With my case now in the hands of the private investigator, I felt more at ease. A burden had been shifted: I would now wait, either for the apologetic call from the legitimate yet disorganised departmental secretary, or for an update on the matter from the investigator. (Could it be, I had asked the investigator, that my appointment within the department is some elaborate fraud? He would not be able to say, he had replied, until he had made some preliminary inquiries.)
The temperature had dropped slightly, enough for me to walk through the city that afternoon. I again walked along the docks, then back into the labyrinth of the old town.
The owner of a small bottega had just opened up. I ordered a vermouth and a sandwich, and sat on the terrace under a parasol. A tall gentleman stopped to ask me for a light. He had a coarse moustache—of both white and thick black hairs—and, despite the heat, he wore a light overcoat that reached his calves.
The gentleman lit his cigarette and offered me one, which I accepted. He introduced himself by his surname, Proto. Was I visiting the city? he asked. I told him the story of the job offer and the now silent departmental secretary, the same story I had told the hotel proprietor, Mr Rosenwasser, the kitchen hand, and the investigator. The gentleman nodded. I remarked on the heat of the afternoons and the charm of the old town, of the side streets and alleyways that crossed the small canals, splitting and rejoining each other at unpredictable intervals.
‘Once one has lived in the city as long as I have,’ Proto replied, ‘he might come to see that the real labyrinth in which we live is not geographical, but rather temporal. I find myself talking with you less due to the chances that both our walks would take us to this exact same point—this spot beneath this parasol—but far more—given your so far brief stay in this city, and especially your tendency, that you have mentioned, to pass this time of day in the hotel lobby—a coincidence of the incalculable pasts and futures we might live. The great Ts’ui Pên believed in an infinite series of times—a network of paths we might live, times that run in parallel, which fork, break off, and diverge or converge on themselves. In one, I come to you asking for a light; in another, I have long quit tobacco, and walk straight past you. In one, my overcoat is brown; in another, it is grey; there are some in which I wear a handkerchief in my breast pocket, others with an extra button fixed to my lapel. In one of these times, we are already friends; in another, I am your enemy.
‘And in the majority of these times, we may not even exist; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us.’
‘And the department? My new job? Will I find these in the future that I am currently propelled towards?’ I jested.
‘There is another time where I walk past this bottega, searching for a light, yet we never meet: you are already in your office, already at work in the department you have been appointed to.’
First published in Spanish in the eponymous collection El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, Editorial Sur, 1941; translated and collected in Labyrinths, New Directions, 1962 and Fictions, Calder and Boyes, 1965, both still in print. Also available in the Collected Fictions, Viking 1998 and as a Penguin Modern, 1998
A Personal Anthology 