"How strange. All this is like a dream."
He did not close his eyes, he did not move, and I had seen one man kill another.
Maneco Uriarte leaned down to the dead man and begged him to forgive him. He was undisguisedly sobbing. The act he had just committed overwhelmed and terrified him. I now know that he regretted less having committed a crime than having committed an act of senselessness.
I couldn't watch anymore. What I had longed to see happen had happened, and I was devastated.
Lafinur later told me that they had to wrestle with the body to pull the knife out. A council was held among them, and they decided to lie as little as possible; the knife fight would be elevated to a duel with swords. Four of the men would claim to have been the seconds, among them Acebal. Everything would be taken care of in Buenos Aires; somebody always has a friend....
On the mahogany table lay a confusion of playing cards and bills that no one could bring himself to look at or touch.
In the years that followed, I thought more than once about confiding the story to a friend, but I always suspected that I derived more pleasure from keeping the secret than I would from telling it. In 1929, a casual conversation suddenly moved me to break the long silence. José Olave, the retired chief of police, had been telling me stories of the knife fighters that hung out in the tough neighborhoods of Retiro, down near the docks—El Bajo and that area. He said men such as that were capable of anything— ambush, betrayal, trickery, the lowest and most infamous kind of villainy— in order to get the better of their opponents, and he remarked that before the Podestás and the Gutierrezes,* there'd been very little knife fighting, the hand-to-hand sort of thing. I told him that I'd once actually witnessed such a fight, and then I told the story of that night so many years before.
He listened to me with professional attention, and then he asked me a question:
"Are you sure Uriarte and the other man had never used a knife in a fight before? That a stretch in the country at one time or another hadn't taught them something?"
"No," I replied. "Everyone there that night knew everyone else, and none of them could believe their eyes."
Olave went on unhurriedly, as though thinking out loud.
"You say one of those daggers had a U-shaped cross guard.... There were two famous daggers like that—the one that Moreira used and the one that belonged to Juan Almada, out around Tapalquén."
Something stirred in my memory.
"You also mentioned a wood-handled knife," Olave went on, "with the mark of a little tree on the blade.
There are thousands of knives like that; that was the mark of the company that made them. But there was one..."
He stopped a moment, then went on:
"There was an Acevedo that had a country place near Pergamino. And there was another brawler of some repute that made his headquarters in that area at the turn of the century—Juan Almanza. From the first man he killed, at the age of fourteen, he always used one of those short knives, because he said it brought him luck. There was bad blood between Juan Almanza and JuanAlmada, because people got them mixed up—their names, you see.... They kept their eyes open for each other a long time, but somehow their paths never crossed. Juan Almanza was killed by a stray bullet in some election or other. The other one, I think, finally died of old age in the hospital at Las Flores."
Nothing more was said that afternoon; we both sat thinking.
Nine or ten men, all of them now dead, saw what my eyes saw—the long thrust at the body and the body sprawled beneath the sky—but what they saw was the end of another, older story. Maneco Uñarte did not kill Duncan; it was the weapons, not the men, that fought. They had lain sleeping, side by side, in a cabinet, until hands awoke them. Perhaps they stirred when they awoke; perhaps that was why Uriarte's hand shook, and Duncan's as well. The two knew how to fight—the knives, I mean, not the men, who were merely their instruments—and they fought well that night. They had sought each other for a long time, down the long roads of the province, and at last they had found each other; by that time their gauchos were dust. In the blades of those knives there slept, and lurked, a human grudge.
Things last longer than men. Who can say whether the story ends here; who can say that they will never meet again.
Juan Muraña
For years I said I was brought up in Palermo.* It was, I know now, mere literary braggadocio, because the fact is, I grew up within the precincts of a long fence made of spear-tipped iron lances, in a house with a garden and my father's and grandfather's library. The Palermo of knife fights and guitars was to be found (I have been given to understand) on the street corners and in the bars and tenement houses.
In 1930, I devoted an essay to Evaristo Carriego, our neighbor, a poet whose songs glorified those neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city. A short time after that, chance threw Emilio Tràpani in my way.
I was taking the train to Morón; Tràpani, who was sitting beside the window, spoke to me by name. It took me a moment to recognize him; so many years had gone by since we shared a bench in that school on Calle Thames. (Roberto Godei will recall that.) Tràpani and I had never particularly liked each other; time, and reciprocal indifference, had put even greater distance between us. It was he, I now remember, who had taught me the rudiments of Lunfardo—the thieves jargon of the day. There on the train we fell into one of those trivial conversations that are bent upon dredging up pointless information and that sooner or later yield the news of the death of a schoolmate who's nothing but a name to us anymore.
Then suddenly Tràpani changed the subject.
"Somebody lent me your book on Carriego," he said. "It's full of knife fighters and thugs and underworld types. Tell me, Borges," he said, looking at me as though stricken with holy terror, "what can you know about knife fighters and thugs and underworld types?"
"I've read up on the subject," I replied.
" 'Read up on it' is right," he said, not letting me go on. "But I don't need to 'read up'—I know those people."
After a silence, he added, as though sharing a secret with me:
"I am a nephew of Juan Muraña."*
Of all the knife fighters in Palermo in the nineties, Muraña was the one that people talked about most.
"Florentina, my mother's sister," he went on, "was Muraña's wife. You might be interested in the story."
Certain rhetorical flourishes and one or another overlong sentence in * Trápani's narration made me suspect that this was not the first time he had told it.
It was always a source of chagrin to my mother that her sister would marry Juan Muraña, whom my mother considered a cold-blooded rogue, though Florentina saw him as a "man of action." There were many versions of the fate that befell my uncle. There were those who claimed that one night when he'd been drinking he fell off the seat of his wagon as he turned the corner of Coronel and cracked his skull on the cobblestones. Some said the law was after him and he ran off to Uruguay. My mother, who could never bear her brother-in-law, never explained it to me. I was just a tyke, and I don't really even remember him.
Around the time of the Centennial,* we were living on Russell Alley. It was a long, narrow house we lived in, so while the front door was on Russell, the back door, which was always locked, was on San Salvador. My aunt, who was getting on in years and had become a little odd, lived in a bedroom in the attic. A skinny, bony woman she was, or so she seemed to me—tall, and miserly with her words. She was afraid of fresh air, never went outside, and she wouldn't let us come in her room; more than once I caught her stealing food and hiding it. Around the neighborhood, people would sometimes say that Muraña's death, or disappearance, had driven her insane. I always picture her dressed in black. She'd taken to talking to herself. The owner of our house was a man named Luchessi* who had a barbershop in Barracas.*My mother, who worked at home as a seamstress, was having a hard time making ends meet. Though I didn't really understand it all, I would overhear certain whispered words: justice of the peace, dispossession, eviction for nonpayment. My mother suffered terribly; my aunt would stubbornly say that Juan would never let that wop* throw us out. She would recall the case—which she'd told us about dozens of times—of a scurrilous thug from the Southside who'd had the audacity to cast aspersions on her husband's courage. When Juan Muraña found out, he'd gone all the way to the other side of the city, found the man, settled the dispute with one thrust of his knife, and thrown the body in the Riachuelo. I can't say whether the story was true; the important thing at the time was that it had been told and believed.