English translation of "Emma Zunz" by Jorge Luis Borges
One of Borges' favorite stories, from El Aleph (1949), and one of the few of his stories which has a female protagonist. I took a stab at translating this because it's pretty short. Watch out for some weird sentences though.
On the fourteenth of January, 1922, Emma Zunz, upon returning from the Tarbuch and Loewenthal textile factory, found on the vestibule floor a letter, postmarked in Brazil, by which she understood that her father had died. They confused her at first glance, the seal and the envelope; then the unfamiliar handwriting bothered her. Nine or ten scribbled lines filled up the page; Emma read that Mr. Maier had accidentally ingested a strong dose of Veronal and had died on the third of the month at the hospital in Bagé. A friend of her father’s at the boarding house had signed the letter, a certain Fein or Fain, from Rio Grande, who could not have known that he was addressing the daughter of the deceased.
Emma let the paper fall. Her first reaction was a sick feeling in her stomach and in her knees; then one of blind guilt, of unreality, of cold, of fear; then, she wanted it to be the next day. Immediately afterwards, she understood that desire was useless because her father’s death was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would keep happening endlessly. She picked up the paper and went to her room. She secretly hid it in a drawer, as if she already had ulterior motives. Perhaps she had already begun to conceive of them; she was already what she would become.
In the growing darkness, Emma cried the rest of the day over the suicide of Manuel Maier, who, in the good old days, had been Emanuel Zunz. She remembered summers at the ranch, near Gualeguay, she remembered (tried to remember) her mother, she remembered the little house in Lanús that they had auctioned off, she remembered the arrest warrant, the shame, she remembered the anonymous letters with the newspaper clippings about the “cashier’s embezzlement,” she remembered (though this she hardly forgot) that her father, on the last night, had sworn that the thief was Loewenthal. Loewenthal, Aarón Loewenthal, previously manager of the factory and now one of the owners. Since 1916, Emma had kept this secret. She hadn’t revealed it to anyone, not even her best friend, Elsa Urstein. Perhaps she was avoiding obnoxious incredulity; perhaps she believed that the secret was a link between herself and the absentee. Loewenthal didn’t know that she knew; Emma Zunz derived a sense of power from this small fact.
She didn’t sleep that night, and when the first light defined the rectangle of her window, her plan was already perfected. She made sure that this day, which seemed endless to her, would be like the others. There were rumors of revolt in the factory; Emma spoke out, as always, against violence. At six o’clock, finished with work, she went with Elsa to a women’s club, which had a gym and a pool. They signed in; she had to repeat and spell out her first and last name, she had to pretend to enjoy the vulgar jokes that came with the physical review1. With Elsa and the Kronfuss’ younger daughter she discussed which movie they would go see on Sunday afternoon. Later, they talked about their boyfriends, and nobody expected that Emma would speak. In April, she would turn nineteen, but men still evoked an almost pathological fear in her… Back at home, she made soup from tapioca and some vegetables, ate early, went to bed, and forced herself to sleep. In this laborious and trivial way, Friday the fifteenth, the eve, passed.
On Saturday, impatience woke her. Impatience, not restlessness, and her singular relief of its finally being that day. She no longer had to plot and imagine; within a few hours, the simplicity of the events would take over. She read in La Prensa that the Nordstjärnan, from Malmö, would set sail that night from dock 3; she called Loewenthal on the phone, insinuated that she wanted to tell him something about the strike without the other girls finding out, and promised to pass by his office at nightfall. Her voice trembled; the tremor suited an informant. Nothing else memorable happened that morning. Emma worked until twelve and planned out the details for a Sunday walk with Elsa and Perla Kronfuss. She lay down after lunch, and, with her eyes closed, she reviewed the plan she had devised. She figured the last stage would be less horrible than the first, and that it would offer her, without a doubt, a taste of victory and justice. Suddenly, alarmed, she got up and ran to the bureau drawer. She opened it; beneath a portrait of Milton Sills, where she had left it the night before last, was the letter from Fain. No one could have seen it; she began to read it and ripped it up.
To refer to that evening’s events in terms of reality would be difficult, and perhaps unfair. One attribute of the infernal is unreality, an attribute that seems to allay its terrors, and coincidentally, aggravate them. How can someone conceive the plausibility of an action when they can hardly believe who did it, how can that brief chaos, which today, renounces and confuses the memory of Emma Zunz, be reclaimed? Emma lived by Almagro, on Linieres Street; it is evident to us that she went to the port that evening. Perhaps in the infamous Paseo de Julio, she saw herself multiplied in the mirrors, publicized by lights, and disrobed by hungry eyes, but it is more reasonable to surmise that at the beginning, she made the mistake of wandering carelessly towards the indifferent portico… She went into two or three bars, saw the routine or schemes of other women. Finally, she came across men from the Nordstjärnan. She feared that the one that was very young would instill in her some form of tenderness, so she opted for a different one, perhaps shorter than her, and rude, so that the purity of the horror would not be diminished. The man led her to a doorway, and then to a dark hallway, and then up a winding staircase, and then to a vestibule (in which there was a window with diamond-shaped panes identical to those in the house in Lanús), and then down a corridor, and then to a door which was locked. Grave events are outside of time, because within them the immediate past remains cut away from the future, because the parts that form them do not seem consecutive.
In that time outside of time, in that disorder bewildered with disjointed and atrocious sensations, did Emma Zunz even once think about the death that motivated her sacrifice? I am of the belief that she did, and in that moment, her desperate purpose landed itself into jeopardy. She wondered (she could not not wonder) if her father had done to her mother the horrible thing that they were doing to her now. She considered it with feeble astonishment and immediately took refuge in vertigo. The man, Swedish or Finnish, did not speak Spanish; he was as much a tool for Emma as she was for him, but she was serving joy, and he, justice.
When she was alone, Emma did not immediately open her eyes. The money the man had left was on the nightstand: Emma sat up and tore it to pieces like she had done earlier with the letter. Ripping up money is impious, like throwing out bread; Emma felt bad as soon as she did it. An act of pride and on such a day… The fear lost itself within the sadness, the disgust in her body. The disgust and the sadness chained her, but Emma slowly got up and began to get dressed. There were no longer any bright colors in the room; the last light of dusk was fading. Emma managed to leave without anyone seeing her; at the street corner, she got on a bus that was going west. She chose, in accordance with her plan, the seat closest to the front, so that nobody would see her face. Perhaps it comforted her to see, that in the insipid hustle and bustle of the streets, what had happened had not contaminated things. She went through the ebbing and opaque neighborhoods, seeing and forgetting them immediately, and she got off at one of the Warnes intersections. Paradoxically, her fatigue turned into strength, since it obligated her to focus on the details of the situation, and hid from her its depth and objective.
Aarón Loewenthal was, to everyone, a serious man; to his few friends, a scrooge. He lived above the factory, alone. Situated in the run-down part of town, he feared thieves: there was a big dog in the factory’s front yard, and in the desk drawer, everyone knew, a revolver. With dignity, he had mourned the unexpected death of his wife the year before - a Gauss, who had brought a fine dowry! -, but money was his true passion. He knew, with intimate embarrassment, that he was better at earning it than at spending it. He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret deal with God that made him exempt from doing good deeds in exchange for prayers and devotion. Bald, corpulent, grieving, with smoked spectacles and a blond beard, he was waiting by the window for worker Zunz’s confidential report.
He saw her push open the gate (that he had left ajar on purpose) and cross the gloomy front yard. He saw her make a small turn when the tied-up dog barked. Emma’s lips were moving like someone praying in a quiet voice; weary, repeating the sentence that Mr. Loewenthal would hear before dying.
Things did not happen as Emma Zunz predicted. Since early the previous morning, she had been imagining herself holding the firm revolver, forcing the wretched man to confess his wretched guilt and expose the intrepid stratagem which would allow the Justice of God to triumph over human justice. (Not by fear, but by being an instrument of justice, she did not want be punished.) Then, a single bullet in the middle of his chest would seal the fate of Loewenthal. But things didn’t happen like that.
In front of Aarón Loewenthal, more than the resolve to avenge her father, Emma felt an urge to punish him for the outrage she had suffered because of him. She could not kill him, after such a thorough disgrace. Nor did she have the time for theatrics. Sitting, timid, she asked Loewenthal for forgiveness, and to cite her obligation in being a loyal informant, she gave him some names, implied others, then cut herself off as if fear had conquered her. She was able to get Loewenthal to leave for a glass of water. When he, skeptical of such a fuss, but indulgent of her, returned to the dining room, Emma had already retrieved the heavy revolver from the drawer. She pulled the trigger two times. The sizeable body collapsed as if the sound and the smoke had shattered it, the glass of water smashed, the face looked at her with astonishment and anger, its mouth swore at her in Spanish and in Yiddish. The curse words did not stop; Emma had to fire again. In the front yard, the chained dog broke out barking, and an outpouring of abrupt blood streamed from the obscene lips and stained the beard and the clothing. Emma began the accusation that she had prepared (“I have avenged my father and they will not punish me…”), but she did not finish it, because Mr. Loewenthal had already died. She never knew if he was able to understand.
The strained barking reminded her that she still could not rest. She moved the couch, unbuttoned the corpse’s jacket, took the splattered glasses off, and left them on the filing cabinet. Then she picked up the phone and repeated what she would repeat so many times, with these and other words: Something incredible has happened… Mr. Loewenthal had me come over regarding a strike… He forced himself on me, I killed him…
The story was incredible, indeed, but it impressed everyone because, substantially, it was true. True was the tone of Emma Zunz, true the modesty, true the hate. True, too, was the outrage she suffered; only the circumstances were false, the time, and one or two proper names.
1. Apparently something where you have to get a physical review done before you can get in the pool