Part 8 (1/2)

Funes,HisMemory*

I recall him (though I have no right to speak that sacred verb-only one man on earth did, and that man is dead) holding a dark pa.s.sionflower in his hand, seeing it as it had never been seen, even had it been stared at from the first light of dawn till the last light of evening for an entire life- time. I recall him-his taciturn face, its Indian features, its extraordinaryremoteness -behind the cigarette. I recall (I think) the slender, leather-braider's fingers. I recall near those hands amate cup, with the coat of arms of theBandaOriental.* I recall, in the window of his house, a yellow straw blind with some vague painted lake scene. I clearly recall his voice-the slow, resentful, nasal voice of the toughs of those days, without the Italian sibilants one hears today. I saw him no more than three times, the last timein 1887___I applaud the idea that all of us who had dealings with the man should write something about him; my testimony will perhaps be the briefest (and certainly the slightest) account in the volume that you are to publish, but it can hardly be the least impartial. Unfortunately I am Argen- tine, and so congenitally unable to produce the dithyramb that is the obligatory genre in Uruguay, especially when the subject is an Uruguayan.Highbrow, dandy, city slicker -Funesdid not utter those insulting words, but I know with reasonable certainty that to him I represented those mis- fortunes.

PedroLeandroIpuche* has written thatFuneswas a precursor of the race of supermen-”a maverick and vernacular Zarathustra”-and I will not argue the point, but one must not forget that he was also a street tough from FrayBentos,with certain incorrigible limitations.

My first recollection ofFunesis quite clear. I see him one afternoon in March or February of '84. That year, my father had taken me to spend the summer in FrayBentos.*I was coming back from the ranch in San Franciscowith my cousin Bernardo Haedo. We were riding along on our horses, singing merrily- and being on horseback was not the only reason for my cheerfulness. After a sultry day, a huge slate-colored storm, fanned by the south wind, had curtained the sky. The wind flailed the trees wildly, and I was filled with the fear (the hope) that we would be surprised in the open countryside by the elemental water. We ran a kind of race against the storm. We turned into the deep bed of a narrow street that ran between two brick sidewalks built high up off the ground. It had suddenly got dark; I heard quick, almost secret footsteps above me-I raised my eyes and saw a boy running along the narrow, broken sidewalk high above, as though running along the top of a narrow, broken wall. I recall the short, baggy trousers- like a gaucho's-that he wore, the straw-soled cotton slippers, the cigarette in the hard visage, all stark against the now limitless storm cloud. Unex- pectedly, Bernardo shouted out tohim-What's the time, Ireneo?Without consulting the sky, without a second's pause, the boy replied, Four minutes till eight, young Bernardo Juan Francisco. The voice was shrill and mocking.

I am so absentminded that I would never have given a second thought to the exchange I've just reported had my attention not been called to it by my cousin, who was prompted by a certain local pride and the desire to seem unfazed by the other boy's trinomial response.

He told me that the boy in the narrow street was one IreneoFunes,and that he was known for certain eccentricities, among them shying away from people and always knowing what time it was, like a clock.

He added that Ireneo was the son of a village ironing woman, Maria ClementinaFunes,and that while some people said his father was a doctor in the salting house (an Englishman named O'Connor), others said he broke horses or drove oxcarts for a living over in the department ofSalto.The boy lived with his mother, my cousin told me, around the corner from VillaLos Laureles.

In '85 and '86, we spent the summer in Montevideo; it was not until '87 that I returned to FrayBentos.Naturally, I asked about everybody I knew, and finally about ”chronometricFunes.”I was told he'd been bucked off a half-broken horse on the ranch in San Francisco and had been left hope- lessly crippled. I recall the sensation of unsettling magic that this news gave me: The only time I'd seen him, we'd been coming home on horseback from the ranch in San Francisco, and he had been walking along a high place. This new event, told by my cousin Bernardo, struck me as very much like a dream confected out of elements of the past. I was told thatFunesnever stirred from his cot, his eyes fixed on the fig tree behind the house or ona spiderweb.At dusk, he would let himself be carried to the window.

Hewas such a proud young man that he pretended that his disastrous fall had actually been fortunate-----Twice I saw him, on his cot behind the iron-barred window that crudely underscored his prisonerlike state-once lying motionless, with his eyes closed; the second time motionless as well, ab- sorbed in the contemplation of a fragrant switch ofartemisia.

It was not without some self-importance that about that same time I had embarked upon a systematic study of Latin. In my suitcase I had brought with me Lh.o.m.ond'sDe virisill.u.s.tribus,Quicherat's Thesaurus, Julius Caesar's commentaries, and an odd-numbered volume of Pliny'sNaturalis.h.i.+storia- a work which exceeded (and still exceeds) my modest abilities asa Latinist.There are no secrets in a small town; Ireneo, in his house on the outskirts of the town, soon learned of the arrival of those out- landish books. He sent me a flowery, sententious letter, reminding me of our ”lamentably ephemeral”

meeting ”on the seventh of February, 1884.” He dwelt briefly, elegiacally, on the ”glorious services” that my uncle,GregorioHaedo, who had died that same year, ”had rendered to his two motherlands in the valiant Battle of Ituzaingo,” and then he begged that I lend him one of the books I had brought, along with a dictionary ”for a full understanding of the text, since I must plead ignorance of Latin.” He promised to return the books to me in good condition, and ”straightway.” The penmans.h.i.+p was perfect, the letters exceptionally well formed; the spelling was that recom- mended byAndresBello:ifory, jforg.At first, of course, I thought it was some sort of joke. My cousins a.s.sured me it was not, that this ”was just... just Ireneo.” I didn't know whether to attribute to brazen conceit, igno- rance, or stupidity the idea that hard-won Latin needed no more teaching than a dictionary could give; in order to fully disabuseFunes,I sent him Quicherat'sGradus ad Parna.s.sum and the Pliny.

On February 14,1 received a telegram from Buenos Aires urging me to return home immediately; my father was ”not at all well.” G.o.d forgive me, but the prestige of being the recipient of an urgent telegram, the desire to communicate to all of FrayBentosthe contradiction between the negative form of the news and the absoluteness of the adverbial phrase, the tempta- tion to dramatize my grief by feigning a virile stoicism-all this perhaps distracted me from any possibility of real pain. As I packed my bag, I real- ized that I didn't have theGradus ad Parna.s.sum and the first volume of Pliny. TheSaturn was to sail the next morning; that evening, after dinner, I walked over toFunes'house. I was amazed that the evening was no less op- pressive than the day had been.

At the honest little house,Funes'mother opened the door.

She told me that Ireneo was in the back room. I shouldn't be surprised if I found the room dark, she told me, since Ireneo often spent his off hours without lighting the candle. I walked across the tiled patio and down the lit- tle hallway farther on, and came to the second patio. There was a grapevine; the darknessseemed to me virtually total. Then suddenly I heard Ireneo's high, mocking voice. The voice was speaking Latin; with morbid pleasure, the voice emerging from the shadows was reciting a speech or a prayer or an incantation. The Roman syllables echoed in the patio of hard-packed earth; my trepidation made me think them incomprehensible, and endless; later, during the enormous conversation of that night, I learned they were the first paragraph of the twenty-fourth chapter of the seventh book of Pliny's Naturalis.h.i.+storia.The subject of that chapter is memory; the last words wereut nihil non iisdemverbis redderetur auditum.

Without the slightest change of voice, Ireneo told me to come in. He was lying on his cot, smoking. I don't think I saw his face until the sun came up the next morning; when I look back, I believe I recall the momentary glow of his cigarette. His room smelled vaguely musty. I sat down; I told him about my telegram and my father's illness.

I come now to the most difficult point in my story, a story whose onlyraison d'etre(asmy readers should be told from the outset) is that dialogue half a century ago. I will not attempt to reproduce the words of it, which are now forever irrecoverable. Instead, I will summarize, faithfully, the many things Ireneo told me. Indirect discourse is distant and weak; I know that I am sacrificing the effectiveness of my tale. I only ask that my readers try to hear in their imagination the broken and staccato periods that astounded me that night.

Ireneo began by enumerating, in both Latin and Spanish, the cases of prodigious memory cataloged in the Naturalis.h.i.+storia:Cyrus, the king of Persia, who could call all the soldiers in his armies by name; Mithridates Eupator, who meted out justice in the twenty-two languages of the king- dom over which he ruled; Simonides, the inventor of the art of memory; Metrodorus, who was able faithfully to repeat what he had heard, though it be but once. With obvious sincerity, Ireneo said he was amazed that such cases were thought to be amazing. He told me that before that rainy after- noon when the blue roan had bucked him off, he had been what every man was-blind, deaf, befuddled, and virtually devoid of memory. (I tried to re- mind him how precise his perception of time, his memory for proper names had been-he ignored me.) He had lived, he said, for nineteen years as though in a dream: he looked without seeing, heard without listening,forgot everything, or virtually everything. When he fell, he'd been knocked unconscious; when he came to again, the present was so rich, so clear, that it was almost unbearable, as were his oldest and even his most trivial memo- ries. It was shortly afterward that he learned he was crippled; of that fact he hardly took notice. He reasoned (or felt) that immobility was a small price to pay. Now his perception and his memory were perfect.

With one quick look, you and I perceive three winegla.s.ses on a table;Funesperceived every grape that had been pressed into the wine and all the stalks and tendrils of its vineyard. He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30,1882, and he could compare them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once, or with the feathers of spray lifted by an oar on the Rio Negro on the eve of the Battle of Quebracho. Nor were those memories simple- every visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, and so on. He was able to reconstruct every dream, every daydream he had ever had. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day; he had never once erred or faltered, but each reconstruction had itself taken an entire day.”I, myself, alone, have more memories than all mankind since the world began,” he said to me. And also:”My dreams are like other people's waking hours.” And again, toward dawn:”My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap.” A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a rhombus-all these are forms we can fully intuit; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a young colt, a small herd of cattle on a mountainside, a flickering fire and its uncountable ashes, and the many faces of a dead man at a wake. I have no idea how many stars he saw in the sky.

Those are the things he told me; neither then nor later have I ever doubted them. At that time there were no cinematographers, no phono- graphs; it nevertheless strikes me as implausible, even incredible, that no one ever performed an experiment withFunes.But then, all our lives we postpone everything that can be postponed; perhaps we all have the cer- tainty, deep inside, that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do everything, know all there is to know.

The voice ofFunes,from the darkness, went on talking.He told me that in 1886 he had invented a numbering system original with himself, and that within a very few days he had pa.s.sed the twenty-four thousand mark. He had not written it down, since anything he thought, even once, remained ineradicably with him. His original motivation, I think, was his irritation that the thirty-three Uruguayan patriots* should require two figures and three words rather than a single figure, a singleword. He then applied this mad principle to the other numbers. Instead of seven thousand thirteen (7013), he would say, for instance,”Maximo Perez”;instead of seven thousand fourteen (7014), ”the railroad”; other numbers were”Luis MelianLafinur,” ”Olimar,” ”sulfur,” ”clubs,” ”the whale,” ”gas,” ”a stewpot,” ”Napoleon,””Agustin de Vedia.”Instead of five hundred (500), he said ”nine.” Every word had a particular figure attached to it, a sort of marker; the later ones were extremely complicated-----I tried to explain to Funesthat his rhapsody of unconnected words was exactly the opposite of a numbersystem. I told him that when one said ”365” one said ”three hun- dreds, six tens, and five ones,” a breakdown impossible with the ”numbers”n.i.g.g.e.rTimoteoora ponchoful of meat.Funeseither could not or would not understand me.

In the seventeenth century, Locke postulated (and condemned) an im- possible language in which each individual thing-every stone, every bird, every branch-would have its own name;Funes oncecontemplated a simi- lar language, but discarded the idea as too general, too ambiguous. The truth was,Funesremembered not only every leaf of every tree in every patch of forest, but every time he had perceived or imagined that leaf. He resolved to reduce every one of his past days to some seventy thousand rec- ollections, which he would then define by numbers. Two considerations dissuaded him: the realization that the task was interminable, and the real- ization that it was pointless. He saw that by the time he died he would still not have finished cla.s.sifying all the memories of his childhood.

The two projects I have mentioned (an infinite vocabulary for the natu- ral series of numbers, and a pointless mental catalog of all the images of his memory) are foolish, even preposterous, but they reveal a certain halting grandeur. They allow us to glimpse, or to infer, the dizzying world thatFuneslived in.Funes,we must not forget, was virtually incapable of gen- eral, platonic ideas. Not only was it difficult for him to see that the generic symbol ”dog” took in all the dissimilar individuals of all shapes and sizes, it irritated him that the ”dog” of three-fourteen in the afternoon, seen in pro- file, should be indicated by the same noun as the dog of three-fifteen, seen frontally. His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them. Swift wrote that the emperor ofLilliputcould perceive the movement of the minute hand of a clock;Funescould continually per- ceive the quiet advances of corruption, of tooth decay, of weariness. He saw-henoticed -the progress of death, of humidity. He was the solitary, lucid spectator of a multiform, momentaneous, and almost unbearably pre- cise world.

Babylon, London, and New York dazzle mankind's imaginationwith their fierce splendor; no one in the populous towers or urgent avenues of those cities has ever felt the heat and pressure of a reality as inexhaustible as that which battered Ireneo, day and night, in his poor South American hinterland. It was hard for him to sleep. To sleep is to take one's mind from the world;Funes,lying on his back on his cot, in the dimness of his room, could picture every crack in the wall, every molding of the precise houses that surrounded him. (I repeat that the most trivial of his memories was more detailed, more vivid than our own perception of a physical pleasure or a physical torment.) Off toward the east, in an area that had not yet been cut up into city blocks, there were new houses, unfamiliar to Ireneo. He pic- tured them to himself as black, compact, made of h.o.m.ogeneous shadow; he would turn his head in that direction to sleep. He would also imagine himself at the bottom of a river, rocked (and negated) by the current.

He had effortlessly learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I sus- pect, nevertheless, that he was not very good at thinking. To think is to ig- nore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract. In the teeming world of IreneoFunesthere was nothing but particulars-and they were virtuallyimmediate particulars.

The leery light of dawn entered the patio of packed earth.

It was then that I saw the face that belonged to the voice that had been talking all night long. Ireneo was nineteen, he had been born in 1868; he looked to me as monumental as bronze-older than Egypt, older than the prophecies and the pyramids. I was struck by the thought that every word I spoke, everyexpression of my face or motion of my hand would endure in his implacable memory; I was rendered clumsy by the fear of making point- less gestures.

IreneoFunesdied in 1889 of pulmonary congestion.

The Shape of the Sword

His face was traversed by a vengeful scar, an ashen and almost perfect arc that sliced from the temple on one side of his head to his cheek on the other. His true name does not matter; everyone inTacuarembocalled him ”the Englishman atLa Colorada.”The owner of the land, Cardoso, hadn't wanted to sell it; I heard that the Englishman plied him with an argument no one could have foreseen-he told him the secret history of the scar. He had come from the border, from Rio Grande doSul;there were those who said that over in Brazil he had been a smuggler. The fields had gone to gra.s.s, the water was bitter; to put things to right, the Englishman worked shoulder to shoulder with his peons. People say he was harsh to the point of cruelty, but scrupulously fair. They also say he liked his drink; once or twice a year he would shut himself up in the room in the belvedere, and two or three days later he would emerge as though from a battle or a spell of dizziness-pale, shaking, befuddled, and as authoritarian as ever. I recall his glacial eyes, his lean energy, his gray mustache. He was standoffish; the fact is, his Spanish was rudimentary, and tainted with the accents of Brazil. Aside from the oc- casional business letter or pamphlet, he got no mail.

The last time I made a trip through the northern provinces, high water along theCaraguataforced me to spend the night atLa Colorada.Within a few minutes I thought I sensed that my showing up that way was somehow inopportune. I tried to ingratiate myself with the Englishman, and to do so I seized upon patriotism, that least discerning of pa.s.sions. I remarked that a country with England's spirit was invincible. My interlocutor nodded, but added with a smile that he wasn't English-he was Irish, from Dungarvan. That said, he stopped, as though he had let slip a secret.

We went outside after dinner to have a look at the sky. The clouds hadcleared away, but far off behind the sharp peaks, the southern sky, creviced and split with lightning, threatened another storm. Back in the dilapidated dining room, the peon who'd served dinner brought out a bottle of rum. We drank for a long time, in silence.

I am not sure what time it was when I realized that I was drunk; I don't know what inspiration or elation or boredom led me to remark on my host's scar. His face froze; for several seconds I thought he was going to eject me from the house. But at last, his voice perfectly ordinary, he said to me: ”I will tell you the story of my scar under one condition-that no con- tempt or condemnation be withheld, no mitigation for any iniquity be pleaded.”

I agreed. This is the story he told, his English interspersed with Spanish, and even with Portuguese: In 1922, in one of the cities of Connaught, I was one of the many young men who were conspiring to win Ireland's independence. Of my companions there, some are still living, working for peace; others, paradoxically, are fighting under English colours, at sea or in the desert; one, the best of us all, was shot at dawn in the courtyard of a prison, executed by men filled with dreams; others (and not the least fortunate, either) met their fate in the anonymous, virtually secret battles of the civil war. We were Republicans and Catholics; we were, I suspect, romantics. For us, Ireland was not just the Utopian future and the unbearable present; it was a bitter yet loving mythology, it was the circular towers and red bogs, it was the repudiation of Parnell, and it was the grand epics that sing the theft of bulls that were he - roes in an earlier incarnation, and in other incarnations fish, and moun- tains. ... One evening I shall never forget, there came to us a man, one of our own, fromMunster-a man called John Vincent Moon.

He couldn't have been more than twenty. He was thin yet slack-muscled, all at once-he gave the uncomfortable impression of being an inverte- brate. He had studied, ardently and with some vanity, virtually every page of one of those Communist manuals; he would haul out his dialectical ma- terialism to cut off any argument. There are infinite reasons a man may have for hating or loving another man; Moon reduced the history of the world to one sordid economic conflict. He declared that the Revolution wasforeordained to triumph. I replied that onlylost causes were of any interest to a gentleman.... Night had fallen; we pursued our cross-purposes in the hallway, down the stairs, then through the vague streets.

The verdicts Moon handed down impressed me considerably less than the sense ofunappealable and absolute truth with which he issued them. The new com- rade did not argue, he did not debate-he p.r.o.nounced judgement, contemp- tuously and, to a degree, wrathfully.

As we came to the last houses of the city that night, we were stupefied by the sudden sound of gunfire.

(Before this, or afterward, we skirted the blind wall of a factory or a gaol.) We turned down a dirt street; a soldier, huge in the glare, burst out of a torched cottage. He shouted at us to halt. I started walking faster; my comrade did not follow me. I turned around- John Vincent Moon was standing as motionless as a rabbit caught in one's headlights-eternalized, somehow, by terror. I ran back, floored the soldier with a single blow, shook Vincent Moon, cursed him, and ordered him to come with me. I had to take him by the arm; the pa.s.sion of fear had stripped him of all will. But then we did run-we fled through the conflagration-riddled night. A burst of rifle fire came our way, and a bullet grazed Moon's right shoulder; as we fled through the pine trees, a weak sob racked his breast.

In that autumn of 1922 I had gone more or less underground, and was living in General Berkeley's country house. The general (whom I had never seen) was at that time posted to some administrative position or other out in Bengal; the house was less than a hundred years old but it was gloomy and dilapidated and filled with perplexing corridors and pointless an- techambers. The museum-cabinet and huge library arrogated to themselves the entire lower floor-there were the controversial and incompatible books that are somehow the history of the nineteenth century; there were scimitars from Nishapur, in whose frozen crescents the wind and violence of battle seemed to be living on. We entered the house (I think I recall) through the rear. Moon, shaking, his mouth dry, mumbled that the events of the night had been ”interesting”; I salved and bandaged him, then brought him a cup of tea. The wound was superficial. Suddenly, puzzled, he stammered: ”You took a terrible chance, coming back to save me like that.”

I told him it was nothing. (It was the habit of civil war that impelled me to act as I acted; besides, the imprisonment of a single one of us could im- peril the entire cause.) The next day, Moon had recovered his composure. He accepted a ciga- rette and subjected me to a harsh interrogation as to the ”financial resources of our revolutionary party.” His questions were quite lucid; I told him (truthfully) that the situation was grave. Deep rumblings of gunfire trou- bled the peace of the south. I told Moon that our comrades were waiting forus. My overcoat and revolver were up in my room; when I returned, I found Moon lying on the sofa, his eyes closed. He thought he had a fever; he pleaded a painful spasm in his shoulder.

It was then that I realized he was a hopeless coward. I clumsily told him to take care of himself, then left.

I was embarra.s.sed by the man and his fear, shamed by him, as though I myself were the coward, not Vincent Moon. Whatsoever one man does, it is as though all men did it. That is why it is not unfair that a single act of disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; that is why it is not unfair that a single Jew's crucifixion should be enough to save it. Schopenhauer may have been right-I am other men, any man is all men, Shakespeare is somehow the wretched John Vincent Moon.

We spent nine days in the general's great house. Of the agonies and the rays of light of that dark war I shall say nothing; my purpose is to tell the story of this scar that affronts me. In my memory, those nine days form a single day-except for the next to last, when our men stormed a barracks and avenged, life for life, our sixteen comrades fallen to the machine guns at Elphin. I would slip out of the house about dawn, in the blurred confusion of first light. I would be back toward nightfall. My comrade would be wait - ing for me upstairs; his wound would not allow him to come down. When I look back, I see him with some book of strategy in his hand-F. N.Maude, or Clausewitz. ”The weapon of preference for me,” he confessed to me one night, ”is artillery.” He enquired into our plans; he enjoyed criticizing or re- thinking them. He was also much given to deploring ”our woeful financial base”; dogmatically and sombrely he would prophesy the disastrous end.”C'est uneaffaireflambee,”he would mutter. To shcw that his physical cow- ardice was a matter of indifference to him, he made a great display of men- tal arrogance.