Borges, "Los espejos"

A work ("Mirrors") by this Argentine man of letters.  You can read the original here.

Not only crystal brings me fear,       
Impenetrable shadow's sight,                        
All mirrors end and start in fright,           
The unreal space reflected near.

Before the glass-like water's hoax:             
Another blue, the deepest sky;                 
At times sliced through by motion's lie:     
Inverted birds or ripple's coax.

Before the silent surface black,             
Untrammeled smoothness in soft sheets,                 
Dreamlike warm whiteness then repeats     
Of marble pale and faintest rose.

And now so many years have past      
Of roaming by the fickle moon;           
I ask myself what chance assumed    
That mirrors would leave me aghast.

Mirrors of metal, mirrors in masks,        
Mahogany, which in the mists                 
In reddish dusk through smoke persists,
This face which answers and which asks,

Unending, fatal, sleepless faces,
Fulfiller of an ancient pact, 
They multiply within the act
A world awash in selfsame traces.

Expanding this vain, doubtful sky  
Within their web at dizzying height,      
Their fog will sometimes cloud the night        
The breath of someone yet to die.

The crystal waits.  And if there hangs    
A mirror in my room's four walls,              
I'm not alone, my double calls:           
His fate held tight in dawn's white fangs.

And once occurred, all things are cleft                          
From crystal boxes but made for show;                  
Where fictive rabbis long ago                    
Read verse and prose from right to left.

And Claudius, an evening's king,             
A king in dream – at least until                
An actor wore his guilty frill,                    
A silent art, a portrait's sting.

How strange it is that mirrors live,                    
And that we dream! Strange that our days    
Each feed on the deceptive haze                               
Reflected in that deepest grid.

And God, I've come to think, might coat                   
Our architecture with hope's sheen,                            
And light this ebony unseen                             
With crystal lands in thoughts remote.

And God has armed the night with dreams               
And mirror forms in countless waves,                       
So that man's mind thinks we are shades, 
Reflections vain.  Hence come our screams.

Tres versiones de Judas

A short story ("Three versions of Judas") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

In Asia Minor or Alexandria, in the second century of Our Faith, when Basilides was publishing that the cosmos was the reckless or wicked improvisation of deficient angels, Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic conventicles. Perhaps Dante would have confined him to a sepulcher of fire; perhaps his name would have augmented the catalogues of minor heresiarchs, somewhere between Satornil and Carpocrates; perhaps some fragment of his sermons, exonerated of all slander, would have remained in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses, or have perished when the fire of a monastic library devoured the last copy of the Syntagma. Instead, God dispatched him to the twentieth century and the university town of Lund. Here, in 1904, the first edition of Kristus och Judas (Christ and Judas) was published; here, in 1909, his seminal work Den hemlige Frälsaren (The Secret Savior) (the latter has a German version, composed in 1912 by Emili Schering and called Der heimliche Heiland).  

Before attempting an examination of the aforecited works, I should reiterate that Nils Runeberg, member of the National Evangelical Union, was profoundly religious. In a cenacle in Paris or even in Buenos Aires, a literary man could very well rediscover the theses of Runeberg; were these theses to be promulgated during this same cenacle, however, they would be nothing more than flimsy exercises in negligence and blasphemy. Yet for Runeberg they composed the key to deciphering theology's central mystery: material for meditation and analysis, for historical and philological controversy, for arrogance, for jubilation, for terror. They justified and ruined his life. Whoever peruses this article should also consider that neither Runeberg's conclusions, nor his dialectics, nor his proofs may register. Indeed, an observer may believe that his conclusion undoubtedly preceded his "proofs." Who now would resign himself to seeking out proofs for something he does not believe, or whose message leaves him indifferent?    

The first edition of Kristus och Judas bore this categorical epigraph, whose sense, years later, Nils Runeberg himself would monstrously expand: Not one thing, but everything which tradition attributes to Judas Iscariot is false (De Quincey, 1857). Preceded by a certain German, De Quincey speculated that Judas betrayed Jesus Christ to force him to declare his divinity and ignite a vast rebellion against the Roman yoke; Runeberg, however, suggests a vindication of a metaphysical kind. Skilfully he begins to highlight the superfluity of Judas's act. He observes (as had Robertson) that in order to identify a master who preached daily in the synagogue and who performed miracles before thousands of people, no treason on the part of an apostle is required. It, nevertheless, occurred. Supposing there to be an error in the Scriptures is intolerable; no less tolerable is admitting an accidental fact into the most beautiful event in world history. Therefore, Judas's betrayal was not accidental: it was a prefigured act which has its mysterious place in the economy of Salvation.

Runeberg goes on: the Word, when it was made flesh, passed from ubiquity to space, from eternity to history, from unbounded happiness to change and flesh; for such a sacrifice it was necessary that a man, who would represent all men, make a sacrifice of condign worth. Judas Iscariot was this man. Judas alone among the Apostles intuited the secret divinity and terrible purpose of Jesus. The Word had been reduced to something mortal; Judas, disciple of the Word, could reduce himself to an informer (the worst crime in infamy) and become host to the unquenchable fire. The lower order is a mirror of the upper order; the forms of the earth correspond to the forms of heaven; our skin's blemishes are a map of the incorruptible constellations; and in some way Judas reflects Jesus. Hence come the thirty coins and the kiss; hence comes voluntary death all the more to merit Damnation. In this way Nils Runeberg elucidated the enigma of Judas.  

Theologians of all confessions refuted Runeberg's explanation. Lars Peter Engström accused him of not knowing, or of omitting, the hypostatic union; Axel Borelius, of renewing the heresy of Docetism, which negated the humanity of Jesus; the mordant Bishop of Lund, of contradicting the third verse of Chapter 22 in the Gospel of Luke.

These assorted anathemas influenced Runeberg, who partially rewrote the condemned book and modified his doctrine. He abandoned to his adversaries all theological terrain and put forth oblique reasonings of moral order. He admitted that Jesus, "who had at his disposal the considerable resources that Omnipotence might offer," did not need a man to redeem all men. Later, he countered those who claimed we knew nothing about the inexplicable traitor; we do know, he said, that he was one of the Apostles, one of those selected to announce the Kingdom of Heaven, to heal the sick, to cleanse the lepers, to raise the dead, and to cast out devils (Matthew 10:7-8; Luke 9:1).

A man so distinguished from others by the Redeemer deserves from us the best interpretation of his acts. To impute his crime to avarice (as have so many others, with reference to John 12:6) is to resign ourselves to the most torpid of motives. Nils Runeberg proposes the opposite motive: hyperbolic and unlimited asceticism. The ascetic, for the greater glory of God, vilifies and mortifies the flesh; Judas did the same thing to the spirit. He renounced honor, good, peace, the Kingdom of Heaven, just like others, less heroically, renounced pleasure.* He premeditated his sins with terrible lucidity. In adultery, abnegation and tenderness should take part; in homicide, courage; in profanities and blasphemy, a certain Luciferian refulgence. Judas chose certain sins not visited with any virtue: the abuse of trust (John 12:6), and betrayal. He labored in gigantic humility, believing himself unworthy of being good. Paul wrote: That, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord (1 Corinthians, 1:31); Judas sought Hell, because the happiness of the Lord was enough for him. He thought that happiness, like good, was a divine attribute, and ought not to be usurped by man.**               

Many have discovered, post factum, that in Runeberg's justifiable beginnings lies his extravagant end. They have also discovered that The Secret Savior is a mere perversion or exasperation of Christ and Judas. Towards the end of 1907, Runeberg ended and revised the handwritten text; almost two years passed before he would give it in for printing. In October of 1909 the book appeared with a prologue – one tepid to the point of enigmatic – by the Danish Hebraist Erik Erfjord, and with this perfidious epigraph: He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not (John 1:10). The general argument is not complete, even if the conclusion is monstrous. God, argues Nils Runeberg, reduced himself to being a man for the salvation of the human race; one may feasibly suppose that the sacrifice he undertook was perfect, not invalidated or attenuated by omissions. To limit his sufferings to the agony endured for one afternoon on a cross is blasphemous.*** To claim that he was man and was incapable of sin contains a contradiction: the attributes of impeccabilitas and humanitas are not compatible. Kemnitz admits that the Redeemer could feel fatigue, cold, embarrassment, hunger, and thirst; he also admits he could sin and lose himself. The famous text

For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness .... He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53:2-3)

is for many a previsioning of the Crucified in the hour of His death; for some (for instance, Hans Lassen Martensen), a refutation of the beauty public consensus attributes to Christ; for Runeberg, this detail prophesied not one moment but all of the atrocious future, in time and in eternity, of the Word which was made flesh. God became man utterly, to infamy, to reprobation, to the very abyss. To save us, He could have chosen any of the destinies woven through the perplexed web of history: He could have been Alexander, or Pythagoras, or Rurik, or Jesus. But He chose a negligible destiny: He chose Judas. 

In vain the bookstores of Stockholm and Lund put forth this revelation. Skeptics considered it, a priori, to be an insipid and laborious theological game; theologians disdained it. Runeberg intuited in this ecumenical indifference an almost miraculous confirmation. God ordered this indifference; God did not wish His terrible secret to be divulged on earth. Runeberg understood that the hour had not come; he sensed that ancient divine curses were converging upon him; he recalled Elijah and Moses, who upon the mountain had covered their faces so as not to see God; he recalled Isaiah, who was terrified when his eyes saw Him whose glory fills the earth; he recalled Saul, whose eyes remained blind on the road to Damascus; he recalled the rabbi Simoen ben Azzai, who saw Paradise and died; he recalled the famous sorcerer John of Viterbo, who, once he could see the Trinity, went completely mad; he recalled the Midrashim, who loathed the impious who pronounced the Shem Hamephorash, the Secret Name of God. Wasn't he possibly guilty of this same dark crime? Might this have been the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, that which may not be forgiven (Matthew 12:31)? Valerius Soranus died for having divulged the secret name of Rome. What infinite punishment awaited him for having discovered and divulged the secret name of God?

Drunk on insomnia and vertiginous dialectics, Nils Runeberg roamed the streets of Malmö, shouting and pleading that his merciful destiny be the sharing of Hell with the Redeemer.         

He died from an aneurysm on March 1, 1912. Heresiologists perhaps will remember him; to our notion of the Son, which seemed exhausted, he added the complications of evil and misfortune.

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* Borelius asks mockingly: Why didn't he renounce renouncing? Why is renouncing not to be renounced?

** Euclydes da Cunha, in a book unknown to Runeberg, notes that, for the heresiarch of Canudos, Antonio Conselheiro, virtue "was almost an impiety." Argentine readers will recall analogous passages in the works of Almafuerte. Runeberg published, in the symbolic leaflet Sju insegel (Seven seals), a serialized descriptive poem, The Secret Water. The first stanzas narrate the facts of a tumultuous day; the last, the finding of a glacial pond. The poet suggests that the endurance of this silent water corrects our useless violence and in some way permits and absolves it. The poem concludes thus: The water of the forest is happy; we may be evil and sad.

*** Maurice Abramowicz observes: "According to this Scandinavian, Jesus always has the easy role: his streak of bad luck, thanks to the science of typographers, enjoys polyglot renown; his thirty-three-year residence among human beings was, on the whole, nothing more than a vacation." In the third appendix to Christelige Dogmatik (Christian Dogmatics), Erfjord refutes this passage. He notes that the crucifixion of God has not ceased because what happened once in time is repeated without respite in eternity. Judas, now, continues to charge silver coins in the temple; he continues to make a slipknot in the rope upon the field of blood.  (To justify this claim, Erfjord invokes the final chapter of the first volume of Jaromir Hladík's Vindication of Eternity.) 

Borges, "Adam Cast Forth"

A poem (original title in English) by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

Was there a garden or was it a dream?
Myself I asked, in fading light so slow.
And if the past, it comforts me to know,
Now Adam's own and sad, were but sleep's reams,

No realer than a magical, mad hoax
Of God?  All has been rendered imprecise
In memory, that clearest Paradise,
Exist it must, and will endure in hopes.

But not for me.  The stubborn dirt we shift
Has exiled me, red internecine spray
Of Cains and Abels and descendants' dread.
But to have loved remains our greatest gift.

To have been happy and to have touched
The living Garden, if but for one day.

Borges, "Poema de los dones"

A work ("Poem of the gifts") by this Argentine writer.  You can read the original here.

May none in tears or with reproach then slight         
God's statement of His mastery, 
Who, with majestic irony,                    
Gave me at once both these books and the night.      

Of these books, now a city, lightless eyes         
He made the owners; eyes, it seems,      
Which in the libraries of dreams                     
Could only read some foolish tracts that tie         

The sun-ups to their zeal.  In vain the day        
Upon them foists its endless tomes;          
As toilsome as those ancient rolls        
That once in Alexandria decayed.                      

From hunger and from thirst (says a Greek tale) 
Near fonts and gardens dies a king; 
Such confines I roam, tiring          
Of this blind library, deep, blind, and pale.              

Encyclopedias, atlases, the East,             
The West, centuries, dynasties,            
Cosmos, symbols, cosmogonies             
Are fêted by these walls, if uselessly.              

Slow in my shade, this hollow darkness free 
With doubting cane I will entice;          
I, who imagined Paradise                     
As being but a kind of library.                 

Some thing that certainly does not entail 
That broad word "chance" – it rules these things;      
Once, many blurry evenings        
Another lost to books and to our shade. 

As through slow galleries I go astray,         
One sacred horror likes this plan:   
That I'm this other, the dead man,      
Perhaps with the same steps on those same days. 

What matters then that word which forms my name,              
(Which of us two has this verse spun,
Of plural I and shadow one?)    
When our anathema is but the same?          

Groussac or Borges, I thus gaze upon   
Our world, unforming, fading fast    
To palest and uncertain ash,                            
Akin to sleep or mere oblivion.                 

El impostor inverosímil Tom Castro

A short story ("The implausible impostor Tom Castro") by this Argentine, based on real events. You can read the original here.

I provide this name because until 1850, this was the name by which he was known in the streets and houses of Talcahuano, Santiago, Chile, and Valparaíso. And it would be fair for him to reassume this name when he returned to these lands even if such a return were mere fantasy, a Saturday pastime.* On the Wapping birth register, with an entry dated June 7, 1834, his name is Arthur Orton. We know that he was the son of a butcher; that his childhood endured the insipid misery commonly incident to the lower boroughs of London; and that he felt the call of the sea. This is hardly unheard of: fleeing to the sea comprises the traditional English rupture with parental authority, the initiation into the heroic. Geography recommends it, as do the Scriptures (Psalm 107): They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.  

Orton fled his deplorable, pink-tainted suburb in a boat on the sea and contemplated, with habitual disillusion, the Southern Cross; he deserted at the port of Valparaíso. He was a man of placid idiocy. Logically, he could (and should) have died of hunger; but his confused joviality, his permanent smile, and his infinite meekness earned him the favor of a certain family Castro, whose name he adopted. There are no traces of this South American episode; but his gratitude did not wane. It is presumed that in 1861 he reappeared in Australia, still with the name Tom Castro. In Sydney he met a certain Bogle, a negro servant. Without being handsome, Bogle was possessed of a relaxed and monumental aura, the work-of-engineering solidity typical of a negro male who has become older, heavier, and more authoritative. He had a second quality which some handbooks of ethnography have denied his race: notions of genius. We shall see evidence of this later. In short, he was a restrained and decent man, with his ancient African appetites very well adjusted for the use and abuse of Calvinism. Apart from the visits of God (which we will describe later), he was absolutely normal, without any other irregularity apart from a modest and long-standing fear that would delay his step as he entered an alleyway or side street, suspicious as he was of the East, the West, the South, and the North, and of the violent vehicle which would put an end to his days.                          

One evening at dusk in a closed-off street corner in Sydney, Orton saw him in the midst of negotiating his imaginary death. At length he offered him his arm and, in mutual astonishment, the two of them crossed the harmless street. Since this twilight moment now long gone, a protectorate was established: that of the insecure and monumental negro over the obese crackpot from Wapping. In September 1865, both of them read a desperate announcement in a local newspaper.          

The idealized dead man

In the last days of April 1854 (as Orton was provoking an effusion of Chilean hospitality as wide as its patios), the steamer Mermaid, proceeding from Rio de Janeiro en route to Liverpool, was shipwrecked in the waters of the Atlantic. Among those who perished was Roger Charles Tichborne, an English military officer raised in France, the eldest son of one of the most important Catholic families of England. It seems implausible, but the death of this Gallicized young man with the finest of Parisian accents – which awakened the incomparable rancor that can only be caused by French intelligentsia, French wit, and French pedantry – was a transcendental event in the destiny of Orton, who had never laid eyes on Tichborne. Roger's horrified mother, Lady Tichborne, refused to believe in his death and began to publish desperate announcements in the newspapers of widest circulation. One of these announcements fell into the soft, funerary hands of the negro Bogle, who conceived of a brilliant plan.    

The virtues of disparity

Tichborne was a svelte gentleman with an air of vexation about him; he had sharp features, an olive complexion, straight black hair, lively eyes, and was almost irritating in his verbal precision. Orton, on the other hand, was an incontinent boor with a vast belly, features of stunning indefiniteness, a complexion bordering on the freckly, brown curly hair, and sleepy eyes; he was also a vague, almost absent conversationalist. Bogle decided that Orton ought to embark on the first steamer to Europe and satisfy the hope of Lady Tichborne by declaring to be her son.  

The project was one of foolish ingeniousness. I will take a simple example: if an impostor in 1914 had pretended to pass for the Emperor of Germany, the first thing he would have fabricated would have been the waxed mustaches, the limp arm, the authoritarian brow, the downcast mood, the illustrious and highly-decorated breast, and the Prussian shako. Bogle was more subtle: he would have presented a glabrous Kaiser, oblivious to military attributes and honorable eagles, with his left arm in a state of unquestionable health. We do not require the metaphor; we know that a flabby, squishy Tichborne appeared, with the amiable grin of an imbecile, brown hair, and an incorrigible ignorance of the French language.  

Bogle knew that a perfect facsimile of the much-desired Roger Charles Tichborne was impossible to obtain. He also knew that all similarities achieved would do nothing more than reveal certain inevitable differences. Therefore he renounced any likeness whatsoever. He intuited that the enormous ineptitude of the impostorship would be conceivable proof that it was not a matter of fraud, that the simplest aspects of certainty would never be discovered by such flagrant means. One should also not forget the all-powerful alliance with time: fourteen years in the Southern hemisphere in a life left to chance can surely change a man.  

And there was another basic reason: Lady Tichborne's repeated and foolish announcements demonstrated her plain conviction that Roger had not died; they also indicated her desire to identify him anew.    

The encounter 

The ever-obliging Tom Castro wrote to Lady Tichborne. To establish his identity he submitted the irrefutable proof of the two beauty marks on his left nipple and that episode from his childhood, so traumatizing yet at the same time so memorable, in which he was assaulted by a swarm of bees. The note was brief and, much in keeping with Tom Castro and Bogle, free of orthographic scruples. In the impressive solitude of a Paris hotel the lady read and re-read the letter with the happiest of tears; and a few days later, she came upon the memories which her son had evoked.     

On the 16th of January, 1867, Roger Charles Tichborne announced his presence at this hotel. He was preceded by his respectable servant, Ebenezer Bogle. The winter day was full of sun; the fatigued eyes of Lady Tichborne were veiled in tears. The negro opened the windows wide. The light created a mask: the mother recognized her prodigal son and embraced him. Now that she had him for real, she could dispense with the newspaper and the letters he used to send her from Brazil; those were merely the adored reflections which had nourished her solitude for fourteen gloomy years. She gave them back to him with pride: not a single one was missing.      

Bogle smiled with the utmost discretion: here was where Roger's placid ghost had been documented. 

Ad majorem Dei gloriam

This illustrious acknowledgement – which seemed to obey the tradition of classic tragedies – ought to have crowned this story, leaving three assured, or at least probable happinesses: that of the loyal mother, that of the apocryphal and indulgent son, and that of the accomplice as compensation for the providential apotheosis of his diligence. Destiny (the name we apply to the incessant and infinite operation of countless intermingled causes) did not settle matters as such. Lady Tichborne died in 1870 and her relatives took up a case against Arthur Orton for the usurpation of a civil estate. Bereft of tears and solitude, but not of greed, they never believed in the blubbery, almost illiterate prodigal son who reemerged in so untimely a fashion from Australia.

Orton counted on the support of his innumerable creditors who had determined that he was in fact Tichborne, so that he would be able to pay them. He likewise counted on the friendship of the family attorney, Edward Hopkins, and that of the antiques dealer Francis J. Baigent. This was, nevertheless, not enough: Bogle thought that in order to win the battle it was paramount that they gain the strong backing of popular opinion. He needed a top hat and a decent umbrella and went seeking inspiration in the decorous streets of London. It was twilight; Bogle wandered about until a moon the color of honey was duplicated in the rectangular water of the public fountains. God visited him. Bogle hailed a cab and had him drive to the apartment of Baigent, the antiques dealer. Baigent sent a long letter to The Times proclaiming that the supposed Tichborne was a shameless impostor. It was signed by Father Goudron of the Society of Jesus. Other, equally Papist denunciations ensued. The effect was immediate: the good people could not but guess that Sir Roger was the target of an abominable Jesuit plot.

The cab         

The trial lasted one hundred ninety days. About a hundred witnesses pledged on their faith that the accused was Tichborne, among them four companions-in-arms from the 6th regiment of the dragoons. His partisans did not stop repeating that he was not an impostor, and if he had been, he had made sure to be a copy of the childhood portraits of his model. Moreover, Lady Tichborne had recognized him and it was clear that a mother could not be mistaken. Everything was going well, or more or less well, until an old flame of Orton's appeared before the tribunal to testify. Bogle did not display a flicker of emotion at this treacherous manoeuvre on the part of the "relatives"; he took an umbrella, hailed a cab again, and went off to plead for a third illumination in the decorous streets of London. We will never know whether he found it: shortly before arriving at Primrose Hill, he was met by that terrible vehicle which had been pursuing him all those years. Bogle saw it coming, let out a scream, but did not manage to save himself. He was violently hurled against the stones; the nag's traffic-driven hooves cracked open his skull.         

The specter

Tom Castro was the ghost of Tichborne, if a poor ghost inhabited by the genius of Bogle. When they informed him that Bogle was dead, he was crushed. He continued to lie, but with little enthusiasm and ludicrous contradictions. It was easy to foresee the end.  

On February 27, 1874, Arthur Orton, alias Tom Castro, was sentenced to fourteen years of hard labor. He made himself well-liked in jail; such was his purpose. His exemplary behavior took four years off his sentence. When its hospitality – that of the prison – finally let him go, he passed through the hamlets and centers of the United Kingdom, giving small talks in which he declared his innocence or affirmed his guilt. His modesty and desire to please were so engrained that, on many evenings, he would begin by defending himself and conclude with a confession, ever at the whims of the public.  

He died on April 2, 1898.

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* I employ this metaphor to remind the reader that these infamous biographies appeared in the Saturday supplement of the evening paper.