The Vigils of a Nightmare
Borges dreamed of a Nordic king, with his sword and his dog; he had the nightmare at dawn and upon waking, “I kept seeing the king for a while” (La pesadilla, 48). Sabato once asked him: “What do you think, Borges, about the validity of dreams—I mean, the reality that appears in dreams?” (Borges, Sabato, 140). Together, they would list cases throughout history, all debatable, and unable to distinguish between them, they spoke of a duality. In La pesadilla, Borges recalls Wordsworth’s dream where “the Bedouin is Don Quixote and yet is neither of the two, and both at once. This duality corresponds to the horror of the dream” (Borges, La pesadilla, 53). In Borges’ La espera, we find a man awaiting his death, and when it arrives, he is found dreaming: “At dawn, he would dream a dream with the same backdrop but variable circumstances” (225), where he fired a revolver at his aggressors—sometimes three, sometimes one, like Dante’s three-headed Lucifer (a reflection of the Trinity) or like Mercury as analyzed by Jung: “It calls to mind that double figure who seems to stand behind both Christ and the devil—the enigmatic Lucifer, who is simultaneously an attribute of both” (85). Or as the Aquarium Sapientum declares: “It is a trinitarian, universal essence called Jehovah. Divine and human at the same time” (84). This duality, coexisting within a triad, is commonplace in dreams, governed by the unconscious, which effortlessly conceives the impossible and the paradoxical. Jung argues that tales, dreams, and myths are ruled by the unconscious, which presents the axiom of Maria Prophetissa: “When the third yields the fourth, unity is also attained” (40). Psychology explains it as:
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the antithesis of the three relatively differentiated functions of consciousness against the undifferentiated—the so-called inferior or deficient function, which is untamed, maladapted, uncontrolled, primitive, and mystic-archaic due to contamination by the collective unconscious (239).
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The man awaiting death in the story returns to his dream at the last moment, perhaps dreaming once more of firing at the three. The magic of the unconscious would have saved him from death again, returning him to the now-ritualized wait for his end. This wait aligns with those timeless words Borges fixed in a closed world—the year 4004 on that northwestern street (Sir James Lightfoot calculated that the universe was created at 9 a.m. in 4004 B.C.). The man has waited since the beginning of time in the fatal duration of Hell. He awaits his death, which, ironically, awaits him at the story’s end.
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If the reader reaches and transcends the ending, it is not necessarily true for the protagonist, who collapses into himself, escaping death in a dream. It occurred to him—and then he dismissed it—“because he couldn’t tell whether it resembled relief or misery” (Borges, La espera, 222) that his entire life was a dream. Just as he ignores that the film he saw at the cinema three blocks away “included images that were also from his past life […] for the idea of a coincidence between art and reality was foreign to him” (221). Villari, or his usurper, “wanted only to endure, not to conclude […] he tried to live purely in the present [but] believed he sensed that the past is the substance of time; that is why it turns to past so quickly” (223). There is an echo in Borges’ poem for the I Ching:
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The future is as irrevocable as rigid yesterday. / There is nothing that is not a silent letter / in the eternal, indecipherable writing / whose book is time. […] / Yet in some corner of your confinement / there may be a light, a crack. / The path is fatal as the arrow. / But in the cracks, God lies in wait (7).
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Similarly irrevocable is Villari’s story, where death stalks him, perhaps offering an escape from the cyclical prison of fate. Death already lurks in the three-faced aggressor, in the dawn, in the nightmare, in the gunshot—or perhaps it has already claimed him. The wait is the dream, or both are death, and both at once.
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The number three thus emerges as a fitting synonym for a process of development in time, paralleling God’s self-revelation as the Absolute One unfolding into three. The triad’s relation to unity can be expressed by an equilateral triangle: a = b = c (Jung, 237).
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Wordsworth’s dream recalls another, more personal one, which Borges summarized for Sabato:
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Once I dreamed I was trying to decipher illegible manuscripts. I was anguished, and the next day, upon waking, the manuscripts lingered for minutes, though I knew it was a nightmare (189).
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It seems the opposite of more common dreams, where one falls asleep with a text, dreams of deciphering or studying it, and wakes to find the book closed on the bed, all reading forgotten. Nightmares, however, bring forth images from Blake’s hell—like ghosts in reality, a dream bleeding into wakefulness.
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Quoting Addison more than once, Borges explains that in dreams, we are “the theater, the spectator, the actors, the fable” (La pesadilla, 53). Sabato believed art offers an escape, while dreams do not: “In art, one expresses; in dreams, everything remains inside” (190). This resonates with a line from El Sur: “Everything was vast, yet intimate and, in some way, secret” (Borges, Ficciones, 221). In La espera, Borges expresses—perhaps achieves—that terrible duality, the vagueness of dreams, open to interpretations yet intimate and secret. The future-word for God, the other Rose, an unforgettable coin and one without an obverse—all are magical artifacts in his stories that reveal the fantastic, or rather, reveal the fantastic itself. In La espera, it is a nightmare at the story’s end that unveils the fantastic, creating an ellipsis, a mystery that compels us to flip back through the pages. “The uneasy reader revisits the relevant chapters and discovers another solution—the true one” (85). Some recall the cinema, others the dreams; we encounter Dante, a brief scuffle, a wolf-dog. Each word is the cipher of a dream within a condensed dream, a moment eternalized on the edge of the abyss. The double who awaits death narrates, remembers, relives the details surrounding his murder (his blur), which precede and inaugurate it, even as he is consumed by the nightmares obscuring his death. But a second doubt, more skeptical than the first, prevents us from affirming whether the impostor dreamed his death, whether he truly died, whether it was all a dream or a work of art. This scrutiny of Borges’ work may seem ironic but not absurd: “Someone—not the best—hints at two arguments. The vain reader, distracted, believes they invented them” (85). The horror of nightmares lies in their impossible fusion of contradictions—when things are and are not simultaneously, as in a dream or a novel, like the death of the dreaming character. But in art, Sabato would say, there is an escape. Borges cites his essay comparing art and magic:
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Magic is the coronation—or nightmare—of chance, not its contradiction. […] Every episode in a careful narrative projects forward. […] The theology of words and episodes is omnipresent in great films (El arte narrativo y la magia, 112–114).
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Borges referred to Sternberg’s film Underworld.
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It is curious, thinking of magic, to find in the story such trivial acts as a trip to the cinema, reading the newspaper, a toothache, the peacocks he did not dream of—all while waiting for death. Each secretly unfolds and heralds death: the altercation at the cinema, the obituary in the paper, the miracle of pain, the peacocks destined to feed nightmares. Time stretches, hides, and waits. Confucius’ commentary on the I Ching hexagram for Waiting states:
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Only when one faces things as they are, without self-deception or illusion, does clarity emerge from events, revealing the path to success. […] For only by resolutely meeting destiny can one master it (53).
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Can the same be said of the double? Was he waiting for or fleeing his killer? Was he condemned to wait? We do not know if he faced his destiny or mastered it like an artist his work. Yet Borges has created a destiny, endlessly foreseeing it within the tale.
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The nightmare suggests an eternal wait, an infernal circle for a traitorous double. Here, the one who waits is the character, the reader, the narrator, and the narrative itself—Addison might say—all fabulating death, giving it meaning. Montaigne, who knew death would come in an unexpected present, wrote: “We know not where death awaits us; let us await it everywhere. To ponder death is to ponder freedom” (36). Borges wrote: “Now, I was going to die! Then I reflected that all things happen to one precisely, precisely now” (Ficciones, 102). The wait is not in vain. In dreams, we first feel oppression, then seek explanation; in art as in magic, these coincide. We might say the wait corresponds to death—or, defying causality, that they are both at once.
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The nightmare has a peculiar horror, expressible through any fable: Wordsworth’s Bedouin who is also Don Quixote, my dream of the king… (La pesadilla, 53–54).
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In La espera, the entire tale blurs reality and nightmare. Cortázar, in his less subtle story La noche boca arriba, finds duality in a double dream, an imported dream: “In the infinite lie of that dream” (166).
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Borges told Sabato twice that he always knows when he is dreaming. What horror did he feel upon confusing dream and reality? I believe the story captures that anguish, making us conscious of death as Montaigne wished. Borges’ voice accompanies us in the wait and wakes us at the tunnel’s end: “However it may be, the dreaming man is a great poet, and upon waking, he returns to being a poor man. Generally, at least” (Borges, Sabato, 189).
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Borges, Jorge Luis. “El arte narrativo y la magia” in Discusión. Spain: Alianza Editorial, 1999.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “El sur”, “El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan”, “Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain” in Ficciones. Spain: Alianza Editorial, 1998.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “La espera” in El Aleph. Spain: Alianza Editorial, 1997.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “La pesadilla” in Siete noches. Mexico: FCE, 1980.
Borges, Jorge Luis, Ernesto Sabato. Diálogos. Argentina: Emecé, 1976.
Cortázar, Julio. “La noche boca arriba” in Final del juego. Argentina: Editorial Sudamericana, 1981.
De Montaigne, Miguel. “Que filosofar es prepararse a morir” in Ensayos. Argentina: Editorial Jackson, 1950.
Jung, Carl. Simbología del espíritu. Mexico: FCE, 1998.
I-Ching. Argentina: Editorial Hermes, 1986.
