* His neck scarf: Here Rosendo Juárez is wearing the tough guy's equivalent of a tie, the chalina, a scarf worn much like an ascot, doubled over, the jacket buttoned up tight to make a large "bloom" under the chin. This garb marks a certain "type" of character.
* "You've put the story in a novel": Here "the man sitting at the table,"Rosendo Juárez, is referring to what was once perhaps JLB's most famous story, "Man on Pink Corner," in A Universal History of Iniquity, q.v., though he calls it a novel rather than a story.
* Neighborhood of the Maldonado: The Maldonado was the creek marking the northern boundary of the city of Buenos Aires around the turn of the century; Rosendo Juárez"words about the creek are true and mark the story as being told many years after the fact. The neighborhood itself would have been Palermo.
* Calle Cabrera: In Palermo, a street in a rough neighborhood not far from the center of the city.
* A kid in black that wrote poems: Probably Evaristo Carriego, JLB's neighbor in Palermo who was the first to make poetry about the "riffraff "—the knife fighters and petty toughs—of the slums. JLB wrote a volume of essays dedicated to Carriego.
* Moreira: See note to "Unworthy," p. 355.
* Chacarita: one of the city's two large cemeteries; La Recoleta was where the elite buried their dead, so Chacarita was the graveyard of the "commoners."
* San Telmo: One of the city's oldest districts, it was a famously rough neighborhood by the time of the story's telling. Fishburn and Hughes associate it with a popular song that boasts of its "fighting spirit" and note that the song would have given "an ironic twist to the last sentence of the story."
The Encounter
* Lunfardo: For an explanation of this supposed "thieves' jargon," see the Foreword to this volume, p. 347.
* One of those houses on Calle Junín: See note to "Unworthy," p. 355.
* Moreira: See note to "Unworthy," p. 355.
* Martín Fierro and Don Segundo Sombra: Unlike the real-life Juan Moreira, Martín Fierro and Don Segundo Sombra were fictional gauchos. Martín Fierrois the hero of the famous poem of the same name by José Hernández; the poem is centrally important in Argentine literature and often figures in JLB's work, as a reference, as a subject of meditation in essays, or rewritten (in "The End," in the volume Fictions, q.v.); his headstrong bravery and antiauthoritarianism are perhaps the traits that were most approved by the "cult of the gaucho" to which JLB alludes here. Don Segundo Sombra is the protagonist of a novel by Ricardo Gúiraldes; for this novel, see the note, below, to "The Gospel According to Mark," p. 399. It is interesting that JLB notes that the model for the gaucho shifts from a real-life person to fictional characters, perhaps to indicate that the true gaucho has faded from the Argentine scene and that (in a common Borges trope) all that's left is the memory of the gaucho.
* The Podestás and the Gutierrezes: The Podestà family were circus actors; in 1884, some ten years after the outlaw gaucho Juan Moreira's death, Juande Podestà put on a pantomime version of the life of Moreira."Two years later," Fishburn and Hughes tell us, "he added extracts from the novel [by Eduardo Gutiérrez]to his performance." The plays were extraordinarily successful. Eduardo Gutiérrez was a prolific and relatively successful, if none too "literary," novelist whose potboilers were published serially in various Argentine magazines. His Juan Moreira, however, brought himself and Moreira great fame, and (in the words of the Diccionario Oxford de Literatura Española e Hisf ano-Americana)"created the stereotype of the heroic gaucho."The dictionary goes on to say that"Borges claims that Gutiérrezis much superior to Fenimore Cooper."
Juan Muraña
* Palermo: A district in Buenos Aires, populated originally by the Italians who immigrated to Argentina in the nineteenth century. Trapani's name marks him as a "native" of that quarter, while Borges and his family moved there probably in search of a less expensive place to live than the central district where they had been living; Borges always mentioned the "shabby genteel" people who lived in that "shabby genteel" neighborhood (Rodriguez Monegal, pp. 48-55).
* Juan Muraña: As noted in "The Encounter," at one point Juan Moreira was the very model of the gaucho and therefore of a certain kind of swaggering masculinity; Juan Muraña's name so closely resembles Moreira's that one suspects that JLB is trading on it to create the shade that so literarily haunts this story. In the dream, especially, Muraña has the look of the gaucho:dressed all in black, with long hair and mustache, etc. Nor, one suspects, is it pure coincidence that the story"Juan Muraña"immediately follows the story in which Juan Moreira's ghost plays such a large part.
* Around the time of the Centenniaclass="underline" The Centennial of the Argentine Declaration of Independence, signed 1810, so the story takes place around 1910.
* A man named Luchessi: Luchessi's name marks him too as a "native" of Palermo, though he has now moved into a district in southern Buenos Aires, near the bustling (if "somewhat dilapidated" [Fishburn and Hughes]) Plaza de la Constitución and its railway station.
* Barracas: Fishburn and Hughes gloss this as a "working-class district in southern Buenos Aires near La Boca and Constitución [see note just above] and bordering the Riachuelo."
* Wop: See note to "Little Sheeny," p. 355, above. In Spanish, gringo was the word used to refer to Italian immigrants; see A Note on the Translation.
* Calle Thames: In Palermo.
The Elderly Lady
* Wars of independence: For the independence not only of Argentina but of the entire continent. During this period there were many famous generals and leaders, many named in the first pages of this story. Thus Rubiois associated with the grand forces of continental self-determination that battled in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century.
* Chacabuco, Cancha Rayada, Maipú, Arequipa: Chacabuco (Chile,1817): The Army of the Andes under General José San Martín fought the Spanish royalist forces under General Marcò del Pont and won. Cancha Rayada (Chile, March 1818): San Martin's army was defeated by the royalists and independence was now very uncertain. Maipú(Chile, April 1818): San Martin's army decisively defeated the royalist forces and secured the independence of Chile. Arequipa ( Peru, 1825): General Antonio José de Sucre, leading Bolivar's army, accepted Spain's surrender of the city after a siege; this, after the Battle of Ayacucho (see below), meant the full independence of Peru.
* He and José de Olavarría exchanged swords: Olavarría (1801-1845) was an Argentine military leader who fought at the battles just mentioned and perhaps at the great Battle of Ayacucho, which determined the full independence of Peru. Exchanging swords was a "romantic custom among generals, and Borges recalls that his own grandfather had exchanged swords with Gen. Mansilla on the eve of a battle" (Fishburn and Hughes). Olavarría and Lavalle (see below) are probably the models for Rubio.
* The famous battle of Cerro Alto ... Cerro Bermejo: However famous this battle may be, I confess I have not been able to locate it. I hope (for the good name of the humble research that has gone into these notes) that this is an example of Borges' famous put-ons (see A Note on the Translation). I feel that it may well be; this is the bird's-eye statement given in the Penguin History of Latin America (Edwin Williamson, New York/London: Penguin, 1992), p. 228, of the years 1823-1824 as they apply to Bolivar (who is mentioned as winning this battle): "Arriving in Peru in September 1823, Bolivar began to prepare for the final offensive against the royalists. By the middle of 1824 he launched his campaign, winning an important battle at Junin, which opened to him the road to Lima, the ultimate prize. In December, while Bolivar was in Lima, Marshal Sucre defeated Viceroy De la Serna's army at the battle of Ayacucho. Spanish power in America had been decisively broken and the Indies were at last free." Thus, it appears that in April of 1823 Bolivar was planning battles, not fighting them. If it is a real battle, I ask a kind reader to inform me of the date and location so that future editions, should there be any, may profit from the knowledge.