached one law to mankind and another to the gods, and that this latter the secret law was kept in the heavens and palaces of the serpents, who revealed it centuries later to the monk Nagarjuna.

  We give an Indian legend set down by the Chinese pilgrim Fa-hsien early in the fifth century:

  King Asoka came to a lake near whose edge stood a lofty pagoda. He thought of pulling it down in order to raise a higher one. A Brahman let him into the tower and once inside told him:

  ‘My human form is an illusion. I am really a Naga, a dragon. My sins condemn me to inhabit this frightful body, but I obey the law preached by the Buddha and hope to work my redemption. You may pull down this shrine if you believe you can build a better one.’

  The Naga showed him the vessels of the altar. The king looked at them with alarm, for they were quite unlike those made by the hands of men, and he left the pagoda standing.

  The Nasnas

  Among the monstrous creatures of the Temptation is the Nasnas, which ‘has only one eye, one cheek, one hand, one leg, half a torso and half a heart.’ A commentator, Jean Claude Margolin, credits the invention of this beast to Flaubert, but Lane in the first volume of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (1839) says it is believed to be the offspring of the Shikk, a demonical creature divided longitudinally, and a human being. The Nasnas, according to Lane (who gives it as Nesnás), resembles ‘half a human being; having half a head, half a body, one arm, and one leg, with which it hops with much agility . . .’ It is found in the woods and desert country of Yemen and Hadhramaut, and is endowed with speech. One race has its face in the breast, like the blemies, and a tail like that of a sheep. Its flesh is sweet and much sought after. Another variety of Nasnas, having the wings of a bat, inhabits the island of Ráïj (perhaps Borneo) at the edge of the China seas. ‘But God,’ adds the sceptical authority, ‘is All-Knowing.’

  The Norns

  In medieval Norse mythology the Norns are the Fates. Snorri Sturluson, who at the beginning of the thirteenth century brought order to the scattered Northern myths, tells us that the Norns are three and that their names are Urth (the past), Verthandi (the present), and Skuld (the future). These three heavenly Norns ruled the fate of the world, while at the birth of every man three individual Norns were present, casting the weird of his life. It may be suspected that the names of the Norns are a refinement or addition of a theological nature; ancient Germanic tribes were incapable of such abstract thinking. Snorri shows us three maidens by a fountain at the base of the World Tree, Yggdrasil. Inexorably, they weave our fate.

  Time (of which they are made) seemed to have quite forgotten them, but around 1606 William Shakespeare wrote the tragedy of Macbeth, in whose first scene they appear. They are the three witches who predict what fate holds in store for Banquo and Macbeth. Shakespeare calls them the weird sisters (I, iii):

  The weird sisters, hand in hand,

  Posters of the seas and land,

  Thus do go about, about . . .

  Wyrd among the Anglo-Saxons was the silent goddess who presided over the destiny of gods and men.

  The Nymphs

  Paracelsus limited their dominion to water, but the ancients thought the world was full of Nymphs. They distinguished them by names according to the places they haunted. The Dryads, or Hamadryads, dwelled in trees, without being seen, and died with them. Other Nymphs were held to be immortal or, as Plutarch obscurely intimates, lived for above 9,720 years. Among these were the Nereids and the Oceanids, which presided over the sea. Nymphs of the lakes and streams were Naiads; those of mountains and caves, Oreads. There were also Nymphs of the glens, called Napaeae, and of groves called Alseids. The exact number of the Nymphs is unknown; Hesiod gives us the figure three thousand. They were earnest young women and very beautiful; their name may mean simply ‘marriageable woman.’ Glimpsing them could cause blindness and, if they were naked, death. A line of Propertius affirms this.

  The ancients made them offerings of honey, olive oil, and milk. They were minor goddesses, but no temples were erected in their honour.

  The Odradek

  Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to account for it on that basis. Others again believe it to be of German origin, only influenced by Slavonic. The uncertainty of both interpretations allows one to assume with justice that neither is accurate, especially as neither of them provides an intelligent meaning of the word.

  No one, of course, would occupy himself with such studies if there were not a creature called Odradek. At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colours. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs.

  One is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a brokendown remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no sign of it; nowhere is there an unfinished or unbroken surface to suggest anything of the kind; the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished. In any case, closer scrutiny is impossible, since Odradek is extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid hold of.

  He lurks by turns in the garret, the stairway, the lobbies, the entrance hall. Often for months on end he is not to be seen; then he has presumably moved into other houses; but he always comes faithfully back to our house again. Many a time when you go out of the door and he happens just to be leaning directly beneath you against the banisters you feel inclined to speak to him. Of course, you put no difficult questions to him, you treat him he is so diminutive that you cannot help it rather like a child.

  ‘Well, what’s your name?’ you ask him. ‘Odradek,’ he says.

  ‘And where do you live?’ ‘No fixed abode,’ he says and laughs; but it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves. And that is usually the end of the conversation. Even these answers are not always forthcoming; often he stays mute for a long time, as wooden as his appearance.

  I ask myself, to no purpose, what is likely to happen to him? Can he possibly die? Anything that dies has had some kind of aim in life, some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not apply to Odradek. Am I to suppose, then, that he will always be rolling down the stairs, with ends of thread trailing after him, right before the feet of my children, and my children’s children? He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful.

  Franz Kafka: The Penal Colony

  (Translated from the German by

  Willa and Edwin Muir)

  [This piece was originally titled Die Sorge des Hausvaters—

  ‘The Cares of a Family Man.’]

  An Offspring of Leviathan

  In the Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century compendium of lives of the saints written by the Dominican friar Jacobus de Voragine, read and re-read in the Middle Ages but now neglected, we find much curious lore. The book went
through numerous editions and translations, among them the one into English printed by William Caxton. Chaucer’s ‘Second Nonne’s Tale’ has its source in the Legenda aurea; Longfellow also was inspired by the work of Jacobus, taking the, title from the Golden Legend for one of the books of his trilogy Christus.

  Out of Jacobus’ medieval Latin, we translate the following from the chapter on St Martha (CV [100]):

  There was at that time, in a certain wood above the Rhone between Arles and Avignon, a dragon that was half beast and half fish, larger than an ox and longer than a horse. Armed with a pair of tusks that were like swords and pointed as horns, it lay in wait in the river, killing all wayfarers and swamping boats. It had come, however, from the sea of Galatia in Asia Minor and was begotten by Leviathan, the fiercest of all water serpents, and by the Wild Ass, which is common to those shores . . .

  One-Eyed Beings

  Before it became the name of an optical instrument, the word ‘monocle’ was applied to beings who had a single eye. So, in a sonnet composed at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Góngora writes of the Monóculo galán de Galatea (‘The monocle who yearns for Galatea’) referring, of course, to Polyphemus, of whom he had previously written in his Fábula de Polifemo: