Borges Marathon, Part 24: The End

No, this isn’t the end of my Borges Marathon project—I’m not even a quarter of the way through. It’s a post about a short story called “The End”, which tells of a knife fight at a quiet, dusty general store cum bar in the middle of a vast plain.

“The End” was a difficult story for me to read and review because it relies heavily on allusions that would be obvious to Argentine readers in 1944 but are lost on many of us in other parts of the world today. The whole story is a retelling of the ending of the epic poem Martín Fierro, with Jorge Luis Borges imagining a different ending from the one provided by the author, José Hernández.

I only know this thanks to the footnotes in my edition of the Collected Fictions, which explain that even before the character of Martín Fierro enters the story, Argentine readers would recognise the references to the unnamed black singer, a song contest and knife fights and would see the connection to the famous poem. Borges was a fan of the Martín Fierro epic, writing a collection of essays about it and joining an avant-garde literary group that published a magazine named after it.

Without the context, “The End” is just a traditional story of vengeance through blood. Change the knives for guns, and it would be a classic tale of the American West, from the stranger riding into town on a horse under a wide-brimmed hat to the laconic conversation and the final deadly confrontation.

It’s the context that makes the story, and since I only knew about it afterwards through footnotes and Wikipedia entries, it didn’t really resonate. For readers familiar with Martín Fierro, however, it would probably be an interesting twist. The original gaucho epic, after more than 2,000 lines of knife fights and bloodshed, ends on a more conciliatory note, with vengeance avoided. The black man is the younger brother of a man Fierro murdered in a duel, but the expected fight is prevented. In “The End”, Borges imagines what would have happened if the duel had gone ahead.

Although he’s providing a more violent, vengeful ending, however, Borges does not glorify the act of vengeance. Here’s how the killer reacts to his final victory after a seven-year wait:

“Unmoving, the black man seemed to stand watch over the agonizing death. He wiped off the bloody knife in the grass and walked slowly back toward the houses, never looking back. His work of vengeance done, he was nobody now. Or rather, he was the other one: there was neither destination nor destiny on earth for him, and he had killed a man.”

This is hardly the stuff of epics. It’s a sad anti-climax, with a strong sense of futility and loss. The phrase “he was nobody now” is particularly powerful. It suggests to me that the pursuit of vengeance has so consumed the man that he has no existence without it. Fierro is dead, and his killer has gained nothing from it.

Although it’s a very different ending from the original ending of Martín Fierro, in a way it’s the same. Hernández denies the reader the expected sense of resolution by avoiding the knife fight altogether; Borges lets the knife fight happen and shows that there’s still no resolution.

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On his blog A Writer’s Life, British novelist Andrew Blackman shares book reviews, insights into the writing process and the latest literary news, as well as listing short story contests with a total of more than $250,000 in prize money.