Among old papers: a forgotten interview by Borges with his mentor, and a ghostly place that exists only on the border between literature and history.
When I mentioned Gog at our Friday gathering, with the air of a man unveiling buried treasure, it turned out that everyone else had read it already.
“One reads Papini at eighteen,” they told me.
Perhaps one does — or did, in their day. I discovered the book in my grandfather’s library in Ourense, in a 1960 first Spanish edition published by Editorial Cisne, and did not come upon it until comparatively recently.
What first struck me in reading the character’s fantastical adventures — besides their resemblance to a certain kind of early twentieth-century American popular fiction — was how closely some of the stories seemed to anticipate Borges.
I was particularly struck by the chapter devoted to an “abandoned city”, which Papini places east of Khamil, deep in the desert. In essence, the protagonist, Gog — a millionaire who roams the world interviewing the leading figures of his age (Gerald Ford, Gandhi, and so on) — recounts how, during one of his journeys, he leaves the caravan with a guide and eventually comes upon a walled city with round watchtowers, apparently deserted. The guide, refusing to reveal its name, insists that the place is cursed and will not enter. Gog, however, finds a way in and describes the mysterious city: streets and palaces sealed, immaculate and well preserved, yet empty. Nothing untoward actually happens; yet Papini, by sheer narrative command, conveys the terror gradually seeping into the visitor.
The city Papini describes in Gog — that perfect enclosure, without inhabitants but not without signs — inevitably recalls the invisible cities of Borges’s stories: Tlön, at once a territory and an encyclopaedia; or those circular ruins where dreams engender realities unaware of their own origin (Fictions, 1944).
Could one have inspired the other? And if so, which inspired which?
I had been turning that question over for some time when I was called upon to settle the estate of my dear friend Jorge Raschetti. During his lifetime, Jorge had told me that he had not merely met Borges: his Buenos Aires firm had handled the writer’s divorce. In gratitude, Borges gave him the manuscript — typed, with handwritten annotations — of one of his stories.
Now, at the sad moment of final farewell, his widow asked me to send the manuscript to an American university that wished to preserve it in its library, and with which Jorge had already reached an agreement before his death.
And so, at last, the manuscript came into my hands.
When I opened the blue elasticated folder that protected it, I found, to my astonishment, a second manuscript: the interview Borges conducted with Papini in 1965. Their conversation was published that same year in the magazine Sur, at a time when Borges was already a central figure in Spanish-language literature and Papini an almost blind old man, withdrawn from public life.
Like the first document, this manuscript was typed, with handwritten corrections and deletions which I suspect were Borges’s own.
Could I have kept the discovery? I could. But I cared too much for Jorge to do such a thing. What I did allow myself was to prolong the stay of those pages in my hands until I had examined them thoroughly. In the Beyond, if anything is abundant, it is time; and I imagine Jorge will not have minded a slight delay in the execution of his final wishes.
So I found the published version of the interview online and began comparing it with the manuscript. And there it was: one passage had been censored — precisely the part in which they discuss Gog and “The Abandoned City”.
In the manuscript, in pencil, whoever made the note — let us continue to imagine it was Borges — had written the following: Father Estêvão da Silveira de Moura; Coimbra; CXVII-MIS-CH-42.
In red ink, apparently in the same hand, were the words: “It is true.”
Plainly, as soon as I sent the manuscript to the United States, this detail would become the subject, at the very least, of some doctoral student’s article. Naturally, I wondered what prevented me from investigating it first.
Searching for the priest’s name online produces nothing useful. But there are other ways of following a trail.
Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of Chinese history knows that, during the early modern period, the only Westerners regularly admitted to the country were Jesuits. I was educated by them and have kept good contacts, so I telephoned Brother Amorós and asked him to look into the Portuguese Jesuit’s name. A fortnight later, he sent me some notes prepared by one of his colleagues, the librarian at the Colegio de El Salvador in Zaragoza.
They read: “Matteo Ricci — another famous Jesuit, I add here for context — refers in some detail, in his letters of 1605, to the journey undertaken by his fellow Jesuit, the Portuguese Silveira de Moura, towards Khamil — that frontier city which old maps variously name Camul, Khamil or Qamil. Silveira de Moura was seeking traces of Nestorian worship in China, in order to establish the origins of Christianity in that part of Asia. Father Estêvão is believed to have died in Coimbra in the middle of the seventeenth century.”
Finally, the obliging librarian added: “Tell your friend to try the Joanina Library in Coimbra. Many of the Society’s collections were donated there.”
And that, indeed, is what I did. After first contacting the library by email, and being delighted to learn that the shelfmark cited in Borges’s manuscript did in fact belong to its holdings, I arranged a journey over the latest San Isidro holiday to that city of narrow streets, courtyards, stairways and medieval arches.
And there it was: “CXVII-MIS-CH-42”. In other words: CXVII = shelf 117; MIS = missions; CH = Cathay/China; 42 = the file number.
It was an extensive manuscript by the late Father Estêvão da Silveira de Moura. Not a book in the proper sense, but loose handwritten notes and fragments of journals, often out of order and frequently without precise dates. Everything had been carefully packed in a well-preserved cardboard box.
I had only one day in which to examine it, so I tried to concentrate on anything that sounded remotely Chinese — which was no small task — and, by the end of the morning, I found it: notes describing an improbable journey to a walled, abandoned and perfect city beyond the mountains that border the Gobi Desert. A city absent from every map, and to which the missionary himself gave no name.
“We came to the place neither by knowledge nor by guidance,” Father Estêvão writes, “but by losing our way.” He recounts how, separated from his Tartar interpreters after a sandstorm, he wandered for three days through a barren region until he saw, on the horizon, a circular wall of smooth black stone barely rising above the ground.
He says he found a half-open gate flanked by two bronze colossi: one clad in scale armour and holding a broken sword; the other naked, carrying a closed book. There were no knockers or bells, yet the gate opened of its own accord when he touched it.
Inside, the city was clean, intact and uninhabited. Its streets ran straight as palace corridors, and in the squares he found four statues of white stone, each standing on a pedestal carved with an unknown script: a lion, a camel, a horse and a winged dragon.
All these elements, in one form or another, also appear in Papini’s novel.
At the centre he found a temple without an altar and, within it, a stele as tall as a man, inscribed with Syriac characters intertwined with ideograms. The missionary recognised the Nestorian symbol — a cross with equal arms enclosed in a circle — and added only one sentence, written in his most trembling hand:
“I have reached a city where Christ was remembered without ever having been known.”
Elsewhere he describes a central palace with double doors, beneath which appears an inscription in Ancient Greek: Μνήμη τοῦ ἀπρόσιτου (“Memory of the Inaccessible”). When he tried to open them, they offered no resistance; yet within lay a perfect void: a chamber without walls, ceiling or floor, containing only a pale, persistent light, “as though all space had become a sign”.
These are the elements Borges would later draw upon in his stories.
Father Estêvão left the nameless city after three days. He did not take his leave, did not pray, did not attempt to record the route back. He says that, shortly after departing, he turned round and the city was no longer visible, as though the desert had swallowed it whole.
I had no time to investigate further, but I had found what I wanted: Papini had not merely inspired Borges; he had also given him the key to a manuscript which Borges, rather selfishly, chose not to share with his readers.
Instead, Borges made it his own, drawing in his stories on the material Papini had left unused.
So, as soon as I finish this article, I shall send both Borges manuscripts to the United States, and before long we shall have a host of American researchers hunting for file “CXVII-MIS-CH-42”. I should not be surprised if, within a few years, someone makes a documentary attempting to pin Papini’s nameless city to the map. But that will be another story. Besides, the title of this article promised you a crime.
And that crime, I must confess, is mine.
Anyone visiting the Joanina Library in Coimbra will see that, as here, everything has now been computerised. But the books and boxes still contain those old cardboard envelopes with ruled index cards recording the names of readers who requested the material. They are entirely redundant now, but have not been removed for fear of damaging the collections.
And what few names appeared on Father Estêvão’s box? Only two: Papini and Borges.
It was impossible to resist.
Since the last San Isidro holiday, my own name has appeared there too — in ballpoint pen.
Should some Portuguese police inspector come to my office in search of incriminating evidence of the illegal graffito I left upon his country’s national heritage, I have made his task remarkably easy. Beautifully mounted in a cream passe-partout and a gilt frame is the photograph I took of the venerable card before returning it to the envelope in the box.
Do keep my secret.
Dr José Vicente Rubio Eire
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