A rancorous scar crossed his face: an ashen, almost perfect arc that wrinkled his temple on one side and his cheekbone on the other. His real name doesn’t matter; everyone in Tacuarembó called him the Englishman of La Colorada. The owner of those grounds, Cardoso, didn’t want to sell; I heard that the Englishman resorted to an unforeseeable argument: he confided in him the scar’s secret history. The Englishman came from the borderlands, from Río Grande del Sur; more than a few said that in Brazil he had been a smuggler. The grounds were swollen, the water supplies bitter; the Englishman, to correct those deficiencies, labored alongside his workers. They say he was severe to the point of cruelty, but scrupulously fair. They also say he was a drinker; a couple times a year he would lock himself in the room of the tower and emerge two or three days later as if from a battle or a frenzy, pale, tremulous, startled and as authoritarian as before. I remember the glacial eyes, the energetic thinness, the gray moustache. He didn’t see anyone; it’s true that his Spanish was rudimentary, Brazilianized. Other than some business letters or brochures, he didn’t receive any correspondence.
The last time I revisited the departments of the North, a flooding of the Caraguatá arroyo forced me to spend the night in La Colorada. After a few minutes I thought I noticed that my appearance was inopportune; I tried to ingratiate myself with the Englishman; I appealed to the least perspicacious of passions: patriotism. I said that a country with the spirit of England was invincible. My interlocutor agreed, but added with a smile that he wasn’t English. He was Irish, from Dungarvan. Having said that he stopped, as though he had revealed a secret.
We went out, after eating, to look at the sky. It had cleared, but behind the hills of the South, cracked and streaked by lightning, lurked another storm. In the dilapidated, vacant dining room, the worker who had served dinner brought out a bottle of rum. We drank for a long time, in silence.
I don’t know what time it would have been when I noticed I was drunk; I don’t know what inspiration or what exultation or what boredom made me mention the scar. The face of the Englishman changed; for a few seconds I thought he would throw me out of the house. Finally he said to me in his habitual voice:
“I’ll tell you the story of my wound under one condition: that you spare no opprobrium, assuage no circumstance of infamy.”
I agreed. This is the story he told me, alternating between English and Spanish, and even Portuguese:
“Around 1922, in one of the cities of Connaught, I was one of the many who conspired for the independence of Ireland. Of my companions, some survive dedicating themselves to peaceful works; others, paradoxically, fight on the seas or in the desert, under English colors; another, the worthiest, died in a barracks yard, at dawn, shot by sleepy men; others (not the least fortunate) met their fate in the anonymous and almost secret battles of the civil war. We were republicans, catholics; we were, I suspect, romantics. Ireland for us wasn’t only the utopian future and the intolerable present; it was a bitter and warm-hearted mythology, it was the circular towers and red marshes, it was the repudiation of Parnell and the enormous epopees that sing of the theft of bulls that in another incarnation were heroes and in others fish and mountains… One evening I won’t forget, an associate from Munster came to us: one John Vincent Moon.
“He was barely twenty years old. He was skinny and flabby at the same time; he gave the awkward impression of being an invertebrate. He had studied with fervor and vanity almost every page of I don’t know what communist manual; he used dialectical materialism to shut down any debate. The reasons a man might have to abhor another man or to love him are infinite: Moon reduced world history to a sordid economic conflict. He asserted that the revolution is destined to triumph. I told him that a gentleman can only be interested in lost causes… It was night; we continued disagreeing in the corridor, in the stairwell, later in the dark streets. The judgments issued by Moon impressed me less than his tone of complete and final certainty. The new comrade didn’t debate; he pronounced with disdain and a certain anger.
“When we arrived at the last houses, we were stunned by sudden gunfire. (Before or after, we drew near the blind wall of a factory or barracks). We turned into a dirt road; a soldier, huge in the glow, emerged from a cabin set on fire. Shouting, he ordered us to stop. I quickened my pace, my comrade didn’t follow me. I turned around: John Vincent Moon was immobile, fascinated, as though eternalized by terror. So I went back, knocked down the soldier in one punch, shook Vincent Moon, insulted him and ordered him to follow me. I had to take him by the arm; the passion of fear invalidated him. We fled through the night pierced by fires. A volley of gunfire came after us; a bullet grazed Moon’s right shoulder; he, as we fled into the pines, burst into a weak sob.
“That autumn of 1922 I had sheltered in General Berkley’s villa. He (who I had never seen) then held I don’t know what administrative position in Bengal; the building was less than a century old, but it was dilapidated and opaque and abounded in baffling corridors and useless antechambers. The museum and enormous library took up the ground level: controversial and inconsistent books that are somehow the history of the 19th century; scimatars from Nishapur, in whose arrested arcs of circle the wind and violence of battle seemed to endure. We entered (I think I remember) from the back. Moon, his mouth dry and trembling, murmured that the events of the evening were interesting; I patched him up, brought him a cup of tea; I was able to confirm that his ‘wound’ was superficial. Suddenly he stammered out in bafflement, ‘But you really stuck your neck out.’ I told him not to worry about it. (The habit of civil war compelled me to act as I acted; moreover, the capture of single associate could compromise our cause).
“The next day Moon had regained his composure. He accepted a cigarette and submitted me to a severe interrogation on the ‘economic resources of our revolutionary party.’ His questions were quite lucid; I told him (truthfully) that the situation was grave. Deep volleys of gunfire shook the South. I told Moon that our companions were waiting for us. My overcoat and my revolver were in my room; when I returned, I found Moon stretched out on the sofa, with his eyes closed. He speculated he had a fever; he cited a painful spasm in his shoulder.
“I then understood that his cowardice was incurable. I awkwardly implored him to take care of himself and parted. This man embarrassed me frightfully, as though I were the coward, not Vincent Moon. What one man does, it is as though all men do. For that reason it is not unjust that one disobedience in a garden contaminates the human species; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew is sufficient to save it. Perhaps Schopenhauer is right: I am others, any man is all men, Shakespeare is somehow the miserable John Vincent Moon.
“Nine days we spent in the general’s enormous house. Of the agonies and lights of war I shall say nothing: my purpose is to relate the story of this scar that affronts me. Those nine days, in my memory, form a single day, except for the penultimate, when our men burst into a barracks and we were able to avenge exactly those sixteen comrades who were machine-gunned in Elphin. I slipped away from the house towards dawn, in the confusion of the gloaming. At sundown I was back. My companion awaited me on the first floor: his wound didn’t permit him to come down to the ground level. I still see him with some strategy book in his hand: F. N. Maude or Clausewitz. ‘My preferred weapon is artillery,’ he confessed to me one night. He inquired about our plans; he liked to censure or revise them. He also frequently denounced ‘our deplorable economic base,’ prophesized, dogmatic and gloomy, the ruinous end. C’est une affaire flambée, he whispered. To show that he was indifferent to his physical cowardice, he magnified his mental arrogance. Thus passed, well or badly, nine days.
“The tenth day the city fell definitively into the power of the Black and Tans. High silent horsemen patrolled the roads; there was ash and smoke in the wind; in a corner I saw a body dumped, less tenacious in my memory than a maniquin on which the soldiers interminably practiced their aim, in the middle of the square… I had gone out when the dawn was in the sky; before midday I returned. Moon, in the library, was speaking to someone; the tone of his voice told me he was speaking on the telephone. Then I heard my name; then that I would return at seven o’clock, then the instruction that they arrest me as I traversed the garden. My reasonable friend was reasonably selling me out. I heard him demand some guarantees of personal safety.
“Here my story gets confused and lost. I know I pursued the informer through nightmarish black corridors and vertiginous deep stairways. Moon knew the house very well, much better than I. Once or twice I lost him. I corralled him before the soldiers arrested me. From one of the general’s panoplies I drew a cutlass; with that half-moon of steel I signed on his face, forever, a half-moon of blood. Borges: to you, a stranger, I have made this confession. Your scorn doesn’t hurt me so much.”
Here the narrator stopped. I noticed that his hands were shaking.
“And Moon?” I asked him.
“He took the coins of Judas and fled to Brazil. That afternoon, in the square, he saw a manniquin shot by some drunks.”
I awaited in vain the rest of the story. Finally I told him to go on.
Then a groan went through him; then he showed me with a weak gentleness the crooked, whitish scar.
“Don’t you believe me?” he stammered. “Don’t you see that I carry written on my face the mark of my infamy? I told you the story this way so that you would listen till the end. I turned in the man who sheltered me: I am Vincent Moon. Now despise me.”