Collected Fictions

A Dialog Between Dead Men

The man arrived from the south of England early one winter morning in 1877. As he was a ruddy, athletic, overweight man, it was inevitable that almost everyone should think that he was English, and indeed he looked remarkably like the archetypical John Bull. He wore a bowler hat and a curious wool cape with an opening in the center. A group of men, women, and babes were waiting for him anxiously; many of them had a red line scored across their throats, others were headless and walked with hesitant, fearful steps, as though groping through the dark. Little by little, they encircled the stranger, and from the back of the crowd someone shouted out a curse, but an ancient terror stopped them, and they dared go no further. From out of their midst stepped a sallow-skinned soldier with eyes like glowing coals; his long tangled hair and lugubrious beard seemed to consume his face; ten or twelve mortal wounds furrowed his body, like the stripes on a tiger's skin. When the newcomer saw him, he paled, but then he stepped forward and put out his hand.

"How grievous it is to see such a distinguished soldier brought low by the instruments of perfidy!" he said, grandiloquently. "And yet what deep satisfaction to have ordered that the torturers and assassins atone for their crimes on the scaffold in the Plazade la Victoria!"

"If it's Santos Pérez and the Reinafé brothers you're referring to, be assured that I have already thanked them,"' the bloody man said with slow solemnity.

The other man looked at him as though smelling a gibe or a threat, but Quiroga* went on:

"You never understood me, Rosas.* But how could you understand me, if our lives were so utterly different? Your fate was to govern in a city that looks out toward Europe and that one day will be one of the most famous cities in the world; mine was to wage war across the solitudes of the Americas, in an impoverished land inhabited by impoverished gauchos. My empire was one of spears and shouts and sandy wastelands and virtually secret victories in godforsaken places. What sort of claim to fame is that?

I live in people's memory—and will go on living there for many years—because I was murdered in a stagecoach in a place called Barranca Yaco by a gang of men with swords and horses. I owe to you that gift of a valiant death, which I cannot say I was grateful for at the time but which subsequent generations have been loath to forget. You are surely familiar with certain primitive lithographs and that interesting literary work penned by a worthy from San Juan?"

Rosas, who had recovered his composure, looked at the other man contemptuously.

"You are a romantic," he said with a sneer." The flattery of posterity is worth very little more than the flattery of one's contemporaries, which is not worth anything, and can be bought with a pocketful of loose change."'

"I know how you think," replied Quiroga. " In 1852, fate, which is generous, or which wanted to plumb you to the very depths, offered you a man's death, in battle. You showed yourself unworthy of that gift, because fighting, bloodshed, frightened you."

"Frightened me?" Rosas repeated. "Me, who've tamed horses in the South and then tamed an entire country?"

For the first time, Quiroga smiled.

"I know," he slowly said, "from the impartial testimony of your peons and seconds-in-command, that you did more than one pretty turn on horseback, but back in those days, across the Americas—and on horseback, too—other pretty turns were done in places named Chacabuco and Junin and Palma Redondo and Caseros."

Rosas listened expressionlessly, and then replied.

'"I had no need to be brave. One of those pretty turns of mine, as you put it, was to manage to convince braver men than I to fight and die for me. Santos Pérez, for example, who was more than a match for you.

Bravery is a matter of bearing up; some men bear up better than others, but sooner or later, every man caves in."

"That may be," Quiroga said, "but I have lived and I have died, and to this day I don't know what fear is.

And now I am going to the place where I will be given a new face and a new destiny, because history is tired of violent men. I don't know who the next man may be, what will be done with me, but I know I won't be afraid."

"I'm content to be who I am," said Rosas, "and I have no wish to be anybody else."

"Stones want to go on being stones, too, forever and ever," Quiroga replied. "And for centuries they are stones—until they crumble into dust. When I first entered into death, I thought the way you do, but I've learned many things here since. If you notice, we're both already changing."

But Rosas paid him no attention; he merely went on, as though thinking out loud:

"Maybe I'm not cut out to be dead, but this place and this conversation seem like a dream to me, and not a dream that /am dreaming, either. More like a dream dreamed by somebody else, somebody that's not born yet."

Then their conversation ended, because just then Someone called them.