object:Gods Script
class:Fiction
class:chapter
author class:Jorge Luis Borges
book class:Labyrinths
The God's Script
The prison is deep and of stone; its form, that of a nearly perfect
hemisphere, though the floor (also of stone) is somewhat less than a
great circle, a fact which in some way aggravates the feelings of oppression
and of vastness. A dividing wall cuts it at the center; this wall, although very
high, does not reach the upper part of the vault; in one cell am I, Tzinacán,
magician of the pyramid of Qaholom, which Pedro de Alvarado devastated
by fire; in the other there is a jaguar measuring with secret and even paces
the time and space of captivity. A long window with bars, flush with the
floor, cuts the central wall. At the shadowless hour [midday], a trap in the
high ceiling opens and a jailer whom the years have gradually been effacing
maneuvers an iron sheave and lowers for us, at the end of a rope, jugs of
water and chunks of flesh. The light breaks into the vault; at that instant I
can see the jaguar.
I have lost count of the years I have lain in the darkness; I, who was
young once and could move about this prison, am incapable of more than
awaiting, in the posture of my death, the end destined to me by the gods.
With the deep obsidian knife I have cut open the breasts of victims and now
I could not, without magic, lift myself from the dust.
On the eve of the burning of the pyramid, the men who got down from
the towering horses tortured me with fiery metals to force me to reveal the
location of a hidden treasure. They struck down the idol of the god before
my very eyes, but he did not abandon me and I endured the torments in
silence. They scourged me, they broke and deformed me, and then I awoke
in this prison from which I shall not emerge in mortal life.
Impelled by the fatality of having something to do, of populating time
in some way, I tried, in my darkness, to recall all I knew. Endless nights I
devoted to recalling the order and the number of stone-carved serpents or the
precise form of a medicinal tree. Gradually, in this way, I subdued the
passing years; gradually, in this way, I came into possession of that which
was already mine. One night I felt I was approaching the threshold of an
intimate recollection; before he sights the sea, the traveller feels a
quickening in the blood. Hours later I began to perceive the outline of the
recollection. It was a tradition of the god. The god, foreseeing that at the end
of time there would be devastation and ruin, wrote on the first day of
166Creation a magical sentence with the power to ward off those evils. He
wrote it in such a way that it would reach the most distant generations and
not be subject to chance. No one knows where it was written nor with what
characters, but it is certain that it exists, secretly, and that a chosen one shall
read it. I considered that we were now, as always, at the end of time and that
my destiny as the last priest of the god would give me access to the privilege
of intuiting the script. The fact that a prison confined me did not forbid my
hope; perhaps I had seen the script of Qaholom a thousand times and needed
only to fathom it.
This reflection encouraged me, and then instilled in me a kind of
vertigo. Throughout the earth there are ancient forms, forms incorruptible
and eternal; any one of them could be the symbol I sought. A mountain
could be the speech of the god, or a river or the empire or the configuration
of the stars. But in the process of the centuries the mountain is levelled and
the river will change its course, empires experience mutation and havoc and
the configuration of the stars varies. There is change in the firmament. The
mountain and the star are individuals and individuals perish. I sought
something more tenacious, more invulnerable. I thought of the generations
of cereals, of grasses, of birds, of men. Perhaps the magic would be written
on my face, perhaps I myself was the end of my search. That anxiety was
consuming me when I remembered the jaguar was one of the attributes of
the god.
Then my soul filled with pity. I imagined the first morning of time; I
imagined my god confiding his message to the living skin of the jaguars,
who would love and reproduce without end, in caverns, in cane fields, on
islands, in order that the last men might receive it. I imagined that net of
tigers, that teeming labyrinth of tigers, inflicting horror upon pastures and
flocks in order to perpetuate a design. In the next cell there was a jaguar; in
his vicinity I perceived a confirmation of my conjecture and a secret favor.
I devoted long years to learning the order and the configuration of the
spots. Each period of darkness conceded an instant of light, and I was able
thus to fix in my mind the black forms running through the yellow fur. Some
of them included points, others formed cross lines on the inner side of the
legs; others, ring-shaped, were repeated. Perhaps they were a single sound or
a single word. Many of them had red edges.
I shall not recite the hardships of my toil. More than once I cried out
to the vault that it was impossible to decipher that text. Gradually, the
167concrete enigma I labored at disturbed me less than the generic enigma of a
sentence written by a god. What type of sentence (I asked myself) will an
absolute mind construct? I considered that even in the human languages
there is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe; to say the
tiger is to say the tigers that begot it, the deer and turtles devoured by it, the
grass on which the deer fed, the earth that was mother to the grass, the
heaven that gave birth to the earth. I considered that in the language of a god
every word would enunciate that infinite concatenation of facts, and not in
an implicit but in an explicit manner, and not progressively but
instantaneously. In time, the notion of a divine sentence seemed puerile or
blasphemous. A god, I reflected, ought to utter only a single word and in that
word absolute fullness. No word uttered by him can be inferior to the
universe or less than the sum total of time. Shadows or simulacra of that
single word equivalent to a language and to all a language can embrace are
the poor and ambitious human words, all, world, universe.
One day or one night—what difference between my days and nights
can there be?—I dreamt there was a grain of sand on the floor of the prison.
Indifferent, I slept again; I dreamt I awoke and that on the floor there were
two grains of sand. I slept again; I dreamt that the grains of sand were three.
They went on multiplying in this way until they filled the prison and I lay
dying beneath that hemisphere of sand. I realized that I was dreaming; with a
vast effort I roused myself and awoke. It was useless to awake; the
innumerable sand was suffocating me. Someone said to me: You have not
awakened to wakefulness, but to a previous dream. This dream is enclosed
within another, and so on to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand.
The path you must retrace is interminable and you will die before you ever
really awake.
I felt lost. The sand burst my mouth, but I shouted: A sand of dreams
cannot kill me nor are there dreams within dreams. A blaze of light awoke
me. In the darkness above there grew a circle of light. I saw the face and
hands of the jailer, the sheave, the rope, the flesh and the water jugs.
A man becomes confused, gradually, with the form of his destiny; a
man is, by and large, his circumstances. More than a decipherer or an
avenger, more than a priest of the god, I was one imprisoned. From the
tireless labyrinth of dreams I returned as if to my home to the harsh prison. I
blessed its dampness, I blessed its tiger, I blessed the crevice of light, I
blessed my old, suffering body, I blessed the darkness and the stone.
168Then there occurred what I cannot forget nor communicate. There
occurred the union with the divinity, with the universe (I do not know
whether these words differ in meaning). Ecstasy does not repeat its symbols;
God has been seen in a blazing light, in a sword or in the circles of a rose. I
saw an exceedingly high Wheel, which was not before my eyes, nor behind
me, nor to the sides, but every place at one time. That Wheel was made of
water, but also of fire, and it was (although the edge could be seen) infinite.
Interlinked, all things that are, were and shall be formed it, and I was one of
the fibers of that total fabric and Pedro de Alvarado who tortured me was
another. There lay revealed the causes and the effects and it sufficed me to
see that Wheel in order to understand it all, without end. O bliss of
understanding, greater than the bliss of imagining or feeling. I saw the
universe and I saw the intimate designs of the universe. I saw the origins
narrated in the Book of the Common. I saw the mountains that rose out of
the water, I saw the first men of wood, the cisterns that turned against the
men, the dogs that ravaged their faces. I saw the faceless god concealed
behind the other gods. I saw infinite processes that formed one single felicity
and, understanding all, I was able also to understand the script of the tiger.
It is a formula of fourteen random words (they appear random) and to
utter it in a loud voice would suffice to make me all powerful. To say it
would suffice to abolish this stone prison, to have daylight break into my
night, to be young, to be immortal, to have the tiger's jaws crush Alvarado,
to sink the sacred knife into the breasts of Spaniards, to reconstruct the
pyramid, to reconstruct the empire. Forty syllables, fourteen words, and I,
Tzinacán, would rule the lands Moctezuma ruled. But I know I shall never
say those words, because I no longer remember Tzinacán.
May the mystery lettered on the tigers die with me. Whoever has seen
the universe, whoever has beheld the fiery designs of the universe, cannot
think in terms of one man, of that man's trivial fortunes or misfortunes,
though he be that very man. That man has been he and now matters no more
to him. What is the life of that other to him, the nation of that other to him, if
he, now, is no one. This is why I do not pronounce the formula, why, lying
here in the darkness, I let the days obliterate me.
Translated by L. A. Murillo
169
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