Collected Fictions

by Borges, Jorge Luis

  Notes to The Aleph

  The Dead Man

  * Rio Grande doSul: The southernmost state of Brazil, bordering both Argentina and Uruguay on the north. Later in this story, a certain wildness is attributed to this region; JLB often employed the implicit contrast between the more "civilized" city and province of Buenos Aires (and all of Argentina) and the less "developed" city of Montevideo and nation of Uruguay and its "wilderness of horse country," the "plains," "the interior," here represented by Rio Grande do Sul.

  * Paso del Molino:"A lower-to-middle-class district outside Montevideo" (Fishburn and Hughes).

  Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden

  * The Auracan or Pampas tongue: The Pampas Indians were a nomadic people who inhabited the plains of the Southern Cone at the time of the Conquest; they were overrun by the Araucans, and the languages and cultures merged; today the two names are essentially synonymous (Fishburn and Hughes). English seems not to have taken the name Pampas for anything but the plains of Argentina.

  * Pulpería: A country store or general store, though not the same sort of corner grocery-store-and-bar, the esquina or almacén, that Borges uses as a setting in the stories that take place in the city. The pulpería would have been precisely the sort of frontier general store that one sees in American westerns.

  A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874)

  * Montoneros: Montoneros were the men of guerrilla militias (generally gauchos) that fought in the civil wars following the wars of independence. They tended to rally under the banner of a leader rather than specifically under the banner of a cause; Fishburn and Hughes put it in the following way: "[T]heir allegiance to their leader was personal and direct, and they were largely indifferent to his political leanings."

  * Lavalle: Juan GaloLavalle (1797-1841) was an Argentine hero who fought on the side of the Unitarians, the centralizing Buenos Aires forces, against the Federalist montoneros of the outlying provinces and territories, whose most famous leader was Juan Manuel de Rosas, the fierce dictator who appears in several of JLB's stories. The mention here of Lavalle and López would indeed locate this story in 1829, a few months before Lavalle was defeated by the combined Rosas and López forces (Fishburn and Hughes). One would assume, then, that the man who fathered Tadeo Isidoro Cruz was fighting with Rosas' forces themselves.

  * Suárez' cavalry: Probably Manuel Isidoro Suárez (1759-1843), JLB's mother's maternal grandfather, who fought on the side of the Unitarians in the period leading up to 1829 (Fishburn and Hughes). Borges may have picked up the protagonist's name, as well, in part from his forebear.

  * Thirty Christian men... Sgt. Ma}. Eusebia Laprida... two hundred Indians: Eusebio Laprida (1829-1898) led eighty, not thirty, men against a regular army unit of two hundred soldiers, not Indians, in a combat at the Cardoso Marshes on January 25, not 23,1856 (data, Fishburn and Hughes). The defeat of the Indians took place during a raid in 1879. JLB here may be conflating the famous Thirty-three led by Lavalleja against Montevideo (see note to"Avelino Arredondo"in The Book of Sand), Laprida's equally heroic exploit against a larger "official" army unit, and Laprida's exploit against the Indians two decades later.

  * Manuel Mesa executed in the Plazade la Victoria: Manuel Mesa (1788-1829) fought on the side of Rosas and the Federalists. In 1829 he organized a force of montoneros and friendly Indians and battled Lavalle, losing that engagement. In his retreat, he was met by Manuel Isidoro Suárez and captured. Suárez sent him to Buenos Aires, where he was executed in the Plaza Victoria.

  * The deserter Martín Fierro: As JLB tells the reader in the Afterword to this volume, this story has been a retelling, from the "unexpected" point of view of a secondary character, of the famous gaucho epic poem Martín Fierro, by José Hernández. Since this work is a classic (or the classic) of nineteenth-century Argentine literature, every reader in the Southern Cone would recognize "what was coming": Martin Fierro, the put-upon gaucho hero, stands his ground against the authorities, and his friend abandons his uniform to stand and fight with him. This changing sides is a recurrent motif in Borges; see "Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden" in this volume, for instance. It seems to have been more interesting to JLB that one might change sides than that one would exhibit the usual traits of heroism. Borges is also fond of rewriting classics: See "The House of Asterion," also in this volume, and note that the narrator in "The Zahir" retells to himself, more or less as the outline of a story he is writing, the story of the gold of the Nibelungen. One could expand the list to great length.

  Emma Zunz

  * Bagé: A city in southern Rio Grande do Sul province, in Brazil.

  * Gualeguay: "A rural town and department in the province of Entre Ríos"(Fishburn and Hughes).

  * Lanús:"A town and middle-class district in Greater Buenos Aires, south-west of the city" (Fishburn and Hughes).

  * Almagro: A lower-middle-class neighborhood near the center of Buenos Aires.

  * Calle Liniers: As the story says, a street in the Almagro neighborhood.

  * Paseo de Julio: Now the Avenida Alem. This street runs parallel with the waterfront; at the time of this story it was lined with tenement houses and houses of ill repute.

  * A westbound Lacroze: The Lacroze Tramway Line served the northwestern area of Buenos Aires at the time; today the city has an extensive subway system.

  * Warnes: A street in central Buenos Aires near the commercial district of Villa Crespo, where the mill is apparently located.

  The Other Death

  * Gualeguay chú:"A town on the river of the same name in the province of Entre Ríos, opposite the town of Fray Bentos, with which there is considerable interchange" (Fishburn and Hughes).

  * Masoller: Masoller, in northern Uruguay, was the site of a decisive battle on September 1, 1904, between the rebel forces of Aparicio Saravia (see below) and the National Army; Saravia was defeated and mortally wounded (Fishburn and Hughes).

  * The banners of Aparicio Saravia: Aparicio Saravia (1856-1904) was a Uruguayan landowner and caudillo who led the successful Blanco (White party) revolt against the dictatorship of Idiarte Borda (the Colorados, or Red party). Even in victory, however, Saravia had to continue to fight against the central government, since Borda's successor, Batlle, refused to allow Saravia's party to form part of the new government. It is the years of this latter revolt that are the time of "The Other Death." See also, for a longer explanation of the political situation of the time, the story"Avelino Arredondo"in The Book of Sand.

  * Rio Negro or Paysandú: RíoNegro is the name of a department in western Uruguay on the river of the same name, just opposite the Argentine province of Entre Ríos. Paysandú is a department in Uruguay bordering Rio Negro. Once again JLB is signaling the relative "wildness" of Uruguay is comparison with Argentina, which was not touched by these civil wars at the time.

  * Gualeguay: See note to p. 215 above. Note the distinction between "Gualeguay" and"Gualeguay chú"(see note to p. 223 above).

  * Ñancay:"A tributary of the Uruguay River that flows through the rich agricultural lands of southern Entre Río sprovince" (Fishburn and Hughes).

  * Men whose throats were slashed through to the spine: This is another instance in which JLB documents the (to us today) barbaric custom by the armies of the South American wars of independence (and other, lesser combats as well) of slitting defeated troops' throats. In other places, he notes offhandedly that "no prisoners were taken," which does not mean that all the defeated troops were allowed to return to their bivouacs. In this case, a rare case, Borges actually "editorializes" a bit: "a civil war that struck me as more some outlaw's dream than the collision of two armies."

  * Ilkscas, Tupambae, Masoller: All these are the sites of battles in northern and central Uruguay fought in 1904 between Saravia's forces and the National Army of Uruguay.

  * White ribbon: Because the troops were often irregulars, or recruited from the gauchos or farmhands of the Argentine, and therefore lacking standardized uniform
s, the only way to tell friend from enemy was by these ribbons, white in the case of the Blancos, red in the case of the Colorados. Here the white ribbon worn by the character marks him as a follower of Saravia, the leader of the Whites. (See notes passim about the significance of these parties.) * Zumacos: The name by which regulars in the Uruguayan National Army were known.

  * Artiguismo: That is, in accord with the life and views of José Gervasio Artigas (1764-1850), a Uruguayan hero who fought against both the Spaniards and the nascent Argentines to forge a separate nation out of what had just been the Banda Oriental, or east bank of the Plate. The argument was that Uruguay had its own "spirit," its own "sense of place," which the effete Argentines of Buenos Aires, who only romanticized the gaucho but had none of their own, could never truly understand or live.

  * Red infantry: The Reds, or Colorados, were the forces of the official national government of Uruguay, in contradistinction to the Blancos, or Whites, of Saravia's forces; the Reds therefore had generally better weapons and equipment, and better-trained military officers on the whole, than the irregular and largely gaucho Whites.

  * ¡Viva Urquiza!: Justo José Urquiza (1801-1870) was president of the Argentinian Confederation between 1854 and 1860. Prior to that, he had fought with the Federalists under Rosas (the provincial forces) against the Unitarians (the Buenos Aires-based centralizing forces), but in 1845 he broke with Rosas (whom JLB always excoriates as a vicious dictator) and eventually saw Buenos Aires province and the other provinces of the Argentinian Confederation brought together into the modern nation of Argentina, though under the presidency of Bartolomé Mitre.

  * Cagancha or India Muerta: The perplexity here derives from the fact that while the battle at Masoller, in which Damián took part, occurred in 1904, the cry ¡Viva Urquiza! would have been heard at the Battle of Cagancha (1839) or India Muerta (1845), where Urquiza's rebel Federalist forces fought the Unitarians. At Cagancha, Urquiza was defeated by the Unitarians; at India Muertahe defeated them. This story may also, thus, have certain subterranean connections with "The Theologians," in its examination of the possibilities of repeating or circular, or at least nondiscrete, time.

  * He "marked" no one: He left his mark on no man in a knife fight; in a fight, when the slight might, even by the standards of the day, be deemed too inconsequential to kill a man for, or if the other man refused to fight, the winner would leave his mark, a scar, that would settle the score.

  Averroës' Search

  * "The seven sleepers of Ephesus": This is a very peculiar story to put in the minds of these Islamic luminaries, for the story of the seven sleepers of Ephesus is a Christian story, told by Gregory of Tours. Clearly the breadth of culture of these gentlemen is great, but it is difficult (at least for this translator) to see the relationship of this particular tale (unlike the other "stories," such as the children playing or "representing" life and the "if it had been a snake it would have bitten him" story told by abu-al-Hasan) to Averroës' quest.

  The Zahir

  * Calk Aráoz: Fishburn and Hughes tell us that in the 19305, Calle Aráoz was "a street of small houses inhabited by the impoverished middle class"; it is near the penitentiary Las Heras.

  * On the corner of Chile and Tacuari: A corner in the Barrio Sur, or southern part of Buenos Aires, as the story says; it is some ten blocks from the Plaza Constitución and its great station.

  * Truco: A card game indigenous, apparently, to Argentina and played very often in these establishments. Borges was fascinated by this game and devoted an essay and two or three poems to it, along with references, such as this one, scattered through-out hisœuvre. The phrase "to my misfortune" indicates the inexorability of the attraction that the game held for him; the narrator could apparently simply not avoid going to the bar. Truco's nature, for JLB, is that combination of fate and chance that seems to rule over human life as well as over games: an infinitude of possibilities within a limited number of cards, the limitations of the rules. See "Truco" in Borges: A Reader.

  * La Concepción:A large church in the Barrio Sur, near the Plaza Constitución.

  * The chamfered curb in darkness: Here JLB's reference is to an ochava—that is, a "corner with the corner cut off" to form a three-sided, almost round curb, and a somewhat wider eight-sided rather than four-sided intersection, as the four corners of the intersection would all be chamfered in that way. This reference adds to the "old-fashioned" atmosphere of the story, because chamfered corners were common on streets traveled by large horse-drawn wagons, which would need extra space to turn the corners so that their wheels would not ride up onto the sidewalks.

  * I went neither to the Basilica del Pilar that morning nor to the cemetery: That is, the narrator did not go to Teodelina's funeral. The Basilica del Pilar is one of the most impressive churches in central Buenos Aires, near the Recoleta cemetery where Teodelina Vilar would surely have been buried.

  * "She's been put into Bosch": Bosch was "a well-known private clinic frequented by the porteño elite" (Fishburn and Hughes).

  The Writing of the God

  * / saw the origins told by the Book of the People. I saw... the dogs that tore at their faces: Here the priest is remembering the story of the creation of the world told in the Popul Vuh, the Mayan sacred text. The standard modern translation is by Dennis Tedlock: Popul Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster Touchstone, 1985). For this part of the genesis story, cf. pp.84-85.

  The Wait

  * Plaza del Once: Pronounced óhn-say, not wunce. This is actually "Plaza Once," but the homonymy of the English and Spanish words makes it advisable, the translator thinks, to modify the name slightly in order to alert the English reader to the Spanish ("eleven"), rather than the English ("onetime" or "past"), sense of the word. Plaza Once is one of Buenos Aires' oldest squares, "associated in Borges's memory with horse-drawn carts" (Fishburn and Hughes), though later simply a modern square.

  The Aleph

  * Quilines: A district in southern Buenos Aires; "at one time favoured for weekend villas, particularly by the British, Quilmes has since become unfashionable, a heavily industrialised area, known mainly for Quilmes Beer, the largest brewing company in the world" (Fishburn and Hughes). Thus JLB is evoking a world of privilege and luxe.

  * Juan Crisóstomo Laflnur Library: This library is named after JLB's great-uncle (1797-1824), who occupied the chair of philosophy at the Colegio de la Unión del Suduntil, under attack for teaching materialism, he was forced into exile.

  * "The most elevated heights of Flores": Here Daneri's absurdity reaches "new heights," for though the neighborhood of Flores had been very much in vogue among the affluent of Buenos Aires society during the nineteenth century, it was only about a hundred feet above sea level. Moreover, it had lost much of its exclusiveness, and therefore glamour, by the time of this story, since in the yellow fever epidemic of 1871 people fled "central" Buenos Aires for the "outlying" neighborhood.

  * Chacarita: One of the two enormous cemeteries in Buenos Aires; the other is Recoleta. A modern guidebook* has this to say about the cemeteries of Buenos Aires: Life and Death in Recoleta & Chacarita: Death is an equalizer, except in Buenos Aires. When the arteries harden after decades of dining at Au Bec Fin and finishing up with coffee and dessert at La Bielaor Café de la Paix, the wealthy and powerful of Buenos Aires move ceremoniously across the street to Recoleta Cemetery, joining their forefathers in a place they have visited religiously all their lives-----According to Argentine novelist Tomás Eloy Martínez, Argentines are "cadaver cultists" who honor their most revered national figures not on the date of their birth but of their death.... Nowhere is this obsession with mortality and corruption more evident than in Recoleta, where generations of the elite repose in the grandeur of ostentatious mausoleums. It is a common saying and only a slight exaggeration that "it is cheaper to live extravagantly all your life than to be buried inRecoleta."Traditionally, money is not enough: you must have a surname like Anchorena, Alvea
r, Aramburu, Avellaneda, Mitre, Martínez de Hoz, or Sarmiento.... Although more democratic in conception, Chacaritahas many tombs which match the finest in Recoleta. One of the most visited belongs to Carlos Gardel, the famous tango singer. (* Argentina, Uruguayé-Paraguay, Wayne Bernhardson and Maria Massolo, Hawthorne, Vic, Australia; Berkeley, CA, USA; and London, UK: Lonely Planet Publications [Travel Survival Kit], 1992)

  * Compendia of Dr. Acevedo Díaz: Eduardo Acevedo Díaz (1882-1959) won the Premio Nacional for his novel Cancha Larga; JLB's entry that year, The Garden of Forking Paths, won second prize.

  * Pedro Henriquez Ureña: Henriquez Ureña (1884-1946), originally from the Dominican Republic, lived for years in Buenos Aires and was an early contributor to Sur, the magazine that Victoria Ocampo founded and that JLB assiduously worked on. It was through Henriquez Ureña, who had lived for a time in Mexico City, that JLB met another close friend, the Mexican humanist Alfonso Reyes. Henriquez Ureña and JLB collaborated on the Antología de la literatura argentina(1937).

  Notes to The Maker

  Foreword

  * Leopoldo Lugones: Lugones (1874-1938) was probably Argentina's leading poet in the second to fourth decades of this century; he was influenced by Spanish modernismo and by the French Symbolists. To a degree he represented to the young Turks of Argentine poetry the ancien régime; therefore he was often attacked, and often tastelessly so. Early on, JLB joined in these gibes at Lugones, though clearly Borge salso recognized Lugones' skills and talents as a poet. Rodriguez Monegal (pp. 197-198) speculates that JLB had mixed feelings about Lugones, especially in his person, but suggests that respect for Lugones as a poet no doubt prevailed, especially as JLB matured. Monegal quotes Borges (quoted by Fernández Moreno) as follows: Lugones was "a solitary and dogmatic man, a man who did not open up easily.... Conversation was difficult with him because he [would] bring everything to a close with a phrase which was literally a period.... Then you had to begin again, to find another subject.... And that subject was also dissolved with a period.... His kind of conversation was brilliant but tiresome. And many times his assertions had nothing to do with what he really believed; he just had to say something extraordinary.... What he wanted was to control the conversation. Everything he said was final. And... we had a great respect for him."(Fernández Moreno [1967], pp. 10-11, in Rodriguez Monegal, p. 197; ellipses in Rodriguez Monegal.) Another problem with Lugones was his partiality to military governments, his proto- and then unfeigned fascism; obviously this did not endear him to many, more liberal, thinkers. In this introduction JLB seems to recognize that while he and his friends were experimenting with a "new" poetics in the first decades of the century, Lugones kept on his amiable way, and to admit that later he, JLB, had put aside some of the more shocking and radical of his notions of poetry in favor of a cleaner, less "poetic" poetry, which Lugones would probably have recognized as much closer to his own. So the "son" comes to see that he has come to resemble the resented "father" (no Freudian implications intended; genetics only; no political implications intended, either; Borges hated military governments and hated fascism and Nazism).