Funes The Memorious – Jorge Luis Borges

They told me that Ireneo did not move now from his cot, but remained with his eyes fined on the backyard fig tree, or on a cobweb. At sunset he allowed himself to be brought to the window. He carried pride to the extreme of pretending that the blow which had befallen him was a good thing .

. . Twice I saw him behind the iron grate which sternly delineated his eternal imprisonment: unmoving, once, his eyes closed; unmoving also, another time, absorbed in the contemplation of a sweet-smelling sprig of lavender cotton. At the time I had begun, not without some ostentation, the methodical study of Latin.

My valise contained the De viris illustribus of Lhomond, the Thesaurus of Quicherat, Caesar’s Commentaries, and an odd-numbered volume of the Historia Naturalis of Pliny, which exceeded (and still exceeds) my modest talents as a Latinist. Everything is noised around in a small town; Ireneo, at his small farm on the outskirts, was not long in learning of the arrival of these anomalous books.

He sent me a flowery, ceremonious letter, in which he recalled our encounter, unfortunately brief, “on the seventh day of February of the year ’84,” and alluded to the glorious services which Don Gregorio Haedo, my uncle, dead the same year, “had rendered to the Two Fatherlands in the glorious campaign of Ituzaingo,” and he solicited the loan of any one of the volumes, to be accompanied by a dictionary “for the better intelligence of the original text, for I do not know Latin as yet.”

He promised to return them in good condition, almost immediately. The letter was perfect, very nicely constructed; the orthography was of the type sponsored by Andres Bello: i for y, j for g. At first I naturally suspected a jest. My cousins assured me it was not so, that these were the ways of Ireneo.

I remember him (I scarcely have the right to use this ghostly verb; only one man on earth deserved the right, and he is dead), I remember him with a dark passionflower in his hand, looking at it as no one has ever looked at such a flower, though they might look from the twilight of day until the twilight of night, for a whole life long.

I remember him, his face immobile and Indian-like, and singularly remote, behind his cigarette. I remember (I believe) the strong delicate fingers of the plainsman who can braid leather. I remember, near those hands, a vessel in which to make mate tea, bearing the arms of the Banda Oriental;<1> I remember, in the window of the house, a yellow rush mat, and beyond, a vague marshy landscape.

I remember clearly his voice, the deliberate, resentful, nasal voice of the old Eastern Shore man, without the Italianate syllables of today, I did not see him more than three times; the last time, in 1887 . . . That all those who knew him should write something about him seems to me a very felicitous idea; my testimony may perhaps be the briefest and without doubt the poorest, and it will not be the least impartial. The deplorable fact of my being an Argentinian will hinder me from falling into a dithyramb – an obligatory form in the Uruguay, when the theme is an Uruguayan.

Litterateur, slicker, Buenos Airean: Funes did not use these insulting phrases, but I am sufficiently aware that for him I represented these unfortunate categories. Pedro Leandro Ipuche has written that Funes was a precursor of the superman, “an untamed and vernacular Zarathustra”; I do not doubt it, but one must not forget, either, that he was a countryman from the town of Fray Bentos, with certain incurable limitations. My first recollection of Funes is quite clear, I see him at dusk, sometime in March or February of the year ’84.

That year, my father had taken me to spend the summer at Fray Bentos. I was on my way back from the farm at San Francisco with my cousin Bernardo Haedo. We came back singing, on horseback; and this last fact was not the only reason for my joy. After a sultry day, an enormous slategray storm had obscured the sky. It was driven on by a wind from the south; the trees were already tossing like madmen; and I had the apprehension (the secret hope) that the elemental downpour would catch us out in the open.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 8646c4b5ab95e552
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 162,591 bytes (0.155 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 10
• Language: English (en)

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• Estimated Reading Time: 15.55 minutes
• Total Words: 3,110
• Total Characters: 17,739
• Average Words per Page: 311.0
• Average Characters per Page: 1773.9

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