The End is an oddity in this anthology, and yet I suppose it fits in the manner of a return in time and a meeting of adversaries. A shopkeeper lies paralyzed on his cot listening to the guitar-playing of a black man who has lost a singing contest, whose brother has been murdered long ago, and who seems to just wait. A man rides in and challenges the black man to a knife fight. The black man wins and walks away, his mission (to kill the man who killed his brother?) complete, his life now without purpose.
There is something to this story that I seem to have missed, even in a second reading. There is the spirit of one man, unable to move and yet accepting his fate to lie helpless on his bed for the rest of his days. There is the patience of another, biding time with his playing of the guitar, waiting for the man with whom he must fight. And there is the man who has murdered, comes to murder again. I’m not sure what Borges is symbolizing here, what he is presenting. Since he claims that the story is based upon an Argentine folk poem but continues the story from there, it is indeed of a twists and turns nature, the change of the victim into victor (as a murderer now himself) may be in keeping with Borges’ line of thinking in that all men do all things. Eventually.
In The Sect of The Phoenix, the first person narrator attempts to discover the background and purpose of a scattered group of people tied together by a secret passed down through generations. Borges compares the group first to the gypsies, as this is one of the group’s inconsistencies with others of religion or country of origin. It doesn’t fly as an answer. He relates that a certain rite of initiation is always performed, but usually by slaves, beggars, lepers, or children. Without revealing in full the secret as such, Borges leads me to believe that it is a human trait, a belief or an emotion that binds these individuals who are of every race and religious persuasion, normal and relative to where they abide.
The Secret is sacred, but it is also somewhat ridiculous. The practice of the mystery is furtive and even clandestine, and its adepts do not speak about it. There are no respectable words to describe it, but it is understood that all words refer to it or better, that they inevitably allude to it, and thus, in dialogue with initiates, when I have prattled about anything at all, they have smiled enigmatically or taken offense, for they have felt that I touched upon the Secret. In Germanic literature there are poems written by sectarians, whose nominal theme is the sea, say, or the evening twilight; but they are, I can hear someone say, in some measure symbols of the Secret. (p. 165)
Life perhaps? A recognition within mankind of it’s own image magnified? I really don’t know. Whatever I think now, I’m sure I’ll think differently with another reading at another time.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology