TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION
Leopoldo Lugones was born on June 13th, 1874 and died on February 18th, 1938. He was a prolific author of short stories and poetry. Borges, while initially critical of his work, eventually referred to him as "the greatest writer of Argentina". Lugones was a supporter of the 1930 Argentine coup, instigated by General José Félix Uriburu, who was supported by the Nationalists. Frustrated with the unfolding of the political situation, Lugones committed suicide by taking a mixture of whisky and cyanide.
Lugones' 1906 short story collection "Strange Forces" contains the three stories I have translated, "An Inexplicable Phenomenon", "The Psychon" and "The Omega Force". This anthology has been translated into English twice before, once by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert in 2001, the other by Daniel Bernardo in 2020. This might appear to be a bit of a duplication of effort, but when I did these translations, I was unaware of the Bernardo and the Alter-Gilbert seemed difficult to find, so I figured it would just be easier (and more fun) to translate three of the stories relevant to the podcast.
Like with the other Latin American works we've translated so far, these three stories, as well as others from "Strange Forces", are discussed at length in Rachel Haywood Ferreira's "The Emergence of Latin American Science Fiction".
- Chrononauts translation office, March 4th, 2021
AN INEXPLICABLE PHENOMENON
It was eleven years ago. I was traveling through the agricultural region that divides the provinces of Córdoba and Santa Fe, provided with the indispensable recommendations to avoid the horrible inns of those colonies in formation. My stomach, defeated by the invariable splashes of fennel and the fatal walnuts of dessert, demanded fundamental refills. My last pilgrimage was to take place under the worst auspices. No one knew how to point me to a hostel in the town to where I had directed myself. However, circumstances were pressing when the justice of the peace, who professed a certain sympathy for me, came to my aid.
- "I know there," he told me, "a lonely widowed Englishman. He has a house, the best of the colony, and several lands of no small value. My position enables me to provide you with a recommendation, if you would like, and if it is effective he will provide you with an excellent accommodation. I say if it is effective, because my man, despite his good qualities, is prone to mood swings on certain occasions, being, moreover, extraordinarily reserved. No one has been able to penetrate his house beyond the dormitory where he receives his very rare guests. This all means that you are going in unfavorable conditions, but it is all I can supply. Success is purely casual. All in all, if you want a letter of recommendation..." [Translators note: 'usually has his moon' literally for 'prone to mood swings', as in being under a good/bad moon, or zodiac sign]
I accepted and continued my journey, arriving at the destination hours later.
There was nothing attractive about the place. The station with its red tile roof; its crunchy charcoal platform; its traffic light to the right, its well to the left. On the double track in front, half a dozen wagons were awaiting the harvest. Beyond was the shed, blocked by bags of wheat. Following the embankment, the pampas with its yellowish color like a handkerchief of herbs; little houses without reboque scattered in the distance, each one with its own pile on its side; on the horizon the festoon of smoke from the moving train, and a silence of peaceful enormity toning the rural color of the landscape.
It was vulgarly symmetrical like all the recent foundations. Lines of measurement were noticeable in that physiognomy of an autumnal meadow. Some settlers came to the post office looking for letters. I asked one for this well-known house, immediately obtaining the address. I noticed in the manner my host was referred to, that he was looked upon as a considerable man.
He didn't live far from the station. About ten blocks further, towards the west, at the end of a dusty road that took on lilac colors in the afternoon, I made out the house with its parapet and its cornice, of a certain exotic gallantry among the surrounding dwellings; its front garden; the inner courtyard surrounded by a wall behind which peach branches protruded. The set was nice and fresh; but everything seemed uninhabited. In the silence of the afternoon, there on the deserted countryside, that little house, despite its features of an industrious chalet, had a kind of sad sweetness, something of a new tomb on the site of an old cemetery.
When I got to the gate, I noticed that there were roses in the garden, autumn roses whose perfume relieved like charity the lashing exhalation of threshing. Among the plants that I could almost touch with my hand, grass grew freely; and a rust-covered shovel lay against the wall, its end entirely tied up by the guide of a vine.
I pushed open the gate, crossed the garden, and not without a certain vague impression of fear did I go to knock on the inner door. Minutes passed. The wind began to whistle in a crack, aggravating the solitude. At a second call, I felt footsteps; and soon after the door opened with a sound of parched wood. The owner of the house appeared, greeting me.
I presented my letter. While he was reading, I was able to observe him at ease. His head was elevated and bald; the shaven face of a clergyman; generous lips, austere nose. He must be a bit mystical. His superficial protuberances balanced, with a straight expression of impulsive tendencies, the imperious disdain of his chin. Defined by his professional inclinations, this man could be the same as a military man or a missionary. I would have liked to look at his hands to complete my impression, but I could only see them from the back.[Translators note: The word "Clergyman" is in English in the original]
Acquainted with the letter, he invited me to come in, and the rest of my stay, until lunchtime, was devoted to my personal arrangements. It was at the table that I began to notice something strange.
As we ate, I noticed that despite his perfect courtesy, something was troubling my interlocutor. His gaze, invariably directed towards one corner of the room, showed a certain anguish, but since his shadow fell precisely at that point, my furtive glances could discover nothing. Otherwise, it might well not be that but a habitual distraction.
The conversation was still quite lively, animated. It was was about the cholera that was hitting the nearby towns at that time. My host was a homeopath, and he did not hide his satisfaction at having found one of the guild in me. To this end, a phrase in the dialogue changed his tenor. The action of reduced doses had just suggested to me an argument which I hastened to make.
- "The influence about Rutter's pendulum", I said concluding a sentence, "exerted in the proximity of any substance, does not depend on the quantity. A homeopathic globule determines oscillations equal to those produced by a dose five hundred or a thousand times greater."[Translators note: Henry Rutter, author of several books on weights and measurements in the 1860s, and a work detailing experiments of a similar nature as mentioned in this story, entitled "Magnetised Currents and the Magnetoscope".]
I realized immediately that he had become interested in my observations. The homeowner was looking at me now.
- "However," he replied, "Reichenbach has refuted this experiment. I assume you have read Reichenbach."[Translators note: Baron Karl Reichenbach (1788 - 1869), chemist, who made several important discoveries, but dedicated the final years of his life to an unproved field of energy combining electricity, magnetism and heat, emanating from all living things, which he called the Odic force]
- "I have read him, yes; I have listened to his criticisms, I have experimented, and my apparatus, affirming Rutter, has shown me that the error came from the learned German, not from the Englishman. The cause of such an error is very simple, so much so that it amazes me how the illustrious discoverer of paraffin and creosote did not find it."
Here, was a smile from my host; conclusive proof that we understood each other.
- "Have you used Rutter's primitive pendulum, or the one perfected by Dr. Leger?"[Translator note: Reference to Leger unknown]
- "The latter," I replied.
- "That's better; and what, according to your research, would be the cause of Reichenbach's error?"
- "This: the sensitive peoples with which he operated, influenced the apparatus, suggesting itself by the quantity of the body studied. If the oscillation caused by a scruple of magnesia, let us suppose, reached a width of four lines, the current ideas about the relationship between cause and effect required that the oscillation increase in proportion to the quantity: ten grams, for example. The Baron's sensitives were individuals not usually versed in scientific speculation; and those who practice such experiments know how powerfully such people are influenced by ideas held to be true, especially when they are logical. Here, then, is the cause of the error. The pendulum does not obey quantity, but only the nature of the body studied; but when the sensitive believes that quantity influences, the effect increases, since all belief is a volition. A pendulum, before which the subject operates without knowing the variations in quantity, confirms Rutter. The hallucination is dissipates..."
- "Oh, we have hallucination here already," said my interlocutor with obvious displeasure.
- "I'm not one of those who explains everything by way of hallucination, at least confusing it with subjectivity, as it often happens. Hallucination is for me a force rather than a state of mind, and thus considered, a good portion of phenomena are explained through it. I believe that's the true doctrine."
- "Unfortunately that's false. Look, I met Home, the medium, in London, back in 1872. Then I followed Crookes's experiments with lively interest, under radically materialistic criterion; but evidence of the phenomena of '74 was imposed on me. Hallucination is not enough to explain everything. Believe me, apparitions are autonomous..."[Translators note: William Crookes (1832 - 1919), a discoverer of cathode rays, working on these issues from 1869 - 1875.]
- "Permit me a little digression," I interrupted - finding in those memories an opportunity to verify my deductions about his personage; I wanted to ask him a question, which certainly did not require an answer, if it is indiscreet: "Have you been a military man?..."
- "For a little while; I was a second lieutenant in the Indian army."
- "Certainly, India would be a field of curious studies for you."
- "No; the war closed the road to Tibet where I wanted to go. I went to Cawnpore, nothing more. For health reasons I very soon returned to England; from England I went to Chile in 1879; and finally to this country in 1888."
- "Did you get sick in India?"
- "Yes," the former soldier answered sadly, fixing his eyes again on the corner of the room.
- "Cholera?" I insisted.
He rested his head on his left hand, and looked over me vaguely. His thumb began to move between the thinning hairs on the nape of his neck. I understood that he was going to introduce me into a confidence to which those gestures were a prologue, and I waited. Outside, a cricket chirped in the dark.
- "It was worse still," began my host. "The mystery will soon be forty years old and no one has known until now. Why talk about it? They wouldn't have understood, thinking me crazy at least. I am not sad, I am desperate. My wife passed away eight years ago, ignoring the evil that was devouring me, and fortunately I have not had children. I meet in you for the first time a man capable of understanding me."
I bowed gratefully.
- "Science is so beautiful, free science, without a chapel and without an academy! And nevertheless, you are still on the threshold. Reichenbach's odic fluids are only the prologue. The case that you are going to know will reveal to you how far it can go."
The narrator was moved. He mixed English phrases with his somewhat grammatical Spanish. The digressions acquired an imperious tendency, a strange rhythmic fullness in that foreign accent.
- "In February 1858," he continued, "was when I lost all my joy. You have heard of the yogis, those unique beggars whose life is shared between espionage and thaumaturgy. Travelers have popularized their exploits, which it would be useless to repeat. But do you know what the basis of their powers consists of?"
- "I believe that it's in the faculty of producing, when they want, autosonambulism, becoming in such a way insensitive, seers, etc."
- "Exactly. Well, I saw the yogis operate in conditions that made any trickery impossible. I even photographed the scenes, and the plate reproduced everything, just as I had seen it. Hallucination was thus, impossible, because chemical ingredients do not hallucinate... so I wanted to develop identical powers. I have always been bold, and then I was not in a position to appreciate the consequences. So I put my hands to work."
- "By what method?"
Without responding to me, he continued:
- "The results were surprising. In a short time I got to sleep. After two years I produced a conscious translation. But those practices had brought me to the height of anxiety. I felt terribly helpless, and with the assurance of an adverse thing mixed with my life like a poison. At the same time, my curiosity was devouring me. I was on the slope and could no longer stop. By a continuous tension of will I managed to save face to the world. Little by little, the power awakened in me became more rebellious. A prolonged distraction caused an unfolding. I felt my personality outside of me, my body came to be something like an affirmation of not me, I would say, expressing that state concretely. As the impressions were being fueled, producing an agonizing lucidity, I resolved one night to see my double. To see what was coming out of me, being myself, during the ecstatic dream."
- "And were you able to do it?"
- "It was one evening, almost night already. Detachment occurred with an accustomed ease. When I regained consciousness, before me, in a corner of the room, there was a shape. And this shape was a monkey, a horrible animal staring at me! Since then he has not left me. I see it constantly. I am his prey. Wherever he goes, going with me, is him. He is always there. He looks at me constantly, but I never approach him, he never moves, I never move..."
I underline the changed pronouns in the last sentence, just as I heard it. A sincere grief seized me. This man did indeed suffer from an atrocious suggestion.
- "Calm yourself" I said, feigning confidence. "Reintegration is not impossible."
- "Oh yes!" he responded bitterly. "This is already old. Imagine, I have lost the concept of unity. I know that two and two are four, as a memory; but I don't believe it anymore. The simplest arithmetic problem is meaningless to me, since I lack the conviction of the whole. And I still suffer strange things. When I take one hand with the other, for example, I feel that the former is different, as if it belonged to a person who is not me. Sometimes I see things double, because each eye proceeds unrelated to the other..."
It was, undoubtedly, a curious case of madness, which did not exclude the most perfect reasoning.
- "But anyway, that monkey?..." I asked to exhaust the matter.
- "He is black like my own shadow, and melancholic in the way of a man. This description is accurate, because I'm looking at him right now. His height is medium, his face like all monkey faces. But I feel, nevertheless, that he resembles me. I speak with complete control of myself. That animal looks like me!"
That man, indeed, was serene; and yet the idea of an simian face was in a stark contrast to his vantage point, raised skull, and straight nose that disbelief was imposed by this circumstance, even more than by the absurdity of the hallucination.
He perfectly noticed my state; he stood up as if adopting a final resolution:
- "I'm going to walk around this room so that you can see him. Observe my shadow, I beg of you."
He raised the lamplight, rolled the table to one end of the dining room, and began to pace. Then, I was seized by the greatest of surprises. The shadow of that subject did not move! Projected about the corner, from the waist up, and with the lower part on the light wooden floor, it seemed a membrane lengthening and shortening according to the greater or lesser proximity of its owner. I could not notice any displacement under the incidences of light in each moment the man had found himself.
Alarmed at supposing myself to be the victim of such madness, I resolved to be unimpressed and to see if I would do something similar with my host, by means of a decisive experiment. I asked him to let me get his silhouette by running a pencil over the shadow's profile.
With permission granted, I fixed a piece of paper with four wet breadcrumbs until I achieved the most perfect adherence possible to the wall, and so that the shadow of the face remained in the very center of the sheet. As can be seen, I wanted to prove by the identity of the profile between the face and its shadow (this was obvious, but the hallucinated person maintained the opposite) the origin of said shadow, with the intention of later explaining its immobility, ensuring an exact base.
I would be lying if I said that my fingers did not tremble a little as they settled on the dark spot, which otherwise perfectly imitated the profile of my interlocutor; but I affirm with complete certainty that my pulse did not fail me on the layout. I made the line without raising my hand, with a blue Hardtmuth pencil, and did not peel off the sheet, concluding that I had, until I was convinced by a scrupulous observation, that my line perfectly coincided with the outline of the shadow, and this with the shadow of the hallucinated face.
My host followed the experiment with immense interest. When I approached the table, I saw his hands tremble with suppressed emotion. My heart was beating, as if sensing an unfortunate outcome.
- "Don't look," I said.
- "I will look!" he answered me with such an imperious accent that, despite myself, I held the paper up to the light.
We both paled in a horrible way. There before our eyes, the pencil line traced a depressed forehead, a flat nose, a bestial snout. The monkey! The cursed thing!
And for the record, I don't know how to draw.
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