"Their faces had been smashed in, as well."
To the sound of their footsteps was added the sound of rain. It occurred to Unwin that they would have to sleep in the labyrinth, in the central chamber of the tale, and that in retrospect he would surely see that long dis- comfort as adventure. He remained silent. Dunraven could not contain himself; like a man who will not forgive a debt, he asked: "Quite an inexplicable story, don"t you think?"
Unwin answered as though thinking out loud: "I don"t know whether it"s explicable or inexplicable. I know it"s a b.l.o.o.d.y lie."
Dunraven burst forth in a torrent of curses and invoked the eyewit- ness of the rector"s elder son-Allaby, apparently, having died-and of every inhabitant of Pentreath. No less taken aback than Dunraven must have been, Unwin begged his pardon. Time, in the dark, seemed slower, longer; both men feared they had lost their way, and they were very tired by the time a dim brightness coming from above showedthem the first steps of a narrow staircase. They climbed the stairs and found themselves in a round apartment, a good bit run-down and gone to seed. Two signs of the ill-fated king remained: a narrow window that looked out over the moors and the sea, and, in the floor, the trap door that opened onto the curve of the staircase. The apartment, though s.p.a.cious, was very much like a jail cell.
Driven to it less by the rain than by the desire to live for the memory and the anecdote, the friends did spend the night within the labyrinth. The mathematician slept soundly; not so the poet, who was haunted by lines of poetry that his rational mind knew to be dreadful: Faceless the sultry and overpowering lion, Faceless the stricken slave, faceless the king.
Unwin had thought that the story of Al-Bokhari"s murder held no in- terest for him, yet he awoke convinced that he had solved it. All that day he was preoccupied and taciturn, fitting and refitting the pieces, and two nights later, he rang up Dunraven and asked him to meet him at a pub in London, where he spoke to him these words, or words very much like them: "Back in Cornwall, I said the story that you"d told me was a lie. What I meant was this: thefacts were true, or might be true, but told in the way you told them, they were clearly humbug. Let me begin with the biggest lie of all, the incredible labyrinth. A fleeing man doesn"t hide out in a labyrinth. He doesn"t throw up a labyrinth on the highest point on the coast, and he doesn"t throw up a crimson-colored labyrinth that sailors see from miles offsh.o.r.e. There"s no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one. For the man who truly wants to hide himself, London is a much better labyrinth than a rooftop room to which every blessed hallway in a building leads. That piece of wisdom, which I submit to you this evening, came to me night before last, while we were listening to the rain on the roof of the labyrinth and waiting to be visited by Morpheus. Warned and corrected by it, I chose to ignore those absurd "facts" of yours and think about something sensible."
"Set theory, for instance, or the fourth dimension of s.p.a.ce," Dunraven remarked.
"No," said Unwin with gravity. "I thought about the Cretan labyrinth. The labyrinth at whose center was a man with the head of a bull."
Dunraven, who had read a great many detective novels, thought that the solution of a mystery was always a good deal less interesting than the mystery itself; the mystery had a touch of the supernatural and even the di- vine about it, while the solution was a sleight of hand. In order to postpone the inevitable, he said: "A bull"s head is how the Minotaur appears on medals and in sculpture. Dante imagined it the other way around, with the body of a bull and the head of a man."
"That version works just as well," Unwin agreed. "What"s important is the correspondence between the monstrous house and the monstrous crea- ture that lives inside it. The Minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth-but no one can say the same for a threat dreamed in a dream. Once one seizes upon the image of the Minotaur (an image that"s unavoidable when there"s a labyrinth in the case) the problem is all but solved. I do have to confess, however, that I didn"t see that that ancient im- age was the key to it, which is why it was necessary for your story to furnish me with a better, a more exact, symbol-thespiderweb."
"Thespiderweb?" Dunravenrepeated, perplexed.
"Yes. I shouldn"t be surprised that thespiderweb(the universal form of thespiderweb,I mean-the Platonicspiderweb)suggested the crime to the murderer (because thereis a murderer). You"ll recall that Al-Bokhari, in a tomb, dreamt of a nest of vipers and awoke to discover thata spiderwebhad suggested the dream to him. Let"s return to that night on which Al-Bokhari dreamt of the tangled nest. The overthrown king and the vizier and the slave are fleeing through the desert with a treasure. They take refuge in a tomb. The vizier-whom we know to be a coward-sleeps; the king- whom we know to be a brave man-does not. So as not to have to share the treasure with his vizier, the king stabs him to death; nights later, the mur- dered man"s ghost threatens the king in a dream. None of this is to be be- lieved; in my view, the events occurred exactly the other way around. That night, I believe, it was the king, the brave man, that slept, andSa"id,the cow- ard, that lay awake. To sleep is to put the universe for a little while out of your mind, and that sort of unconcern is not easy for a man who knows that unsheathed swords are after him.Sa"id, agreedy man, watched over the sleep of his king. He thought of killing him,perhaps even toyed with the knife, but he didn"t have the courage for it. He called the slave. They hid part of the treasure in the tomb, then fled to Suakin and on to England. Not to hide from Al-Bokhari, you understand, but in fact to lure him to them and kill him-that was what led the vizier to build the high labyrinth of bright crimson walls in full view of the sea. He knew that ships would carry the fame of the slave, the lion, and the scarlet man back to the ports of Nu- bia, and that sooner or later Al-Bokhari would come to beard him in his labyrinth. The trap was laid in the web"s last corridor. Al-Bokhari had infi - nite contempt forSa"id;he would never stoop to take the slightest precau- tion. The long-awaited day at last arrives; Ibn-Hakam disembarks in England, walks up to the door of the labyrinth, pa.s.ses through the blind corridors, and has perhaps set his foot upon the first steps of the staircase when his vizier kills him -perhaps with a bullet, I don"t know-from the trap door above. Then the slave no doubt killed the lion, and another bullet no doubt killed the slave. ThenSa"idsmashed in the three faces with a large rock.
He had to do that; a single dead man with his face smashed in would have suggested a problem of ident.i.ty, but the lion, the black man, and the king were elements in a series whose first terms would lead inevitably to the last. There"s nothing strange about the fact that the man that visited Allaby was seized with terror; he had just committed the dreadful deed and was about to flee England and recover his treasure."
A thoughtful, or incredulous, silence followed Unwin"s words. Dun-raven called for another mug of ale-before he offered his opinion.
"I accept," he said, "that my Ibn-Hakam might beSa"id.Such metamor- phoses, you will tell me, are cla.s.sic artifices of the genre-conventions that the reader insists be followed. What I hesitate to accept is the hypothesis that part of the treasure was left behind in the Sudan. Remember thatSa"idwas fleeing the king and the enemies of the king, as well; it"s easier, it seems to me, to imagine him stealing the entire treasure than taking the time to bury part of it. Perhaps no odd coins were found lying about because there were no coins left; perhaps the brickmasons had consumed a treasure which, unlike the gold of theNibelungen, wasnot infinite. Thus we would have Ibn-Hakam crossing the sea to reclaim a squandered treasure."
"Notsquandered," said Unwin. "Invested. Invested in erecting upon the soil of infidels a great circular trap of brickwork intended to entangle and annihilate the king.Sa"id"sactions, if your supposition is correct, were mo- tivated not by greed but by hatred and fear. He stole the treasure and then realized that the treasure was not for him the essential thing. The essential thing was that Ibn-Hakam die. He pretended to be Ibn-Hakam, killed Ibn-Hakam, and at lastwas Ibn-Hakam."
"Yes," agreed Dunraven. "He was a wanderer who, before becoming no one in death, would recall once having been a king, or having pretended to be a king."
The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths1 "This is the story read by the rector from his pulpit. See p. 257
It is said by men worthy of belief (though Allah"s knowledge is greater) that in the first days there was a king of the isles of Babylonia who called to- gether his architects and his priests and bade them build him a labyrinth so confused and so subtle that the most prudent men would not venture to enter it, and those who did would lose their way. Most unseemly was the edifice that resulted, for it is the prerogative of G.o.d, not man, to strike con- fusion and inspire wonder. In time there came to the court a king of the Arabs, and the king of Babylonia (to mock the simplicity of his guest) bade him enter the labyrinth, where the king of the Arabs wandered, humiliated and confused, until the coming of the evening, when he implored G.o.d"s aid and found the door. His lips offered no complaint, though he said to the king of Babylonia that in his land he had another labyrinth, and Allah will- ing, he would see that someday the king of Babylonia made its acquain- tance. Then he returned to Arabia with his captains and his wardens and he wreaked such havoc upon the kingdoms of Babylonia, and with such great blessing by fortune, that he brought low its castles, crushed its people, and took the king of Babylonia himself captive. He tiedhim atop a swift-footed camel and led him into the desert. Three days they rode, and then he said to him, "O king of time and substance and cipher of the century! In Babylonia didst thou attempt to make me lose my way in a labyrinth of bra.s.s with many stairways, doors, and walls; now the Powerful One has seen fit to al- low me to show thee mine, which has no stairways to climb, nor doors to force, nor wearying galleries to wander through, nor walls to impede thy pa.s.sage."
Then he untied the bonds of the king of Babylonia and abandoned him in the middle of the desert, where he died of hunger and thirst. Glory to Him who does not die.
The Wait
The coach left him at number 4004 on that street in the northwest part of the city. It was not yet 9:00a.m.; the man noted with approval the mottled plane trees, the square of dirt at the foot of each, the decent houses with their little balconies, the pharmacy next door, the faded diamonds of the paint store and the hardware store. A long windowless hospital wall ab.u.t.ted the sidewalk across the street; farther down, the sun reflected off some greenhouses. It occurred to the man that those things (now arbitrary, coin- cidental, and in no particular order, like things seen in dreams) would in time, G.o.d willing, become unchanging, necessary, and familiar. In the phar- macy window, porcelain letters spelled out "Breslauer": the Jews were crowding out the Italians, who had crowded out the native-born. All the better: the man preferred not to mix with people of his own blood.
The coachman helped him lift down his trunk; a distracted- or weary-looking woman finally opened the door. From the driver"s seat, the coach- man handed the man back one of the coins, a Uruguayan two-centavo piece that had been in the man"s pocket since that night in the hotel inMelo.The man gave him fortycentavos,and instantly regretted it: "I must act so that everyone will forget me. I"ve made two mistakes: I"ve paid with a coin from another country and I"ve let this man see that the mistake matters."
Preceded by the woman, the man walked through the long entryway and on through the first patio; the room he"d reserved was, as good luck would have it, off the second patio, in the rear. There was a bed of ironwork that art had distorted into fantastic curves suggesting vines and branches; there were also a tall pine chifforobe, a night table, a bookcase with books on the bottommost shelf, two mismatched chairs, and a washstand with its bowl, pitcher, and soap dish and a carafe of cloudy gla.s.s. A crucifix and amap of Buenos Aires province adorned the walls; the wallpaper was crim- son, with a pattern of large peac.o.c.ks, tails outspread. The room"s only door opened onto the patio. The chairs had to be rearranged to make room for the trunk. The tenant gave his nod to everything; when the woman asked him what his name was, he said Villari-not as a secret act of defiance, not to mitigate a humiliation that quite honestly he didn"t feel, but rather be- cause that name haunted him, he couldn"t come up with another one. Cer- tainly he was not seduced by the literary error of imagining that adopting the name of his enemy would be the astute thing to do.
At first Sr. Villari never left the house, but after a few weeks had pa.s.sed he started going out for a while at nightfall. In the evening he would occa- sionally go into the motion-picture theater three blocks away.
He never sat nearer the screen than the last row; he always got up a little before the pic- ture was over.
He saw tragic stories of the underworld; no doubt they had their errors; no doubt they included certain images that were also a part of Sr. Villari"s previous life, but he didn"t notice the errors, because the notion that there might be parallels between art and life never occurred to him. He docilely tried to like things; he tried to take things in the spirit they were of- fered. Unlike people who had read novels, he never saw himself as a charac- ter in a book.
He never received a letter, or even a circular, but with vague hopefulness he read one of the sections of the newspaper. In the afternoon, he would draw one of the chairs over to the door and sit and sip gravely at hismate, his eyes fixed on the ivy that climbed the wall of the two-story house next door.
Years of solitude had taught him that although in one"s memory days all tend to be the same, there wasn"t a day, even when a man was in jail or hospital, that didn"t have its surprises. During other periods ofisolation he had given in to the temptation to count the days (and even the hours), but this isolation was different, because there was no end to it-unless the newspaper should bring him news one morning of the death of Alejandro Villari. It was also possible that Villariwas already dead, and then his life was a dream. That possibility disturbed him, because he couldn"t quite fig- ure out whether it felt like a relief or a misfortune; he told himself it was ab- surd, and he discarded it. In now-distant days-distant less because of the lapse of time than because of two or three irrevocable acts-he had desired many things, with a desire that lacked all scruples; that powerful urge to possess, which had inspired the hatred of men and the love of the occa- sional woman, no longer desiredthings -it wanted only to endure, wanted not to end. The taste of themate, the taste of the black tobacco, the growing band of shade that slowly crept across the patio-these were reason enough to live.
There was a wolf-dog in the house, now grown quite old; Villari made friends with it. He spoke to it in Spanish, in Italian, and with the few words he still remembered of the rustic dialect of his childhood.
Villari tried to live in the mere present, looking neither backward nor ahead; memories mattered less to him than his visions of the future. In some obscure way he thought he could sense that the past is the stuff that time is made of; that was why time became past so quickly. One day his weariness felt for a mo- ment like happiness, at moments such as that, he was not a great deal more complex than the dog.
One night he was left shocked, speechless, and trembling by a burst of pain deep in his mouth, striking almost at the heart of him. Within a few minutes, that horrible miracle returned, and then again toward dawn. The next day Villari sent for a cab, which left him at a dentist"s office in the neighborhood of Plaza del Once.* There, his tooth was pulled. At the "mo- ment of truth," he was neither more cowardly nor more composed than anyone else.
Another night, as he came back from the motion-picture theater, he felt someone shove him. Furious, indignant, and with secret relief, he turned on the insolent culprit; he spit out a filthy insult. The other man, dumb- founded, stammered an apology. He was a tall young man with dark hair; on his arm was a German-looking woman. That night Villari told himself many times that he didn"t know them; still, four or five days went by before he went out again.
Among the books in the bookcase was aDivine Comedy, with the old commentary by Andreoli.
Impelled less by curiosity than by a sense of duty, Villari undertook to read that masterpiece. He would read a canto before dinner, and then, strictly and methodically, the notes. He did not think of the infernal torments as improbable or excessive, nor did it occur to him that Dante would have condemned him, Villari, to the farthest circle of h.e.l.l, where Ugolino"s teeth gnaw endlessly at Ruggieri"s throat.
The peac.o.c.ks on the crimson wallpaper seemed the perfect thing for feeding persistent nightmares, but Sr. Villari never dreamed of a monstrous gazebo of living birds all intertangled. In the early-morning hours he would dream a dream of unvarying backdrop but varying details. Villari and two other men would come into a room with revolvers drawn, or he would be jumped by them as he came out of the motion-picture theater, or they-all three of them at once-would be the stranger that had shoved him, or theywould wait for him sad-faced out in the courtyard and pretend not to know him. At the end of the dream, he would take the revolver out of the drawer in the nightstand that stood beside the bed (and therewas a gun in that drawer) and fire it at the men. The noise of the gun would wake him, but it was always a dream-and in another dream the attack would occur again and in another dream he would have to kill them again.
One murky morning in July, the presence of strange people (not the sound of the door when they opened it) woke him. Tall in the shadowy dimness of the room, oddly simplified by the dimness (in the frightening dreams, they had always been brighter), motionless, patient, and watching, their eyes lowered as though the weight of their weapons made them stoop-shouldered, Alejandro Villari and a stranger had at last caught up with him. He gestured at them to wait, and he turned over and faced the wall, as though going back to sleep. Did he do that to awaken the pity of the men that killed him, or because it"s easier to endure a terrifying event than to imagine it, wait for it endlessly-or (and this is perhaps the most likely pos- sibility) so that his murderers would become a dream, as they had already been so many times, in that same place, at that same hour?
That was the magic spell he was casting when he was rubbed out by the revolvers" fire.
The Man on the Threshold
BioyCasaresbrought back a curious knife from London, with a triangular blade and an H-shaped hilt; our friend ChristopherDewey,of the British Council, said that sort of weapon was in common use in Hindustan. That verdict inspired him also to mention that he had once worked in Hindu- stan, between the two wars. (Ultraauroremet Gangem,I recall him saying in Latin, misquoting a verse from Juvenal.) Among the stories he told us that night, I shall be so bold as to reconstruct the one that follows. My text will be a faithful one; may Allah prevent me from adding small circ.u.mstan- tial details or heightening the exotic lineaments of the tale with interpola- tions from Kipling. Besides, it has an antique, simple flavor about it that it would be a shame to lose-something of the1001 Nights.
The precise geography of the facts I am going to relate hardly matters. And besides-what sort of exactness can the names Amritsar and Udh be ex- pected to convey in Buenos Aires? I shall only say, then, that back in those years there were riots in a certain Muslim city, and that the central govern- ment sent a strong fellow in to impose order. The man was a Scot, descended from an ill.u.s.trious clan of warriors, and in his blood there flowed a history of violence. My eyes beheld him but one time, but I shall never forget the jet black hair, the prominent cheekbones, the avid nose and mouth, the broad shoulders, the strong Viking bones. David Alexander Glencairn shall be his name tonight in my story.
The two Christian names befit the man, for they are the names of kings who ruled with an iron scepter.
David Alexander Glencairn (I shall have to get used to calling him that) was, I suspect, a man who was greatly feared; the mere announcement of his coming was suffi- cient to cast peace over the city. That, however, did not keep him fromputting into effect a number of forceful measures. Several years pa.s.sed; the city and the district were at peace; Sikhs and Muslims had put aside their ancient discords. And then suddenly Glencairn disappeared. Naturally, there were any number of rumors of his having been kidnapped or killed.
These things I learned from my superior, because there was strict cen- sorship and the newspapers didn"t discuss Glencairn"s disappearance- did not so much as mention it, so far as I can recall. There is a saying, you know-that India is larger than the world; Glencairn, who may have been all-powerful in the city to which he was fated by a signature at the end of some doc.u.ment, was a mere cipher in the coils and springs and workings of the Empire. The searches performed by the local police turned up nothing; my superior thought that a single individual, working on his own, might in- spire less resentment and achieve better results. Three or four days later (distances in India are what one might call generous), I was working with no great hope through the streets of the opaque city that had magically swallowed up a man.
I felt, almost immediately, the infinite presence of a spell cast to hide Glencairn"s whereabouts.There is not a soul in this city (I came to suspect)that doesn"t know the secret, and that hasn"t sworn to keep it. Most people, when I interrogated them, pleaded unbounded ignorance; they didn"t know who Glencairn was, had never seen the man, never heard of him. Others, contrariwise, had seen him not a quarter of an hour ago talking to Such-and-such, and they would even show me the house the two men had gone into, where of course n.o.body knew a thing about them-or where I"d just missed them, they"d left just a minute earlier. More than once I balled my fist and hit one of those tellers of precisely detailed lies smack in the face. Bystanders would applaud the way I got my frustrations off my chest, and then make up more lies. I didn"t believe them, but I didn"t dare ignore then. One evening somebody left me an envelope containing a slip of paper on which were written some directions....
By the time I arrived, the sun had pretty well gone down. The neighbor- hood was one of common folk, the humble of the earth; the house was squat. From the walkway in the street I could make out a series of court- yards of packed earth and then, toward the rear, a brightness. Back in the last courtyard, some sort of Muslim celebration was going on; a blind man entered with a lute made of reddish-colored wood.
At my feet, on the threshold of this house, as motionless as an inani- matething, a very old man lay curledup on the ground. I shall describe him, because he is an essential part of the story. His many years had reducedand polished him the way water smooths and polishes a stone or genera- tions of men polish a proverb. He was covered in long tatters, or so it looked to me, and the turban that wound about his head looked frankly like one rag the more. In the fading evening light, he lifted his dark face and very white beard to me. I spoke to him without preamble-because I had already lost all hope, you see- about David Alexander Glencairn. He didn"t under- stand me (or perhaps he didn"t hear me) and I had to explain that Glen-cairn was a judge and that I was looking for him. When I uttered those words, I felt how absurd it was to question this ancient little man for whom the present was scarcely more than an indefinite rumor.News of the Mutiny or the latest word of Akbar, this man might have (I thought), but not of Glencairn. What he told me confirmed that suspicion.
"A judge!" he said with frail astonishment. "A judge who is lost and be- ing searched for. The event took place when I was a boy. I know nothing of dates, but Nikal Seyn had not died at the wall at Delhi yet"- Nicholson he meant, you see. "The past lives on in memory; surely I shall be able to re- cover what in that time took place. Allah had permitted, in His wrath, that mankind grow corrupted; filled with curses were men"s mouths, and with falsehoods and deception. And yet not all men were perverse, so that when it was proclaimed that the queen was going to send a man to enforce the laws of England in this land, the least evil of men were glad, because they felt that law is better than disorder. The Christian came, but no time did it take him to prevaricate and oppress, to find extenuation for abominable crimes, and to sell his verdicts. At first, we did not blame him; none of us were familiar with the English justice he administered, and for all we knew, this judge"s seeming abuses were inspired by valid, though arcane, reasons.Surely all things have justification in his book, we tried to think, but his simi- larity to the other evil judges of the world was too clear, and at last we had to admit that he was simply an evil man. He soon became a tyrant, and my poor people (in order to avenge themselves for the mistaken hope that once they had reposed in him) came to entertain the idea of kidnapping him and putting him to trial. Talking was not sufficient; from fine words, it was nec- essary that we move onward to acts. No one, perhaps, with the exception of the simplest of mind or the youngest of years, believed that such a terrible purpose would ever be fulfilled, but thousands of Sikhs and Muslims kept their word, and one day, incredulous, theydid what each of them had thought impossible. They kidnapped the judge, and for a prison they put him in a farmhouse in the distant outskirts of the town. Then they con- sulted with the subjects who had been aggrieved by him, or in some caseswith the subjects" orphans and widows, for the executioner"s sword had not rested during those years. At last-and this was perhaps the most difficult thing of all-they sought for and appointed a judge to judge the judge."
Here the man was interrupted by several women who made their way into the house. Then he went on, slowly: "It is said that every generation of mankind includes four honest men who secretly hold up the universe and justify it to the Lord. One of those men would have been the most fitting judge. But where was one to find them, if they wander the earth lost and anonymous and are not recognized when they are met with and not even they themselves know the high mission they perform? Someone, therefore, reflected that if fate had forbidden us wise men, we had to seek out fools. That opinion won the day. Scholars of the Qur"an, doctors of the law, Sikhs who bear the name of lions yet worship G.o.d, Hindus who worship a mult.i.tude of G.o.ds, monks of the master Mahavira who teach that the shape of the universe is that of a man with his legs spread open wide, worshipers of fire, and black-skinned Jews composed the tribunal, but the ultimate verdict was to be decided by a madman."
Here he was interrupted by several people leaving the celebration.
"A madman," he repeated, "so that the wisdom of G.o.d might speak through his mouth and bring shame to human pride and overweening. The name of this man has been lost, or perhaps was never known, but he wan- dered these streets naked, or covered with rags, counting his fingers with his thumb and hurling gibes at the trees."
My good sense rebelled. I said that to leave the decision to a madman was to make a mockery of the trial.
"The accused man accepted the judge," was the reply. "Perhaps he real- ized that given the fate thatawaited the conspirators if they should set him free, it was only from a madman that he might hope for anything but a sen- tence of death. I have heard that he laughed when he was told who the judge was to be. The trial lasted for many days and nights, because of the great number of witnesses."
He fell silent. Some concern was at work in him. To break the silence, I asked how many days it had been.
"At least nineteen days," he replied. More people leaving the celebration interrupted him; Muslims are forbidden wine, but the faces and voices seemed those of drunkards. One of the men shouted something at the old man as he pa.s.sed by.
"Nineteen days exactly," he emended. "The infidel dog heard the sen- tence, and the knife was drawn across his throat."
He spoke with joyous ferocity, but it was with another voice that he ended his story.
"He died without fear. Even in the basest of men there is some virtue."
"Where did this take place that you have told me about?" I asked him. "In a farmhouse?"
For the first time he looked me in the eye. Then slowly, measuring his words, he answered.
"I said a farmhouse was his prison, not that he was tried there. He was tried in this very city, in a house like all other houses, like this one.... One house is like another-what matters is knowing whether it is built in heaven or in h.e.l.l."
I asked him what had happened to the conspirators.
"That, I do not know," he said patiently. "These things happened many years ago and by now they have been long forgotten. Perhaps they were con- demned by men, but not by G.o.d."
Having said this, he got up. I felt that his words dismissed me, that from that moment onward I had ceased to exist for him. A mob of men and women of all the nations of Punjab spilled out over us, praying and singing, and almost swept us away; I was astonished that such narrow courtyards, little more than long entryways, could have contained such numbers of people. Others came out of neighboring houses; no doubt they had jumped over the walls.... Pushing and shouting imprecations, I opened a way for myself. In the farthest courtyard I met a naked man crowned with yellow flowers, whom everyone was kissing and making obeisances to; there was a sword in his hand. The sword was b.l.o.o.d.y, for it had murdered Glencairn, whose mutilated body I found in the stables at the rear.
The Aleph
OG.o.d, I couldbe bounded in a nutsh.e.l.l and count myself a King of infinite s.p.a.ce.
Hamkt,lira
But they will teach us that Eternity is the Standing still of the Present Time, aNunc-stans (as the Schools call it); which nei- ther they, nor any else understand, no more than they would aHic-stans for an Infinite greatnesse of Place.
Leviathan,IV:46
That same sweltering morning thatBeatriz Viterbodied, after an imperious confrontation with her illness in which she had never for an instant stooped to either sentimentality or fear, I noticed that a new advertis.e.m.e.nt for some cigarettes or other(blondes, I believe they were) had been posted on the iron billboards of the PlazaConst.i.tucion;the fact deeply grieved me, for I realized that the vast unceasing universe was already growing away from her, and that this change was but the first in an infinite series.The universe may change, but I shall not, thought I with melancholy vanity. I knew that more than once my futile devotion had exasperated her; now that she was dead, I could consecrate myself to her memory-without hope, but also without humiliation. I reflected that April 30 was her birthday; stopping by her house onCalle Garaythat day to pay my respects to her father and her first cousin CarlosArgentino Daneriwas an irreproachable, perhaps essen- tial act of courtesy. Once again I would wait in the half-light of the little parlor crowded with furniture and draperies and bric-a-brac, once again I would study the details of the many photographs and portraits of her:Bea- trizViterbo, in profile, in color;Beatrizin a mask at the Carnival of 1921;Beatriz"first communion;Beatrizon the day of her wedding to RobertoAlessandri;Beatrizshortly after the divorce, lunching at the Jockey Club;BeatrizinQuilines*with Delia San Marco Porcel and CarlosArgentino; Beatrizwith the Pekinese that had been a gift fromVillegas Haedo; Beatrizin full-front and in three-quarters view, smiling, her hand on her chin.... I would not be obliged, as I had been on occasions before, to justify my pres- encewith modest offerings of books-books whose pages I learned at last to cut, so as not to find, months later, that they were still intact.
Beatriz Viterbodied in 1929; since then, I have not allowed an April 30 to pa.s.s without returning to her house. That first time, I arrived at seven-fifteen and stayed for about twenty-five minutes; each year I would turn up a little later and stay a little longer; in 1933, a downpour came to my aid; they were forced to ask me to dinner. Naturally, I did not let that fine prece- dent go to waste; in 1934 I turned up a few minutes after eight with a lovely confection from Santa Fe; it was perfectly natural that I should stay for din- ner. And so it was that on those melancholy and vainly erotic anniversaries I came to receive the gradual confidences of CarlosArgentino Daneri.
Beatrizwas tall, fragile, very slightly stooped; in her walk, there was (if I may be pardoned the oxymoron) something of a graceful clumsiness, asoupconof hesitancy, or of palsy; CarlosArgentinois a pink, substantial, gray-haired man of refined features. He holds some sort of subordinate po- sition in an illegible library in the outskirts toward the south of the city; he is authoritarian, though also ineffectual; until very recently he took advan- tage of nights and holidays to remain at home. At two generations"
remove, the Italiansand the liberal Italian gesticulation still survive in him. His mental activity is constant, pa.s.sionate, versatile, and utterly insignificant. He is full of pointless a.n.a.logies and idle scruples. He has (asBeatrizdid) large, beautiful, slender hands. For some months he labored under an ob- session for Paul Fort, less for Fort"s ballads than the idea of a glory that could never be tarnished. "He is the prince of the poets ofla belle France" he would fatuously say. "You a.s.sail him in vain; you shall never touch him-not even the most venomous of your darts shall ever touch him."
On April 30, 1941, I took the liberty of enriching my sweet offering with a bottle of domestic brandy.
CarlosArgentinotasted it, p.r.o.nounced it "interesting," and, after a few snifters, launched into anapologia for mod- ern man.
"I picture him," he said with an animation that was rather unaccount- able, "in his study, as though in the watchtower of a great city, surrounded by telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, the latest in radio-telephone and motion-picture and magic-lantern equipment, and glossaries and calendars and timetables and bulletins...."
He observed that for a man so equipped, the act of traveling was super- erogatory; this twentieth century of ours had upended the fable of Muham- mad and the mountain-mountains nowadays did in fact come to the modern Muhammad.
So witless did these ideas strike me as being, so sweeping and pompous the way they were expressed, that I a.s.sociated them immediately with litera- ture. Why, I asked him, didn"t he write these ideas down?
Predictably, he replied that he already had; they, and others no less novel, figured large in the Augural Canto, Prologurial Canto, or simply Prologue-Canto, of a poem on which he had been working, with no deafening hurly-burly andsans reclame, for many years, leaning always on those twin staffs Work and Solitude. First he would open the floodgates of the imagination, then repair to the polishing wheel. The poem was ent.i.tledThe Earth; it centered on a description of our own terraqueous...o...b..and was graced, of course, with picturesque digression and elegant apostrophe.
I begged him to read me a pa.s.sage, even if only a brief one. He opened a desk drawer, took out a tall stack of tablet paper stamped with the letter- head of the JuanCrisostomoLafinur Library,* and read, with ringing self-satisfaction: I have seen, as did the Greek, man"s cities and his fame, The works, the days of various light, the hunger; I prettify no fact, I falsify no name, For thevoyage I narrate is ...autour de ma chambre.
"Astanza interesting from every point of view," he said. "The first line wins the kudos of the learned, the academician, the h.e.l.lenist-though per- haps not that of those would-be scholars that make up such a substantial portion of popular opinion. The second moves from Homer to Hesiod (im- plicit homage, at the very threshold of the dazzling new edifice, to the father of didactic poetry), not without revitalizing a technique whose lineage may be traced to Scripture-that is, enumeration, congeries, or conglobation.
The third-baroque? decadent? the purified and fanatical cult of form?- consists of twinned hemistichs; the fourth, unabashedly bilingual, a.s.sures me the unconditional support of every spirit able to feel the ample attrac- tions of playfulness. I shall say nothing of the unusual rhyme, nor of the erudition that allowsme-without pedantry or boorishness!-to include within the s.p.a.ce of four lines three erudite allusions spanning thirty centuries of dense literature: first theOdyssey, second theWorks and Days, and third that immortal bagatelle that regales us with the diversions of the Savo- yard"s plume-----Once again, I show my awareness that trulymodern art demands the balm of laughter, ofscherzo. There is no doubt about it- Goldoni was right!"
CarlosArgentinoread me many another stanza, all of which earned the same profuse praise and comment from him. There was nothing memora- ble about them; I could not even judge them to be much worse than the first one. Application, resignation, and chance had conspired in their com- position; the virtues that Daneri attributed to them were afterthoughts. I realized that the poet"s work had lain not in the poetry but in the invention of reasons for accounting the poetry admirable; naturally, that later work modified the poem for Daneri, but not for anyone else. His oral expression was extravagant; his metrical clumsiness prevented him, except on a very few occasions, from transmitting that extravagance to the poem.
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