Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations (9 page)

Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth

(1949)

. . . like the spider, which builds itself a feeble house.

The Koran
, xxix, 40

“This,” said Dunraven with a sweeping gesture that did not fail to embrace the misty stars while it took in the bleak moor, the sea, the dunes, and an imposing, tumbledown building that somehow suggested a stable long since fallen into disrepair, “this is the land of my forebears.”

Unwin, his companion, drew the pipe out of his mouth and made some faint sounds of approval. It was the first summer evening of 1914; weary of a world that lacked the dignity of danger, the two friends set great value on these far reaches of Cornwall. Dunraven cultivated a dark beard and thought of himself as the author of a substantial epic, which his contemporaries would barely be able to scan and whose subject had not yet been revealed to him; Unwin had published a paper on the theory supposed to have been written by Fermat in the margin of a page of Diophantus. Both men—need it be said?—were young, dreamy, and passionate.

“It’s about a quarter of a century ago now,” said Dunraven, “that Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, chief or king of I don’t know what Nilotic tribe, died in the central room of this house at the hands of his cousin Zaid. After all these years, the facts surrounding his death are still unclear.”

Unwin, as was expected of him, asked why.

“For several reasons,” was the answer. “In the first place, this house is a labyrinth. In the second place, it was watched over by a slave and a lion. In the third place, a hidden treasure vanished. In the fourth place, the murderer was dead when the murder happened. In the fifth place—”

Tired out, Unwin stopped him.

“Don’t go on multiplying the mysteries,” he said. “They should be kept simple. Bear in mind Poe’s purloined letter, bear in mind Zangwill’s locked room.”

“Or made complex,” replied Dunraven. “Bear in mind the universe.”

Climbing the steep dunes, they had reached the labyrinth. It seemed to them, up close, a straight and almost endless wall of unplastered brick, barely higher than a man’s head. Dunraven said that the building had the shape of a circle, but so wide was this circle that its curve was almost invisible. Unwin recollected Nicholas of Cusa, to whom a straight line was the arc of an infinite circle. They walked on and on, and along about midnight discovered a narrow opening that led into a blind, unsafe passage. Dunraven said that inside the house were many branching ways but that, by turning always to the left, they would reach the very center of the network in little more than an hour. Unwin assented. Their cautious footsteps resounded off the stone-paved floor; the corridor branched into other, narrower corridors. The roof was very low, making the house seem to want to imprison them, and they had to walk one behind the other through the complex dark. Unwin went ahead, forced to slacken the pace because of the rough masonry and the many turns. The unseen wall flowed on by his hand, endlessly. Unwin, slow in the blackness, heard from his friend’s lips the tale of the death of Ibn Hakkan.

“Perhaps the oldest of my memories,” Dunraven said, “is the one of Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari in the port of Pentreath. At his heels followed a black man with a lion— unquestionably they were the first black man and the first lion my eyes had ever seen, outside of engravings from the Bible. I was a boy then, but the beast the color of the sun and the man the color of night impressed me less than Ibn Hakkan himself. To me, he seemed very tall; he was a man with sallow skin, half-shut black eyes, an insolent nose, fleshy lips, a saffron-colored beard, a powerful chest, and a way of walking that was self-assured and silent. At home, I said, ‘A king has come on a ship.’ Later, when the bricklayers were at work here, I broadened his title and dubbed him King of Babel.

“The news that this stranger would settle in Pentreath was received with welcome, but the scale and shape of his house aroused disapproval and bewilderment. It was not right that a house should consist of a single room and of miles and miles of corridors. ‘Among foreigners such houses might be common,’ people said, ‘but hardly here in England.’ Our rector, Mr. Allaby, a man with out-of-the-way reading habits, exhumed an Eastern story of a king whom the Divinity had punished for having built a labyrinth, and he told this story from the pulpit. The very next day, Ibn Hakkan paid a visit to the rectory; the circumstances of the brief interview were not known at the time, but no further sermon alluded to the sin of pride, and the Moor was able to go on contracting masons. Years afterward, when Ibn Hakkan was dead, Allaby stated to the authorities the substance of their conversation.

“Ibn Hakkan, refusing a chair, had told him these or similar words: ‘No man can place judgment upon what I am doing now. My sins are such that were I to invoke for hundreds upon hundreds of years the Ultimate Name of God, this would be powerless to set aside the least of my torments; my sins are such that were I to kill you, Reverend Allaby, with these very hands, my act would not increase even slightly the torments that Infinite Justice holds in store for me. There is no land on earth where my name is unknown. I am Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, and in my day I ruled over the tribes of the desert with a rod of iron. For years and years, with the help of my cousin Zaid, I trampled them underfoot until God heard their outcry and suffered them to rebel against me. My armies were broken and put to the sword; I succeeded in escaping with the wealth I had accumulated during my reign of plunder. Zaid led me to the tomb of a holy man, at the foot of a stone hill. I ordered my slave to watch the face of the desert. Zaid and I went inside with our chest of gold coins and slept, utterly worn out. That night, I believed that a tangle of snakes had trapped me. I woke up in horror. By my side, in the dawn, Zaid lay asleep; a spider web against my flesh had made me dream that dream. It pained me that Zaid, who was a coward, should be sleeping so restfully. I reflected that the wealth was not infinite and that Zaid might wish to claim part of it for himself. In my belt was my silver-handled dagger; I slipped it from its sheath and pierced his throat with it. In his agony, he muttered words I could not make out. I looked at him. He was dead, but, fearing that he might rise up, I ordered my slave to obliterate the dead man’s face with a heavy rock. Then we wandered under the sun, and one day we spied a sea. Very tall ships plowed a course through it. I thought that a dead man would be unable to make his way over such waters, and I decided to seek other lands. The first night after we sailed, I dreamed that I killed Zaid. Everything was exactly the same, but this time I understood his words. He said: “As you now kill me, I shall one day kill you, wherever you may hide.” I have sworn to avert that threat. I shall bury myself in the heart of a labyrinth so that Zaid
?
s
ghost will lose its way.’

“After having said this, he went away. Allaby did his best to think that the Moor was mad and that his absurd labyrinth was a symbol and a clear mark of his madness. Then he reflected that this explanation agreed with the extravagant building and with the extravagant story but not with the strong impression left by the man Ibn Hakkan.

Who knew whether such tales might not be common in the sand wastes of Egypt, who knew whether such queer things corresponded (like Pliny’s dragons) less to a person than to a culture? On a visit to London, Allaby combed back numbers of the
Times
; he verified the fact of the uprising and of the subsequent downfall of al-Bokhari and of his vizier, whose cowardice was well known.

“Al-Bokhari, as soon as the bricklayers had finished, installed himself in the center of the labyrinth. He was not seen again in the town; at times, Allaby feared that Zaid had caught up with the king and killed him. At night, the wind carried to us the growling of the lion, and the sheep in their pens pressed together with an ancient fear.

“It was customary for ships from Eastern ports, bound for Cardiff or Bristol, to anchor in the little bay. The slave used to go down from the labyrinth (which at that time, I remember, was not its present rose color but was crimson) and exchanged guttural-sounding words with the ships’ crews, and he seemed to be looking among the men for the vizier’s ghost. It was no secret that these vessels carried cargoes of contraband, and if of alcohol or of forbidden ivories, why not of dead men as well?

“Some three years after the house was finished, the
Rose of Sharon
anchored one October morning just under the bluffs. I was not among those who saw this sailing ship, and perhaps the image of it I hold in my mind is influenced by forgotten prints of Aboukir or of Trafalgar, but I believe it was among that class of ships so minutely detailed that they seem less the work of a shipbuilder than of a carpenter, and less of a carpenter than of a cabinetmaker. It was (if not in reality, at least in my dreams) polished, dark, fast, and silent, and its crew was made up of Arabs and Malayans.

“It anchored at dawn, and in the late afternoon of that same day Ibn Hakkan burst into the rectory to see Allaby. He was dominated—completely dominated—by a passion of fear, and was scarcely able to make it clear that Zaid had entered the labyrinth and that his slave and his lion had already been killed. He asked in all seriousness whether the authorities might be able to help him. Before Allaby could say a word, al-Bokhari was gone—as if torn away by the same terror that had brought him for the second and last time to the rectory. Alone in his library, Allaby reflected in amazement that this fear-ridden man had kept down Sudanese tribes by the knife, knew what a battle was, and knew what it was to kill. Allaby found out the next day that the boat had already set sail (bound for the Red Sea port of Suakin, he later learned). Feeling it was his duty to verify the death of the slave, he made his way up to the labyrinth. Al-Bokhari’s breathless tale seemed to him utterly fantastic, but at one turn of the corridor he came upon the lion, and the lion was dead, and at another turn there was the slave, who was also dead, and in the central room he found al-Bokhari—with his face obliterated. At the man’s feet was a small chest inlaid with mother-of-pearl; the lock had been forced, and not a single coin was left.”

Dunraven’s final sentences, underlined by rhetorical pauses, were meant to be impressive; Unwin guessed that his friend had gone over them many times before, always with the same confidence—and with the same flatness of effect. He asked, in order to feign interest, “How were the lion and the slave killed?”

The relentless voice went on with a kind of gloomy satisfaction, “Their faces were also bashed in.”

A muffled sound of rain was now added to the sound of the men’s steps. Unwin realized that they would have to spend the night in the labyrinth, in the central chamber, but that in time this uncomfortable experience could be looked back on as an adventure. He kept silent. Dunraven could not restrain himself, and asked, in the manner of one who wants to squeeze the last drop, “Can this story be explained?”

Unwin answered, as though thinking aloud, “I have no idea whether it can be explained or not. I only know it’s a lie.”

Dunraven broke out in a torrent of strongly flavored language and said that all the population of Pentreath could bear witness to the truth of what he had told and that if he had to make up a story, he was a writer after all and could easily have invented a far better one. No less astonished than Dunraven, Unwin apologized. Time in the darkness seemed more drawn out; both men began to fear they had gone astray, and were feeling their tiredness when a faint gleam of light from overhead revealed the lower steps of a narrow staircase. They climbed up and came to a round room that lay in ruin. Two things were left that attested to the fear of the ill-starred king: a slit of a window that looked out onto the moors and the sea, and a trapdoor in the floor that opened above the curve of the stairway. The room, though spacious, had about it something of a prison cell.

Less because of the rain than because of a wish to have a ready anecdote for friends, the two men spent the night in the labyrinth. The mathematician slept soundly; not so the poet, who was hounded by verses that his judgment knew to be worthless:

Faceless the sultry and overpowering lion, Faceless the stricken slave, faceless the king. 

Unwin felt that the story of al-Bokhari’s death had left him indifferent, but he woke up with the conviction of having unraveled it. All that day, he was preoccupied and unsociable, trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together, and two nights later he met Dunraven in a pub back in London and said to him these or similar words: “In Cornwall, I said your story was a lie. The
facts
were true, or could be thought of as true, but told the way you told them they were obviously lies. I will begin with the greatest lie of all—with the unbelievable labyrinth. A fugitive does not hide himself in a maze. He does not build himself a labyrinth on a bluff overlooking the sea, a crimson labyrinth that can be sighted from afar by any ship’s crew. He has no need to erect a labyrinth when the whole world already is one.

For anyone who really wants to hide away, London is a better labyrinth than a lookout tower to which all the corridors of a building lead. The simple observation I have just propounded to you came to me the night before last while we were listening to the rain on the roof and were waiting for sleep to fall upon us. Under its influence, I chose to put aside your absurdities and to think about something sensible.”