Introduction: Jorge Luis Borges in Timor-Leste

In January 1944, isolated in his native and rather peaceful Buenos Aires watching from afar while World War II ravaged the planet, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) wrote a very short story entitled ‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’, later included in his Ficciones (Fictions). Presented as an idea for a longer piece to take place ‘in an oppressed, tenacious country’, it is set in Ireland in 1824. Fergus Kilpatrick was ‘a conspirator, a secret and glorious captain of conspirators’ who opposed the English domination, and ‘perished on the eve of the victorious revolt which he had premeditated and dreamt of’. As people commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the victorious revolt of which Fergus was the symbol, Ryan, one of his great-grandchildren, is preparing to write a biography of the hero. What he finds is a secret that leaves him astonished: Fergus had betrayed his companions. Having been exposed in a meeting of his fellow conspirators, ‘he signed his own sentence, but begged that his punishment not harm his country’. His assassination was prepared by his friends in such a way that the blame for the act would fall on their enemies. Fergus's allegedly innocent blood could then be vindicated by his followers and feed the anticipated revolt. As such, the plan transformed ‘the traitor's execution [into] an instrument for the country's emancipation’. Ryan gives up writing his book.