As with many of his stories Borges begins as if this is something taken from the archives – “These events took place at La Colorada ranch, in the southern part of the township of Junín, during the last days of March, 1928” – though of course we know it’s pure fiction. The first page sketches the background and personality of Espinosa, a young man of “with nothing more noteworthy about him than an almost unlimited kindness and a capacity for public speaking that had earned him several prizes at the English school in Ramos Mejía.” Espinosa ends up trapped by floods on a friend’s farm, his only companions being the farm foreman Gutres and Gutres’s son and daughter. Good-natured and condescending, the young visitor decides to take it upon himself to educate the Gutres by reading to them from the Bible, with disastrous results. The ending is truly stunning. A breathtakingly ironic story about class, belief and unintended consequences.
First published in English, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with the author, in The New Yorker, October 1971, and collected in Doctor Brodie’s Report, Dutton, 1972, and Collected Fictions, Viking, 1998/Penguin, 2000, where it is translated by Andrew Hurley. Read it online at the New Yorker here; or hear it read by Paul Theroux here
A Personal Anthology 