The Other Duel

I found "The Other Duel" to be a strange story. I found it funny the narrator made it clear this story may not be as exact as it could be by saying things like "in my memory" (140) and "I have no way of knowing whether the events I am about to narrate are effects or causes" (141). Maybe Borges did not mean for the story to seem not exact because the story sounds like it is, but comments like that made me thing that maybe the narrator was supposed to exaggerate the story slightly. In the very first paragraph the narrator says, "...and its tragic end still calls up the medicinal fragrance of the eucalyptus trees and the singing of the birds" (140). I found this sentence to be very ironic. He refers to the event as tragic but yet ends his sentence with a pleasing image. If the event was so tragic then why would he mention the birds singing. I took this to mean that maybe the event that occurred was not looked at as a negative thing by everyone. I found it interesting that Silveira named his dog Thirty-three. I circled it as I was reading thinking the dog's name held some significance, but I did not find any. I may be over analyzing the dog's name, but I feel its weird he named his dog a number and why thirty-three? Another ironic thing about the story was the way the two men died. First, Cardoso asked to be able to kill someone by slitting their throat for pleasure because he had never done it before. Ironically this is how he died. Their deaths were also ironic because Cardoso was going to take pleasure out of slitting a man's throat and all the prisoners took pleasure out of watching him die. They even bet on who would die first!