The Weird

by Ann

  Under the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness. At first I thought it was spinning; then I realized that the movement was an illusion produced by the dizzying spectacles inside it. The Aleph was probably two or three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained inside it, with no diminution in size. Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos. I saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw the multitudes of the Americas, saw a silvery spider-web at the center of a black pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), saw endless eyes, all very close, studying themselves in me as though in a mirror, saw all the mirrors on the planet (and none of them reflecting me), saw in a rear courtyard on Calle Soler the same tiles I’d seen twenty years before in the entryway of a house in Fray Bentos, saw clusters of grapes, snow, tobacco, veins of metal, water vapor, saw convex equatorial deserts and their every grain of sand, saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget, saw her violent hair, her haughty body, saw a cancer in her breast, saw a circle of dry soil within a sidewalk where there had once been a tree, saw a country house in Adrogué, saw a copy of the first English translation of Pliny (Philemon Holland’s), saw every letter of every page at once (as a boy, I would be astounded that the letters in a closed book didn’t get all scrambled up together overnight), saw simultaneous night and day, saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal, saw my bedroom (with no one in it), saw in a study in Alkmaar a globe of the terraqueous world placed between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly, saw horses with wind-whipped manes on a beach in the Caspian Sea at dawn, saw the delicate bones of a hand, saw the survivors of a battle sending postcards, saw a Tarot card in a shopwindow in Mirzapur, saw the oblique shadows of ferns on the floor of a greenhouse, saw tigers, pistons, bisons, tides, and armies, saw all the ants on earth, saw a Persian astrolabe, saw in a desk drawer (and the handwriting made me tremble) obscene, incredible, detailed letters that Beatriz had sent Carlos Argentino, saw a beloved monument in Chacarita, saw the horrendous remains of what had once, deliciously, been Beatriz Viterbo, saw the circulation of my dark blood, saw the coils and springs of love and the alterations of death, saw the Aleph from everywhere at once, saw the earth in the Aleph, and the Aleph once more in the earth and the earth in the Aleph, saw my face and my viscera, saw your face, and I felt dizzy, and I wept, because my eyes had seen that secret, hypothetical object whose name has been usurped by men but which no man has ever truly looked upon: the inconceivable universe.

  I had a sense of infinite veneration, infinite pity.

  ‘Serves you right, having your mind boggled, for sticking your nose in where you weren’t wanted,’ said a jovial, bored voice. ‘And you may rack your brains, but you’ll never repay me for this revelation – not in a hundred years. What a magnificent observatory, eh, Borges!’

  Carlos Argentino’s shoes occupied the highest step. In the sudden half-light, I managed to get to my feet.

  ‘Magnificent…Yes, quite…magnificent,’ I stammered.

  The indifference in my voice surprised me.

  ‘You did see it?’ Carlos Argentino insisted anxiously. ‘See it clearly? In color and everything?’

  Instantly, I conceived my revenge. In the most kindly sort of way – manifestly pitying, nervous, evasive – I thanked Carlos Argentino Daneri for the hospitality of his cellar and urged him to take advantage of the demolition of his house to remove himself from the pernicious influences of the metropolis, which no one – believe me, no one! – can be immune to. I refused, with gentle firmness, to discuss the Aleph; I clasped him by both shoulders as I took my leave and told him again that the country – peace and quiet, you know – was the very best medicine one could take.

  Out in the street, on the steps of the Constitución Station, in the subway, all the faces seemed familiar. I feared there was nothing that had the power to surprise or astonish me anymore, I feared that I would never again be without a sense of déjà vu. Fortunately, after a few unsleeping nights, forgetfulness began to work in me again.

  Postscript (March 1, 1943): Six months after the demolition of the building on Calle Garay, Procrustes Publishers, undaunted by the length of Carlos Argentino Daneri’s substantial poem, published the first in its series of ‘Argentine pieces.’ It goes without saying what happened: Carlos Argentino won second place in the National Prize for Literature.2 The first prize went to Dr. Aita; third, to Dr. Mario Bonfanti; incredibly, my own work The Sharper’s Cards did not earn a single vote. Once more, incomprehension and envy triumphed! I have not managed to see Daneri for quite a long time; the newspapers say he’ll soon be giving us another volume. His happy pen (belabored no longer by the Aleph) has been consecrated to setting the compendia of Dr. Acevedo Diaz to verse.

  There are two observations that I wish to add: one, with regard to the nature of the Aleph; the other, with respect to its name. Let me begin with the latter: ‘aleph,’ as well all know, is the name of the first letter of the alphabet of the sacred language. Its application to the disk of my tale would not appear to be accidental. In the Kabbala, that letter signifies the En Soph, the pure and unlimited godhead; it has also been said that its shape is that of a man pointing to the sky and the earth, to indicate that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher. For the Mengenlehre, the aleph is the symbol of the transfinite numbers, in which the whole is not greater than any of its parts. I would like to know: Did Carlos Argentino choose that name, or did he read it, applied to another point at which all points converge, in one of the innumerable texts revealed to him by the Aleph in his house? Incredible as it may seem, I believe that there is (or was) another Aleph; I believe that the Aleph of Calle Garay was a false Aleph.

  Let me state my reasons. In 1867, Captain Burton was the British consul in Brazil; in July of 1942, Pedro Henriquez Ureña discovered a manuscript by Burton in a library in Santos, and in this manuscript Burton discussed the mirror attributed in the East to Iskandar dhu-al-Qarnayn, or Alexander the Great of Macedonia. In this glass, Burton said, the entire universe was reflected. Burton mentions other similar artifices – the sevenfold goblet of Kai Khosru; the mirror that Tariq ibn-Ziyad found in a tower (1001 Nights, 272); the mirror that Lucian of Samosata examined on the moon (True History, I:26); the specular spear attributed by the first book of Capella’s Satyricon to Jupiter; Merlin’s universal mirror, ‘round and hollow and…[that] seem’d a world of glas’ (Faerie Queene, III:2, 19) – and then adds these curious words: ‘But all the foregoing (besides sharing the defect of not existing) are mere optical instruments. The faithful who come to the Amr mosque in Cairo, know very well that the universe lies inside one of the stone columns that surround the central courtyard…No one, of course, can see it, but those who put their ear to the surface claim to hear, within a short time, the bustling rumour of it…The mosque dates to the seventh century; the columns were taken from other, pre-Islamic, temples, for as ibn-Khalduun has written: In the republics founded by nomads, the attendance of foreigners is essential for all those things that bear upon masonry.’

  Does that Aleph exist, within the heart of a stone? Did I see it when I saw all things, and then forget it? Our minds are permeable to forgetfulness; I myself am distorting and losing, through the tragic erosion of the years, the features of Beatriz.

  For Estela Canto

  A Child in the Bush of Ghosts

  Olympe Bhêly-Quénum

  Olympe Bhêly-Quénum (1928–) is a Beninese writer, journalist, literary critic, and researcher. Born in Ouidah, Benin, Bhêly-Quénum won the Grand prix littéraire de l’Afrique noire for Le Chant du lac in 1966. He moved to France in the late 1940s and lives there today. In the 1960s he served as the editor-in-chief of the African magazine L’Afrique Actuelle and then served with UNESCO. His stories and novels originally written in French have been translated into English, German, Czech, and Japanese.
‘A Child in the Bush of Ghosts’ (1950) is a ghost story, perhaps, but also a surreal vision; André Breton famously called the story ‘du rêve a l’état brut’ (dream of the raw).

  When I was eleven years old, one of my uncles one day took me along with him to his farm. His name was Akpoto. He was a handsome man with large black eyes, sturdy and distinguished-looking. We had set out early, and yet the African morning sun had beaten us to it. We had covered more than thirteen kilometers on the district council road; then we had taken the pathway that led to Houêto. A small river, fordable at any time of day, cut across the path of fine golden sand which meandered through a high and dense forest.

  We had crossed the river and continued walking on sand. I loved the softness of that sandy earth; its velvety surface pleasantly caressed the soles of my bare feet. But the joy I felt in walking on that path gradually gave way to fear as we penetrated ever more deeply into the forest. When we left the path for a sodden trail, I suddenly had a feeling that the humidity pervaded my whole body, and the sense of fear became intolerable. I therefore started pestering my uncle with little questions which were as irritating as they were foolish. I kept knocking against him, clung to his hand or moved clumsily in front of him and thus almost succeeded several times in making him fall…

  We were crossing a kind of clearing where the sky above remained invisible as in most of our forests. We had already walked too much. For how long? I can’t say. I was not yet going to school and, naturally, did not know any French, to the utter indignation of my father, the respectable primary school teacher, who always saw me as sickly and unable to stand the hustle and bustle of a school in session. As far as my uncle was concerned, he was able to determine the time of day from the position of the sun through a special kind of sensory perception, or rather intuition. Therefore after having raised his eyes in vain towards the arches of the towering trees hiding the sky from our eyes, he said to me in his gentle voice which I can still hear:

  ‘Wait for me here, I’ll be back in a short while.’

  He left me, plunging with big steps into the bush that stretched out as far as the eye could see. He had put a big orange and four guavas into my hands. Suddenly I felt dead tired. I was gripped by the urge to cry but controlled myself. I’ve never had much use for cry-babies. There is nothing I detest so much as giving unbridled expression to our sorrows. And I waited. Oh, I certainly waited more than I shall ever be able to wait again, but my uncle did not return. There was plenty of time for me to eat two guavas, then my orange, and then I waited again a very long time before munching my two remaining guavas.

  Worn out by the anxiety brought about by seeing nothing but the bush with its frightening calm around me, I sat down on the black forest earth and buried my face in my hands as if I never wanted to see any more of the place where I was. But as the humidity caught hold of me I had to rise again and I started walking without really having any idea of where I was going. I ought to have searched for the path we had followed until then but all my senses were gripped by panic and I marched like an automaton. I wished I could have given out a single scream, whistled, sung or talked loudly, or even just muttered something – anything to assuage the effect of the fear in me, anything to make me feel aware of my person or, simply, to give me the illusion that I still was myself, a human being, alive, finding myself there by chance, but I could not say anything…True to God, it is the only time I remember ever having felt fear.

  I walked on relentlessly, unable to rediscover the path covered with sand; neither did I see the river again, its waters rolling with a sweet music, but I suddenly noticed in front of me a big woman wrapped in a white lappa that concealed her face and covered her feet. She advanced towards me; my heart started pounding fast; I felt as if I were receiving heavy blows from a ram inside me that did not quite succeed in splitting my chest open. I started shouting, no, I would have liked to shout; I felt I was shouting but did not hear myself shouting. I wished I could see the earth opening under my feet but the humus refused to do my bidding.

  Only then did I concede defeat and stretched out my arms to the woman like a baby to its mother. To my surprise the woman passed me by in mute indifference. I looked back. She too had turned her head and before I had time to avert my eyes, she had already uncovered her face. I then saw something frightful: an emaciated face, the face of a fleshless skull, which made a horrid and repugnant grimace at me. I started running head over heels but glanced backwards from time to time. It was to no avail, for I constantly saw the person at a distance of twenty paces behind me, although she was not running.

  But my mad gallop did not last very long; for a few moments after that encounter I found myself right in front of the railroad tracks. My heart was thumping so violently that it seemed to be about to burst my chest. I looked back again and saw my uncle.

  ‘Where have you been? Why did you abandon me in the forest?’ I asked, staring at him in bleak reproach.

  He looked at me with pity because he read the anguish in my eyes; he told me, however, that he had not wasted any time at Houêto:

  ‘I ordered my farm labourers at once to catch the chickens you see here and went myself to dig out cassava tubers for your grandmother and great-aunt. As soon as the job was finished, I returned to the clearing and was greatly surprised not to find you. I then continued my return journey, looking everywhere. All of a sudden I heard a rustle in the bush to my left; at first I thought it was a deer but I changed my mind afterwards when I saw a human shape running helter-skelter; it was you. I could have called you but I preferred to follow you with my eyes, for we were moving along parallel lines. A single step, but a big one, separated me from you, my boy. And then, of course, I had nothing to fear for you, for the bush is not dangerous.’

  I felt sad at having brought him to the point where he thought he owed me an explanation. But on the other hand, my heart was still throbbing with anger and subdued sobs when I asked him in a trembling voice whether he had seen the river again.

  ‘Yes, of course. It was there even before our ancestors were born, and will certainly remain after we’re dead and gone.’

  ‘You may be right, but I did not re-cross it.’

  ‘What’s that you’re telling me? You must have forded it without noticing.’

  ‘But it’s true, uncle! I didn’t see the slightest trace of the river; just look at my legs and feet, they aren’t soaked like yours.’

  ‘You surprise me, Codjo!’

  ‘Let’s return to the clearing by the path that has brought me here, if you don’t believe me,’ I said with an assurance that today I find astounding on the part of the child I was.

  My uncle tucked his baskets with the cassava and chickens in them under some undergrowth, put me astride his shoulders and we took the path on which I had come, or rather the trail which perhaps would never have come into existence if I had not been the first human being who in my terrorized gallop had savagely flattened the grass along that line. We had arrived at the clearing, then at the farm much more quickly than we could have managed by walking on the sand-covered pathway. Akpoto was dumbfounded not to be obliged to pass the river he had been crossing for more than thirty-five years, the source of which he imagined to be somewhere in the forest. He put me down. My mouth felt dry. I quenched my thirst by drinking from a gourd, and this made me feel the freshness of the water and the pleasure of drinking it more keenly. Then we set out on the return journey, taking once more the kind of game-track I had discovered and which had become the fastest way to go to Houêto and back.

  ‘A walking skeleton, that sort of thing doesn’t exist. No dead man comes back to stay among the living; my grandmother and great-grandfather followed one another into death at a month’s interval; nobody’s ever told me that he has met them during the three years since they stopped coddling me.’ So went my train of thought, and I was convinced that my encounter with the skeleton was merely the result of a hallucination.

  Still, I wanted to make
sure it was only an illusion and, taking advantage of a moment when my parents’ watchfulness had flagged, I sneaked away from our compound where I was getting bored. I liked the open air, the solitude at the seaside or in the bush, and likewise the company of human beings who made no impositions on me but allowed me to make myself useful without feeling duty-bound to do so. In my parents’ house everything was offered to me on a golden platter; I was pampered and idle and felt my uselessness to the full.

  I reached the clearing again through the game-track and started searching for the source of the river. My mind was totally absorbed in the operation, perhaps because I was what my parents called ‘a self-willed child’, or perhaps also because I had an ulterior motive: to surprise my uncle by discovering the truth I wanted to find out. I therefore headed into the bush, slipping over pebbles, sinking into the spongy suction of the soft ground; skipping over creepers, crawling among thorns. In front of me appeared a big chameleon. We looked at each other for a good second and its skin visibly, and gradually, took on the colour of the indigo cloth tied around my neck, which I was wearing over my khaki shorts. At that moment I thought of my revered great-grandfather who in telling tales did not hide his predilection for the chameleon: ‘It rarely misses its destination because it knows how to adjust itself to its surroundings and never looks back.’