Adventure classics – The case of the baby-faced killer

“The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan”

by Jorge Luis Borges

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Billy the Kid

Edgar Allan Poe famously wrote that no subject is as poetic as the death of a beautiful woman. Too bad nobody’s found a counterpoint epigram for the fascination that surrounds a childlike killer. There’s something horribly fascinating about the boyish innocence of youthful killers, from 1930’s gangster George “Baby Face” Nelson, to Perry Smith of In Cold Blood infamy, to Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and week’s Dylann Roof. But the first of these was Billy the Kid.

Or as Argentinean Jorge Luis Borges names him in his 1935 collected volume of stories, A Universal History ofIniquities, “Bill Harrigan.”

I doubt the Kid would have minded getting a new alias. He’d already used William Henry McCarty, William H. Bonney, Henry McCarty and Henry Antrim, giving him a new name for almost everyone he killed in his 21 years of life. (Although reputed to have killed 21 men “not counting Mexicans” during his brief life, more modern estimates put the Kid’s number of fatalities at probably not more than a dozen.)

Borges, however, errs on the side of legend, using as sources Frederick Watson’s 1931 A Century of Gunmen and Walter Nobel Burns’ 1925 The Saga of Billy the Kid. (Borges read English fluently, thanks to his English grandmother.)

Stop, rewind. I’m writing an essay about stories of the southwestern United States and I’m using an example by a writer from South America. What’s up with that? Is this another blatant example of the Westernization of world culture?

Maybe. Or maybe not. Although Borges seems like the last person in the world to strap on a six-shooter, leap into the saddle and ride off into the sunset, he was also the inheritor of centuries of the centuries of frontier culture that spanned the Americas. And he admitted to a fondness for the Argentinean equivalent of Old West lawlessness, “of the toughs and petty criminals of the Buenos Aires underworld,” as he wrote in his preface to the 1954 edition of his Universal History (sometimes translated as A Universal History of Infamy).

In Borges’ version, the boy who would become Billy the Kid left his home in New York’s Bowery to join the westering movement infecting the country. At the age of 14, the scrawny youngster in a bar one night when a brawny giant enters, a pair of pistols at his belt, and “wishes all the gringo sons of bitches drinking in the place a buenos noches.” Someone whispers fearfully that this is Belisario Villagrán, from Chihuahua.

“Instantly a shot rings out. Shielded by the ring of tall men around him, Billy has shot the intruder. The glass falls from Villagrán’s hand; then the entire man follows. There is no need for a second shot.”

When someone offers to cut a notch on Billy’s gun to mark the killing, Billy mutters, “Mexicans ain’t worth making’ notches for.” The legend has begun.

Although there are more than a dozen other stories in Universal History, and more would be added in later English translations, this one of a youthful killer seems appropriate for a youthful writer. Do we need another rewind? Borges was actually well into his 30’s when he wrote the stories of Universal History, but still dependent on his parents to supplement his meager income as a writer and editor. He would not marry until his 60’s, and that relationship was short-lived. He may have sometimes wished everything in life was simple enough to be solved with a few rounds from a six-shooter.)

(Next Friday, Adventure classics begins a July of science fiction adventures with Samuel L. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah. . . ”)

Adventure classics -- When every story was new

“The Aleph”

by Jorge Luis Borges

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When did fantasy become calcified? Carrie Vaughn, leader of this fall’s writing workshop at the Dallas FenCon and herself no slouch as a fantasy writer, took a moment to bemoan some of the tropes that have become de rigueur in her own subgenre. “Why does urban fantasy have to have a love triangle?” she asked. “Why not a love quadrangle?” (I think she was joking about that one.)

One of the joys of writing this blog about classic stories has been to let me see original genre tropes before they became clichés. Originals like the subject of today’s post, “The Aleph,” and Argentinean Jorge Luis Borges, the man who wrote it and inadvertently fathered the subgenre of magical realism.

South America wasn’t exactly a literary hotbed in the 1940’s when Borges and a small group of friends took control of a new literary magazine, Anales de Buenos Aires. As was often the case with new publications, Borges not only edited the magazine but wrote a great deal of its copy, reports Andrew Hurley in the introduction to his 1998 translation of the Borges collection, The Aleph and Other Stories.

Borges described many of his stores as fantasies. But what fantasies they are, dealing not with magical creatures or distant galaxies, but with life and death and immortality, with libraries and mazes and puzzles, often set in the mundane (at least to the writer) world of contemporary South America.

“The Aleph” begins with the determination of the narrator to remain faithful to the memory of unrequited love for the lately deceased Beatriz Viterbo. “I knew that more than once my futile devotion had exasperated her;” Borges writes. “now that she was
dead, I could consecrate myself to her memory¾ without hope, but also without humiliation.” Doggedly visiting the family of his dead love, the narrator comes to know¾ and detest¾ the pompous cousin he suspects had taken his place in Beatriz’s affections.

With the aid of healthy doses of cognac, the narrator learns that the family home contains a phenomenon not only transcendent, but essential to the cousin’s continued work as a poet. It is the Aleph, “the microcosm of the alchemists and Kabbalists¼ ”

And see it the narrator does: “a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness¼ Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos.” And among those infinite things are the “obscene, incredible, detailed letters” in her well-known handwriting, of Beatriz to her cousin.

With the house that holds this vision is about to be demolished, a destruction that threatens the narrator’s tie to his dead love as well as his rival’s work and sanity, the cousin asks insistently, “You did see it?”

And so gives the scorned lover his chance for revenge. “I refused, with gentle firmness, to discuss the Aleph; I clasped him by both shoulders as I look my leave and told him again that the country¾ peace and quiet, you know¾ was the very best medicine one could take.”

Was the vision true or false? “Did I see it when I saw all things, and then forget it?" the narrator asks finally. "Our minds are permeable to forgetfulness; I myself am distorting and losing, through the tragic erosion of the years, the features of Beatriz.”

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics looks at L. Frank Baum’s American fairy tale, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.)

Adventure classics -- Nominal rose, universal library

The Name of the Rose

by Umberto Eco

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When an Italian professor of philosophy specializing in the (to most of us) obscure discipline of semiotics writes a mystery, it’s safe to bet it won’t be like any other mystery you’ve ever read. For anybody who hasn’t read The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco’s 1980 homage to Sherlock Holmes, Jorge Luis Borges, and libraries -- among many other themes -- I’ll provide a brief plot summary. It doesn’t give away one iota of the real fun of this medieval mystery.

Fourteenth-century English monk William of Baskerville arrives at an Italian abbey intending to deliver a message to the abbot from one of the era’s major political players. Instead, after suitably mystifying the monks with the acuteness of his deductions in the matter of a strayed horse, he finds himself plunged into a deeper mystery.

A young monk has plunged to his death from the high window of the abbey’s library -- a library the dead man should not have able to enter in the first place, and one as hard to escape from as the universe we live in. A library whose guardian, the old, dour and blind monk, Jorge of Burgos, seems incapable of overpowering a younger and stronger man. More strange deaths follow.

The possibility of suicides is bad enough, but the abbot, no slouch at deduction himself, suspects murder. Can William solve the mystery? You bet your deerstalker -- make that habit -- he can. But the real truth is worse even than the abbot feared.

Along the way there’s a love story, arson, an inquisition, and a host of in-jokes. How many references to Sherlock Holmes can you spot? How many to the Argentinean savant Borges? (Who also lost his sight.)

And then there’s the evocative title, although I searched in vain for references to roses when first reading the book. It was the last on a list of possible titles Eco presented to some friends. (His first choice was Delitti all’ abbazia -- Murders at the Abbey (“a clear
quotation of Murder at the Vicarage,”) he later wrote, no doubt chuckling all the while.

In fact, as he stated in On Literature, a collection of essays, “One could carry out a psychoanalysis of influences. . . (including) the historical novels of Dmitri Merezkovskij, and I had to admit that I had read them when I was twelve even though I never thought of them while I was writing the novel.”

Still, for most of us, the biggest lure is that of total immersion in another place and time.

As Eco notes, “I take a reader from Texas, who has never seen Europe, into a medieval abbey . . . and make him feel at ease.”

From this reader from Texas, that’s saying something.

(Next Wednesday -- Adventure classics continues a month of historical fiction with another total immersion sage, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. The only mystery there -- will Scarlett O’Hara ever figure out what she really wants?)