Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations Read Online Free PDF

wasn’t Rosendo. Was anyone going to believe that?
    The man at our feet was dying. It looked to me like the hand that done the job done it well. Just the same, the man hung on. When he knocked that second time Julia was brewing some matés. The cup went clear around the circle and back to me before he died. When the end came, he said in a low voice, “Cover my face.” All he had left was pride and he didn’t want us gaping at him while his face went through its agony. Someone put his hat over him and that’s how he died—without a sound—under that high black crown. It was only when his chest stopped heaving they dared uncover him. He had that worn-out look dead men have. In his day, from the Artillery Barracks all the way to the Southside, he was one of the scrappiest men around. When I knew he was dead and couldn’t talk, I stopped hating him.
    “All it takes to die is being alive,” says one of the girls in the crowd. And in the same way another one says, “A man’s so full of pride and now look—all he’s good for is gathering flies.”
    Right then the Northside gang starts talking to each other in low voices. Then two of them come out together saying, “The woman killed him.” After that, in a real loud voice, one of them threw the accusation in her face, and they all swarmed in around her. Forgetting I had to be careful, I was on them like a light. I don’t know what kept me from reaching for my knife. There were a lot of eyes watching—maybe everybody’s—and I said, putting them down, “Look at this woman’s hands. How could she get the strength of the nerve to knife a man?”
    Then, kind of offhand, I added, “Whoever would have dreamed the deceased, who—like they say—was a pretty tough guy in his own neck of the woods, would end up this way? And in a place sleepy as this, where nothing ever happens till some outsider comes around trying to show us a little fun and for all his pains only gets himself spit on?”
    Nobody offered his hide for a whipping.
    Right then, in the dead silence, you could make out the approach of riders. It was the law. Everybody—some more, some less—had his own good reason for staying clear of the police. The best thing was to dump the body in the Maldonado. You remember that long window the knife went flying out of? Well, that’s where the man in black went. A bunch of guys lifted him up. There were hands stripping him of every cent and trinket he had, and someone even hacked off one of his fingers to steal his ring. They helped themselves, all right—real daring bunch with a poor defenseless stiff once a better guy already straightened him out. One good heave and the current did the rest. To keep him from floating, they maybe even tore out his guts. I don’t know—I didn’t want to look. The old-timer with the gray moustache never took his eyes off me. Making the best of all the commotion, La Lujanera slipped away.
    When the lawmen came in for a look, the dance was going good again. That blind fiddler could really scrape some lively numbers on that violin of his—the kind of thing you never hear anymore. It was beginning to get light outside. The fence posts on a nearby slope seemed to stand alone, the strands of wire still invisible in the early dawn. Nice and easy, I walked the two or three blocks back to my shack. A candle was burning in the window, then all at once went out. Let me tell you, I hurried when I saw that. Then, Borges, I put my hand inside my vest—here by the left armpit where I always carry it—and took my knife out again. I turned the blade over, real slow. It was as good as new, innocent-looking, and you couldn’t see the slightest trace of blood on it.

The Approach to al-Mu’tasim

    (1935)

    Philip Guedalla informs us that the novel The Approach to al-Mu’tasim by the Bombay barrister Mir Bahadur Ali “is a rather uneasy combination of those Islamic allegories which never fail to impress their own translators, and of that