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

the twenty-third of January, 1856, in the Cardoso marshes, he was one of thirty white men who, led by Sergeant Major Eusebio Laprida, fought against two hundred Indians. In this action he was wounded by a spear.
    The dim and hardy story of his life is full of gaps. Around 1868, we hear of him once more in Pergamino, married or living with a woman, father of a son, and owner of a small holding of land. In 1869, he was appointed sergeant of the local police. He had made up for his past and, in those days, may have thought of himself as a happy man, though deep down he wasn’t. (What lay in wait for him, hidden in the future, was a night of stark illumination— the night in which at last he glimpsed his own face, the night in which at last he heard his name. Fully understood, that night exhausts his story; or rather, one moment in that night, one deed, since deeds are our symbols.) Any life, no matter how long or complex it may be, is made up essentially of a single moment —the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is. It has been said that Alexander the Great saw his iron future in the fabled story of Achilles, and Charles XII of Sweden, his in the story of Alexander. To Tadeo Isidoro Cruz, who did not know how to read, this revelation was not given by a book; it was in a manhunt and in the man he was hunting that he learned who he was. The thing happened in this way: 
    During the last days of the month of June, 1870, he received orders to capture an outlaw who had killed two men. The man was a deserter from the forces of Colonel Benito Machado on the southern frontier; he had killed a Negro in a drunken brawl in a whorehouse and, in another brawl, a man from the district of Rojas. The report added that he had last been seen near the Laguna Colorada. This was the same place where the troop of gaucho militia had gathered, some forty years earlier, before starting out on the misadventure that gave their flesh to the vultures and dogs. Out of this spot had come Manuel Mesa, who was later made to stand before a firing squad in the central square of Buenos Aires while the drums rolled in order to drown out his last words; out of this spot had come the unknown man who fathered Cruz and died in a ditch, his skull split by a saber that had seen action on the battlefields of Peru and Brazil. Cruz had forgotten the name of the place. Now, after a vague and puzzling uneasiness, it came to him.
    Pursued by the soldiers and shuttling back and forth on horseback, the hunted man had woven a long maze, but nonetheless, on the night of July twelfth, the troops tracked him down. He had taken shelter in a growth of tall reeds. The darkness was nearly impenetrable; Cruz and his men, stealthily and on foot, advanced toward the clumps in whose swaying center the hidden man lay in wait or asleep. A startled plover let out a cry. Tadeo Isidoro Cruz had the feeling of having lived this moment before. The hunted man came out of his hiding place to fight them in the open. Cruz made out the hideous figure—his overgrown hair and gray beard seemed to eat away his face. An obvious reason keeps me from describing the fight that followed. Let me simply point out that the deserter badly wounded or killed several of Cruz’s men. Cruz, while he fought in the dark (while his body fought in the dark), began to understand. He understood that one destiny is no better than another, but that every man must obey what is within him. He understood that his shoulder braid and his uniform were now in his way. He understood that his real destiny was as a lone wolf, not a gregarious dog. He understood that the other man was himself. Day dawned over the boundless plain. Cruz threw down his kepi, called out that he would not be party to the crime of killing a brave man, and began fighting against his own soldiers, shoulder to shoulder with Martín Fierro, the deserter.

The Two Kings and Their Two Labyrinths

    (1946)

    [This is the story the Reverend