Free Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations by Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N.T. di Giovanni)

third murder at C, four miles from A and B, halfway between the two. Lay in wait for me then at D, two miles from A and C, again halfway between them. Kill me at D, the way you are going to kill me here at Triste-leRoy.”
    “The next time I kill you,” said Scharlach, “I promise you such a maze, which is made up of a single straight line and which is invisible and unending.”
    He moved back a few steps. Then, taking careful aim, he fired.

The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874)

    (1944)

    I’m looking for the face I had
    Before the world was made.
    Yeats, A Woman Young and Old

    On the sixth of February, 1829, a troop of gaucho militia, harried all day by Lavalle on their march north to join the army under the command of López, made a halt some nine or ten miles from Pergamino at a ranch whose name they did not know. Along about dawn, one of the men had a haunting nightmare and, in the dim shadows of a shed where he lay sleeping, his confused outcry woke the woman who shared his bed. Nobody ever knew what he dreamed, for around four o’clock that afternoon the gauchos were routed by a detachment of Suárez’ cavalry in a chase that went on for over twenty miles and ended, in thickening twilight, in tall swamp grasses, where the man died in a ditch, his skull split by a saber that had seen service in the Peruvian and Brazilian wars. The woman’s name was Isidora Cruz. The son born to her was given the name Tadeo Isidoro.
    My aim here is not to recount his whole personal history.
    Of the many days and nights that make up his life, only a single night concerns me; as to the rest, I shall tell only what is necessary to that night’s full understanding. The episode belongs to a famous poem—that is to say, to a poem which has come to mean “all things to all men” (I Corinthians 9:22), since almost endless variations, versions, and perversions have been read into its pages. Those who have theorized about Tadeo Isidoro’s story—and they are many—lay stress upon the influence of the wide-open plains on his character, but gauchos exactly like him were born and died along the wooded banks of the Paraná and in the hilly back country of Uruguay. He lived, it must be admitted, in a world of unrelieved barbarism. When he died, in 1874, in an outbreak of smallpox, he had never laid eyes on a mountain or a gas jet or a windmill pump. Nor on a city. In 1849, he went to Buenos Aires on a cattle drive from the ranch of Francisco Xavier Acevedo. The other drovers went into town on a spending spree; Cruz, somewhat wary, did not stray far from a shabby inn in the neighborhood of the stockyards. There he spent several days, by himself, sleeping on the ground, brewing his maté, getting up at daybreak, and going to bed at dusk. He realized (beyond words and even beyond understanding) that he could not cope with the city. One of the drovers, having drunk too much, began poking fun at him. Cruz ignored him, but several times on the way home, at night around the campfire, the other man kept on with his gibes, and Cruz (who up till then had shown neither anger nor annoyance) laid him out with his knife.
    On the run, Cruz was forced to hide out in a marshy thicket. A few nights later, the cries of a startled plover warned him he had been ringed in by the police. He tested his knife in a thick clump of grass and, to keep from entangling his feet, took off his spurs. Choosing to fight it out rather than be taken, he got himself wounded in the forearm, in the shoulder, and in the left hand. When he felt the blood dripping between his fingers; he fought harder than ever, badly wounding the toughest members of the search party. Toward daybreak, weak with loss of blood, he was disarmed. The army in those days acted as a kind of penal institution; Cruz was sent off to serve in an outpost on the northern frontier. As a common soldier, he took part in the civil wars, sometimes fighting for the province of his birth, sometimes against. On