Borges loves the Martín Fierro epic, and “A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz” is another retelling of the famous tale, this time from the point of view of a minor character.

This means the story would have a very different resonance for Argentine readers, who would be instantly familiar with the story and would recognise the details as they started to accumulate.

For an English reader like me, who has never read Martín Fierro, the effect is different. I had to dig into the footnotes to understand the historical context and the Fierro references. Without them, the story is a biography indeed, although this being Borges, it’s not a standard biography by any means. He begins by eschewing the very purpose of a biography, to tell the story of Cruz’s life:

It is not my purpose to repeat the story of his life. Of the days and nights that composed it, I am interested in only one; about the rest, I will recount nothing but that which is essential to an understanding of that single night.

So we get a kind of cursory summary of some of the main events in Cruz’s life: his work as a gaucho, his sudden and senseless murder of another man, his valiant fight and eventual capture, his conscription into the army in lieu of a prison term. Then we skip forward to the night Borges is interested in, the moment that defines him:

Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment —the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.

I don’t really agree with this—I believe in multiple moments, multiple opportunities to know who you are and to evolve and become who you want to be. But perhaps that’s more of a contemporary notion; in any case, Borges’s idea of a single defining moment makes for a good story.

As Cruz approaches his defining moment, a strong sense of deja vu creeps into the story. He and his men are chasing an outlaw who’s wanted for murder, and the whole episode echoes his own flight from the law and subsequent capture decades earlier. He realises that, although he’s now on the side of the law, his true nature is to be the outlaw he is pursuing.

He realized his deep-rooted destiny as a wolf, not a gregarious dog; he realized that the other man was he himself.

That idea of a character recognising himself in others occurs in other Borges stories. It hints at our deeper connections beyond the superficial things that divide us, but it’s also connected with Borges’s fascination with mirrors, infinite duplication, and repeating patterns throughout history. We enter a kind of infinite recursion, where Cruz is both the pursuer and the pursued, and we start to wonder how many times and in how many ways this episode has already occurred and will occur again.

This made it a satisfying story for me, even though I missed a lot of the historical references and the Fierro rewriting. The big realisation for people familiar with the epic would be that the man he’s pursuing is Martín Fierro himself, and the ending is a famous moment in the epic when Cruz abandons his men and joins forces with the outlaw. In Martín Fierro, the episode is told from the hero’s point of view, but in “A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz”, we approach it from an entirely different perspective.

This concept of switching sides is also reminiscent of other Borges stories such as “The Shape of the Sword” and “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero“, while the rewriting of Martín Fierro is a technique he also uses in “The End“. For more details on Borges fictions, check out other posts in my Borges Marathon, a slow and steady reading of all 100+ stories by Jorge Luis Borges.