Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (62 page)
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Authors: Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N.T. di Giovanni)
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The Carbuncle
In mineralogy the carbuncle, from the Latin
carbunculus
, ‘a little coal’, is a ruby; as to the carbuncle of the ancients, it is supposed to have been a garnet.
In sixteenth-century South America, the name was given by the Spanish conquistadors to a mysterious animal mysterious because nobody ever saw it well enough to know whether it was a bird or a mammal, whether it had feathers or fur. The poet-priest Martín del Barco Centenera, who claims to have seen it in Paraguay, describes it in his Argentina (1602) only as ‘a smallish animal, with a shining mirror on its head, like a glowing coal . . .’ Another conquistador, Gonzalo Fernández del Oviedo, associates this mirror or light shining out of the darkness two of which he glimpsed in the Strait of Magellan with the precious stone that dragons were thought to have hidden in their brain. He took his knowledge from Isidore of Seville, who wrote in his
Etymologies
:
it is taken from the dragon’s brain but does not harden into a gem unless the head is cut from the living beast; wizards, for this reason, cut the heads from sleeping dragons. Men bold enough to venture into dragon lairs scatter grain that has been doctored to make these beasts drowsy, and when they have fallen asleep their heads are struck off and the gems plucked out.
Here we are reminded of Shakespeare’s toad (
As You Like It
, II, i), which, though ‘ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head . . .’
Possession of the Carbuncle’s jewel offered fortune and luck. Barco Centenera underwent many hardships hunting the reaches of Paraguayan rivers and jungles for the elusive creature; he never found it. Down to this day we know nothing more about the beast and its secret head stone.
The Catoblepas
Pliny (VIII, 32), relates that somewhere on the borders of Ethiopia, near the head of the Nile, there is found a wild beast called the catoblepas; an animal of moderate size, and in other respects sluggish in the movement of the rest of its limbs; its head is remarkably heavy, and it only carries it with the greatest difficulty, being always bent down towards the earth. Were it not for this circumstance, it would prove the destruction of the human race; for all who behold its eyes, fall dead upon the spot.
Catoblepas, in Greek, means ‘that which looks downward’. The French naturalist Cuvier has conjectured that the gnu (contaminated by the basilisk and the gorgon) suggested the Catoblepas to the ancients. At the close of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Flaubert describes it and has it speak in this way:
black buffalo with the head of a hog, hanging close to the ground, joined to its body by a thin neck, long and loose as an emptied intestine. It wallows in the mud, and its legs are smothered under the huge mane of stiff bristles that hide its face.
‘Obese, downhearted, wary, I do nothing but feel under my belly the warm mud. My head is so heavy that I cannot bear its weight. I wind it slowly around my body; with half-open jaws, I pull up with my tongue poisonous plants dampened by my breath. Once, I ate up my forelegs unawares.
‘No one, Anthony, has ever seen my eyes; or else, those who have seen them have died. If I were to lift my eyelids my pink and swollen eyelids you would die on the spot.’
The Celestial Stag
We know absolutely nothing about the appearance of the Celestial Stag (maybe because nobody has ever had a good look at one), but we do know that these tragic animals live underground in mines and desire nothing more than to reach the light of day. They have the power of speech and implore the miners to help them to the surface. At first, a Celestial Stag attempts to bribe the workmen with the promise of revealing hidden veins of silver and gold; when this gambit fails, the beast becomes troublesome and the miners are forced to overpower it and wall it up in one of the mine galleries. It is also rumoured that miners outnumbered by the Stags have been tortured to death.
Legend has it that if the Celestial Stag finds its way into the open air, it becomes a foul-smelling liquid that can breed death and pestilence. The tale is from China and is recorded by G. Willoughby-Meade in his book
Chinese Ghouls and Goblins
.
The Centaur
The Centaur is the most harmonious creature of fantastic zoology. ‘Biform’ it is called in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, but its heterogeneous character is easily overlooked, and we tend to think that in the Platonic world of ideas there is an archetype of the Centaur as there is of the horse or the man. The discovery of this archetype took centuries; early archaic monuments show a naked man to whose waist the body and hind quarters of a horse are uncomfortably fixed. On the west façade of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, the Centaurs already stand on the legs of a horse, and from the place where the animal’s neck should start we find a human torso.
Centaurs were the offspring of Ixion, a king of Thessaly, and a cloud which Zeus had given the shape of Hera (or Juno); another version of the legend asserts that they were the offspring of Centaurus, Apollo’s son, and Stilbia; a third, that they were the fruit of a union of Centaurus with the mares of Magnesium. (It is said that centaur is derived from gandharva
;
in Vedic myth, the Gandharvas are minor gods who drive the horses of the sun.) Since the art of riding was unknown to the Greeks of Homeric times, it has been conjectured that the first Scythian horseman they came across seemed to them all one with his horse, and it has also been alleged that the cavalry of the conquistadors were Centaurs to the Indians. A text quoted by Prescott runs as follows:
One of the riders fell off his horse; and the Indians, seeing the animal fall asunder, up to now having deemed the beast all one, were so filled with terror that they turned and fled, crying out to their comrades that the animal had made itself into two and wondering at this: wherein we may detect the secret hand of God; since, had this not happened, they might have slaughtered all the Christians.
But the Greeks, unlike the Indians, were familiar with the horse; it is more likely that the Centaur was a deliberate invention and not a confusion born of ignorance.
The best known of the Centaur fables is the one in which they battle with the Lapiths followed a quarrel at a marriage celebration. To the Centaurs wine was now a new experience; in the midst of the banqueting an intoxicated Centaur insulted the bride and, overturning the tables, started the famous Centauromachy that Phidias, or a disciple of his, would carve on the Parthenon, that Ovid would commemorate in Book XII of the Metamorphoses, and that would inspire Rubens. Defeated by the Lapiths, the Centaurs were forced to leave Thessaly. Hercules, in a second encounter with them, all but annihilated the race of Centaurs with his arrows.
Anger and rustic barbarism are symbolized in the Centaur, but Chiron, ‘the most righteous of the Centaurs’ (
Iliad
, XI, 832), was the teacher of Achilles and Aesculapius, whom he instructed in the arts of music, hunting, and war, as well as medicine and surgery. Chiron stands out in Canto XII of the Inferno, generally known as the ‘Canto of the Centaurs’. The acute observations of Momigliano in his 1945 edition of the Commedia should interest the curious.
Pliny (VII, 3) says he saw a Hippocentaur embalmed in honey that had been brought to Rome from Egypt in the reign of Claudius.
In the ‘Feast of the Seven Sages’, Plutarch humorously tells that one of the shepherds of Periander, a tyrant of Corinth, brought his master, in a leather pouch, a newborn creature that a mare had given birth to and whose face, neck, and arms were human while its body was that of a horse. It cried like a baby, and everyone thought it to be a frightening omen. The sage Thales examined it, chuckled, and said to Periander that really he could not approve his herdsmen’s conduct.
In Book V of his poem
De rerum natura
, Lucretius declares the Centaur impossible since the equine species reaches maturity before the human, and at the age of three the Centaur would be a full-grown horse and a babbling child. The horse would die fifty years before the man.
Cerberus
If Hell is a house, the house of Hades, it is natural that it have its watchdog; it is also natural that this dog be fearful. Hesiod’s Theogony gives it fifty heads; to make things easier for the plastic arts, this number has been reduced and Cerberus’ three heads are now a matter of public record. Virgil speaks of its three throats; Ovid of its threefold bark; Butler compares the triple-crowned tiara of the Pope, who is Heaven’s doorman, with the three heads of the dog who is the doorman of Hell (
Hudibras
, IV, 2). Dante lends it human characteristics which increase its infernal nature: a filthy black beard, clawed hands that in the lashing rain rip at the souls of the damned. It bites, barks, and bares its teeth.
Bringing Cerberus up into the light of day was the last of Hercules’ tasks. (‘He drow out Cerberus, the hound of helle,’ writes Chaucer in ‘The Monke’s Tale’.) Zachary Grey, an English writer of the eighteenth century, in his commentary on Hudibras interprets the adventure in this way:
This Dog with three Heads denotes the past, the present, and the Time to come; which receive, and, as it were, devour all things. Hercules got the better of him, which shews that heroick Actions are always victorious over Time, because they are present in the Memory of Posterity.
According to the oldest texts, Cerberus greets with his tail (which is a serpent) those entering into Hell, and tears to pieces those who try to get out. A later legend has him biting the newly arrived; to appease him a honeycake was placed in the coffin of the departed.
In Norse mythology, a blood-spattered dog, Garmr, keeps watch over the house of the dead and will fight against the gods when hell’s wolves devour the moon and sun. Some give this dog four eyes; the dogs of Yama, the Brahman god of death, also have four eyes.
Both Brahmanism and Buddhism offer hells full of dogs, which, like Dante’s Cerberus, are torturers of souls.