Afterword.
G.o.d grant that the essential monotony of this miscellany (which time has com- piled, not I, and into which have been bundled long-ago pieces that I"ve not had the courage to revise, for I wrote them out of a different concept of litera- ture) be less obvious than the geographical and historical diversity of its sub- jects. Of all the books I have sent to press, none, I think, is as personal as this motley, disorganized anthology, precisely because it abounds in reflections and interpolations. Few things have happened to me, though many things I have read. Or rather, few things have happened to me more worthy of remembering than the philosophy of Schopenhauer or England"s verbal music.
A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a s.p.a.ce with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
J.L.B. Buenos Aires, October 31,1960
In Praise of Darkness (1969).
Foreword.
Without realizing at first that I was doing so, I have devoted my long life to literature, teaching, idleness, the quiet adventures of conversation, philol- ogy (which I know very little about), the mysterious habit of Buenos Aires, and the perplexities which not without some arrogance are called meta- physics. Nor has my life been without its friendships, which are what really matter. I don"t believe I have a single enemy-if I do, n.o.body ever told me. The truth is that no one can hurt us except the people we love. Now, at my seventy years of age (the phrase is Whitman"s), I send to the press this fifth book of verse.
CarlosFriashas suggested that I take advantage of the foreword to this book to declare my aesthetics.My poverty, my will, resist that suggestion. I do nothave an aesthetics. Time has taught me a few tricks -avoiding syno- nyms, the drawback to which is that they suggest imaginary differences; avoiding Hispanicisms, Argentinisms, archaisms, and neologisms; using everyday words rather than shocking ones; inserting circ.u.mstantial details, which are now demanded by readers, into my stories; feigning a slight un- certainty, since even though reality is precise, memory isn"t; narrating events (this I learned from Kipling and the Icelandic sagas) as though I didn"t fully understand them; remembering that tradition, conventions, "the rules," are not an obligation, and that time will surely repeal them-but such tricks (or habits) are most certainly not an aesthetics. Anyway, I don"t believe in those formulations that people call "an aesthetics." As a general rule, they are no more than useless abstractions; they vary from author to author and even from text to text, and can never be more than occasional stimuli or tools.
This, as I said, is my fifth book of poetry. It is reasonable to a.s.sume that it will be no better or worse than the others. To the mirrors, labyrinths, and swords that my resigned reader will already have been prepared for have been added two new subjects: old age and ethics. Ethics, as we all know, was a constant preoccupation of a certain dear friend that literature brought me, Robert Louis Stevenson. One of the virtues that make me prefer Protestant nations to Catholic ones is their concern for ethics. Milton tried to educate the children in his academy in the knowledge of physics, mathe- matics, astronomy, and natural sciences; in the mid-seventeenth century Dr. Johnson was to observe that "Prudence and justice are preeminences and virtues which belong to all times and all places; we are perpetually moralists and only sometimes geometers."
In these pages the forms of prose and verse coexist, I believe, without discord. I might cite ill.u.s.trious antecedents-Boethius"Consolation of Phi- losophy, Chaucer"sTales, theBook of the Thousand Nights and a Night, I pre- fer to say that those divergences look to me to be accidental-I hope this book will be read as a book of verse. A volume,perse,is not anstheticmo- ment, it is one physical object among many; the aesthetic moment can only occur when the volume is written or read. One often hears that free verse is simply a typographical sham; I think there"s a basic error in that statement. Beyond the rhythm of a line of verse, its typographical arrangement serves to tell the reader that it"s poetic emotion, not information or rationality, that he or she should expect. I once yearned after the long breath line of the Psalms1 "in the Spanish version of this Foreword, I deliberately spelled the word with its initialp, which is reprobated by most Peninsular grammarians. The members of the Spanish Royal Academy want to impose their own phonetic inabilities on the New World; they suggest such provincial forms asneuma forpneuma, skologia forpsi- cologia,andsiquicofor psiquico.They"ve even taken to prescribingvikingoforviking. I have a feeling we"ll soon be hearing talk of the works of Kiplingo.
or Walt Whitman; after all these years I now see, a bit melancholically, that I have done no more than alternate between one and another cla.s.sical meter: the alexandrine, the hendecasyllable, the heptasyllable.
In a certainmilongaI have attempted, respectfully, to imitate the florid valor of Ascasubi* and thecoplas of the barrios.
Poetry is no less mysterious than the other elements of the orb. A lucky line here and there should not make us think any higher of ourselves, for such lines are the gift of Chance or the Spirit; only the errors are our own. Ihope the reader may find in my pages something that merits being remem- bered; in this world, beauty is so common.
J.L.B. Buenos Aires, June 24,1969
The Ethnographer
I was told about the case in Texas, but it had happened in another state. It has a single protagonist (though in every story there are thousands of pro- tagonists, visible and invisible, alive and dead). The man"s name, I believe, was Fred Murdock. He was tall, as Americans are; his hair was neither blond nor dark, his features were sharp, and he spoke very little. There was noth- ing singular about him, not even that feigned singularity that young men affect. He was naturally respectful, and he distrusted neither books nor the men and women who write them. He was at that age when a man doesn"t yet know whohe is, and so is ready to throw himself into whatever chance puts in his way-Persian mysticism or the unknown origins of Hungarian, algebra or the hazards of war, Puritanism or orgy. At the university, an ad - viser had interested him in Amerindian languages. Certain esoteric rites still survived in certain tribes out West; one of hisprofessors, an older man, sug- gested that he go live on a reservation, observe the rites, and discover the se- cret revealed by the medicine men to the initiates. When he came back, he would have his dissertation, and the university authorities would see that it was published.
Murdock leaped at the suggestion. One of his ancestors had died in the frontier wars; that bygone conflict of his race was now a link. He must have foreseen the difficulties that lay ahead for him; he would have to convince the red men to accept him as one of their own. He set out upon the long ad- venture. He lived for more than two years on the prairie, sometimes shel- tered by adobe walls and sometimes in the open. He rose before dawn, went to bed at sundown, and came to dream in a language that was not that of his fathers. He conditioned his palate to harsh flavors, he covered himself with strange clothing, he forgot his friends and the city, he came to think in a fashion that the logic of his mind rejected. During the first few months of his new education he secretly took notes; later, he tore the notes up- perhaps to avoid drawing suspicion upon himself, perhaps because he no longer needed them.
After a period of time (determined upon in advance by certain practices, both spiritual and physical), the priest instructedMurdockto start remembering his dreams, and to recount them to him at day- break each morning. The young man found that on nights of the full moon he dreamed of buffalo. He reported these recurrent dreams to his teacher; the teacher at last revealed to him the tribe"s secret doctrine. One morning, without saying a word to anyone, Murdock left.
In the city, he was homesick for those first evenings on the prairie when, long ago, he had been homesick for the city. He made his way to his professor"s office and told him that he knew the secret, but had resolved not to reveal it.
"Are you bound by your oath?" the professor asked.
"That"s not the reason," Murdock replied. "I learned something out there that I can"t express."
"The English language may not be able to communicate it," the profes- sor suggested.
"That"s not it, sir. Now that I possess the secret, I could tell it in a hun- dred different and even contradictory ways. I don"t know how to tell you this, but the secret is beautiful, and science, our science, seems mere frivolity to me now."
After a pause he added: "And anyway, the secret is not as important as the paths that led me to it. Each person has to walk those paths himself."
The professor spoke coldly: "I will inform the committee of your decision. Are you planning to live among the Indians?"
"No," Murdock answered. "I may not even go back to the prairie. What the men of the prairie taught me is good anywhere and for any circ.u.mstances."
That was the essence of their conversation.
Fred married, divorced, and is now one of the librarians at Yale.
PedroSalvadores
ForJuan Murchison
I want to put in writing, perhaps for the first time, one of the strangest and saddest events in the history of my country. The best way to go about it, I believe, is to keep my own part in the telling of the story small, and to sup- press all picturesque additions and speculative conjectures.
A man, a woman, and the vast shadow of a dictator* are the story"s three protagonists. The man"s name was PedroSalvadores;my grandfather Acevedo was a witness to his existence, a few days or weeks after the Battle of MonteCaseros.*There may have been no real difference betweenPedroSalvadoresand the common run of mankind, but his fate, the years of it, made him unique. He was a gentleman much like the other gentlemen of his day, with a place in the city and some land (we may imagine) in the country; he was a member of the Unitarian party.* His wife"s maiden name was Planes; they livedtogether onCalle Suipacha,not far from the corner of Temple.* The house in which the events took place was much like the oth- ers on the street: the front door, the vestibule, the inner door, the rooms, the shadowy depth of the patios. One night in 1842, PedroSalvadoresand his wife heard the dull sound of hoofbeats coming closer and closer up the dusty street, and the wild huzzahs and imprecations of the horses" riders. But this time the hors.e.m.e.n of the tyrant"s posse* did not pa.s.s them by. The whooping and shouting became insistent banging on the door. Then, as the men were breaking down the door,Salvadoresmanaged to push the dining table to one side, lift the rug, and hide himself in the cellar.
His wife moved the table back into place. The posse burst into the house; they had come to getSalvadores.His wife told them he"d fled-to Montevideo, she told them. They didn"t believe her; they lashed her with their whips, smashed all the sky blue china,* and searched the house, but it never occurred to them to lift the rug. They left at midnight, vowing to return.
It is at this point that the story of PedroSalvadorestruly begins. He lived in that cellar for nine years. No matter how often we tell ourselves that years are made of days, and days of hours, and that nine years is an abstrac- tion, an impossible sum, the story still horrifies and appalls. I suspect that in the darkness that his eyes learned to fathom, he came not to think of anything-not even his hatred or his danger. He was simply there, in the cellar. Now and again, echoes of that world he could not enter would reach him from above: his wife"s footsteps as she went about her routine, thej, thump of the water pump and the pail, the pelting of rain in the patio. Every day, too, might be his last.
His wife gradually got rid of all the servants; they were capable of in- forming on them. She told her family that her husband was in Uruguay. She earned a living for the two of them by sewing for the army. In the course of time she had two children; her family, attributing the children to a lover, re- pudiated her. After the fall of the tyrant they got down on their knees to her and begged forgiveness.
What, who, was PedroSalvadores?Was he imprisoned by terror, love, the invisible presence of Buenos Aires, or, in the final a.n.a.lysis, habit? To keep him from leaving her, his wife would give him vague news of conspira- cies and victories. Perhaps he was a coward, and his wife faithfully hid from him that she knew that. I picture him in his cellar, perhaps without even an oil lamp, or a book. The darkness would draw him under, into sleep. He would dream, at first, of the dreadful night when the knife would seek the throat, or dream of open streets, or of the plains. Within a few years, he would be incapable of fleeing, and he would dream of the cellar. At first he was a hunted man, a man in danger; later ... we will never know-a quiet animal in its burrows, or some sort of obscure deity?
All this, until that summer day in 1852 when the dictator Rosas fled the country. It was then that the secret man emerged into the light of day; my grandfather actually spoke with him. Puffy, slack-muscled, and obese, PedroSalvadoreswas the color of wax, and he spoke in a faint whisper. The gov- ernment had confiscated his land; it was never returned to him. I believe he died in poverty.
We see the fate of PedroSalvadores,like all things, as a symbol of some- thing that we are just on the verge of understanding----
Legend
Cain and Abel came upon each other after Abel"s death. They were walking through the desert, and they recognized each other from afar, since both men were very tall. The two brothers sat on the ground, made a fire, and ate. They sat silently, as weary people do when dusk begins to fall. In the sky, a star glimmered, though it had not yet been given a name. In the light of the fire, Cain saw that Abel"s forehead bore the mark of the stone, and he dropped the bread he was about to carry to his mouth and asked his brother to forgive him.
"Was it you that killed me, or did I kill you? " Abel answered. " I don"t re-member anymore; here weare, together, like before."
"Now I know that you have truly forgiven me," Cain said, "because for- getting is forgiving. I, too, will try to forget."
"Yes," said Abel slowly. "So long as remorse lasts, guilt lasts."
A Prayer
Thousands of times, and in both of the languages that are a part of me, my lips have p.r.o.nounced, and shall go on p.r.o.nouncing, the Paternoster, yet I only partly understand it. This morning-July 1, 1969-I want to attempt a prayer that is personal, not inherited. I know that such an undertaking de- mands a sincerity that is more than human. First of all, obviously I am barred from asking for anything. Asking that my eyes not be filled with night would be madness; I know of thousands of people who can see, yet who are not particularly happy, just, or wise. Time"s march is a web of causes and effects, and asking for any gift of mercy, however tiny it might be, is to ask that a link be broken in that web of iron, ask that it be already broken. No one deserves such a miracle. Nor can I plead that my trespa.s.ses be for- given; forgiveness is the act of another, and only I myself can save me. For- giveness purifies the offended party, not the offender, who is virtually untouched by it. The freeness of my "free will" is perhaps illusory, but I am able to give, or to dream that I give. I can give courage, which I do not pos- sess; I can give hope, which does not lie within me; I can teach a willingness to learn that which I hardly know myself, or merely glimpse. I want to be re- membered less as poet than as friend; I want someone to repeat a cadence from Dunbar or Frost or that man who, at midnight, looked upon that tree that bleeds, the Cross, and to reflect that he heard those words for the first time from my lips. None of the rest matters to me; I hope that oblivion will not long delay. The designs of the universe are unknown to us, but we do know that to think with lucidity and to act with fairness is to aid those de- signs (which shall never be revealed to us).
I want to die completely; I want to die with this body, my companion.
His End and His Beginning
The death throes done, he lay now alone-alone and broken and rejected- and then he sank into sleep. When he awoke, there awaited him his common- place habits and the places of his everyday existence. He told himself that he shouldn"t think too much about the night before, and, cheered by that re - solve, he unhurriedly dressed for work. At the office, he got through his du- ties pa.s.sably well, though with that uneasy sense (caused by weariness) of repeating things he"d already done. He seemed to notice that the others turned their eyes away; perhaps they already knew thathe was dead. That night the nightmares began; he was left without the slightest memory of them-just the fear that they"d return. In time, that fear prevailed; it came between him and the page he was supposed to write, the books he tried to read. Letters would crawl about on the page like ants; faces, familiar faces, gradually blurred and faded, objects and people slowly abandoned him. His mind seized upon those changing shapes in a frenzy of tenacity.
However odd it may seem, he never suspected the truth; it burst upon him suddenly. He realized that he was unable to remember the shapes, sounds, and colors of his dreams; there were no shapes, colors, or sounds, nor were the dreams dreams. They were his reality, a reality beyond silence and sight, and therefore beyond memory. This realization threw him into even greater consternation than the fact that from the hour of his death he had been struggling in a whirlwind of senseless images. The voices he"d heard had been echoes; the faces he"d seen had been masks; the fingers of his hands had been shadows-vague and insubstantial, true, yet also dear to him, and familiar.
Somehow he sensed that it was his duty to leave all these things be- hind; now he belonged to this new world, removed from past, present, and future. Little by little this new world surrounded him. He suffered many agonies, journeyed through realms of desperation and loneliness-appalling peregrinations, for they transcended all his previous perceptions, memo- ries, and hopes. All horror lay in their newness and their splendor. He had deserved grace-he had earned it; every second since the moment of his death, he had been inheaven.
Brodie"s Report (1970).
Foreword.
Kipling"s last stories were no less tortured and labyrinthine than Franz Kafka"s or Henry James"s, which they unquestionably surpa.s.s; in 1885, though, in Lah.o.r.e, early in his career, Kipling began writing a series of brief tales composed in a plain style, and he published those stories in 1890. Not a few of them -"In the House of Suddhoo,"* "Beyond the Pale," "The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows"-are laconic masterpieces; it has occurred to me from time to time that that which a young man of genius is capable of con- ceiving and bringing to fruition, a man beginning to get along in years and who knows his craft might, without immodesty, himself attempt. The issue of that reflection is contained in this volume; my readers may judge it for themselves.
I have tried (I am not sure how successfully) to write plain tales. I dare not say they are simple; there is not a simple page, a simple word, on earth-for all pages, all words, predicate the universe, whose most notori- ous attribute is its complexity. But I do wish to make clear that I am not, nor have I ever been, what used to be called a fabulist or spinner of para- bles, what these days is called anauteur engage.I do not aspire to beAEsop. My tales, like those of theThousand and One Nights, are intended not to persuade readers, but to entertain and touch them. This intention does not mean that I shut myself, as Solomon"s image would have it, into an ivory tower. My convictions with respect to political matters are well known; I have joined the Conservative Party (which act is a form of skepticism), and no one has ever called me a Communist, a nationalist, an anti-Semite, or a supporter ofHormiga Negra*or of Rosas.* I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government. I have never hidden my opinions, even through the difficult years, but I havenever allowed them to intrude upon my literary production, either, save that one time when I praised the Six-Day War. The craft is mysterious; our opinions are ephemeral, and I prefer* Plato"s theory of the Muse to that ofPoe,who argued, or pretended to argue, that the writing of a poem is an operation of the intelligence. (I never cease to be amazed that the Cla.s.sics professed a Romantic theory while a Romantic poet espoused a Cla.s.sical one.) Aside from the text that gives its name to this book (and whose pater- nity, obviously, can be traced to Lemuel Gulliver"s last voyage), my stories are "realistic," to use a term that is fashionable these days. They observe, I believe, all the conventions of the genre (a genre no less convention-ridden than all the others, and one we will soon enough grow tired of, if we are not already). They abound in the circ.u.mstantial details that writers are required to invent- details that we can find such splendid examples of in the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon ballad of the Battle of Maldon and the Icelandic sagas that came later. Two of the stories (I will not say which ones) can be opened with the same fantastic key. The curious reader will perceive certain secret affinities among the tales. A mere handful of arguments have haunted me all these years; I am decidedly monotonous.
For the general outline of the story called "The Gospel According to Mark," the best story of the volume, I am indebted to a dream that Hugo Ramirez Moroni* had one night; I fear I may have spoiled the dream with the changes that my imagination (or my reason) deemed it needed. But then literature is naught but guided dreaming, anyway.
I have renounced the shocks of a baroque style as well as those afforded by unforeseen or unexpected endings. I have, in short, preferred to prepare my readers for my endings, rather than to astound them. For many years I believedthat it would be my fortune to achieve literature through varia- tions and novelties; now that I am seventy years old I think I have found my own voice. A word changed here or there will neither spoil nor improve what I dictate, except when those alterations succeed in leavening a heavy sentence or softening an emphasis. Each language is a tradition, each word a shared symbol; the changes that an innovator may make are trifling-we should remember the dazzling but often unreadable work ofa Mallarmeor a Joyce. These reasonable, rational arguments are quite likely the result of weariness; advanced age has taught me to resign myself to beingBorges.
I care little about theDiccionario de laRealAcademia("dont chaque edition fait regretter la precedente,"asPaul Grossac glumly remarked), and equally little about these tiresome dictionaries of Argentinisms. All ofthem-on both this side of the Atlantic and the other-tend to stress the differences between our Spanish and theirs, and thereby to disintegrate the language. I recall that when somebody or other scolded Roberto Arlt be- cause he knew so little aboutLunfardo,the putative language of the Buenos Aires underworld, he answered his critic in this way: "I was raised in VillaLuro,among thugs and bullies and poor people, and I really had very little time to study the way they talked."Lunfardois, in fact, a literary put-on, a language invented by composers of tangos and writers of comedies for the stage and screen; the lowlifes and thugs themselves, those who lived in the tough, ragged outskirts of the city and who are supposed to have created it and used it in their daily lives, actually know nothing about it, except what phonograph records may have taught them.
I have set my stories at some distance in both time and s.p.a.ce. Imagina- tion has more freedom to work, that way. Today, in 1970, who can recall ex- actly what those outskirts of Palermo orLomaswere like at the end of the nineteenth century? Incredible as it may seem, there are certain punctilious men and women who act as a sort of "trivia police." They will note, for ex- ample, thatMartin Fierrowould have talked about abag of bones, not asack, and they will criticize (perhaps unfairly, perhaps not) the golden-pink coat of a certain horse famous in our literature.*
G.o.d save you, reader, from long forewords.-The quotation is from Quevedo, who (not to commit an anachronism that would have been caught sooner or later) never read the prefaces of Shaw.
J.L.B. Buenos Aires, April 19,1970
The Interloper
2Reyes 1:26*
They say (though it seems unlikely) thatEduardo,the younger of the Nel- son brothers, told the story in eighteen-ninety-something at the wake forCristian,the elder, who had died of natural causes in the district ofMoron.What is unquestionably true is that as the cups ofmate went their rounds in the course of that long night when there was nothing else to do, somebody heard it fromsomeone and later repeated it to Santiago Dabove, from whom I first heard it. I was told the story again, years later, in t.u.r.dera, where it had actually occurred. This second, somewhat less succinct version corrobo- rated the essential details of Santiago"s, with the small divergences and variations one always expects. I commit it to writing now because I believe it affords us (though I may of course be mistaken) a brief and tragic win- dow on the sort of men that once fought their knife fights and lived their harsh lives in the tough neighborhoods on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. I will tell the story conscientiously, though I can foresee myself yielding to the literary temptation to heighten or insert the occasional small detail.
In t.u.r.dera they were known as the Nilsens. I was told by the parish priest that his predecessor recalled having seen, not without some surprise, a worn black-letter Bible in the house; on its last pages he had glimpsed handwritten names and dates. That black-bound volume was the only book they owned-its troubled chronicle of the Nilsens is now lost, as everything will one day be lost. The big ramshackle house (which is no longer stand- ing) was of unplastered brick; from the entryway one could see a first inte - rior patio of red tiles and another, farther back, of packed earth. Few people, however, entered that entryway; the Nilsens defended their solitude. They slept on cots in dilapidated and unfurnished bedrooms; their luxuries were horses, saddles, short-bladed daggers, flashy Sat.u.r.day night clothes, andthe alcohol that made them belligerent. I know that they were tall, with reddish hair-the blood of Denmark or Ireland (countries whose names they probably never heard) flowed in the veins of those twocriollos.*The *... neighborhood was afraid of the Redheads, as they were called; it is not im- possible that one or another killing had been their work. Once they had stood shoulder to shoulder and fought it out with the police. People say the younger brother had once traded words with Juan Iberra and not gone away with the worst of it-which according to those who knew about such things was saying a great deal. They were cattle drivers, teamsters, horse thieves, and sometime cardsharps. They had a reputation for tightfisted-ness, except when drinking and gambling made them generous. About their kinspeople, nothing is known even of where they came from. They owned an oxcart and a yoke of oxen.