The Bribe by Jorge Luis Borges — Read

The BribeMy story is about two men or, rather, about an episode involving two men. The actual affair, in itself neither singular nor even out of the ordinary, matters less than the character of its protagonists. Each of them sinned out of vanity, but in different ways and with different results. The events giving rise to the anecdote (for really it is not much more) took place a short time ago. To my mind, it could only have happened where it did in America.

I had occasion at the University of Texas, in Austin, to speak at length to one of the two, Dr Ezra Winthrop. This was towards the end of 1961. Winthrop was a professor of Old English (he did not approve of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon', which to him suggested an artifact made of two parts). I can remember that without once contradicting me he corrected my many mistakes and rash assumptions about the language. I was told that in his examinations he never asked a single question but invited his students to expatiate upon this or that topic, leaving the choice up to them. Of old Puritan stock, a native of Boston, Winthrop had found it hard getting used to the habits and prejudices of the South. He missed the snow, but it is my observation that Northerners are conditioned to the cold, much as we Argentines are to the heat. I still preserve the image, now dim, of a rather tall man with grey hair, less agile than strong. Clearer is my memory of his colleague, Herbert Locke, who gave me a copy of his book Towards a History of the Kenning, in which one reads that the Saxons were not long in dispensing with those somewhat too mechanical metaphors (‘whale's road' for ‘the sea', ‘falcon of battle' for ‘the eagle'), whereas the skalds went on combining and interweaving them to the point of inextricability. I mention Herbert Locke because he is an integral part of my story.