Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (43 page)
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Authors: Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N.T. di Giovanni)
Tags: #Short stories
Juan Muraña
For years now, I have been telling people I grew up in that part of Buenos Aires known as Palermo. This, I’ve come to realize, is mere literary bravado; the truth is that I really grew up on the inside of a long iron picket fence in a house with a garden and with my father’s and his father’s library. The Palermo of knife fights and of guitar playing lurked (so they say) on street comers and down back alleys. In 1930, I wrote a study of Evaristo Carriego, a neighbor of ours, a poet and glorifier of the city’s outlying slums. A little after that, chance brought me face to face with Emilio Trápani. I was on the train to Morón. Trápani, who was sitting next to the window, called me by name. For some time I could not place him, so many years had passed since we’d been classmates in a school on Thames Street. Roberto Godel, another classmate, may remember him.
Trápani and I never had any great liking for each other. Time had set us apart, and also our mutual indifference. He had taught me, I now recall, all the basic slang words of the day. Riding along, we struck up one of those trivial conversations that force you to unearth pointless facts and that lead up to the discovery of the death of a fellow-schoolmate who is no longer anything more than a name. Then, abruptly, Trápani said to me, “Someone lent me your Carriego book, where you’re talking about hoodlums all the time. Tell me, Borges, what in the world can you know about hoodlums?” He stared at me with a kind of wonder.
“I’ve done research,” I answered.
Not letting me go on, he said, “Research is the word, all right. Personally, I have no use for research—I know these people inside out.” After a moment’s silence, he added, as though he were letting me in on a secret, “I’m Juan Muraña’s nephew.”
Of all the men around Palermo famous for handling a knife way back in the nineties, the one with the widest reputation was Muraña. Trápani went on, “Florentina—my aunt—was his wife. Maybe you’ll be interested in this story.”
Certain devices of a literary nature and one or two longish sentences led me to suspect that this was not the first time he had told the story.
My mother [Trápani said] could never quite stomach the fact that her sister had linked herself up with a man like Muraña, who to her was just a big brute, while to Aunt Florentina he was a man of action. A lot of stories circulated about my uncle’s end. Some say that one night when he was dead drunk he tumbled from the seat of his wagon, making the turn around the comer of Coronel, and cracked his skull on the cobblestones. It’s also said that the law was on his heels and he ran away to Uruguay. My mother, who couldn’t stand her brother-in-law, never explained to me what actually happened. I was just a small boy then and have no memories of him.
Along about the time of the Centennial, we were living in a long, narrow house on Russell Alley. The back door, which was always kept locked, opened on the other side of the block, on San Salvador Street. My aunt, who was well along in years and a bit queer, had a room with us up in our attic. Big-boned but thin as a stick, she was—or seemed to me—very tall. She also wasted few words. Living in fear of fresh air, she never went out; nor did she like our going into her room. More than once, I caught her stealing and hiding food. The talk around the neighborhood was that Muraña’s death, or disappearance, had affected her mind. I remember her always in black. She had also fallen into the habit of talking to herself.
Our house belonged to a certain Mr. Luchessi, the owner of a barbershop on the Southside, in Barracas. My mother, who did piecework at home as a seamstress, was in financial straits. Without being able to understand them, I heard whispered terms like “court order” and “eviction notice.” My mother was really at her wit’s end, and my aunt kept saying stubbornly that Juan was not going to stand by and let the gringo, that wop, throw us out. She recalled the incident—which all of us knew by heart—of a bigmouthed tough from the Southside who had dared doubt her husband’s courage. Muraña, the moment he found out, took all the trouble to go clear across the town, ferret the man out, put him straight with a blow of his knife, and dump his body into the Riachuelo. I don’t know if the story’s true; what matters is that it was told and that it became accepted.
I saw myself sleeping in empty lots on Serrano Street or begging handouts or going around with a basket of peaches. Selling on the streets tempted me, because it would free me from school
. I
don’t know how long our troubles lasted. Your late father once told us that you can’t measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well. I didn’t quite understand what he meant, but the words stuck in my mind.
One night, I had a dream that ended in a nightmare. I dreamed of my Uncle Juan. I had never got to know him, but I thought of him as a burly man with a touch of the Indian about him, a sparse moustache and his hair long. He and I were heading south, cutting through huge stone quarries and scrub, but these quarries and thickets were also Thames Street. In the dream, the sun was high overhead. Uncle Juan was dressed in a black suit. He stopped beside a sort of scaffolding in a narrow mountain pass. He held his hand under his jacket, around the level of his heart—not like a person who’s about to pull a knife but as though he were keeping the hand hidden. In a very sad voice, he told me, “I’ve changed a lot.” He withdrew the hand, and what I saw was the claw of a vulture. I woke up screaming in the dark.
The next day, my mother made me go with her to Luchessi’s. I know she was going to ask him for extra time; she probably took me along so that our landlord would see her helplessness. She didn’t mention a word of this to her sister, who would never have let her lower herself in such a way. I hadn’t ever set foot in Barracas before; it seemed to me there were a lot more people around than I imagined there’d be, and a lot more traffic and fewer vacant lots. From the comer, we saw several policemen and a flock of people in front of the house we were looking for. A neighbor went from group to group telling everyone that around three o’clock that morning he had been awakened by someone thumping on a door. He heard the door open and someone go in. Nobody shut the door, and as soon as it was light Luchessi was found lying there in the entranceway, half dressed. He’d been stabbed a number of times. The man lived alone; the authorities never caught up with the murderer. Nothing, it seems, had been stolen. At the time, somebody recalled that the deceased had almost lost his sight. In an important-sounding voice, someone else said, “His time had come.” This judgment and the tone made an impression on me; as the years passed I was to find out that any time a person dies there’s always somebody who makes this same discovery.
At the wake, we were offered coffee and I had a cup. In the coffin there was a wax dummy in place of the dead man. I mentioned this to my mother; one of the undertaker’s men laughed and explained to me that the dummy dressed in black was Mr. Luchessi. I stood spellbound, staring at him. My mother had to yank me away.
For months afterward, nobody talked of anything else. Crimes were so few in those days; just remember all the fuss that was made over the case of Melena, Campana, and Silletero. The one person in all Buenos Aires who showed no interest whatever was Aunt Florentina. She kept on saying, with the persistence of old age, “I told you Juan would never let that gringo put us out in the street.”
One day, it rained buckets. As I could not go to school that morning, I began rummaging through the house. I climbed up to the attic. There was my aunt, sitting with her hands folded together; I could tell that she wasn’t even thinking. The room smelled damp. In one corner stood the iron bedstead, with her rosary beads attached to one of the bars, in another a wooden chest where she kept her clothes. A picture of the Virgin was pinned to one of the whitewashed walls. On the table by the bed was a candlestick. Without lifting her eyes, my aunt said, “I know what brings you up here. Your mother sent you. She just doesn’t seem to understand that it was Juan who saved us.”
“Juan?” I said, amazed. “Juan died over ten years ago.”
“Juan is here,” she told me. “Do you want to see him?” She opened the drawer of the night table and took out a dagger, then went on speaking in a soft, low voice. “Here he is. I knew he would never forsake me. In the whole world there hasn’t been another man like him. He didn’t let the gringo get out a word.”
It was only then that I understood. That poor raving woman had murdered Luchessi. Driven by hate, by madness, and maybe—who knows—by love, she had slipped out by the back door, had made her way block after block in the dead of night, had found the house she was after, and, with those big, bony hands, had sunk the dagger. The dagger was Muraña—it was the dead man she had gone on worshiping.
I never knew whether she told my mother the story or not. She died a short time before the eviction.
Here Trápani—whom I have never run across again—ended his account. Since then, I have often thought about this bereft woman and about her man. Juan Muraña walked the familiar streets of my boyhood; I may have seen him many times, unawares. He was a man who knew what all men come to know, a man who tasted death and was afterward a knife, and is now the memory of a knife, and will tomorrow be oblivion—the oblivion that awaits us all.
The Elder Lady
On the fourteenth of January, 1941, María Justina Rubio de Jáuregui was to be one hundred years old. She was the last surviving daughter of any of the soldiers who had fought in the South American War of Independence.
Colonel Mariano Rubio, her father, was what might, without irreverence, be called a minor immortal. Born in 1799 in the Buenos Aires parish of La Merced, the son of local landowners, he was promoted to ensign in San Martín’s Army of the Andes, and he fought in the battle of Chacabuco, in the defeat of Cancha Rayada, at Maipú, and, two years after that, at Arequipa. It is told that on the eve of one of these battles, he and a fellow-officer, José de Olavarría, exchanged swords. At the beginning of April, 1823, there took place the famous engagement of Big Hill, which, having been fought in a valley between two summits, is often also known as the battle of Red Hill. Always envious of our glories, the Venezuelans attribute this victory to General Simón Bolívar, but the impartial observer, the Argentine historian, is not easily taken in and knows only too well that the laurels rightfully belong to Colonel Mariano Rubio. The Colonel, at the head of a regiment of Colombian hussars, turned the tide in this battle, waged entirely with sabers and lances, which paved the way for the no less famous action at Ayacucho, in which he also took part, receiving a wound. In 1827, it was his fate to fight boldly at Ituzaingó, under the immediate command of Alvear. In spite of his blood tie with the dictator Rosas, in later years he Was one of Lavalle’s men, and once broke up a troop of gaucho militia in an action the Colonel always referred to as a saberfest. With the defeat of the Unitarians, he emigrated to Uruguay, where he married. In the eighteen-forties, in the course of that country’s long civil war, the Guerra Grande, he died in Montevideo during the siege of the city by Oribe’s Blancos. He was nearly forty-four, which at that time was almost old age. He had been a friend of the writer Florencio Varela. It is quite likely that professors at the Military Academy would have flunked him, since his only experience lay in fighting battles, not in taking examinations.
He left two daughters, of which the younger, María Justina, is the one who concerns us.
Toward the end of 1853, the Colonel’s widow and his daughters settled in Buenos Aires. They never got back their lands, which had been confiscated by the dictator during the Colonel’s long absence, but the memory of those miles and miles of lost acres on which they had never laid eyes survived in the family for many years. At the age of seventeen, María Justina married the physician Bernado Jáuregui, who, though a civilian, fought during the civil wars in the battles of Pavón and Cepeda, and later died practicing his profession during the yellow-fever epidemic of the eighteen-seventies. He left a son and two daughters. Mariano, the firstborn, was a customs inspector, and he used to frequent the National Library and National Archives, with the intention of compiling an exhaustive life of the hero, his grandfather, which he never finished and perhaps never began. The older daughter, María Elvira, married a cousin, a Saavedra, who was employed in the Ministry of Finance. Julia, the second daughter, had married a Mr. Molinari, who, despite his Italian name, was a professor of Latin and a person of the highest accomplishments. I pass over grandchildren and great-grandchildren; it is enough that my reader picture a family that is honorable, that has come down in life, and that is presided over by a heroic shade and by a daughter born in exile.
The family lived modestly in Palermo, in what at the time was the outskirts of Buenos Aires, not far from the church of Guadalupe. Mariano still remembered having seen there, from a tramcar of the Grand National Lines, the big pond on whose shores were scattered a series of hovels, not of galvanized-iron sheets but of unplastered brick. Yesterday’s poverty was less poor than the poverty handed down to us today by industrialism. Fortunes were also much smaller then.
The Rubios lived above a local dry-goods store. The stairway was narrow; the banister, which ran up the right-hand side, led to a longish corridor, at the end of which was a dark vestibule, where there were a coatrack and a few chairs. The vestibule opened into the small drawing room, with its upholstered furniture, and the drawing room into the dining room, with its mahogany furniture and glass-fronted china closet. The metal shutters, always kept drawn in fear of the sunlight, let a little dim twilight filter through. I recall an odor of stored away things. At the back of the house were the bedrooms, the bathroom, a small gallery with a laundry tub, and the servant’s room. In the whole house there were no books other than a volume of the poet Andrade; a short biography of the hero, with handwritten additions scribbled into the margins; and Montaner y Simón’s
Hispano-American Encyclopedia,
acquired on installments, together with the small set of shelves that came with it. They lived on a pension, which was never paid them punctually, and on the income from a rented property—the single remains of the once vast acreage—in Lomas de Zamora.
At the time of my story, the elder lady lived with Julia, who was widowed, and with Julia’s son. Mrs. Jáuregui went on hating bygone tyrants—Artigas, Rosas, and Urquiza. The First World War, which made her loathe the Germans, about whom she knew very little, was less real to her than the revolution of 1890 and, needless to say, the cavalry charge at Big Hill. Since 1932, she had been growing dimmer and dimmer; common metaphors are the best because they are the only true ones. She was, of course, a Catholic, which does not necessarily mean that she believed in a God that is One and is Three, or even in an afterlife. While her hands moved over her rosary, she muttered prayers that she had never understood. In place of Easter and of Twelfth Night she had accepted Christmas, just as she had grown to accept tea instead of maté. To her, the words “Protestant,” “Jew,” “Freemason,” “heretic,” and “atheist” were synonyms and empty of meaning. While she could still talk, she spoke not of Spaniards but of
godos
,
or Goths, just as her ancestors had done. During the Centennial, in 1910, she could hardly believe that the Spanish Infanta—who, after all, was a princess—spoke, against all expectation, like a common Spaniard and not like an Argentine lady; it was at her son-in-law’s wake that a rich relative, who had never set foot in the Jáuregui house but whose name they avidly sought in the society pages of the newspapers, gave her the disquieting news. Many of the place names that Mrs. Jáuregui used had long since been altered; she still spoke of such streets as Las Artes, Temple, Buen Orden, La Piedad, the two Calles Largas, and of the Plaza del Parque and the Portones. The family affected these archaisms, which in her were spontaneous. They spoke of “Orientales” instead of “Uruguayans.”
Mrs. Jáuregui never went out of the house after 1921; perhaps she never suspected that Buenos Aires had been changing and growing. First memories are the most vivid. The city that she pictured beyond her front door may well have been a much earlier one than that of the time they were forced to move from the center of town out to Palermo. If so, to her the oxen that hauled wagons still rested in the square of the Once, and dead violets still spread their fragrance among the gardens of Barraeas. “Now all my dreams are of dead people” was one of the last things she was heard to say. No one had ever thought of her as a fool, but as far as I know she had never enjoyed the pleasures of the mind; the last pleasures left her would be those of memory and, later on, of forgetfulness. She had always been generous. I recall her bright, quiet eyes and her smile. Who knows what tumult of passions—now lost but which once burned—there had been in that old woman; in her day, she had been quite pleasant looking. Sensitive to plants, whose modest and silent life was so akin to her own, she looked after some begonias in her room and touched their leaves, which she could no longer see. Up until 1929, the year in which she sank into a kind of half sleep, she recounted historical happenings, but always using the same words in the same order, as if they were the Lord’s Prayer, so that I grew to suspect there were no longer any real images behind them. Even eating one thing or another was all the same to her. She was, in short, happy.
Sleeping, as we all know, is the most secret of our acts. We devote a third of our lives to it, and yet do not understand it. For some, it is no more than an eclipse of wakefulness; for others, a more complex state spanning at one and the same time past, present, and future; for still others, an uninterrupted series of dreams. To say that Mrs. Jáuregui spent ten years in a quiet chaos is perhaps mistaken; each moment of those ten years may well have been a pure present, without a before or after. There is no reason to marvel at such a present, which we count by days and nights and by the hundreds of leaves of many calendars and by anxieties and events; it is what we go through every morning before waking up and every night before falling asleep. Twice each day, we are all the elder lady.
The Jáuregui family lived, as we have already seen, in a somewhat false situation. They felt they belonged to the aristocracy, but the people spoken of in the society column knew nothing whatever about them; they were descendants of a founding father, but more often than not the schoolbooks overlooked him. While it is undeniable that a street bore his name, that street, known to very few people, was lost somewhere out behind the sprawling Westside cemetery.
The fourteenth of January was drawing near.
On the tenth, an officer in full-dress uniform delivered to the family a letter signed by the Minister of War himself, announcing his visit on the fourteenth. The Jáureguis showed the letter to the whole neighborhood and made a great deal of the engraved stationery and the signature. Then the newspapermen came. The family helped them with all available information; it was obvious that they had never heard of Colonel Rubio. People whom the family scarcely knew called by telephone so as to be invited.
They all worked very hard for the great day. They waxed the floors, they washed the windows, they undraped the chandeliers, they polished the mahogany, they shined all the silver in the china closet, they moved the furniture around, and they opened the lid of the drawing-room piano to show off the velvet cloth that covered the keys. People came and went. A neighbor lady very kindly lent a pot of geraniums. The only person unaware of all the fuss was Mrs. Jáuregui, who, wearing a fixed smile, seemed not to understand a thing. Helped by the servant girl, Julia got her mother primped up as though she were already dead. The first things visitors would see on entering would be the oil portrait of the hero and, a little below it and to the right, the sword of his many battles. Even in hard times, the Jáureguis had always refused to sell the sword, thinking they would one day donate it to the Historical Museum.
The party would begin at seven. They had set the hour for six-thirty, knowing all along that nobody likes to be the first to arrive. By ten minutes past seven, not a soul had yet appeared; the family argued somewhat nervously the advantages and disadvantages of not being punctual. Elvira, who took pride in arriving on the dot, flatly stated that it was an unpardonable discourtesy to keep others waiting. Julia, repeating what her husband had always said, was of the opinion that arriving late was a courtesy, because if everyone did so it would make things easier and that way no one would be hurrying anyone else. At seven-fifteen, the house was packed. The whole neighborhood could see and envy the automobile and chauffeur of Mrs. Figueroa, who almost never invited the Jáureguis to her house but whom they received effusively, so that nobody would guess they only saw each other once in a blue moon. The President sent his aide, an extremely polite gentleman, who said that it was a great honor for him to shake the hand of the daughter of the hero of Big Hill. The Minister, who had to leave early, read a very fine speech, in which more was said about General San Martín, however, than about Colonel Rubio. The elderly lady sat in her armchair, propped up with pillows, and from time to time nodded her head approvingly or dropped her fan. A group of distinguished ladies, the Daughters of the Republic, sang her the National Anthem, which she seemed not to hear. The photographers herded the gathering into artistic groupings and were lavish with their flashbulbs. The small glasses of sherry and port were not enough to go around. Someone uncorked a number of bottles of champagne. Mrs. Jáuregui did not utter a single word; perhaps she no longer knew who she was. From that night on, she never left her bed.
When all the strangers had gone, the family improvised a small cold supper. The delicate perfume of incense had long since been dispelled by the odor of tobacco smoke and coffee.
The morning and afternoon papers loyally lied, dwelling on the almost miraculous memory of the hero’s daughter, who “is an eloquent storehouse of a century of Argentine history.” Julia wanted to show her mother the clippings. In her twilit room, the elder lady lay motionless, her eyes closed. She had no fever; the doctor examined her and said that everything was as it should be. A few days later, she died. The press of so many people, the unusual clamor, the flashbulbs, the speech, the uniforms, and the repeated handshaking had hastened her end. Perhaps she believed that they were Rosas’ henchmen, who had broken into the house.
I think back on the dead soldiers of Big Hill; I think of the nameless men of America and of Spain who met their deaths under the hooves of the horses; I think that the last victim of that throng of lances high on a Peruvian tableland was, more than a century later, a very old lady.