Jorge Luis Borges, “Historia del guerrero y la cautiva” (1945), it first appeared in 1949 in the short story collection El Aleph. For this translation the following edition was considered as a base-text: Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones - El Aleph - El informe de Brodie, Editorial Biblioteca Ayacucho, Caracas (Venezuela), 1993, pp. 113-115. Collaborative translation from Spanish into English by Anastasia Manvelyan, Justin Tran, Cecile Diroll, Samson Le, Arianna Davalos, and Nate Leizerowicz, in the context of Spanish 4 Course taught by Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier at University of California Riverside (Fall Quarter 2024).
Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden
Jorge Luis Borges
On page 278 of his book The Poetry (Bari, 1942), Croce, abbreviating a Latin text by the historian Paul the Deacon, narrates the fate and cites the epitaph of Droctulft; both these moved me in a singular way. Later I understood why. Droctulft was a Longobard warrior who, during the siege of Ravenna, abandoned his own people and died defending the city he had previously been attacking. The people from Ravenna gave him burial in a temple and composed an epitaph which manifested their gratitude (“contempsit caros, dum nos amat ille, parentes”)[1] and the peculiar contrast that was visible between the atrocious figure of that barbarian and his simplicity and goodness:
Terribilis visu
facies mente benignus,
Longaque robusto pectores barba fuit![2]
Such is the history of the destiny of Droctulft, a barbarian who died defending Rome, or such is the fragment of his history that Paul the Deacon could preserve. I do not even know when it took place: whether in the middle of the sixth century, when the Longobards desolated the plains of Italy; or in the eighth century, 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, who was without a doubt unique and unfathomable (all the individuals are), but the generic type that tradition has made of him and many others like him, a tradition that is the work of oblivion and memory. Through a dark geography of forests and marshes, the wars brought him to Italy, from the riverbanks of the Danube and the Elba, and he may have not known that he went south and he may have not known that he waged war against the Romans. Perhaps he professed Arianist faith, which maintains that the glory of the Son is a reflection of the glory of the Father, but it is more congruent to imagine him devoted to the Earth, 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 laden with coins and bracelets. He came from the inextricable forests of the wild boar and the bison; he was light-skinned, courageous, innocent, cruel, loyal to his captain and his tribe, but not to the universe. Wars bring him to Ravenna, where he sees something he has never seen before, or at least not in its entirety. He sees the day and the cypresses and the marble. He sees a whole that involves multiplicity not falling into disorder; he sees a city, an organism composed of statues, temples, gardens, rooms, amphitheater steps, vases, column’s capitals, and regular, open spaces. None of these artifacts (I know) impress him for their beauty; they affect him as a complex machinery would affect us today—one whose purpose we do not understand, but whose design hints at an immortal intelligence. Perhaps seeing a single arch with an incomprehensible inscription in eternal Roman letters is enough for him. Suddenly, this revelation blinds and renews him: 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 people and fights for Ravenna. He dies, and on his tomb, they carve words he would not have understood:
Contempsit caros, dum nos amat ille, parentes,
Hanc patrlam reputans esse, Ravenna, suam.[3]
He was not a traitor (traitors rarely inspire pious epitaphs); he was an enlightened man, a convert. A few generations later, the Longobards who condemned the defector followed his example; they became Italians, Lombards, and perhaps one of his descendants—Aldiger—could have engendered those who engendered 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 warrior’s story in Croce’s book, it moved me in an unusual way, and I felt as though I were rediscovering, in a different form, something that had once been my own. Fleetingly, I thought of the Mongolian horsemen who wanted to turn China into an endless grazing field and then grew old in the cities they had longed to destroy; but this was not the memory I was searching for. I found it at last: it was a story I once heard from my English grandmother, who has passed away.
In 1872, my grandfather Borges was the commander of the northern and western borders of Buenos Aires and the southern ones of Santa Fe. The command post was in Junín; beyond it lay a chain of outposts, spaced four or five leagues apart; and beyond that, what was then called the Pampa [the Pampas], or Tierra Adentro [the Interior or Hinterland]. Once, half in wonder and half in jest, my grandmother commented upon her fate as an Englishwoman exiled to those ends of the earth. They told her she wasn’t the only one and, months later, pointed out a young Indian woman slowly crossing the plaza [the square]. She wore two red mantles and was barefoot; her hair was blonde. A soldier told her that another Englishwoman wanted to speak with her. The woman nodded and entered the command post without fear, though not without mistrust. Her coppery face was painted in fierce colors, but her eyes were that pale blue the English call gray. Her body was lithe, like a deer’s, and her hands were strong and bony. She came from the desert, from Tierra Adentro, and everything seemed too small for her: the doors, the walls, the furniture.
Perhaps the two women felt like sisters for a moment; they were far from their beloved island and in an incredible country. My grandmother uttered a question; the other woman answered with difficulty, searching for the words and repeating them, as if amazed by an old taste. She had not spoken her native language for nearly fifteen years, and it was not easy for her to recover it. She said she was from Yorkshire, that her parents emigrated to Buenos Aires, that she had lost them in a malón [an Indian raid], that the indios [the Indians] had taken her and that she was now the wife of a chieftain, to whom she had already given two sons; and that he was very brave. She said this in rustic English, interwoven with Araucanian [Mapudungun language] or Pampan [Tehuelche language], and behind the story a feral life could be glimpsed: the awnings of horsehide, the bonfires of manure, the feasts of charred meat or raw entrails, the stealthy departures at dawn; the assaults on corrals, the hooting and the looting, the war, the devastating raids on farms by naked horsemen, the polygamy, the stench and the magic. To such barbarity an Englishwoman had lowered herself. Moved by pity and scandal, my grandmother urged her not to return. She swore to protect her, and swore to rescue her children. The other woman replied that she was happy and returned, that night, to the desert. Francisco Borges was to die shortly after, in the revolution of seventy-four; perhaps my grandmother, then, could perceive in the other woman, also held captive and transformed by this implacable continent, a monstrous mirror of her destiny...
Every year, the blonde Indian woman used to come to the pulperías [country grocery stores] at Junín, or at Fuerte Lavalle, in search of trinkets and “vices”; she did not appear, since the conversation with my grandmother. However, they saw each other once again. That day my grandmother had gone hunting; on a ranch near the wetlands, a man was slaughtering a sheep, he was disgorging it. As if in a dream, the Indian woman passed by there, riding a horse. She threw herself to the ground and drank the warm blood. I don’t know whether she did it because she could no longer act otherwise, or as a challenge and a sign.
A thousand three hundred years and the ocean mediate
between the fate of the captive woman and the fate of Droctulft. Both these are,
now, equally irrecoverable. The figure of the barbarian who embraces the cause
of Ravenna, the figure of the European woman who opts for the wilderness, may seem
antagonistic. Nevertheless, both were seized by a secret impetus, an impetus
deeper than reason, and both heeded that impetus that they would not have known
how to justify. Perhaps the stories I have referred to are one single story.
The obverse and reverse of this coin are, for God, equal.
For Ulrike von Kühlmann.
[1] [TN: “He despised his beloved parents,
while he loved us”].
[2] [TN: “A face terrible in sight, kind in
mind, / His beard was long and reached his robust chest”]. Gibbon (Declive
and Fall, XLV) also translates these verses.
[3] [TN: “He despised his beloved parents,
while he loved us / Considering this homeland, Ravenna, his own”].
