Jorge Luis Borges
Death and the Compass
To Mandie Molina Vedia
Of the many problems which exercised the daring perspicacity of Lonnrot none
was so strange - so harshly strange, we may say - as the staggered series of
bloody acts which culminated at the villa of Triste-le-Roy, amid the boundless
odor of the eucalypti. It is true that Erik Lonnrot did not succeed in
preventing the last crime, but it is indisputable that he foresaw it. Nor did
he, of course, guess the identity of Yarmolinsky's unfortunate assassin, but he
did divine the secret morphology of the vicious series as well as the
participation of Red Scharlach, whose alias, is Scharlach the Dandy. This
criminal (as so many others) had sworn on his honor to kill Lonnrot, but the
latter had never allowed himself to be intimidated. Lonnrot thought of himself
as a pure thinker, an Auguste Dupin, but there was something of the adventurer
in him, and even of the gamester.
The first crime occurred at the Hotel du Nord - that high prism that dominates
the estuary whose waters are the colors of the desert. To this tower (which
most manifestly unites the hateful whiteness of a sanitorium, the numbered
divisibility of a prison, and the general appearance of a bawdy house) on the
third day of December came the delegate from Podolsk to the Third Talmudic
Congress, Doctor Marcel Yarmolinsky, a man of gray beard and gray eyes. We
shall never know whether the Hotel du Nord pleased him: he accepted it with the
ancient resignation which had allowed him to endure three years of war in the
Carpathians and three thousand years of oppression and pogroms. He was given a
sleeping room on floor R, in front of the suite which the Tetrarch of Galilee
occupied not without some splendor. Yarmolinsky supped, postponed until the
following day an investigation of the unknown city, arranged upon a cupboard
his many books and his few possessions, and before midnight turned off the
light. (Thus declared the Tetrarch's chauffeur, who slept in an adjoining
room.) On the fourth, at 11:03 A.M., there was a telephone call for him from
the editor of the Yiddische Zeitung; Doctor Yarmolinsky did not reply; he was
found in his room, his face already a little dark, and his body, almost nude,
beneath a large anachronistic cape. He was lying not far from the door which
gave onto the corridor; a deep stab wound had split open his breast. In the
same room, a couple of hours later, in the midst of journalists, photographers,
and police, Commissioner Treviranus and Lonnrot were discussing the problem
with equanimity.
"There's no need to look for a Chimera, or a cat with three legs," Treviranus
was saying as he brandished an imperious cigar. "We all know that the Tetrarch
of Galilee is the possessor of the finest sapphires in the world. Someone,
intending to steal them, came in here by mistake. Yarmolinsky got up; the
robber had to kill him. What do you think?"
"It's possible, but not interesting," Lonnrot answered. "You will reply that
reality hasn't the slightest need to be of interest. And I'll answer you that
reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but that hypotheses may
not. In the hypothesis you have postulated, chance intervenes largely. Here
lies a dead rabbi; I should prefer a purely rabbinical explanation; not the
imaginary mischances of an imaginary robber."
Treviranus answered ill-humoredly:
"I am not interested in rabbinical explanations; I am interested in the capture
of the man who stabbed this unknown person."
"Not so unknown," corrected Lonnrot. "Here are his complete works." He
indicated a line of tall volumes: A Vindication of the Cabala; An Examination
of the Philosophy of Robert Fludd; a literal translation of the Sepher Yezirah;
a Biography of the Baal Shem; a History of the Sect of the Hasidim; a monograph
(in German) on the Tetragrammaton; another, on the divine nomenclature of the
Pentateuch. The Commissioner gazed at them with suspicion, almost with
revulsion. Then he fell to laughing.
"I'm only a poor Christian," he replied. "Carry off all these moth-eaten
classics if you like; I haven't got time to lose in Jewish superstitions."
"Maybe this crime belongs to the history of Jewish superstitions," murmured
Lonnrot.
"Like Christianity," the editor of the Yiddische Zeitung dared to put in. He
was a myope, an atheist, and very timid.
No one answered him. One of the agents had found inserted in the small
typewriter a piece of paper on which was written the following inconclusive
sentence.
The first letter of the Name has been spoken
Lonnrot abstained from smiling. Suddenly become a bibliophile - or Hebraist -
he directed that the dead man's books be made into a parcel, and he carried
them to his office. Indifferent to the police investigation, he dedicated
himself to studying them. A large octavo volume revealed to him the teachings
of Israel Baal Shem-Tob, founder of the sect of the Pious; another volume, the
virtues and terrors of the Tetragrammaton, which is the ineffable name of God;
another, the thesis that God has a secret name, in which is epitomized (as in
the crystal sphere which the Persians attribute to Alexander of Macedon) his
ninth attribute, eternity - that is to say, the immediate knowledge of
everything that will exist, exists, and has existed in the universe. Tradition
numbers ninety-nine names of God; the Hebraists attribute this imperfect number
to the magical fear of even numbers; the Hasidim reason that this hiatus
indicates a hundredth name-the Absolute Name.
From this erudition he was distracted, within a few days, by the appearance of
the editor of the Yiddische Zeitung. This man wished to talk of the
assassination; Lonnrot preferred to speak of the diverse names of God. The
journalist declared, in three columns, that the investigator Erik Lonnrot had
dedicated himself to studying the names of God in order to "come up with" the
name of the assassin. Lonnrot, habituated to the simplifications of journalism,
did not become indignant. One of those shopkeepers who have found that there
are buyers for every book came out with a popular edition of the History of the
Sect of the Hasidim.
The second crime occurred on the night of the third of January, in the most
deserted and empty corner of the capital's western suburbs. Toward dawn, one of
the gendarmes who patrol these lonely places on horseback detected a man in a
cape, lying prone in the shadow of an ancient paint shop. The hard visage
seemed bathed in blood; a deep stab wound had split open his breast. On the
wall, upon the yellow and red rhombs, there were some words written in chalk.
The gendarme spelled them out . . .
That afternoon Treviranus and Lonnrot made their way toward the remote scene of
the crime. To the left and right of the automobile, the city disintegrated; the
firmament grew larger and the houses meant less and less and a brick kiln or a
poplar grove more and more. They reached their miserable destination: a final
alley of rose-colored mud walls which in some way seemed to reflect the
disordered setting of the sun. The dead man had already been identified. He was
Daniel Simon Azevedo, a man of some fame in the ancient northern suburbs, who
had risen from wagoner to political tough, only to degenerate later into a
thief and even an informer. (The singular style of his death struck them as
appropriate: Azevedo was the last representative of a generation of bandits who
knew how to handle a dagger, but not a revolver.) The words in chalk were the
following:
The second letter of the Name has been spoken
The third crime occurred on the night of the third of February. A little before
one o'clock, the telephone rang in the office of Commissioner Treviranus. In
avid secretiveness a man with a guttural voice spoke: he said his name was
Ginzberg (or Ginsburg) and that he was disposed to communicate, for a
reasonable remuneration, an explanation of the two sacrifices of Azevedo and
Yarmolinsky. The discordant sound of whistles and horns drowned out the voice
of the informer. Then the connection was cut off. Without rejecting the
possibility of a hoax (it was carnival time), Treviranus checked and found he
had been called from Liverpool House, a tavern on the Rue de Toulon - that
dirty street where cheek by jowl are the peepshow and the milk store, the
bordello and the women selling Bibles. Treviranus called back and spoke to the
owner. This personage (Black Finnegan by name, an old Irish criminal who was
crushed, annihilated almost, by respectability) told him that the last person
to use the establishment's phone had been a lodger, a certain Gryphius, who had
just gone out with some friends. Treviranus immediately went to Liverpool
House, where Finnegan related the following facts. Eight days previously,
Gryphius had taken a room above the saloon. He was a man of sharp features, a
nebulous gray beard, shabbily clothed in black; Finnegan (who put the room to a
use which Treviranus guessed) demanded a rent which was undoubtedly excessive;
Gryphius immediately paid the stipulated sum. He scarcely ever went out; he
dined and lunched in his room; his face was hardly known in the bar. On this
particular night, he carne down to telephone from Finnegan's office. A closed
coupe stopped in front of the tavern. The driver did not move from his seat;
several of the patrons recalled that he was wearing a bear mask. Two harlequins
descended from the coupe; they were short in stature, and no one could fail to
observe that they were very drunk. With a tooting of horns they burst into
Finnegan's office; they embraced Gryphius, who seemed to recognize them but who
replied to them coldly; they exchanged a few words in Yiddish - he, in a low
guttural voice; they, in shrill, falsetto tones - and then the party climbed to
the upstairs room. Within a quarter hour the three descended, very joyous;
Gryphius, staggering, seemed as drunk as the others. He walked - tall, dazed -
in the middle, between the masked harlequins. (One of the women in the bar
remembered the yellow, red and green rhombs, the diamond designs.) Twice he
stumbled; twice he was held up by the harlequins. Alongside the adjoining dock
basin, whose water was rectangular, the trio got into the coupe and
disappeared. From the running board, the last of the harlequins had scrawled an
obscene figure and a sentence on one of the slates of the outdoor shed.
Treviranus gazed upon the sentence. It was nearly foreknowable. It read:
The last of the letters of the Name has been spoken
He examined, then, the small room of Gryphius-Ginzberg. On the floor was a
violent star of blood; in the corners, the remains of some Hungarian-brand
cigarettes; in a cabinet, a book in Latin - the Philologus Hebraeo-Graecus
(1739) of Leusden - along with various manuscript notes. Treviranus studied the
book with indignation and had Lonnrot summoned. The latter, without taking off
his hat, began to read while the Commissioner questioned the contradictory
witnesses to the possible kidnapping. At four in the morning they came out. In
the tortuous Rue de Toulon, as they stepped on the dead serpentines of the
dawn, Treviranus said:
"And supposing the story of this night were a sham?"
Erik Lonnrot smiled and read him with due gravity a passage (underlined) of the
thirty-third dissertation of the Philologus:
Dies Judaeorum incipit a solis occasu usque ad solis occasum diei sequentis.
"This means," he added, "that the Hebrew day begins at sundown and lasts until
the following sundown."
Treviranus attempted an irony.
"Is this fact the most worthwhile you've picked up tonight?"
"No. Of even greater value is a word Ginzberg used."
The afternoon dailies did not neglect this series of disappearances. The Cross
and the Sword contrasted them with the admirable discipline and order of the
last Eremitical Congress; Ernest Palast, writing in The Martyr, spoke out
against "the intolerable delays in this clandestine and frugal pogrom, which
has taken three months to liquidate three Jews"; the Yiddische Zeitung rejected
the terrible hypothesis of an anti-Semitic plot, "even though many discerning
intellects do not admit of any other solution to the triple mystery"; the most
illustrious gunman in the South, Dandy Red Scharlach, swore that in his
district such crimes as these would never occur, and he accused Commissioner
Franz Treviranus of criminal negligence.
On the night of March first, the Commissioner received an imposing-looking,
sealed envelope. He opened it: the envelope contained a letter signed Baruj
Spinoza, and a detailed plan of the city, obviously torn from a Baedeker. The
letter prophesied that on the third of March there would not be a fourth crime,
inasmuch as the paint shop in the West, the Tavern on the Rue de Toulon and the
Hotel du Nord were the "perfect vertices of an equilateral and mystic
triangle"; the regularity of this triangle was made clear on the map with red
ink. This argument, more geometrico, Treviranus read with resignation, and sent
the letter and map on to Lonnrot - who deserved such a piece of insanity.
Erik Lonnrot studied the documents. The three sites were in fact equidistant.
Symmetry in time (the third of December, the third of January, the third of
February); symmetry in space as well . . . Of a sudden he sensed he was about
to decipher the mystery. A set of calipers and a compass completed his sudden
intuition. He smiled, pronounced the word "Tetragrammaton" (of recent
acquisition), and called the Commissioner on the telephone. He told him:
"Thank you for the equilateral triangle you sent me last night. It has enabled
me to solve the problem. Tomorrow, Friday, the criminals will be in jail, we
can rest assured."
"In that case, they're not planning a fourth crime?"
"Precisely because they are planning a fourth crime can we rest assured."
Lonnrot hung up. An hour later he was traveling in one of the trains of the
Southern Railways, en route to the abandoned villa of Triste-le-Roy. South of
the city of our story there flows a blind little river filled with muddy water
made disgraceful by floating scraps and garbage. On the further side is a
manufacturing suburb where, under the protection of a chief from Barcelona,
gunmen flourish. Lonnrot smiled to himself to think that the most famous of
them - Red Scharlach - would have given anything to know of this clandestine
visit. Azevedo had been a comrade of Scharlach's; Lonnrot considered the remote
possibility that the fourth victim might be Scharlach himself. Then, he put
aside the thought . . . He had virtually deciphered the problem; the mere
circumstances, or the reality (names, prison records, faces, judicial and penal
proceedings), scarcely interested him now. Most of all he wanted to take a
stroll, to relax from three months of sedentary investigation. He reflected on
how the explanation of the crimes lay in an anonymous triangle and a dust-laden
Greek word. The mystery seemed to him almost crystalline now; he was mortified
to have dedicated a hundred days to it.
The train stopped at a silent loading platform. Lonnrot descended. It was one
of those deserted afternoons which seem like dawn. The air over the muddy plain
was damp and cold. Lonnrot set off across the fields. He saw dogs, he saw a
wagon on a dead road, he saw the horizon, he saw a silvery horse drinking the
crapulous water of a puddle. Dusk was falling when he saw the rectangular
belvedere of the villa of Triste-le-Roy, almost as tall as the black eucalypti
which surrounded it. He thought of the fact that only one more dawn and one
more nightfall (an ancient splendor in the east, and another in the west)
separated him from the hour so much desired by the seekers of the Name.
A rust colored wrought-iron fence defined the irregular perimeter of the villa.
The main gate was closed. Without much expectation of entering, Lonnrot made a
complete circuit. In front of the insurmountable gate once again, he put his
hand between the bars almost mechanically and chanced upon the bolt. The
creaking of the iron surprised him. With laborious passivity the entire gate
gave way.
Lonnrot advanced among the eucalypti, stepping amidst confused generations of
rigid, broken leaves. Close up, the house on the estate of Triste-le-Roy was
seen to abound in superfluous symmetries and in maniacal repetitions: a glacial
Diana in one lugubrious niche was complemented by another Diana in another
niche; one balcony was repeated by another balcony; double steps of stairs
opened into a double balustrade. A two-faced Hermes cast a monstrous shadow.
Lonnrot circled the house as he had the estate. He examined everything; beneath
the level of the terrace he noticed a narrow shutter door.
He pushed against it: some marble steps descended to a vault. Versed now in the
architect's preferences, Lonnrot divined that there would be a set of stairs on
the opposite wall. He found them, ascended, raised his hands, and pushed up a
trap door.
The diffusion of light guided him to a window. He opened it: a round, yellow
moon outlined two stopped-up fountains in the melancholy garden. Lonnrot
explored the house. He traveled through antechambers and galleries to emerge
upon duplicate patios; several times he emerged upon the same patio. He
ascended dust-covered stairways and came out into circular antechambers; he was
infinitely reflected in opposing mirrors; he grew weary of opening or
half-opening windows which revealed the same desolate garden outside, from
various heights and various angles; inside, the furniture was wrapped in yellow
covers and the chandeliers bound up with cretonne. A bedroom detained him; in
the bedroom, a single rose in a porcelain vase - at the first touch the ancient
petals fell apart. On the second floor, on the top story, the house seemed to
be infinite and growing. The house is not this large, he thought. It is only
made larger by the penumbra, the symmetry, the mirrors, the years, my
ignorance, the solitude.
Going up a spiral staircase he arrived at the observatory. The evening moon
shone through the rhomboid diamonds of the windows, which were yellow, red and
green. He was brought to a halt by a stunning and dizzying recollection.
Two men of short stature, ferocious and stocky, hurled themselves upon him and
took his weapon. Another man, very tall, saluted him gravely, and said:
"You are very thoughtful. You've saved us a night and a day."
It was Red Scharlach. His men manacled Lonnrot's hands. Lonnrot at length found
his voice.
"Are you looking for the Secret Name, Scharlach?"
Scharlach remained standing, indifferent. He had not participated in the short
struggle; he scarcely stretched out his hand to receive Lonnrot's revolver. He
spoke; in his voice Lonnrot detected a fatigued triumph, a hatred the size of
the universe, a sadness no smaller than that hatred.
"No," answered Scharlach. "I am looking for something more ephemeral and
slippery, I am looking for Erik Lonnrot. Three years ago, in a gambling house
on the Rue de Toulon, you arrested my brother and had him sent to prison. In
the exchange of shots that night my men got me away in a coupe, with a police
bullet in my chest. Nine days and nine nights I lay dying in this desolate,
symmetrical villa; I was racked with fever, and the odious double-faced Janus
who gazes toward the twilights of dusk and dawn terrorized my dreams and my
waking. I learned to abominate my body, I came to feel that two eyes, two
hands, two lungs are as monstrous as two faces. An Irishman attempted to
convert me to the faith of Jesus; he repeated to me that famous axiom of the
goyim: All roads lead to Rome. At night, my delirium nurtured itself on this
metaphor: I sensed that the world was a labyrinth, from which it was impossible
to flee, for all paths, whether they seemed to lead north or south, actually
led to Rome, which was also the quadrilateral jail where my brother was dying
and the villa of Triste-le-Roy. During those nights I swore by the god who sees
from two faces, and by all the gods of fever and of mirrors, to weave a
labyrinth around the man who had imprisoned my brother. I have woven it, and it
holds: the materials are a dead writer on heresies, a compass, an
eighteenth-century sect, a Greek word, a dagger, the rhombs of a paint shop.
"The first objective in the sequence was given me by chance. I had made plans
with some colleagues - among them, Daniel Azevedo - to take the Tetrarch's
sapphires. Azevedo betrayed us; with the money we advanced him he got himself
inebriated and started on the job a day early. In the vastness of the hotel he
got lost; at two in the morning he blundered into Yarmolinsky's room. The
latter, harassed by insomnia, had set himself to writing. He was editing some
notes, apparently, or writing an article on the Name of God; he had just
written the words The first letter of the Name has been spoken. Azevedo
enjoined him to be quiet; Yarmolinsky reached out his hand for the bell which
would arouse all the hotel's forces; Azevedo at once stabbed him in the chest.
It was almost a reflex action: half a cen tury of violence had taught him that
it was easiest and surest to kill . . . Ten days later, I learned through the
Yiddische Zeitung that you were perusing the writings of Yarmolinsky for the
key to his death. For my part I read the History of the Sect of the Hasidim; I
learned that the reverent fear of pronouncing the Name of God had given rise to
the doctrine that this Name is all-powerful and mystic. I learned that some
Hasidim, in search of this secret Name, had gone as far as to offer human
sacrifices . . . I knew you would conjecture that the Hasidim had sacrificed
the rabbi; I set myself to justifying this conjecture.
"Marcel Yarmolinsky died on the night of December third; for the second
sacrifice I selected the night of January third. Yarmolinsky died in the North;
for the second sacrifice a place in the West was preferable. Daniel Azevedo was
the inevitable victim. He deserved death: he was an impulsive person, a
traitor; his capture could destroy the entire plan. One of our men stabbed him;
in order to link his corpse to the other one I wrote on the paint shop diamonds
The second letter of the Name has been spoken.
"The third 'crime' was produced on the third of February. It was as Treviranus
must have guessed, a mere mockery, a simulacrum. I am
Gryphius-Ginzberg-Ginsburg; I endured an interminable week (filled out with a
tenuous false beard) in that perverse cubicle on the Rue de Toulon, until my
friends spirited me away. From the running board one of them wrote on a pillar
The last of the letters of the Name has been spoken. This sentence revealed
that the series of crimes was triple. And the public thus understood it;
nevertheless, I interspersed repeated signs that would allow you, Erik Lonnrot,
the reasoner, to understand that it is quadruple. A portent in the North,
others in the East and West, demand a fourth portent in the South; the
Tetragrammaton - the name of God, JHVH - is made up of four letters; the
harlequins and the paint shop sign suggested four points. In the manual of
Leusden I underlined a certain passage: it manifested that the Hebrews
calculate a day counting from dusk to dusk and that therefore the deaths
occurred on the fourth day of each month. To Treviranus I sent the equilateral
triangle. I sensed that you would supply the missing point. The point which
would form a perfect rhomb, the point which fixes where death, exactly, awaits
you. In order to attract you I have premeditated everything, Erik Lonnrot, so
as to draw you to the solitude of Triste-le-Roy."
Lonnrot avoided Scharlach's eyes. He was looking at the trees and the sky
divided into rhombs of turbid yellow, green and red. He felt a little cold, and
felt, too, an impersonal, almost anonymous sadness. It was already night; from
the dusty garden arose the useless cry of a bird. For the last time, Lonnrot
considered the problem of symmetrical and periodic death.
"In your labyrinth there are three lines too many," he said at last. "I know of
a Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line. Along this line so many
philosophers have lost themselves that a mere detective might well do so too.
Scharlach, when, in some other incarnation you hunt me, feign to commit (or do
commit) a crime at A, then a second crime at B, eight kilometers from A, then a
third crime at C, four kilometers from A and B, halfway enroute between the
two. Wait for me later at D, two kilometers from A and C, halfway, once again,
between both. Kill me at D, as you are now going to kill me at Triste-le-Roy."
"The next time I kill you," said Scharlach, "I promise you the labyrinth made
of the single straight line which is invisible and everlasting."
He stepped back a few paces. Then, very carefully, he fired.