Collected Fictions

by Jorge Luis Borges

  This play observed the unities of time, place, and action; it took place in Hradcany, in the library of Baron Römerstadt, on one of the last evenings of the nineteenth century. In Act I, Scene I, a stranger pays a visit to Römerstadt.(A clock strikes seven, a vehemence of last sunlight exalts the window-panes, on a breeze float the ecstatic notes of a familiar Hungarian melody.) This visit is followed by others; the persons who come to importune Römerstadt are strangers to him, though he has the uneasy sense that he has seen them before, perhaps in a dream. All fawn upon him, but it is clear— first to the play's audience, then to the baron himself—that they are secret enemies, sworn to his destruction. Römerstadt manages to check or fend off their complex intrigues; in the dialogue they allude to his fiancée, Juliade Weidenau, and to one Jaroslav Kubin, who once importuned her with his love. Kubinhas now gone mad, and believes himself to be Römerstadt.... The dangers mount; by the end of the second act, Römerstadt finds himself forced to kill one of the conspirators. Then the third and last act begins. Little by little, incoherences multiply; actors come back onstage who had apparently been discarded from the plot; for one instant, the man that Römerstadt killed returns. Someone points out that the hour has grown no later: the clock strikes seven; upon the high windowpanes the western sunlight shimmers; the thrilling Hungarian melody floats upon the air. The first interlocutor comes onstage again and repeats the same words he spoke in Act I, Scene I. Without the least surprise or astonishment, Römerstadt talks with him; the audience realizes that Römerstadt is the pitiable Jaroslav Kubin. The play has not taken place; it is the circular delirium that Kubin endlessly experiences and re-experiences.

  Hladik had never asked himself whether this tragicomedy of errors was banal or admirable, carefully plotted or accidental. In the design I have outlined here, he had intuitively hit upon the best way of hiding his short-comings and giving full play to his strengths, the possibility of rescuing (albeit symbolically) that which was fundamental to his life. He had finished the first act and one or another scene of the third; the metrical nature of the play allowed him to go over it continually, correcting the hexameters, without a manuscript. It occurred to him that he still had two acts to go, yet very soon he was to die. In the darkness he spoke with God. If, he prayed, I do somehow exist, if I am not one of Thy repetitions or errata, then I exist as the author o/The Enemies. In order to complete that play, which can justify me and justify Thee as well, I need one more year. Grant me those days, Thou who art the centuries and time itself. It was the last night, the most monstrous night, but ten minutes later sleep flooded Hladik like some dark ocean.

  Toward dawn, he dreamed that he was in hiding, in one of the naves of the Clementine Library. What are you looking for? a librarian wearing dark glasses asked him. I'm looking for God, Hladik replied.

  God, the librarian said, z's in one of the letters on one of the pages of one of the four hundred thousand volumes in the Clementine. My parents and my parents' parents searched for that letter; I myself have gone blind searching for it. He removed his spectacles and Hladik saw his eyes, which were dead. A reader came in to return an atlas. This atlas is worthless, he said, and handed it to Hladik. Hladik opened it at random. He saw a map of India—a dizzying page. Suddenly certain, he touched one of the tiny letters. A voice that was everywhere spoke to him: The time for your labor has been granted. Here Hladik awoke.

  He remembered that the dreams of men belong to God and that Maimonides had written that the words of a dream, when they are clear and distinct and one cannot see who spoke them, are holy. Hladik put his clothes on; two soldiers entered the cell and ordered him to follow them.

  From inside his cell, Hladik had thought that when he emerged he would see a maze of galleries, stairways, and wings. Reality was not so rich; he and the soldiers made their way down a single iron staircase into a rear yard. Several soldiers—some with their uniforms unbuttoned—were looking over a motorcycle, arguing about it. The sergeant looked at his watch; it was eight forty-four. They had to wait until nine. Hladik, feeling more insignificant than ill fortuned, sat down on a pile of firewood. He noticed that the soldiers' eyes avoided his own. To make the wait easier, the sergeant handed him a cigarette.

  Hladik did not smoke; he accepted the cigarette out of courtesy, or out of humility. When he lighted it, he saw that his hands were trembling. The day clouded over; the soldiers were speaking in low voices, as though he were already dead. Vainly he tried to recall the woman that Juliade Weidenau had symbolized....

  The firing squad fell in, lined up straight. Hladik, standing against the prison wall, awaited the discharge.

  Someone was afraid the wall would be spattered with blood; the prisoner was ordered to come forward a few steps. Absurdly, Hladik was reminded of the preliminary shufflings-about of photographers. A heavy drop of rain grazed Hladik's temple and rolled slowly down his cheek; the sergeant called out the final order.

  The physical universe stopped.

  The weapons converged upon Hladik, but the men who were to kill him were immobile. The sergeant's arm seemed to freeze, eternal, in an inconclusive gesture. On one of the paving stones of the yard, a bee cast a motionless shadow. As though in a painting, the wind had died. Hladik attempted a scream, a syllable, the twisting of a hand. He realized that he was paralyzed. He could hear not the slightest murmur of the halted world. I am in hell, he thought, I am dead. Then I am mad, he thought. And then, time has halted. Then he reflected that if that were true, his thoughts would have halted as well. He tried to test this conjecture: he repeated (without moving his lips) Virgil's mysterious fourth eclogue. He imagined that the now-remote soldiers must be as disturbed by this as he was; he wished he could communicate with them. He was surprised and puzzled to feel neither the slightest weariness nor any faintness from his long immobility. After an indeterminate time, he slept. When he awoke, the world was still motionless and muffled. The drop of water still hung on his cheek; on the yard, there still hung the shadow of the bee; in the air the smoke from the cigarette he'd smoked had never wafted away. Another of those "days" passed before Hladik understood.

  He had asked God for an entire year in which to finish his work; God in His omnipotence had granted him a year. God had performed for him a secret miracle: the German bullet would kill him, at the determined hour, but in Hladik's mind a year would pass between the order to fire and the discharge of the rifles. From perplexity Hladik moved to stupor, from stupor to resignation, from resignation to sudden gratitude.

  He had no document but his memory; the fact that he had to learn each hexameter as he added it imposed upon him a providential strictness, unsuspected by those who essay and then forget vague provisional paragraphs. He did not work for posterity, nor did he work for God, whose literary preferences were largely unknown to him. Painstakingly, motionlessly, secretly, he forged in time his grand invisible labyrinth. He redid the third act twice. He struck out one and another overly obvious symbol—the repeated chimings of the clock, the music. No detail was irksome to him. He cut, condensed, expanded; in some cases he decided the original version should stand. He came to love the courtyard, the prison; one of the faces that stood before him altered his conception of Romerstadt's character. He discovered that the hard-won cacophonies that were so alarming to Flaubert are mere visual superstitions—weaknesses and irritations of the written, not the sounded, word.... He completed his play; only a single epithet was left to be decided upon now. He found it; the drop of water rolled down his cheek.

  He began a maddened cry, he shook his head, and the fourfold volley felled him.

  Jaromir Hladik died on the twenty-ninth of March, at 9:02 a.m.

  Three Versions of Judas

  There seemed a certainty in degradation.

  T. E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, CIII

  In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith, in the days when Basilides proclaimed that the cosmos was a reckless or maleficent improvisation by an
gels lacking in perfection, Nils Runeberg, with singular intellectual passion, would have led one of the gnostic conventicles. Dante might have consigned him to a sepulcher of fire; his name would have helped swell the catalogs of minor heresiarchs, between Satornilus and Carpocrates; one or another fragment of his teachings, bedizened with invective, would have been recorded for posterity in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses or would have perished when the burning of a monastery's library devoured the last copy of the Syntagma. Instead, God allotted him the twentieth century and the university city of Lund. There, in 1904, he published the first edition of Kristus och Judas; there, in 1909, his magnum opus, Den hemlige Walsaren. (Of this last-named book there is a German version, translated in 1912 by Emil Schering; it is titled Der heimliche Heiland.)

  Before undertaking an examination of the works mentioned above, it is important to reiterate that Nils Runeberg, a member of the National Evangelical Union, was a deeply religious man. At a soirée in Paris or even in Buenos Aires, a man of letters might very well rediscover Runeberg's theses; those theses, proposed at such a soirée, would be slight and pointless exercises in slovenliness or blasphemy.

  For Runeberg, they were the key that unlocked one of theology's central mysteries; they were the stuff of study and meditation, of historical and philological controversy, of arrogance, of exultation, and of terror.

  They justified and destroyed his life. Those who peruse this article should likewise consider that it records only Runeberg's conclusions, not his dialectic or his proofs. It will be said that the conclusion no doubt preceded its "proofs." But what man can content himself with seeking out proofs for a thing that not even he himself believes in, or whose teaching he cares naught for?

  The first edition of Kristus och Judas bears this categorical epigraph, whose meaning, years afterward, Nils Runeberg himself was monstrously to expatiate upon: It is not one thing, but all the things which legend attributes to Judas Iscariot that are false (De Quincey,1857). Like a certain German before him, De Quincey speculated that Judas had delivered up Christ in order to force Him to declare His divinity and set in motion a vast uprising against Rome's yoke; Runeberg suggests a vindication of a metaphysical nature. Cleverly, he begins by emphasizing how superfluous Judas' action was. He observes (as Robertson had) that in order to identify a teacher who preached every day in the synagogue and worked miracles in the plain sight of thousands of people, there was no need of betrayal by one of the teacher's own apostles. That is precisely, however, what occurred. To assume an error in the Scriptures is intolerable, but it is no less intolerable to assume that a random act intruded into the most precious event in the history of the world. Ergo, Judas' betrayal was not a random act, but predetermined, with its own mysterious place in the economy of redemption. Runeberg continues: The Word, when it was made Flesh, passed from omnipresence into space, from eternity into history, from unlimited joy and happiness into mutability and death; to repay that sacrifice, it was needful that a man (in representation of all mankind) make a sacrifice of equal worth. Judas Iscariot was that man. Alone among the apostles, Judas sensed Jesus' secret divinity and His terrible purpose. The Word had stooped to become mortal; Judas, a disciple of the Word, would stoop to become an informer (the most heinous crime that infamy will bear) and to dwell amid inextinguishable flames. As below, so above; the forms of earth correspond to the forms of heaven; the blotches of the skin are a map of the incorruptible constellations; Judas is somehow a reflection of Jesus. From that conclusion derive the thirty pieces of silver and the kiss; from that conclusion derives the voluntary death, so as even more emphatically to merit reprobation. Thus did Nils Runeberg explain the enigma that is Judas.

  Theologians of every faith brought forth refutations. Lars Peter Engström accused Runeberg of ignoring the hypostatic union; Axel Borelius, of rekindling the Docetic heresy, which denied Jesus' humanity; the steely bishop of Lund accused him of contradicting Chapter 22, verse 3 of the Gospel According to St. Luke.

  These diverse anathemas did have their influence on Runeberg, who partially rewrote the reprehended book and modified its doctrine. He abandoned the theological ground to his adversaries and proposed oblique arguments of a moral order. He admitted that Jesus, "who could call upon the considerable resources that Omnipotence can offer," had no need of a man to carry out His plan for the redemption of all mankind. Then he rebutted those who claimed that we know nothing of the inexplicable betrayer. We know, Runeberg said, that he was one of the apostles, one of those chosen to herald the kingdom of heaven, to heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, and cast out demons (Matthew 10:7-8, Luke 9:1). The acts of a man thus singled out by the Redeemer merit the most sympathetic interpretation we can give them. To impute his crime to greed (as some have done, citing John 12:6) is to settle for the basest motive. Nils Runeberg proposed a motive at the opposite extreme: a hyperbolic, even limitless asceticism. The ascetic, ad majorem Dei gloriam, debases and mortifies the flesh; Judas debased and mortified the spirit. He renounced honor, goodness, peace, the kingdom of heaven, as others, less heroically, renounce pleasure.[1]

  He plotted his sins with terrible lucidity. In adultery, tenderness and abnegation often play a role; in homicide, courage; in blasphemy and profanation, a certain satanic zeal. Judas chose sins unvisited by any virtue: abuse of confidence (John 12:6) and betrayal. He labored with titanic humility; he believed himself unworthy of being good. Paul wrote: He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord (I Corinthians 1:31); Judas sought hell because joy in the Lord was enough for him. He thought that happiness, like goodness, is a divine attribute, which should not be usurped by men.[2]

  Many have discovered, after the fact, that in Runeberg's justifiable beginnings lies his extravagant end, and that Den hemligefvalsaren is a mere perversion or exasperation of his Kristus och Judas. In late 1907, Runeberg completed and revised the manuscript text; almost two years passed before he delivered it to the publisher. In October, 1909, the book appeared with a foreword (lukewarm to the point of being enigmatic) by the Danish Hebrew scholar Erik Erfjord, and with the following epigraph: He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not (John 1:10). The book's general argument is not complex, although its conclusion is monstrous. God, argues Nils Runeberg, stooped to become man for the redemption of the human race; we might well then presume that the sacrifice effected by Him was perfect, not invalidated or attenuated by omissions. To limit His suffering to the agony of one afternoon on the cross is blasphemous.[3] To claim that He was man, and yet was incapable of sin, is to fall into contradiction; the attributes impeccabilitas and humanitas are incompatible. Kemnitz will allow that the Redeemer could feel weariness, cold, distress, hunger, and thirst; one might also allow Him to be able to sin and be condemned to damnation. For many, the famous words in Isaiah 53: 2 - 3, He shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief, are a foreshadowing of the Crucified Christ at the hour of His death. For some (Hans Lassen Martensen, for example), they are a refutation of the loveliness that the vulgar consensus attributes to Christ; for Runeberg, they are the detailed prophecy not of a moment but of the entire horrendous future, in Time and in Eternity, of the Word made Flesh. God was made totally man, but man to the point of iniquity, man to the point of reprobation and the Abyss. In order to save us, He could have chosen any of the lives that weave the confused web of history: He could have been Alexander or Pythagoras or Rurik or Jesus; he chose an abject existence: He was Judas.

  In vain did the bookstores of Stockholm and Lund offer readers this revelation. The incredulous considered it, a priori, a vapid and tedious theological game; theologians disdained it. Runeberg sensed in that ecumenical indifference an almost miraculous confirmation. God had ordered that indifference; God did not want His ter
rible secret spread throughout the earth. Runeberg realized that the hour was not yet come. He felt that ancient, divine curses were met in him. He recalled Elijah and Moses, who covered their faces upon the mountain so as not to look upon God; Isaiah, who was terrified when his eyes beheld the One whose glory fills the earth; Saul, whose eyes were blinded on the road to Damascus; the rabbi Simeon ben Azai, who saw the Garden and died; the famous wizard John of Viterbo, who went mad when the Trinity was revealed to him; the Midrashim, who abominate those who speak the Shem Hamephorash, the Secret Name of God. Was it not that dark sin that he, Runeberg, was guilty of? Might not that be the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost (Matthew 12:31) which shall not be forgiven? Valerius Soranus died for revealing the hidden name of Rome; what infinite punishment would be Runeberg's for having discovered and revealed the terrible name of God?

  Drunk with sleeplessness and his dizzying dialectic, Nils Runeberg wandered the streets of Mälmo, crying out for a blessing—that he be allowed to share the Inferno with the Redeemer.

  He died of a ruptured aneurysm on March 1, 1912. Heresiologists will perhaps remember him; he added to the concept of the Son, which might have been thought long spent, the complexities of misery and evil.

  1944

  [1] Borelius sarcastically asks: Why did he not renounce renunciation? Why not renounce the renunciation of renunciation?