Duncan said no, and added, as though to explain, “The trouble is I’m afraid of you.”
Everybody howled with laughter.
Uriarte, picking himself up, answered, “I’m going to have it out with you, and right now.” Someone—may he be forgiven for it—remarked that weapons were not lacking.
I do not know who went and opened the glass cabinet. Maneco Uriarte picked out the showiest and longest dagger, the one with the U-shaped crosspiece; Duncan, almost absentmindedly, picked a wooden-handled knife with the stamp of a tiny tree on the blade. Someone else said it was just like Maneco to play it safe, to choose a sword. It astonished no one that his hand began shaking; what was astonishing is that the same thing happened with Duncan.
Tradition demands that men about to fight should respect the house in which they are guests, and step outside. Half on a spree, half seriously, we all went out into the damp night. I was not drunk—at least, not on wine—but I was reeling with adventure; I wished very hard that someone would be killed, so that later I could tell about it and always remember it. Maybe at that moment the others were no more adult than I was. I also had the feeling that an overpowering current was dragging us on and would drown us. Nobody believed the least bit in Maneco’s accusation; everyone saw it as the fruit of an old rivalry, exacerbated by the wine.
We pushed our way through a clump of trees, leaving behind the summerhouse. Uriarte and Duncan led the way, wary of each other. The rest of us strung ourselves out around the edge of an opening of lawn. Duncan had stopped there in the moonlight and said, with mild authority, “This looks like the right place.”
The two men stood in the center, not quite knowing what to do. A voice rang out: “Let go of all that hardware and use your hands!”
But the men were already fighting. They began clumsily, almost as if they were afraid of hurting each other; they began by watching the blades, but later their eyes were on one another. Uriarte had laid aside his anger, Duncan his contempt or aloofness. Danger, in some way, had transfigured them; these were now two men fighting, not boys. I had imagined the fight as a chaos of steel; instead, I was able to follow it, or almost follow it, as though it were a game of chess. The intervening years may, of course, have exaggerated or blurred what I saw. I do not know how long it lasted; there are events that fall outside the common measure of time.
Without ponchos to act as shields, they used their forearms to block each lunge of the knife. Their sleeves, soon hanging in shreds, grew black with blood. I thought that we had gone wrong in supposing that they knew nothing about this kind of fencing. I noticed right off that they handled themselves in different ways. Their weapons were unequal. Duncan, in order to make up for his disadvantage, tried to stay in close to the other man; Uriarte kept stepping back to be able to lunge out with long, low thrusts. The same voice that had called attention to the display cabinet shouted out now: “They’re killing each other! Stop them!”
But no one dared break it up. Uriarte had lost ground; Duncan charged him. They were almost body to body now. Uriarte’s weapon sought Duncan’s face. Suddenly the blade seemed shorter, for it was piercing the taller man’s chest. Duncan lay stretched out on the grass. It was at this point that he said, his voice very low, “How strange. All this is like a dream.”
He did not shut his eyes, he did not move, and I had seen a man kill another man.
Maneco Uriarte bent over the body, sobbing openly, and begged to be forgiven. The thing he had just done was beyond him. I know now that he regretted less having committed a crime than having earned out a senseless act.
I did not want to look anymore. What I had wished for so much had happened, and it left me shaken. Lafinur told me later that they had had to struggle hard to pull out the weapon. A makeshift council was formed. They decided to lie as little as possible and to elevate this duel with knives to a duel with swords. Four of them volunteered as seconds, among them Acebal. In Buenos Aires anything can be fixed; someone always has a friend.
On top of the mahogany table where the men had been playing, a pack of English cards and a pile of bills lay in a jumble that nobody wanted to look at or to touch.
In the years that followed, I often considered revealing the story to some friend, but always I felt that there was a greater pleasure in being the keeper of a secret than in telling it. However, around 1929, a chance conversation suddenly moved me one day to break my long silence. The retired police captain, don José Olave, was recalling stories about men from the tough riverside neighborhood of the Retiro who had been handy with their knives; he remarked that when they were out to kill their man, scum of this kind had no use for the rules of the game, and that before all the fancy playing with daggers that you saw now on the stage, knife fights were few and far between. I said I had witnessed one, and gave him an account of what had happened nearly twenty years earlier.
He listened to me with professional attention, then said, “Are you sure Uriarte and What’s-His-Name never handled a knife before? Maybe they had picked up a thing or two around their fathers’ ranches.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Everybody there that night knew one another pretty well, and I can tell you they were all amazed at the way the two men fought.”
Olave went on in his quiet manner, as if thinking aloud. “One of the weapons had a U-shaped crosspiece in the handle. There were two daggers of that kind which became quite famous—Moreira’s and Juan Almada’s. Almada was from down south, in Tapalquén.”
Something seemed to come awake in my memory. Olave continued. “You also mentioned a knife with a wooden handle, one with the Little Tree brand. There are thousands of them, but there was one—"
He broke off for a moment, then said, “Señor Acevedo had a big property up around Pergamino. There was another of these famous toughs from up that way—Juan Almanza was his name. This was along about the turn of the century. When he was fourteen, he killed his first man with one of these knives. From then on, for luck, he stuck to the same one. Juan Almanza and Juan Almada had it in for each other, jealous of the fact that many people confused the two. For a long time they searched high and low for one another, but they never met. Juan Almanza was killed by a stray bullet during some election brawl or other. The other man, I think, died a natural death in a hospital bed in Las Flores.”
Nothing more was said. Each of us was left with his own conclusions.
Nine or ten men, none of whom is any longer living, saw what my eyes saw—that sudden stab and the body under the night sky—but perhaps what we were really seeing was the end of another story, an older story. I began to wonder whether it was Maneco Uriarte who killed Duncan or whether in some uncanny way it could have been the weapons, not the men, which fought. I still remember how Uriarte’s hand shook when he first gripped his knife, and the same with Duncan, as though the knives were coming awake after a long sleep side by side in the cabinet. Even after their gauchos were dust, the knives—the knives, not their tools, the men—knew how to fight. And that night they fought well.
Things last longer than people; who knows whether these knives will meet again, who knows whether the story ends here.
Juan Muraña
For years now, I have been telling people I grew up in that part of Buenos Aires known as Palermo. This, I’ve come to realize, is mere literary bravado; the truth is that I really grew up on the inside of a long iron picket fence in a house with a garden and with my father’s and his father’s library. The Palermo of knife fights and of guitar playing lurked (so they say) on street comers and down back alleys. In 1930, I wrote a study of Evaristo Carriego, a neighbor of ours, a poet and glorifier of the city’s outlying slums. A little after that, chance brought me face to face with Emilio Trápani. I was on the train to Morón. Trápani, who was sitting next to the window, called me by name. For some time I could not place him, so many years had passed since we’d been classmates in a school on Thames Street. Roberto Godel, another classmate, may remember him.
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Trápani and I never had any great liking for each other. Time had set us apart, and also our mutual indifference. He had taught me, I now recall, all the basic slang words of the day. Riding along, we struck up one of those trivial conversations that force you to unearth pointless facts and that lead up to the discovery of the death of a fellow-schoolmate who is no longer anything more than a name. Then, abruptly, Trápani said to me, “Someone lent me your Carriego book, where you’re talking about hoodlums all the time. Tell me, Borges, what in the world can you know about hoodlums?” He stared at me with a kind of wonder.
“I’ve done research,” I answered.
Not letting me go on, he said, “Research is the word, all right. Personally, I have no use for research—I know these people inside out.” After a moment’s silence, he added, as though he were letting me in on a secret, “I’m Juan Muraña’s nephew.”
Of all the men around Palermo famous for handling a knife way back in the nineties, the one with the widest reputation was Muraña. Trápani went on, “Florentina—my aunt—was his wife. Maybe you’ll be interested in this story.”
Certain devices of a literary nature and one or two longish sentences led me to suspect that this was not the first time he had told the story.
My mother [Trápani said] could never quite stomach the fact that her sister had linked herself up with a man like Muraña, who to her was just a big brute, while to Aunt Florentina he was a man of action. A lot of stories circulated about my uncle’s end. Some say that one night when he was dead drunk he tumbled from the seat of his wagon, making the turn around the comer of Coronel, and cracked his skull on the cobblestones. It’s also said that the law was on his heels and he ran away to Uruguay. My mother, who couldn’t stand her brother-in-law, never explained to me what actually happened. I was just a small boy then and have no memories of him.
Along about the time of the Centennial, we were living in a long, narrow house on Russell Alley. The back door, which was always kept locked, opened on the other side of the block, on San Salvador Street. My aunt, who was well along in years and a bit queer, had a room with us up in our attic. Big-boned but thin as a stick, she was—or seemed to me—very tall. She also wasted few words. Living in fear of fresh air, she never went out; nor did she like our going into her room. More than once, I caught her stealing and hiding food. The talk around the neighborhood was that Muraña’s death, or disappearance, had affected her mind. I remember her always in black. She had also fallen into the habit of talking to herself.
Our house belonged to a certain Mr. Luchessi, the owner of a barbershop on the Southside, in Barracas. My mother, who did piecework at home as a seamstress, was in financial straits. Without being able to understand them, I heard whispered terms like “court order” and “eviction notice.” My mother was really at her wit’s end, and my aunt kept saying stubbornly that Juan was not going to stand by and let the gringo, that wop, throw us out. She recalled the incident—which all of us knew by heart—of a bigmouthed tough from the Southside who had dared doubt her husband’s courage. Muraña, the moment he found out, took all the trouble to go clear across the town, ferret the man out, put him straight with a blow of his knife, and dump his body into the Riachuelo. I don’t know if the story’s true; what matters is that it was told and that it became accepted.
I saw myself sleeping in empty lots on Serrano Street or begging handouts or going around with a basket of peaches. Selling on the streets tempted me, because it would free me from school. I don’t know how long our troubles lasted. Your late father once told us that you can’t measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well. I didn’t quite understand what he meant, but the words stuck in my mind.
One night, I had a dream that ended in a nightmare. I dreamed of my Uncle Juan. I had never got to know him, but I thought of him as a burly man with a touch of the Indian about him, a sparse moustache and his hair long. He and I were heading south, cutting through huge stone quarries and scrub, but these quarries and thickets were also Thames Street. In the dream, the sun was high overhead. Uncle Juan was dressed in a black suit. He stopped beside a sort of scaffolding in a narrow mountain pass. He held his hand under his jacket, around the level of his heart—not like a person who’s about to pull a knife but as though he were keeping the hand hidden. In a very sad voice, he told me, “I’ve changed a lot.” He withdrew the hand, and what I saw was the claw of a vulture. I woke up screaming in the dark.
The next day, my mother made me go with her to Luchessi’s. I know she was going to ask him for extra time; she probably took me along so that our landlord would see her helplessness. She didn’t mention a word of this to her sister, who would never have let her lower herself in such a way. I hadn’t ever set foot in Barracas before; it seemed to me there were a lot more people around than I imagined there’d be, and a lot more traffic and fewer vacant lots. From the comer, we saw several policemen and a flock of people in front of the house we were looking for. A neighbor went from group to group telling everyone that around three o’clock that morning he had been awakened by someone thumping on a door. He heard the door open and someone go in. Nobody shut the door, and as soon as it was light Luchessi was found lying there in the entranceway, half dressed. He’d been stabbed a number of times. The man lived alone; the authorities never caught up with the murderer. Nothing, it seems, had been stolen. At the time, somebody recalled that the deceased had almost lost his sight. In an important-sounding voice, someone else said, “His time had come.” This judgment and the tone made an impression on me; as the years passed I was to find out that any time a person dies there’s always somebody who makes this same discovery.
At the wake, we were offered coffee and I had a cup. In the coffin there was a wax dummy in place of the dead man. I mentioned this to my mother; one of the undertaker’s men laughed and explained to me that the dummy dressed in black was Mr. Luchessi. I stood spellbound, staring at him. My mother had to yank me away.
For months afterward, nobody talked of anything else. Crimes were so few in those days; just remember all the fuss that was made over the case of Melena, Campana, and Silletero. The one person in all Buenos Aires who showed no interest whatever was Aunt Florentina. She kept on saying, with the persistence of old age, “I told you Juan would never let that gringo put us out in the street.”
One day, it rained buckets. As I could not go to school that morning, I began rummaging through the house. I climbed up to the attic. There was my aunt, sitting with her hands folded together; I could tell that she wasn’t even thinking. The room smelled damp. In one corner stood the iron bedstead, with her rosary beads attached to one of the bars, in another a wooden chest where she kept her clothes. A picture of the Virgin was pinned to one of the whitewashed walls. On the table by the bed was a candlestick. Without lifting her eyes, my aunt said, “I know what brings you up here. Your mother sent you. She just doesn’t seem to understand that it was Juan who saved us.”
“Juan?” I said, amazed. “Juan died over ten years ago.”
“Juan is here,” she told me. “Do you want to see him?” She opened the drawer of the night table and took out a dagger, then went on speaking in a soft, low voice. “Here he is. I knew he would never forsake me. In the whole world there hasn’t been another man like him. He didn’t let the gringo get out a word.”
It was only then that I understood. That poor raving woman had murdered Luchessi. Driven by hate, by madness, and maybe—who knows—by love, she had slipped out by the back door, had made her way block after block in the dead of night, had found the house she was after, and, with those big, bony hands, had sunk the dagger. The dagger was Muraña—it was the dead man she had gone on worshiping.
I never knew whether she told my mother the story or not. She died a short time before the eviction.
Here Trápani—whom I have never run across again—ended his
account. Since then, I have often thought about this bereft woman and about her man. Juan Muraña walked the familiar streets of my boyhood; I may have seen him many times, unawares. He was a man who knew what all men come to know, a man who tasted death and was afterward a knife, and is now the memory of a knife, and will tomorrow be oblivion—the oblivion that awaits us all.
The Elder Lady
On the fourteenth of January, 1941, María Justina Rubio de Jáuregui was to be one hundred years old. She was the last surviving daughter of any of the soldiers who had fought in the South American War of Independence.
Colonel Mariano Rubio, her father, was what might, without irreverence, be called a minor immortal. Born in 1799 in the Buenos Aires parish of La Merced, the son of local landowners, he was promoted to ensign in San Martín’s Army of the Andes, and he fought in the battle of Chacabuco, in the defeat of Cancha Rayada, at Maipú, and, two years after that, at Arequipa. It is told that on the eve of one of these battles, he and a fellow-officer, José de Olavarría, exchanged swords. At the beginning of April, 1823, there took place the famous engagement of Big Hill, which, having been fought in a valley between two summits, is often also known as the battle of Red Hill. Always envious of our glories, the Venezuelans attribute this victory to General Simón Bolívar, but the impartial observer, the Argentine historian, is not easily taken in and knows only too well that the laurels rightfully belong to Colonel Mariano Rubio. The Colonel, at the head of a regiment of Colombian hussars, turned the tide in this battle, waged entirely with sabers and lances, which paved the way for the no less famous action at Ayacucho, in which he also took part, receiving a wound. In 1827, it was his fate to fight boldly at Ituzaingó, under the immediate command of Alvear. In spite of his blood tie with the dictator Rosas, in later years he Was one of Lavalle’s men, and once broke up a troop of gaucho militia in an action the Colonel always referred to as a saberfest. With the defeat of the Unitarians, he emigrated to Uruguay, where he married. In the eighteen-forties, in the course of that country’s long civil war, the Guerra Grande, he died in Montevideo during the siege of the city by Oribe’s Blancos. He was nearly forty-four, which at that time was almost old age. He had been a friend of the writer Florencio Varela. It is quite likely that professors at the Military Academy would have flunked him, since his only experience lay in fighting battles, not in taking examinations.