As everyone knows, scholarly conferences are popular in American universities. Dr Winthrop, in his turn, had given a paper at one of the important Germanic symposia the year before, at Michigan State. His department head, who was getting ready to go off on sabbatical, asked Winthrop to choose a delegate to deliver a paper at the next conference, to be held at Wisconsin. There were only two real candidates Herbert Locke and Eric Einarsson.
Winthrop, like Carlyle, had renounced the Puritan faith of his ancestors but not its ethics. His duty was clear, and he did not decline to give his advice. Herbert Locke, going back to 1954, had been unstinting in his assistance to him, particularly with regard to a certain annotated edition of Beowulf which, in a number of universities, had replaced Klaeber’s edition. Locke was now compiling a very useful work for the Germanic specialist an English Anglo-Saxon dictionary that would save readers from the often useless examination of etymological dictionaries. The Icelander was considerably younger; his insolence had earned him everyone’s dislike, including Winthrop’s. Einarsson’s critical edition of Maldon had contributed a good deal to spreading his name. He was a master of polemic, and at the symposium he would cut a better figure than the shy, taciturn Locke.
Winthrop was in the midst of these considerations when there appeared in the review columns of the Yale Philological Quarterly a long article on the teaching of Anglo-Saxon. The piece was signed with the giveaway initials ‘E. E.’ and, as if to allay any doubt, under them it read ‘University of Texas’. Written in a foreigner’s correct English, the article, while not admitting of the least incivility, embodied a certain violence. It argued that to begin Anglo-Saxon by studying Beowulf, the work of an early period but in a pseudo-Virgilian, rhetorical style, was as arbitrary as to begin the study of English with the elaborate poetry of Milton. Its author advised an inversion of chronological order, starting, say, with the eleventh-century poem ‘The Grave’, in which the everyday language comes through, and then going back to the origins. As for Beowulf, some excerpt from its tedious aggregate of over three thousand lines was enough for example, the funeral rites of Scyld, who came from the sea and returns to the sea. There was no mention of Winthrop’s name in the article, but nonetheless he felt himself stiffly attacked. This mattered less to him, however, than the fact that his teaching method had been impugned.
Only a few days were left. Wanting to be fair, Winthrop could not allow Einarsson’s article, which was being widely commented upon, to influence his decision. The choice between Locke and the Icelander gave him no small trouble. Winthrop spoke to Lee Rosenthal, the department chairman, one morning, and that same afternoon Einarsson was officially named to make the trip to Wisconsin.
On the eve of his departure, Einarsson presented himself in Ezra Winthrop’s office. He had come to say goodbye and to thank Winthrop. One of the windows opened onto a tree-lined side street, and the two men were surrounded by shelves of books. Einarsson was quick to recognize a first edition of the Edda Islandorum, bound in parchment. Winthrop told him that he was sure Einarsson would do a good job and that he had nothing to thank him for. Their conversation, if I am not mistaken, was long. ‘Let’s speak frankly,’ said Einarsson. ‘Everyone knows that in honouring me with representing the university, Rosenthal is acting upon your advice. I am a good Germanic scholar; I’ll do my best not to disappoint him.
The tongue of my childhood is the tongue of the sagas, and I pronounce Anglo-Saxon better than my British colleagues. My students say “cyning”, not “cunning”. They also know that smoking is absolutely forbidden in my classes and that they cannot come to them rigged out as hippies. As regards my unsuccessful rival, it would be in very bad taste were I to criticize him. In his book on the kenning he demonstrates not only his research into original sources but also into the pertinent works of Meissner and Marquardt. But let’s put all this nonsense aside. I owe you a personal explanation.’
Einarsson paused, gave a glance out the window, and resumed. ‘I left my country at the end of 1964,’ he said. ‘When someone decides to emigrate to a distant land, he fatally imposes upon himself the duty of getting on in that land. My first two small works, whose nature was strictly philological, had no other object than to demonstrate my ability. That, obviously, was not enough. I had always been interested in the Battle of Maldon, which I can repeat from memory with an occasional slip or two. I managed to get Yale to publish my critical edition of it. The poem records a Norse victory, as you know, but as regards the notion that it may have influenced the later Icelandic sagas, I judge that inadmissible and absurd. I hinted at this merely to flatter English-speaking readers.’
The Icelander held Winthrop in his gaze. ‘I come now to the heart of the matter my polemical piece in the Quarterly. As you are aware, it justifies, or tries to justify, my system, but it deliberately exaggerates the drawbacks of yours, which, in exchange for imposing on the student the boredom of three thousand consecutive lines of intricate verse that narrate a confused story, endows him with a large vocabulary, allowing him to enjoy if by then he has not given it up the entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature. To go to Wisconsin was my real aim. You and I, my dear friend, know that these conferences are foolish and that they entail pointless expense but that they can prove useful in one’s career.’
Winthrop looked at him in surprise. The New Englander was an intelligent man, but he tended to take things seriously including conferences and the world, which may very well be a cosmic joke.
‘You perhaps remember our first conversation,’ Einarsson went on. ‘I had arrived from New York. It was a Sunday. The university dining halls were closed, and we had lunch at the Nighthawk. I learned a great deal from that meeting. As a good European, I had always supposed that the American Civil War was a crusade against slave owners; you argued that the South was within its rights to wish to secede from the Union and to maintain its own institutions. To lend greater strength to what you were saying, you told me that you were a Northerner and that one of your forebears had fought in that war in the ranks of Henry Halleck. You also praised the courage of the Confederates. I have an unusual flair for making instant assessments. That morning was enough for me. I realized, my dear Winthrop, that you are governed by the curious American passion for impartiality. You want, above all, to be fair-minded. Precisely because you are a Northerner, you attempt to understand and justify the South’s cause. As soon as I knew that my trip to Wisconsin depended on what you might say to Rosenthal, I pressed the Quarterly to get my article into print, knowing that to criticize your teaching methods was the best means of getting your vote.’
There was a long silence. Winthrop was the first to break it. ‘I’m an old friend of Herbert’s, whose work I esteem,’ he said. ‘Directly or indirectly, you attacked me. To have denied you my vote would have been a sort of reprisal. I assessed his merits and yours, and the result you already know.’ He added, as if thinking aloud, ‘Maybe I gave in to the vanity of not seeking revenge. As you see, your stratagem worked.’
‘Stratagem is the right word,’ Einarsson replied, ‘but I do not regret what I did. I shall always act in the best interests of our department. Be that as it may, I was determined to go to Wisconsin.’
‘My first Viking,’ said Winthrop, looking Einarsson straight in the eye.
‘Another romantic superstition. It is not enough to be a Scandinavian to have descended from Vikings. My forefathers were good pastors of the Evangelical church; at the beginning of the tenth century, my ancestors may have been good priests of Thor. In my family, as far as I know, there were never any seafarers.’
‘There were many in mine,’ Winthrop said. ‘Still, we aren’t so different. One sin is common to us both — vanity. You pay me this visit to boast of your clever stratagem; I backed you to boast that I am an upright man.’
‘Another thing is common to us,’ said Einarsson. ‘Nationality. I am an American citizen. My destiny is here, not in Ultima Thule. You would say that a passport does not change a man’s nature.�
��
Then, shaking hands, they took leave of each other.
Avelino Arredondo
The event took place in Montevideo in 1897.
Every Saturday, in the way of the honest poor who know they cannot invite people home or else are trying to escape home, a group of young men occupied the same side table at the Café del Globo. They were all from Montevideo, and they had found it hard at first to make friends with Arredondo, a man from the interior, who neither confided in others nor encouraged others to confide in him. A little over twenty years old, he was lean and dark, rather short, and maybe a bit clumsy. His would have been an almost anonymous face had his eyes at one and the same time sleepy and lively not rescued it. He worked as a clerk in a drygoods store on Buenos Aires Street, studying law in his spare time. When the others condemned the war that ravaged the country and that, according to general opinion, the president was prolonging for unworthy reasons, Arredondo remained silent. He also remained silent when they made fun of him for being stingy.
A short while after the battle of Cerros Blancos, Arredondo told his companions that they would not be seeing him for a time, since he had to travel to Mercedes. The news stirred no one. Somebody told him to watch out for the gaucho rabble of Aparicio Saravia, the rebel leader of the Whites. With a smile, Arredondo answered that he was not afraid of the Whites. The other man, who was a White himself, said nothing.
His goodbye to Clara, his fiancée, Arredondo found harder. He made it in almost the same words he had used with his friends, warning her not to expect letters, as he would be very busy. Clara, who was not in the habit of writing, accepted the explanation without a protest. The two were very much in love.
Arredondo lived on the outskirts of town. He was looked after by a mulatto woman who bore the same surname as he, since her forebears had been slaves of his family many years earlier, at the time of the Great War. Clementina was completely trustworthy, and he ordered her to tell anyone who came looking for him that he was away in the country. He had already collected his last pay from the dry goods store.
He moved into a back room of his house one that opened onto the earth-paved third patio. It was a pointless measure, but it helped him to initiate his self-imposed reclusion. From the narrow iron bed, in which he was beginning to take naps again, he looked with a touch of melancholy at a bare shelf. He had sold his books even his textbooks. All he had left was a Bible that he had never read before and that he would never finish reading. He leafed through it page by page sometimes out of interest, sometimes out of boredom and he took upon himself the task of learning by heart some chapter or other of Exodus and the end of Ecclesiastes. He made no effort to understand what he read. He was a freethinker, but he never let a single night pass without saying the Lord’s Prayer, which, on coming to Montevideo, he had promised his mother he would do. To fail in this filial promise, he thought, might bring him bad luck. Arredondo knew that his goal was the morning of the twenty-fifth of August. He knew the exact number of days he had to get through. Once his goal was attained, time would cease, or, rather, nothing that happened after that would matter. He awaited the date like someone awaiting a boon or a liberation. He had let his clock run down so as not to be forever looking at it, but every night, on hearing the twelve dark strokes of midnight on a town clock, he tore a leaf out of the calendar and thought, One day less.
In the beginning he worked to build up a routine brewing maté, smoking Turkish cigarettes that he rolled himself, reading and rereading a set number of pages, trying to converse with Clementina when she brought him his meals on a tray, and, before putting out the candle, repeating and embellishing the speech he planned to give. Talking to Clementina, a woman well along in years, was not at all easy, for her memory had remained rooted in the countryside and in its daily life. Arredondo also laid out a chessboard, on which he played haphazard games that never came to a conclusion. He was missing a rook, which he replaced with a bullet or with a two-cent coin. To fill time, he cleaned his room every morning, chasing away spiders with a dust cloth and broom. The mulatto woman did not like his doing these menial tasks, which were her domain and which, in addition, he was not especially good at. He would have preferred waking with the sun already high, but his habit of getting up at dawn was stronger than his will. He missed his friends a good deal but, without feeling bitter about it, he knew that, given his invincible reserve, they were not missing him. One evening, one of them came to ask for him and was turned away from the door. Clementina did not know the caller, and Arredondo never learned who it was. He had been an avid reader of newspapers, and now he found it hard giving up these museums of ephemeral tidbits. He was not a man cut out for deep thinking or for deliberating. His days and his nights were all the same, but Sundays weighed most on him. Towards the middle of July, he suspected that it had been a mistake to parcel out time, which in some way bears us along. Presently, he let his imagination wander over the length and breadth of Uruguay, then running with blood over the rolling fields of Santa Irene, where he had flown kites; over a certain pinto, which by now would be dead; over the dust raised by cattle when they are herded by drovers; over the weary stagecoach that came from Fray Bentos once a month with its hoard of trinkets; over the bay of La Agraciada, where the Thirty-Three, the country’s national heroes, had disembarked; over the Hervidero; over the hill ranges, the woods, and the rivers; over the Cerro, where he had climbed up to the lighthouse, thinking that on either bank of the Plate there was no other hill like it. From this hill overlooking the bay of Montevideo his thoughts passed on to the hill of the Uruguayan national emblem, and he fell asleep.
Every night the breeze off the sea brought a coolness propitious to sleep. He was never wakeful. He loved his fiancée completely, but it had been said that a man should not think about women above all when they are not there. Life in the country had accustomed him to chastity. As for this other business, he tried to think as little as possible about the man he hated. The din of the rain on the flat roof kept him company.
To a man in jail or to a blind man, time flows downstream, as if along an easy slope. Halfway through his reclusion, Arredondo experienced more than once that almost timeless time. In the first of the house’s three patios there was a cistern with a frog in it. It never occurred to Arredondo to think that the frog’s time, which borders on eternity, was what he himself sought.
When the date was not far off, his impatience began again. One night, unable to bear it any longer, he went out into the street. Everything seemed different, larger. Turning a corner, he saw a light and entered a saloon. To justify his presence, he ordered a bitter rum. Some soldiers, leaning on the wooden bar, were holding forth.
‘You know it’s absolutely forbidden to give out news of battles,’ one of them said. ‘Listen to what happened yesterday evening. This will amuse you. A few of us were passing by La Razón, when we heard a voice inside defying the order. Losing no time, we marched in. The office was pitch-dark, but we riddled with bullets whoever was doing the talking. We wanted to drag him out by the heels. When it was quiet, we searched the place for him, but what we found was one of those machines they call a phonograph, which speaks by itself.’
All of them laughed. ‘What do you think of a dodge like that, farmer?’ the soldier said to Arredondo, who had been eavesdropping. Arredondo kept silent.
The uniformed man brought his face close to Arredondo’s and said, ‘Quick! Let me hear you shout, “Long live the president of our country Juan Idiarte Borda!”’
Arredondo did not disobey, and amid mocking applause he managed to reach the door. He was in the street when a final insult was hurled at him. ‘Fear’s no fool,’ he heard. ‘It kills anger.’ Arredondo had behaved like a coward, but he knew he was not one. Slowly he made his way back home.
On the twenty-fifth of August, Avelino Arredondo woke up at a little after nine. He thought first of Clara and only later of the date. ‘Goodbye to waiting,’ he told himself then, relieved. ‘Today’s th
e day.’
He shaved without hurrying, and in the mirror he found his everyday face. He chose a red necktie and put on his best clothes. He ate a late lunch. The overcast sky threatened drizzle. He had always imagined the sky would be bright and blue. A touch of sadness came over him as he left his damp room for the last time. In the arched entranceway he met Clementina and gave her his few remaining pesos. On the sign over the hardware store he saw the coloured diamond shapes, meaning paint was sold there, and he reflected that for over two months he had not given them a thought. He walked towards Sarandi Street. It was a holiday and very few people were about.
The clock had not struck three when he reached the Plaza Matriz. The ‘Te Deum’ was already over. A group of dignitaries government officials, Army officers, and prelates was coming down the slow steps of the church. At first sight, the tall hats some still in hand the uniforms, the gold braid, the arms, and the tunics created the illusion that the group was large; in reality, there were no more than about thirty people. Arredondo, who felt no fear, was filled with a kind of respect. He asked someone which was the president.
‘You see the archbishop, with his mitre and crosier the one beside him,’ he was told.
Arredondo drew a revolver and opened fire. Idiarte Borda took one or two steps, fell headlong, and said distinctly, ‘I’ve been shot!’
Arredondo gave himself up to the authorities. Later he was to declare, ‘I am a Colorado, a Red, and I say it with pride. I’ve killed the president, who betrayed and tainted our party. I broke with my friends and my fiancée, so as not to implicate them. I did not look at the newspapers, so that nobody could say they had incited me. I claim this act of justice as my own. Now let me be judged.’
This is the way it probably happened, although in a more involved fashion; this is the way I imagine it happened.
Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations Page 33
