Collected Fictions (54 page)

The lamb, prepared with slow skillfulness by one of the peons that worked on the estate, held us long in the dining room. The dates of the wines were discussed. There was a guitar; my cousin, I think I recall, sang Elias Regules'
La tapera
and
El gaucho
and a few
décimas
in Lunfardo,* which was
de rigueur
back then—verses about a knife fight in one of those houses on Calle Junín.* Coffee was brought in, and cigars.

Not a word
about heading back home. I felt, as Lugones once put it, "the fear of the lateness of the hour." I couldn't bring myself to look at the clock. To hide the loneliness I felt at being a boy among men, I drank down, without much pleasure, a glass or two of wine. Suddenly, Uriarte loudly challenged Duncan to a game of poker, just the two of them,
mano a mano.
Someone objected that two-handed poker usually was a sorry sort of game, and suggested a table of four. Duncan was in favor of that, but Uriarte, with an obstinacy that I didn't understand (and didn't try to), insisted that it be just the two of them. Outside of
truco
(whose essential purpose is to fill time with verses and good-natured mischief) and the modest labyrinths of solitaire, I have never cared much for cards. I slipped out of the room without anyone's noticing.

A big house that one has never been in before, its rooms in darkness (there was light only in the dining room), means more to a boy than an unexplored country to a traveler. Step by step I explored the house; I recall a billiard room, a conservatory with glass panes of rectangles and lozenges, a pair of rocking chairs, and a window from which there was a glimpse of a gazebo. In the dimness, I became lost; the owner of the house—whose name, after all these years, might have been Acevedo or Acebal—finally found me. Out of kindness, or, being a collector, out of vanity, he led me to a sort of museum case.

When he turned on the light, I saw that it contained knives of every shape and kind, knives made famous by the circumstances of their use. He told me he had a little place near Pergamino, and that he had gathered his collection over years of traveling back and forth through the province. He opened the case and without looking at the little show cards for each piece he recounted the knives' histories, which were always more or less the same, with differences of place and date. I asked if among his knives he had the dagger that had been carried by Moreira*(at that time the very archetype of the gaucho, as Martín Fierroand Don Segundo Sombra*would later be). He had to admit he didn't, but he said he could show me one like it, with the same U-shaped cross guard. Angry voices interrupted him. He closed the case immediately; I followed him.

Uriarte was shouting that Duncan had been cheating. The others were standing around them. Duncan, I recall, was taller than the others; he was a sturdy-looking, inexpressive man a bit heavy in the shoulders, and his hair was so blond that it was almost white. Maneco Uriarte was a man of many nervous gestures and quick movements; he was dark, with features that revealed, perhaps, some trace of Indian blood, and a sparse, petulant mustache. Clearly, they were all drunk; I cannot say for certain whether there were two or three bottles scattered about on the floor or whether the cinematographer's abuses have planted that false memory in my mind. Uriarte's cutting (and now obscene) insults never ceased. Duncan seemed not to hear him; finally he stood up, as though weary, and hit Uriarte, once, in the face. Uriarte screamed—from the floor where he now lay sprawling—that he was not going to tolerate such an affront, and he challenged Duncan to fight.

Duncan shook his head.

"To tell the truth, I'm afraid of you," he added, by way of explanation.

A general burst of laughter greeted this.

"You're going to fight me, and now," Uriarte replied, once more on his feet.

Someone, God forgive him, remarked that there was no lack of weapons.

I am not certain who opened the vitrine. Maneco Uriarte selected the longest and showiest knife, the one with the U-shaped cross guard; Duncan, almost as though any one of them would serve as well as any other, chose a wood-handled knife with the figure of a little tree on the blade. Someone said it was like Maneco to choose a sword. No one was surprised that Maneco's hand should be shaking at such a moment; everyone was surprised to see that Duncan's was.

Tradition demands that when men fight a duel, they not sully the house they are in, but go outside for their encounter. Half in sport, half serious, we went out into the humid night. I was not drunk from wine, but I was drunk from the adventure; I yearned for someone to be killed, so that I could tell about it later, and remember it. Perhaps just then the others were no more adult than 1.1 also felt that a whirlpool we seemed incapable of resisting was pulling us down, and that we were about to be lost. No one really took Maneco's accusation seriously; everyone interpreted it as stemming from some old rivalry, tonight exacerbated by the wine.

We walked through the woods that lay out beyond the gazebo. Uriarte and Duncan were ahead of us; I thought it odd that they should watch each other the way they did, as though each feared a surprise move by the other. We came to a grassy patch.

"This place looks all right," Duncan said with soft authority.

The two men stood in the center indecisively.

"Throw down that hardware—it just gets in the way. Wrestle each other down for real!" a voice shouted.

But by then the men were fighting. At first they fought clumsily, as though afraid of being wounded; at first they watched their opponent's blade, but then they watched his eyes. Uriarte had forgotten about his anger; Duncan, his indifference or disdain. Danger had transfigured them; it was now two men, not two boys, that were fighting. I had imagined a knife fight as a chaos of steel, but I was able to follow it, or almost follow it, as though it were a game of chess. Time, of course, has not failed both to exalt and to obscure what I saw. I am not sure how long it lasted; there are events that cannot be held to ordinary measures of time.

As their forearms (with no ponchos wrapped around them for protection) blocked the thrusts, their sleeves, soon cut to ribbons, grew darker and darker with their blood. It struck me that we'd been mistaken in assuming they were unfamiliar with the knife. I began to see that the two men handled their weapons differently. The weapons were unequal; to overcome that disadvantage, Duncan tried to stay close to the other man, while Uriarte drew away in order to make long, low thrusts.

"They're killing each other! Stop them!" cried the same voice that had mentioned the showcase.

No one summoned the courage to intervene. Uriarte had lost ground; Duncan then charged him. Their bodies were almost touching now. Uriarte's blade sought Duncan's face. Abruptly it looked shorter; it had plunged into his chest. Duncan lay on the grass. It was then that he spoke, his voice barely audible:

"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.

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.