The Disinterested Assassin: Bill Harrigan
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
 |
| Meteor Crater - Arizona - 2011 |
In the summer
of 2011 my wife Rosemary, our two granddaughters and I decided to drive our
Chevrolet Malibu to south Texas. This meant that in the back seat we had an
already difficult Rebecca, a 13 year-old full-fledged teenager and her sister Lauren
who was 8. For the former, Rebecca, most of the canyons we visited, including
the Grand Canyon were simply rocks upon rocks. For Lauren there was usually no
comment but in Meteor Crater Arizona (it was 40 Celsius when we arrived around
noon, she found much that interested her. I would say she was fascinated.
Throughout
the whole expedition at the crater I felt a strange degree of unreality which I
have never been able to explain to myself or to others. Particular to this was
the loss of a sense of the size of the crater which looked smaller than it
really was. When we visited Monument Valley the monuments were really a lot
smaller than in the John Wayne/John Ford films.
As I survive these days of humid melancholy with that erstwhile teenager still a teenager in our home I discovered a little nagging explanation for my Meteor Crater unrest.
I never
did see Jorge Luís Borges in my many trips to the Pigmalion Book Store on
Avenida Corrientes in Buenos Aires. We simply never went on the same days to
buy our books in English. Had I seen him I would not have been surprised. And I
know he would have worn a tie and at the very least a sport coat and slacks.
In those
years , 1965, 1966 when I went to Pigmalion I was much too ignorant to
appreciate Borges as I do now. I would not have known that he had written a
book in 1954 called Historia Universal de la Infamia and that one of the essays
would be about the life of Billy the Kid. He begins his story, El Asesino
Desinteresado – Bill Harrigan with a description of the area that we drove
through in our Malibu. In some ways the four of us in our Silver Malibu now
seem to be as strange as if I had spotted a blind poet in a tie, in spite of
the sweltering heat scampering gingerly with his cane at Meteor Crater.
El
asesino desinteresado Bill Harrigan
Jorge
Luis Borges
La imagen de las tierras de Arizona, antes que
ninguna otra imagen: la imagen de las tierras de Arizona y de Nuevo México,
tierras con un ilustre fundamento de oro y de plata, tierras vertiginosas y
aéreas, tierras de la meseta monumental y de los delicados colores, tierras con
blanco resplandor de esqueleto pelado por los pájaros. En esas tierras, otra
imagen, la de Billy the Kid: el jinete clavado sobre el caballo, el joven de
los duros pistoletazos que aturden el desierto, el emisor de balas invisibles
que matan a distancia, como una magia.
The image of the
lands of Arizona before any other: the image of the lands of Arizona and New
Mexico, lands with an illustrious base of gold and silver, of dizzying arid
heights, lands of the monumental mesas and of delicate colours, lands with the
white glare of skeletons picked clean by birds. In those lands, another image,
that of Billy the Kid, the man firmly nailed to his horse, the young man of the hard pistol
shots that deaden the desert, the source of invisible bullets that kill at a
distance like magic.
El desierto veteado de metales, árido y
reluciente. El casi niño que al morir a los veintiún años debía a la justicia
de los hombres veintiuna muertes—"sin contar mejicanos".
The desert streaked of metals, arid and shining. The almost-boy who upon dying at 21owed
justice for 21 deaths – “not counting Mexicans”.
My translation
