When the end draws near, there no longer remain any remembered images; only words remain. It is not strange that time should have confused the words that once represented me with those that were symbols of the fate of he who accompanied me for so many centuries. I have been Homer; shortly, I shall be No One, like Ulysses; shortly, I shall be all men; I shall be dead.
Postscript (1950). — Among the commentaries elicited by the preceding publication, the most curious, if not the most urbane, is biblically entitled A Coat of Many Colors(Manchester, 1948) and is the work of the most tenacious pen of Doctor Nahum Cordovero. It comprises some one hundred pages. The author speaks of the Greek centos, of the centos of late Latinity, of Ben Jonson, who defined his contemporaries with bits of Seneca, of the Virgilius evangelizans of Alexander Ross, of the artifices of George Moore and of Eliot and, finally, of “the narrative attributed to the antique dealer Joseph Cartaphilus.” He denounces, in the first chapter, brief interpolations from Pliny (Historia naturalis, V, 8); in the second, from Thomas de Quincey(Writings, III, 439); in the third, from an epistle of Descartes to the ambassador Pierre Chanut; in the fourth, from Bernard Shaw (Back to Methuselah, V). He infers from these intrusions or thefts that the whole document is apocryphal.
In my opinion, such a conclusion is inadmissible. “When the end draws near,” wrote Cartaphilus, “there no longer remain any remembered images; only words remain.” Words, displaced and mutilated words, words of others, were the poor pittance left him by the hours and the centuries.
To Cecilia Ingenieros
Translated by James E. Irby
The Zahir
In Buenos Aires, the Zahir is a common ordinary coin wortli twenty centavos; the letters N T and the number 2 are notched by razor or penknife marks; 1929 is engraved od the obverse side. (In Guzerat, toward the end of the eighteenth century, a tiger was Zahir; in Java, it was a blind man in the Surakarta mosque, a man whom the Faithful stoned; in Persia, an astrolabe which Nadir Shah ordered sunk to the bottom of the sea; in the prisons of Madhi, about 1892, it was a small compass, wrapped in a strip of turban, which Rudolph Carl von Slatin handled; in the mosque at Cordoba, it was, according to Zotenberg, a vein running through the marble in one of the twelve hundred columns; in the Jewish quarter of Tetuan, it was the bottom of a well.) Today is the thirteenth of November; on the seventh of June, at dawn, the Zahir fell into my hands; I am not now the person I was on that day, but still I am able to remember, and perhaps even to relate, what happened. I am still, however partially, Borges.
Teodelina Villar died on the sixth of June. Around 1930, her various likenesses filled the smart reviews; this ubiquity probably contributed to the legend that she was beautiful, although not every one of her effigies unconditionally supported this hypothesis. In any case, Teodelina Villar was less interested in beauty than in perfection. The Hebrews and the Chinese codified the entire human condition; in the Mishnah it is written that, after sunset on Saturday, a tailor should not go out into the street with so much as a needle about him; in the Book of Rites it is stated that a guest should wear a grave air when accepting the first glass of wine, and adopt a happily respectful mien on taking the second. Teodelina Villar imposed on herself an analogous but even more minutely rigorous program. Like an adept of Confucius or of the Talmud, she sought irreproachable correctness in every act; her striving was more admirable than theirs, however, and sterner, for the norms of her credo were not eternal, but rather depended on the chance code of Paris or Hollywood. Teodelina Villar let herself be seen in the orthodox places, at the orthodox time, with the orthodox attributes, arid the orthodox boredom, but the boredom, the attributes, the time and the places all faded and became passe almost at once, and only served Teodelina Villar to define poor taste. She sought the Absolute, like Flaubert, but the Absolute in the momentary. Her life was exemplary, and yet an inner despair unremittingly gnawed her. She attempted continual metamorphoses, as if to flee from herself; the color of her hair and the forms of her hair-do were notoriously unstable. She was always changing her smile, her complexion, the slant of her eyes. Beginning in 1932 she was studiously thin. . . . The war gave her pause. How to follow the fashion when Paris was occupied by the Germans? A foreigner whom she had always distrusted took advantage of her good faith to sell her a lot of cylindrical hats; within the year she found out that these absurd creations had never been worn in Paris and therefore were not hats at all but arbitrary and unauthorized aberrations. Disasters never occur singly: Doctor Villar was forced to move to Calle Aráoz, and his daughter’s likeness came to decorate advertisements for creams and automobiles. (The creams which she applied to excess, the automobiles she no longer owned!) She knew that the exercise of her art required a fortune. She chose to retire rather than to bungle. Besides, it pained her to have to compete with giddy girls. The sinister apartment on Araoz proved too much for her to bear: on June 6, Teodelina Villar committed the solecism of dying in the southern suburbs. Shall I confess that, moved by the sincerest of Argentine passions—snobbism—I was enamored of her, and that her death moved me to tears? Perhaps the reader has already suspected as much.
At a wake, the progress of corruption causes the dead to recuperate their former faces. At some stage or other of the confused night of the sixth, Teodelina Villar magically became what she had been twenty years before; her features recovered the authority supplied by hauteur, money, youth, the awareness of crowning a hierarchy, a lack of imagination, a certain limitation, stolidity. I thought, more or less, thus: no version of this face, which had so unsettled me, will be as memorable as the one I now saw; better that it be the last, especially since it could have been the first. I left her lying rigidly among the flowers, her disdain of death achieving perfection. It was perhaps two in the morning when I went away. Outside, the predictable rows of one-and two-story houses had taken on the abstract air they assume at night, when shadow and silence simplify them. Inebriated with an almost impersonal pity, I roamed the streets. At the corner of Chile and Tacuari I saw that a wine shop was open. And in that wine shop—to my detriment—three men were playing cards.
The figure of speech known as oxymoron consists in applying to a word an epithet which seems to contradict the word itself: thus the Gnostics spoke of dark light, the alchemists of a black sun. To make my last visit to Teodelina Villar and then to go out and order a drink in a wine shop was a kind of oxymoron; I was tempted by the coarseness and ease with which I could do it. (The fact that a card game was in progress served to heighten the contrast.) I ordered a glass of orange brandy. In my change I was given the Zahir. I stared at it for a moment, and then I went out into the street, perhaps already feverish. It occurred to me that every coin in the world is a symbol for all the coins that forever glitter in history and in fable. I recalled the obol of Charon; and the obol which Belisarius sought; Judas’ thirty pieces; the drachmas of Lai’s, the courtesan; the ancient coin proffered by one of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus; the shining coins of the wizard of The Thousand and One Nights, which turned into paper circles; Isaac Laquedem’s inexhaustible penny; the 60,000 pieces of silver—one for each line of an epic poem—which Firdusi returned to a king because they were not gold; the gold piece which Ahab had nailed to the mast; Leopold Bloom’s irreversible florin; the louis d’or whose effigy informed against the fugitive Louis XVI close by Varennes. As in a dream the thought that every coin allows such illustrious connotations struck me as of a vast, if inexplicable, importance. I walked with increasing haste down deserted streets and through empty squares. Fatigue deposited me at some corner or other. I recognized a long-suffering iron fence. Behind it I saw the black and white tiles of the portico of the Church of La Concepcion. I had wandered about in a random circle. I now found myself a block from the wine shop where I had been given the Zahir.
I turned the corner. The dark octagonal window indicated from a distance that the shop was closed. In Calle Belgrano, I took a cab. Sleepless, obsessed, almost joyful, I refl
ected on how nothing is less material than money, inasmuch as any coin whatsoever (a twenty-centavo piece, let us say) is, strictly speaking, a repertory of possible futures. Money is abstract, I repeated, money is future time. It can be an evening in the suburbs, it can be the music of Brahms, it can be maps, it can be chess, it can be coffee, it can be the words of Epictetus teaching us to despise gold. Money is a Proteus more versatile than the one on the island of Pharos. It is unpredictable time, Bergsonian time, not the obstinate time of Islam or of the Portico. The de-terminists deny that there is such a thing as a single possible act in the world, that is, an act which might have happened. But a coin symbolizes our free will. (I did not yet suspect that these “thoughts” of mine were a stratagem I was opposing to the Zahir and the first form of its demoniacal influence.) I fell asleep after tenacious caviling, but dreamt I was a heap of gold coin guarded by a griffin.
The next day I decided I had been drunk. I also decided to be rid of the coin which so unnerved me. I looked at it: there was nothing out of the ordinary about it, except for the notched cuts. The best thing to do would have been to bury it in the garden or hide it in some corner of the library, but I was anxious to get out of its orbit. I preferred to lose it. I did not go, that morning, to the Church of El Pilar, nor to the cemetery; instead I went by subway to Con-stitucion, and from Constitucion to the corner of San Juan and Boedo. I got off, on an impulse, at Urquiza. I set out in a southwesterly direction. With studied lack of order I turned one corner and then another and another, and, in a street that looked to me like any other, I went into some dive or other, ordered a drink, and paid for it with the Zahir. I half closed my eyes, behind my dark glasses, and managed not to see the numbers on the houses nor the name of the street. That night I took a sleeping pill and slept easily.
The composition of a tale of fantasy served to distract me until the end of June. This tale involves two or three enigmatic periphrases: in place of blood I wrote sword’s water; gold is serpent’s bed. And the story is told in the first person. The narrator is an ascetic who has renounced all dealings with men and who lives in a kind of desert. (The name of this place is Gnitaheidr.) He leads a simple, candid life, and some people, therefore, consider him an angel; such a view is a pious exaggeration, for no man is free of sin. To go no further afield, our man has cut his father’s throat; true enough, the father was a famous wizard and had gotten his hands on an infinite treasure by the use of magical arts. Our man, then, has now dedicated his life to guarding this treasure from the insane greed of humankind. He stands watch day and night. Soon, perhaps too soon, his vigil will come to an end: the stars have revealed to him that the sword which will cut it short has already been forged. (The name of the sword is Gram.) In an increasingly tortuous style, he considers the sheen and suppleness of his own body; in some paragraph or other he speaks distractedly of body scales; in still another he states that the treasure he guards is a hoard of fulgent gold and reddish rings. Finally we realize that the ascetic is the serpent Fafnir and that the treasure on which he lies is the Treasure of the Nibelungs. The appearance of Sigurd brings the story to an abrupt end.
As I have already said, the composition of this trifle (in the course of whose narrative I intercalated, with pseudo-erudition, an occasional line from the Fáfnismál) allowed me to forget the existence of the coin. Some nights I felt so sure of being able to forget it, that I voluntarily summoned it to mind. The truth is that I overdid these intervals: it proved easier to start the process than to put an end to it. In vain did I repeat that this abominable nickel disc differed in no wise from all those others that are passed from hand to hand, all alike, infinite and inoffensive. Impelled by this reflection, I strove to think of another coin, but was unable. I remember, too, some frustrating experiments with Chilean five- and ten-centavo coins and with an Uruguayan vinten. On the sixteenth of July, I acquired a pound sterling; I did not look at it all day long, but that night (and many others) I placed it under a magnifying glass and studied it by the light of a powerful electric lamp. Then, with a pencil, I traced it on paper. Neither the bright gold of the coin nor the dragon of St. George was any use: I could not get rid of my obsession.
Sometime in August I made up my mind to consult a psychiatrist. I did not tell him the whole ridiculous story; I simply said that I was tormented by insomnia and that I was often haunted by the image of some object or other; the image, for example, of a poker chip or of a coin. . . . Shortly afterward, in a book shop in Calle Sarmiento, I dug up a copy of Julius Barlach’s Urkunden zur Geschichte der Zahirsage (Breslau, 1899).
My ill was described in that book. According to the prologue the author proposed “to gather into one handy octavo volume all the documents relating to the superstition of the Zahir, including four items from the Habicht archives and the original manuscript of the Philip Meadows Taylor report.” The belief in the Zahir is Islamic and apparently dates from the eighteenth century. (Barlach calls into question the passages which Zotenburg attributes to Abul-feda.) In Arabic, Zahir means notorious, visible; in this sense, it is one of the ninety-nine names of God; in Moslem lands, the people use it to designate “beings or things which possess the terrible virtue of being unforgettable, and whose image finally drives people mad.” Our first irrefutable testimony on this head comes from the Persian Lutif Alí Azur. This polygraph and dervish wrote, in the punctilious pages of the biographical encyclopedia titled Temple of Fire, that in a school at Shiraz there was a copper astrolabe “fashioned in such wise that whoever looked at it even once could afterwards think of nothing else, whereupon the King ordered it thrown into the deepest part of the sea, lest men forget the universe.” The account furnished by Meadows Taylor—who was in the service of the Nizam of Hyderabad and wrote the well-known Confessions of a Thug—is more extensive. Around 1832, in the outskirts of Bhuj, Taylor heard the unusual phrase “Verily he has looked on the Tiger,” by way of signifying madness or sanctity. He was told that the reference was to a magic tiger, a tiger which had signified the ruin of whoever had looked on it, even if it had been from afar, for the beholder was left sunken in thought until the end of his days. Someone said that one of these unfortunates had fled to Mysore, where he had painted the figure of the tiger in a palace. Years later, Taylor visited the prisons of this kingdom; at Nittur, the governor showed him a cell on whose floor, walls, and vaulting a Moslem fakir had designed—in barbaric colors which time was mellowing before their complete erasure—a species of infinite Tiger. This Tiger was made up of many tigers fused in the most vertiginous manner: this Tiger was traversed by tigers, striped with tigers, and encompassed seas and armies and Himalayas resembling tigers. The painter had died years before in this same cell; he had come from Sind or perhaps Guzerat and his initial idea had been to trace out a map of the world. Some vestiges of this intent were to be seen in the monstrous image. Taylor recounted the story to Mohammad Al-Yemeni, of Fort William. This man told him that every created being tends toward Zaheer30 but that the All-Merciful does not allow two things to be Zaheer at the same time inasmuch as one alone is enough to fascinate a multitude; he added that there is always a Zaheer, that in the Age of Ignorance it was the idol called Yauq, and that later it was a prophet from Jorasan who used to wear a veil embroidered with stones or a mask of gold;31 he also said that God is inscrutable.
I read Barlach’s monograph several times. I need not publicly plumb the depth of my feelings; I recall my despair when I realized that nothing could save me now, my essential relief in knowing that I was not to blame for my misfortune, the envy I felt toward those whose Zahir was not a coin but a fragment of marble or a tiger. How easy to avoid thinking about a tiger! I also recall the singular anxiety with which I read the following paragraph: “A commentator on the Gulshan i Raz declares that whoever has laid eyes on the Zahir will soon see the Rose, and he cites a line of verse interpolated into Attar’s Asrar Nama (Book of Things Unknown): The Zahir is the shadow of the Rose and the rending of the Veil.’ �
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Collected Stories Page 42
