Labyrinths (16 page)

The humility and wretchedness of the troglodyte brought to my memory the image of Argos, the moribund old dog in the
Odyssey,
and so I gave him the name Argos and tried to teach it to him. I failed over and again. Conciliation, rigor and obstinacy were completely in vain. Motionless, with lifeless eyes, he seemed not to perceive the sounds I tried to press upon him. A few steps from me, he seemed to be very distant. Lying on the sand like a small ruinous lava sphinx, he let the heavens turn above him from the twilight of dawn till that of evening. I judged it impossible that he not be aware of my purpose. I recalled that among the Ethiopians it is well known that monkeys deliberately do not speak so they will not be obliged to work, and I attributed Argos' silence to suspicion or fear. From that imagination I went on to others, even more extravagant. I thought that Argos and I participated in different universes; I thought that our perceptions were the same, but that he combined them in another way and made other objects of them; I thought that perhaps there were no objects for him, only a vertiginous and continuous play of extremely brief impressions. I thought of a world without memory, without time; I considered the possibility of a language without nouns, a language of impersonal verbs or indeclinable epithets. Thus the days went on dying and with them the years, but something akin to happiness happened one morning. It rained, with powerful deliberation.

Desert nights can be cold, but that night had been fire. I dreamt that a river in Thessaly (to whose waters I had returned a goldfish) came to rescue me; over the red sand and black rock I heard it approach; the coolness of the air and the busy murmur of the rain awoke me. I ran naked to meet it. Night was fading; beneath the yellow clouds, the tribe, no less joyful than I, offered themselves to the vivid downpour in a kind of ecstasy. They seemed like Corybantes possessed by the divinity. Argos, his eyes turned toward the sky, groaned; torrents ran down his face, not only of water but (I later learned) of tears. Argos, I cried, Argos.

Then, with gentle admiration, as if he were discovering something lost and forgotten a long time ago, Argos stammered these words: "Argos, Ulysses' dog." And then, also without looking at me: "This dog lying in the manure."

We accept reality easily, perhaps because we intuit that nothing is real. I asked him what he knew of the
Odyssey.
The exercise of Greek was painful for him; I had to repeat the question.

"Very little," he said. "Less than the poorest rhapsodist. It must be a thousand and one hundred years since I invented it."

IV

Everything was elucidated for me that day. The troglodytes were the Immortals; the rivulet of sandy water, the River sought by the horseman. As for the city whose renown had spread as far as the Ganges, it was some nine centuries since the Immortals had razed it. With the relics of its ruins they erected, in the same place, the mad city I had traversed: a kind of parody or inversion and also temple of the irrational gods who govern the world and of whom we know nothing, save that they do not resemble man. This establishment was the last symbol to which the Immortals condescended; it marks a stage at which, judging that all undertakings are in vain, they determined to live in thought, in pure speculation. They erected their structure, forgot it and went to dwell in the caves. Absorbed in thought, they hardly perceived the physical world.

These things were told me by Homer, as one would speak to a child. He also related to me his old age and the last voyage he undertook, moved, as was Ulysses, by the purpose of reaching the men who do not know what the sea is nor eat meat seasoned with salt nor suspect what an oar is. He lived for a century in the City of the Immortals. When it was razed, he advised that the other be founded. This should not surprise us; it is famous that after singing of the war of Ilion, he sang of the war of the frogs and mice. He was like a god who might create the cosmos and then create a chaos.

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal. I have noted that, in spite of religions, this conviction is very rare. Israelites, Christians and Moslems profess immortality, but the veneration they render this world proves they believe only in it, since they destine all other worlds, in infinite number, to be its reward or punishment. The wheel of certain Hindustani religions seems more reasonable to me; on this wheel, which has neither beginning nor end, each life is the effect of the preceding and engenders the following, but none determines the totality. . . Indoctrinated by a practice of centuries, the republic of immortal men had attained the perfection of tolerance and almost that of indifference. They knew that in an infinite period of time, all things happen to all men. Because of his past or future virtues, every man is worthy of all goodness, but also of all perversity, because of his infamy in the past or future. Thus, just as in games of chance the odd and even numbers tend toward equilibrium, so also wit and stolidity cancel out and correct each other and perhaps the rustic
Poem of the Cid
is the counterbalance demanded by one single epithet from the
Eclogues
or by an epigram of Heraclitus. The most fleeting thought obeys an invisible design and can crown, or inaugurate, a secret form. I know of those who have done evil so that in future centuries good would result, or would have resulted in those already past. . . Seen in this manner, all our acts are just, but they are also indifferent. There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the
Odyssey;
if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the
Odyssey,
at least once. No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.

The concept of the world as a system of precise compensations influenced the Immortals vastly. In the first place, it made them invulnerable to pity. I have mentioned the ancient quarries which broke the fields on the other bank; a man once fell headlong into the deepest of them; he could not hurt himself or die but he was burning with thirst; before they threw him a rope, seventy years went by. Neither were they interested in their own fate. The body, for them, was a submissive domestic animal and it sufficed to give it, every month, the pittance of a few hours of sleep, a bit of water and a scrap of meat. Let no one reduce us to the status of ascetics. There is no pleasure more complex than that of thought and we surrendered ourselves to it. At times, an extraordinary stimulus would restore us to the physical world. For example, that morning, the old elemental joy of the rain. Those lapses were quite rare; all the Immortals were capable of perfect quietude; I remember one whom I never saw stand up: a bird had nested on his breast.

Among the corollaries of the doctrine that there is nothing lacking compensation in something else, there is one whose theoretical importance is very small, but which induced us, toward the end or the beginning of the tenth century, to disperse ourselves over the face of the earth. It can be stated in these words: "There exists a river whose waters grant immortality; in some region there must be another river whose waters remove it." The number of rivers is not infinite; an immortal traveler who traverses the world will finally, some day, have drunk from all of them. We proposed to discover that river.

Death (or its allusion) makes men precious and pathetic. They are moving because of their phantom condition; every act they execute may be their last; there is not a face that is not on the verge of dissolving like a face in a dream. Everything among the mortals has the value of the irretrievable and the perilous. Among the Immortals, on the other hand, every act (and every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible beginning, or the faithful presage of others that in the future will repeat it to a vertiginous degree. There is nothing that is not as if lost in a maze of indefatigable mirrors. Nothing can happen only once, nothing is preciously precarious. The elegiacal, the serious, the ceremonial, do not hold for the Immortals. Homer and I separated at the gates of Tangier; I think we did not even say goodbye.

V

I traveled over new kingdoms, new empires. In the fall of 1066, I fought at Stamford Bridge, I do not recall whether in the forces of Harold, who was not long in finding his destiny, or in those of the hapless Harald Hardrada, who conquered six feet of English soil, or a bit more. In the seventh century of the Hegira, in the suburb of Bulaq, I transcribed with measured calligraphy, in a language I have forgotten, in an alphabet I do not know, the seven adventures of Sinbad and the history of the City of Bronze. In the courtyard of a jail in Samarkand I played a great deal of chess. In Bikaner I professed the science of astrology and also in Bohemia. In 1638 I was at Kolozsvar and later in Leipzig. In Aberdeen, in 1714, I subscribed to the six volumes of Pope's
Iliad;
I know that I frequented its pages with delight. About 1729 I discussed the origin of that poem with a professor of rhetoric named, I think, Giambattista; his arguments seemed to me irrefutable. On the fourth of October, 1921, the
Patna,
which was taking me to Bombay, had to cast anchor in a port on the Eritrean coast.
18
I went ashore; I recalled other very ancient mornings, also facing the Red Sea, when I was a tribune of Rome and fever and magic and idleness consumed the soldiers. On the outskirts of the city I saw a spring of clear water; I tasted it, prompted by habit. When I came up the bank, a spiny bush lacerated the back of my hand. The unusual pain seemed very acute to me. Incredulous, speechless and happy, I contemplated the precious formation of a slow drop of blood. Once again I am mortal, I repeated to myself, once again I am like all men. That night, I slept until dawn. . .

After a year's time, I have inspected these pages. I am certain they reflect the truth, but in the first chapters, and even in certain paragraphs of the others, I seem to perceive something false. This is perhaps produced by the abuse of circumstantial details, a procedure I learned from the poets and which contaminates everything with falsity, since those details can abound in the realities but not in their recollection. . . I believe, however, that I have discovered a more intimate reason. I shall write it; no matter if I am judged fantastic.

The story I have narrated seems unreal because in it are mixed the events of two different men.
In the first chapter, the horseman wants to know the name of the river bathing the walls of Thebes; Flaminius Rufus, who before has applied to the city the epithet of Hekatompylos, says that the river is the Egypt; none of these locutions is proper to him but rather to Homer, who makes express mention in the
Iliad
of Thebes Hekatompylos and who in the
Odyssey,
by way of Proteus and Ulysses, invariably says Egypt for Nile. In the second chapter, the Roman, upon drinking the immortal water, utters some words in Greek; these words are Homeric and may be sought at the end of the famous catalogue of the ships. Later, in the vertiginous palace, he speaks of "a reprobation which was almost remorse"; these words belong to Homer, who had projected that horror. Such anomalies disquieted me; others, of an aesthetic order, permitted me to discover the truth. They are contained in the last chapter; there it is written that I fought at Stamford Bridge, that I transcribed in Bulaq the travels of Sinbad the Sailor and that I subscribed in Aberdeen to the English
Iliad
of Pope. One reads,
inter alia:
"In Bikaner I professed the science of astrology and also in Bohemia." None of these testimonies is false; what is significant is that they were stressed. The first of them seems proper to a warrior, but later one notes that the narrator does not linger over warlike deeds, but does over the fates of men. Those which follow are even more curious. A dark elemental reason obliged me to record them; I did it because I knew they were pathetic. Spoken by the Roman Flaminius Rufus, they are not. They are, spoken by Homer; it is strange that the latter should copy in the thirteenth century the adventures of Sinbad, another Ulysses, and should discover after many centuries, in a northern kingdom and a barbarous tongue, the forms of his
Iliad.
As for the sentence containing the name of Bikaner, one can see that it was fabricated by a man of letters, desirous (as was the author of the ship catalogue) of exhibiting splendid words.
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When the end draws near, there no longer remain any remembered images; only words remain. It is not strange that time should have confused the words that once represented me with those that were symbols of the fate of he who accompanied me for so many centuries. I have been Homer; shortly, I shall be No One, like Ulysses; shortly, I shall be all men; I shall be dead.

Postscript (1950).
― Among the commentaries elicited by the preceding publication, the most curious, if not the most urbane, is biblically entitled
A Coat of Many Colors
(Manchester, 1948) and is the work of the most tenacious pen of Doctor Nahum Cordovero. It comprises some one hundred pages. The author speaks of the Greek centos, of the centos of late Latinity, of Ben Jonson, who defined his contemporaries with bits of Seneca, of the
Virgilius evangelizans
of Alexander Ross, of the artifices of George Moore and of Eliot and, finally, of "the narrative attributed to the antique dealer Joseph Cartaphilus." He denounces, in the first chapter, brief interpolations from Pliny
(Historia naturalis,
V, 8); in the second, from Thomas de Quincey
(Writings,
III, 439); in the third, from an epistle of Descartes to the ambassador Pierre Chanut; in the fourth, from Bernard Shaw
(Back to Methuselah,
V). He infers from these intrusions or thefts that the whole document is apocryphal.