Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations

by Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N. T. di Giovanni)

  “Some three years after the house was finished, the Rose of Sharon anchored one October morning just under the bluffs. I was not among those who saw this sailing ship, and perhaps the image of it I hold in my mind is influenced by forgotten prints of Aboukir or of Trafalgar, but I believe it was among that class of ships so minutely detailed that they seem less the work of a shipbuilder than of a carpenter, and less of a carpenter than of a cabinetmaker. It was (if not in reality, at least in my dreams) polished, dark, fast, and silent, and its crew was made up of Arabs and Malayans.

  “It anchored at dawn, and in the late afternoon of that same day Ibn Hakkan burst into the rectory to see Allaby. He was dominated—completely dominated—by a passion of fear, and was scarcely able to make it clear that Zaid had entered the labyrinth and that his slave and his lion had already been killed. He asked in all seriousness whether the authorities might be able to help him. Before Allaby could say a word, al-Bokhari was gone—as if torn away by the same terror that had brought him for the second and last time to the rectory. Alone in his library, Allaby reflected in amazement that this fear-ridden man had kept down Sudanese tribes by the knife, knew what a battle was, and knew what it was to kill. Allaby found out the next day that the boat had already set sail (bound for the Red Sea port of Suakin, he later learned). Feeling it was his duty to verify the death of the slave, he made his way up to the labyrinth. Al-Bokhari’s breathless tale seemed to him utterly fantastic, but at one turn of the corridor he came upon the lion, and the lion was dead, and at another turn there was the slave, who was also dead, and in the central room he found al-Bokhari—with his face obliterated. At the man’s feet was a small chest inlaid with mother-of-pearl; the lock had been forced, and not a single coin was left.”

  Dunraven’s final sentences, underlined by rhetorical pauses, were meant to be impressive; Unwin guessed that his friend had gone over them many times before, always with the same confidence—and with the same flatness of effect. He asked, in order to feign interest, “How were the lion and the slave killed?”

  The relentless voice went on with a kind of gloomy satisfaction, “Their faces were also bashed in.”

  A muffled sound of rain was now added to the sound of the men’s steps. Unwin realized that they would have to spend the night in the labyrinth, in the central chamber, but that in time this uncomfortable experience could be looked back on as an adventure. He kept silent. Dunraven could not restrain himself, and asked, in the manner of one who wants to squeeze the last drop, “Can this story be explained?”

  Unwin answered, as though thinking aloud, “I have no idea whether it can be explained or not. I only know it’s a lie.”

  Dunraven broke out in a torrent of strongly flavored language and said that all the population of Pentreath could bear witness to the truth of what he had told and that if he had to make up a story, he was a writer after all and could easily have invented a far better one. No less astonished than Dunraven, Unwin apologized. Time in the darkness seemed more drawn out; both men began to fear they had gone astray, and were feeling their tiredness when a faint gleam of light from overhead revealed the lower steps of a narrow staircase. They climbed up and came to a round room that lay in ruin. Two things were left that attested to the fear of the ill-starred king: a slit of a window that looked out onto the moors and the sea, and a trapdoor in the floor that opened above the curve of the stairway. The room, though spacious, had about it something of a prison cell.

  Less because of the rain than because of a wish to have a ready anecdote for friends, the two men spent the night in the labyrinth. The mathematician slept soundly; not so the poet, who was hounded by verses that his judgment knew to be worthless:

  Faceless the sultry and overpowering lion, Faceless the stricken slave, faceless the king.

  Unwin felt that the story of al-Bokhari’s death had left him indifferent, but he woke up with the conviction of having unraveled it. All that day, he was preoccupied and unsociable, trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together, and two nights later he met Dunraven in a pub back in London and said to him these or similar words: “In Cornwall, I said your story was a lie. The facts were true, or could be thought of as true, but told the way you told them they were obviously lies. I will begin with the greatest lie of all—with the unbelievable labyrinth. A fugitive does not hide himself in a maze. He does not build himself a labyrinth on a bluff overlooking the sea, a crimson labyrinth that can be sighted from afar by any ship’s crew. He has no need to erect a labyrinth when the whole world already is one.

  For anyone who really wants to hide away, London is a better labyrinth than a lookout tower to which all the corridors of a building lead. The simple observation I have just propounded to you came to me the night before last while we were listening to the rain on the roof and were waiting for sleep to fall upon us. Under its influence, I chose to put aside your absurdities and to think about something sensible.”

  “About the theory of series, say, or about a fourth dimension of space?” asked Dunraven.

  “No,” said Unwin, serious. “I thought about the labyrinth of Crete. The labyrinth whose center was a man with the head of a bull.”

  Dunraven, steeped in detective stories, thought that the solution of a mystery is always less impressive than the mystery itself. Mystery has something of the supernatural about it, and even of the divine; its solution, however, is always tainted by sleight of hand. He said, to put off the inevitable, “On coins and in sculpture the Minotaur has a bull’s head. Dante imagined it as having the body of a bull and a man’s head.”

  “That version also fits my solution,” Unwin agreed.

  “What matters is that both the dwelling and the dweller be monstrous. The Minotaur amply justifies its maze. The same can hardly be said of a threat uttered in a dream. The Minotaur’s image once evoked (unavoidably, of course, in a mystery in which there is a labyrinth), the problem was virtually solved. Nonetheless, I confess I did not fully understand that this ancient image held the key, but in your story I found a detail I could use—the spider web.”

  “The spider web?” repeated Dunraven, baffled.

  “Yes. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the spider web (the Platonic spider web—let’s keep this straight) may have suggested to the murderer (for there is a murderer) his crime. You remember that al-Bokhari, in the tomb, dreamed about a tangle of snakes, and upon waking found that a spider web had prompted his dream. Let us go back to that night in which al-Bokhari had that dream. The defeated king and the vizier and the slave are escaping over the desert with treasure. They take shelter for the night in a tomb. The vizier, whom we know to be a coward, sleeps; the king, whom we know to be a brave man, does not sleep. In order not to share the treasure, the king knifes the vizier. Several nights later, the vizier’s ghost threatens the king in a dream. All this is unconvincing. To my understanding, the events took place in another way. That night, the king, the brave man, slept, and Zaid, the coward, lay awake. To sleep is to forget all things, and this particular forgetfulness is not easy when you know you are being hunted down with drawn swords. Zaid, greedy, bent over the sleeping figure of his king. He thought about killing him (maybe he even played with his dagger), but he did not dare. He woke the napping slave, they buried part of the treasure in the tomb, and they fled to Suakin and to England. Not to hide themselves from al-Bokhari but to lure him and to kill him, they built—like the spider its web—the crimson labyrinth on the high dunes in sight of the sea. The vizier knew that ships would carry to Nubian ports the tale of the red-bearded man, of the slave, and of the lion, and that sooner or later al-Bokhari would come in search of them in their labyrinth. In the last passageway of the maze, the trap lay waiting. Al-Bokhari had always underrated Zaid, and now did not lower himself to take the slightest precaution. At last, the wished-for day came; Ibn Hakkan landed in England, went directly to the door of the maze, made his way into its blind corridors, and perhaps had already set foot on the first steps when
his vizier killed him—I don’t know whether with a bullet—from the trapdoor in the ceiling. The slave would finish off the lion and another bullet would finish off the slave. Then Zaid crushed the three faces with a rock. He had to do it that way; one dead man with his face bashed in would have suggested a problem of identity, but the beast, the black man, and the king formed a series, and, given the first two terms, the last one would seem natural. It is not to be wondered at that he was driven by fear when he spoke to Allaby; he had just finished his awful job and was about to flee England and unearth the treasure.”

  A thoughtful silence, or disbelief, followed Unwin’s words. Dunraven asked for another tankard before giving his judgment.

  “I admit,” he said, “that my Ibn Hakkan could have been Zaid. Such metamorphoses are classic rules of the game, are accepted conventions demanded by the reader. What I am unwilling to admit is your conjecture that a part of the treasure remained in the Sudan. Remember that Zaid fled from the king and from the king’s enemies both; it is easier to picture him stealing the whole hoard than taking the time to bury a portion of it. At the very end, perhaps no coins were found in the chest because no coins were left. The bricklayers would have eaten up a fortune that, unlike the red gold of the Nibelungs, was not inexhaustible. And so we have Ibn Hakkan crossing the seas in order to recover a treasure already squandered.”

  “I shouldn’t say squandered,” Unwin said. “The vizier invested it, putting together on an island of infidels a great circular trap made of brick and destined not only to lure a king but to be his grave. Zaid, if your guess is correct, acted out of hate and fear, and not out of greed. He stole the treasure, and only later found that he was really after something else. He really wanted to see Ibn Hakkan dead. He pretended to be Ibn Hakkan, he killed Ibn Hakkan, and in the end he became Ibn Hakkan.”

  “Yes,” agreed Dunraven. “He was a good-for-nothing who, before becoming a nobody in death, wanted one day to look back on having been a king or having been taken for a king.”

  The Man on the Threshold

  (1952)

  Bioy-Casares brought back with him from London a strange dagger with a triangular blade and a hilt in the shape of an H; a friend of ours, Christopher Dewey of the British Council, told us that such weapons were commonly used in India. This statement prompted him to mention that he had held a job in that country between the two wars. (“Ultra Auroram et Gangen,” I recall his saying in Latin, misquoting a line from Juvenal.) Of the stories he entertained us with that night, I venture to set down the one that follows. My account will be faithful; may Allah deliver me from the temptation of adding any circumstantial details or of weighing down the tale’s Oriental character with interpolations from Kipling. It should be remarked that the story has a certain ancient simplicity that it would be a pity to lose—something perhaps straight out of the Arabian Nights.

  The precise geography [Dewey said] of the events I am going to relate is of little importance. Besides, what would the names of Amritsar or Oudh mean in Buenos Aires? Let me only say, then, that in those years there were disturbances in a Muslim city and that the central government sent out one of their best people to restore order. He was a Scotsman from an illustrious clan of warriors, and in his blood he bore a tradition of violence. Only once did I lay eyes on him, but I shall not forget his deep black hair, the prominent cheekbones, the somehow avid nose and mouth, the broad shoulders, the powerful set of a Viking. David Alexander Glencairn is what he’ll be called in my story tonight; the names are fitting, since they belonged to kings who ruled with an iron scepter. David Alexander Glencairn (as I shall have to get used to calling him) was, I suspect, a man who was feared; the mere news of his coming was enough to quell the city. This did not deter him from putting into effect a number of forceful measures. A few years passed. The city and the outlying district were at peace; Sikhs and Muslims had laid aside their ancient enmities, and suddenly Glencairn disappeared. Naturally enough, there was no lack of rumors that he had been kidnapped or murdered.

  These things I learned from my superior, for the censorship was strict and the newspapers made no comment on (nor did they even record, for all I recall) Glencairn’s disappearance. There’s a saying that India is larger than the world; Glencairn, who may have been all powerful in the city to which he was destined by a signature scrawled across the bottom of some document, was no more than a cog in the administration of Empire. The inquiries of the local police turned up nothing; my superior felt that a civilian might rouse less suspicion and achieve greater results. Three or four days later (distances in India are generous), I was appointed to my mission and was working my way without hope of success through the streets of the commonplace city that had somehow whisked away a man.

  I felt, almost at once, the invisible presence of a conspiracy to keep Glencairn’s fate hidden. There’s not a soul in this city (I suspected) who is not in on the secret and who is not sworn to keep it. Upon being questioned, most people professed an unbounded ignorance; they did not know who Glencairn was, had never seen him, had never heard anyone speak of him. Others, instead, had caught a glimpse of him only a quarter of an hour before talking to So-and-So, and they even accompanied me to the house the two had entered and in which nothing was known of them, or which they had just that moment left. Some of those meticulous liars I went so far as to knock down. Witnesses approved my outbursts, and made up other lies. I did not believe them, but neither did I dare ignore them. One afternoon, I was handed an envelope containing a slip of paper on which there was an address.

  The sun had gone down when I got there. The quarter was poor but not rowdy; the house was quite low; from the street I caught a glimpse of a succession of unpaved inner courtyards, and somewhere at the far end an opening. There, some kind of Muslim ceremony was being held; a blind man entered with a lute made of a reddish wood.

  At my feet, motionless as an object, an old, old man squatted on the threshold. I’ll tell what he was like, for he is an essential part of the story. His many years had worn him down and polished him as smooth as water polishes a stone, or as the generations of men polish a sentence. Long rags covered him, or so it seemed to me, and the cloth he wore wound around his head was one rag more. In the dusk, he lifted a dark face and a white beard. I began speaking to him without preamble, for by now I had given up all hope of ever finding David Alexander Glencairn. The old man did not understand me (perhaps he did not hear me), and I had to explain that Glencairn was a judge and that I was looking for him. I felt, on speaking these words, the pointlessness of questioning this old man for whom the present was hardly more than a dim rumor. This man might give me news of the Mutiny or of Akbar (I thought) but not of Glencairn. What he told me confirmed this suspicion.

  “A judge!” he cried with weak surprise. “A judge who has got himself lost and is being searched for. That happened when I was a boy. I have no memory for dates, but Nikal Seyn (Nicholson) had not yet been killed before the wall of Delhi. Time that has passed stays on in memory; I may be able to summon back what happened then. God, in his wrath, had allowed people to fall into corruption; the mouths of men were full of blasphemy and of deceit and of fraud. Yet not all were evil, and when it was known that the queen was about to send a man who would carry out in this land the law of England, those who were less evil were cheered, for they felt that law is better than disorder. The Christian came to us, but it was not long before he too was deceiving and oppressing us, concealing abominable crimes, and selling decisions. We did not blame him in the beginning; the English justice he administered was not familiar to anyone, and the apparent excesses of the new judge may have obeyed certain valid arcane reasoning. Everything must have a justification in his book, we wished to think, but his kinship with all evil judges the world over was too obvious to be overlooked, and at last we were forced to admit that he was simply a wicked man. He turned out to be a tyrant, and the unfortunate people (in order to avenge themselves for the false hopes they had once placed
in him) began to toy with the idea of kidnapping him and submitting him to judgment. To talk was not enough; from plans they had to move to action. Nobody, perhaps, save the very foolish or the very young, believed that that rash scheme could be carried out, but thousands of Sikhs and Muslims kept their word and one day they executed—incredulous—what to each of them had seemed impossible. They sequestered the judge and held him prisoner in a farmhouse beyond the outskirts of the town. Then they called together all those who had been wronged by him, or, in some cases, orphans and widows, for during those years the executioner’s sword had not rested. In the end—this was perhaps the most difficult— they sought and named a judge to judge the judge.”

  At this point, the old man was interrupted by some women who were entering the house. Then he went on, slowly.

  “It is well known that there is no generation that does not include in it four upright men who are the secret pillars of the world and who justify it before the Lord: one of these men would have made the perfect judge. But where are they to be found if they themselves wander the world lost and nameless, and do not know each other when they meet, and are unaware of the high destiny that is theirs? Someone then reasoned that if fate forbade us wise men, we should seek out the witless. This opinion prevailed. Students of the Koran, doctors of law, Sikhs who bear the name of lions and who worship one God, Hindus who worship a multitude of gods, Mahavira monks who teach that the shape of the universe is that of a man with his legs spread apart, worshipers of fire, and black Jews made up the court, but the final ruling was entrusted to a madman.”

  Here he was interrupted by people who were leaving the ceremony.