Picture taken with long time exposure shows light traces of cars
driving on the A2 highway at the exit “Lehrte” near Hanover, central
Germany: photo by Julian Stratenschulte/AFP, 18 January 2017
Picture taken with long time exposure shows light traces of cars
driving on the A2 highway at the exit “Lehrte” near Hanover, central
Germany: photo by Julian Stratenschulte/AFP, 18 January 2017
Jorge Luis Borges: El Aleph
Dos domingos después, Daneri me llamó por teléfono, entiendo que por primera vez en la vida. Me propuso que nos reuniéramos a las cuatro, “para tomar juntos la leche, en el contiguo salón-bar que el progresismo de Zunino y de Zungri -- los propietarios de mi casa, recordarás -- inaugura en la esquina; confitería que te importará conocer”. Acepté, con más resignación que entusiasmo. Nos fue difícil encontrar mesa; el “salón-bar”, inexorablemente moderno, era apenas un poco menos atroz que mis previsiones; en las mesas vecinas, el excitado público mencionaba las sumas invertidas sin regatear por Zunino y por Zungri. Carlos Argentino fingió asombrarse de no sé qué primores de la instalación de la luz (que, sin duda, ya conocía) y me dijo con cierta severidad:
Traté de razonar.
En la parte inferior del escalón, hacia la derecha, vi una pequeña esfera tornasolada, de casi intolerable fulgor. Al principio la creí giratoria; luego comprendí que ese movimiento era una ilusión producida por los vertiginosos espectáculos que encerraba. El diámetro del Aleph sería de dos o tres centímetros, pero el espacio cósmico estaba ahí, sin disminución de tamaño. Cada cosa (la luna del espejo, digamos) era infinitas cosas, porque yo claramente la veía desde todos los puntos del universo. Vi el populoso mar, vi el alba y la tarde, vi las muchedumbres de América, vi una plateada telaraña en el centro de una negra pirámide, vi un laberinto roto (era Londres), vi interminables ojos inmediatos escrutándose en mí como en un espejo, vi todos los espejos del planeta y ninguno me reflejó, vi en un traspatio de la calle Soler las mismas baldosas que hace treinta años vi en el zaguán de una casa en Fray Bentos, vi racimos, nieve, tabaco, vetas de metal, vapor de agua, vi convexos desiertos ecuatoriales y cada uno de sus granos de arena, vi en Inverness a una mujer que no olvidaré, vi la violenta cabellera, el altivo cuerpo, vi un cáncer en el pecho, vi un círculo de tierra seca en una vereda, donde antes hubo un árbol, vi una quinta de Adrogué, un ejemplar de la primera versión inglesa de Plinio, la de Philemon Holland, vi a un tiempo cada letra de cada página (de chico, yo solía maravillarme de que las letras de un volumen cerrado no se mezclaran y perdieran en el decurso de la noche), vi la noche y el día contemporáneo, vi un poniente en Querétaro que parecía reflejar el color de una rosa en Bengala, vi mi dormitorio sin nadie, vi en un gabinete de Alkmaar un globo terráqueo entre dos espejos que lo multiplican sin fin, vi caballos de crin arremolinada, en una playa del Mar Caspio en el alba, vi la delicada osatura de una mano, vi a los sobrevivientes de una batalla, enviando tarjetas postales, vi en un escaparate de Mirzapur una baraja española, vi las sombras oblicuas de unos helechos en el suelo de un invernáculo, vi tigres, émbolos, bisontes, marejadas y ejércitos, vi todas las hormigas que hay en la tierra, vi un astrolabio persa, vi en un cajón del escritorio (y la letra me hizo temblar) cartas obscenas, increíbles, precisas, que Beatriz había dirigido a Carlos Argentino, vi un adorado monumento en la Chacarita, vi la reliquia atroz de lo que deliciosamente había sido Beatriz Viterbo, vi la circulación de mi oscura sangre, vi el engranaje del amor y la modificación de la muerte, vi el Aleph, desde todos los puntos, vi en el Aleph la tierra, y en la tierra otra vez el Aleph y en el Aleph la tierra, vi mi cara y mis vísceras, vi tu cara, y sentí vértigo y lloré, porque mis ojos habían visto ese objeto secreto y conjetural, cuyo nombre usurpan los hombres, pero que ningún hombre ha mirado: el inconcebible universo.
INDIA -The Magh Mela festival at Sangam, at the confluence of rivers Ganges, Yamuna and mythical Saraswati in Allahabad. By @sanjaykanojiao7: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 18 January 2017
Beatriz Viterbo died in 1929. From that time on, I never let a thirtieth of April go by without a visit to her house. I used to make my appearance at seven-fifteen sharp and stay on for some twenty-five minutes. Each year, I arrived a little later and stay a little longer. In 1933, a torrential downpour coming to my aid, they were obliged to ask me for dinner. Naturally, I took advantage of that lucky precedent. In 1934, I arrived, just after eight, with one of those large Santa Fe sugared cakes, and quite matter-of-factly I stayed to dinner. It was in this way, on these melancholy and vainly erotic anniversaries, that I came into the gradual confidences of Carlos Argentino Daneri.
Beatriz had been tall, frail, slightly stooped; in her walk there was (if the oxymoron may be allowed) a kind of uncertain grace, a hint of expectancy. Carlos Argentino was pink-faced, overweight, gray-haired, fine-featured. He held a minor position in an unreadable library out on the edge of the Southside of Buenos Aires. He was authoritarian but also unimpressive. Until only recently, he took advantage of his nights and holidays to stay at home. At a remove of two generations, the Italian "S" and demonstrative Italian gestures still survived in him. His mental activity was continuous, deeply felt, far-ranging, and -- all in all -- meaningless. He dealt in pointless analogies and in trivial scruples. He had (as did Beatriz) large, beautiful, finely shaped hands. For several months he seemed to be obsessed with Paul Fort -- less with his ballads than with the idea of a towering reputation. "He is the Prince of poets," Daneri would repeat fatuously. "You will belittle him in vain -- but no, not even the most venomous of your shafts will graze him."
On the thirtieth of April, 1941, along with the sugared cake I allowed myself to add a bottle of Argentine cognac. Carlos Argentino tasted it, pronounced it "interesting," and, after a few drinks, launched into a glorification of modern man.
"I view him," he said with a certain unaccountable excitement, "in his inner sanctum, as though in his castle tower, supplied with telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, wireless sets, motion-picture screens, slide projectors, glossaries, timetables, handbooks, bulletins..."
He remarked that for a man so equipped, actual travel was superfluous. Our twentieth century had inverted the story of Mohammed and the mountain; nowadays, the mountain came to the modern Mohammed.
So foolish did his ideas seem to me, so pompous and so drawn out his exposition, that I linked them at once to literature and asked him why he didn't write them down. As might be foreseen, he answered that he had already done so -- that these ideas, and others no less striking, had found their place in the Proem, or Augural Canto, or, more simply, the Prologue Canto of the poem on which he hd been working for many years now, alone, without publicity, with fanfare, supported only by those twin staffs universally known as work and solitude. First, he said, he opened the floodgates of his fancy; then, taking up hand tools, he resorted to the file. The poem was entitled The Earth; it consisted of a description of the planet, and, of course, lacked no amount of picturesque digressions and bold apostrophes.
I asked him to read me a passage, if only a short one. He opened a drawer of his writing table, drew out a thick stack of papers -- sheets of a large pad imprinted with the letterhead of the Juan Crisóstomo Lafinur Library -- and, with ringing satisfaction, declaimed:
He read me many other stanzas, each of which also won his own approval and elicited his lengthy explications. There was nothing remarkable about them. I did not even find them any worse than the first one. Application, resignation, and chance had gone into the writing; I saw, however, that Daneri's real work lay not in the poetry but in his invention of reasons why the poetry should be admired. Of course, this second phase of his effort modified the writing in his eyes, though not in the eyes of others. Daneri's style of delivery was extravagant, but the deadly drone of his metric regularity tended to tone down and to dull that extravagance.1
Only once in my life have I had occasion to look into the fifteen thousand alexandrines of the Polyolbion, that topographical epic in which Michael Drayton recorded the flora, fauna, hydrography, orography, military and monastic history of England. I am sure, however, that this limited but bulky production is less boring than Carlos Argentino's similar vast undertaking. Daneri had in mind to set to verse the entire face of the planet, and, by 1941, had already dispatched a number of acres of the State of Queensland, nearly a mile of the course run by the River Ob, a gasworks to the north of Veracruz, the leading shops in the Buenos Aires parish of Concepción, the villa of Mariana Cambaceres de Alvear in the Belgrano section of the Argentine capital, and a Turkish baths establishment not far from the well-known Brighton Aquarium. He read me certain long-winded passages from his Australian section, and at one point praised a word of his own coining, the colour "celestewhite," which he felt "actually suggests the sky, an element of utmost importance in the landscape of the Down Under." But these sprawling, lifeless hexameters lacked even the relative excitement of the so-called Augural Canto. Along about midnight, I left.
Two Sundays later, Daneri rang me up -- perhaps for the first time in his life. He suggested we get together at four o'clock "for cocktails in the salon-bar next door, which the forward-looking Zunino and Zungri -- my landlords, as you doubtless recall -- are throwing open to the public. It's a place you'll really want to get to know."
More in resignation than in pleasure, I accepted. Once there, it was hard to find a table. The "salon-bar," ruthlessly modern, was only barely less ugly than what I had excepted; at the nearby tables, the excited customers spoke breathlessly of the sums Zunino and Zungri had invested in furnishings without a second thought to cost. Carlos Argentino pretended to be astonished by some feature or other of the lighting arrangement (with which, I felt, he was already familiar), and he said to me with a certain severity, "Grudgingly, you'll have to admit to the fact that these premises hold their own with many others far more in the public eye."
He then reread me four or five different fragments of the poem. He had revised them following his pet principle of verbal ostentation: where at first "blue" had been good enough, he now wallowed in "azures," "ceruleans," and "ultramarines." The word "milky" was too easy for him; in the course of an impassioned description of a shed where wool was washed, he chose such words as "lacteal," "lactescent," and even made one up -- "lactinacious." After that, straight out, he condemned our modern mania for having books prefaced, "a practice already held up to scorn by the Prince of Wits in his own grafeful preface to the Quixote." He admitted, however, that for the opening of his new work an attention-getting foreword might prove valuable -- "an accolade signed by a literary hand of renown." He next went on to say that he considered publishing the initial cantos of his poem. I then began to understand the unexpected telephone call; Daneri was going to ask me to contribute a foreword to his pedantic hodgepodge. My fear turned out unfounded; Carlos Argentino remarked, with admiration and envy, that surely he could not be far wrong in qualifying with the ephitet "solid" the prestige enjoyed in every circle by Álvaro Melián Lafinur, a man of letters, who would, if I insisted on it, be only too glad to dash off some charming opening words to the poem. In order to avoid ignominy and failure, he suggested I make myself spokesman for two of the book's undeniable virtues -- formal perfection and scientific rigour -- "inasmuch as this wide garden of metaphors, of figures of speech, of elegances, is inhospitable to the least detail not strictly upholding of truth." He added that Beatriz had always been taken with Álvaro.
I agreed -- agreed profusely -- and explained for the sake of credibility that I would not speak to Álvaro the next day, Monday, but would wait until Thursday, when we got together for the informal dinner that follows every meeting of the Writers' Club. (No such dinners are ever held, but it is an established fact that the meetings do take place on Thursdays, a point which Carlos Argentino Daneri could verify in the daily papers, and which lent a certain reality to my promise.)
Half in prophecy, half in cunning, I said that before taking up the question of a preface I would outline the unusual plan of the work. We then said goodbye.
Turning the corner of Bernardo de Irigoyen, I reviewed as impartially as possible the alternatives before me. They were: a) to speak to Álvaro, telling him the first cousin of Beatriz' (the explanatory euphemism would allow me to mention her name) had concocted a poem that seemed to draw out into infinity the possibilities of cacophony and chaos: b) not to say a word to Álvaro. I clearly foresaw that my indolence would opt for b.
But first thing Friday morning, I began worrying about the telephone. It offended me that that device, which had once produced the irrecoverable voice of Beatriz, could now sink so low as to become a mere receptacle for the futile and perhaps angry remonstrances of that deluded Carlos Argentino Daneri. Luckily, nothing happened -- except the inevitable spite touched off in me by this man, who had asked me to fulfill a delicate mission for him and then had let me drop.
Gradually, the phone came to lose its terrors, but one day toward the end of October it rang, and Carlos Argentino was on the line. He was deeply disturbed, so much so that at the outset I did not recognise his voice. Sadly but angrily he stammered that the now unrestrainable Zunino and Zungri, under the pretext of enlarging their already outsized "salon-bar," were about to take over and tear down this house.
"My home, my ancestral home, my old and inveterate Garay Street home!" he kept repeating, seeming to forget his woe in the music of his words.
It was not hard for me to share his distress. After the age of fifty, all change becomes a hateful symbol of the passing of time. Besides, the scheme concerned a house that for me would always stand for Beatriz. I tried explaining this delicate scruple of regret, but Daneri seemed not to hear me. He said that if Zunino and Zungri persisted in this outrage, Doctor Zunni, his lawyer, would sue ipso facto and make them pay some fifty thousand dollars in damages.
Zunni's name impressed me; his firm, although at the unlikely address of Caseros and Tacuarí, was nonetheless known as an old and reliable one. I asked him whether Zunni had already been hired for the case. Daneri said he would phone him that very afternoon. He hesitated, then with that level, impersonal voice we reserve for confiding something intimate, he said that to finish the poem he could not get along without the house because down in the cellar there was an Aleph. He explained that an Aleph is one of the points in space that contains all other points.
"It's in the cellar under the dining room," he went on, so overcome by his worries now that he forgot to be pompous. "It's mine -- mine. I discovered it when I was a child, all by myself. The cellar stairway is so steep that my aunt and uncle forbade my using it, but I'd heard someone say there was a world down there. I found out later they meant an old-fashioned globe of the world, but at the time I thought they were referring to the world itself. One day when no one was home I started down in secret, but I stumbled and fell. When I opened my eyes, I saw the Aleph."
"The Aleph?" I repeated.
"Yes, the only place on earth where all places are -- seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending. I kept the discovery to myself and went back every chance I got. As a child, I did not foresee that this privilege was granted me so that later I could write the poem. Zunino and Zungri will not strip me of what's mine -- no, and a thousand times no! Legal code in hand, Doctor Zunni will prove that my Aleph is inalienable."
I tried to reason with him. "But isn't the cellar very dark?" I said.
"Truth cannot penetrate a closed mind. If all places in the universe are in the Aleph, then all stars, all lamps, all sources of light are in it, too."
"You wait there. I'll be right over to see it."
I hung up before he could say no. The full knowledge of a fact sometimes enables you to see all at once many supporting but previously unsuspected things. It amazed me not to have suspected until that moment that Carlos Argentino was a madman. As were all the Viterbos, when you came down to it. Beatriz (I myself often say it) was a woman, a child, with almost uncanny powers of clairvoyance, but forgetfulness, distractions, contempt, and a streak of cruelty were also in her, and perhaps these called for a pathological explanation. Carlos Argentino's madness filled me with spiteful elation. Deep down, we had always detested each other.
On Garay Street, the maid asked me kindly to wait. The master was, as usual, in the cellar developing pictures. On the unplayed piano, beside a large vase that held no flowers, smiled (more timeless than belonging to the past) the large photograph of Beatriz, in gaudy colours. Nobody could see us; in a seizure of tenderness, I drew close to the portrait and said to it, "Beatriz, Beatriz Elena, Beatriz Elena Viterbo, darling Beatriz, Beatriz now gone forever, it's me, it's Borges."
Moments later, Carlos came in. He spoke dryly. I could see he was thinking of nothing else but the loss of the Aleph.
"First a glass of pseudo-cognac," he ordered, "and then down you dive into the cellar. Let me warn you, you'll have to lie flat on your back. Total darkness, total immobility, and a certain ocular adjustment will also be necessary. From the floor, you must focus your eyes on the nineteenth step. Once I leave you, I'll lower the trapdoor and you'll be quite alone. You needn't fear the rodents very much -- though I know you will. In a minute or two, you'll see the Aleph -- the microcosm of the alchemists and Kabbalists, our true proverbial friend, the multum in parvo!"
Once we were in the dining room, he added, "Of course, if you don't see it, your incapacity will not invalidate what I have experienced. Now, down you go. In a short while you can babble with all of Beatriz' images."
Tired of his inane words, I quickly made my way. The cellar, barely wider than the stairway itself, was something of a pit. My eyes searched the dark, looking in vain for the globe Carlos Argentino had spoken of. Some cases of empty bottles and some canvas sacks cluttered one corner. Carlos picked up a sack, folded it in two, and at a fixed spot spread it out.
"As a pillow," he said, "this is quite threadbare, but if it's padded even a half-inch higher, you won't see a thing, and there you'll lie, feeling ashamed and ridiculous. All right now, sprawl that hulk of yours there on the floor and count off nineteen steps."
I went through with his absurd requirements, and at last he went away. The trapdoor was carefully shut. The blackness, in spite of a chink that I later made out, seemed to me absolute. For the first time, I realised the danger I was in: I'd let myself be locked in a cellar by a lunatic, after gulping down a glassful of poison! I knew that back of Carlos' transparent boasting lay a deep fear that I might not see the promised wonder. To keep his madness undetected, to keep from admitting he was mad, Carlos had to kill me. I felt a shock of panic, which I tried to pin to my uncomfortable position and not to the effect of a drug. I shut my eyes -- I opened them. Then I saw the Aleph.
I arrive now at the ineffable core of my story. And here begins my despair as a writer. All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south. (Not in vain do I recall these inconceivable analogies; they bear some relation to the Aleph.)
Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction. Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive. Nonetheless, I'll try to recollect what I can.
On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe.
I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.
"Feeling pretty cockeyed, are you, after so much spying into places where you have no business?" said a hated and jovial voice. "Even if you were to rack your brains, you couldn't pay me back in a hundred years for this revelation. One hell of an observatory, eh, Borges?"
Carlos Argentino's feet were planted on the topmost step. In the sudden dim light, I managed to pick myself up and utter, "One hell of a -- yes, one hell of a."
The matter-of-factness of my voice surprised me. Anxiously, Carlos Argentino went on.
"Did you see everything -- really clear, in colours?"
At that moment I found my revenge. Kindly, openly pitying him, distraught, evasive, I thanked Carlos Argentino Daneri for the hospitality of his cellar and urged him to make the most of the demolition to get away from the pernicious metropolis, which spares no one -- believe me, I told him, no one! Quietly and forcefully, I refused to discuss the Aleph. On saying goodbye, I embraced him and repeated that the country, that fresh air and quiet were the great physicians.
Out on the street, going down the stairways inside Constitution Station, riding the subway, every one of the faces seemed familiar to me. I was afraid that not a single thing on earth would ever again surprise me; I was afraid I would never again be free of all I had seen. Happily, after a few sleepless nights, I was visited once more by oblivion.
Postscript of March first, 1943 -- Some six months after the pulling down of a certain building on Garay Street, Procrustes & Co., the publishers, not put off by the considerable length of Daneri's poem, brought out a selection of its "Argentine sections". It is redundant now to repeat what happened. Carlos Argentino Daneri won the Second National Prize for Literature. 2 First Prize went to Dr. Aita; Third Prize, to Dr. Mario Bonfanti. Unbelievably, my own book The Sharper's Cards did not get a single vote. Once again dullness and envy had their triumph! It's been some time now that I've been trying to see Daneri; the gossip is that a second selection of the poem is about to be published. His felicitous pen (no longer cluttered by the Aleph) has now set itself the task of writing an epic on our national hero, General San Martín.
I want to add two final observations: one, on the nature of the Aleph; the other, on its name. As is well known, the Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Its use for the strange sphere in my story may not be accidental. For the Kabbala, the letter stands for the En Soph, the pure and boundless godhead; it is also said that it takes the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth, in order to show that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher; for Cantor's Mengenlehre, it is the symbol of transfinite numbers, of which any part is as great as the whole. I would like to know whether Carlos Argentino chose that name or whether he read it -- applied to another point where all points converge - - in one of the numberless texts that the Aleph in his cellar revealed to him. Incredible as it may seem, I believe that the Aleph of Garay Street was a false Aleph.
Here are my reasons. Around 1867, Captain Burton held the post of British Consul in Brazil. In July, 1942, Pedro Henríquez Ureña came across a manuscript of Burton's, in a library at Santos, dealing with the mirror which the Oriental world attributes to Iskander Zu al-Karnayn, or Alexander Bicornis of Macedonia. In its crystal the whole world was reflected. Burton mentions other similar devices -- the sevenfold cup of Kai Kosru; the mirror that Tariq ibn-Ziyad found in a tower (Thousand and One Nights, 272); the mirror that Lucian of Samosata examined on the moon (True History, I, 26); the mirrorlike spear that the first book of Capella's Satyricon attributes; Merlin's universal mirror, which was "round and hollow... and seem'd a world of glas" (The Faerie Queene, III, 2, 19) -- and adds this curious statement: "But the aforesaid objects (besides the disadvantage of not existing) are mere optical instruments. The Faithful who gather at the mosque of Amr, in Cairo, are acquainted with the fact that the entire universe lies inside one of the stone pillars that ring its central court... No one, of course, can actually see it, but those who lay an ear against the surface tell that after some short while they perceive its busy hum... The mosque dates from the seventh century; the pillars come from other temples of pre-Islamic religions, since, as ibn-Khaldun has written: 'In nations founded by nomads, the aid of foreigners is essential in all concerning masonry.'"
Does this Aleph exist in the heart of a stone? Did I see it there in the cellar when I saw all things, and have I now forgotten it? Our minds are porous and forgetfulness seeps in; I myself am distorting and losing, under the wearing away of the years, the face of Beatriz.
1 Among my memories are also some lines of a satire in which he lashed out unsparingly at bad poets. After accusing them of dressing their poems in the warlike armour of erudition, and of flapping in vain their unavailing wings, he concluded with this verse:
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986): El Aleph (The Aleph), first published in Sur, September 1945; included in El Aleph and other stories, 1949; English version by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with the author
Jorge Luis Borges: El Aleph
O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a King of infinite space.
Hamlet, II, 2
But they will teach us that eternity is the standing still of the Present Time, a Nunc-stans (as the schools call it; which neither they, nor any else understand, no more than they could a Hic-stans for in Infinite greatnesse of Place.
Leviathan, IV, 46
La candente mañana de febrero en que Beatriz Viterbo murió, después
de una imperiosa agonía que no se rebajó un solo instante ni al
sentimentalismo ni al miedo, noté que las carteleras de fierro de la
Plaza Constitución habían renovado no sé qué aviso de cigarrillos
rubios; el hecho me dolió, pues comprendí que el incesante y vasto
universo ya se apartaba de ella y que ese cambio era el primero de una
serie infinita. Cambiará el universo pero yo no, pensé con melancólica
vanidad; alguna vez, lo sé, mi vana devoción la había exasperado; muerta
yo podía consagrarme a su memoria, sin esperanza, pero también sin
humillación. Consideré que el treinta de abril era su cumpleaños;
visitar ese día la casa de la calle Garay para saludar a su padre y a
Carlos Argentino Daneri, su primo hermano, era un acto cortés,
irreprochable, tal vez ineludible. De nuevo aguardaría en el crepúsculo
de la abarrotada salita, de nuevo estudiaría las circunstancias de sus
muchos retratos. Beatriz Viterbo, de perfil, en colores; Beatriz, con
antifaz, en los carnavales de 1921; la primera comunión de Beatriz;
Beatriz, el día de su boda con Roberto Alessandri; Beatriz, poco después
del divorcio, en un almuerzo del Club Hípico; Beatriz, en Quilmes, con
Delia San Marco Porcel y Carlos Argentino; Beatriz, con el pekinés que
le regaló Villegas Haedo; Beatriz, de frente y de tres cuartos,
sonriendo, la mano en el mentón… No estaría obligado, como otras veces, a
justificar mi presencia con módicas ofrendas de libros: libros cuyas
páginas, finalmente, aprendí a cortar, para no comprobar, meses después,
que estaban intactos.
Beatriz Viterbo murió en 1929; desde entonces, no dejé pasar un
treinta de abril sin volver a su casa. Yo solía llegar a las siete y
cuarto y quedarme unos veinticinco minutos; cada año aparecía un poco
más tarde y me quedaba un rato más; en 1933, una lluvia torrencial me
favoreció: tuvieron que invitarme a comer. No desperdicié, como es
natural, ese buen precedente; en 1934, aparecí, ya dadas las ocho, con
un alfajor santafecino; con toda naturalidad me quedé a comer. Así, en
aniversarios melancólicos y vanamente eróticos, recibí las graduales
confidencias de Carlos Argentino Daneri.
Beatriz era alta, frágil, muy ligeramente inclinada; había en su andar (si el oxímoron*
es tolerable) una como graciosa torpeza, un principio de éxtasis;
Carlos Argentino es rosado, considerable, canoso, de rasgos finos.
Ejerce no sé qué cargo subalterno en una biblioteca ilegible de los
arrabales del Sur; es autoritario, pero también es ineficaz;
aprovechaba, hasta hace muy poco, las noches y las fiestas para no salir
de su casa. A dos generaciones de distancia, la ese italiana y la
copiosa gesticulación italiana sobreviven en él. Su actividad mental es
continua, apasionada, versátil y del todo insignificante. Abunda en
inservibles analogías y en ociosos escrúpulos. Tiene (como Beatriz)
grandes y afiladas manos hermosas. Durante algunos meses padeció la
obsesión de Paul Fort, menos por sus baladas que por la idea de una
gloria intachable. “Es el Príncipe de los poetas de Francia”, repetía
con fatuidad. “En vano te revolverás contra él; no lo alcanzará, no, la
más inficionada de tus saetas.”
El treinta de abril de 1941 me permití agregar al alfajor una botella
de coñac del país. Carlos Argentino lo probó, lo juzgó interesante y
emprendió, al cabo de unas copas, una vindicación del hombre moderno.
-- Lo evoco -- dijo con una animación algo inexplicable -- en su gabinete
de estudio, como si dijéramos en la torre albarrana de una ciudad,
provisto de teléfonos, de telégrafos, de fonógrafos, de aparatos de
radiotelefonía, de cinematógrafos, de linternas mágicas, de glosarios,
de horarios, de prontuarios, de boletines…
Observó que para un hombre así facultado el acto de viajar era
inútil; nuestro siglo XX había transformado la fábula de Mahoma y de la
montaña; las montañas, ahora, convergían sobre el moderno Mahoma.
Tan ineptas me parecieron esas ideas, tan pomposa y tan vasta su
exposición, que las relacioné inmediatamente con la literatura; le dije
que por qué no las escribía. Previsiblemente respondió que ya lo había
hecho: esos conceptos, y otros no menos novedosos, figuraban en el Canto
Augural, Canto Prologal o simplemente Canto-Prólogo de un poema en el
que trabajaba hacía muchos años, sin réclame, sin bullanga
ensordecedora, siempre apoyado en esos dos báculos que se llaman el
trabajo y la soledad. Primero, abría las compuertas a la imaginación;
luego, hacía uso de la lima. El poema se titulabaLa Tierra; tratábase de una descripción del planeta, en la que no faltaban, por cierto, la pintoresca digresión y el gallardo apóstrofe**.
Le rogué que me leyera un pasaje, aunque fuera breve. Abrió
un cajón del escritorio, sacó un alto legajo de hojas de block
estampadas con el membrete de la Biblioteca Juan Crisóstomo Lafinur y
leyó con sonora satisfacción:
He visto, como el griego, las urbes de los hombres,
los trabajos, los días de varia luz, el hambre;
no corrijo los hechos, no falseo los nombres,
pero el voyage que narro, es… autour de ma chambre.
los trabajos, los días de varia luz, el hambre;
no corrijo los hechos, no falseo los nombres,
pero el voyage que narro, es… autour de ma chambre.
-- Estrofa a todas luces interesante -- dictaminó -- . El primer
verso granjea el aplauso del catedrático, del académico, del helenista,
cuando no de los eruditos a la violeta, sector considerable de la
opinión; el segundo pasa de Homero a Hesíodo (todo un implícito
homenaje, en el frontis del flamante edificio, al padre de la poesía
didáctica), no sin remozar un procedimiento cuyo abolengo está en la
Escritura, la enumeración, congerie o conglobación; el tercero
-- ¿barroquismo, decadentismo; culto depurado y fanático de la forma? --
consta de dos hemistiquios gemelos; el cuarto, francamente bilingüe, me
asegura el apoyo incondicional de todo espíritu sensible a los
desenfadados envites de la facecia. Nada diré de la rima rara ni de la
ilustración que me permite, ¡sin pedantismo!, acumular en cuatro versos
tres alusiones eruditas que abarcan treinta siglos de apretada
literatura: la primera a la Odisea, la segunda a los Trabajos y días,
la tercera a la bagatela inmortal que nos depararan los ocios de la
pluma del saboyano… Comprendo una vez más que el arte moderno exige el
bálsamo de la risa, el scherzo. ¡Decididamente, tiene la palabra Goldoni!
Otras muchas estrofas me leyó que también obtuvieron su aprobación y
su comentario profuso. Nada memorable había en ellas; ni siquiera las
juzgué mucho peores que la anterior. En su escritura habían colaborado
la aplicación, la resignación y el azar; las virtudes que Daneri les
atribuía eran posteriores. Comprendí que el trabajo del poeta no estaba
en la poesía; estaba en la invención de razones para que la poesía fuera
admirable; naturalmente, ese ulterior trabajo modificaba la obra para
él, pero no para otros. La dicción oral de Daneri era extravagante; su
torpeza métrica le vedó, salvo contadas veces, trasmitir esa
extravagancia al poema1.
Una sola vez en mi vida he tenido ocasión de examinar los quince mil dodecasílabos del Polyolbion,
esa epopeya topográfica en la que Michael Drayton registró la fauna, la
flora, la hidrografía, la orografía, la historia militar y monástica de
Inglaterra; estoy seguro de que ese producto considerable, pero
limitado, es menos tedioso que la vasta empresa congénere de Carlos
Argentino. Éste se proponía versificar toda la redondez del planeta; en
1941 ya había despachado unas hectáreas del estado de Queensland, más de
un kilómetro del curso del Ob, un gasómetro al norte de Veracruz, las
principales casas de comercio de la parroquia de la Concepción, la
quinta de Mariana Cambaceres de Alvear en la calle Once de Septiembre,
en Belgrano, y un establecimiento de baños turcos no lejos del
acreditado acuario de Brighton. Me leyó ciertos laboriosos pasajes de la
zona australiana de su poema; esos largos e informes alejandrinos
carecían de la relativa agitación del prefacio. Copio una estrofa:
Sepan. A manderecha del poste rutinario
(viniendo, claro está, desde el Nornoroeste)
se aburre una osamenta -- ¿Color? Blanquiceleste --
que da al corral de ovejas catadura de osario.
(viniendo, claro está, desde el Nornoroeste)
se aburre una osamenta -- ¿Color? Blanquiceleste --
que da al corral de ovejas catadura de osario.
-- Dos audacias -- gritó con exultación --, rescatadas, te oigo mascullar,
por el éxito. Lo admito, lo admito. Una, el epíteto rutinario, que
certeramente denuncia, en passant, el inevitable tedio inherente a las faenas pastoriles y agrícolas, tedio que ni las geórgicas ni nuestro ya laureado Don Segundo se atrevieron jamás a denunciar así, al rojo vivo. Otra, el enérgico prosaísmo se aburre una osamenta,
que el melindroso querrá excomulgar con horror pero que apreciará más
que su vida el crítico de gusto viril. Todo el verso, por lo demás, es
de muy subidos quilates. El segundo hemistiquio entabla animadísima
charla con el lector; se adelanta a su viva curiosidad, le pone una
pregunta en la boca y la satisface… al instante. ¿Y qué me dices de ese
hallazgo, blanquiceleste? El pintoresco neologismo sugiere el cielo, que
es un factor importantísimo del paisaje australiano. Sin esa evocación
resultarían demasiado sombrías las tintas del boceto y el lector se
vería compelido a cerrar el volumen, herida en lo más íntimo el alma de
incurable y negra melancolía.
Hacia la medianoche me despedí.
Dos domingos después, Daneri me llamó por teléfono, entiendo que por primera vez en la vida. Me propuso que nos reuniéramos a las cuatro, “para tomar juntos la leche, en el contiguo salón-bar que el progresismo de Zunino y de Zungri -- los propietarios de mi casa, recordarás -- inaugura en la esquina; confitería que te importará conocer”. Acepté, con más resignación que entusiasmo. Nos fue difícil encontrar mesa; el “salón-bar”, inexorablemente moderno, era apenas un poco menos atroz que mis previsiones; en las mesas vecinas, el excitado público mencionaba las sumas invertidas sin regatear por Zunino y por Zungri. Carlos Argentino fingió asombrarse de no sé qué primores de la instalación de la luz (que, sin duda, ya conocía) y me dijo con cierta severidad:
-- Mal de tu grado habrás de reconocer que este local se parangona con los más encopetados de Flores.
Me releyó, después, cuatro o cinco páginas del poema. Las había
corregido según un depravado principio de ostentación verbal: donde
antes escribió azulado, ahora abundaba en azulino, azulenco y hasta azulillo. La palabra lechoso no era bastante fea para él; en la impetuosa descripción de un lavadero de lanas, prefería lactario, lacticinoso, lactescente, lechal…
Denostó con amargura a los críticos; luego, más benigno, los equiparó a
esas personas, “que no disponen de metales preciosos ni tampoco de
prensas de vapor, laminadores y ácidos sulfúricos para la acuñación de
tesoros, pero que pueden indicar a los otros el sitio de un tesoro”.
Acto continuo censuró la prologomanía, “de la que ya hizo mofa, en la donosa prefación del Quijote,
el Príncipe de los Ingenios”. Admitió, sin embargo, que en la portada
de la nueva obra convenía el prólogo vistoso, el espaldarazo firmado por
el plumífero de garra, de fuste. Agregó que pensaba publicar los cantos
iniciales de su poema. Comprendí, entonces, la singular invitación
telefónica; el hombre iba a pedirme que prologara su pedantesco fárrago.
Mi temor resultó infundado: Carlos Argentino observó, con admiración
rencorosa, que no creía errar en el epíteto al calificar de sólido el
prestigio logrado en todos los círculos por Álvaro Melián Lafinur,
hombre de letras, que, si yo me empeñaba, prologaría con embeleso el
poema. Para evitar el más imperdonable de los fracasos, yo tenía que
hacerme portavoz de dos méritos inconcusos: la perfección formal y el
rigor científico, “porque ese dilatado jardín de tropos, de figuras, de
galanuras, no tolera un solo detalle que no confirme la severa verdad”.
Agregó que Beatriz siempre se había distraído con Álvaro.
Asentí, profusamente asentí. Aclaré, para mayor verosimilitud, que no
hablaría el lunes con Álvaro, sino el jueves: en la pequeña cena que
suele coronar toda reunión del Club de Escritores. (No hay tales cenas,
pero es irrefutable que las reuniones tienen lugar los jueves, hecho que
Carlos Argentino Daneri podía comprobar en los diarios y que dotaba de
cierta realidad a la frase.) Dije, entre adivinatorio y sagaz, que antes
de abordar el tema del prólogo, describiría el curioso plan de la obra.
Nos despedimos; al doblar por Bernardo de Irigoyen, encaré con toda
imparcialidad los porvenires que me quedaban: a) hablar con Álvaro y
decirle que el primo hermano aquel de Beatriz (ese eufemismo explicativo
me permitiría nombrarla) había elaborado un poema que parecía dilatar
hasta lo infinito las posibilidades de la cacofonía y del caos; b) no
hablar con Álvaro. Preví, lúcidamente, que mi desidia optaría por b.
A partir del viernes a primera hora, empezó a inquietarme el
teléfono. Me indignaba que ese instrumento, que algún día produjo la
irrecuperable voz de Beatriz, pudiera rebajarse a receptáculo de las
inútiles y quizá coléricas quejas de ese engañado Carlos Argentino
Daneri. Felizmente, nada ocurrió -- salvo el rencor inevitable que me
inspiró aquel hombre que me había impuesto una delicada gestión y luego
me olvidaba.
El teléfono perdió sus terrores, pero a fines de octubre, Carlos
Argentino me habló. Estaba agitadísimo; no identifiqué su voz, al
principio. Con tristeza y con ira balbuceó que esos ya ilimitados Zunino
y Zungri, so pretexto de ampliar su desaforada confitería, iban a
demoler su casa.
-- ¡La casa de mis padres, mi casa, la vieja casa inveterada de la calle Garay!
-- repitió, quizá olvidando su pesar en la melodía.
No me resultó muy difícil compartir su congoja. Ya cumplidos los
cuarenta años, todo cambio es un símbolo detestable del pasaje del
tiempo; además, se trataba de una casa que, para mí, aludía
infinitamente a Beatriz. Quise aclarar ese delicadísimo rasgo; mi
interlocutor no me oyó. Dijo que si Zunino y Zungri persistían en ese
propósito absurdo, el doctor Zunni, su abogado, los demandaría ipso facto por daños y perjuicios y los obligaría a abonar cien mil nacionales.
El nombre de Zunni me impresionó; su bufete, en Caseros y Tacuarí, es
de una seriedad proverbial. Interrogué si éste se había encargado ya
del asunto. Daneri dijo que le hablaría esa misma tarde. Vaciló y con
esa voz llana, impersonal, a que solemos recurrir para confiar algo muy
íntimo, dijo que para terminar el poema le era indispensable la casa,
pues en un ángulo del sótano había un Aleph. Aclaró que un Aleph es uno
de los puntos del espacio que contienen todos los puntos.
-- Está en el sótano del comedor -- explicó, aligerada su dicción por la
angustia --. Es mío, es mío: yo lo descubrí en la niñez, antes de la edad
escolar. La escalera del sótano es empinada, mis tíos me tenían
prohibido el descenso, pero alguien dijo que había un mundo en el
sótano. Se refería, lo supe después, a un baúl, pero yo entendí que
había un mundo. Bajé secretamente, rodé por la escalera vedada, caí. Al
abrir los ojos, vi el Aleph.
-- ¿El Aleph? -- repetí.
-- Sí, el lugar donde están, sin confundirse, todos los lugares del
orbe, vistos desde todos los ángulos. A nadie revelé mi descubrimiento,
pero volví. ¡El niño no podía comprender que le fuera deparado ese
privilegio para que el hombre burilara el poema! No me despojarán Zunino
y Zungri, no y mil veces no. Código en mano, el doctor Zunni probará
que es inajenable mi Aleph.
Traté de razonar.
-- Pero, ¿no es muy oscuro el sótano?
-- La verdad no penetra en un entendimiento rebelde. Si todos los
lugares de la tierra están en el Aleph, ahí estarán todas las
luminarias, todas las lámparas, todos los veneros de luz.
-- Iré a verlo inmediatamente.
Corté, antes de que pudiera emitir una prohibición. Basta el
conocimiento de un hecho para percibir en el acto una serie de rasgos
confirmatorios, antes insospechados; me asombró no haber comprendido
hasta ese momento que Carlos Argentino era un loco. Todos esos Viterbo,
por lo demás… Beatriz (yo mismo suelo repetirlo) era una mujer, una niña
de una clarividencia casi implacable, pero había en ella negligencias,
distracciones, desdenes, verdaderas crueldades, que tal vez reclamaban
una explicación patológica. La locura de Carlos Argentino me colmó de
maligna felicidad; íntimamente, siempre nos habíamos detestado.
En la calle Garay, la sirvienta me dijo que tuviera la bondad de
esperar. El niño estaba, como siempre, en el sótano, revelando
fotografías. Junto al jarrón sin una flor, en el piano inútil, sonreía
(más intemporal que anacrónico) el gran retrato de Beatriz, en torpes
colores. No podía vernos nadie; en una desesperación de ternura me
aproximé al retrato y le dije:
-- Beatriz, Beatriz Elena, Beatriz Elena Viterbo, Beatriz querida, Beatriz perdida para siempre, soy yo, soy Borges.
Carlos entró poco después. Habló con sequedad; comprendí que no era capaz de otro pensamiento que de la perdición del Aleph.
-- Una copita del seudo coñac -- ordenó -- y te zampuzarás en el sótano. Ya
sabes, el decúbito dorsal es indispensable. También lo son la
oscuridad, la inmovilidad, cierta acomodación ocular. Te acuestas en el
piso de baldosas y fijas los ojos en el decimonono escalón de la
pertinente escalera. Me voy, bajo la trampa y te quedas solo. Algún
roedor te mete miedo ¡fácil empresa! A los pocos minutos ves el Aleph.
¡El microcosmo de alquimistas y cabalistas, nuestro concreto amigo
proverbial, el multum in parvo!
Ya en el comedor, agregó:
-- Claro está que si no lo ves, tu incapacidad no invalida mi
testimonio… Baja; muy en breve podrás entablar un diálogo con todas las
imágenes de Beatriz.
Bajé con rapidez, harto de sus palabras insustanciales. El sótano,
apenas más ancho que la escalera, tenía mucho de pozo. Con la mirada,
busqué en vano el baúl de que Carlos Argentino me habló. Unos cajones
con botellas y unas bolsas de lona entorpecían un ángulo. Carlos tomó
una bolsa, la dobló y la acomodó en un sitio preciso.
-- La almohada es humildosa -- explicó --, pero si la levanto un solo
centímetro, no verás ni una pizca y te quedas corrido y avergonzado.
Repantiga en el suelo ese corpachón y cuenta diecinueve escalones.
Cumplí con sus ridículos requisitos; al fin se fue. Cerró
cautelosamente la trampa; la oscuridad, pese a una hendija que después
distinguí, pudo parecerme total. Súbitamente comprendí mi peligro: me
había dejado soterrar por un loco, luego de tomar un veneno. Las
bravatas de Carlos transparentaban el íntimo terror de que yo no viera
el prodigio; Carlos, para defender su delirio, para no saber que estaba
loco, tenía que matarme. Sentí un confuso malestar, que traté de
atribuir a la rigidez, y no a la operación de un narcótico. Cerré los
ojos, los abrí. Entonces vi el Aleph.
Arribo, ahora, al inefable centro de mi relato; empieza, aquí, mi
desesperación de escritor. Todo lenguaje es un alfabeto de símbolos cuyo
ejercicio presupone un pasado que los interlocutores comparten; ¿cómo
transmitir a los otros el infinito Aleph, que mi temerosa memoria apenas
abarca? Los místicos, en análogo trance, prodigan los emblemas: para
significar la divinidad, un persa habla de un pájaro que de algún modo
es todos los pájaros; Alanus de Insulis, de una esfera cuyo centro está
en todas partes y la circunferencia en ninguna; Ezequiel, de un ángel de
cuatro caras que a un tiempo se dirige al Oriente y al Occidente, al
Norte y al Sur. (No en vano rememoro esas inconcebibles analogías;
alguna relación tienen con el Aleph.) Quizá los dioses no me negarían el
hallazgo de una imagen equivalente, pero este informe quedaría
contaminado de literatura, de falsedad. Por lo demás, el problema
central es irresoluble: la enumeración, siquiera parcial, de un conjunto
infinito. En ese instante gigantesco, he visto millones de actos
deleitables o atroces; ninguno me asombró como el hecho de que todos
ocuparan el mismo punto, sin superposición y sin transparencia. Lo que
vieron mis ojos fue simultáneo: lo que transcribiré, sucesivo, porque el
lenguaje lo es. Algo, sin embargo, recogeré.
En la parte inferior del escalón, hacia la derecha, vi una pequeña esfera tornasolada, de casi intolerable fulgor. Al principio la creí giratoria; luego comprendí que ese movimiento era una ilusión producida por los vertiginosos espectáculos que encerraba. El diámetro del Aleph sería de dos o tres centímetros, pero el espacio cósmico estaba ahí, sin disminución de tamaño. Cada cosa (la luna del espejo, digamos) era infinitas cosas, porque yo claramente la veía desde todos los puntos del universo. Vi el populoso mar, vi el alba y la tarde, vi las muchedumbres de América, vi una plateada telaraña en el centro de una negra pirámide, vi un laberinto roto (era Londres), vi interminables ojos inmediatos escrutándose en mí como en un espejo, vi todos los espejos del planeta y ninguno me reflejó, vi en un traspatio de la calle Soler las mismas baldosas que hace treinta años vi en el zaguán de una casa en Fray Bentos, vi racimos, nieve, tabaco, vetas de metal, vapor de agua, vi convexos desiertos ecuatoriales y cada uno de sus granos de arena, vi en Inverness a una mujer que no olvidaré, vi la violenta cabellera, el altivo cuerpo, vi un cáncer en el pecho, vi un círculo de tierra seca en una vereda, donde antes hubo un árbol, vi una quinta de Adrogué, un ejemplar de la primera versión inglesa de Plinio, la de Philemon Holland, vi a un tiempo cada letra de cada página (de chico, yo solía maravillarme de que las letras de un volumen cerrado no se mezclaran y perdieran en el decurso de la noche), vi la noche y el día contemporáneo, vi un poniente en Querétaro que parecía reflejar el color de una rosa en Bengala, vi mi dormitorio sin nadie, vi en un gabinete de Alkmaar un globo terráqueo entre dos espejos que lo multiplican sin fin, vi caballos de crin arremolinada, en una playa del Mar Caspio en el alba, vi la delicada osatura de una mano, vi a los sobrevivientes de una batalla, enviando tarjetas postales, vi en un escaparate de Mirzapur una baraja española, vi las sombras oblicuas de unos helechos en el suelo de un invernáculo, vi tigres, émbolos, bisontes, marejadas y ejércitos, vi todas las hormigas que hay en la tierra, vi un astrolabio persa, vi en un cajón del escritorio (y la letra me hizo temblar) cartas obscenas, increíbles, precisas, que Beatriz había dirigido a Carlos Argentino, vi un adorado monumento en la Chacarita, vi la reliquia atroz de lo que deliciosamente había sido Beatriz Viterbo, vi la circulación de mi oscura sangre, vi el engranaje del amor y la modificación de la muerte, vi el Aleph, desde todos los puntos, vi en el Aleph la tierra, y en la tierra otra vez el Aleph y en el Aleph la tierra, vi mi cara y mis vísceras, vi tu cara, y sentí vértigo y lloré, porque mis ojos habían visto ese objeto secreto y conjetural, cuyo nombre usurpan los hombres, pero que ningún hombre ha mirado: el inconcebible universo.
Sentí infinita veneración, infinita lástima.
-- Tarumba habrás quedado de tanto curiosear donde no te llaman -- dijo
una voz aborrecida y jovial --. Aunque te devanes los sesos, no me pagarás
en un siglo esta revelación. ¡Qué observatorio formidable, che Borges!
Los zapatos de Carlos Argentino ocupaban el escalón más alto. En la brusca penumbra, acerté a levantarme y a balbucear:
-- Formidable. Sí, formidable.
La indiferencia de mi voz me extrañó. Ansioso, Carlos Argentino insistía:
-- ¿Lo viste todo bien, en colores?
En ese instante concebí mi venganza. Benévolo, manifiestamente
apiadado, nervioso, evasivo, agradecí a Carlos Argentino Daneri la
hospitalidad de su sótano y lo insté a aprovechar la demolición de la
casa para alejarse de la perniciosa metrópoli, que a nadie ¡créame, que a
nadie! perdona. Me negué, con suave energía, a discutir el Aleph; lo
abracé, al despedirme, y le repetí que el campo y la serenidad son dos
grandes médicos.
En la calle, en las escaleras de Constitución, en el subterráneo, me
parecieron familiares todas las caras. Temí que no quedara una sola cosa
capaz de sorprenderme, temí que no me abandonara jamás la impresión de
volver. Felizmente, al cabo de unas noches de insomnio, me trabajó otra
vez el olvido.
Posdata del primero de marzo de 1943. A los seis meses de la
demolición del inmueble de la calle Garay, la Editorial Procusto no se
dejó arredrar por la longitud del considerable poema y lanzó al mercado
una selección de “trozos argentinos”. Huelga repetir lo ocurrido; Carlos
Argentino Daneri recibió el Segundo Premio Nacional de Literatura. El primero fue otorgado al doctor Aita; el tercero, al doctor Mario Bonfanti; increíblemente, mi obra Los naipes del tahúr
no logró un solo voto. ¡Una vez más, triunfaron la incomprensión y la
envidia! Hace ya mucho tiempo que no consigo ver a Daneri; los diarios
dicen que pronto nos dará otro volumen. Su afortunada pluma (no
entorpecida ya por el Aleph) se ha consagrado a versificar los epítomes
del doctor Acevedo Díaz.
Dos observaciones quiero agregar: una, sobre la naturaleza del Aleph;
otra, sobre su nombre. Éste, como es sabido, es el de la primera letra
del alfabeto de la lengua sagrada. Su aplicación al disco de mi historia
no parece casual. Para la Cábala, esa letra significa el En Soph, la
ilimitada y pura divinidad; también se dijo que tiene la forma de un
hombre que señala el cielo y la tierra, para indicar que el mundo
inferior es el espejo y es el mapa del superior; para la Mengenlehre,
es el símbolo de los números transfinitos, en los que el todo no es
mayor que alguna de las partes. Yo querría saber: ¿Eligió Carlos
Argentino ese nombre, o lo leyó, aplicado a otro punto donde convergen todos los puntos,
en alguno de los textos innumerables que el Aleph de su casa le reveló?
Por increíble que parezca, yo creo que hay (o que hubo) otro Aleph, yo
creo que el Aleph de la calle Garay era un falso Aleph.
Doy mis razones. Hacia 1867 el capitán Burton ejerció en el Brasil el
cargo de cónsul británico; en julio de 1942 Pedro Henríquez Ureña
descubrió en una biblioteca de Santos un manuscrito suyo que versaba
sobre el espejo que atribuye el Oriente a Iskandar Zú al-Karnayn, o
Alejandro Bicorne de Macedonia. En su cristal se reflejaba el universo
entero. Burton menciona otros artificios congéneres -la séptuple copa de
Kai Josrú, el espejo que Tárik Benzeyad encontró en una torre (1001 Noches, 272), el espejo que Luciano de Samosata pudo examinar en la luna (Historia verdadera, I, 26), la lanza especular que el primer libro del Satyricon de Capella atribuye a Júpiter, el espejo universal de Merlin, “redondo y hueco y semejante a un mundo de vidrio” (The Faerie Queene,
III, 2, 19) --, y añade estas curiosas palabras: “Pero los anteriores
(además del defecto de no existir) son meros instrumentos de óptica. Los
fieles que concurren a la mezquita de Amr, en el Cairo, saben muy bien
que el universo está en el interior de una de las columnas de piedra que
rodean el patio central… Nadie, claro está, puede verlo, pero quienes
acercan el oído a la superficie, declaran percibir, al poco tiempo, su
atareado rumor… La mezquita data del siglo VII; las columnas proceden de
otros templos de religiones anteislámicas, pues como ha escrito
Abenjaldún: En las repúblicas fundadas por nómadas es indispensable el concurso de forasteros para todo lo que sea albañilería“.
¿Existe ese Aleph en lo íntimo de una piedra? ¿Lo he visto cuando vi
todas las cosas y lo he olvidado? Nuestra mente es porosa para el
olvido; yo mismo estoy falseando y perdiendo, bajo la trágica erosión de
los años, los rasgos de Beatriz.
1. Recuerdo, sin embargo, estas líneas de una sátira que fustigó con rigor a los malos poetas:
Aqueste da al poema belicosa armadura
De erudicción; estotro le da pompas y galas.
Ambos baten en vano las ridículas alas…
¡Olvidaron, cuidados, el factor HERMOSURA!
De erudicción; estotro le da pompas y galas.
Ambos baten en vano las ridículas alas…
¡Olvidaron, cuidados, el factor HERMOSURA!
Sólo el temor de crearse un ejército de enemigos implacables y poderosos lo disuadió (me dijo) de publicar sin miedo el poema.
2. “Recibí tu apenada congratulación”,
me escribió. “Bufas, mi lamentable amigo, de envidia, pero confesarás
-- ¡aunque te ahogue!-- que esta vez pude coronar mi bonete con la más roja
de las plumas; mi turbante, con el más califa de los rubíes.”
*
Oxímoron: Combinación en una misma estructura sintáctica de dos palabras
o expresiones de significado opuesto, que originan un nuevo sentido.
Ejemplo: “un silencio atronador”.
** Apóstrofe:
Figura que consiste en dirigir la palabra con vehemencia en segunda
persona a una o varias, presentes o ausentes, vivas o muertas, a seres
abstractos o a cosas inanimadas, o en dirigírsela a sí mismo en iguales
términos.
INDIA -The Magh Mela festival at Sangam, at the confluence of rivers Ganges, Yamuna and mythical Saraswati in Allahabad. By @sanjaykanojiao7: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 18 January 2017
The Aleph
O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a King of infinite space...
Hamlet, II, 2
But they will teach us that Eternity is the Standing still of the Present Time, a Nunc-stans (as the schools call it); which neither they, nor any else understand, no more than they would a Hic-stans for an Infinite greatness of Place.
Leviathan, IV, 46On the burning February morning Beatriz Viterbo died, after braving an agony that never for a single moment gave way to self-pity or fear, I noticed that the sidewalk billboards around Constitution Plaza were advertising some new brand or other of American cigarettes. The fact pained me, for I realised that the wide and ceaseless universe was already slipping away from her and that this slight change was the first of an endless series. The universe may change but not me, I thought with a certain sad vanity. I knew that at times my fruitless devotion had annoyed her; now that she was dead, I could devote myself to her memory, without hope but also without humiliation. I recalled that the thirtieth of April was her birthday; on that day to visit her house on Garay Street and pay my respects to her father and to Carlos Argentino Daneri, her first cousin, would be an irreproachable and perhaps unavoidable act of politeness. Once again I would wait in the twilight of the small, cluttered drawing room, once again I would study the details of her many photographs: Beatriz Viterbo in profile and in full colour; Beatriz wearing a mask, during the Carnival of 1921; Beatriz at her First Communion; Beatriz on the day of her wedding to Roberto Alessandri; Beatriz soon after her divorce, at a luncheon at the Turf Club; Beatriz at a seaside resort in Quilmes with Delia San Marco Porcel and Carlos Argentino; Beatriz with the Pekingese lapdog given her by Villegas Haedo; Beatriz, front and three-quarter views, smiling, hand on her chin... I would not be forced, as in the past, to justify my presence with modest offerings of books -- books whose pages I finally learned to cut beforehand, so as not to find out, months later, that they lay around unopened.
Beatriz Viterbo died in 1929. From that time on, I never let a thirtieth of April go by without a visit to her house. I used to make my appearance at seven-fifteen sharp and stay on for some twenty-five minutes. Each year, I arrived a little later and stay a little longer. In 1933, a torrential downpour coming to my aid, they were obliged to ask me for dinner. Naturally, I took advantage of that lucky precedent. In 1934, I arrived, just after eight, with one of those large Santa Fe sugared cakes, and quite matter-of-factly I stayed to dinner. It was in this way, on these melancholy and vainly erotic anniversaries, that I came into the gradual confidences of Carlos Argentino Daneri.
Beatriz had been tall, frail, slightly stooped; in her walk there was (if the oxymoron may be allowed) a kind of uncertain grace, a hint of expectancy. Carlos Argentino was pink-faced, overweight, gray-haired, fine-featured. He held a minor position in an unreadable library out on the edge of the Southside of Buenos Aires. He was authoritarian but also unimpressive. Until only recently, he took advantage of his nights and holidays to stay at home. At a remove of two generations, the Italian "S" and demonstrative Italian gestures still survived in him. His mental activity was continuous, deeply felt, far-ranging, and -- all in all -- meaningless. He dealt in pointless analogies and in trivial scruples. He had (as did Beatriz) large, beautiful, finely shaped hands. For several months he seemed to be obsessed with Paul Fort -- less with his ballads than with the idea of a towering reputation. "He is the Prince of poets," Daneri would repeat fatuously. "You will belittle him in vain -- but no, not even the most venomous of your shafts will graze him."
On the thirtieth of April, 1941, along with the sugared cake I allowed myself to add a bottle of Argentine cognac. Carlos Argentino tasted it, pronounced it "interesting," and, after a few drinks, launched into a glorification of modern man.
"I view him," he said with a certain unaccountable excitement, "in his inner sanctum, as though in his castle tower, supplied with telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, wireless sets, motion-picture screens, slide projectors, glossaries, timetables, handbooks, bulletins..."
He remarked that for a man so equipped, actual travel was superfluous. Our twentieth century had inverted the story of Mohammed and the mountain; nowadays, the mountain came to the modern Mohammed.
So foolish did his ideas seem to me, so pompous and so drawn out his exposition, that I linked them at once to literature and asked him why he didn't write them down. As might be foreseen, he answered that he had already done so -- that these ideas, and others no less striking, had found their place in the Proem, or Augural Canto, or, more simply, the Prologue Canto of the poem on which he hd been working for many years now, alone, without publicity, with fanfare, supported only by those twin staffs universally known as work and solitude. First, he said, he opened the floodgates of his fancy; then, taking up hand tools, he resorted to the file. The poem was entitled The Earth; it consisted of a description of the planet, and, of course, lacked no amount of picturesque digressions and bold apostrophes.
I asked him to read me a passage, if only a short one. He opened a drawer of his writing table, drew out a thick stack of papers -- sheets of a large pad imprinted with the letterhead of the Juan Crisóstomo Lafinur Library -- and, with ringing satisfaction, declaimed:
Mine eyes, as did the Greek's, have known men's towns and fame,"From any angle, a greatly interesting stanza," he said, giving his verdict. "The opening line wins the applause of the professor, the academician, and the Hellenist -- to say nothing of the would-be scholar, a considerable sector of the public. The second flows from Homer to Hesiod (generous homage, at the very outset, to the father of didactic poetry), not without rejuvenating a process whose roots go back to Scripture -- enumeration, congeries, conglomeration. The third -- baroque? decadent? example of the cult of pure form? -- consists of two equal hemistichs. The fourth, frankly bilingual, assures me the unstinted backing of all minds sensitive to the pleasures of sheer fun. I should, in all fairness, speak of the novel rhyme in lines two and four, and of the erudition that allows me -- without a hint of pedantry! -- to cram into four lines three learned allusions covering thirty centuries packed with literature -- first to the Odyssey, second to Works and Days, and third to the immortal bagatelle bequathed us by the frolicking pen of the Savoyard, Xavier de Maistre. Once more I've come to realise that modern art demands the balm of laughter, the scherzo. Decidedly, Goldoni holds the stage!"
The works, the days in light that fades to amber;
I do not change a fact or falsify a name --
The voyage I set down is... autour de ma chambre.
He read me many other stanzas, each of which also won his own approval and elicited his lengthy explications. There was nothing remarkable about them. I did not even find them any worse than the first one. Application, resignation, and chance had gone into the writing; I saw, however, that Daneri's real work lay not in the poetry but in his invention of reasons why the poetry should be admired. Of course, this second phase of his effort modified the writing in his eyes, though not in the eyes of others. Daneri's style of delivery was extravagant, but the deadly drone of his metric regularity tended to tone down and to dull that extravagance.1
Only once in my life have I had occasion to look into the fifteen thousand alexandrines of the Polyolbion, that topographical epic in which Michael Drayton recorded the flora, fauna, hydrography, orography, military and monastic history of England. I am sure, however, that this limited but bulky production is less boring than Carlos Argentino's similar vast undertaking. Daneri had in mind to set to verse the entire face of the planet, and, by 1941, had already dispatched a number of acres of the State of Queensland, nearly a mile of the course run by the River Ob, a gasworks to the north of Veracruz, the leading shops in the Buenos Aires parish of Concepción, the villa of Mariana Cambaceres de Alvear in the Belgrano section of the Argentine capital, and a Turkish baths establishment not far from the well-known Brighton Aquarium. He read me certain long-winded passages from his Australian section, and at one point praised a word of his own coining, the colour "celestewhite," which he felt "actually suggests the sky, an element of utmost importance in the landscape of the Down Under." But these sprawling, lifeless hexameters lacked even the relative excitement of the so-called Augural Canto. Along about midnight, I left.
Two Sundays later, Daneri rang me up -- perhaps for the first time in his life. He suggested we get together at four o'clock "for cocktails in the salon-bar next door, which the forward-looking Zunino and Zungri -- my landlords, as you doubtless recall -- are throwing open to the public. It's a place you'll really want to get to know."
More in resignation than in pleasure, I accepted. Once there, it was hard to find a table. The "salon-bar," ruthlessly modern, was only barely less ugly than what I had excepted; at the nearby tables, the excited customers spoke breathlessly of the sums Zunino and Zungri had invested in furnishings without a second thought to cost. Carlos Argentino pretended to be astonished by some feature or other of the lighting arrangement (with which, I felt, he was already familiar), and he said to me with a certain severity, "Grudgingly, you'll have to admit to the fact that these premises hold their own with many others far more in the public eye."
He then reread me four or five different fragments of the poem. He had revised them following his pet principle of verbal ostentation: where at first "blue" had been good enough, he now wallowed in "azures," "ceruleans," and "ultramarines." The word "milky" was too easy for him; in the course of an impassioned description of a shed where wool was washed, he chose such words as "lacteal," "lactescent," and even made one up -- "lactinacious." After that, straight out, he condemned our modern mania for having books prefaced, "a practice already held up to scorn by the Prince of Wits in his own grafeful preface to the Quixote." He admitted, however, that for the opening of his new work an attention-getting foreword might prove valuable -- "an accolade signed by a literary hand of renown." He next went on to say that he considered publishing the initial cantos of his poem. I then began to understand the unexpected telephone call; Daneri was going to ask me to contribute a foreword to his pedantic hodgepodge. My fear turned out unfounded; Carlos Argentino remarked, with admiration and envy, that surely he could not be far wrong in qualifying with the ephitet "solid" the prestige enjoyed in every circle by Álvaro Melián Lafinur, a man of letters, who would, if I insisted on it, be only too glad to dash off some charming opening words to the poem. In order to avoid ignominy and failure, he suggested I make myself spokesman for two of the book's undeniable virtues -- formal perfection and scientific rigour -- "inasmuch as this wide garden of metaphors, of figures of speech, of elegances, is inhospitable to the least detail not strictly upholding of truth." He added that Beatriz had always been taken with Álvaro.
I agreed -- agreed profusely -- and explained for the sake of credibility that I would not speak to Álvaro the next day, Monday, but would wait until Thursday, when we got together for the informal dinner that follows every meeting of the Writers' Club. (No such dinners are ever held, but it is an established fact that the meetings do take place on Thursdays, a point which Carlos Argentino Daneri could verify in the daily papers, and which lent a certain reality to my promise.)
Half in prophecy, half in cunning, I said that before taking up the question of a preface I would outline the unusual plan of the work. We then said goodbye.
Turning the corner of Bernardo de Irigoyen, I reviewed as impartially as possible the alternatives before me. They were: a) to speak to Álvaro, telling him the first cousin of Beatriz' (the explanatory euphemism would allow me to mention her name) had concocted a poem that seemed to draw out into infinity the possibilities of cacophony and chaos: b) not to say a word to Álvaro. I clearly foresaw that my indolence would opt for b.
But first thing Friday morning, I began worrying about the telephone. It offended me that that device, which had once produced the irrecoverable voice of Beatriz, could now sink so low as to become a mere receptacle for the futile and perhaps angry remonstrances of that deluded Carlos Argentino Daneri. Luckily, nothing happened -- except the inevitable spite touched off in me by this man, who had asked me to fulfill a delicate mission for him and then had let me drop.
Gradually, the phone came to lose its terrors, but one day toward the end of October it rang, and Carlos Argentino was on the line. He was deeply disturbed, so much so that at the outset I did not recognise his voice. Sadly but angrily he stammered that the now unrestrainable Zunino and Zungri, under the pretext of enlarging their already outsized "salon-bar," were about to take over and tear down this house.
"My home, my ancestral home, my old and inveterate Garay Street home!" he kept repeating, seeming to forget his woe in the music of his words.
It was not hard for me to share his distress. After the age of fifty, all change becomes a hateful symbol of the passing of time. Besides, the scheme concerned a house that for me would always stand for Beatriz. I tried explaining this delicate scruple of regret, but Daneri seemed not to hear me. He said that if Zunino and Zungri persisted in this outrage, Doctor Zunni, his lawyer, would sue ipso facto and make them pay some fifty thousand dollars in damages.
Zunni's name impressed me; his firm, although at the unlikely address of Caseros and Tacuarí, was nonetheless known as an old and reliable one. I asked him whether Zunni had already been hired for the case. Daneri said he would phone him that very afternoon. He hesitated, then with that level, impersonal voice we reserve for confiding something intimate, he said that to finish the poem he could not get along without the house because down in the cellar there was an Aleph. He explained that an Aleph is one of the points in space that contains all other points.
"It's in the cellar under the dining room," he went on, so overcome by his worries now that he forgot to be pompous. "It's mine -- mine. I discovered it when I was a child, all by myself. The cellar stairway is so steep that my aunt and uncle forbade my using it, but I'd heard someone say there was a world down there. I found out later they meant an old-fashioned globe of the world, but at the time I thought they were referring to the world itself. One day when no one was home I started down in secret, but I stumbled and fell. When I opened my eyes, I saw the Aleph."
"The Aleph?" I repeated.
"Yes, the only place on earth where all places are -- seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending. I kept the discovery to myself and went back every chance I got. As a child, I did not foresee that this privilege was granted me so that later I could write the poem. Zunino and Zungri will not strip me of what's mine -- no, and a thousand times no! Legal code in hand, Doctor Zunni will prove that my Aleph is inalienable."
I tried to reason with him. "But isn't the cellar very dark?" I said.
"Truth cannot penetrate a closed mind. If all places in the universe are in the Aleph, then all stars, all lamps, all sources of light are in it, too."
"You wait there. I'll be right over to see it."
I hung up before he could say no. The full knowledge of a fact sometimes enables you to see all at once many supporting but previously unsuspected things. It amazed me not to have suspected until that moment that Carlos Argentino was a madman. As were all the Viterbos, when you came down to it. Beatriz (I myself often say it) was a woman, a child, with almost uncanny powers of clairvoyance, but forgetfulness, distractions, contempt, and a streak of cruelty were also in her, and perhaps these called for a pathological explanation. Carlos Argentino's madness filled me with spiteful elation. Deep down, we had always detested each other.
On Garay Street, the maid asked me kindly to wait. The master was, as usual, in the cellar developing pictures. On the unplayed piano, beside a large vase that held no flowers, smiled (more timeless than belonging to the past) the large photograph of Beatriz, in gaudy colours. Nobody could see us; in a seizure of tenderness, I drew close to the portrait and said to it, "Beatriz, Beatriz Elena, Beatriz Elena Viterbo, darling Beatriz, Beatriz now gone forever, it's me, it's Borges."
Moments later, Carlos came in. He spoke dryly. I could see he was thinking of nothing else but the loss of the Aleph.
"First a glass of pseudo-cognac," he ordered, "and then down you dive into the cellar. Let me warn you, you'll have to lie flat on your back. Total darkness, total immobility, and a certain ocular adjustment will also be necessary. From the floor, you must focus your eyes on the nineteenth step. Once I leave you, I'll lower the trapdoor and you'll be quite alone. You needn't fear the rodents very much -- though I know you will. In a minute or two, you'll see the Aleph -- the microcosm of the alchemists and Kabbalists, our true proverbial friend, the multum in parvo!"
Once we were in the dining room, he added, "Of course, if you don't see it, your incapacity will not invalidate what I have experienced. Now, down you go. In a short while you can babble with all of Beatriz' images."
Tired of his inane words, I quickly made my way. The cellar, barely wider than the stairway itself, was something of a pit. My eyes searched the dark, looking in vain for the globe Carlos Argentino had spoken of. Some cases of empty bottles and some canvas sacks cluttered one corner. Carlos picked up a sack, folded it in two, and at a fixed spot spread it out.
"As a pillow," he said, "this is quite threadbare, but if it's padded even a half-inch higher, you won't see a thing, and there you'll lie, feeling ashamed and ridiculous. All right now, sprawl that hulk of yours there on the floor and count off nineteen steps."
I went through with his absurd requirements, and at last he went away. The trapdoor was carefully shut. The blackness, in spite of a chink that I later made out, seemed to me absolute. For the first time, I realised the danger I was in: I'd let myself be locked in a cellar by a lunatic, after gulping down a glassful of poison! I knew that back of Carlos' transparent boasting lay a deep fear that I might not see the promised wonder. To keep his madness undetected, to keep from admitting he was mad, Carlos had to kill me. I felt a shock of panic, which I tried to pin to my uncomfortable position and not to the effect of a drug. I shut my eyes -- I opened them. Then I saw the Aleph.
I arrive now at the ineffable core of my story. And here begins my despair as a writer. All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south. (Not in vain do I recall these inconceivable analogies; they bear some relation to the Aleph.)
Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction. Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive. Nonetheless, I'll try to recollect what I can.
On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe.
I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.
"Feeling pretty cockeyed, are you, after so much spying into places where you have no business?" said a hated and jovial voice. "Even if you were to rack your brains, you couldn't pay me back in a hundred years for this revelation. One hell of an observatory, eh, Borges?"
Carlos Argentino's feet were planted on the topmost step. In the sudden dim light, I managed to pick myself up and utter, "One hell of a -- yes, one hell of a."
The matter-of-factness of my voice surprised me. Anxiously, Carlos Argentino went on.
"Did you see everything -- really clear, in colours?"
At that moment I found my revenge. Kindly, openly pitying him, distraught, evasive, I thanked Carlos Argentino Daneri for the hospitality of his cellar and urged him to make the most of the demolition to get away from the pernicious metropolis, which spares no one -- believe me, I told him, no one! Quietly and forcefully, I refused to discuss the Aleph. On saying goodbye, I embraced him and repeated that the country, that fresh air and quiet were the great physicians.
Out on the street, going down the stairways inside Constitution Station, riding the subway, every one of the faces seemed familiar to me. I was afraid that not a single thing on earth would ever again surprise me; I was afraid I would never again be free of all I had seen. Happily, after a few sleepless nights, I was visited once more by oblivion.
Postscript of March first, 1943 -- Some six months after the pulling down of a certain building on Garay Street, Procrustes & Co., the publishers, not put off by the considerable length of Daneri's poem, brought out a selection of its "Argentine sections". It is redundant now to repeat what happened. Carlos Argentino Daneri won the Second National Prize for Literature. 2 First Prize went to Dr. Aita; Third Prize, to Dr. Mario Bonfanti. Unbelievably, my own book The Sharper's Cards did not get a single vote. Once again dullness and envy had their triumph! It's been some time now that I've been trying to see Daneri; the gossip is that a second selection of the poem is about to be published. His felicitous pen (no longer cluttered by the Aleph) has now set itself the task of writing an epic on our national hero, General San Martín.
I want to add two final observations: one, on the nature of the Aleph; the other, on its name. As is well known, the Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Its use for the strange sphere in my story may not be accidental. For the Kabbala, the letter stands for the En Soph, the pure and boundless godhead; it is also said that it takes the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth, in order to show that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher; for Cantor's Mengenlehre, it is the symbol of transfinite numbers, of which any part is as great as the whole. I would like to know whether Carlos Argentino chose that name or whether he read it -- applied to another point where all points converge - - in one of the numberless texts that the Aleph in his cellar revealed to him. Incredible as it may seem, I believe that the Aleph of Garay Street was a false Aleph.
Here are my reasons. Around 1867, Captain Burton held the post of British Consul in Brazil. In July, 1942, Pedro Henríquez Ureña came across a manuscript of Burton's, in a library at Santos, dealing with the mirror which the Oriental world attributes to Iskander Zu al-Karnayn, or Alexander Bicornis of Macedonia. In its crystal the whole world was reflected. Burton mentions other similar devices -- the sevenfold cup of Kai Kosru; the mirror that Tariq ibn-Ziyad found in a tower (Thousand and One Nights, 272); the mirror that Lucian of Samosata examined on the moon (True History, I, 26); the mirrorlike spear that the first book of Capella's Satyricon attributes; Merlin's universal mirror, which was "round and hollow... and seem'd a world of glas" (The Faerie Queene, III, 2, 19) -- and adds this curious statement: "But the aforesaid objects (besides the disadvantage of not existing) are mere optical instruments. The Faithful who gather at the mosque of Amr, in Cairo, are acquainted with the fact that the entire universe lies inside one of the stone pillars that ring its central court... No one, of course, can actually see it, but those who lay an ear against the surface tell that after some short while they perceive its busy hum... The mosque dates from the seventh century; the pillars come from other temples of pre-Islamic religions, since, as ibn-Khaldun has written: 'In nations founded by nomads, the aid of foreigners is essential in all concerning masonry.'"
Does this Aleph exist in the heart of a stone? Did I see it there in the cellar when I saw all things, and have I now forgotten it? Our minds are porous and forgetfulness seeps in; I myself am distorting and losing, under the wearing away of the years, the face of Beatriz.
1 Among my memories are also some lines of a satire in which he lashed out unsparingly at bad poets. After accusing them of dressing their poems in the warlike armour of erudition, and of flapping in vain their unavailing wings, he concluded with this verse:
But they forget, alas, one foremost fact -- BEAUTY!Only the fear of creating an army of implacable and powerful enemies dissuaded him (he told me) from fearlessly publishing this poem.
2 "I received your pained congratulations," he wrote me. "You rage, my poor friend, with envy, but you must
confess -- even if it chokes you! -- that this time I have crowned my cap with the reddest of feathers; my turban with the
most caliph of rubies."
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986): El Aleph (The Aleph), first published in Sur, September 1945; included in El Aleph and other stories, 1949; English version by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with the author
A murmuration of starlings are seen in the sky of Pontevedra, northwestern Spain: photo by Miguel Riopa/AFP, 18 January 2017
A murmuration of starlings are seen in the sky of Pontevedra, northwestern Spain: photo by Miguel Riopa/AFP, 18 January 2017
KOSOVO - A stag eats a piece of corn on a snow-covered field in the
village of Dumnice near the town of Vushtrri. By @armend_nimani #AFP: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 16 January 2017
KASHMIR - A baby monkey is cuddled by its mother to keep warm as the sub-zero temperatures freeze life in Tangmarg. By @TauseefMUSTAFA #AFP: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 18 January 2017
KASHMIR - Icicles hang from the trees in Tanmarg, about 34 kms north of Srinagar, following a fresh snowfall. By @TauseefMUSTAFA #AFP: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 18 January 2017
SERBIA - A migrant walks through the snowfall, near Belgrade's main railway station with temperatures dropping below 0 Celsius. By @iandrej #AFP: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 18 January 2017
It could be 1944 but we took this picture today (with a drone) in Belgrade. #Refugees wait for food distribution under a heavy snowfall.: image via Santi Palacios #SantiPalacios, 18 January 2017
BULGARIA - A man walks on a snow-covered street in a suburb of Sofia after heavy snowfall. By Nikolay Doychinov #AFP: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 18 January 2017
PAKISTAN - Pakistani men ride on a horsecart during heavy fog in Lahore. By Arif Ali #AFP: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 18 January 2017
PAKISTAN - A vendor waits for customers at a streetside stall during heavy fog in Lahore. By Arif Ali #AFP: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 18 January 2017
MEXICO
- A migrant walks along the train tracks in the community of Caborca in
Sonora state, Mexico. By @estrellafoto #AFP: image via
Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 18 January 2017
France - A homeless man sleeps on the pavement in Paris as a cold wave is expected during the next days. #AFP @MartinBureau1: image via Aurelia BAILLY @AureliaBAILLY, 16 January 2017
UK - Construction cranes are pictured near Tower Bridge in London at sunrise. By @DSorabji #AFP: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 18 January 2017
UK - The sun sets behind The Elizabeth Tower, better known as "Big Ben", in London. By @lealolivas #AFP: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 18 January 2017
A child lies injured after an air force jet accidentally bombarded a camp for those displaced by Boko Haram Islamists, in Rann, northeast Nigeria according to medical charity MSF: photo by MSF/AFP, 18 January 2017
A child lies injured after an air force jet accidentally bombarded a camp for those displaced by Boko Haram Islamists, in Rann, northeast Nigeria according to medical charity MSF: photo by MSF/AFP, 18 January 2017
A military vehicle of the Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF) is seen during an operation to clear the al-Zirai district of Islamic State militants in Mosul, Iraq: photo by Muhammad Hamed/Reuters, 18 January 2017
A military vehicle of the Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF) is seen during an operation to clear the al-Zirai district of Islamic State militants in Mosul, Iraq: photo by Muhammad Hamed/Reuters, 18 January 2017
IRAQ
- Members of the Iraqi special forces Counter Terrorism Service walk
next to destroyed shops in eastern Mosul. By @dilkoff #AFP: image via
Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 18 January 2017
IRAQ - Iraqi forces have fully retaken east Mosul from the IS group, 3 months after the start of the offensive against IS. By @dilkoff #AFP: image via
Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 18 January 2017
IRAQ - An Iraqi Army soldier patrols in Mosul's al-Jazair neighbourhood as they look for Islamic State (IS) group fighters By @dilkoff #AFP: image via
Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 18 January 2017
A vendor helps put on a wig on a customer at a wig shop near the central train station in Shanghai, China: photo by Aly Song/Reuters, 18 January 2017
A vendor helps put on a wig on a customer at a wig shop near the central train station in Shanghai, China: photo by Aly Song/Reuters, 18 January 2017
Israeli policemen detain a Bedouin man during clashes that followed a protest against home demolitions in the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran, which is not recognised by the Israeli apartheid government, near the southern city of Beersheba, in the Negev desert: photo by Ahmad Gharabli/AFP, 18 January 2017
Israeli policemen detain a Bedouin man during clashes that followed a protest against home demolitions in the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran, which is not recognised by the Israeli apartheid government, near the southern city of Beersheba, in the Negev desert: photo by Ahmad Gharabli/AFP, 18 January 2017
Destruction of houses in the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran which is not recognized by the Israeli Gvt. Jan 18th @menahemkahana @AFPphoto: image via L'Instant-ParisMatch @instantmatch, 18 January 2017
A group of boojie women gathered at Knitty City in New York lay down their plastic brain-substitute devices long enough to make their pink Pussyhats in preparation for protests, in Washington and New York, for women’s rights following the election of Donald Trump: photo by William Edwards/AFP, 18 January 2017
A group of boojie women gathered at Knitty City in New York lay down their plastic brain-substitute devices long enough to make their pink Pussyhats in preparation for protests, in Washington and New York, for women’s rights following the election of Donald Trump: photo by William Edwards/AFP, 18 January 2017
YEMEN - Female fighters supporting the Shiite Huthi rebels, take part in an anti-Saudi rally in Sanaa. By Mohammed Huwais #AFP: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 18 January 2017
#Madagascar Workers from an informal sapphire mine seep soil in the waters of a river as they look for gems.
By @GGuercia @AFPphoto: image via
Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 18 January 2017
A man holds a sign while standing next to a police officer in front of
the offices of the financial firm Goldman Sachs during a protest
against the company’s involvement and influence with the incoming Trump
administration in New York, New York, USA: photo Justin Lane/EPA, 18 January 2017
A man holds a sign while standing next to a police officer in front of the offices of the financial firm Goldman Sachs during a protest against the company’s involvement and influence with the incoming Trump administration in New York, New York, USA: photo Justin Lane/EPA, 18 January 2017
Large Pink Man of Wax with Dead Eagle Plus Ultra
Writing my inaugural address at the Winter White House, Mar-a-Lago, three weeks ago. Looking forward to Friday. #Inauguration: image via Donald J. Drumpf @realDonaldDrumpf, 18 January 2017
1/ Sad cousin of the press conference folders #trumpwrites #inauguration: image via Reading The Pictures @ReadingThePix, 18 November 2017
2/ Really sad is what happens if you do “Trump writing” image search. (For kicks, try it w Obama.) #trumpwrites #inauguration: tweet via Reading The Pictures @ReadingThePix, 18 November 2017
2/ Really sad is what happens if you do “Trump writing” image search. (For kicks, try it w Obama.) #trumpwrites #inauguration: tweet via Reading The Pictures @ReadingThePix, 18 November 2017
3/ Illogical on its face. Trump dictates. #trumpwrites #inauguration: tweet via Reading The Pictures@ReadingThePix, 18 November 2017 @ReadingThePix, 18 November 2017
4/ TIME eagle do-over. (Mean when bird terrorized him, not viral, free-publicity pic that helped make him legit.) #trumpwrites #inauguration: tweet via Reading The Pictures @ReadingThePix, 18 November 2017
4/ TIME eagle do-over. (Mean when bird terrorized him, not viral, free-publicity pic that helped make him legit.) #trumpwrites #inauguration: tweet via Reading The Pictures @ReadingThePix, 18 November 2017
5/ The very rare shot of #Trump self-conscious. He can’t tolerate weakness, but … there you are. #trumpwrites #inauguration: tweet via Reading The Pictures @ReadingThePix, 18 November 2017
6/ Best argument yet for hiring a photographer. (But not holding our breath.) #trumpwrites #inauguration: tweet via Reading The Pictures @ReadingThePix, 18 November 2017
6/ Best argument yet for hiring a photographer. (But not holding our breath.) #trumpwrites #inauguration: tweet via Reading The Pictures @ReadingThePix, 18 November 2017
7/ After Obama visual craft and production value, it’s a long way down. #trumpwrites #inauguration: tweet via Reading The Pictures @ReadingThePix, 18 November 2017
Separated at birth: The President-elect writing his inauguration speech, and... Steve McCroskey?: image via Matttaibi @mtaibbi, 18 January 2017
Separated at birth: The President-elect writing his inauguration speech, and... Steve McCroskey?: image via Matttaibi @mtaibbi, 18 January 2017
UK - People pose for a "selfie" photograph with waxwork model of US President Donald Trump at Madame Tussaud's in London. By @isabelinfantes: image via
Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 18 January 2017
IRAQ - A masked Iraqi counter-terrorism service member poses for a picture in Bartalla as they search for IS group fighters. By #ahmedafp: image via Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 18 January 2017
MALAYSIA
- Muslim clowns travel onboard a train during a fund-raising event for
children with cancer in Kuala Lumpur. By @MananVatsyayana: image via
Frédérique Geffard @fgeffardAFP, 18 January 2017
join us TOMORROW NIGHT @ 7p in #Dumbo to discuss our incoming INSANE CLOWN PRESIDENT w/ @mtaibbi
image via The POWERHOUSE Arena @ POWERHOUSE Arena, 18 January 2018
Jagjot Singh Rubal, an Indian artist, gives final touches to a portrait of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump ahead of Trump’s inauguration at his workshop in Amritsar, India: photo by Munish Sharma/Reuters, 19 January 2017
join us TOMORROW NIGHT @ 7p in #Dumbo to discuss our incoming INSANE CLOWN PRESIDENT w/ @mtaibbi
image via The POWERHOUSE Arena @ POWERHOUSE Arena, 18 January 2018
Jagjot Singh Rubal, an Indian artist, gives final touches to a portrait of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump ahead of Trump’s inauguration at his workshop in Amritsar, India: photo by Munish Sharma/Reuters, 19 January 2017
Jagjot
Singh Rubal, an Indian artist, gives final touches to a portrait of
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump ahead of Trump’s inauguration at his
workshop in Amritsar, India: photo by Munish Sharma/Reuters, 19 January 2017
Thick smoke rises from a fire which broke out at oil wells set ablaze by Islamic State militants before fleeing the oil-producing region of Qayyara, Iraq: photo by Girish Gupta/Reuters, 19 January 2017
Controlled explosion by @kenhermannphoto: image via WIRED Photo @WIREDPhoto, 1 January 2017
Victor Estrella Burgos of the Dominican Republic in action during his
Men’s singles second round match against Australia’s Bernard Tomic at
the Australian Open, Melbourne, Australia: photo by Jason Reed/Reuters, 18 January 2017
Victor Estrella Burgos of the Dominican Republic in action during his
Men’s singles second round match against Australia’s Bernard Tomic at
the Australian Open, Melbourne, Australia: photo by Jason Reed/Reuters, 18 January 2017
2 comments:
Tom,
Thank you for this post. Rereading Borge's The Aleph is a great way to spend Installation Day. The line, "Happily, after a few sleepless nights, I was visited once more by oblivion," has never made more sense to me than it does today.
-David
Thanks, David.
Yes, I too attempted... in fact, have for some time been more or less systematically attempting... a sort of calculated Borgesian invitation to Oblivion.
(A not very effective form of anesthesia, I fear.)
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