To Victoria Ocampo
On page 242 of Lidell Hart’s History of the European War, we read that an offensive of three British divisions (supported by fourteen hundred artillery pieces) against the Serre-Montauban line had been planned for 24 July, 1916 and had to be postponed until the morning of the 29th. The torrential rains (notes Captain Lidell Hart) caused this delay - nothing significant, certainly. The following statement, dictated, read, and signed by Doctor Yu Tsun, former professor of English in the Hochschule of Tsingtao, throws an unsuspected light on the case. The first two pages are missing.
‘…and I hung up. Immediately afterward, I recognized the voice that had answered in German. It was Captain Richard Madden’s. Madden, in Viktor Runeberg’s department, meant the end of our toils and - but this seemed to me very secondary, or should have seemed so - also of our lives. It meant that Runeberg had been arrested or murdered.1 Before the sun set on that day, I would suffer the same fate. Madden was relentless. Rather, he was obliged to be relentless. An Irishman on the orders of England, a man accused of indifference and perhaps treason, how would he not embrace and be grateful for this miraculous turn: the discovery, the capture, maybe the death of two agents of the German Empire? I went up to my room; absurdly, I locked the door and lay down face up on the narrow iron bed. In the window were the same roofs as ever and the cloudy six o’clock sun. It seemed to me incredible that this day without premonitions or symbols was that of my implacable death. In spite of my dead father, in spite of having been a child in a symmetrical garden of Hai Feng, I, now, was going to die? Then I reflected that all things happen to one person precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries, and only in the present do events occur; innumerable men in the air, on earth and sea, and all that really happens happens to me. The almost intolerable memory of Madden’s horselike face banished these digressions. In the midst of my hatred and my terror (I don’t mind speaking of terror now; now that I’ve outwitted Richard Madden, now that my throat yearns for the rope) I thought that that tumultuous and undoubtedly happy warrior couldn’t suspect that I possessed the Secret. The precise location of the new British artillery depot on the Ancre. A bird streaked across the gray sky and blindly I transformed it into an airplane and this airplane into many (in the French sky) annihilating the artillery depot with aerial bombs. If my mouth could, before being undone by a gunshot, shout that name so that they heard it in Germany… My human voice was very weak. How could I make it reach the Chief’s ear? The ear of that sick and hateful man, who knew nothing of Runeberg or of me except that we were in Staffordshire and who awaited in vain news of us in his arid Berlin office, infinitely examining newspapers… I said aloud, I have to run. I sat up noiselessly, in a useless perfection of silence, as though Madden were already waiting for me. Something - perhaps the mere ostentation of proving that I had no recourse - made me check my pockets. I found what I knew I would find. The American watch, the nickel chain and the rectangular coin, the keychain with the useless, compromising keys to Runeberg’s department, the notebook, a letter that I resolved to destroy immediately (and that I didn’t destroy), the false passport, one crown, two shillings, and a few pennies, the red-blue pencil, the handkerchief, the revolver with one bullet. Absurdly, I clutched it and weighed it in my hand to give myself courage. Vaguely I thought that a gunshot can be heard from very far. In ten minutes my plan was ready. The phonebook gave me the name of the only person capable of transmitting the message: he lived in a suburb of Fenton, less than half an hour away by train.
I am a cowardly man. Now I say it, now that I’ve carried through a plan that no one will not qualify as risky. I know that its execution was a terrible thing. I didn’t do it for Germany, no. I don’t care about a barbarous country that has forced on me the abjection of being a spy. Besides, I know of a man of England - a modest man - who for me is no less than Goethe. I didn’t speak with him for more than an hour, but for that hour he was Goethe… I did it because I felt that the Chief feared slightly those of my race - the innumerable ancestors who come together in me. I wanted to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies. Besides, I had to flee the captain. His hands and his voice could be banging at my door at any moment. I dressed noiselessly, said goodbye to myself in the mirror, went down, scanned the quiet street and left. The station wasn’t far from home, but I judged it preferable to take a car. I argued that this way I would run less risk of being recognized; the fact is that in the deserted street I felt visible and vulnerable, infinitely. I remember I told the driver to stop a little before the main entrance. I got out with willful and almost painful slowness; I was going to the village of Ashgrove, but I got a ticket for a more distant station. The train was leaving in very few minutes, at 8:50. I hurried; the next one would leave at half past nine. There was almost no one on the platform. I walked through the cars: I remember some farmers, a grieving woman, a boy fervently reading the Annals of Tacitus, a wounded and happy soldier. The train finally pulled away. A man that I recognized ran in vain to the end of the platform. It was Captain Richard Madden. Obliterated, trembling, I shrank into the other side of the seat, away from the fearful window.
From that obliteration I passed into an almost abject happiness. I told myself that my duel was under way and that I had won the first round, in escaping, even for forty minutes, even by a stroke of chance, my adversary’s attack. I argued that it wasn’t minimal, since without this precious difference that the train schedule granted me I would be in jail, or dead. I argued (with no less sophistication) that my cowardly happiness proved that I was a man capable of carrying through the adventure successfully. From that weakness I took strengths that didn’t abandon me. I foresee that man will resign himself everyday to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be nothing but warriors and bandits; I give them this advice: The agent of an atrocious undertaking must imagine that he has already carried it out, must impose on himself a future that is as irrevocable as the past. Thus I proceeded, as my dead man’s eyes registered the flowing of the day that might be the last, and the spreading of the night. The train rolled slowly between the ash trees. It stopped, almost in the middle of the country. No one shouted the name of the station. “Ashgrove?” I asked some boys on the platform. “Ashgrove,” they replied. I got off.
A lamp illuminated the platform, but the boys’ faces remained in the shadows. One asked me, “Are you going to Doctor Stephen Albert’s house?” Without waiting for an answer, another said, “The house is far from here, but you won’t get lost if you take this path to the left, and at every crossroads turn left.” I threw them a coin (the last one), went down some stone steps, and stepped onto the solitary path. It sloped slowly down. It was made of elemental earth, above the branches blended together, the low and circular moon seemed to accompany me. For an instant, I thought that Richard Madden had somehow penetrated my desperate purpose. Very quickly I realized that that was impossible. The advice to always turn left reminded me that such was the common procedure to discover the central courtyard of certain labyrinths. I understand something of labyrinths: not in vain am I the great-grandson of Ts’ui Pên, who was governor of Yunnan and renounced temporal power to write a novel with more characters than the Hung Lu Meng and to build a labyrinth in which all men would get lost. Thirteen years he dedicated to these heterogenous toils, but the hand of a stranger murdered him and his novel was senseless and no one found the labyrinth. Under English trees I meditated on that lost labyrinth: I imagined it inviolate and perfect in the secret summit of a mountain, I imagined it erased by rice paddies or under water, I imagined it infinite, not with octagonal pavilions and turning pathways, but with rivers and provinces and kingdoms… I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of a sinuous, growing labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and that would somehow imply the stars. Absorbed in these illusory images, I forgot my fate as a pursued man. I felt, for a time, indeterminate, like an abstract perceiver of the world. The dark and vivid countryside, the moon, the remains of the evening, affected me, as did the downward slope that eliminated any possibility of weariness. The evening was intimate, infinite. The path descended and forked, among the already hazy meadows. A high and syllabic-like music drifted in and out on the sway of the wind, muted by leaves and distance. I thought that a man can be the enemy of other men, at other times of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, watercourses, winds. Thus I came to a high rusty gate. Between the grates I deciphered a grove and a kind of pavilion. I realized, suddenly, two things, the first trivial, the second almost incredible: the music was coming from the pavilion, the music was Chinese. Because of that, I had accepted it fully, without paying attention to it. I don’t remember if there was a doorbell or if I knocked with my hands. The flickering of the music continued.
But from the back of the intimate house a lantern came near: a lantern streaked and sometimes blocked out by the trunks, a lantern of paper, with the shape of drums and the color of the moon. A tall man carried it. I didn’t see his face, because the light blinded me. He opened the gate and said slowly in my language:
“I see that the pious Hsi P’êng insists on righting my solitude. You will no doubt want to see the garden?”
I recognized the name of one of our numerous consuls and repeated, bewildered, “The garden?”
“The garden of forking paths.”
Something stirred in my memory and I pronounced with incomprehensible certainty, “The garden of my ancestor, Ts’ui Pên.”
“Your ancestor? Your illustrious ancestor? Come in.”
The damp path zigzagged like those of my childhood. We came to a library of eastern and western books. I recognized, bound in yellow leather, some handwritten volumes of the Lost Encyclopedia that was led by the Third Emperor of the Luminous Dynasty and was never printed. The gramophone’s disc turned next to a bronze phoenix. I also remember a vase of the pink family and another, older by centuries, of that blue color that our ancestors copied from the potters of Persia…
Stephen Albert observed me, smiling. He was (I already said it) very tall, with refined features, gray eyes, and a gray beard. There was something of a priest in him, and of a sailor; afterwards he told me that he had been a missionary in Tientsin “before aspiring to be a sinologist.”
We sat down; I in a long and low divan, he with his back to the window and a tall circular clock. I calculated that my pursuer, Richard Madden, would not arrive for at least an hour. My irrevocable determination could wait.
“An astonishing destiny, Ts’ui Pên’s,” said Stephen Albert. “Governor of his native province, learned in astronomy, astrology, and the tireless interpretation of canonical books, chess player, famous poet and calligrapher: he abandoned it all in order to compose a book and a labyrinth. He renounced the pleasures of oppression, of justice, of his many wives, of banquets and even of erudition and cloistered himself for thirteen years in the Pavilion of Limpid Solitude. At his death, his heirs found only chaotic manuscripts. The family, as you are perhaps not unaware, wanted to condemn them to the fire; but his executor, a Buddhist or Taoist monk, insisted on their publication.”
“We of the blood of Ts’ui Pên,” I replied, “still deplore that monk. That publication was senseless. The book is an indecisive collection of contradictory drafts. I examined it once: in the third chapter the hero dies, in the fourth he is alive. As to Ts’ui Pên’s other undertaking, his labyrinth…”
“Here is the Labyrinth,” he said pointing me to a tall lacquered desk.
“An ivory labyrinth!” I exclaimed. “A minimal labyrinth…”
“A labyrinth of symbols,” he corrected. “An invisible labyrinth of time. To me, an English barbarian, it has been granted to reveal this diaphanous mystery. After one hundred years, the details are irrecoverable, but it is not hard to guess what happened. Ts’ui Pên would say one time: I am retiring to write a book. And another time: I am retiring to build a labyrinth. Everyone imagined two works; no one thought that book and labyrinth were a single object. The Pavilion of Limpid Solitude rose in the middle of a perhaps intricate garden; this may have suggested to men a physical labyrinth. Ts’ui Pên died; no one, in the vast lands that were his, found the labyrinth. Two circumstances gave me the right solution to the problem. One: the curious legend that Ts’ui Pên set out to build a labyrinth that was strictly infinite. The other: a fragment of a letter I discovered.
Albert got up. He turned his back to me for a few moments; he opened a drawer of the gold and black desk. He came back with a paper that was once crimson; now pink and thin and cross-sectioned. Ts’ui Pên’s calligraphic renown was justified. I read with incomprehension and fervor those words that a man of my blood redacted in meticulous brush: I leave to some futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths. I gave back the letter in silence. Albert continued:
“Before exhuming this letter, I had asked myself in what way a book can be infinite. I didn’t guess at any method other than a cyclical, circular volume. A volume whose last page was identical to its first, with the possibility of continuing indefinitely. I remembered also that night that is in the middle of the 1001 Nights, when the queen Scheherazade (through a magical distraction of the copyist) begins to narrate verbatim the story of the 1001 nights, with the risk of coming again to the night in which she narrates it, and thus to infinity. I imagined also a platonic, hereditary work, transmitted from father to son, in which each new individual would add a chapter or correct with pious care the page of his elders. These conjectures distracted me; but none seemed to me to correspond, even remotely, to the contradictory chapters of Ts’ui Pên. In this state of perplexity, they sent me the manuscript that you examined from Oxford. I paused, naturally, at the sentence: I leave to some futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths. Almost in the act I understood; the garden of forking paths was the chaotic novel; the phrase some futures (not to all) suggested to me the image of forking in time, not in space. The general rereading of the work confirmed that theory. In all fictions, every time a man confronts various alternatives, he opts for one and eliminates the others; in that of the almost inextricable Ts’ui Pên, he opts - simultaneously - for all of them. He creates, thus, various futures, various times, which also proliferate and fork. Hence the novel’s contradictions. Fang, let’s say, has a secret; a stranger knocks on his door; Fang decides to kill him. Naturally, there are several possible outcomes: Fang could kill the intruder, the intruder could kill Fang, both could be saved, both could die, et cetera. In the work of Ts’ui Pên, all outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forks. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge; for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible paths you are my enemy, in another my friend. If you can put up with my hopeless pronunciation, let’s read a few pages.”
His face, in the vivid circle of the lamp, was undoubtedly that of an old man, but with something unwavering and even immortal. He read with slow precision two pieces from a single epic chapter. In the first an army marches toward a battle across a deserted mountain; the horror of the rocks and of the shadow makes them think nothing of life and they achieve victory easily. In the second, the same army crosses a palace in which a feast is taking place; the resplendent battle seems to them a continuation of the feast and they achieve victory. I listened with proper veneration to these old fictions, perhaps less admirable than the fact that one of my blood had contrived them and that a man of a remote empire was returning them to me, in the course of a desperate adventure, on a western island. I remember the last words, repeated in each piece like a secret commandment: Thus fought the heroes, their admirable hearts tranquil, their swords violent, resigned to kill and to die.
From that moment, I felt around me and in my dark body an invisible, intangible swarming. Not the swarming of the divergent, parallel, and finally coalescent armies, but a more inaccessible, more intimate agitation that they somehow prefigured. Stephen Albert continued:
“I don’t think that your illustrious ancestor played vainly with variations. I don’t judge it plausible that he sacrificed thirteen years to the infinite execution of a rhetorical experiment. In your country, the novel is an inferior genre; at that time it was a contemptible genre. Ts’ui Pên was an ingenious novelist, but he was also a man of letters who surely did not consider himself a mere novelist. The testimony of his contemporaries proclaims - and his life confirms well enough - his metaphysical, mystical inclinations. Philosophical controversy usurps a good part of his novel. I know that of all problems, none troubled him and made him suffer like the abysmal problem of time. However, that is the only problem that doesn’t figure in the pages of the Garden. He doesn’t even use the word that means time. How do you explain that voluntary omission?
I proposed various solutions, all insufficient. We debated them; in the end, Stephen Albert said to me:
“In a riddle whose subject is chess, what is the only forbidden word?”
I reflected a moment and responded: “The word chess.”
“Precisely,” said Albert, “The Garden of Forking Paths is an enormous riddle, or parable, whose subject is time; this recondite cause forbids the mention of its name. To always omit a word, to draw on inept metaphors and obvious circumlocutions, is perhaps the most emphatic manner in which to suggest it. It is the tortuous manner that the oblique Ts’ui Pên preferred in each one of the bends of his unremitting novel. I have confronted hundreds of manuscripts, I’ve corrected the errors that the negligence of copyists introduced, I’ve guessed at the plan of that chaos, I’ve reestablished, I believe I’ve reestablished, the primordial order, I’ve translated the entire work: I know that he does not once use the word time. The explanation is obvious: The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts’ui Pên perceived it. Unlike Newton and Schopenhauer, he did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in infinite series of times, in a growing and vertiginous web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times. That weft of times that approach, fork, get cut off, or ignore each other for centuries, encompasses all possibilities. We do not exist in the majority of those times; in some you exist and I don’t; in others, me, and not you; in another, both of us. In this one, which a favorable fortune has granted me, you have come to my house. In another, you have found me dead while coming through the garden; in another, I say these same words, but I am an error, a ghost.
“In all,” I articulated not without trembling, “I appreciate and revere your recreation of Ts’ui Pên’s garden.”
“Not in all,” he murmured with a smile. “Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.”
I felt again the swarming that I spoke of. It seemed to me that the damp garden that surrounded the house was saturated infinitely with invisible people. Those people were Albert and me, secret, laboring and multiform in other dimensions of time. I raised my eyes and the faint nightmare dissipated. In the yellow and black garden there was only one man; but that man was sharp like a statue, but that man moved along the path and was Captain Richard Madden.
“The future already exists,” I responded, “but I am your friend. Can I look at the letter again?”
Albert stood up. Tall, he opened the drawer of the tall desk; he turned his back to me for a moment. I had prepared the revolver. I fired with utmost care: Albert collapsed without a complaint. I swear that his death was instantaneous: a fulmination.
The rest is unreal, insignificant. Madden burst in, arrested me. I’ve been condemned to the gallows. Abominably, I’ve won: I’ve communicated to Berlin the secret name of the city that they must attack. Yesterday they bombed it; I read it in the same magazines that put to England the enigma of the learned sinologist Stephen Albert who was killed by a stranger, Yu Tsun. The Chief deciphered that enigma. He knows that my problem was to indicate (through the din of war) the city called Albert and that I found no other means than to kill someone with that name. He doesn’t know (no one can know) my unending contrition and weariness.’
An odious and outlandish hypothesis. The Prussian spy Hans Rabener alias Viktor Runeberg attacked the bearer of the arrest warrant, Captain Richard Madden, with a pistol. He, in self defense, wounded him fatally. (Editor’s note) ↩