“Beatriz, Beatriz Elena, Beatriz Elena Viterbo, beloved Beatriz, Beatriz lost forever, it’s me, Borges.”
A little later Carlos came in. He spoke with a certain dryness. I understood that he was incapable of thinking of anything but the loss of the Aleph.
“A glass of the pseudo-cognac,” he ordered, “and then you can duck into the cellar. As you already know, the dorsal decubitus is imperative. And so are darkness, immobility, and a certain ocular accommodation. You lie down on the tile floor and fix your eyes on the nineteenth step of the pertinent stairs. I leave, lower the trap door, and you’re alone. Quite likely—it should be easy!—some rodent will scare you! In a few minutes you will see the Aleph. The microcosm of alchemists and cabalists, our proverbial concrete friend, the multum in parvo!”
Once we were in the dining room he added:
“Of course if you don’t see it, your incapacity in no way invalidates my testimony. . . . Now, down with you. Very shortly you will be able to engage in a dialogue with all of the images of Beatriz.”
I rapidly descended, tired of his insubstantial words. The cellar, barely wider than the stairs, had much of a well about it. I gazed about in search of the trunk of which Carlos Argentino had spoken. Some cases with bottles in them and some canvas bags cluttered one corner. Carlos picked up one of the bags, folded it in half and placed it exactly in a precise spot.
“A humble pillow,” he explained, “but if I raise it one centimeter, you won’t see a thing, and you’ll be left abashed and ashamed. Stretch your bulk out on the floor and count off nineteen steps.”
I complied with his ridiculous requisites; and at last he went away. Carefully he closed the trap door; the darkness, despite a crevice which I discovered later, seemed total. And suddenly I realized the danger I ran: I had allowed myself to be buried by a madman, after having drunk some poison! Behind the transparent bravado of Carlos was the intimate terror that I would not see the prodigy; to defend his delirium, to avoid knowing that he was mad, Carlos had to kill me. A confused malaise swept over me; I attempted to attribute it to my rigid posture rather than to the operation of a narcotic. I closed my eyes; opened them. Then I saw the Aleph.
I arrive, now, at the ineffable center of my story. And here begins my despair as a writer. All language is an alphabet of symbols whose use presupposes a past shared by all the other interlocutors. How, then, transmit to others the infinite Aleph, which my fearful mind scarcely encompasses? The mystics, in similar situations, are lavish with emblems: to signify the divinity, a Persian speaks of a bird that in some way is all birds; Alanus de Insulis speaks of a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of an angel with four faces who looks simultaneously to the Orient and the Occident, to the North and the South. (Not vainly do I recall these inconceivable analogies; they bear some relation to the Aleph.) Perhaps the gods would not be against my finding an equivalent image, but then this report would be contaminated with literature, with falsehood. For the rest, the central problem is unsolvable: the enumeration, even if only partial, of an infinite complex. In that gigantic instant I saw millions of delightful and atrocious acts; none astonished me more than the fact that all of them together occupied the same point, without superposition and without transparency. What my eyes saw was simultaneous: what I shall transcribe is successive, because language is successive. Nevertheless, I shall cull something of it all.
In the lower part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere, of almost intolerable brilliance. At first I thought it rotary; then I understood that this movement was an illusion produced by the vertiginous sights it enclosed. The Aleph’s diameter must have been about two or three centimeters, but Cosmic Space was in it, without diminution of size. Each object (the mirror’s glass, for instance) was infinite objects, for I clearly saw it from all points in the universe. I saw the heavy-laden sea; I saw the dawn and the dusk; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silver-plated cobweb at the center of a black pyramid; I saw a tattered labyrinth (it was London); I saw interminable eyes nearby looking at me as if in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors in the planet and none reflected me; in an inner patio in the Calle Soler I saw the same paving tile I had seen thirty years before in the entranceway to a house in the town of Fray Bentos; I saw clusters of grapes, snow, tobacco, veins of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and every grain of sand in them; I saw a woman at Inverness whom I shall not forget: I saw her violent switch of hair, her proud body, the cancer in her breast; I saw a circle of dry land on a sidewalk where formerly there had been a tree; I saw a villa in Adrogue; I saw a copy of the first English version of Pliny, by Philemon Holland, and saw simultaneously every letter on every page (as a boy I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get mixed up and lost in the course of a night); I saw night and day contemporaneously; I saw a sunset in Queretaro which seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal; I saw my bedroom with nobody in it; I saw in a study in Alkmaar a terraqueous globe between two mirrors which multiplied it without end; I saw horses with swirling manes on a beach by the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out post cards; I saw a deck of Spanish playing cards in a shopwindow in Mirzapur; I saw the oblique shadows of some ferns on the floor of a hothouse; I saw tigers, emboli, bison, ground swells, and armies; I saw all the ants on earth; I saw a Persian astrolabe; in a desk drawer I saw (the writing made me tremble) obscene, incredible, precise letters, which Beatriz had written Carlos Argentino; I saw an adored monument in La Chacarita cemetery; I saw the atrocious relic of v/hat deliciously had been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my obscure blood; I saw the gearing of love and the modifications of death; I saw the Aleph from all points; I saw the earth in the Aleph and in the earth the Aleph once more and the earth in the Aleph; I saw my face and my viscera; I saw your face and felt vertigo and cried because my eyes had seen that conjectural and secret object whose name men usurp but which no man has gazed on: the inconceivable universe.
I felt infinite veneration, infinite compassion.
“You must be good and dizzy from peering into things that don’t concern you,” cried a hateful, jovial voice. “Even if you rack your brains, you won’t be able to pay me back in a century for this revelation. What a formidable observatory, eh, Borges!”
Carlos Argentino’s feet occupied the highest step. In the half-light I managed to get up and to stammer:
“Formidable, yes, formidable.”
The indifference in the sound of my voice surprised me. Anxiously Carlos Argentino insisted:
“You saw it all, in colors?”
It was at that instant that I conceived my revenge. Benevolently, with obvious pity, nervous, evasive, I thanked Carlos Argentino for the hospitality of his cellar and urged him to take advantage of the demolition of his house to get far away from the pernicious capital, which is easy on no one, believe me, on no one! I refused, with suave energy, to discuss the Aleph; I embraced him on leaving, and repeated that the country and its quiet are two grand doctors.
In the street, on the Constitucion stairs, in the subway, all the faces struck me as familiar. I feared that not a single thing was left to cause me surprise; I was afraid I would never be quit of the impression that I had “returned.” Happily, at the end of a few nights of insomnia, forgetful-ness worked in me again.
P.S. March 1, 1943
Six months after the demolition of the building in Calle Garay, Procusto Publishers did not take fright at the length of Argentino’s considerable poem and launched upon the reading public a selection of “Argentino Extracts.” It is almost needless to repeat what happened: Carlos Argentino Daneri received Second Prize, of the National Prizes for Literature.27 First Prize was awarded to Doctor Aita; Third, to Doctor Mario Bonfanti; incredibly, my book The Cards of the Cardsharp did not get a single vote. Once again incomprehension and envy won the day! For a long
time now I have not been able to see Daneri; the daily press says he will soon give us another volume. His fortunate pen (no longer benumbed by the Aleph) has been consecrated to versifying the epitomes of Doctor Acevedo Diaz.
I would like to add two further observations: one, on the nature of the Aleph; the other, on its name. As is well known, the latter is the name of the first letter of the alphabet of the sacred language. Its application to the cycle of my story does not appear mere chance. For the cabala, this letter signifies the En-Sof, the limitless and pure divinity; it has also been said that it has the form of a man who points out heaven and earth, to indicate that the inferior world is the mirror and map of the superior; for the Men-genlehre, it is the symbol of transfinite numbers, in which the whole is no greater than any of its parts. I wanted to know: Had Carlos Argentino chosen this name, or had he read it, applied to another point where all points converge, in some one of the innumerable texts revealed to him by the Aleph in his house? Incredible as it may seem, I believe there is (or was) another Aleph, I believe that the Aleph in the Calle Garay was a false Aleph.
Here are my reasons. Toward 1867, Captain Burton held the office of British Consul in Brazil. In July, 1942, Pedro Henriquez Urena discovered, in a library at Santos, a manuscript by Burton dealing with the mirror which the Orient attributes to Iskandar Zu al-Karnayn, or Alexander Bicornis of Macedonia. In its glass the entire world was reflected. Burton mentions other artifices of like kind: the septuple goblet of Kai Josru; the mirror which Tarik Ben-zeyad found in a tower (The Thousand and One Nights, 272); the mirror which Lucian of Samosata was able to examine on the moon (True History, I, 26); the diaphanous spear which the first book of Capella’s Satyricon attributes to Jupiter; the universal mirror of Merlin, “round and hollow . . . and seemd a world of glas” (The Faerie Queene, III, 2, 19). And he adds these curious words: “But the former (besides the defect of not existing) are mere instruments of optics. The Faithful who attend the Mosque of Amr, in Cairo, know very well that the universe is in the interior of one of the stone columns surrounding the central courtyard. . . . No one, of course, can see it, but those who put their ears to the surface claim to hear, within a short time, its workaday rumor. . . . The mosque dates from the seventh century; the columns come from other, pre-Islamic, temples, for as ibn-Khaldun has written: “In republics founded by nomads, the assistance of foreigners is indispensable in all that concerns masonry.’’
Does that Aleph exist in the innermost recess of a stone? Did I see it when I saw all things, and have I forgotten it? Our minds are porous with forgetfulness; I myself am falsifying and losing, through the tragic erosion of the years, the features of Beatriz.
—Translated by Anthony Kerrigan
The Immortal
Salomon saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.
Francis Bacon: Essays, LVIII
In London, in the first part of June 1929, the antique dealer Joseph Cartaphilus of Smyrna offered the Princess of Lucinge the six volumes in small quarto (1715-1720) of Pope’s Iliad. The Princess acquired them; on receiving the books, she exchanged a few words with the dealer. He was, she tells us, a wasted and earthen man, with gray eyes and gray beard, of singularly vague features. He could express himself with fluency and ignorance in several languages; in a very few minutes, he went from French to English and from English to an enigmatic conjunction of Salonika Spanish and Macao Portuguese. In October, the Princess heard from a passenger of the Zeus that Cartaphilus had died at sea while returning to Smyrna, and that he had been buried on the island of Ios. In the last volume of the Iliad she found this manuscript.
The original is written in English and abounds in Latinisms. The version we offer is literal.
I
As far as I can recall, my labors began in a garden in Thebes Hekatompylos, when Diocletian was emperor. I had served (without glory) in the recent Egyptian wars, I was tribune of a legion quartered in Berenice, facing the Red Sea: fever and magic consumed many men who had magnanimously coveted the steel. The Mauretanians were vanquished; the land previously occupied by the rebel cities was eternally dedicated to the Plutonic gods; Alexandria, once subdued, vainly implored Caesar’s mercy; within a year the legions reported victory, but I scarcely managed a glimpse of Mars’ countenance. This privation pained me and perhaps caused me precipitously to undertake the discovery, through fearful and diffuse deserts, of the secret City of the Immortals.
My labors began, I have related, in a garden in Thebes. All that night I was unable to sleep, for something was struggling within my heart. I arose shortly before dawn; my slaves were sleeping, the moon was of the same color as the infinite sand. An exhausted and bloody horseman came from the east. A few steps from me, he tumbled from his mount. In a faint, insatiable voice he asked me in Latin the name of the river bathing the city’s walls. I answered that it was the Egypt, fed by the rains. “Another is the river I seek,” he replied sadly, “the secret river which cleanses men of death.” Dark blood surged from his breast. He told me that his homeland was a mountain on the other side of the Ganges and that on this mountain it was said that if one traveled to the west, where the world ends, he would reach the river whose waters grant immortality. He added that on its far bank the City of the Immortals rises, rich in bastions and amphitheaters and temples. Before dawn he died, but I had determined to discover the city and its river. Interrogated by the executioner, some Mauretanian prisoners confirmed the traveler’s tale; someone recalled the Elysian plain, at the end of the earth, where men’s lives are perdurable; someone else, the peaks where the Pactolus rises, whose inhabitants live for a century. In Rome, I conversed with philosophers who felt that to extend man’s life is to extend his agony and multiply his deaths. I do not know if I ever believed in the City of the Immortals: I think that then the task of finding it was sufficient. Flavius, proconsul of Getulia, gave me two hundred soldiers for the undertaking. I also recruited mercenaries, who said they knew the roads and were the first to desert.
Later events have deformed inextricably the memory of the first days of our journey. We departed from Arsinoe and entered the burning desert. We crossed the land of the troglodytes, who devour serpents and are ignorant of verbal commerce; that of the garamants, who keep their women in common and feed on lions; that of the augyls, who worship only Tartarus. We exhausted other deserts where the sand is black, where the traveler must usurp the hours of night, for the fervor of day is intolerable. From afar, I glimpsed the mountain which gave its name to the Ocean: on its sides grows the spurge plant, which counteracts poisons; on its peak live the satyrs, a nation of fell and savage men, given to lewdness. That these barbarous regions, where the earth is mother of monsters, could shelter in their interior a famous city seemed inconceivable to all of us. We continued our march, for it would have been dishonor to turn back. A few foolhardy men slept with their faces exposed to the moon; they burned with fever; in the corrupted water of the cisterns others drank madness and death. Then the desertions began; very shortly thereafter, mutinies. To repress them, I did not hesitate to exercise severity. I proceeded justly, but a centurion warned me that the seditious (eager to avenge the crucifixion of one of their number) were plotting my death. I fled from the camp with the few soldiers loyal to me. I lost them in the desert, amid the sandstorms and the vast night. I was lacerated by a Cretan arrow. I wandered several days without finding water, or one enormous day multiplied by the sun, my thirst or my fear of thirst. I left the route to the judgment of my horse. In the dawn, the distance bristled up into pyramids and towers. Intolerably, I dreamt of an exiguous and nitid labyrinth: in the center was a water jar; my hands almost touched it, my eyes could see it, but so intricate and perplexed were the curves that I knew I would die before reaching it.
II
When finally I became untangled from this nightmare,
I found myself lying with my hands tied, in an oblong stone niche no larger than a common grave, shallowly excavated into the sharp slope of a mountain. Its sides were damp, polished by time rather than by human effort. I felt a painful throbbing in my chest, I felt that I was burning with thirst. I looked out and shouted feebly. At the foot of the mountain, an impure stream spread noiselessly, clogged with debris and sand; on the opposite bank (beneath the last sun or beneath the first) shone the evident City of the Immortals. I saw walls, arches, façades and fora: the base was a stone plateau. A hundred or so irregular niches, analogous to mine, furrowed the mountain and the valley. In the sand there were shallow pits; from these miserable holes (and from the niches) naked, gray-skinned, scraggly bearded men emerged. I thought I recognized them: they belonged to the bestial breed of the troglodytes, who infest the shores of the Arabian Gulf and the caverns of Ethiopia; I was not amazed that they could not speak and that they devoured serpents.
The urgency of my thirst made me reckless. I calculated that I was some thirty feet from the sand; I threw myself headlong down the slope, my eyes closed, my hands behind my back. I sank my bloody face into the dark water. I drank just as animals water themselves. Before losing myself again in sleep and delirium, I repeated, inexplicably, some words in Greek: “the rich Trojans from Zelea who drink the black water of the Aisepos.”
I do not know how many days and nights turned above me. Aching, unable to regain the shelter of the caverns, naked on the unknown sand, I let the moon and the sun gamble with my unfortunate destiny. The troglodytes, infantile in their barbarity, did not aid me to survive or to die. In vain I begged them to put me to death. One day, I broke my bindings on an edge of flint. Another day, I got up and managed to beg or steal ― I, Marcus Flaminius Rufus, military tribune of one of Rome’s legions ― my first detested portion of serpent flesh.
Collected Stories Page 40
