Part 31 (1/2)

”Don't you realize that the first thing to find out is whether there is only one man dreaming, or two men dreaming each other?”

”I amBorges.I saw your name in the register and I came upstairs.”

”But I amBorges,and I am dying in a house onCalle Maipu.”

There was a silence, and then he said to me: ”Let's try a test. What was the most terrible moment of our life?”

I leaned over him and the two of us spoke at once. I know that neither of us spoke the truth.

A faint smile lit up the aged face. I felt that that smile somehow re- flected my own.

”We've lied to each other,” he said, ”because we feel that we are two, not one. The truth is that we are two yet we are one.”

I was beginning to be irritated by this conversation, and I told him so. Then I added: ”And you, there in 1983-are you not going to tell me any- thing about the years I have left?”

”What can I tell you, poorBorges?The misfortunes you are already ac- customed to will repeat themselves. You will be left alone in this house. Youwill touch the books that have no letters and theSwedenborgmedallionand the wooden tray with the Federal Cross. Blindness is not darkness; it is a form of solitude. You will return to Iceland.”

”Iceland! Sea-girt Iceland!”

”In Rome, you will once more recite the poetry of Keats, whose name, like all men's names, was writ inwater.”

”I've never been in Rome.”

”There are other things. You will write our best poem-an elegy.”

”On the death of...” I began. I could not bring myself to say the name.

”No. She will outliveyou.”

We grew silent. Then he went on: ”You will write the book we've dreamed of for so long. In 1979 you will see that your supposed career has been nothing but a series of drafts, mis- cellaneous drafts, and you will give in to the vain and superst.i.tious temp- tation to write your great book-the superst.i.tion that inflicted upon us Goethe'sFaust, andSalammbo,andUlysses. I filled, incredible to tell, many, many pages.”

”And in the end you realized that you had failed.”

”Worse. I realized that it was a masterpiece in the most overwhelming sense of the word. My good intentions hadn't lasted beyond the first pages; those that followed held the labyrinths, the knives, the man who thinks he's an image, the reflection that thinks it's real, the tiger that stalks in the night, the battles that are in one's blood, the blind and fatal Juan Murana, the voice ofMacedonieFernandez,the s.h.i.+p made with the fingernails of the dead, Old English repeated in the evening.”

”That museum rings a bell,” I remarked sarcastically.

”Not to mention false recollections, the doubleness of symbols, the long catalogs, the skilled handling of prosaic reality, the imperfect symmetries that critics so jubilantly discover, the not always apocryphal quotations.”

”Did you publish it?”

”I toyed, without conviction, with the melodramatic possibility of de- stroying the book, perhaps by fire.

But I wound up publis.h.i.+ng it in Madrid, under a pseudonym. I was taken for a clumsy imitator ofBorges -a person who had the defect of not actually beingBorgesyet of mirroring all the out- ward appearances of the original.”

”I'm not surprised,” I said. ”Every writer sooner or later becomes his own least intelligent disciple.”

”That book was one of the roads that led me to this night. The others... The humiliation of old age, the conviction of having already lived each day...”

”I will not write that book,” I said.

”You will, though. My words, which are now your present, will one day be but the vaguest memory of a dream.”

I found myself annoyed by his dogmatic tone, the tone that I myself no doubt use in my cla.s.ses. I was annoyed by the fact that we resembled each other so much and that he was taking advantage of the impunity lent him by the nearness of death.

”Are you so sure,” I said, to get back at him a bit, ”that you're going to die?”

”Yes,”he replied. ”I feel a sort of sweetness and reliefI'venever felt be- fore. I can't describe it; all words require a shared experience. Why do you seem so annoyed at what I'm saying?”

”Because we're too much like each other. I loathe your face, which is a caricature of mine, I loathe your voice, which is a mockery of mine, I loathe your pathetic syntax, which is my own.”

”So do I,” he smiled. ”Which is why I decided to kill myself.”

A bird sang from the garden.

”It's the last one,” the other man said.

He motioned me toward him. His hand sought mine. I stepped back; I was afraid the two hands would merge.

”The Stoics teach,” he said to me, ”that we should not complain of life-the door of the prison is open. I have always understood that; I myself saw life that way, but laziness and cowardice held me back.

About twelve days ago, I was giving a lecture in La Plata on Book VI of theaLneid.Sud- denly, as I was scanning a hexameter, I discovered what my path was to be. Imade this decision-and since that moment, I have felt myself invulnera- ble. You shall one day meet that fate-you shall receive that sudden revela- tion, in the midst of Latin and Virgil, yet you will have utterly forgotten this curious prophetic dialogue that is taking place in two times and two places. When you next dream it, you shall be who Iam, and you shall be my dream.”

”I won't forget it-I'm going to write it down tomorrow.”

”It will lie in the depths of your memory, beneath the tides of your dreams. When you write it, you will think that you're weaving a tale of fan- tasy. And it won't be tomorrow, either-it will be many years from now.”

He stopped talking; I realized that he had died. In a way, I died with him-in grief I leaned over his pillow, but there was no one there anymore.

I fled the room. Outside, there was no patio, no marble staircase, no great silent house, no eucalyptus trees, no statues, no gazebo in a garden, no foun- tains, no gate in the fence surrounding the hotel in the town ofAdrogue.

Outside awaited other dreams.

Blue Tigers

A famous poem by Blake paints the tiger as a fire burning bright and an eternal archetype of Evil; I prefer the Chesterton maxim that casts the tiger as a symbol of terrible elegance. Apart from these, there are no words that can rune the tiger, that shape which for centuries has lived in the imagina- tion of mankind. I have always been drawn to the tiger. I know that as a boy I would linger before one particular cage at the zoo; the others held no in- terest for me. I would judge encyclopedias and natural histories by their en- gravings of the tiger. When theJungle Books were revealed to me I was upset that the tiger, Shere Khan, was the hero's enemy. As the years pa.s.sed, this strange fascination never left me; it survived my paradoxical desire to be- come a hunter as it did all common human vicissitudes. Until not long ago (the date feels distant but it really is not), it coexisted peacefully with my day-to-day labors at the University of Lah.o.r.e. I am a professor of Eastern and Western logic, and I consecrate my Sundays to a seminar on the phi- losophy of Spinoza. I should add that I am a Scotsman; it may have been my love of tigers that brought me from Aberdeen to Punjab. The outward course of my life has been the common one, but in my dreams I always saw tigers. Now it is other forms that fill them.

I have recounted all these facts more than once, until now they seem al- most to belong to someone else. I let them stand, however, since they are re- quired by my statement.

Toward the end of 1904,1 read that in the region of the Ganges delta a blue variety of the species had been discovered. The news was confirmed by sub- sequent telegrams, with the contradictions and incongruities that one ex- pects in such cases. My old love stirred once more. Nevertheless, I suspectedsome error, since the names of colors are notoriously imprecise. I remem- bered having once read that in Icelandic, Ethiopia was ”Blaland,” Blue Landor the Land of Black Men. The blue tiger might well be a black panther. Nothing was mentioned of stripes; the picture published by the London press, showing a blue tiger with silver stripes, was patently apocryphal. Similarly, the blue of the ill.u.s.tration looked more like that of heraldry than reality. In a dream, I saw tigers of a blue I had never seen before, and for which I could find no word. I know it was almost black, but that description of course does scant justice to the shade I saw.

Some months later, a colleague of mine told me that in a certain village miles from the Ganges he had heard talk of blue tigers. I was astonished by that piece of news, because tigers are rare in that area.

Once again I dreamed of the blue tiger, throwing its long shadow as it made its way over the sandy ground. I took advantage of the end of term to make a journey to that village, whose name (for reasons that will soon be clear) I do not wish to recall.

I arrived toward the end of the rainy season. The village squatted at the foot of a hill (which looked to me wider than it was high) and was sur- rounded and menaced by the jungle, which was a dark brown color. Surely one of the pages of Kipling contains that village of my adventure, since all of India, all the world somehow, can be found there. Suffice it to report that a ditch, and swaying cane-stalk bridges, const.i.tuted the huts' fragile defense. Toward the south there were swamps and rice fields and a ravinewith a muddy river whose name I never learned, and beyond that, again, the jungle.