So we can pick up from where we were, on horseback…
…And find MacKay there looking out over the pampas, the flat and featureless wilderness of men and horses, where the horses were said at that time to outnumber the human population by as much as six to one, in vast herds running wild beyond the limit of the observation powers even of the most skilled cattleman and wily banker to calculate.
There are no fencing improvements here whatsoever, he recorded in one of his regular letters back to his people in Scotland, before continuing, “Every man, woman and child in the country rides. One might fancy one’s self in the land of centaurs, amidst a population half-men, half-horse. Even the beggars ride on horseback” transcribing the words from the Historia Argentina of Sir Woodbine Parish, although he claimed them for his own.
A thief among the Lapiths, MacKay's letters also stole from the mythical accounts of the infamous killings within families and other transgressions which marked out this race of beings since their origins, a race renowned for their capacity for extreme violence and savage civil conflict as well as their weakness for women and wine, before that part of his Archiv was entirely lost in the fire of 1912 which occurred as a result of a lightning strike that also destroyed his entire property, as if in just and divine retribution for his own crimes of theft.
So only the ash of his own memories, and those of his relations who were able to pass on the occasional remembered phrase or fragment of story remained, which passed into oblivion with their deaths, and only the echo can sometimes be heard, say, within the later writing of another creolo such as Borges himself or, more reliably, of his mentor Macedonio Fernández.
Thus I take as an example Macedonio's famous poem 'I believed' which was published in the year of his death in 1952, or shortly afterwards.
CREÍA YO
No a todo alcanza Amor, pues que no puedo
romper el gajo con que Muerte toca.
Mas poco Muerte puede
si en corazón de Amor su miedo muere.
Mas poco Muerte puede, pues no puede
entrar su miedo en pecho donde Amor.
Que Muerte rige a Vida; Amor a Muerte.
I do not dare yet to translate the poem however so as to scandalously claim it as my own, since the 'musical component' of the essential fugal form, rhyme scheme ABAAACA, measure and beat of the lines, and calm sense arising from the flow of the soft consonantal sounds of the words, which must be intoned out loud, is quite beyond me. As for the condensed meaning within the story, the savagery of the violence of the struggle between Death, Love, and Life is clear enough: - Not to everything does Love reach, for it cannot / break the goring with which Death beats. / But little Death can… / if in a heart where Love is fear itself dies. / But little Death can… / because fear itself cannot enter a chest where Love… . / That Death rules over Life; as Love over Death.