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One day among the days of the year of 1904,
in a house that still exists on Honduras Street, Evaristo Carriego read,
with a heavy heart and with eagerness,
the book of the origin of Charles De Baatz, Comte D’Artagnan.
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With eagerness,
because Dumas offered him
what others get
from Shakespeare
or Balzac
or Walt Whitman,
the flavor
of the fullness of a life.
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With heavy heart,
because he was young,
proud,
shy,
and poor,
and he believed himself
exiled from life.
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Life exists in France,
he thought,
in the clear contact of steels,
or when the armies of the Emperor steal the land,
but I have been dealt the 20th Century,
the belated 20th Century,
and this mediocre South American tenement… |
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In those thoughts
Carriego was lost
when something happened.
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The strumming of a guitar working hard,...
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...the uneven line of low lying houses
seen from the window,...
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...Juan Murana
touching his broad-brimmed hat
to answer a greeting
(Juan Murana that just last night
scarred Suarez the Chilean),...
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...the moon in the patio square, ...
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...an old man with a fighting rooster,...
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...something, ...
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...anything.
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Something
that we
cannot
recover.
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Something
about which
we know its essence
but not its form.
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Something
ordinary
and trivial
and not perceived
before that moment.
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Something
that revealed
to Carriego
that the Universe
(which gives itself complete
in every instant,
in any place
and not only
in the books of Dumas)
was also there,...
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in this very present,
in Palermo,
in 1904.
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Come in, for the Gods are here as
well,
said Heraclitus of Ephesus
to the people that found him
warming himself in the kitchen. |
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I have suspected some times that any
human life,
no matter how intricate and full it is,
contains really just one moment: |
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The moment in which a man knows
forever who he is. |
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Since the unfathomable revelation
that I have tried to intuit,
Carriego is Carriego. |
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From “Evaristo
Carriego” by Jorge Luis Borges. |
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