Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (26 page)
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Authors: Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N.T. di Giovanni)
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Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities
Those of This America
Standing out sharply against a background of blue walls or open sky, two hoodlums dressed in close-fitting suits of sober black and wearing thick-heeled shoes dance a deadly dance a ballet of matching knives until a carnation starts from the ear of one of them as a knife finds its mark in him, and he brings the unaccompanied dance to a close on the ground with his death. Satisfied, the other adjusts his high-crowned hat and spends his final years recounting the story of this clean duel. That, in sum and substance, is the history of our old-time Argentine underworld. The history of New York’s old underworld is both more dizzying and more clumsy.
Those of the Other
The history of the gangs of New York (revealed in 1928 by Herbert Asbury in a solid volume of four hundred octavo pages) contains all of the confusion and cruelty of the barbarian cosmogonies, and much of their giant-scale ineptitude cellars of old breweries honeycombed into Negro tenements; a ramshackle New York of three-storey structures; criminal gangs like the Swamp Angels, who rendezvoused in a labyrinth of sewers; criminal gangs like the Daybreak Boys, who recruited precocious murderers of ten and eleven; loners, like the bold and gigantic Plug Uglies, who earned the smirks of passersby with their enormous plug hats, stuffed with wool and worn pulled down over their ears as helmets, and their long shirttails, worn outside the trousers, that flapped in the Bowery breeze (but with a huge bludgeon in one hand and a pistol peeping out of a pocket); criminal gangs like the Dead Rabbits, who entered into battle under the emblem of a dead rabbit impaled on a pike; men like Dandy Johnny Dolan, famous for the oiled forelock he wore curled and plastered against his forehead, for his cane whose handle was carved in the likeness of a monkey, and for the copper device he invented and used on the thumb for gouging out an adversary’s eyes; men like Kit Burns, who for twenty-five cents would decapitate a live rat with a single bite; men like Blind Danny Lyons, young and blond and with immense dead eyes, who pimped for three girls, all of whom proudly walked the streets for him; rows of houses showing red lanterns in the windows, like those run by seven sisters from a small New England village, who always turned their Christmas Eve proceeds over to charity; rat pits, where wharf rats were starved and sent against terriers; Chinese gambling dives; women like the repeatedly widowed Red Norah, the vaunted sweetheart of practically the entire Gopher gang; women like Lizzie the Dove, who donned widow’s weeds when Danny Lyons was executed for murder, and who was stabbed in the throat by Gentle Maggie during an argument over whose sorrow for the departed blind man was the greater; mob uprisings like the savage week of draft riots in 1863, when a hundred buildings were burned to the ground and the city was nearly taken over; teeming street fights in which a man went down as at sea, trampled to death; a thief and horse poisoner like Yoske Nigger. All these go to weave underworld New York’s chaotic history. And its most famous hero is Edward Delaney, alias William Delaney, alias Joseph Marvin, alias Joseph Morris, alias Monk Eastman boss of twelve hundred men.
The Hero
These shifts of identity (as distressing as a masquerade, in which one is not quite certain who is who) omit his real name presuming there is such a thing as a real name. The recorded fact is that he was born in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn as Edward Osterman, a name later Americanized to Eastman. Oddly enough, this stormy underworld character was Jewish. He was the son of the owner of a kosher restaurant, where men wearing rabbinical beards could safely partake of the bloodless and thrice-cleansed flesh of ritually slaughtered calves. At the age of nineteen, about 1892, his father set him up in business with a bird store. A fascination for animals, an interest in their small decisions and inscrutable innocence, turned into a lifelong hobby. Years afterwards, in a period of opulence, when he scornfully refused the Havana cigars of freckle-faced Tammany sachems or when he paid visits to the best houses of prostitution in that new invention, the automobile (which seemed the bastard offspring of a gondola), he started a second business, a front, that accommodated a hundred cats and more than four hundred pigeons none of which were for sale to anyone. He loved each one, and often he strolled through his neighbourhood with a happy cat under an arm, while several others trailed eagerly behind.
He was a battered, colossal man. He had a short, bull neck; a barrel chest; long, scrappy arms; a broken nose; a face, although plentifully scarred, less striking than his frame; and legs bowed like a cowboy’s or a sailor’s. He could usually be found without a shirt or coat, but not without a derby hat several sizes too small perched on his bullet-shaped head. Mankind has conserved his memory. Physically, the conventional moving-picture gunman is a copy of him, not of the pudgy, epicene Capone. It is said of Louis Wolheim that Hollywood employed him because his features suggested those of the lamented Monk Eastman. Eastman used to strut about his underworld kingdom with a great blue pigeon on his shoulder, just like a bull with a cowbird on its rump.
Back in the mid-nineties, public dance halls were a dime a dozen in the city of New York. Eastman was employed in one of them as a bouncer. The story is told that a dance-hall manager once refused to hire him, whereupon Monk demonstrated his capacity for the work by wiping the floor with the pair of giants who stood between him and the job. Single-handed, universally feared, he held the position until 1899. For each troublemaker he quelled, he cut a notch in his brutal bludgeon. One night, his attention drawn to a shining bald pate minding its own business over a bock beer, he laid its bearer out with a blow. ‘I needed one more notch to make fifty,’ he later explained.
The Territory
From 1899 on, Eastman was not only famous but, during elections, he was captain of an important ward. He also collected protection money from the houses of prostitution, gambling dives, streetwalkers, pickpockets, and burglars of his sordid domain. Tammany politicians hired him to stir up trouble; so did private individuals. Here are some of his prices:
| Ear chewed off | $15 |
| Leg or arm broke | $19 |
| Shot in leg | $25 |
| Stab | $25 |
| Doing the big job | $100 and up |
Sometimes, to keep his hand in, Eastman personally carried out a commission.
A question of boundaries (as subtle and thorny as any cramming the dockets of international law) brought Eastman into confrontation with Paul Kelly, the well-known chief of a rival gang. Bullets and rough-and-tumble fighting of the two gangs had set certain territorial limits. Eastman crossed these bounds alone one early morning and was assailed by five of Kelly’s men. With his flailing, apelike arms and blackjack, Monk knocked down three of the attackers, but he was ultimately shot twice in the stomach and left for dead. Eastman closed the hot wounds with thumb and index finger and staggered to Gouverneur Hospital. There, for several weeks, life, a high fever, and death vied for him, but his lips refused to name his would-be killer. When he left the hospital, the war was on, and, until the nineteenth of August, 1903 it flowered in one shoot-out after another.
The Battle of Rivington Street
A hundred heroes, each a bit different from his photograph fading in police files; a hundred heroes reeking of tobacco smoke and alcohol; a hundred heroes wearing straw boaters with gaily coloured bands; a hundred heroes afflicted, some more, some less, with shameful diseases, tooth decay, complaints of the respiratory tracts or kidneys; a hundred heroes as insignificant or splendid as those of Troy or Bull Run these hundred let loose this black feat of arms under the shadows of the arches of the Second Avenue elevated. The cause was the attempted raid by Kelly’s gunmen on a stuss game operated by a friend of Eastman’s on Rivington Street. One of the gunmen was killed, and the ensuing flurry of shots swelled into a battle of uncounted revolvers. Sheltered behind the pillars of the elevated structure, smooth-shaven men quietly blazed away at each other and became the focus of an awesome ring of rented automobiles loaded with eager reinforcements, each bearing a fistful of artillery.
What did the protagonists of this battle feel? First (I believe), the brutal conviction that the senseless din of a hundred revolvers was going to cut them down at any moment; second (I believe), the no less mistaken certainty that if the first shots did not hit them they were invulnerable. What is without doubt, however, is that, under cover of the iron pillars and the night, they fought with a vengeance. Twice the police intervened, and twice they were driven off. At the first glimmer of dawn, the battle petered out as if it were obscene or ghostly. Under the great arches of the elevated were left seven critically wounded men, four corpses, and one dead pigeon.
The Creakings
The local politicians, in whose ranks Monk Eastman served, always publicly denied that such gangs existed, or else claimed that they were mere sporting clubs. The indiscreet battle of Rivington Street now alarmed them. They arranged a meeting between Eastman and Kelly in order to suggest to them the need for a truce. Kelly (knowing very well that Tammany Hall was more effective than any number of Colts when it came to obstructing police action) agreed at once; Eastman (with the pride of his great, brutish hulk) hungered for more blasting and further frays. He began to refuse, and the politicians had to threaten him with prison. In the end, the two famous gangsters came face to face in an unsavoury dive, each with a huge cigar between his teeth, a hand on his revolver, and his watchful thugs surrounding him. They arrived at a typically American decision: they would settle their dispute in the ring by squaring off with their fists. Kelly was an experienced boxer. The fight took place in a barn up in the Bronx, and it was an extravagant affair. A hundred and forty spectators looked on, among them mobsters with rakish derbies and their molls with enormous coiffures in which weapons were sometimes concealed.
The pair fought for two hours and it ended in a draw. Before a week was out, the shooting started up again. Monk was arrested for the nth time. With great relief Tammany Hall washed their hands of him; the judge prophesied for him, with complete accuracy, ten years in prison.
Eastman vs Germany
When the still puzzled Monk was released from Sing Sing, the twelve hundred members of his gang had broken up into warring factions. Unable to reorganize them, he took to operating on his own. On the eighth of September 1917, he was arrested for creating a disturbance in a public thoroughfare. The next day, deciding to take part in an even larger disturbance, he enlisted in the 106th Infantry of the New York National Guard. Within a few months, he was shipped overseas with his regiment.
We know about various aspects of his campaign. We know that he violently disapproved of taking prisoners and that he once (with just his rifle butt) interfered with that deplorable practice. We know that he managed to slip out of the hospital three days after he had been wounded and make his way back to the front, lines. We know that he distinguished himself in the fighting around Montfaucon. We know that he later held that a number of little dance halls around the Bowery were a lot tougher than the war in Europe.
The Mysterious, Logical End
On Christmas Day, 1920, Monk Eastman’s body was found at dawn on one of the downtown streets of New York. It had five bullet wounds in it. Happily unaware of death, an alley cat hovered around the corpse with a certain puzzlement.
The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan
An image of the desert wilds of Arizona, first and foremost, an image of the desert wilds of Arizona and New Mexico a country famous for its silver and gold camps, a country of breathtaking open spaces, a country of monumental mesas and soft colours, a country of bleached skeletons picked clean by buzzards. Over this whole country, another image that of Billy the Kid, the hard rider firm on his horse, the young man with the relentless six-shooters, sending out invisible bullets which (like magic) kill at a distance.
The desert veined with precious metals, arid and blinding-bright. The near child who on dying at the age of twenty-one owed to the justice of grown men twenty-one deaths ‘not counting Mexicans’.
The Larval Stage
Along about 1859, the man who would become known to terror and glory as Billy the Kid was born in a cellar room of a New York City tenement. It is said that he was spawned by a tired-out Irish womb but was brought up among Negroes. In this tumult of lowly smells and woolly heads, he enjoyed a superiority that stemmed from having freckles and a mop of red hair. He took pride in being white; he was also scrawny, wild, and coarse. At the age of twelve, he fought in the gang of the Swamp Angels, that branch of divinities who operated among the neighbourhood sewers. On nights redolent of burnt fog, they would clamber out of that foul-smelling labyrinth, trail some German sailor, do him in with a knock on the head, strip him to his underwear, and afterward sneak back to the filth of their starting place. Their leader was a grey-haired Negro, Gas House Jonas, who was also celebrated as a poisoner of horses.
Sometimes, from the upper window of a waterfront dive, a woman would dump a bucket of ashes upon the head of a prospective victim. As he gasped and choked, Swamp Angels would swarm him, rush him into a cellar, and plunder him.
Such were the apprentice years of Billy Harrigan, the future Billy the Kid. Nor did he scorn the offerings of Bowery playhouses, enjoying in particular (perhaps without an inkling that they were signs and symbols of his destiny) cowboy melodramas.
Go West!
If the jammed Bowery theatres (whose top-gallery riffraff shouted ‘Hoist that rag!’ when the curtain failed to rise promptly on schedule) abounded in these blood and thunder productions, the simple explanation is that America was then experiencing the lure of the Far West. Beyond the sunset lay the goldfields of Nevada and California. Beyond the sunset were the redwoods, going down before the axe; the buffalo’s huge Babylonian face; Brigham Young’s beaver hat and plural bed; the red man’s ceremonies and his rampages; the clear air of the deserts; endless-stretching range land; and the earth itself, whose nearness quickens the heart like the nearness of the sea. The West beckoned. A slow, steady rumour populated those years that of thousands of Americans taking possession of the West. On that march, around 1872, was Bill Harrigan, treacherous as a bull rattler, in flight from a rectangular cell.
The Demolition of a Mexican
History (which, like certain film directors, proceeds by a series of abrupt images) now puts forward the image of a danger-filled saloon, located as if on the high seas out in the heart of the all-powerful desert. The time, a blustery night of the year 1873; the place, the Staked Plains of New Mexico. All around, the land is almost uncannily flat and bare, but the sky, with its storm-piled clouds and moon, is full of fissured cavities and mountains. There are a cow’s skull, the howl and the eyes of coyotes in the shadows, trim horses, and from the saloon an elongated patch of light. Inside, leaning over the bar, a group of strapping but tired men drink a liquor that warms them for a fight; at the same time, they make a great show of large silver coins bearing a serpent and an eagle. A drunk croons to himself, poker-faced. Among the men are several who speak a language with many
s
’s, which must be Spanish, for those who speak it are looked down on. Bill Harrigan, the red-topped tenement rat, stands among the drinkers. He has downed a couple of
aguardientes
and thinks of asking for one more, maybe
because he hasn’t a cent left. He is somewhat overwhelmed by these men of the desert. He sees them as imposing, boisterous, happy, and hatefully wise in the handling of wild cattle and big horses. All at once there is dead silence, ignored only by the voice of the drunk, singing out of tune. Someone has come in a big, burly Mexican, with the face of an old Indian squaw. He is endowed with an immense sombrero and with a pair of six-guns at his side. In awkward English, he wishes a good evening to all the gringo sons of bitches who are drinking. Nobody takes up the challenge. Bill asks who he is, and they whisper to him, in fear, that the Dago that is, the Diego is Belisario Villagrán, from Chihuahua. At once, there is a resounding blast. Sheltered by that wall of tall men, Bill has fired at the intruder. The glass drops from Villagrán’s hand; then the man himself drops. He does not need another bullet. Without deigning to glance at the showy dead man, Bill picks up his end of the conversation. ‘Is that so?’ he drawled. ‘Well, I’m Billy the Kid, from New York.’ The drunk goes on singing, unheeded. One may easily guess the apotheosis. Bill gives out handshakes all around and accepts praises, cheers, and whiskies. Someone notices that there are no notches on the handle of his revolver and offers to cut one to stand for Villagrán’s death. Billy the Kid keeps this someone’s razor, though he says that ‘ It’s hardly worthwhile noting down Mexicans.’ This, perhaps, is not quite enough. That night, Bill lays out his blanket beside the corpse and with great show sleeps till daybreak.
Deaths for Deaths’ Sake
Out of that lucky blast (at the age of fourteen), Billy the Kid the hero was born, and the furtive Bill Harrigan died. The boy of the sewer and the knock on the head rose to become a man of the frontier. He made a horseman of himself, learning to ride straight in the saddle Wyoming or Texas-style and not with his body thrown back, the way they rode in Oregon and California. He never completely matched his legend, but he kept getting closer and closer to it. Something of the New York hoodlum lived on in the cowboy; he transferred to Mexicans the hate that had previously been inspired in him by Negroes, but the last words he ever spoke were (swear) words in Spanish. He learned the art of the cowpuncher’s maverick life. He learned another, more difficult art how to lead men. Both helped to make him a good cattle rustler. From time to time, Old Mexico’s guitars and whorehouses pulled on him.
With the haunting lucidity of insomnia, he organized populous orgies that often lasted four days and four nights. In the end, glutted, he settled accounts with bullets. While his trigger finger was unfailing, he was the most feared man (and perhaps the most anonymous and most lonely) of that whole frontier. Pat Garrett, his friend, the sheriff who later killed him, once told him, ‘I’ve had a lot of practice with the rifle shooting buffalo.’
‘I’ve had plenty with the six-shooter,’ Billy replied modestly. ‘Shooting tin cans and men.’
The details can never be recovered, but it is known that he was credited with up to twenty-one killings — ‘not counting Mexicans’. For seven desperate years, he practiced the extravagance of utter recklessness.
The night of the twenty-fifth of July 1880, Billy the Kid came galloping on his piebald down the main, or only, street of Fort Sumner. The heat was oppressive and the lamps had not been lighted; Sheriff Garrett, seated on a porch in a rocking chair, drew his revolver and sent a bullet through the Kid’s belly. The horse kept on; the rider tumbled into the dust of the road. Garrett got off a second shot. The townspeople (knowing the wounded man was Billy the Kid) locked their window shutters tight. The agony was long and blasphemous. In the morning, the sun by then high overhead, they began drawing near, and they disarmed him. The man was gone. They could see in his face that used-up look of the dead.
He was shaved, sheathed in ready-made clothes, and displayed to awe and ridicule in the window of Fort Sumner’s biggest store. Men on horseback and in buckboards gathered for miles and miles around. On the third day, they had to use make-up on him. On the fourth day, he was buried with rejoicing.