By an unexpected but probable, if not inevitable, turn of circumstance, I have before me a trimly executed manuscript which bears the signature of that renowned author of critical diversions, the lamented Jorge Luis Borges of Buenos Aires. Though he was not honored, while living, to find his own work subjected to the penetrating scrutiny with which he so often illumined the creations of others, his intellectual heirs will perhaps discover in my synopsis of his manuscript¹ a dim reflection of his own Homeric vision.

A propitious drunkard, a Buenos Airean whom I found wandering bewildered on an elevated railway platform in steaming Chicago, introduced himself, after an hour's sobering conversation in a neighborhood bistro, as M. Pappagallo, an author of some note among the little-known. At the first mention of his native city, I raised the name of Borges, and was surprised to find his attitude transformed from mild disinterest to wounded fear. His own work, it came out, had been the subject of the critic's analysis; but far from giving him pleasure, this honor had produced in Pappagallo the necessity of vacating his atelier, abandoning his work, and affecting at all times the habit of gauzing himself in the blue, biting fumes of execrable French cigarettes.

He squinted across the bistro table, solemnly extricated a manuscript from his string-secured ream of treasures, and offered it to me. In measured, perhaps rehearsed English, accented with the rolling twang of Patagonia, he explained that he was the author of "La Mantilla", the novel with which Sr Borges was concerned in the very manuscript I held in my hands.

In "Pappagallo's La Mantilla", Borges, with characteristic slyness, creates another, and hypothetical Borges, who wrings from the author's prose the premise from which the entire work proceeds (with the depth and sonorousness of a recitation of names of the dead): the book is simply a description of the unravelling, stitch by stitch, of the black mantilla belonging to the author's aunt!

The magnificent Borges (with the threshed economy he winnowed until nothing whatever, finally, was written) etches a single line expressing all the despair, the clownishness, the certainty of Pappagallo's mammoth, elephantine, six hundred fifty-eight page work:

"The book is simply a description of the unravelling, stitch by stitch, of the black mantilla belonging to the author's aunt!"

In the latter pages of his "Ziggurat of a novel" (to quote the author's description of his own work) Pappagallo reveals, or intimates, that the aunt's mantilla is, or may be, woven of only a single thread. While the author has merely hinted at this terrifying recursion (over the course of nearly two hundred gnarled pages), the piquant Borges has simply written:

"The aunt's mantilla is, or may be, woven of only a single thread."

Pappagallo has finally been rendered intelligible, the whole balanced, quivering weight of his language and symbolism distilled in five seconds of prose. This is why the author had renounced "La Mantilla", and why the kindly Borges had refrained from publishing his criticism. Imagine the years of Pappagallo's craft and hunger now pinioned and useless as a lepidopterist's trophy! He no longer wished to speak of "La Mantilla", to hear the name of Borges, nor to possess the priceless manuscript, which he gave to me. Thus the author's distress and the critic's compassion resulted in my (and, I hope, my readers') good fortune.

Before catching the next train en route to his destination somewhere among the Northwestern streets of fuming Chicago which begin with the letter "O"², Pappagallo told me that his new novel, when completed, might be composed of a single excruciating sentence, and he expressed, blasphemously, some pleasure in the knowledge that Sr Borges would never be able to reduce this nascent creation to such clarity that it would cease to have a purpose of its own, serving simply as an attractor for the lightning that was the critic's merciless brightness.

Surely M. Pappagallo is to be forgiven his bitterness; he will take some solace in knowing that even Borges, with unaccustomed prolixity, added four sentences to the two I have quoted in this monograph, to wit:

" 'A future monologist may use this very sentence as grist for his mill. This is to be expected, if not with interest. In the present case, my subject may be reduced to its substrate,' Borges pronounced. He drew a breath and continued with some drama in a stage whisper: 'The book is simply the description of the unravelling, stitch by stitch, of the black mantilla belonging to the author's aunt! The aunt's mantilla is, or may be, woven of only a single thread.' "

Thus a total of six sentences are employed to express what might have been written thus:

"The book is simply the description of the unravelling, stitch by stitch, of the black mantilla belonging to the author's aunt! The aunt's mantilla is, or may be, woven of only a single thread.'"

Finally, I must admit the likelihood that the language of Borges - adamant, entangling, bejewelled - would be even more knotted and hair-raising in the original Spanish, which, tantalizingly, was never composed. This monumental work exists only in the form of Anthony Kerrigan's excellent English translation, which I have used as the basis for this synopsis.

NOTES:
¹ Currently in the possession of Lynbairth, Ochas, and Dorre, Esqs., of LaSalle St., Chicago, to whom interested collectors may apply.

2 Oketa, Olympia, Oglalla, etc.