Part 1 (1/2)

COLLECTED FICTIONS.

Jorge Luis Borges.

Translated by Andrew Hurley.

A Universal History of Iniquity (1935).

I inscribe this book to S.D.-English, innumerable, and an Angel.

Also: I offer her that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow-the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams, and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.

Preface to the First Edition

The exercises in narrative prose that const.i.tute this book were performed from 1933 to 1934. They are derived, I think, from my rereadings of Steven- son and Chesterton, from the first films ofvon Sternberg,and perhaps from a particular biography of the Argentine poetEvaristo Carriego.*Certain techniques are overused: mismatched lists, abrupt transitions, the reduction of a person's entire life to two or three scenes. (It is this pictorial intention that also governs the story called ”Man on Pink Corner.”) The stories are not, nor do they attempt to be, psychological.

With regard to the examples of magic that close the book, the only right I can claim to them is that of translator and reader. I sometimes think that good readers are poets as singular, and as awesome, as great authors them- selves. No one will deny that the pieces attributed byValeryto his pluperfect MonsieurEdmond Testeare worth notoriously less than those of his wife and friends.

Reading, meanwhile, is an activity subsequent to writing-more re- signed, more civil, more intellectual.

J.L.B.

Buenos Aires May 27,1935

Preface to the 1954 Edition

I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. In vain did Andrew Lang attempt, in the eighteen-eighties, to imitate Pope'sOdyssey; it was already a parody, and so defeated the parodist's attempt to exaggerate its tautness.”Baroco” was a term used for one of the modes of syllogistic reasoning; the eighteenth century applied it to certain abuses in seventeenth-century architecture and painting. I would venture to say that the baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources. The baroque is intellectual, and Bernard Shaw has said that all in- tellectual labor is inherently humorous. This humor is unintentional in the works...o...b..ltasar Gradan*but intentional, even indulged, in the works of John Donne.The extravagant t.i.tle of this volume proclaims its baroque nature. Soft- ening its pages would have been equivalent to destroying them; that is why I have preferred, this once, to invoke the biblical wordsquod scripsi, scripsi (John 19:22), and simply reprint them, twenty years later, as they first ap- peared. They are the irresponsible sport of a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories, and so amused himself by changing and distorting (sometimes without aesthetic justification) the stories of other men. From these ambiguous exercises, he went on to the arduous composi- tion of a straightforward short story-”Man on Pink Corner”-which he signed with the name of one of his grandfather's grandfathers, FranciscoBustos;the story has had a remarkable, and quite mysterious, success.

In that text, which is written in the accents of the toughs and petty criminals of theBuenosAires underworld, the reader will note that I have interpolated a number of ”cultured” words -entrails, conversion , etc. I did this because the tough, the knife fighter, the thug, the type that Buenos Aires calls thecompadreorcompadrito,aspires to refinement, or (and this reason excludes the other, but it may be the true one) becausecompadresare individuals and don't always talk like TheCompadre,which is a Platonic ideal.

The learned doctors of the Great Vehicle teach us that the essential characteristic of the universe is its emptiness. They are certainly correct with respect to the tiny part of the universe that is this book.

Gallows and pirates fill its pages, and that wordiniquity strikes awe in its t.i.tle, but under all the storm and lightning, there is nothing. It is all just appearance, a sur- face of images-which is why readers may, perhaps, enjoy it. The man who made it was a pitiable sort of creature, but he found amus.e.m.e.nt in writing it; it is to be hoped that some echo of that pleasure may reach its readers.

In the section calledEtceteraI have added three new pieces.

J.L.B.

The Cruel RedeemerLazarusMorell

THE REMOTE CAUSE.

In 1517,Fray Bartolome de las Casas,feeling great pity for the Indians who grew worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean gold mines, proposed to Emperor Charles V that Negroes be brought to the isles of the Caribbean, so thatthey might grow worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean gold mines. To that odd variant on the speciesphilan- thropist we owe an infinitude of things:W.

C.Handy's blues; the success achieved in Paris by the Uruguayan attorney-painter PedroFigari*;the fine runaway-slave prose of the likewise Uruguayan Vicente Rossi*; the mytho- logical stature of Abraham Lincoln; the half-million dead of the War of Se- cession; the $3.3 billion spent on military pensions; the statue of the imaginary semblance of Antonio(Falucho)Ruiz*; the inclusion of the verb ”lynch” in respectable dictionaries; the impetuous King Vidor filmHallelu- jah; the stout bayonet charge of the regiment of ”Blacks and Tans” (the color of their skins, not their uniforms) against that famous hill near Monte- video*; the gracefulness of certain elegant young ladies; the black man who killedMartin Fierro;that deplorable rumbaThe Peanut-Seller; the arrested and imprisoned Napoleonism ofToussaintL'Ouverture;the cross and the serpent in Haiti; the blood of goats whose throats are slashed by thepapalois machete; thehabanera that is the mother of the tango; thecandombe.And yet another thing: the evil and magnificent existence of the cruel redeemer Lazarus Morell.*

THE PLACE.

The Father of Waters, the Mississippi, the grandest river in the world, was the worthy stage for the deedsofthatincomparable blackguard. (AlvarezdePineda discovered this great river, though it was first explored byHernando de Soto,conqueror of Peru, who whiled away his months in the prison of theInca Atahualpateaching his jailer chess. Whende Sotodied, the river's waters were his grave.) The Mississippi is a broad-chested river, a dark and infinite brother of theParana,the Uruguay, the Amazon, and the Orinoco. It is a river of mulatto-hued water; more than four hundred million tons of mud, carried by that water, insult the Gulf of Mexico each year. All that venerable and an- cient waste has created a delta where gigantic swamp cypresses grow from the slough of a continent in perpetualdissolution and where labyrinths of clay, dead fish, and swamp reeds push out the borders and extend the peace of their fetid empire. Upstream, Arkansas and Ohio have their bottom- lands, too, populated by a jaundiced and hungry-looking race, p.r.o.ne to fevers, whose eyes gleam at the sight of stone and iron, for they know only sand and driftwood and muddy water.

THE MEN.

In the early nineteenth century (the period that interests us) the vast cotton plantations on the riverbanks were worked from sunup to sundown by Ne- gro slaves. They slept in wooden cabins on dirt floors.

Apart from the mother-child relations.h.i.+p, kins.h.i.+p was conventional and murky; the slaves had given names, but not always surnames. They did not know how to read. Their soft falsetto voices sang an English of drawn-out vowels. They worked in rows, stooped under the overseer's lash. They would try to escape, and men with full beards would leap astride beautiful horses to hunt them down with baying dogs.

Onto an alluvium of beastlike hopefulness and African fear there had sifted the words of the Scripture; their faith, therefore, was Christian.Go down, Moses, they would sing, low and in unison. The Mississippi served them as a magnificent image of the sordid Jordan.

The owners of that hard-worked land and those bands of Negroes were idlers, greedy gentlemen with long hair who lived in wide-fronted mansions that looked out upon the river-their porches always pseudo-Greek with columns made of soft white pine. Good slaves cost a thousand dollars, b.u.t.they didn't last long. Some were so ungrateful as to sicken and die. A man had to get the most he could out of such uncertain investments. That was why the slaves were in the fields from sunup to sundown; that was why the fields were made to yield up their cotton or tobacco or sugarcane every year. The female soil, worn and haggard from bearing that impatient culture's get, was left barren within a few years, and a formless, clayey desert crept into the plantations.

On broken-down farms, on the outskirts of the cities, in dense fields of sugarcane, and on abject mud flats lived the ”poor whites”; they were fisher- men, sometime hunters, horse thieves. They would sometimes even beg pieces of stolen food from the Negroes. And yet in their prostration they held one point of pride-their blood, untainted by ”the cross of color” and unmixed. Lazarus Morell was one of these men.

THE MAN.

The daguerreotypes printed in American magazines are not actually of Morell. That absence of a genuine likeness of a man as memorable and fa- mous as Morell cannot be coincidental. It is probably safe to a.s.sume that Morell refused to sit for the silvered plate-essentially, so as to leave no pointless traces; incidentally, so as to enhance his mystery.... We do know, however, that he was not particularly good-looking as a young man and that his close-set eyes and thin lips did not conspire in his favor. The years, as time went on, imparted to him that peculiar majesty that white-haired blackguards, successful (and unpunished) criminals, seem generally to pos- sess. He was a Southern gentleman of the old school, in spite of his impov- erished childhood and his shameful life. He was not ignorant of the Scriptures, and he preached with singular conviction. ”I once saw Lazarus Morell in the pulpit,” wrote the owner of a gambling house in Baton Rouge, ”and I heard his edifying words and saw the tears come to his eyes. I knew he was a fornicator, a n.i.g.g.e.r-stealer, and a murderer in the sight of the Lord, but tears came to my eyes too.”

Another testimony to those holy outpourings is provided by Morell himself: ”I opened the Bible at random, put my finger on the first verse that came to hand-St. Paul it was-and preached for an hour and twenty min- utes. Crenshaw and the boys didn't put that time to bad use, neither, for they rounded up all the folks' horses and made off with 'em. We sold 'em in the state of Arkansas, all but one bay stallion, the most spirited thing youever laid eyes on, that I kept for myself. Crenshaw had his eye on that horse, too, but I convinced him it warn't the horse for him.”

THE METHODHorses stolen in one state and sold in another were but the merest digres- sion in Morell's criminal career, but they did prefigure the method that would a.s.sure him his place in a Universal History of Iniquity. His method was unique not only because of thesuigeneriscirc.u.mstances that shaped it, but also because of the depravity it required, its vile manipulation of trust, and its gradual evolution, like the terrifying unfolding of a nightmare.Al Caponeand BugsMoranoperate with lavish capital and subservient ma- chine guns in a great city, but their business is vulgar. They fight for a mo- nopoly, and that is the extent of it....

In terms of numbers, Morell at one time could command more than a thousand sworn confederates.

There were two hundred in the Heads, or General Council, and it was the Heads that gave the orders that the other eight hundred followed. These ”strikers,” as they were called, ran all the risk. If they stepped out of line, they would be handed over to the law or a rock would be tied to their feet and their bodies would be sunk in the swirling waters of the river. Often, these men were mulattoes. Their wicked mission was this: In a momentary wealth of gold and silver rings, to inspire respect, they would roam the vast plantations of the South. They would choose some wretched black man and offer him his freedom. They would tell him that if he'd run away from his master and allow them to resell him on another plantation far away, they would give him a share of the money and help him escape a second time. Then, they said, they'd convey him to free soil.... Money and freedom-ringing silver dollars and freedom to boot-what greater temptation could they hold out to him? The slave would work up the courage for his first escape.

The river was a natural highway. A canoe, the hold of a riverboat, a barge, a raft as big as the sky with a pilothouse on the bow or with a roof of canvas sheeting ... the place didn't matter; what mattered was knowing that you were moving, and that you were safe on the unwearying river.... They would sell him on another plantation. He would run away again, to the sugarcane fields or the gullies. And it would be then that the fearsome and terrible benefactors (whom he was beginning to distrust by now) would bring up obscure ”expenses” and tell him they had to sell him onelast time. When he escaped the next time, they told him, they'd give him his percentage of the two sales, and his liberty. The man would let himself be sold, he would work for a while, and then he would risk the dogs and whips and try to escape on his own. He would be brought back b.l.o.o.d.y, sweaty, desperate, and tired.