Hann tekr sverthtt Gram ok leggrimethal theira bert Volsunga Saga, 27

My story will be faithful to reality, or at least to my personal recollection of reality, which is the same thing. The events took place only a short while ago, but I know that the habit of literature is also the habit of interpolating circ.u.mstantial details and accentuating certain emphases. I wish to tell the story of my encounter with Ulrikke (I never learned her last name, and per- haps never will) in the city of York. The tale will span one night and one morning.

It would be easy for me to say that I saw her for the first time beside the Five Sisters at York Minster, those stained gla.s.s panes devoid offigurairep- resentation that Cromwell's iconoclasts left untouched, but the fact is that we met in the dayroom of the Northern Inn, which lies outside the walls. There were but a few of us in the room, and she had her back to me. Some- one offered her a gla.s.s of sherry and she refused it.

"I am a feminist," she said. "I have no desire to imitate men. I find their tobacco and their alcohol repulsive."The p.r.o.nouncement was an attempt at wit, and I sensed this wasn't the first time she'd voiced it. I later learned that it was not like her-but what we say is not always like us.

She said she'd arrived at the museum late, but that they'd let her in when they learned she was Norwegian.

"Not the first time the Norwegians storm York," someone remarked.

"Quite right," she said. "England was ours and we lost her-if, that is, anyone can possess anything or anything can really be lost."

It was at that point that I looked at her. A line somewhere in William Blake talks about girls of soft silver or furious gold, but in Ulrikke there was both gold and softness. She was light and tall, with sharp features and grayeyes. Less than by her face, I was impressed by her air of calm mystery. She smiled easily, and her smile seemed to take her somewhere far away. She was dressed in black-unusual in the lands of the north, which try to cheer the dullness of the surroundings with bright colors. She spoke a neat, precise English, slightly stressing the r>s. I am no great observer; I discovered these things gradually.

We were introduced. I told her I was a professor at the University of the Andes, inBogota.I clarified that I myself was Colombian.

"What is 'being Colombian'?"

"I'm not sure," I replied. "It's an act of faith."

"Like being Norwegian," she said, nodding.

I can recall nothing further of what was said that night. The next day I came down to the dining room early. I saw through the windows that it had snowed; the moors ran on seamlessly into the morning.

There was no one else in the dining room. Ulrikke invited me to share her table. She told me she liked to go out walking alone.

I remembered an old quip of Schopenhauer's.

"I do too. We can go out alone together," I said.

We walked off away from the house through the newly fallen snow. There was not a soul abroad in the fields. I suggested we go downriver a few miles, to Thorgate. I know I was in love with Ulrikke; there was no other person on earth I'd have wanted beside me.

Suddenly I heard the far-off howl of a wolf. I have never heard a wolf howl, but I know that it was a wolf. Ulrikke's expression did not change.

After a while she said, as though thinking out loud: "The few shabby swords I saw yesterday in York Minster were more moving to me than the great ships in the museum at Oslo."

Our two paths were briefly crossing: that evening Ulrikke was to con- tinue her journey toward London; I, toward Edinburgh.

"On Oxford Street," she said, "I will retrace the steps ofde Quincey,who went seeking his lost Anna among the crowds of London."

"DeQuincey," I replied, "stopped looking. My search for her, on the other hand, continues, through all time."

"Perhaps," Ulrikke said softly, "you have found her."

I realized that an unforeseen event was not to be forbidden me, and I kissed her lips and her eyes. She pushed me away with gentle firmness, but then said: "I shall be yours in the inn at Thorgate. I ask you, meanwhile, not to touch me. It's best that way."

For a celibate, middle-aged man, proffered love is a gift that one no longer hopes for; a miracle has the right to impose conditions. I recalled my salad days inPopayanand a girl from Texas, as bright and slender as Ulrikke, who had denied me her love.

I did not make the mistake of asking her whether she loved me. I real- ized that I was not the first, and would not be the last. That adventure, per- haps the last for me, would be one of many for that glowing, determined disciple of Ibsen.

We walked on, hand in hand.

"All this is like a dream," I said, "and I never dream.""Like that king," Ulrikke replied, "who never dreamed until a sorcerer put him to sleep in a pigsty."

Then she added: "Ssh! A bird is about to sing."

In a moment we heard the birdsong.

"In these lands," I said, "people think that a person who's soon to die can see the future."

"And I'm about to die," she said.

I looked at her, stunned.

"Lets cut through the woods," I urged her. "We'll get to Thorgate sooner."

"The woods are dangerous," she replied.

We continued across the moors.

"I wish this moment would last forever," I murmured.

"Foreveris a word mankind is forbidden to speak," Ulrikke declared emphatically, and then, to soften her words, she asked me to tell her my name again, which she hadn't heard very well.

"JavierOtarola,"I said.

She tried to repeat it, but couldn't. I failed, likewise, withUlrikke.

"I will call you Sigurd," she said with a smile.

"And if I'm to be Sigurd," I replied, "then you shall be Brunhild."

Her steps had slowed.

"Do you know the saga?" I asked.

"Of course," she said. "The tragic story that the Germans spoiled with their parvenuNibelungen."

I didn't want to argue, so I answered: "Brunhild, you are walking as though you wanted a sword to lie be- tween us in our bed."

We were suddenly before the inn. I was not surprised to find that it, like the one we had departed from, was called the Northern Inn.

From the top of the staircase, Ulrikke called down to me: "Did you hear the wolf? There are no wolves in England anymore. Hurry up."

As I climbed the stairs, I noticed that the walls were papered a deep crimson, in the style of William Morris, with intertwined birds and fruit. Ulrikke entered the room first. The dark chamber had a low, peaked ceiling. The expected bed was duplicated in a vague gla.s.s, and its burnished ma- hogany reminded me of the mirror of the Scriptures. Ulrikke had already undressed. She called me by my true name, Javier. I sensed that the snow was coming down harder. Now there was no more furniture, no moremir- rors. There was no sword between us. Like sand, time sifted away. Ancient in the dimness flowed love, and for the first and last time, I possessed the im- age of Ulrikke.

The Congress

Ils s'acheminerent vers un chateau immense, au frontispice duquel on lisait: "Je n'appartiens a personne et j'appartiens a tout le monde. Vous y etiez avant que d'y entrer, et vous y serez encore quand vous en sortirez."

Diderot:Jacques Le Fataliste et son Maitre(1769)

My name is AlexanderFerri.There are martial echoes in the name, but nei- ther the trumpets of glory nor the great shadow of the Macedonian (the phrase is borrowed from the author ofLosmarmoles,whose friendship I am honored to claim) accord very well with the gray, modest man who weavfs these lines on the top floor of a hotel onCalleSantiago delEstero in aSouthside that's no longer the Southside it once was. Any day now will mark the anniversary of my birth more than seventy years ago; I am still giving English lessons to very small cla.s.ses of students. Indecisiveness or oversight, or perhaps other reasons, led to my never marrying, and now I am alone. I do not mind solitude; after all, it is hard enough to live with oneself and one's own peculiarities. I can tell that I am growing old; one un- equivocal sign is the fact that I find novelty neither interesting nor surpris- ing, perhaps because I see nothing essentially new in it- it's little more than timid variations on what's already been. When I was young, I was drawn to sunsets,slums, and misfortune; now it is to mornings in the heart of the city and tranquility. I no longer play at being Hamlet. I have joined the Conservative Party and a chess club, which I attend as a spectator- sometimes an absentminded one. The curious reader may exhume, from some obscure shelf in the National Library onCalle Mexico,a copy of my bookA Brief Examination of the a.n.a.lytical Language of John Wilkins, a work which ought to be republished if only to correct or mitigate its many errors. The new director of the library, I am told, is a literary gentleman who has devoted himself to the study of antique languages, as though the languagesoftoday were not sufficiently primitive, and to the demagogical glorifica- tion of an imaginary Buenos Aires of knife fighters. I have never wished to meet him. I arrived in this city in 1899, and fate has brought me face to face with a knife fighter, or an individual with a reputation as one, exactly once. Later, if the occasion presents itself, I will relate that incident.

I have said that I am alone; a few days ago, a fellow resident here in the hotel, having heard me talk aboutFermin Eguren,told me that he had re- cently died, inPunta delEste.

I find my sadness over the death of that man (who most emphatically was never my friend) to be curiously stubborn. I know that I am alone; I am the world's only custodian of the memory of thatgeste that was the Con- gress, a memory I shall never share again. I am now its only delegate. It is true that all mankind are delegates, that there is not a soul on the planet who is not a delegate, yet I am a member of the Congress in another way- Iknow I am; that is what makes me different from all my innumerable col - leagues, present and future. It is true that on February 7,1904, we swore by all that's sacred-is there anything on earth that is sacred, or anything that's not?-that we would never reveal the story of the Congress, but it is no less true that the fact that I am now a perjurer is also part of the Congress. That statement is unclear, but it may serve to pique my eventual readers' curiosity.

At any rate, the task I have set myself is not an easy one. I have never at- tempted to produce narrative prose, even in its epistolary form; to make matters worse, no doubt, the story I am about to tell is not believable. It was the pen ofJose Fernandez Irala,the undeservedly forgotten poet ofLosmarmoles,that fate had destined for this enterprise, but now it is too late. I will not deliberately misrepresent the facts, but I can foresee that sloth and clumsiness will more than once lead me into error.

The exact dates are of no importance. I would remind the reader that I came here from Santa Fe, the province of my birth, in 1899. I have never gone back; I have grown accustomed to Buenos Aires (a city I am not, how- ever, particularly fond of) like a person grown accustomed to his own body, or an old ache. I sense, though I find little interest in the fact, that my death is near; I should, therefore, hold in check my tendency to digress, and get on with telling the story.

Years do not change our essence, if in fact we have an essence; the impulse that led me one night to the Congress of the World was that same impulse that had initially betaken me to the city room of the news- paperUltimaHora*For a poor young man from the provinces, being anewspaperman can be a romantic life, much as a poor young man from the big city might conceive a gaucho's life to be romantic, or the life of a peon on his little piece of land. I am not embarra.s.sed to have wanted to be a jour- nalist, a profession which now strikes me as trivial. I recall having heard my colleagueFernandez Iralasay that the journalist writes to be forgotten, while he himself wanted to write to be remembered, and to last. By then he had already sculpted (the word was in common use) some of the perfect sonnets that were to appear sometime later, with the occasional slight re- touching, in the pages ofLosmarmoles.

I cannot put my finger on the first time I heard someone mention the Congress. It may have been that evening when the paymaster paid me my monthly salary and to celebrate that proof that I was now a part of Buenos Aires I invited Irala to have dinner with me. Irala said he was sorry, he couldn't that night, he couldn't miss the Congress. I immediately realized that he was not referring to that pompous, dome-capped building at the far end of an avenue on which so many Spaniards chose to live, but rather to something more secret, and more important. People talked about the Con- gress-some with open contempt, others with lowered voices, still others with alarm or curiosity; all, I believe, in ignorance. A few Sat.u.r.days later, Irala invited me to go with him. He had seen, he said, to all the necessary arrangements.

It was somewhere between nine and ten at night. On the trolley, Irala told me that the preliminarymeetings took place on Sat.u.r.day and that don Alejandro Glencoe, perhaps inspired by my name, had already given leave for me to attend. We went into theConfiteriadel Gas.* The delegates, some fifteen or twenty I would say, were sitting around a long table; I am not cer- tain whether there was a raised dais or whether memory has added it. I rec- ognized the chairman immediately, though I had never seen him before. Don Alejandro was a gentleman of dignified air, well past middle age, with a wide, frank forehead, gray eyes, and a red beard flecked generously with white. I never saw him in anything but a dark frock coat; he tended to sit with his crossed hands resting on his walking stick. He was tall, and robust-looking. To his left sat a much younger man, likewise with red hair; the vio- lent color of this latter fellow's hair suggested fire, however, while the color of Glencoe's beard was more like autumn leaves.

To Glencoe's right sat a young man with a long face and a singularly low forehead, and quite the dandy.

Everyone had ordered coffee; one and another had also ordered ab- sinthe. The first thing that caught my attention was the presence of a woman, the only one among so many men. At the other end of the tablethere was a boy about ten years old, dressed in a sailor suit; he soon fell asleep. There were also a Protestant minister, two unequivocal Jews, and a Negro with a silk kerchief and very tight clothing in the style street corner toughs affected in those days. Before the Negro and the boy there sat cups of chocolate. I cannot recall the others, except for one Sr.MarcelodelMazo,a man of exquisite manners and cultured conversation, whom I never saw again. I still have a blurred and unsatisfactory photograph of one of the meetings, though I shan't publish it because the clothing of the period, the hair and mustaches, would leave a comical and even seedy impression that would misrepresent the scene. All organizations tend to create their own dialects and their own rituals; the Congress, which was always slightly dreamlike to me, apparently wanted its delegates to discover gradually, and without haste, the goal that the Congress sought, and even the Christian names and patronymics of their colleagues. I soon realized that I was under an obligation not to ask questions, and so I abstained from questioningFer- nandezIrala, who for his own part volunteered nothing. I missed not a sin- gle Sat.u.r.day, but a month or two pa.s.sed before I understood. From the second meeting on, the person who sat next to me was Donald Wren, an en- gineer for the Southern Railway, who would later give me English lessons.

Don Alejandro spoke very little; the others did not address him directly, but I sensed that they were speaking for his benefit and sought his approval. A wave of his slow hand sufficed to change the subject of discussion. Little by little I discovered that the red-haired man to his left bore the odd name Twirl. I recall the impression of frailty he gave-the characteristic of certain very tall men, as though their height gave them vertigo and made them stoop. His hands, I recall, often toyed with a copper compa.s.s, which from time to time he would set on the table. He died in late 1914, an infantryman in an Irish regiment.

The man who always sat at don Alejandro's right was the beetle-browed young man,Fermin Eguren,the chairman's nephew. I am not a believer in the methods of realism, an artificial genre if ever there was one; I prefer to reveal from the very beginning, and once and for all, what I only gradually came to know. But before that, I want to remind the reader of my situation at that time: I was a poor young man fromCasilda,the son of farmers; I had made my way to Buenos Aires and suddenly found myself, or so I felt, at the very centerofthatgreat city-perhaps, who can say, at the center of the world. A half century has pa.s.sed, yet I still feel that first sense of dazzled bewilderment-which would by no means be the last. These, then, are the facts; I will relate them very briefly: Don Alejandro Glencoe, the chairman, was a rancher from the easternprovince,* the owner of a country estate on the border with Brazil. His fa- ther, originally from Aberdeen, had settled in South America in the middle of the last century. He had brought with him some hundred or so books- the only books, I daresay, that don Alejandro had ever read in his life. (I mention these heterogeneous books, which I have held in my own hands, because one of them contained the seed from which my tale springs.) When the elder Glencoe died, he left a daughter and a son; the son would grow up to be our chairman. The daughter, who married a man named Eguren, was Fermin's mother. Don Alejandro ran once for the House of Deputies, but political bosses barred his way to the Uruguayan Congress. This rebuff ran- kled him, and he resolved to foundanother Congress-a Congress of enor- mously grander scope. He recalled having read in one of Carlyle's volcanic pages of the fate of that Anacharsis Cloots, worshiper of the G.o.ddess Rea- son, who stood at the head of thirty-six foreigners and spoke, as the "spokesman for the human race," before an a.s.sembly in Paris. Inspired byCloots' example, don Alejandro conceived the idea of establishing a Con- gress of the World, which would represent all people of all nations. The headquarters for the organizational meetings was theConfiteriadel Gas; the opening ceremonies, set for four years thence, would take place at don Alejandro's ranch. He, like so many Uruguayans, was no follower ofArti- gas,*and he loved Buenos Aires, but he was determined that the Congress should meet in his homeland. Curiously, the original date for that first meeting would be met with almost magical exactness.

At first we received a not inconsiderable honorarium for the meetings we attended, but the zeal that inflamed us all causedFernandez Irala,who was as poor as I was, to renounce his, and we others all followed suit. That gesture turned out to be quite salutary, as it separated the wheat from the chaff; the number of delegates dropped, and only the faithful remained. The only salaried position was that of the secretary, Nora Erfjord, who had no other means of subsistence and whose work was overwhelming.

Keeping tabs on an ent.i.ty which embraced the entire planet was no trivial occupa- tion. Letters flew back and forth, as did telegrams. Messages of support came in from Peru, Denmark, and Hindustan. A Bolivian gentleman pointed out that his country was totally landlocked, with no access to the sea what- soever, and suggested that that deplorable condition should be the topic of one of our first debates.

Twirl, a man of lucid intelligence, remarked that the Congress pre- sented a problem of a philosophical nature. Designing a body of men andwomen which would represent all humanity was akin to fixing the exact number of Platonic archetypes, an enigma that has engaged the perplexity of philosophers for centuries. He suggested, therefore, that (to take but one example) don Alejandro Glencoe might represent ranchers, but also Uru- guayans, as well as founding fathers and red-bearded men and men sitting in armchairs. Nora Erfjord was Norwegian. Would she represent sec- retaries, Norwegians, or simply all beautiful women? Was one engineer suf- ficient to represent all engineers, even engineers from New Zealand?

It was at that point, I believe, thatFermininterrupted.

"Ferrican represent wops,"* he said with a snort of laughter.

Don Alejandro looked at him sternly.

"Sr.Ferri," donAlejandro said serenely, "represents immigrants, whose labors are even now helping to build the nation."

Fermin Egurencould never stand me. He thought highly of himself on several counts: for being a Uruguayan, for coming of native stock, for having the ability to attract women, for having discovered an expensive tailor, and, though I shall never know why, for being descended from the Basques-a people who, living always on the margins of history, have never done anything but milk cows.

One particularly trivial incident sealed our mutual enmity. After one of our sessions, Eguren suggested that we go off toCalle Junin.*The idea held little interest for me, but I agreed, so as not to expose myself to his railery.Fernandez Iralawent with us. As we were leaving the house we had been to, we b.u.mped into a big, burly brute of a man. Eguren, who'd no doubt been drinking a little too much, gave him a shove. The other man blocked our way angrily.

"The man that wants to leave here is going to have to get past this knife," he said.

I remember the gleam of the blade in the dimness of the vestibule. Eguren stepped back, terrified. I was scared, too, but my anger got the better of my fear. I put my hand inside my jacket, as though to pull out a knife.

"Let's settle this in the street," I said in a steady voice.

The stranger answered back, his voice changed.

"That's a man to my own heart! I just wanted to test you fellows, friend."

Now he was chuckling.

"Youused the word 'friend,' I didn't," I rejoined, and we walked out.

The man with the knife went on into the wh.o.r.ehouse. I was told laterthat his name wasTapiaorParedesor something of the sort, and that he was a famous troublemaker. Out on the sidewalk, Irala, who'd been calm up to that point, slapped me on the back.

"At least there was one musketeer among the three of us!" he exclaimed."Salve, d'Artagnan!"

Fermin Egurennever forgave me for having witnessed him back down.I feel that it is at this point, and only at this point, that the story be- gins. The pages that have gone before have recorded only the conditions re- quired by chance or fate in order for the incredible event (perhaps the only event of my entire life) to occur. Don Alejandro Glencoe was always at the center of the web of plans, but we gradually began to feel, not without some astonishment and alarm, that the real chairman was Twirl. This singular in- dividual with his flaming mustache fawned upon Glencoe and evenFerminEguren, but with such exaggeration that the fawning might be taken for mockery, and therefore not compromise his dignity. Glencoe prided himself upon his vast fortune, and Twirl figured out that all it took to saddle Glen- coe with some new project was to suggest that the undertaking might be too costly. At first, I suspect, the Congress had been little more than a vague name; Twirl was constantly proposing ways to expand it, and don Alejandro always went along. It was like being at the center of an ever-widening, end- lessly expanding circle that seemed to be moving farther and farther beyond one's reach. Twirl declared, for example, that the Congress could not do without a library of reference books;Nierenstein,who worked in a book- store, began bringing us the atlases of Justus Perthes and sundry encyclope- dias, from Pliny'sHistoriaNaturalisand Beauvais'Speculum to the pleasant labyrinths (I reread these pages with the voice ofFernandezIrala) of the il- l.u.s.trious Frenchencyclopedistes,of the Britannica,of PierreLarousse,Brockhaus,La.r.s.en, andMontanery Simon.I recall having reverently ca- ressed the silky volumes of a certain Chinese encyclopedia, the beautiful brushstrokes of its characters seeming more mysterious to me than the spots on a leopard's skin. I will not reveal at this point the fate those silken pages met, a fate I do not lament.

Don Alejandro had conceived a liking forFernandez Iralaand me, per- haps because we were the only delegates that did not try to flatter him. He invited us to spend a few days with him on his ranch, La Caledonia, where the carpenters, chosen from among the laborers on the estate, were already hard at work.

After a long journey upriver and a final crossing on a raft, we stepped one morning onto the eastern sh.o.r.e. Even after all that, we had to pa.s.s severalnights in poverty-stricken general stores and open and close many a gate in many a stock fence across theCuchilla Negra.We were riding in a gig; the landscape seemed much larger and more lonely to me than that of the little plot where I was born.

I still retain my two distinct images of the ranch: the one I'd pictured to myself before we arrived and the one my eyes actually took in. Absurdly, I had imagined, as though in a dream, an impossible combination of the flat-lands around Santa Fe and the Palace of Running Waters*: La Caledonia was in fact a long adobe house with a peaked roof of thatched straw and a brick gallery. To my eyes, it looked built to last: the rough walls were almost a yard thick, and the doors were narrow. No one had thought of planting a tree; the place was battered by the first sun of morning and the last sun of evening. The corrals were of stone; the herd was large, the cows skinny and behorned; the swirling tails of the horses reached the ground. I tasted for the first time the meat of a just-slaughtered animal. The men brought out sacks of hardtack; a few days later, the foreman told me he'd never tasted bread in his life. Irala asked where the bathroom was; don Alejandro swept his arm through the air expansively, as much as to say "the entire conti- nent." It was a moonlit night; I went out for a walk and came upon him, watched over by a rhea.

The heat, which nightfall had not softened, was unbearable, but every- one exclaimed over the evening's coolness. The rooms were low-ceiling'd and numerous, and they seemed run-down to me; Irala and I were given one that faced south. It had two cots and a washstand, whose pitcher and basin were of silver. The floor was of packed earth.

The next day I came upon the library and its volumes of Carlyle, and I looked up the pages devoted to that spokesman for the human race, Anacharsis Cloots, who had brought me to that morning and that solitude. After breakfast (identical to dinner) don Alejandro showed us the site of the Congress' new headquarters. We rode out a league on horseback, across the open plains. Irala, who sat his horse more than a bit nervously, had a spill.

"That city boy really knows how to get off a horse," the foreman said with a straight face.

We saw the building from a distance. A score or so of men had raised a sort of amphitheater, still in bits and pieces. I recall scaffolding, and tiers of seats through which one could glimpse stretches of sky.

More than once I tried to converse with thegauchos,but every attempt failed. Somehow they knew theywere different. But they were sparing with their words even among themselves, speaking their nasal, Brazilianized sortof Spanish. No doubt their veins carried Indian and Negro blood. They were strong, short men; in La Caledonia I was tall, which I had never been before. Almost all of them wore the chiripa,and some wore the wide-leggedbombacha.*They had little or nothing in common with the mournful char- acters inHernandezor RafaelObligado.*Under the spur of their Sat.u.r.day alcohol, they could be casually violent. There were no women, and I never heard a guitar.

But the men that lived on that frontier did not make as great an impres- sion on me as the complete change that had taken place in don Alejandro. In Buenos Aires he was an affable, moderate man; in La Caledonia, he was the stern patriarch of a clan, as his forebears had been. Sunday mornings he would read the Scripture to the laborers on his ranch; they understood not a word. One night, the foreman, a youngish man who had inherited the po- sition from his father, came to tell us that a sharecropper and one of the la- borers were about to have a knife fight. Don Alejandro stood up unhurriedly. He went out to the ring of men, took off the weapon he always wore, gave it to the foreman (who seemed to have turned fainthearted at all this), and stepped between the two blades. Immediately I heard his order: "Put those knives down, boys."

Then in the same calm voice he added: "Now shake hands and behave yourselves. I'll have no squawks of this sort here."

The two men obeyed. The next day I learned that don Alejandro had dismissed the foreman.

I felt I was being imprisoned by the solitude. I feared I would never make it back to Buenos Aires. I can't say whetherFernandez Iralashared that fear, but we talked a great deal about Argentina and what we would do when we got back. I missed not the places one ordinarily might miss but rather the lions at the entrance to a house onCalle Jujuynear the Plaza del Once,* or the light from a certain store of inexact location. I was always a good rider; I soon fell into the habit of mounting a horse and riding for great distances. I still remember that big piebald I would saddle up-surely he's dead by now. I might even have ridden into Brazil one afternoon or evening, because the frontier was nothing but a line traced out by boundary stones.