Funes,HisMemory*
I recall him (though I have no right to speak that sacred verb-only one man on earth did, and that man is dead) holding a dark pa.s.sionflower in his hand, seeing it as it had never been seen, even had it been stared at from the first light of dawn till the last light of evening for an entire life- time. I recall him-his taciturn face, its Indian features, its extraordinaryremoteness -behind the cigarette. I recall (I think) the slender, leather-braider"s fingers. I recall near those hands amate cup, with the coat of arms of theBandaOriental.* I recall, in the window of his house, a yellow straw blind with some vague painted lake scene. I clearly recall his voice-the slow, resentful, nasal voice of the toughs of those days, without the Italian sibilants one hears today. I saw him no more than three times, the last timein 1887___I applaud the idea that all of us who had dealings with the man should write something about him; my testimony will perhaps be the briefest (and certainly the slightest) account in the volume that you are to publish, but it can hardly be the least impartial. Unfortunately I am Argen- tine, and so congenitally unable to produce the dithyramb that is the obligatory genre in Uruguay, especially when the subject is an Uruguayan.Highbrow, dandy, city slicker -Funesdid not utter those insulting words, but I know with reasonable certainty that to him I represented those mis- fortunes.
PedroLeandroIpuche* has written thatFuneswas a precursor of the race of supermen-"a maverick and vernacular Zarathustra"-and I will not argue the point, but one must not forget that he was also a street tough from FrayBentos,with certain incorrigible limitations.
My first recollection ofFunesis quite clear. I see him one afternoon in March or February of "84. That year, my father had taken me to spend the summer in FrayBentos.*I was coming back from the ranch in San Franciscowith my cousin Bernardo Haedo. We were riding along on our horses, singing merrily- and being on horseback was not the only reason for my cheerfulness. After a sultry day, a huge slate-colored storm, fanned by the south wind, had curtained the sky. The wind flailed the trees wildly, and I was filled with the fear (the hope) that we would be surprised in the open countryside by the elemental water. We ran a kind of race against the storm. We turned into the deep bed of a narrow street that ran between two brick sidewalks built high up off the ground. It had suddenly got dark; I heard quick, almost secret footsteps above me-I raised my eyes and saw a boy running along the narrow, broken sidewalk high above, as though running along the top of a narrow, broken wall. I recall the short, baggy trousers- like a gaucho"s-that he wore, the straw-soled cotton slippers, the cigarette in the hard visage, all stark against the now limitless storm cloud. Unex- pectedly, Bernardo shouted out tohim-What"s the time, Ireneo?Without consulting the sky, without a second"s pause, the boy replied, Four minutes till eight, young Bernardo Juan Francisco. The voice was shrill and mocking.
I am so absentminded that I would never have given a second thought to the exchange I"ve just reported had my attention not been called to it by my cousin, who was prompted by a certain local pride and the desire to seem unfazed by the other boy"s trinomial response.
He told me that the boy in the narrow street was one IreneoFunes,and that he was known for certain eccentricities, among them shying away from people and always knowing what time it was, like a clock.
He added that Ireneo was the son of a village ironing woman, Maria ClementinaFunes,and that while some people said his father was a doctor in the salting house (an Englishman named O"Connor), others said he broke horses or drove oxcarts for a living over in the department ofSalto.The boy lived with his mother, my cousin told me, around the corner from VillaLos Laureles.
In "85 and "86, we spent the summer in Montevideo; it was not until "87 that I returned to FrayBentos.Naturally, I asked about everybody I knew, and finally about "chronometricFunes."I was told he"d been bucked off a half-broken horse on the ranch in San Francisco and had been left hope- lessly crippled. I recall the sensation of unsettling magic that this news gave me: The only time I"d seen him, we"d been coming home on horseback from the ranch in San Francisco, and he had been walking along a high place. This new event, told by my cousin Bernardo, struck me as very much like a dream confected out of elements of the past. I was told thatFunesnever stirred from his cot, his eyes fixed on the fig tree behind the house or ona spiderweb.At dusk, he would let himself be carried to the window.
Hewas such a proud young man that he pretended that his disastrous fall had actually been fortunate-----Twice I saw him, on his cot behind the iron-barred window that crudely underscored his prisonerlike state-once lying motionless, with his eyes closed; the second time motionless as well, ab- sorbed in the contemplation of a fragrant switch ofartemisia.
It was not without some self-importance that about that same time I had embarked upon a systematic study of Latin. In my suitcase I had brought with me Lh.o.m.ond"sDe virisill.u.s.tribus,Quicherat"s Thesaurus, Julius Caesar"s commentaries, and an odd-numbered volume of Pliny"sNaturalishistoria- a work which exceeded (and still exceeds) my modest abilities asa Latinist.There are no secrets in a small town; Ireneo, in his house on the outskirts of the town, soon learned of the arrival of those out- landish books. He sent me a flowery, sententious letter, reminding me of our "lamentably ephemeral"
meeting "on the seventh of February, 1884." He dwelt briefly, elegiacally, on the "glorious services" that my uncle,GregorioHaedo, who had died that same year, "had rendered to his two motherlands in the valiant Battle of Ituzaingo," and then he begged that I lend him one of the books I had brought, along with a dictionary "for a full understanding of the text, since I must plead ignorance of Latin." He promised to return the books to me in good condition, and "straightway." The penmanship was perfect, the letters exceptionally well formed; the spelling was that recom- mended byAndresBello:ifory, jforg.At first, of course, I thought it was some sort of joke. My cousins a.s.sured me it was not, that this "was just... just Ireneo." I didn"t know whether to attribute to brazen conceit, igno- rance, or stupidity the idea that hard-won Latin needed no more teaching than a dictionary could give; in order to fully disabuseFunes,I sent him Quicherat"sGradus ad Parna.s.sum and the Pliny.
On February 14,1 received a telegram from Buenos Aires urging me to return home immediately; my father was "not at all well." G.o.d forgive me, but the prestige of being the recipient of an urgent telegram, the desire to communicate to all of FrayBentosthe contradiction between the negative form of the news and the absoluteness of the adverbial phrase, the tempta- tion to dramatize my grief by feigning a virile stoicism-all this perhaps distracted me from any possibility of real pain. As I packed my bag, I real- ized that I didn"t have theGradus ad Parna.s.sum and the first volume of Pliny. TheSaturn was to sail the next morning; that evening, after dinner, I walked over toFunes"house. I was amazed that the evening was no less op- pressive than the day had been.
At the honest little house,Funes"mother opened the door.
She told me that Ireneo was in the back room. I shouldn"t be surprised if I found the room dark, she told me, since Ireneo often spent his off hours without lighting the candle. I walked across the tiled patio and down the lit- tle hallway farther on, and came to the second patio. There was a grapevine; the darknessseemed to me virtually total. Then suddenly I heard Ireneo"s high, mocking voice. The voice was speaking Latin; with morbid pleasure, the voice emerging from the shadows was reciting a speech or a prayer or an incantation. The Roman syllables echoed in the patio of hard-packed earth; my trepidation made me think them incomprehensible, and endless; later, during the enormous conversation of that night, I learned they were the first paragraph of the twenty-fourth chapter of the seventh book of Pliny"s Naturalishistoria.The subject of that chapter is memory; the last words wereut nihil non iisdemverbis redderetur auditum.
Without the slightest change of voice, Ireneo told me to come in. He was lying on his cot, smoking. I don"t think I saw his face until the sun came up the next morning; when I look back, I believe I recall the momentary glow of his cigarette. His room smelled vaguely musty. I sat down; I told him about my telegram and my father"s illness.
I come now to the most difficult point in my story, a story whose onlyraison d"etre(asmy readers should be told from the outset) is that dialogue half a century ago. I will not attempt to reproduce the words of it, which are now forever irrecoverable. Instead, I will summarize, faithfully, the many things Ireneo told me. Indirect discourse is distant and weak; I know that I am sacrificing the effectiveness of my tale. I only ask that my readers try to hear in their imagination the broken and staccato periods that astounded me that night.
Ireneo began by enumerating, in both Latin and Spanish, the cases of prodigious memory cataloged in the Naturalishistoria:Cyrus, the king of Persia, who could call all the soldiers in his armies by name; Mithridates Eupator, who meted out justice in the twenty-two languages of the king- dom over which he ruled; Simonides, the inventor of the art of memory; Metrodorus, who was able faithfully to repeat what he had heard, though it be but once. With obvious sincerity, Ireneo said he was amazed that such cases were thought to be amazing. He told me that before that rainy after- noon when the blue roan had bucked him off, he had been what every man was-blind, deaf, befuddled, and virtually devoid of memory. (I tried to re- mind him how precise his perception of time, his memory for proper names had been-he ignored me.) He had lived, he said, for nineteen years as though in a dream: he looked without seeing, heard without listening,forgot everything, or virtually everything. When he fell, he"d been knocked unconscious; when he came to again, the present was so rich, so clear, that it was almost unbearable, as were his oldest and even his most trivial memo- ries. It was shortly afterward that he learned he was crippled; of that fact he hardly took notice. He reasoned (or felt) that immobility was a small price to pay. Now his perception and his memory were perfect.
With one quick look, you and I perceive three winegla.s.ses on a table;Funesperceived every grape that had been pressed into the wine and all the stalks and tendrils of its vineyard. He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30,1882, and he could compare them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once, or with the feathers of spray lifted by an oar on the Rio Negro on the eve of the Battle of Quebracho. Nor were those memories simple- every visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, and so on. He was able to reconstruct every dream, every daydream he had ever had. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day; he had never once erred or faltered, but each reconstruction had itself taken an entire day."I, myself, alone, have more memories than all mankind since the world began," he said to me. And also:"My dreams are like other people"s waking hours." And again, toward dawn:"My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap." A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a rhombus-all these are forms we can fully intuit; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a young colt, a small herd of cattle on a mountainside, a flickering fire and its uncountable ashes, and the many faces of a dead man at a wake. I have no idea how many stars he saw in the sky.
Those are the things he told me; neither then nor later have I ever doubted them. At that time there were no cinematographers, no phono- graphs; it nevertheless strikes me as implausible, even incredible, that no one ever performed an experiment withFunes.But then, all our lives we postpone everything that can be postponed; perhaps we all have the cer- tainty, deep inside, that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do everything, know all there is to know.
The voice ofFunes,from the darkness, went on talking.He told me that in 1886 he had invented a numbering system original with himself, and that within a very few days he had pa.s.sed the twenty-four thousand mark. He had not written it down, since anything he thought, even once, remained ineradicably with him. His original motivation, I think, was his irritation that the thirty-three Uruguayan patriots* should require two figures and three words rather than a single figure, a singleword. He then applied this mad principle to the other numbers. Instead of seven thousand thirteen (7013), he would say, for instance,"Maximo Perez";instead of seven thousand fourteen (7014), "the railroad"; other numbers were"Luis MelianLafinur," "Olimar," "sulfur," "clubs," "the whale," "gas," "a stewpot," "Napoleon,""Agustin de Vedia."Instead of five hundred (500), he said "nine." Every word had a particular figure attached to it, a sort of marker; the later ones were extremely complicated-----I tried to explain to Funesthat his rhapsody of unconnected words was exactly the opposite of a numbersystem. I told him that when one said "365" one said "three hun- dreds, six tens, and five ones," a breakdown impossible with the "numbers"n.i.g.g.e.rTimoteoora ponchoful of meat.Funeseither could not or would not understand me.
In the seventeenth century, Locke postulated (and condemned) an im- possible language in which each individual thing-every stone, every bird, every branch-would have its own name;Funes oncecontemplated a simi- lar language, but discarded the idea as too general, too ambiguous. The truth was,Funesremembered not only every leaf of every tree in every patch of forest, but every time he had perceived or imagined that leaf. He resolved to reduce every one of his past days to some seventy thousand rec- ollections, which he would then define by numbers. Two considerations dissuaded him: the realization that the task was interminable, and the real- ization that it was pointless. He saw that by the time he died he would still not have finished cla.s.sifying all the memories of his childhood.
The two projects I have mentioned (an infinite vocabulary for the natu- ral series of numbers, and a pointless mental catalog of all the images of his memory) are foolish, even preposterous, but they reveal a certain halting grandeur. They allow us to glimpse, or to infer, the dizzying world thatFuneslived in.Funes,we must not forget, was virtually incapable of gen- eral, platonic ideas. Not only was it difficult for him to see that the generic symbol "dog" took in all the dissimilar individuals of all shapes and sizes, it irritated him that the "dog" of three-fourteen in the afternoon, seen in pro- file, should be indicated by the same noun as the dog of three-fifteen, seen frontally. His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them. Swift wrote that the emperor ofLilliputcould perceive the movement of the minute hand of a clock;Funescould continually per- ceive the quiet advances of corruption, of tooth decay, of weariness. He saw-henoticed -the progress of death, of humidity. He was the solitary, lucid spectator of a multiform, momentaneous, and almost unbearably pre- cise world.
Babylon, London, and New York dazzle mankind"s imaginationwith their fierce splendor; no one in the populous towers or urgent avenues of those cities has ever felt the heat and pressure of a reality as inexhaustible as that which battered Ireneo, day and night, in his poor South American hinterland. It was hard for him to sleep. To sleep is to take one"s mind from the world;Funes,lying on his back on his cot, in the dimness of his room, could picture every crack in the wall, every molding of the precise houses that surrounded him. (I repeat that the most trivial of his memories was more detailed, more vivid than our own perception of a physical pleasure or a physical torment.) Off toward the east, in an area that had not yet been cut up into city blocks, there were new houses, unfamiliar to Ireneo. He pic- tured them to himself as black, compact, made of h.o.m.ogeneous shadow; he would turn his head in that direction to sleep. He would also imagine himself at the bottom of a river, rocked (and negated) by the current.
He had effortlessly learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I sus- pect, nevertheless, that he was not very good at thinking. To think is to ig- nore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract. In the teeming world of IreneoFunesthere was nothing but particulars-and they were virtuallyimmediate particulars.
The leery light of dawn entered the patio of packed earth.
It was then that I saw the face that belonged to the voice that had been talking all night long. Ireneo was nineteen, he had been born in 1868; he looked to me as monumental as bronze-older than Egypt, older than the prophecies and the pyramids. I was struck by the thought that every word I spoke, everyexpression of my face or motion of my hand would endure in his implacable memory; I was rendered clumsy by the fear of making point- less gestures.
IreneoFunesdied in 1889 of pulmonary congestion.
The Shape of the Sword
His face was traversed by a vengeful scar, an ashen and almost perfect arc that sliced from the temple on one side of his head to his cheek on the other. His true name does not matter; everyone inTacuarembocalled him "the Englishman atLa Colorada."The owner of the land, Cardoso, hadn"t wanted to sell it; I heard that the Englishman plied him with an argument no one could have foreseen-he told him the secret history of the scar. He had come from the border, from Rio Grande doSul;there were those who said that over in Brazil he had been a smuggler. The fields had gone to gra.s.s, the water was bitter; to put things to right, the Englishman worked shoulder to shoulder with his peons. People say he was harsh to the point of cruelty, but scrupulously fair. They also say he liked his drink; once or twice a year he would shut himself up in the room in the belvedere, and two or three days later he would emerge as though from a battle or a spell of dizziness-pale, shaking, befuddled, and as authoritarian as ever. I recall his glacial eyes, his lean energy, his gray mustache. He was standoffish; the fact is, his Spanish was rudimentary, and tainted with the accents of Brazil. Aside from the oc- casional business letter or pamphlet, he got no mail.
The last time I made a trip through the northern provinces, high water along theCaraguataforced me to spend the night atLa Colorada.Within a few minutes I thought I sensed that my showing up that way was somehow inopportune. I tried to ingratiate myself with the Englishman, and to do so I seized upon patriotism, that least discerning of pa.s.sions. I remarked that a country with England"s spirit was invincible. My interlocutor nodded, but added with a smile that he wasn"t English-he was Irish, from Dungarvan. That said, he stopped, as though he had let slip a secret.
We went outside after dinner to have a look at the sky. The clouds hadcleared away, but far off behind the sharp peaks, the southern sky, creviced and split with lightning, threatened another storm. Back in the dilapidated dining room, the peon who"d served dinner brought out a bottle of rum. We drank for a long time, in silence.
I am not sure what time it was when I realized that I was drunk; I don"t know what inspiration or elation or boredom led me to remark on my host"s scar. His face froze; for several seconds I thought he was going to eject me from the house. But at last, his voice perfectly ordinary, he said to me: "I will tell you the story of my scar under one condition-that no con- tempt or condemnation be withheld, no mitigation for any iniquity be pleaded."
I agreed. This is the story he told, his English interspersed with Spanish, and even with Portuguese: In 1922, in one of the cities of Connaught, I was one of the many young men who were conspiring to win Ireland"s independence. Of my companions there, some are still living, working for peace; others, paradoxically, are fighting under English colours, at sea or in the desert; one, the best of us all, was shot at dawn in the courtyard of a prison, executed by men filled with dreams; others (and not the least fortunate, either) met their fate in the anonymous, virtually secret battles of the civil war. We were Republicans and Catholics; we were, I suspect, romantics. For us, Ireland was not just the Utopian future and the unbearable present; it was a bitter yet loving mythology, it was the circular towers and red bogs, it was the repudiation of Parnell, and it was the grand epics that sing the theft of bulls that were he - roes in an earlier incarnation, and in other incarnations fish, and moun- tains. ... One evening I shall never forget, there came to us a man, one of our own, fromMunster-a man called John Vincent Moon.
He couldn"t have been more than twenty. He was thin yet slack-muscled, all at once-he gave the uncomfortable impression of being an inverte- brate. He had studied, ardently and with some vanity, virtually every page of one of those Communist manuals; he would haul out his dialectical ma- terialism to cut off any argument. There are infinite reasons a man may have for hating or loving another man; Moon reduced the history of the world to one sordid economic conflict. He declared that the Revolution wasforeordained to triumph. I replied that onlylost causes were of any interest to a gentleman.... Night had fallen; we pursued our cross-purposes in the hallway, down the stairs, then through the vague streets.
The verdicts Moon handed down impressed me considerably less than the sense ofunappealable and absolute truth with which he issued them. The new com- rade did not argue, he did not debate-he p.r.o.nounced judgement, contemp- tuously and, to a degree, wrathfully.
As we came to the last houses of the city that night, we were stupefied by the sudden sound of gunfire.
(Before this, or afterward, we skirted the blind wall of a factory or a gaol.) We turned down a dirt street; a soldier, huge in the glare, burst out of a torched cottage. He shouted at us to halt. I started walking faster; my comrade did not follow me. I turned around- John Vincent Moon was standing as motionless as a rabbit caught in one"s headlights-eternalized, somehow, by terror. I ran back, floored the soldier with a single blow, shook Vincent Moon, cursed him, and ordered him to come with me. I had to take him by the arm; the pa.s.sion of fear had stripped him of all will. But then we did run-we fled through the conflagration-riddled night. A burst of rifle fire came our way, and a bullet grazed Moon"s right shoulder; as we fled through the pine trees, a weak sob racked his breast.
In that autumn of 1922 I had gone more or less underground, and was living in General Berkeley"s country house. The general (whom I had never seen) was at that time posted to some administrative position or other out in Bengal; the house was less than a hundred years old but it was gloomy and dilapidated and filled with perplexing corridors and pointless an- techambers. The museum-cabinet and huge library arrogated to themselves the entire lower floor-there were the controversial and incompatible books that are somehow the history of the nineteenth century; there were scimitars from Nishapur, in whose frozen crescents the wind and violence of battle seemed to be living on. We entered the house (I think I recall) through the rear. Moon, shaking, his mouth dry, mumbled that the events of the night had been "interesting"; I salved and bandaged him, then brought him a cup of tea. The wound was superficial. Suddenly, puzzled, he stammered: "You took a terrible chance, coming back to save me like that."
I told him it was nothing. (It was the habit of civil war that impelled me to act as I acted; besides, the imprisonment of a single one of us could im- peril the entire cause.) The next day, Moon had recovered his composure. He accepted a ciga- rette and subjected me to a harsh interrogation as to the "financial resources of our revolutionary party." His questions were quite lucid; I told him (truthfully) that the situation was grave. Deep rumblings of gunfire trou- bled the peace of the south. I told Moon that our comrades were waiting forus. My overcoat and revolver were up in my room; when I returned, I found Moon lying on the sofa, his eyes closed. He thought he had a fever; he pleaded a painful spasm in his shoulder.
It was then that I realized he was a hopeless coward. I clumsily told him to take care of himself, then left.
I was embarra.s.sed by the man and his fear, shamed by him, as though I myself were the coward, not Vincent Moon. Whatsoever one man does, it is as though all men did it. That is why it is not unfair that a single act of disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; that is why it is not unfair that a single Jew"s crucifixion should be enough to save it. Schopenhauer may have been right-I am other men, any man is all men, Shakespeare is somehow the wretched John Vincent Moon.
We spent nine days in the general"s great house. Of the agonies and the rays of light of that dark war I shall say nothing; my purpose is to tell the story of this scar that affronts me. In my memory, those nine days form a single day-except for the next to last, when our men stormed a barracks and avenged, life for life, our sixteen comrades fallen to the machine guns at Elphin. I would slip out of the house about dawn, in the blurred confusion of first light. I would be back toward nightfall. My comrade would be wait - ing for me upstairs; his wound would not allow him to come down. When I look back, I see him with some book of strategy in his hand-F. N.Maude, or Clausewitz. "The weapon of preference for me," he confessed to me one night, "is artillery." He enquired into our plans; he enjoyed criticizing or re- thinking them. He was also much given to deploring "our woeful financial base"; dogmatically and sombrely he would prophesy the disastrous end."C"est uneaffaireflambee,"he would mutter. To shcw that his physical cow- ardice was a matter of indifference to him, he made a great display of men- tal arrogance.
Thus pa.s.sed, well or not so well, nine days.On the tenth, the city fell once and forever into the hands of the Black and Tans. High-sitting, silent hors.e.m.e.n patrolled their beats; there was ash and smoke in the wind. I saw a dead body sprawled on one corner-yet that dead body is less vivid in my memory than the dummy that the soldiers endlessly practised their marksmanship on in the middle of the city square.... I had gone out when dawn was just streaking the sky; before noon, I was back. Moon was in the library, talking to someone; I realized from the tone of his voice that he was speaking on the telephone. Then I heard my name; then, that I"d be back at seven, and then, that I"d be arrested as I came across the lawn. My rational friend was rationally selling me out. I heard him demand certain guarantees of his own safety.
Here my story becomes confused and peters out a bit. I know that I chased the snitch through black corridors of nightmare and steep stairwells of vertigo. Moon knew the house well, every bit as well as I.
Once or twice I lost him, but I managed to corner him before the soldiers arrested me. From one of the general"s suits of armor, I seized a scimitar, and with that steel crescent left a flourish on his face forever -a half-moon of blood. To you alone,Borges-you who are a stranger-I have made this confession.
Your contempt is perhaps not so painful.
Here the narrator halted. I saw that his hands were trembling.
"And Moon?" I asked. "What became of Moon?"
"He was paid his Judas silver and he ran off to Brazil. That evening, in the city square, I saw a dummy shot by a firing squad of drunks."
I waited vainly for the rest of the story. Finally, I asked him to go on.
A groan made his entire body shiver; he gestured, feebly, gently, toward the curving whitish scar.
"Do you not believe me?" he stammered. "Do you not see set upon my face the mark of my iniquity? I have told you the story this way so that you would hear it out. It was / who betrayed the man who saved me and gave me shelter-it is /who am Vincent Moon. Now, despise me."
1942.
The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero
Sothe Platonic Year Whirls out new right and wrong Whirls in the old instead; All men are dancers and their tread Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.
W. B.Yeats,The Tower
Under the notorious influence of Chesterton (inventor and embellisher of elegant mysteries) and the court counselor Leibniz (who invented preestab-lished harmony), in my spare evenings I have conceived this plot-which I will perhaps commit to paper but which already somehow justifies me. It needs details, rectifications, tinkering-there are areas of the story that have never been revealed to me. Today, January 3,1944,1 see it in the follow- ing way: The action takes place in an oppressed yet stubborn country-Poland, Ireland, the republic of Venice, some South American or Balkan state.... Ortook place rather, for though the narrator is contemporary, the story told by him occurred in the mid or early nineteenth century-in 1824, let us say, for convenience"s sake; in Ireland, let us also say. The narrator is a man named Ryan, the great-grandson of the young, heroic, beautiful, murdered Fergus Kilpatrick, whose grave was mysteriously violated, whose name gives l.u.s.ter to Browning"s and Hugo"s verses, and whose statue stands high upon a gray hilltop among red bogs.Kilpatrick was a conspirator and a secret and glorious captain of con- spirators. Like Moses, who from the land of Moab glimpsed yet could not reach the promised land, Kilpatrick perished on the eve of the victorious re- bellion he had planned for and dreamed of. The date of the first centenary of his death is approaching; the circ.u.mstances of the crime are enigmatic; Ryan, who is writing a biography of the hero, discovers that the enigma goesdeeper than mere detective work can fathom. Kilpatrick was murdered in a theater; the English police never apprehended the a.s.sa.s.sin. Historians claim that this failure does not tarnish the good name of the police, since it is pos- sible that the police themselves had Kilpatrick murdered. Other aspects of the mystery disturb Ryan; certain things seem almost cyclical, seem to repeat or combine events from distant places, distant ages. For example: Everyone knows that the constables who examined the hero"s body found a sealed let- ter warning Kilpatrick not to go to the theater that night; Julius Caesar, too, as he was walking toward the place where the knives of his friends awaited him, received a note he never read-a note telling him of his betrayal and revealing the names of his betrayers. Caesar"s wife, Calpurnia, saw in dreams a tower felled by order of the Senate; on the eve of Kilpatrick"s death, false and anonymous rumors of the burning of the circular tower of Kilgarvan spread throughout the country-an event that might be taken as an omen, since Kilpatrick had been born in Kilgarvan. These (and other) parallels between the story of Julius Caesar and the story of an Irish con- spirator induce Ryan to imagine some secret shape of time, a pattern of re- peating lines. His thoughts turn to the decimal history conceived by Condorcet, the morphologies proposed by Hegel,Spengler,andVico,mankind as posited by Hesiod, degenerating from gold to iron. He thinks of the transmigration of souls, a doctrine that lends horror to Celtic literature and that Caesar himself attributed to the Druids of Britain; he toys with the idea that before Fergus Kilpatrick was Fergus Kilpatrick, he was Julius Cae- sar. He is saved from those circular labyrinths by a curious discovery, a dis- covery which, however, will plunge him deep into other, yet more tangled and heterogeneous mazes: It seems that certain words spoken by a beggar who spoke with Fergus Kilpatrick on the day of his death had been pre- figured by Shakespeare, inMacbeth. The idea that history might have copied history is mind-boggling enough; that history should copyliteratureis inconceivable-----Ryan digs further, and he finds that in 1814 JamesAlexander Nolan, the oldest of the hero"s comrades, had translated Shake- speare"s major plays into Gaelic-among themJulius Caesar. He also finds in the archives a ma.n.u.script article by Nolan on the SwissFestspiele-vast peripatetic theatrical performances that require thousands of actors and retell historical episodes in the same cities, the same mountains in which they occurred. Another unpublished doc.u.ment reveals to Ryan that a few days before the end, Kilpatrick, presiding over the last gathering of his chiefs, had signed the death sentence of a traitor, whose name has been scratched out.
This sentence does not jibe with Kilpatrick"s customarymercifulness. Ryan investigates the matter (his investigation being one of the gaps in the book"s narration) and manages to decipher the enigma.
Kilpatrick was murdered in a theater, yet the entire city played the role of theater, too, and the actors were legion, and the play that was crowned by Kilpatrick"s death took place over many days and many nights. Here is what happened: On August 2, 1824, the conspirators met. The country was ripe for re- bellion; something, however, always went awry-there must have been a traitor within the inner circle. Fergus Kilpatrick had given James Nolan the job of ferreting out the ident.i.ty of this traitor, and Nolan had carried out his mission. He announced to the gathered comrades that the traitor was Kilpatrick himself. He proved the truth of his accusation beyond the shadow of a doubt, and the men at the council that night condemned their leader to death. The leader signed his own death sentence, but he pleaded that his punishment not harm the cause.
And so it was that Nolan conceived a strange plan. Ireland idolized Kil- patrick; the slightest suspicion of his baseness would have compromised the rebellion; Nolan proposed a way to turn the traitor"s execution into an in- strument for the emanc.i.p.ation of the country. He proposed that the con- demned man die at the hands of an unknown a.s.sa.s.sin in deliberately dramatic circ.u.mstances; those circ.u.mstances would engrave themselves upon the popular imagination and hasten the rebellion. Kilpatrick swore to collaborate in this plan which would give him an occasion to redeem him- self, and which would be crowned by his death.Nolan had no time to invent the circ.u.mstances of the multiple execu- tion from scratch, and so he plagiarized the scene from another playwright, the English enemy Will Shakespeare, reprising scenes from Macbeth andJulius Caesar. The public yet secret performance occurred over several days. The condemned man entered Dublin, argued, worked, prayed, repre- hended, spoke words of pathos-and each of those acts destined to shine forth in glory had been ch.o.r.eographed by Nolan. Hundreds of actors col- laborated with the protagonist; the role of some was complex, the role of others a matter of moments on the stage. The things they did and said en- dure in Ireland"s history books and in its impa.s.sioned memory. Kilpatrick, moved almost to ecstasy by the scrupulously plotted fate that would redeem him and end his days, more than once enriched his judge"s text with impro- vised words and acts.
Thus the teeming drama played itself out in time, un- til that August 6,1824, in a box (prefiguring Lincoln"s) draped with funereal curtains, when a yearned-for bullet pierced the traitor-hero"s breast. Betweentwo spurts of sudden blood, Kilpatrick could hardly p.r.o.nounce the few words given him to speak.
In Nolan"s play, the pa.s.sages taken from Shakespeare are theleast dra- matic ones; Ryan suspected that the author interpolated them so that some- one, in the future, would be able to stumble upon the truth.
Ryan realized that he, too, was part of Nolan"s plot.... After long and stubborn delibera- tion, he decided to silence the discovery. He published a book dedicated to the hero"s glory; that too, perhaps, had been foreseen.
Death and the Compa.s.s
For Manaie Molina Vedia
Of the many problems on which Lonnrot"s reckless perspicacity was exer- cised, none was so strange-so rigorously strange, one might say-as the periodic series of b.l.o.o.d.y deeds that culminated at the Villa Triste-le-Roy, amid the perpetual fragrance of the eucalyptus. It is true that ErikLonnrotdid not succeed in preventing the last crime, but he did, indisputably, fore- see it. Nor did he divine the ident.i.ty of Yarmolinsky"s unlucky murderer, but he did perceive the evil series" secret shape and the part played in it by RedScharlach,whose second sobriquet isScharlachthe Dandy. That crimi- nal (like so many others) had sworn upon his honor to killLonnrot,butLonnrotnever allowed himself to be intimidated. He thought of himself as a reasoning machine, anAuguste Dupin,but there was something of the ad- venturer in him, even something of the gambler.
The first crime occurred in theHotel duNord,that tall prism sitting high above the estuary whose waters are the color of the desert. To that tower (which is notorious for uniting in itself the abhorrent whiteness of a sanatorium, the numbered divisibility of a prison, and the general appear- ance of a house of ill repute) there came, on December 3, the delegate from Podolsk to the Third Talmudic Congress-Dr.Marcelo Yarmolinsky, aman of gray beard and gray eyes. We will never know whether he found theHo- tel duNordto his liking; he accepted it with the ancient resignation that had allowed him to bear three years of war in the Carpathians and three thousand years of pogroms and oppression. He was given a room onRFloor, across the hall from the suite occupied-not without some splendor-by the Tetrarch of Galilee. Yarmolinsky had dinner, put off till the next day his examination of the unfamiliar city, set out his many books and very few articles of jewelry on a bureau, and, before midnight, turnedoff the light. (Thus testified the tetrarch"s driver, who was sleeping in the ad- joining room.) On the fourth, at 11:30a.m., a writer for theYiddischeZeitungtelephoned Yarmolinsky, but Dr. Yarmolinsky did not answer. He was found lying on the floor of his room, his face by now slightly discol- ored, his body almost naked beneath an anachronistic cape. He was lying not far from the door to the hallway; a deep knife wound had rent his chest. A couple of hours later, in the same room, standing amid journalists, pho- tographers, and gendarmes, police commissioner Trevira.n.u.s andLonnrotserenely discussed the problem.
"No need to go off on wild-goose chases here," Trevira.n.u.s was saying, as he brandished an imperious cigar. "We all know that the Tetrarch of Galilee owns the finest sapphires in the world. Somebody intending to steal the sapphires broke in here by mistake. Yarmolinsky woke up, the burglar had to killhim. -What do you think?"
"Possible, but uninteresting,"Lonnrotreplied. "You will reply that reality has not the slightest obligation to be interesting. I will reply in turn that reality may get along without that obligation, but hypotheses may not. In the hypothesis that you suggest, here, on the spur of the moment, chance plays a disproportionate role. What we have here is a dead rabbi; I would prefer a purely rabbinical explanation, not the imaginary bunglings of an imaginary burglar."
Trevira.n.u.s" humor darkened.
"I"m not interested in "rabbinical explanations," as you call them; what I"m interested in is catching the blackguard that stabbed this unknown man."
"Unknown?" askedLonnrot."Here are his complete works." He ges- tured to the bureau with its rowoftallbooks:A Vindication of the Kabbalah; A Study of the Philosophy of Robert Fludd; a literal translation of theSefer Yetsirah; aBiography of the Baal Shem; A History of the Hasidim; a mono- graph in German on the Tetragrammaton; another on the divine nomen- clature of the Pentateuch. The commissioner looked at them with fear, almost with revulsion. Then he laughed.
"I"m a poor Christian fellow," he replied. "You can take those things home with you, if you want them; I can"t be wasting my time on Jewish superst.i.tions."
"This crime may, however,belong to the history of Jewish supersti- tions,"Lonnrotmuttered.
"As Christianity does," the writer from theYiddischeZeitungadded, scathingly. He was nearsighted, quite shy, and an atheist.
No one answered him. In the little typewriter, one of the agents had found a slip of paper, with this unfinished declaration:
The first letter of the Name has been written.
Lonnrotresisted a smile. Suddenly turned bibliophile or Hebraist, he ordered one of the officers to wrap up the dead man"s books, and he took them to his apartment. Then, indifferent to the police investigation, he set about studying them. One book, an octavo volume, revealed to him the teachings of Israel Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the sect of the Pious; an- other, the virtues and terrors of the Tetragrammaton, the ineffable name of G.o.d; yet another, the notion that G.o.d has a secret name, which (much like the crystal sphere attributed by the Persians to Alexander of Macedonia) contains His ninth attribute, the eternity-that is, immediate knowledge- of all things that shall be, are, and have been in the universe. Tradition reck- ons the names of G.o.d at ninety-nine; while Hebraists attribute that imperfect sum to the magical fear of even numbers, the Hasidim argue that the lacuna points toward a hundredth name-the Absolute Name.
From his eruditionLonnrot wasdistracted, a few days later, by the writer from theYiddischeZeitung.The young man wanted to talk about the murder;Lonnrotpreferred to talk about the many names of G.o.d.
The jour- nalist filled three columns with the story that the famed detective ErikLonnrothad taken up the study of the names of G.o.d in order to discover the name of the murderer.Lonnrot,accustomed to journalists" simplifica- tions, did not take offense. One of those shopkeepers who have found that any given man may be persuaded to buy any given book published a popu- lar editionof A History of the Hasidim.
The second crime took place on the night of January 3, in the emptiest and most G.o.dforsaken of the echoing suburbs on the western outskirts of the capital. Sometime around dawn, one of the mounted gendarmes that patrolled the solitudes of those blocks saw a man, wrapped in a poncho, ly- ing in the doorway of an old paint factory. His hard face looked as though it were wearing a mask of blood; a deep knife wound split his chest. On the wall, across the red and yellow rhombuses, someone had chalked some words, which the gendarme spelled out to himself.... That afternoon, Tre-vira.n.u.s andLonnrotmade their way to the distant scene of the crime. To the left and right of their automobile, the city crumbled away; the sky ex- panded, and now houses held less and less importance, a brick kiln or a poplar tree more and more. They came to their miserable destination; afinal alleyway lined with pink-colored walls that somehow seemed to reflect the rambunctious setting of the sun. By this time, thedead man had been identified. He was DanielSimonAzevedo,a man of some reputation in the old slums of the Northside, where he had risen from wagon driver to election-day thug, only to degenerate thereafter into a thief and even an in- former. (The singular manner of his death seemed fitting:Azevedowas the last representative of a generation of outlaws who used a knife but not a re- volver.) The chalked words read as follows:
The second letter of the Name has been written.
The third crime took place on the night of February 3. A few minutes before one, the telephone rang in Commissioner Trevira.n.u.s" office. Keenly secretive, the guttural voice of a man came on the line; he told the commis- sioner his name was Ginzberg (orGinsburg)and said that for a reasonable fee he was willing to reveal certain details of the two sacrifices, Azevedo"s and Yarmolinsky"s. A cacophony of whistles and party horns drowned out the informer"s voice. Then, the line went dead. Without discarding the pos - sibility of a prank (it was carnival time, after all), Trevira.n.u.s made inquiries and found that the call had come from Liverpool House, a tavern on the ruedeToulon-that brackish street shared by a popular museum of wonders and a milk store, a brothel and a company of Bible sellers. Trevira.n.u.s tele- phoned the owner of the place-BlackFinnegan,former Irish criminal now overwhelmed, almost crushed, by honesty.Finnegantold Trevira.n.u.s that the last person to use the telephone in the tavern had been a tenant, one Gryphius, who"d just gone out with some friends. Trevira.n.u.s drove imme- diately to Liverpool House.