It is not just these games I have thought up—I have also thought a great deal about the house. Each part of the house occurs many times; any particular place is another place. There is not one wellhead, one courtyard, one drinking trough, one manger; there are fourteen [an infinite number of] mangers, drinking troughs, courtyards, wellheads. The house is as big as the world—or rather, it is the world. Nevertheless, by making my way through every single courtyard with its wellhead and every single dusty gallery of gray stone, I have come out onto the street and seen the temple of the Axes and the sea. That sight, I did not understand until a night vision revealed to me that there are also fourteen [an infinite number of] seas and temples. Everything exists many times, fourteen times, but there are two things in the world that apparently exist but once—on high, the intricate sun, and below, Asterion. Perhaps I have created the stars and the sun and this huge house, and no longer remember it.
Every nine years, nine men come into the house so that I can free them from all evil. I hear their footsteps or their voices far away in the galleries of stone, and I run joyously to find them. The ceremony lasts but a few minutes. One after another, they fall, without my ever having to bloody my hands. Where they fall, they remain, and their bodies help distinguish one gallery from the others. I do not know how many there have been, but I do know that one of them predicted as he died that someday my redeemer would come.
Since then, there has been no pain for me in solitude, because I know that my redeemer lives, and in the end he will rise and stand above the dust. If my ear could hear every sound in the world, I would hear his footsteps. I hope he takes me to a place with fewer galleries and fewer doors. What will my redeemer be like, I wonder. Will he be bull or man? Could he possibly be a bull with the face of a man?
Or will he be like me?
The morning sun shimmered on the bronze sword. Now there was not a trace of blood left on it.
"Can you believe it, Ariadne?" said Theseus. "The Minotaur scarcely defended itself."
For Maria Mosquera Eastman
[1] The original reads "fourteen," but there is more than enough cause to conclude that when spoken by Asterion that number stands for "infinite."
The Other Death
About two years ago, I believe it was (I've lost the letter), Gannon wrote me from Gualeguaychu* to announce that he was sending me a translation, perhaps the first to be done into Spanish, of Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem "The Past"; in a postscript he added that Pedro Damián, a man he said he knew I'd remember, had died a few nights earlier of pulmonary congestion. He'd been ravaged by fever, Gannon said, and in his delirium had relived that bloody day at Masoller.* The news struck me as predictable and even trite, because at nineteen or twenty Pedro Damián had followed the banners of Aparicio Saravia.*The 1904 uprising had caught him unawares on a ranch in Rio Negro or Paysandu*, where he was working as a common laborer; Damián was from Entre Ríos, Gualeguay* to be exact, but where his friends went, he went—just as spirited and ignorant a fellow as they were. He fought in the occasional hand-to-hand skirmish and in that last battle; repatriated in 1905, he went back (with humble tenacity) to working in the fields. So far as I am aware, he never left his province again. He spent his last thirty years on quite a solitary little farm a league or two from the Ñancay*; it was in that godforsaken place that I spoke with him one evening in 1942—or tried to speak with him. He was a man of few words and little learning. The sound and fury of Masoller were the full extent of his story; it came as no surprise to me that he had relived those times as he lay dying. ... I had learned that I would never see Damián again, and so I tried to recall him; my visual memory is so bad that all I could remember was a photograph that Gannon had taken of him. That, too, is not particularly remarkable, if you consider that I saw the man himself but once, in early 1942, but saw the photograph countless times.
Gannon sent me the photo; I've lost it, but now I've stopped looking for it. I'd be afraid to find it.
The second episode took place in Montevideo, months later. The fever and agonizing death of the man from Entre Ríos suggested to me a tale of fantasy based on the defeat at Masoller; when I told the plot of the story to Emir Rodriguez Monegal, he gave me a letter of introduction to Col. Dionisio Tabares, who had led the campaign. The colonel received me after dinner. From his comfortable rocking chair out in the courtyard, he lovingly and confusedly recalled the old days. He spoke of munitions that never arrived and of exhausted horses, of grimy, sleepy men weaving labyrinths of marches, and of Saravia, who could have entered Montevideo but turned aside "because gauchos have an aversion to the city," of men whose throats were slashed through to the spine,* of a civil war that struck me as more some outlaw's dream than the collision of two armies. He talked about Illescas, Tupambae, Masoller,* and did so with such perfectly formed periods, and so vividly, that I realized that he'd told these same stories many times before—indeed, it all made me fear that behind his words hardly any memories remained. As he took a breath, I managed to mention the name Damián.
"Damián? Pedro Damián?" the colonel said. "He served with me. A little Indian-like fellow the boys called Dayman." He began a noisy laugh, but suddenly cut it off, with real or pretended discomfort.
It was in another voice that he said that war, like women, served to test a man—before a man goes into battle, he said, no man knows who he truly is. One fellow might think himself a coward and turn out to be a brave man, or it might be the other way around, which was what happened to that poor Damián, who swaggered around the pulperías with his white ribbon* and then fell apart in Masoller.
There was one shoot-out with the Zumacos* where he'd acted like a man, but it was another thing when the armies squared off and the cannon started in and every man felt like five thousand other men had ganged up to kill'im. Poor little mestizo bastard, he'd spent his whole life dipping sheep, and all of a sudden he'd gotten himself swept up in that call to defend the nation....
Absurdly, Col. Tabares' version of the events embarrassed me. I'd have preferred that they not have taken place quite that way. Out of the aged Damián, a man I'd had a glimpse of on a single afternoon, and that, many years ago, I had unwittingly constructed a sort of idol; Tabares' version shattered it. Suddenly I understood Damián's reserve and stubborn solitude; they had been dictated not by modesty, but by shame. Futilely I told myself, over and over, that a man pursued by an act of cowardice is more complex and more interesting than a man who is merely brave. The gaucho Martín Fierro, I thought, is less memorable than Lord Jim or Razumov. Yes, but Damián, as a gaucho, had an obligation to be Martín Fierro—especially so in the company of Uruguayan gauchos. With respect to what Tabares said and failed to say, I caught the gamy taste of what was called Artiguismo* — the (perhaps unarguable) awareness that Uruguay is more elemental than our own country, and therefore wilder.... I recall that that night we said our goodbyes with exaggerated effusiveness.