Funes, His Memory

Borges, speaking in the first person, tells the story of meeting Ireneo Funes—a young man who, after falling from a horse, acquired the astonishing ability to remember forever everything he had felt (seen, heard, touched, etc.). The key scene of the story is the narrator’s nighttime conversation with Funes, who is bound to his bed due to injury. Funes believes that until the incident with the horse (a bluish shade!) “over the nineteen years he lived as if in a dream: looking without seeing, listening without hearing, forgetting everything—almost everything.”

To pass the time, Funes amuses himself by reconstructing the experiences of an entire day (the only drawback is that this activity also takes up the whole day) and by building his own system of counting, in which each number has its own name. “Instead of seven thousand thirty, he would say, for example, Maximо Perez; instead of seven thousand forty, the train.” Borges tries to explain that such a system directly contradicts the usual method of counting, but Funes either doesn’t understand him or doesn’t want to.