The Dead Man
A ten days’ stay on the Uruguay-Brazil border in 1934 seems to have impressed me far more than all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, since in my imagination I keep going back to that one not very notable experience. (At the time, I thought of it as boring, though on one of those days I did see a man shot down before my very eyes.) A likely explanation for this is that everything I then witnessed—the stone fences, the longhorn cattle, the horses’ silver trappings, the bearded gauchos, the hitching posts, the ostriches—was so primitive, and even barbarous, as to make it more a journey into the past than a journey through space.
“The Dead Man” should not be taken, as I sometimes fear it may be, as a deliberate allegory on human life, though, like poor Otálora, we are given all things only to have them snatched from us at the moment we die. I prefer the story to be read as a kind of adventure.
Several rash enthusiasts have fallen into the mistake of thinking that “The Dead Man” might easily be worked into a film. They overlook the fact that Azevedo Bandeira, in a movie, would require psychological plausibility, while in a story he may be both accepted and yet not understandable. No real man, of course, would act the way he does.
The story has been criticized by some friends as being no more than a sketchy outline; my incapacity, or laziness, has led me to believe that such an outline is sufficient.
A few elements in the story may be worth pointing out. Here, as in other cases, I have begun with a long opening sentence. My feeling is that first sentences should be long in order to tear the reader out of his everyday life and firmly lodge him in an imaginary world. If an illustrious example be allowed me, Cervantes apparently felt the same way when he began his famous novel. As to the names, Otálora is an old family name of mine; so is Azevedo, but with a Spanish c instead of the Portuguese O. Bandeira was the name of Enrique Amorim’s head gardener, and the word bandeira (flag) also suggests the Portuguese bandeirantes, or conquistadors. During that 1934 trip, we actually spent one night at a ranch called El Suspiro. The present tense, used throughout the story, makes it perhaps more vivid. The gaucho laboriously picking out a milonga at the very end is my comment on the way country people really play the guitar, though I’m sure that in the film version he will be made to sound like Andrés Segovia.
The Other Death
All theologians have denied God one miracle—that of undoing the past. The eleventh-century churchman Pier Damiano, however, grants Him that all but unimaginable power. This gave me the idea of writing a story about a scientist who, in some minor and unobtrusive way, attempts a similar feat. He hides two black balls in an upper drawer and three yellow ones in a lower drawer and, after years of hard work, finds that they have changed places. I was not long in perceiving that this tame miracle would never do, and that I would have to dream up something more dramatic. I thought of a common man coming to such a wonder, unawares, at the very moment he dies. Aparicio Saravia’s revolution had caught my imagination from boyhood, and I saw a way of combining, in a setting of that backwoods civil war, the gaucho idea of courage as the one cardinal virtue and my metaphysical plan. And so my story, which was first titled “The Redemption,” was born.
In the story, for literary purposes, the miracle takes place over a span of some forty-odd years. Pedro Damián’s sin would be the more unbearable for him since, as the lone Argentine among Uruguayans, he would feel greater shame. Ultimately, Damián dies as he would have liked to die—struck down by a bullet in the chest while leading a charge. Had this actually happened, his fellow soldiers would hardly have remarked on such a detail. I introduced it into my story in order to make the whole atmosphere that much more visionary.
Emerson’s verses are mentioned at the outset for two main reasons: first, because I simply admire their beauty; second, so as to send the reader—if he goes back to them—off the track, since they strongly express the idea that the past is unchangeable.
A favorite trick of mine is to work into my fiction the names of real friends. In “The Other Death” we find Ulrike von Kühlmann, Patricio Gannon, and Emir Rodríguez Monegal.
Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth
Before “Ibn Hakkan,” I had previously tried my hand at two detective stories, “The Garden of Branching Paths” (1941) and “Death and the Compass” (1942). The former won a second prize in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; the latter was flatly rejected. My interest in detective fiction is rooted in my reading of Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Wrecker, G. K. Chesterton, Eden Phillpotts, and, of course, Ellery Queen. In a world of shapeless psychological writing, I found in this particular form the classic virtues of a beginning, a middle, and an end—of something planned and executed. Bioy-Casares and I even went to the length of editing, in Buenos Aires, a successful collection of detective novels. The series was called “The Seventh Circle.” The amount of reading required in the selection of these books rid me, in time, of my boyish craze for the general run of such games and puzzles. “Ibn Hakkan” turned out to be my swan song.
My first two exercises of 1941 and 1942 were, I think, fair attempts at Chestertonian storytelling. When I wrote “Ibn Hakkan,” however, it became a cross between a permissible detective story and a caricature of one. The more I worked on it, the more hopeless the plot seemed and the stronger my need to parody. What I ended up with I hope will be read for its humor. I certainly can’t expect anyone to take seriously or to look for symbols in such pictorial whims as a black slave, a lion in Cornwall, a red-haired king, and a scarlet maze so large that on first sight its outer ramparts appear to be a straight blank wall.
The pseudo-Arabian parable preached by the timorous Mr. Allaby from his pulpit was written before “Ibn Hakkan.” How it found its way into the story is now a mystery to me.
The Man on the Threshold
I have previously written of this story:
The sudden and recurring glimpse into a deep set of corridors and patios of a tenement house around the corner from Paraná Street, in Buenos Aires, gave me the tale entitled “The Man on the Threshold”; I placed it in India so as to make its unlikeliness less obvious.
Looking back on this statement, I seem to recall a rather different starting point. One night in Salto, Uruguay, with Enrique Amorim, for lack of anything better to do, we went around to the local slaughterhouse to watch the cattle being killed. Squatting on the threshold of the long, low adobe building was a battered and almost lifeless old man. Amorim asked him, “Are they killing?” The old man appeared to come to a brief and evil awakening, and answered back in a fierce whisper, “Yes, they’re killing! They’re killing!”
Somehow the idea—somehow the image—of an apparently helpless old man holding a secret power impressed itself on my imagination. I wove this image into the present story and, several years later, used it again—almost word for word—near the close of another story, “The South.” Of course, the same linking of seeming helplessness and real power is to be found in the Arabian Nights and in the idea of old and wizened witches.
Students of Kipling will note that my Indian background is, in part, cribbed from him. Mention of Nikal Seyn comes from Kim. The madman counting on his fingers and mocking at the trees comes from the poem “Evarra and His Gods.” The young man crowned with flowers was suggested, I think, by From Sea to Sea.
I’m sorry to say that “The Man on the Threshold” is also a bit of a trick story and a game with time. What is told as having happened years and years earlier is actually taking place at that moment. The teller, of course, as he patiently spins his yam, is really hindering the officer from breaking in and stopping the trial and execution.
The Challenge
I was lecturing during the dictatorship out in the western part of the Province of Buenos Aires, in the city of Chivilcoy, when I was told the story of Wenceslao Suárez, nicknamed the Manco, or One-Handed. After I published “The Challenge,” I re
ceived two letters bearing on the subject. (These letters are printed at the back of Evaristo Carriego.) One recounts Wenceslao’s story with certain variations in the place names and in the behavior of his foe. The other tells of a similar incident in Entre Ríos, where the opponents—an Argentine and an Uruguayan—end their fight exchanging knives as a token of friendship. Both letters corroborate rather than debunk the tradition.
I found in this story a key to much of what I had already heard, thought about, and invented in stories of my own about such disinterested duels. I think the reader will find in “The Challenge” a full explanation of my feeling for the subject of knives, knife fighters, courage, and so on, as it has concerned me over the past forty or forty-five years.
Of course, Wenceslao’s story may be found wanting in likelihood, but, as Boileau pointed out, “Reality stands in no need of being true to life.”
This piece, like many others of mine, is halfway between a real short story and an essay.
The Captive
This tale, of course, is true. Frontier life has always attracted me, no doubt because some hundred years ago my grandparents lived among civilization’s outposts out on the edge of the Province of Buenos Aires. Colonel Borges, my grandfather, there held the command of the Northern and Western Frontier until he met his death in 1874. Additionally, I have always been interested in the strangeness of memory and in the fact that the past is somehow rescued, or saved for us, by it. De Quincey thought of the human brain as a palimpsest, wherein all our yesterdays, down to the minutest detail, survive; for their release, these yesterdays only await the proper, unsuspected stimulus. Memory, not the captive, may very well be the real subject of the story.
Borges and Myself
This all-too-famous sketch is my personal rendering of the old Jekyll-and-Hyde theme, save that in their case the opposition is between good and evil and in my version the opposites are the spectator and the spectacle. During extremes of happiness or unhappiness, I am apt to feel—in the space of a single, fleeting moment—that what I am undergoing is happening, independent of me, to somebody else. According to one of the Indian schools of philosophy, the ego is merely an onlooker who has identified himself with the man he is continually looking at. The fact that when I write I am stressing certain peculiarities of mine and omitting others has led me to think of Borges as a creature of fancy. This suspicion is strengthened by the existence of so many articles and studies that deal with him. A preoccupation with identity and sometimes its discord, duality, runs through much of my work—for example, in “The Theologians” and in “Tadeo Isidoro Cruz” and in the very title of my later poetry, The Self and the Other.
The Maker
This story may be thought of as autobiographical—Homer as an exaltation of myself, his blindness as my blindness, his acceptance of darkness as my acceptance. On the other hand, the departures from autobiography are striking. Blindness came to me as a slow twilight, not as a revelation; no Iliads and no Odysseys ever awaited me. When I first conceived this piece, I hesitated between Homer and Milton. Milton, however, is almost a contemporary, and also—as Dr. Johnson felt—a not very lovable figure. But Homer, as old as Western civilization itself, is a myth and so may quite easily be made into another myth. Eleven years after writing “The Maker,” I seem to have recast my fable—without being aware of it—into a more narrowly autobiographical poem called “In Praise of Darkness.” As for Milton, I have paid due tribute to him in a sonnet entitled “A Rose and Milton.”
An early translator was worried that there was no strict English equivalent for the words “El hacedor,” my Spanish title. I could only inform him that “hacedor” was my own translation of the English “maker,” as used by Dunbar in his “Lament.”
Ever since 1934, the writing of short prose pieces—fables, parables, brief narratives—has given me a certain mysterious satisfaction. I think of such pages as these as I think of coins— small material objects, hard and bright, tokens of something else.
The Intruder
In the fall of 1965, the Buenos Aires bibliophile Gustavo Fillol Day asked me for a short story to be published by him in one of those fine and secret editions meant for the happy few. Around that time I had been rereading Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills, and I told Fillol that I had a story in mind. The brevity and straightforwardness of the young Kipling tempted me, since I had always written very involved and many-faceted narratives. A few months later I was ready to get down to work, and at the beginning of 1966 I dictated “The Intruder” to my mother.
Without my suspecting it, the hint for this story—perhaps the best I have ever written—came out of a chance conversation with my friend don Nicolás Paredes sometime back in the late twenties. Commenting on the decadence of tango lyrics, which even then went in for “loud self-pity” among sentimental compadritos betrayed by their wenches, Paredes remarked dryly, “Any man who thinks five minutes straight about a woman is no man—he’s a queer.” Love among such people was obviously ruled out; I knew that their real passion would be friendship. Out of this rather abstract set of ideas I evolved my story. I placed it in an almost nameless town to the south of Buenos Aires more than seventy years ago so that nobody could dispute the details. Really there are only two characters—the two brothers. Of them, we are allowed to hear only what the elder brother says; it is he who takes all the decisions, even the last one. I made them brothers for the sake of likelihood and, of course, to avoid unsavory implications.
I was stuck at the end of the story, unsure of the words Cristián would say. My mother, who from the outset thoroughly disliked the tale, at that point gave me the words I needed without a moment’s hesitation.
“The Intruder” was, by the way, the first of my new ventures into straightforward storytelling. From this beginning I went on to write many others, ultimately collecting them under the title El informe de Brodie (Doctor Brodie’s Report).
The Immortals
Blake wrote that were our senses closed—were we made blind, deaf, dumb, and so forth—we should see all things as they are: endless. “The Immortals” came out of that strange idea and also out of Rupert Brooke’s derivative line, “And see, no longer blinded by our eyes.” We acknowledge this first debt by calling one of the characters don Guillermo Blake.
Thrice over I attempted writing the story. First with Marta Mosquera Eastman and later with Alicia Jurado. They may still have copies of those early drafts. The story was to have been called “The Chosen One.” For some reason or other, each of these schemes was dropped. Then, in 1966, I took the story up again with Bioy-Casares. By that time, Bioy and I had invented a new way of telling gruesome and uncanny tales. It lay in understating the grimness and essential horror while playing up certain humorous aspects—a kind of graft between Alfred Hitchcock and the Marx Brothers. This not only made for more amusing and less pretentious writing, but at the same time underlined the horror. We developed the technique in our comic detective saga, Six Problems for don Isidro Parodi, and, more openly, in the first of the Two Memorable Fantasies, “The Witness.” In fact, some of the personages in “The Immortals” are taken from the Six Problems, and in the present story are fated to a terrible eternity. Another detail may be pointed out, the circumstance that all the characters—including the very Frankenstein of the story, the maker of monsters Dr. Narbondo—are also blatant fools and indulge in a silly jargon all their own.
The story deals in its own way with the problem of immortality. Since our only proof of personal death is statistical, and inasmuch as a new generation of deathless men may be already on its way, I have for years lived in fear of never dying. Such an idea as immortality would, of course, be unbearable. In “The Immortals” we are face to face with people who are only immortal and nothing else, and the prospect, I trust, is appalling. I think that this joint story (I can say this without undue vanity
because I wrote it with someone else) is among my very best and that, despite
its having been overlooked by Argentine critics, it may yet come into its own.
The Meeting
I seem to be telling the same story over and over again. Obviously, “The Meeting” is at heart the identical tale I have told in another new story of mine, “Juan Muraña.” It is also linked to a fairly recent sonnet called “Allusion to a Shadow of the Nineties,” which is about Muraña’s knife, and to a short prose poem, “The Dagger,” written I think in the late forties. Perhaps not so obvious is the fact that when I wrote these things I was quite unaware of repeating myself or of attempting variations. Precisely what takes over my mind in these cases, I do not know.
Spinoza’s doctrine of things having a life of their own, or of wanting to persist in their own being, has struck me as particularly true of those things, such as weapons, meant for quite specific ends. A dagger, for example, has to fulfill a destiny. In the story, the two knives have a will of their own, ruling the hapless young men who are supposed to be wielding them. Duncan and Uriarte are gentlemen, but the knives turn them into gauchos. In order to make this sufficiently clear, I have given Uriarte, who is a coward, the victory.
Back of all this lies my personal—or perhaps Argentine— obsession with knives. In the United States or in England, where men tend to square off with their fists, people think of fighting as something to be done bare-handed. In Western or gangster films, we often see men throw down their arms and resort to their fists. To me this seems highly unnatural and even unconvincing, since there is no earthly reason for a cowboy or a gangster also to be something of a boxer. Among compadritos, if a man struck another he did it with the back of his hand, as a mere provocation, and then the real fighting began. To me there is real intimacy in the knife; in fact, in one of my poems, the last line runs: “and across my throat the intimate knife.” Firearms, of course, stand for marksmanship rather than courage. Fistfighting seems both harmless and undignified to an Argentine, while knife dueling has what Dr. Johnson said of the lives of sailors and seamen—”the dignity of danger.”