These reflections bring me to the door of your office. I go inside. We exchange a few conventional, cordial words, and I give you this book. Unless I am mistaken, you didn't dislike me, Lugones, and you'd have liked to like some work of mine. That never happened, but this time you turn the pages and read a line or two approvingly, perhaps because you've recognized your own voice in it, perhaps because the halting poetry itself is less important than the clean-limbed theory.
At this point, my dream begins to fade and melt away, like water in water. The vast library surrounding me is on Calle Mexico, not Rodríguez Peña, and you, Lugones, killed yourself in early '38. My vanity and my nostalgia have confected a scene that is impossible. Maybe so, I tell myself, but tomorrow I too will be dead and our times will run together and chronology will melt into an orb of symbols, and somehow it will be true to say that I have brought you this book and that you have accepted it.
J. L. B.
Buenos Aires, August 9, 1960
The Maker*
He had never lingered among the pleasures of memory. Impressions, momentary and vivid, would wash over him: a potter's vermilion glaze; the sky-vault filled with stars that were also gods; the moon, from which a lion had fallen; the smoothness of marble under his sensitive, slow fingertips; the taste of wild boar meat, which he liked to tear at with brusque, white bites; a Phoenician word; the black shadow cast by a spear on the yellow sand; the nearness of the sea or women; heavy wine, its harsh edge tempered by honey—these things could flood the entire circuit of his soul. He had known terror, but he had known wrath and courage as well, and once he had been the first to scale an enemy wall. Keen, curious, inadvertent, with no law but satisfaction and immediate indifference, he had wandered the various world and on now this, now that seashore, he had gazed upon the cities of men and their palaces. In teeming marketplaces or at the foot of a mountain upon whose uncertain peak there might be satyrs, he had listened to complex stories, which he took in as he took in reality—without asking whether they were true or false.
Gradually, the splendid universe began drawing away from him; a stubborn fog blurred the lines of his hand; the night lost its peopling stars, the earth became uncertain under his feet. Everything grew distant, and indistinct. When he learned that he was going blind, he cried out. ("Stoicism" had not yet been invented, and Hector could flee without self-diminution.) Now (he felt) I will not be able to see the sky filled with mythological dread or this face that the years will transfigure. Days and nights passed over this despair of his flesh, but one morning he awoke, looked (with calm now) at the blurred things that lay about him, and felt, inexplicably, the way one might feel upon recognizing a melody or a voice, that all this had happened to him before and that he had faced it with fear but also with joy and hopefulness and curiosity. Then he descended into his memory, which seemed to him endless, and managed to draw up from that vertigo the lost remembrance that gleamed like a coin in the rain—perhaps because he had never really looked at it except (perhaps) in a dream.
The memory was this: Another boy had insulted him, and he had run to his father and told him the story.
As though he weren't paying attention, or didn't understand, his father let him talk, but then he took a bronze knife down from the wall—a beautiful knife, charged with power, that the boy had furtively coveted. Now he held it in his hands, and the surprise of possession wiped away the insult that he had suffered, but his father's voice was speaking: Let it be known that you are a man, and there was a command in the voice. Night's blindness was upon the paths; clutching to himself the knife in which he sensed a magical power, the boy descended the steep rough hillside that his house stood on and ran to the seashore, dreaming that he was Ajax and Perseus and peopling the dark salt air with wounds and battles. It was the precise flavor of that moment that he sought for now; the rest didn't matter—the insulting words of his challenge, the clumsy combat, the return with the bloodied blade.
Another memory, in which there was also a night and the foretaste of adventure, sprouted from that first one. A woman, the first woman the gods had given him, had awaited him in the darkness of a subterranean crypt, and he searched for her through galleries that were like labyrinths of stone and down slopes that descended into darkness. Why had those memories come to him, and why did they come without bitterness, like some mere foreshadowing of the present?
With grave wonder, he understood. In this night of his mortal eyes into which he was descending, love and adventure were also awaiting him. Ares and Aphrodite—because now he began to sense (because now he began to be surrounded by) a rumor of glory and hexameters, a rumor of men who defend a temple that the gods will not save, a rumor of black ships that set sail in search of a beloved isle, the rumor of the Odysseys and Iliads that it was his fate to sing and to leave echoing in the cupped hands of human memory. These things we know, but not those that he felt as he descended into his last darkness.
Dreamtigers*
In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger—not the jaguar, that spotted "tiger"* that inhabits the floating islands of water hyacinths along the Paraná and the tangled wilderness of the Amazon, but the true tiger, the striped Asian breed that can be faced only by men of war, in a castle atop an elephant. I would stand for hours on end before one of the cages at the zoo; I would rank vast encyclopedias and natural history books by the splendor of their tigers. (I still remember those pictures, I who cannot recall without error a woman's brow or smile.) My childhood outgrown, the tigers and my passion for them faded, but they are still in my dreams. In that underground sea or chaos, they still endure. As I sleep I am drawn into some dream or other, and suddenly I realize that it's a dream. At those moments, I often think: This is a dream, a pure diversion of my will, and since I have unlimited power, I am going to bring forth a tiger.
Oh, incompetence! My dreams never seen to engender the creature I so hunger for. The tiger does appear, but it is all dried up, or it's flimsy-looking, or it has impure vagaries of shape or an unacceptable size, or it's altogether too ephemeral, or it looks more like a dog or bird than like a tiger.
A Dialog About a Dialog
A: Absorbed in our discussion of immortality, we had let night fall without lighting the lamp, and we couldn't see each other's faces. With an off-handedness or gentleness more convincing than passion would have been, Macedonie Fernández' voice said once more that the soul is immortal. He assured me that the death of the body is altogether insignificant, and that dying has to be the most unimportant thing that can happen to a man. I was playing with Macedonio's pocketknife, opening and closing it. A nearby accordion was infinitely dispatching La Comparsita, that dismaying trifle that so many people like because it's been misrepresented to them as being old.... I suggested to Macedonie that we kill ourselves, so we might have our discussion without all that racket.