Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, Andrew Hurley Read Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jorge Luis Borges, Andrew Hurley
that their lord had been waiting for them for almost two years. At last they reached the dark sepulcher, and they offered up the head of their enemy.
The Supreme Court handed down its verdict, and it was as expected: the retainers were granted the privilege of suicide. All obeyed, some with ardent serenity, and they lie now beside their lord. Today, men and children come to the sepulcher of those faithful men to pray.
THE SATSUMA MAN
Among the pilgrims who come to the grave, there is one dusty, tired young man who must have come from a great distance. He prostrates himself before the monument to the councillor Oishi Kuranosuké and he says aloud: "When I saw you lying drunk by the roadside, at the doorstep of a whore-house in Kioto, I knew not that you were plotting to avenge your lord; and, thinking you to be a faithless man, I trampled on you and spat in your face as I passed. I have come to offer atonement." He spoke these words and then committed hará kiri.
The priest of the temple where Kuranosuké's body lay was greatly moved by the Satsuma man's courage, and he buried him by the side of the Rônins and their lord.
This is the end of the story of the forty-seven loyal retainers—except that the story has no ending, because we other men, who are perhaps not loyal yet will never entirely lose the hope that we might one day be so, shall continue to honor them with our words.*
Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv
For Angélica Ocampo
Unless I am mistaken, the original sources of information on Al-Moqanna, the Veiled (or, more strictly, Masked) Prophet of Khorasan, are but four: (a) the excerpts from the History of the Caliphs preserved by Bãladhun; (b) the Manual of the Giant, or Book of Precision and Revision, by the official historian of the Abbasids, Ibn Ab1 Tahfr Tarfur; (c) the Arabic codex entitled The Annihilation of the Rose, which refutes the abominable heresies of the Rosa Obscura or Rosa Secreta, which was the Prophet's holy work; and (d) several coins (without portraits) unearthed by an engineer named Andrusov on ground that had been leveled for the Trans-Caspian Railway. These coins were deposited in the Numismatic Museum in Tehran; they contain Persian distichs which summarize or correct certain passages from the Annihilation. The original Rosa has apparently been lost, since the manuscript found in 1899 and published (not without haste) by the Morgenländisches Archive was declared by Horn, and later by Sir Percy Sykes, to be apocryphal.
The fame of the Prophet in the West is owed to Thomas Moore's garru-lous poem Lolla Rookh, awork laden with the Irish conspirator's sighs and longings for the East.
THE SCARLET DYE
In the year 120 of the Hegira, or 736 of the Christian era, there was born in Turkestan the man Hakim, whom the people of that time and that region were to call The Veiled. His birthplace was the ancient city of Merv, whose gardens and vineyards and lawns look out sadly onto the desert. Noontime there, when not obscured by choking clouds of sand that leave a film of whitish dust on the black clusters of the grapes, is white and dazzling.
Hakim was raised in that wearied city. We know that one of his father's brothers trained him as a dyer—the craft, known to be a refuge for infidels and impostors and inconstant men, which inspired the first anathemas of his extravagant career. My face is of gold, a famous page of the Annihilation says, but I have steeped the purple dye and on the second night have plunged the uncarded wool into it, and on the third night have saturated the prepared wool, and the emperors of the islands still contend for that bloody cloth. Thus did I sin in the years of my youth, deforming the true colors of the creatures. The Angel would tell me that lambs were not the color of tigers, while Satan would say to me that the All-Powerful One desired that they be, and in that pursuit he employed my cunning and my dye. Now I know that neither the Angel nor Satan spoke the
The Supreme Court handed down its verdict, and it was as expected: the retainers were granted the privilege of suicide. All obeyed, some with ardent serenity, and they lie now beside their lord. Today, men and children come to the sepulcher of those faithful men to pray.
THE SATSUMA MAN
Among the pilgrims who come to the grave, there is one dusty, tired young man who must have come from a great distance. He prostrates himself before the monument to the councillor Oishi Kuranosuké and he says aloud: "When I saw you lying drunk by the roadside, at the doorstep of a whore-house in Kioto, I knew not that you were plotting to avenge your lord; and, thinking you to be a faithless man, I trampled on you and spat in your face as I passed. I have come to offer atonement." He spoke these words and then committed hará kiri.
The priest of the temple where Kuranosuké's body lay was greatly moved by the Satsuma man's courage, and he buried him by the side of the Rônins and their lord.
This is the end of the story of the forty-seven loyal retainers—except that the story has no ending, because we other men, who are perhaps not loyal yet will never entirely lose the hope that we might one day be so, shall continue to honor them with our words.*
Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv
For Angélica Ocampo
Unless I am mistaken, the original sources of information on Al-Moqanna, the Veiled (or, more strictly, Masked) Prophet of Khorasan, are but four: (a) the excerpts from the History of the Caliphs preserved by Bãladhun; (b) the Manual of the Giant, or Book of Precision and Revision, by the official historian of the Abbasids, Ibn Ab1 Tahfr Tarfur; (c) the Arabic codex entitled The Annihilation of the Rose, which refutes the abominable heresies of the Rosa Obscura or Rosa Secreta, which was the Prophet's holy work; and (d) several coins (without portraits) unearthed by an engineer named Andrusov on ground that had been leveled for the Trans-Caspian Railway. These coins were deposited in the Numismatic Museum in Tehran; they contain Persian distichs which summarize or correct certain passages from the Annihilation. The original Rosa has apparently been lost, since the manuscript found in 1899 and published (not without haste) by the Morgenländisches Archive was declared by Horn, and later by Sir Percy Sykes, to be apocryphal.
The fame of the Prophet in the West is owed to Thomas Moore's garru-lous poem Lolla Rookh, awork laden with the Irish conspirator's sighs and longings for the East.
THE SCARLET DYE
In the year 120 of the Hegira, or 736 of the Christian era, there was born in Turkestan the man Hakim, whom the people of that time and that region were to call The Veiled. His birthplace was the ancient city of Merv, whose gardens and vineyards and lawns look out sadly onto the desert. Noontime there, when not obscured by choking clouds of sand that leave a film of whitish dust on the black clusters of the grapes, is white and dazzling.
Hakim was raised in that wearied city. We know that one of his father's brothers trained him as a dyer—the craft, known to be a refuge for infidels and impostors and inconstant men, which inspired the first anathemas of his extravagant career. My face is of gold, a famous page of the Annihilation says, but I have steeped the purple dye and on the second night have plunged the uncarded wool into it, and on the third night have saturated the prepared wool, and the emperors of the islands still contend for that bloody cloth. Thus did I sin in the years of my youth, deforming the true colors of the creatures. The Angel would tell me that lambs were not the color of tigers, while Satan would say to me that the All-Powerful One desired that they be, and in that pursuit he employed my cunning and my dye. Now I know that neither the Angel nor Satan spoke the
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