Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations

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

  The Men

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century (the date that concerns us), the vast cotton plantations along the river were worked, from sunup to sundown, by blacks. These blacks slept on dirt floors in wooden cabins. Apart from mother-child relations, kinships were casual and unclear. They had first names, but they made do without family names. Nor could they read. Their soft falsetto voices intoned an English of drawled vowels. They worked in rows, bent under the overseer’s lash. When they ran away, full-bearded men, springing onto beautiful horses, tracked them down with snarling packs of hounds.

  To successive layers of animal hopes and African fears there had been added the words of the Bible. Their faith, therefore, lay in Christ, They sang deeply and in chorus, ‘Go down, Moses.’ The Mississippi served them as a magnificent image of the paltry Jordan. The owners of this hard-worked land and of these black gangs were idle, greedy gentlemen with flowing locks, who lived in big mansions that overlooked the river always with a white pine, Greek Revival portico. A good slave was worth a thousand dollars and did not last long. Some of them were thankless enough to fall ill and die. Out of such uncertainties, one had to wring the greatest return. This is why slaves were kept in the fields from first light to last; this is why plantations required yearly crops, such as cotton or tobacco or sugarcane. The soil, overworked and mismanaged by this greedy cultivation, was left exhausted within a short time, and tangled, miry wastes encroached upon the land. On abandoned farms, on the outskirts of towns, among the thick canebrakes, and in the abject bayous lived the poor whites. They were fishermen, occasional hunters, and horse thieves. They often begged bits of stolen food from the blacks, and even in their lowly condition these poor whites kept up a certain pride that of their untainted, unmixed blood. Lazarus Morell was one of them.

  The Man

  The daguerreotypes of Morell usually published in American magazines are not authentic. This lack of genuine representations of so memorable and famous a man cannot be accidental. We may suppose that Morell resisted the camera, essentially, so as not to leave behind pointless clues, and, at the same time, to foster the mystery that surrounded him. We know, however, that as a young man he was not favoured with looks, and that his eyes, which were too close together, and his straight lips were not prepossessing. Thereafter, the years conferred upon him that majesty peculiar to white-haired scoundrels and daring, unpunished criminals. He was an old Southern gentleman, despite a miserable childhood and an inglorious life. Versed in Scripture, he preached with unusual conviction ; ‘I saw Lazarus Morell in the pulpit,’ noted the proprietor of a Baton Rouge gambling house, ‘and I listened to his edifying words and I saw the tears gather in his eyes. I knew that in God’s sight he was an adulterer, a Negro-stealer, and a murderer, but my eyes wept, too.’

  Another fair record of these holy effusions is furnished by Morell himself. ‘I opened my Bible at random,’ he wrote, ‘and came upon a fitting verse from Saint Paul, and I preached an hour and twenty minutes. Nor was this time misspent by my assistant Crenshaw and his confederates, for they were outside rounding up all the hearers’ horses. We sold them on the Arkansas side of the river, except for one spirited chestnut that I reserved for my own private use. He pleased Crenshaw as well, but I made him see that the animal was not for him.’

  The Method

  The stealing of horses in one state and selling them in another were barely more than a digression in Morell’s criminal career, but they foreshadowed the method that now assures him his rightful place in a Universal History of Infamy. This method is unique not only for the peculiar circumstances that distinguished it but also for the sordidness it required, for its deadly manipulation of hope, and for its step by step development, so like the hideous unfolding of a nightmare. Al Capone and Bugs Moran were later to operate in a great city, with dazzling sums of money and lowly submachine guns, but their affairs were vulgar. They merely vied for a monopoly. As to numbers of men, Morell came to command some thousand all sworn confederates. Two hundred of them made up the Heads, or Council, and they gave the orders that the remaining eight hundred carried out. All the risks fell upon these active agents, or strikers, as they were called. In the event of trouble, it was they who were handed over to justice or thrown into the Mississippi with a stone fixed securely about their feet. A good many of them were mulattoes. Their diabolical mission was the following:

  Flashing rings on their fingers to inspire respect, they traveled up and down the vast plantations of the South. They would pick out a wretched black and offer him freedom. They would tell him that if he ran away from his master and allowed them to sell him, he would receive a portion of the money paid for him, and they would then help him escape again, this second time sending him to a free state. Money and freedom, the jingle of silver dollars together with his liberty what greater temptation could they offer him? The slave became emboldened for his first escape.

  The river provided the natural route. A canoe; the hold of a steamboat; a scow; a great raft as big as the sky, with a cabin at the point or three or four wigwams the means mattered little, what counted was feeling the movement and the safety of the unceasing river. The black would be sold on some other plantation, then run away again to the canebrakes or the morasses. There his terrible benefactors (about whom he now began to have serious misgivings) cited obscure expenses and told him they had to sell him one final time. On his return, they said, they would give him part of both sales and his freedom. The man let himself be sold, worked for a while, and on his final escape defied the hounds and the whip. He then made his way back bloodied, sweaty, desperate, and sleepy.

  Final Release

  The legal aspect of these doings must now be reviewed. The runaway slave was not put up for sale by Morell’s gang until his first master had advertised and offered a reward to any man who would catch him. An advertisement of this kind warranted the person to take the property, if found. The black then became a property in trust, so that his subsequent sale was only a breach of trust, not stealing. Redress by a civil action for such a breach was useless, as the damages were never paid.

  All this was very reassuring but not entirely foolproof. The black, out of sheer gratitude or misery, might open his mouth. A jug of rye whisky in some Cairo brothel, where the son of a bitch, born a slave, would squander those good dollars that they had no business letting him have, and their secret was spilled. Throughout these years, abolitionist agitators roamed the length and breadth of the North a mob of dangerous madmen who opposed private property, preached the emancipation of slaves, and incited them to run away. Morell was not going to let himself be taken in by those anarchists. He was no Yankee, he was a Southern white, the son and grandson of whites, and he hoped one day to retire from business and become a gentleman and have his own miles of cotton fields and rows of bent-over slaves. He was not about to take pointless risks not with his experience.

  The runaway expected his freedom. Lazarus Morell’s shadowy mulattoes would give out an order among themselves that was sometimes barely more than a nod of the head, and the slave would be freed from sight, hearing, touch, day, infamy, time, his benefactors, pity, the air, the hound packs, the world, hope, sweat, and himself. A bullet, a knife, or a blow, and the Mississippi turtles and catfish would receive the last evidence.

  The Cataclysm

  In the hands of reliable men, the business had to prosper. At the beginning of 1834, Morell had already ‘emancipated’ some seventy blacks, and many others were ready to follow the lead of these lucky forerunners. The field of operations grew wider, and it became essential to take on new associates. Among those who swore to the oath was a young man from Arkansas, one Virgil Stewart, who very soon made himself conspicuous for his cruelty. Stewart was the nephew of a gentleman who had had many slaves decoyed away. In August 1834 this young man broke his oath and exposed Morell and his whole gang. Morell’s house in New Orleans was surrounded by the authorities. Only due to their negligence, or perhaps throu
gh a bribe, was Morell able to make good an escape.

  Three days passed. During this time, Morell remained hidden on Toulouse Street in an old house with courtyards that were filled with vines and statues. It seems that he took to eating little and would stalk up and down the dim, spacious rooms in his bare feet, smoking thoughtful cigars. By a slave of the place, he sent two letters to Natchez and a third to Red River. On the fourth day, three men joined him, and they stayed until dawn, arguing over plans. On the fifth day, Morell got out of bed as it was growing dusk and, asking for a razor, carefully shaved off his beard. Then he dressed and left. At an easy pace, he made his way across the city’s northern suburbs. Once in the country, skirting the Mississippi flats, he walked more briskly.

  His scheme was foolhardy. He planned to enlist the services of the last men still to owe him honour the South’s obliging blacks. They had watched their companions run off and never seen them reappear. Their freedom, therefore, was real. Morell’s object was to raise the blacks against the whites, to capture and sack New Orleans, and to take possession of the territory. Morell, brought down and nearly destroyed by Stewart’s betrayal, contemplated a nationwide response a response in which criminal elements would be exalted to the point of redemption and a place in history. With this aim, he started out for Natchez, where he enjoyed greater strength. I copy his account of that journey:

  I walked four days, and no opportunity offered for me to get a horse. The fifth day, about twelve, I stopped at a creek to get some water and rest a little. While I was sitting on a log, looking down the road the way that I had come, a man came in sight riding on a good-looking horse. The very moment I saw him, I was determined to have his horse. I arose and drew an elegant rifle pistol on him and ordered him to dismount. He did so, and I took his horse by the bridle and pointed down the creek, and ordered him to walk before me. He went a few hundred yards and stopped. I made him undress himself. He said, ‘If you are determined to kill me, let me have time to pray before I die.’ I told him I had no time to hear him pray. He dropped on his knees, and I shot him through the back of the head. I ripped open his belly and took out his entrails, and sunk him in the creek. I then searched his pockets, and found four hundred dollars and thirty-seven cents, and a number of papers that I did not take time to examine. His boots were brand-new, and fitted me genteelly. I put them on and sunk my old shoes in the creek.

  That was how I obtained the horse I needed, and directed my course for Natchez in much better style than I had been for the last five days.

  The Disruption

  Morell leading rebellions of blacks who dreamed of lynching him; Morell lynched by armies of blacks he dreamed of leading it hurts me to confess that Mississippi history took advantage of neither of these splendid opportunities. Nor, contrary to all poetic justice (or poetic symmetry), did the river of his crimes become his grave. On the second of January 1835 Lazarus Morell died of a lung ailment in the Natchez hospital, where he had been interned under the name Silas Buckley. A fellow patient on the ward recognized him. On the second and on the fourth, the slaves of certain plantations attempted an uprising, but they were put down without a great deal of bloodshed.

  Tom Castro, the Implausible Impostor

  Tom Castro is what I call him, for this was the name he was known by, around 1850, in the streets and houses of Talcahuano, Santiago, and Valparaiso, and it is only fitting now that he comes back to these shores even if only as a ghost and as mere light reading that he go by this name again. The registry of births in Wapping lists him as Arthur Orton, and enters the name under the date 7 June 1834. It is known that he was a butcher’s son, that his childhood suffered the drabness and squalor of London slums, and that he felt the call of the sea. This last fact is not uncommon. Running away to sea is, for the English, the traditional break from parental authority the road to adventure; Geography fosters it, and so does the Bible (Psalms, 107): ‘They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.’

  Orton ran away from his familiar, dirty, brick-red streets, went down to the sea in a ship, gazed at the Southern Cross with the usual disappointment, and deserted in the Chilean port of Valparaiso. As an individual, he was at once quiet and dull. Logically, he might (and should) have starved to death, but his dim-witted good humour, his fixed smile, and his unrelieved meekness brought him under the wing of a family called Castro, whose name he came to adopt. Of this South American episode no other traces are left, but his gratefulness does not seem to have flagged, since, in 1861, he reappears in Australia still using that name Tom Castro. There, in Sydney, he made the acquaintance of a certain Ebenezer Bogle, a Negro servant. Bogle, without being especially handsome, had about him that air of authority and assurance, that architectural solidity typical of certain Negroes well along in years, in flesh, and in dignity. He had another quality, which most anthropology textbooks have denied his race a capacity for sudden inspiration. In due time, we shall see proof of this. He was a well-mannered, upright person, whose primeval African lusts had been carefully channelled by the uses and misuses of Calvinism. Apart from receiving divine visitations (which will presently be described), Bogle was no different from other men, with nothing more distinctive about him than a longstanding, shamefaced fear that made him linger at street crossings glancing east, west, south, and north in utter dread of the vehicle that might one day take his life.

  Orton first saw him early one evening on a deserted Sydney street corner, steeling himself against this quite unlikely death. After studying him for a long while, Orton offered the Negro his arm, and, sharing the same amazement, the two men crossed the harmless street. From that moment of a now dead and lost evening, a protectorate came into being that of the solid, unsure Negro over the obese dimwit from Wapping. In September 1865 Bogle read a forlorn advertisement in the local paper.

  The Idolized Dead Man

  Toward the end of April 1854 (while Orton was enjoying the effusions of Chilean hospitality), the steamer Mermaid, sailing from Rio de Janeiro to Liverpool, went down in the waters of the Atlantic. Among those lost was Roger Charles Tichborne, an army officer brought up in France and heir of one of the leading Roman Catholic families of England. Incredible as it may seem, the death of this Frenchified young man who spoke English with the most refined Parisian accent and awoke in others that incomparable resentment which only French intelligence, French wit, and French pedantry can touch off was a fateful event in the life of Arthur Orton, who had never laid eyes on Tichborne. Lady Tichborne, Roger’s anguished mother, refused to give credence to her son’s death and had heartrending advertisements published in newspapers the world over. One of these notices fell into the soft, black hands of Ebenezer Bogle, and a masterly scheme was evolved.

  The Virtues of Disparity

  Tichborne was a gentleman, slight in build, with a trim, buttoned-up look, sharp features, darkish skin, straight black hair, lively eyes, and a finicky, precise way of speaking. Orton was an enormously fat, out-and-out boor, whose features could hardly be made out; he had somewhat freckled skin, wavy brown hair, heavy-lidded eyes, and his speech was dim or nonexistent. Bogle got it into his head that Orton’s duty was to board the next Europe-bound steamer and to satisfy Lady Tichborne’s hopes by claiming to be her son. The plan was outrageously ingenious. Let us draw a simple parallel. If an impostor, in 1914, had undertaken to pass himself off as the German emperor, what he would immediately have faked would have been the turned-up moustache, the withered arm, the authoritarian frown, the grey cape, the illustriously bemedalled chest, and the pointed helmet. Bogle was more subtle. He would have put forward a clean-shaven kaiser, lacking in military traits, stripped of glamorous decorations, and whose left arm was in an unquestionable state of health. We can lay aside the comparison. It is on record that Bogle put forward a flabby Tichborne, with an imbecile’s amiable smile, brown hair, and an invincible ignorance of French. He knew that an exact likeness o
f the long-lost Roger Charles Tichborne was an outright impossibility. He also knew that any resemblances, however successfully contrived, would only point up certain unavoidable disparities. Bogle therefore steered clear of all likeness. Intuition told him that the vast ineptitude of the venture would serve as ample proof that no fraud was afoot, since an impostor would hardly have overlooked such flagrant discrepancies. Nor must the all-important collaboration of time be forgotten: fourteen years of Southern Hemisphere, coupled with the hazards of chance, can wreak change in a man.

  A further assurance of success lay in Lady Tichborne’s unrelenting, harebrained advertisements, which showed how unshakably she believed that Roger Charles was not dead and how willing she was to recognize him,

  The Meeting

  Tom Castro, always ready to oblige, wrote to Lady Tichborne. To confirm his identity, he cited the unimpeachable proof of two moles located close to the nipple of his left breast and that childhood episode so painful, but at the same time so unforgettable of his having been attacked by a nest of hornets. The letter was short and, in keeping with Tom Castro and Bogle, was wanting in the least scruples of orthography. In the imposing seclusion of her Paris hotel, the lady read and reread the letter through tears of joy, and in a few days’ time she came up with the memories her son had asked for.