A spiteful scar crossed his face: an ash-colored
and nearly perfect arc that creased his temple at one tip and his cheek at the
other. His real name is of no importance, everyone in Tacuarembó called him the
Englishman from La Colorada.” Cardoso, the owner of those fields refused to
sell them: I understand that the Englishman resorted to an unexpected argument:
he confided to Cardoso the secret of the scar. The Englishman came from the
border, from Rio Grande del Sur; there are many who say that in Brazil he had
been a smuggler. The fields were overgrown with grass, the waterholes brackish;
the Englishman, in order to correct those deficiencies, worked fully as hard as
his laborers. They say that he was severe to the point of cruelty, but
scrupulously just. They say also that he drank: a few times a year he locked
himself into an upper room, not to emerge until two or three days later as if
from a battle or from vertigo, pale, trembling, confused and as authoritarian
as ever. I remember the glacial eyes, the energetic leanness, the gray
mustache. He had no dealings with anyone; it is a fact that his Spanish was
rudimentary and cluttered with Brazilian. Aside from a business letter or some
pamphlet he received no mail.
The last time I passed through the northern provinces, a
sudden overflowing of the Caraguatá stream compelled me to spend the night at
La Colorada. Within a few moments, I seemed to sense that my appearance was
inopportune, I tried to ingratiate myself with the Englishman; I resorted to
the least discerning of passions: patriotism. I claimed as invincible a country
with such spirit as England’s.
My companion agreed. but added with a smile that he was not English. He was
Irish from Hungarian. Having said this, he stopped short, as if he had revealed
a secret.
After dinner we went outside to look at the sky.
It had cleared up, but beyond the low hills the southern sky, streaked and
gashed by lightning was conceiving another storm. Into the cleared up dining
room the boy who had served dinner brought a bottle of rum. We drank for some
time, in silence.
I don’t know what time it must have been when I
observed that I was drunk; I don’t know what inspiration or what exultation or
tedium made me mention the scar.
The Englishman’s face changed its expression; for
a few seconds I thought he was going to throw me out of the house. At length he
said in his normal voice:
“I’ll tell you the history of my scar under one
condition that of not mitigating one bit of the opprobrium, of the infamous
circumstances.”
I agreed. This is the story that he told me,
mixing his English with Spanish, and even with Portuguese: “Around 1922, in one
of the cities of Connaught, I was one of the many who were conspiring for the
independence of Ireland.
Of my comrades, some are sell living, dedicated to peaceful pursuits; others,
paradoxically, are fighting on desert and sea under the English flag; another,
the most worthy, died in the courtyard of a barracks, at dawn, shot by men
filled with sleep; still others (not the most unfortunate) met their destiny in
the anonymous and almost secret battles of the civil war. We were Republicans,
Catholics; we were, I suspect, Romantics. Ireland was for us not only the
utopian future and the intolerable present; it was a bitter and cherished
mythology, it was the circular towed and the red marshes, it was the
repudiation of Parnell and the enormous epic poems which sang of the robbing of
bulls which in another incarnation were heroes and in others fish and mountains
. . . One afternoon I will never forget, an affiliate from Munster joined us:
one John Vincent Moon.
“He was scarcely twenty years old. He was slender
and flaccid at the same time; he gave the uncomfortable impression of being
invertebrate. He had studied with fervor and with vanity nearly every page of
Lord knows what Communist manual; he made use of dialectical materialism to put
an end to any discussion whatever. The reasons one can have for hating another
man, or for loving him, are infinite: Moon reduced the history of the universe
to a sordid economic conflict He affirmed that the revolution was predestined to
succeed. I told him that for a gentleman only lost causes should be attractive
. . . Night had already fallen; we continued our disagreement in the hall, on
the stilts, then along the vague streets. The judgments Moon emitted impressed
me less than his irrefutable, apodictic note. The new comrade did not discuss:
he dictated opinions with scorn and with a certain anger.
“As we were arriving at the outlying houses, a
sudden burst of gunfire stunned us. (Either before or afterwards we skirted the
blank wall of a factory or barracks.) We moved into an unpaved street; a
soldier, huge in the firelight, came out of a burning hut. Crying out, he
ordered us to stop. I quickened my pace; my companion did not follow. I turned
around: John Vincent Moon was motionless, fascinated, as if energized by fear.
I then ran back and knocked the soldier to the ground with one blow, shook
Vincent Moon, insulted him and ordered him to follow. I had to take him by the
arm; the passion of fear had rendered him helpless. We fled into the night
pierced by flames. A rifle volley reached out for us, and a bullet nicked
Moon’s right shoulder; as we were fleeing amid pines, he broke out in weak
sobbing.
“In that fall of 1923 I had taken shelter in
General Berkeley’s country house. The general (whom I had never seen) was
carrying out some administrative assignment or other in Bengal;
the house was less than a century old, but it was decayed and shadowy and
flourished in puzzling corridors and in pointless antechambers. The museum and
the huge library usurped the first floor: controversial and uncongenial books
which in some manner are the history of the nineteenth century; scimitars from
Nishapur, along whose captured arcs there seemed to persist still the wind and
violence of battle. We entered (I seem to recall) through the rear. Moon,
trembling, his mouth parched, murmured that the events of the night were
interesting I dressed his wound and
brought him a cup of tea; I was able to determine that his ‘wound’ was
superficial. Suddenly he stammered in bewilderment:
‘You know, you ran a terrible risk.’
I told him not to worry about it. (The habit of
the civil war had incited me to act is I did; besides, the capture of a single
member could endanger our cause.)
“By the following day Moon had recovered his
poise. He accepted a cigarette and subjected me to a severe interrogation on
the ‘economic resources of our revolutionary party.’ His questions were very
lucid; I told him (truthfully) that the situation was serious. Deep bursts of
rifle fire agitated the south. I told
Moon our comrades were waiting for us. My overcoat and my revolver were in my
room; when I returned, I found Moon stretched out on the sofa, his eyes closed.
He imagined he had a fever; he invoked a painful spasm in his shoulder.
“At that moment I understood that his cowardice
was irreparable. I clumsily entreated him to take care of himself and went out.
This frightened man mortified me, as if I were the coward, not Vincent Moon.
Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason it is not
unfair that one disobedience in a garden
should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that
the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it. Perhaps
Schopenhauer was right. I am all other men, any man is all men, Shakespeare is
in some manner the miserable John Vincent Moon.
“Nine days we spent in the general’s enormous
house. Of the agonies and the successes of the war I shall not speak: I propose
to relate the history of the scar that insults me. In my memory, those nine
days form only a single day , save for
the next to the last, when our men broke
into a barracks and we were able to avenge precisely the sixteen
comrades who had been machine- gunned in Elphin. I slipped out of the house
towards dawn, in the confusion of daybreak. At Highball I was back. My
companion was waiting for me upstairs: his wound did not permit him to descend
to the ground floor. I recall him having some volume of strategy in his hand,
F. N. Maude or Clausewitz ‘The weapon I prefer is the artillery,’ he confessed
to me one night.
He inquired into our plans; he liked to censure
them or revise them. He also was accustomed to denouncing ‘our deplorable
economic basis’; dogmatic and gloomy, he predicted the disastrous end.
‘C’est une
affaire flambée,’ he murmured. In order to show that he was indifferent to
being a physical coward, he magnified his mental arrogance. In this way, for
good or for bad, nine days elapsed.
“On the tenth day the city fell definitely to the
Black and Tans. Tall, silent horsemen patrolled the roads; ashes and smoke rode
on the wind; on the corner I saw a corpse thrown to the ground, an Impression
less firm in my memory than that of a dummy on which the soldiers endlessly
practiced their marksmanship, in the middle of the square . . . I had left when
dawn was in the sky, before noon I returned. Moon, in the library, was speaking
with someone; the tone of his voice told me he was talking on the telephone.
Then I heard my name; then that I would return at seven; then, the suggestion
that they should arrest me as I was crossing the garden. My reasonable fiend
was reasonably selling me out. I heard him demand guarantees of personal
safety.
‘Here my story is confused and becomes lost. I
know that I pursued the informer along the black, nightmarish halls and along
deep stairways of dizziness. Moon knew the house very well, much better than I.
One or two times I lost him. I cornered him before the soldiers stopped me.
From one of the general’s collections of arms I tore a cutlass with that half
moon I carved into his face forever a half moon of blood. Borges, to you, a
stranger I have made this confession. Your contempt does not grieve me so
much.’’
Here the narrator stopped. I noticed that his hands
were shaking.
“And Moon?” I asked him.
“He collected his Judas money and fled to Brazil. That
afternoon, in the square, he saw a dummy shot up by some drunken men. I waited
in vain for the rest of the story. Finally I told him to go on. Then a sob went
through his body; and with a weak gentleness he pointed to the whitish curved
scar.
“You don’t believe me?” he stammered. “Don’t you see that I carry written on my face the
mark of my infamy? I have told you the story thus so that you would hear me to
the end. I denounced the man who protected me. I am Vincent Moon. Now despise
me.”
To E. H. M
Translated
by D. A. Y.
