Chapter 9 Funes

I remember (actually I have no right to utter that sacred verb, only one person in the world has the right, and that person is no more) holding a dark passionflower in his hand, looking at it as if he had never seen it before. He looked at it, though he had looked at it from dawn to dusk, all his life.I remember him smoking a cigarette, taciturn, and the expression on his Indian face strangely distant.I think I remember the look of his long, slender fingers.I remember the yerba mate tea pot with the coat of arms of the East Coast region in his hand; I remember a yellow mat outside the window of his house, which can vaguely see the scenery of the lake.I remember his voice distinctly; the slow, sulky nasal voice of the suburbanites of old, without the hiss of the Italian immigrants of today.I have seen him only three times; the last time was in 1887... I thought it would be interesting for anyone who had contact with him to write some reminiscences about him; The shortest, certainly the poorest, but not the most unjust.My deplorable situation as an Argentinian prevents me from participating in the obligatory genre of eulogy for Uruguay when the subject is a Uruguayan.Cultured, personable Buenos Aires; although Funes never used that derogatory term, I have every reason to believe that I am that kind of person in his mind.Pedro Leandro Ipche said that Funes was the forerunner of the Superman, "a Zarathustra born and bred and unaxed"; I have no dispute with this, but cannot Forget that he is also a general resident of Fray Bentos, with certain irreparable limitations.

My impression of meeting Funes for the first time was very clear.It was an evening in March or February, 1884.My father took me to Fray Bentos for the summer.I came back from the San Francisco estate with my cousin Bernardo Aedo.We rode horses, sang songs, and were in a good mood.I was still more pleased when, after a sweltering day, the sky suddenly turned cloudy, and the branches of the trees danced with the help of a southerly wind, I dreaded (or rather hoped for) a downpour in the open country.We rode our horses and galloped like we were racing against a storm.We entered an alley lined with extremely high brick sidewalks.It was suddenly dark; I heard quick, almost stealthy footsteps above me, and looking up, I saw a lad running along the narrow, dilapidated sidewalk, as if running over the narrow, dilapidated wall.I remember the knickerbockers and straw sandals he was wearing, and his dark face with a cigarette in his mouth was set off by the overwhelming black clouds.Bernardo yelled at him unexpectedly: What time is it, Ireneo?The young man neither looked at the weather nor stopped, and replied, four minutes to eight, Master Bernardo Juan Francisco.His voice was high-pitched and mocking.

I was absent-minded at the time, and if my cousin hadn't emphasized it, the question and answer between the two of them would not have attracted my attention at all.I think the reason why my cousin emphasized it is probably out of pride in his hometown, and he wants to show that he doesn't care about that kind of address with a name and a surname. My cousin told me that the guy in the alley was named Ireneo Funes, and he was a bit weird, for example, he didn't communicate with anyone, and he told the time at any time like a clock.His mother was a town ironer, Maria Clementina Funes, and his father, some said, was a slaughterhouse doctor, an Englishman named O'Connor, and others said his father was Salto A horse trainer or guide in the province.He lived with his mother around the corner of Laurel Manor.

We spent the summers in Montevideo in 1885 and 1886. In 1887 we went again to Fray Bentos.Naturally, I asked everyone I knew, and finally the "Live Clock Funes".I was told that he fell from an untrained horse at the San Francisco estate and was left paralyzed with no hope of recovery.I remember the uncomfortable, magical impressions that the news conjured up in my mind: I saw him only once, when we rode back from the estate of San Francisco, walking on high places; Much like a deja vu dream.They said he lay motionless in his cot, staring at a distant cactus or a spider's web.In the evening he had him carried to the window.He was so haughty that he even pretended to think that this fatal blow was a blessing in disguise... Twice I saw him through the bars, which crudely suggested his condition as an eternal prisoner: once saw him motionless, with his eyes closed; Another time, he remained motionless, staring at a branch of Shandao Nian with a strong smell.

At that time, I had begun to study Latin systematically with complacency.In my trunk I carried Lomond's Lives, Kicherat's Anthology, Julius Caesar's Commentary, and a disjointed copy of Pliny's Natural History, which were then and now are beyond my limited capabilities as a Latin scholar.In the small town, small stories about a little sesame and mung beans spread quickly; Ireneo, who lived in a cottage by the lake, heard that these rare books had arrived in the town.He wrote me a beautifully written and polite letter referring to our regrettably brief encounter on "February 7, 1884" and praising my uncle Don Grego, who died that year Rio Aedo "for the honorable service done to the two nations at the heroic battle of Ituzaingo", begged me to lend him any Latin book, with a dictionary attached, "in order to better to understand the original well, since I do not know Latin at the moment".He guarantees the return of books and dictionaries in good condition on extremely short notice.The calligraphy is perfect and elegant; the spelling is as Andrés Bello advocated, with i for y and j for g.At first glance, I automatically thought it was a joke.My cousins ​​assured me it wasn't a joke, it was Ireneo's thing.I don't know whether it's shameless, ignorant, or stupid to think that learning difficult Latin requires no other means than a dictionary; "Poetry Jinliang" and the works of Pliny.

On February 14, Buenos Aires sent me a telegram telling me to hurry back because my father was "not well".Pity the heavens; the importance of being the recipient of an urgent telegram, the contradictory desire to let the whole town of Fray Bentos know the negative form of the message and the categorical counterpart of "not good", pretending to be manly The allure of being strong and thus making my grief more dramatic may divert me from the full possibility of feeling pain.When I packed the suitcase, I found that "Jinliang" and the first volume of "Natural History" were missing.The Saturn was due to sail the next morning; after supper that day, I headed for the Funes house.To my surprise the night was no less dreary than the day.

Funes' mother received me in her tidy cabin.She told me that Funes was in the back room and that it would not be surprising if it was dark because Ireneo was used to passing the dull hours without a candle.I walked through the paved courtyard and a small corridor to the second courtyard.There was one vine; the rest was almost pitch black.Suddenly, I heard Ireneo's high-pitched mocking voice.The voice was speaking Latin; the voice from the dark was reciting a speech, a prayer, or a scripture with a melodious tone.The syllables of ancient Rome echoed in the courtyard on the dirt floor; in my astonishment, I felt that the syllables were inexplicable and endless; only later, during the long conversation that night, did I know that he was reciting the seventh chapter of "Natural History". The first paragraph of the twenty-fourth chapter of the volume.The content of that chapter deals with memory, and the last sentence is "everything you hear is a story".

Ireneo, without any change in tone, invited me into the house.He lay on the cot and smoked.I don't think I can see his face until dawn; I just remember the red butt of his cigarette.There was a faint damp smell in the room.I sat down; recounted the telegram and my father's illness. Now comes the most difficult point of my story.Perhaps it is time for the reader to know that the plot of the story is only a conversation fifty years ago, and his exact words are now lost. thing.The indirect narrative seemed distant and feeble; I knew my story would be discounted; my readers could imagine the staccato conversation that night.

Ireneo first used both Latin and Spanish, and listed the examples of extraordinary memory recorded in "Natural History": King Hiro of Persia could call out the name of every soldier in his army; Ridates the Great ruled his empire in twenty-two languages; the Greek poet Simonides invented the method of memory training; recite it out.He really didn't see what was so amazing about such things.He told me that before the rainy afternoon when the pale blue horse threw him to the ground, he was no different from ordinary people: blind and deaf, so to speak, ignorant and unable to remember anything. (I reminded him that he has a precise sense of time, and he remembers people's names and fathers; he doesn't care.) The nineteen years he has lived are like a big dream: seeing but not hearing, hearing but not hearing, great forgetfulness, Can't remember anything.After falling from the horse, he lost consciousness; when he woke up, everything in front of him was so complicated and so clear, and he remembered so clearly the distant and small things before, which was unbearable.Not long after, he found himself paralyzed.He doesn't care.I think he thinks immobility is the least price to pay.Now his comprehension and memory could not have been better.

At a glance, we can see three wine glasses on the table; Funes can see all the branches of a vine, the clusters of fruit, and each grape.He remembered the shape of the southern sunrise at dawn on April 30, 1882, and compared it in memory with the texture of a leather bound book he had only seen once, and with paddles on the Negro River on the eve of the Cabrajo riots The ripples caused compare.Those weren't mere memories; every visual image was associated with a feeling of muscle, warmth, and so on.He can reproduce all dreams.Two or three times he has recreated a full day; never ambiguous, but each time takes a full day.He said to me: My memory alone is worth the sum of the memories of all people since the beginning of the world.And he said: I sleep as you do when you are awake.At dawn, he said: My memory is like a dumping ground.The images we can fully perceive are a circle, a right triangle, a rhombus on a blackboard; but Ireneo can directly perceive the flying mane of the horse, the hind legs of the cattle on the mountain, the kaleidoscopic flames and countless ashes, and Various appearances of the deceased during the long vigil.I don't know how many stars he saw in the sky.

He told me these things; I believed them then and since.There were no movies or gramophones in those days; but it is indubitable and unbelievable that no one ever experimented on Funes.It is true that in life we ​​put off everything that can be put off; perhaps we are all convinced that we are immortal, that sooner or later man will be omnipotent and omniscient. Funes' voice continued to speak in the darkness. He told me that in 1886 he had come up with a unique way of counting and in a few days had passed twenty-four thousand.He didn't write it down because once he thought about it he couldn't forget it.What prompted him to think at first was that the East Bank Thirty-Three group of characters needed two symbols and three characters, which made him feel troublesome. According to his method, only one symbol and one character were needed.Then he applied this whimsical principle to other numbers.For example, he replaced 7013 with Maximo Perez; 7014 with Railroad; De Bedia each represent a number.He replaced five hundred with nine.Each word has a special symbol, as if it is some kind of mark; the number gets more and more complicated as it goes to the back... I tried to explain to him that the wild and scientific notation of counting numbers with no internal connection is Contrary to that.I told him that when people say the number 365, they mean three hundred digits, six tens digits, and five unit digits; if you use black Timoteo and meat sacks to represent the two numbers, it is impossible to analyze them.Funes didn't understand me, or didn't want to. In the 17th century, Locke pointed out (or criticized) the impossibility of a language in which every specific thing, every stone, every bird, and every branch has its proper name; Funes also designed a A similar language, but was later discarded as too general and vague in his opinion.In fact, Funes not only remembered every leaf of every tree in every forest, but also remembered its shape every time he saw or recalled it.He was determined to reduce every day in the past to about 70,000 memories, and then number them.Later, due to two considerations, he canceled his original intention: first, he realized that this work would have no end, and second, he realized that this approach was useless.He felt that the day of his death would not have time to catalog all his childhood memories. The two projects I have mentioned (an endless coded vocabulary of things in nature, and a useless abdominal manuscript catalog of recalled impressions) are absurd, but reveal something indescribably great.They allow us to see or guess into Funes' dizzying mental world.We must not forget that Funes hardly engages in general, purely theoretical thinking.Not only is it difficult for him to understand that the universal symbol "dog" includes many individual dogs of different sizes and shapes; The dogs numbered 3-4 look the same from the front.He was also amazed every time he saw his own face and his own hands in the mirror.Swift says that the emperor of Lilliput can see the movement of the minute hand of a clock; Funes constantly sees the silent progress of decay, tooth decay, and fatigue.He noticed the progression of death and dampness.He is a solitary and lucid spectator of the wider world, immediate and almost intolerably precise.Babylon, London, and New York dazzle the imagination and the eye with their splendor; but none, in their towering buildings and bustling streets, sees reality so much day and night as the unfortunate Ireneo in the suburbs of South America. The rush of heat and pressure.He has trouble falling asleep.Sleep is the release from the cares of the world; and Funes, lying on his back, contemplates in the dark every crack and line of the house around him. (I repeat, his most trivial recollections are more vivid and more nuanced than the physical pleasures and pains we perceive.) New and unfamiliar houses had been built in the unblocked east.Funes imagined them to be black, dense, composed of a uniform darkness; he slept with his face turned in that direction.He also often imagined himself sinking at the bottom of the river, being swayed by the flowing water, unrestrained. He learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin without much effort.But I don't think his thinking ability is very strong.Thinking is forgetting differences, induction, abstraction.In Funes' world full of pits and valleys, there are only palpable details. The light of dawn came hesitantly to the dirt yard. Only then did I see clearly the face that had been talking all night.Ireneo was nineteen; born in 1868; he seemed to me like a bronze statue, older than Egypt, predating prophecies and pyramids.I thought that every word I said (every gesture I made) would forever be preserved in his unflappable memory; I dared not make useless gestures, and was therefore very reserved. Ireneo Funes died in 1889 of pulmonary congestion.