The Two Kings and Their Two Labyrinths
(1946)
[This is the story the Reverend Allaby tells from the pulpit in “Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth.” See here]
Chroniclers worthy of trust have recorded (but only Allah is All-Knowing) that in former times there was a king of the isles of Babylon who called together his architects and his wizards and set them to build him a labyrinth so intricate that no wise man would dare enter inside, and so subtle that those who did would lose their way. This undertaking was a blasphemy, for confusion and marvels belong to God alone and not to man. With the passage of time there came to his court a king of the Arabs, and the king of Babylon (wishing to mock his guest’s simplicity) allowed him to set foot in his labyrinth, where he wandered in humiliation and bewilderment until the coming of night. It was then that the second king implored the help of God and soon after came upon the door. He suffered his lips to utter no complaint, but he told the king of Babylon that he, too, had a labyrinth in his land and that, God willing, he would one day take pleasure in showing it to his host. Then he returned to Arabia, gathered his captains and his armies, and overran the realms of Babylon with so fair a fortune that he ravaged its castles, broke its peoples, and took captive the king himself. He bound him onto a swift camel and brought him into the desert. Three days they rode, and then the captor said, “O king of time and crown of the century! In Babylon you lured me into a labyrinth of brass cluttered with many stairways, doors, and walls; now the Almighty has brought it to pass that I show you mine, which has no stairways to climb, nor doors to force, nor unending galleries to wear one down, nor walls to block one’s way.”
He then loosened the bonds of the first king and left him in the heart of the desert to die of thirst and hunger. Glory be to the Living, who dieth not.
The Dead Man
(1946)
That a man from the outlying slums of a city like Buenos Aires, that a sorry hoodlum with little else to his credit than a passion for recklessness, should find his way into that wild stretch of horse country between Brazil and Uruguay and become the leader of a band of smugglers, seems on the face of it unbelievable. To those who think so, I’d like to give an account of what happened to Benjamín Otálora, of whom perhaps not a single memory lingers in the neighborhood where he grew up, and who died a fitting death, struck down by a bullet, somewhere on the border of Rio Grande do Sul. Of the details of his adventures I know little; should I ever be given the facts, I shall correct and expand these pages. For the time being, this outline may prove of some use.
Benjamín Otálora, along about 1891, is a strapping young man of nineteen. He has a low forehead, candid blue eyes, and that country-boy appearance that goes with Basque ancestry. A lucky blow with a knife has made clear to him that he is also brave; his opponent’s death causes him no concern, nor does his need to flee the country. The political boss of the district gives him a letter of introduction to a certain Azevedo Bandeira, in Uruguay. Otálora books passage; the crossing is stormy and the ship pitches and creaks. The next day, he wanders the length and breadth of Montevideo, with unacknowledged or perhaps unsuspected homesickness. He does not find Azevedo Bandeira. Getting on toward midnight, in a small saloon out on the northern edge of town, he witnesses a brawl between some cattle drovers. A knife flashes. Otálora has no idea who is in the right or wrong, but the sheer taste of danger lures him, just as cards or music lure other men. In the confusion, he blocks a lunging knife thrust that one off the gauchos aims at a man wearing a rough countryman’s poncho and, oddly, the dark derby of a townsman. The man turns out to be Azevedo Bandeira. (As soon as he finds this out, Otálora destroys the letter, preferring to be under no one’s obligation.) Azevedo Bandeira, though of stocky build, gives the unaccountable impression of being somehow misshapen. In his large face, which seems always to be too close, are the Jew, the Negro, and the Indian; in his bearing, the tiger and the ape. The scar that cuts across his cheek is one ornament more, like his bristling black moustache.
A fantasy or a mistake born of drunkenness, the fight ends as quickly as it broke out. Otálora takes a drink with the drovers and then goes along with them to an all-night party and after that—the sun high in the sky by now—to a rambling house in the Old Town. Inside, on the bare ground of the last patio, the men lay out their sheepskin saddle blankets to sleep. Dimly, Otálora compares this past night with the night before; here he is, on solid ground now, among friends. A pang of remorse for not missing his Buenos Aires nags at him, however. He sleeps until nightfall, when he is wakened by the same gaucho who, blind drunk, had tried to knife Bandeira. (Otálora recalls that the man has shared the high-spirited night with the rest ofthem, and that Bandeira had seated him at his right hand and forced him to go on drinking.) The man says the boss has sent for him. In a kind of office opening into the entrance passage (Otálora has never before seen an entrance with doors opening into it from the sides), Azevedo Bandeira, in the company of an aloof and showy red-haired woman, is waiting for him. Bandeira praises him up and down, offers him a shot of rum, tells him he has the makings of a man of guts, suggests that he go up north with the others to bring back a large cattle herd. Otálora agrees; toward dawn they are on the road, heading for Tacuarembó.
For Otálora a new kind of life opens up, a life of far-flung sunrises and long days in the saddle, reeking of horses. It is an untried and at times unbearable life, but it’s already in his blood, for just as the men of certain countries worship and feel the call of the sea, we Argentines in turn (including the man who weaves these symbols) yearn for the boundless plains that ring under a horse’s hooves. Otálora has grown up in a neighborhood of teamsters and liverymen. In under a year, he makes himself into a gaucho. He learns to handle a horse, to round up and slaughter cattle, to throw a rope for holding an animal fast or bolas for bringing it down, to fight off sleep, to weather storms and frosts and sun, to drive a herd with whistles and hoots. Only once during this whole apprenticeship does he set eyes on Azevedo Bandeira, but he has him always in mind because to be one of Bandeira’s men is to be looked up to and feared, and because after any feat or hard job the gauchos always say Bandeira does it better. Somebody has it that Bandeira was born on the Brazilian side of the Cuareim, in Rio Grande do Sul; this, which should lower him in Otálora’s eyes, somehow—with its suggestion of dense forests and of marshes and of inextricable and almost endless distances—only adds to him. Little by little, Otálora comes to realize that Bandeira’s interests are many and that chief among them is smuggling. To be a cattle drover is to be a servant; Otálora decides to work himself up to the level of smuggler. One night, as two of his companions are about to go over the border to bring back a consignment of rum, Otálora picks a fight with one of them, wounds him, and takes his place. He is driven by ambition and also by a dim sense of loyalty. The man (he thinks) will come to find out that I’m worth more than all his Uruguayans put together. Another year goes by before Otálora sees Montevideo again. They come riding through the outskirts and into the city (which to Otálora now seems enormous); reaching the boss’s house, the men prepare to bed down in the last patio. The days pass, and Otálora still has not laid eyes on Bandeira. It is said, in fear, that he is ailing; every afternoon a Negro goes up to Bandeira’s room with a kettle and maté. One evening, the job is assigned to Otálora. He feels vaguely humiliated, but at the same time gratified.
The bedroom is bare and dark. There’s a balcony that faces the sunset, there’s a long table with a shining disarray of riding crops, bullwhips, cartridge belts, firearms, and knives. On the far wall there’s a mirror and the glass is faded. Bandeira lies face up, dreaming and muttering in his sleep; the sun’s last rays outline his features. The big white bed seems to make him smaller, darker. Otálora notes his graying hair, his exhaustion, his weakness, the deep wrinkles of his years. It angers him being mastered by this old man. He thinks that a single blow would be enough to finish him. At this moment,
he glimpses in the mirror that someone has come in. It’s the woman with the red hair; she is barefoot and only half-dressed, and looks at him with cold curiosity. Bandeira sits up in bed; while he speaks of business affairs of the past two years and drinks maté after maté, his fingers toy with the woman’s braided hair. In the end, he gives Otálora permission to leave.
A few days later, they get orders to head north again. There, in a place that might be anywhere on the face of the endless plains, they come to a forlorn ranch. Not a single tree or a brook. The sun’s first and last rays beat down on it. There are stone fences for the lean longhorn cattle. This rundown set of buildings is called “The Last Sigh.”
Sitting around the fire with the ranch hands, Otálora hears that Bandeira will soon be on his way from Montevideo. He asks what for, and someone explains that there’s an outsider turned gaucho among them who’s giving too many orders. Otálora takes this as a friendly joke and is flattered that the joke can be made. Later on, he finds out that Bandeira has had a falling out with one of the political bosses, who has withdrawn his support. Otálora likes this bit of news.
Crates of rifles arrive; a pitcher and washbasin, both of silver, arrive for the woman’s bedroom; intricately figured damask draperies arrive; one morning, from out of the hills, a horseman arrives—a sullen man with a full beard and a poncho. His name is Ulpiano Suárez and he is Azevedo Bandeira’s strong-arm man, or bodyguard. He speaks very little and with a thick Brazilian accent. Otálora does not know whether to put down his reserve to unfriendliness, or to contempt, or to mere backwoods manners. He realizes, however, that to carry out the scheme he is hatching he must win the other man’s friendship.
Next into Benjamín Otálora’s story comes a black-legged bay horse that Azevedo Bandeira brings from the south, and that carries a fine saddle worked with silver and a saddle blanket trimmed with a jaguar skin. This spirited horse is a token of Bandeira’s authority and for this reason is coveted by the young man, who comes also—with a desire bordering on spite—to hunger for the woman with the shining hair. The woman, the saddle, and the big bay are attributes or trappings of a man he aspires to bring down.
At this point the story takes another turn. Azevedo Bandeira is skilled in the art of slow intimidation, in the diabolical trickery of leading a man on, step by step, shifting from sincerity to mockery. Otálora decides to apply this ambiguous method to the hard task before him. He decides to replace Azevedo Bandeira, but to take his time over it. During days of shared danger, he gains Suárez’ friendship. He confides his plan to him; Suárez pledges to help. Then a number of things begin happening of which I know only a few. Otálora disobeys Bandeira’s orders; he takes to overlooking them, changing them, defying them. The whole world seems to conspire with him, hastening events. One noontime, somewhere around Tacuarembó, there is an exchange of gunfire with a gang from Brazil; Otálora takes Bandeira’s place and shouts out orders to the Uruguayans. A bullet hits him in the shoulder, but that afternoon Otálora rides back to “The Last Sigh” on the boss’s horse, and that evening some drops of his blood stain the jaguar skin, and that night he sleeps with the woman with the shining hair. Other accounts change the order of these events, denying they happened all in the same day.
Bandeira, nevertheless, remains nominally the boss. He goes on giving orders which are not carried out. Benjamín Otálora leaves him alone, out of mixed reasons of habit and pity. The closing scene of the story coincides with the commotion of the closing night of the year 1894. On this night, the men of “The Last Sigh” eat freshly slaughtered meat and fall into quarreling over their liquor; someone picks out on the guitar, over and over again, a milonga that gives him a lot of trouble. At the head of the table, Otálora, feeling his drink, piles exultation upon exultation, boast upon boast; this dizzying tower is a symbol of his irresistible destiny. Bandeira, silent amid the shouting, lets the night flow noisily on. When the clock strikes twelve, he gets up like a man just remembering he has something to do. He gets up and softly knacks at the woman’s door. She opens at once, as though waiting to be called. She steps out barefoot and half-dressed. In an almost feminine, soft-spoken drawl, Bandeira gives her an order.
“Since you and the Argentine care so much for each other,” he says, “you’re going to kiss him right now in front of everyone.”
He adds an obscene detail. The woman tries to resist, but two men have taken her by the arms and fling her upon Otálora. Brought to tears, she kisses his face and chest, Ulpiano Suárez has his revolver out. Otálora realizes, before dying, that he has been betrayed from the start, that he has been sentenced to death—that love and command and triumph have been accorded him because his companions already thought of him as a dead man, because to Bandeira he already was a dead man.
Suárez, almost in contempt, fires the shot.
The Other Death
(1948)
I have mislaid the letter, but a couple of years or so ago Gannon wrote me from his ranch up in Gualeguaychú saying he would send me a translation, perhaps the very first into Spanish, of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem “The Past,” and adding in a P.S. that don Pedro Damián, whom I might recall, had died of a lung ailment a few nights earlier. The man (Gannon went on), wasted by fever, had in his delirium relived the long ordeal of the battle of Masoller. It seemed to me there was nothing unreasonable or out of the ordinary about this news since don Pedro, when he was nineteen or twenty, had been a follower of the banners of Aparicio Saravia. Pedro Damián had been working as a hand up north on a ranch in Río Negro or Paysandú when the 1904 revolution broke out. Although he was from Gualeguaychú, in the province of Entre Ríos, he went along with his friends and, being as cocky and ignorant as they were, joined the rebel army. He fought in one or two skirmishes and in the final battle. Returned home in 1905, Damián, with a kind of humble stubbornness, once more took up his work as a cowhand. For all I know, he never left his native province again. He spent his last thirty years living in a small lonely cabin eight or ten miles from Ñancay. It was in that out-of-the-way place that I spoke with him one evening (that Í tried to speak with him one evening) back around 1942; he was a man of few words, and not very bright. Masoller, it turned out, was the whole of his personal history. And so I was not surprised to find out that he had lived the sound and fury of that battle over again at the hour of his death. When I knew I would never see Damián another time, I wanted to remember him, but so poor is my memory for faces that all I could recall was the snapshot Gannon had taken of him. There is nothing unusual in this fact, considering that I saw the man only once at the beginning of 1942, but had looked at his picture many times. Gannon sent me the photograph and it, too, has been misplaced. I think now that if I were to come across it, I would feel afraid.
The second episode took place in Montevideo, months later. Don Pedro’s fever and his agony gave me the idea for a tale of fantasy based on the defeat at Masoller; Emir Rodríguez Monegal, to whom I had told the plot, wrote me an introduction to Colonel Dionisio Tabares, who had fought in that campaign. The Colonel received me one evening after dinner. From a rocking chair out in the side yard, he recalled the old days with great feeling but at the same time with a faulty sense of chronology. He spoke of ammunition that never reached him and of reserves of horses that arrived worn out, of sleepy dust-covered men weaving labyrinths of marches, of Saravia, who might have ridden into Montevideo but who passed it by “because the gaucho has a fear of towns,” of throats hacked from ear to ear, of a civil war that seemed to me less a military operation than the dream of a cattle thief or an outlaw. Names of battles kept coming up: Illescas, Tupambaé, Masoller. The Colonel’s pauses were so effective and his manner so vivid that I realized he had told and retold these same things many times before, and I feared that behind his words almost no true memories remained. When he stopped for a breath, I managed to get in Damián’s name.
“Damián? Pedro Damián?” said the Colonel. “He served with me. A little half-bree
d. I remember the boys used to call him Daymán—after the river.” The Colonel let out a burst of loud laughter, then cut it off all at once. I could not tell whether his discomfort was real or put on.
In another voice, he stated that war, like women, served as a test of men, and that nobody knew who he really was until he had been under fire. A man might think himself a coward and actually be brave. And the other way around, too, as had happened to that poor Damián, who bragged his way in and out of saloons with his white ribbon marking him as a Blanco, and later on lost his nerve at Masoller. In one exchange of gunfire with the regulars, he handled himself like a man, but then it was something else again when the two armies met face to face and the artillery began pounding away and every man felt as though there were five thousand other men out there grouping to kill him. That poor kid. He’d spent his life on a farm dipping sheep, and then all of a sudden he gets himself dragged along and mixed up in the grim reality of war. . . .