object:Story of the Warrior and the Captive
class:Fiction
class:chapter
author class:Jorge Luis Borges
book class:Labyrinths
Story of the Warrior and the Captive
O
n page 278 of his book La poesia (Bari, 1942), Croce, abbreviating a
Latin text of the historian Peter the Deacon, narrates the destiny and
cites the epitaph of Droctulft; both these moved me singularly; later I
understood why. Droctulft was a Lombard warrior who, during the siege of
Ravenna, left his companions and died defending the city he had previously
attacked. The Ravennese gave him burial in a temple and composed an
epitaph in which they manifested their gratitude (contempsit caros, dum nos
amat ille, parentes) and observed the peculiar contrast evident between the
barbarian's fierce countenance and his simplicity and goodness:
Terribilis visu facies, sed mente benignus,
Longaque robusto pectore barba fuit! 21
Such is the story of the destiny of Droctulft, a barbarian who died
defending Rome, or such is the fragment of his story Peter the Deacon was
able to salvage. I do not even know in what period it took place: whether
toward the middle of the sixth century, when the Longobardi desolated the
plains of Italy, or in the eighth, before the surrender of Ravenna. Let us
imagine (this is not a historical work) the former.
Let us imagine Droctulft sub specie aeternitatis, not the individual
Droctulft, who no doubt was unique and unfathomable (all individuals are),
but the generic type formed from him and many others by tradition, which is
the effect of oblivion and of memory. Through an obscure geography of
forests and marshes, the wars brought him to Italy from the banks of the
Danube and the Elbe, and perhaps he did not know he was going south and
perhaps he did not know he was fighting against the name of Rome. Perhaps
he professed the Arrianist faith, which holds that the Son's glory is a
reflection of the Holy Father's, but it is more congruous to imagine him a
worshiper of the Earth, of Hertha, whose covered idol went from hut to hut
in a cow-drawn cart, or of the gods of war and thunder, which were crude
wooden figures wrapped in homespun clothing and hung with coins and
bracelets. He came from the inextricable forests of the boar and the bison; he
was light-skinned, spirited, innocent, cruel, loyal to his captain and his tribe,
21
Also Gibbon (Decline and Fall, XLV) transcribes these verses.
129but not to the universe. The wars bring him to Ravenna and there he sees
something he has never seen before, or has not seen fully. He sees the day
and the cypresses and the marble. He sees a whole whose multiplicity is not
that of disorder; he sees a city, an organism composed of statues, temples,
gardens, rooms, amphitheaters, vases, columns, regular and open spaces.
None of these fabrications (I know) impresses him as beautiful; he is
touched by them as we now would be by a complex mechanism whose
purpose we could not fathom but in whose design an immortal intelligence
might be divined. Perhaps it is enough for him to see a single arch, with an
incomprehensible inscription in eternal Roman letters. Suddenly he is
blinded and renewed by this revelation, the City. He knows that in it he will
be a dog, or a child, and that he will not even begin to understand it, but he
also knows that it is worth more than his gods and his sworn faith and all the
marshes of Germany. Droctulft abandons his own and fights for Ravenna.
He dies and on his grave they inscribe these words which he would not have
understood:
Contempsit caros, dum nos amat ille, parentes,
Hanc patriam reputans esse, Ravenna, suam.
He was not a traitor (traitors seldom inspire pious epitaphs); he was a
man enlightened, a convert. Within a few generations, the Longobardi who
had condemned this turncoat proceeded just as he had; they became Italians,
Lombards, and perhaps one of their blood—Aldiger—could have
engendered those who engendered the Alighieri. . . Many conjectures may
be applied to Droctulft's act; mine is the most economical; if it is not true as
fact it will be so as symbol.
When I read the story of this warrior in Croce's book, it moved me in
an unusual way and I had the impression of having recovered, in a different
form, something that had been my own. Fleetingly I thought of the
Mongolian horsemen who tried to make of China an infinite pasture ground
and then grew old in the cities they had longed to destroy; this was not the
memory I sought. At last I found it: it was a tale I had once heard from my
English grandmother, who is now dead.
In 1872, my grandfather Borges was commander of the northern and
western frontiers of Buenos Aires and the southern frontier of Santa Fe. His
headquarters was in Junín; beyond that, four or five leagues distant from
130each other, the chain of outposts; beyond that, what was then termed the
pampa and also the "hinterland." Once—half out of wonder, half out of
sarcasm—my grandmother commented upon her fate as a lone
Englishwoman exiled to that far corner of the earth; people told her that she
was not the only one there and, months later, pointed out to her an Indian
girl who was slowly crossing the plaza. She wore two brightly colored
blankets and went barefoot; her hair was blond. A soldier told her another
Englishwoman wanted to speak to her. The girl agreed; she entered the
headquarters without fear but not without suspicion. In her copper-colored
face, which was daubed in ferocious colors, her eyes were of that reluctant
blue the English call gray. Her body was lithe, like a deer's; her hands,
strong and bony. She came from the desert, from the hinterland, and
everything seemed too small for her: doors, walls, furniture.
Perhaps the two women felt for an instant as sisters; they were far
from their beloved island and in an incredible country. My grandmother
uttered some kind of question; the other woman replied with difficulty,
searching for words and repeating them, as if astonished by their ancient
flavor. For some fifteen years she had not spoken her native language and it
was not easy for her to recover it. She said that she was from Yorkshire, that
her parents had emigrated to Buenos Aires, that she had lost them in an
Indian raid, that she had been carried off by the Indians and was now the
wife of a chieftain, to whom she had already given two sons, and that he was
very brave. All this she said in a rustic English, interwoven with Araucanian
or Pampan, and behind her story one could glimpse a savage life: the
horsehide shelters, the fires made of dry manure, the feasts of scorched meat
or raw entrails, the stealthy departures at dawn, the attacks on corrals, the
yelling and the pillaging, the wars, the sweeping charges on the haciendas by
naked horsemen, the polygamy, the stench and the superstition. An
Englishwoman had lowered herself to this barbarism. Moved by pity and
shock, my grandmother urged her not to return. She swore to protect her, to
retrieve her children. The woman answered that she was happy and returned
that night to the desert. Francisco Borges was to die a short time later, in the
revolution of seventy-four; perhaps then my grandmother was able to
perceive in this other woman, also held captive and transformed by the
implacable continent, a monstrous mirror of her own destiny. . .
Every year, the blond Indian woman used to come to the country
stores at Junín or at Fort Lavalle to obtain trinkets or makings for maté; she
131did not appear after the conversation with my grandmother. However, they
saw each other once again. My grandmother had gone hunting one day; on a
ranch, near the sheep dip, a man was slaughtering one of the animals. As if
in a dream, the Indian woman passed by on horseback. She threw herself to
the ground and drank the warm blood. I do not know whether she did it
because she could no longer act any other way, or as a challenge and a sign.
A thousand three hundred years and the ocean lie between the destiny
of the captive and the destiny of Droctulft. Both these, now, are equally
irrecoverable. The figure of the barbarian who embraced the cause of
Ravenna, the figure of the European woman who chose the wasteland, may
seem antagonistic. And yet, both were swept away by a secret impulse, an
impulse more profound than reason, and both heeded this impulse, which
they would not have known how to justify. Perhaps the stories I have related
are one single story. The obverse and the reverse of this coin are, for God,
the same.
For Ulrike von Kühlmann
Translated by J.E.I.
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