Part 14 (1/2)

”Of course they did,” said abu-al-Hasan, now become the apologist for a performance that he only barely recalled and that had irritated him considerably at the time. ”They spoke and sang and gave long boring speeches!”

”In that case,” said Faraj, ”there was no need fortwenty persons. A sin- gle speaker couldtell anything, no matter how complex it might be.”

To that verdict, they all gave their nod. They extolled the virtues of Arabic-the language used by Allah, they recalled, when He instructs the angels-and then the poetry of the Arabs. After according that poetry its due praise, abu-al-Hasan dismissed those other poets who, writing inCor- dobaor Damascus, clung to pastoral images and Bedouin vocabulary- outmoded, he called them. He said it was absurd for a man whose eyes beheld the wide Guadalquivir to compose odes upon the water of a well. It was time, he argued, that the old metaphors be renewed; back when Zuhayr compared fate to a blind camel, he said, the figure was arresting-but five hundred years of admiration had worn it very thin. To that verdict, which they had all heard many times before, from many mouths, they all likewise gave their nod.Averroes,however, kept silent. At last he spoke, not so much to the others as to himself.

”Less eloquently,” he said, ”and yet with similar arguments, I myself have sometimes defended the proposition argued now by abu-al-Hasan. In Alexandria there is a saying that only the man who hasalready committed acrime and repented of it is incapable of that crime; to be free of an erro- neous opinion, I myself might add, one must at some time have professed it. In hismu'allaqa, Zuhayr says that in the course of his eighty years of pain and glory many is the time he has seen destiny trample men, like an old blind camel; abu-al-Hasan says that that figure no longer makes us marvel. One might reply to that objection in many ways. First, that if the purpose of the poem were to astound, its life would be not measured in centuries but in days, or hours, or perhaps even minutes. Second, that a famous poet is less an inventor than a discoverer. In praise of ibn-Sharaf of Berkha, it has many times been said that only he was capable of imagining that the stars of the morning sky fall gently, like leaves falling from the trees; if that were true, it would prove only that the image is trivial. The image that only a sin- gle man can shape is an image that interests no man. There are infinite things upon the earth; any one of them can be compared to any other. Comparing stars to leaves is no less arbitrary than comparing them to fish, or birds. On the other hand, every man has surely felt at some moment in his life that destiny is powerful yet clumsy, innocent yet inhuman. It was in order to record that feeling, which may be fleeting or constant but which no man may escape experiencing, that Zuhayr's line was written. No one will ever say better what Zuhayr said there. Furthermore (and this is perhaps the essential point of my reflections), time, which ravages fortresses and great cities, onlyenriches poetry. At the time it was composed by him in Arabia, Zuhayr's poetry served to bring together two images-that of the old camel and that of destiny; repeated today, it serves to recall Zuhayr and to conflate our own tribulations with those of that dead Arab. The figurehad two terms; today, ithas four. Time widens the circle of the verses, and I myself know some verses that are, like music, all things to all men. Thus it was that many years ago, in Marrakesh, tortured by memories ofCordoba,I soothed myself by repeating the apostrophe which Abd-al-Rahman spoke in the gar- dens of al-Rusayfah to an African palm:

Thou too art, oh palm!

On this foreign soil...

”A remarkable gift, the gift bestowed by poetry-words written by a king homesick for the Orient served to comfort me when I was far away in Africa, homesick for Spain.”

ThenAverroesspoke of the first poets, those who in the Time of Igno- rance, before Islam, had already said all things in the infinite language of the deserts. Alarmed (and not without reason) by the inane versifications ofibn-Sharaf,he said that in the ancients and the Qur'an could all poetry be read, and he condemned as illiterate and vain all desire to innovate. The others listened with pleasure, for he was vindicating that which was old.

Muezzins were calling the faithful to the prayer of first light when Ave-rroesentered his library again. (In the harem, the black-haired slave girls had tortured a red-haired slave girl, butAverroeswas not to know that until evening.) Something had revealed to him the meaning of the two obscure words. With firm, painstaking calligraphy, he added these lines to the ma.n.u.script:Aristu [Aristotle]gives the name ”tragedy” to panegyrics and the name ”comedy” to satires and anathemas. There are many admirable tragedies and comedies in the Qur'an and the mu'allaqatof the mosque.

He felt sleep coming upon him, he felt a chill. His turban unwound, he looked at himself in a metal mirror.

I do not know what his eyes beheld, for no historian has described the forms of his face. I know that he suddenly disappeared, as though annihilated by a fire without light, and that with him disappeared the house and the unseen fountain and the books and the ma.n.u.scripts and the turtledoves and the many black-haired slave girls and the trembling red-haired slave girl and Faraj and abu-al-Hasan and the rosebushes and perhaps even the Guadalquivir.

In the preceding tale, I have tried to narrate the process of failure, the process of defeat. I thought first of that archbishop of Canterbury who set himself the task of proving that G.o.d exists; then I thought of the alchemists who sought the philosopher's stone; then, of the vain trisectors of the angle and squarers of the circle. Then I reflected that a more poetic case than these would be a man who sets himself a goal that is not forbidden to other men, but is forbidden to him. I recalledAverroes,who, bounded within the circle of Islam, could never know the meaning of the wordstragedy andcomedy. I told his story; as Iwent on, I felt what that G.o.d mentioned by Bur- ton must have felt-the G.o.d who set himself the task of creating a bull but turned out a buffalo. I felt that the work mocked me, foiled me, thwarted me. I felt thatAverroes,trying to imagine what a play is without ever having suspected what a theater is, was no more absurd than I, trying to imagineAverroesyet with no more material than a few s.n.a.t.c.hes fromRenan,Lane, andAsin Palacios.I felt, on the last page, that my story was a symbol of the man I had been as I was writing it, and that in order to write that story I had had to be that man, and that in order to be that man I had had to write that story, and so on,ad infinitum. (And just when I stop believing in him,”Averroes”disappears.)

The Zahir

In Buenos Aires the Zahir is a common twenty-centavo coin into which a razor or letter opener has scratched the letterN Tand the number2; the date stamped on the face is 1929. (In Gujarat, at the end of the eighteenth century, the Zahir was a tiger; in Java it was a blind man in the Surakarta mosque, stoned by the faithful; in Persia, an astrolabe that Nadir Shah or- dered thrown into the sea; in the prisons of Mahdi, in 1892, a small sailor's compa.s.s, wrapped in a shred of cloth from a turban, that Rudolf Karl von Slatin touched; in the synagogue inCordoba,according toZotenberg,a vein in the marble of one of the twelve hundred pillars; in the ghetto inTetuan,the bottom of a well.) Today is the thirteenth of November; last June 7, at dawn, the Zahir came into my hands; I am not the man I was then, but I am still able to recall, and perhaps recount, what happened. I am still, albeit only partially,Borges.

On June 6,Teodelina Villardied. Back in 1930, photographs of her had littered the pages of worldly magazines; that ubiquity may have had some- thing to do with the fact that she was thought to be a very pretty woman, al- though that supposition was not unconditionally supported by every image of her. But no matter-TeodelinaVillarwas less concerned with beauty than with perfection. The Jews and Chinese codified every human situa- tion: theMishnah tells us that beginning at sunset on the Sabbath, a tailor may not go into the street carrying a needle; the Book of Rites informs us that a guest receiving his first gla.s.s of wine must a.s.sume a grave demeanor; receiving the second, a respectful, happy air. The discipline that TeodelinaVillarimposed upon herself was a.n.a.logous, though even more painstaking and detailed. Like Talmudists and Confucians, she sought to make every ac- tion irreproachably correct, but her task was even more admirable and difficult than theirs, for the laws of her creed were not eternal, but sensitive to the whims of Paris and Hollywood. TeodelinaVillarwould make her en- trances into orthodox places, at the orthodox hour, with orthodox adorn- ments, and with orthodox world-weariness, but the world-weariness, the adornments, the hour, and the places would almost immediately pa.s.s out of fas.h.i.+on, and so come to serve (upon the lips of TeodelinaVillar)for the very epitome of ”tackiness.” She sought the absolute, like Flaubert, but the ab- solute in the ephemeral. Her life was exemplary, and yet an inner despera- tion constantly gnawed at her. She pa.s.sed through endless metamorphoses, as though fleeing from herself; her coiffure and the color of her hair were famously unstable, as were her smile, her skin, and the slant of her eyes. From 1932 on, she was studiedly thin.... The war gave her a great deal to think about. With Paris occupied by the Germans, how was one to follow fas.h.i.+on? A foreign man she had always had her doubts about was allowed to take advantage of her good will by selling her a number of stovepipe-shapedchapeaux.Within a year, it was revealed that those ridiculous shapeshad never been worn in Paris, and therefore were nothats, but arbitrary and unauthorizedcaprices. And it never rains but it pours: Dr.Villarhad to move toCalle Araoz*and his daughter's image began to grace advertise- ments for face creams and automobiles-face creams she never used and automobiles she could no longer afford! Teodelina knew that the proper ex- ercise of her art required a great fortune; she opted to retreat rather than surrender. And besides-it pained her to compete with mere insubstantial girls. The sinister apartment onAraoz,however, was too much to bear; on June 6, TeodelinaVillarcommitted the breach of decorum of dying in the middle of BarrioSur.Shall I confess that moved by the sincerest of Argen- tine pa.s.sions-sn.o.bbery-I was in love with her, and that her deathactu- ally brought tears to my eyes? Perhaps the reader had already suspected that.

At wakes, the progress of corruption allows the dead person's body to recover its former faces. At some point on the confused night of June 6, TeodelinaVillarmagically became what she had been twenty years before; her features recovered the authority that arrogance, money, youth, the awareness of being thecreme de la creme,restrictions, a lack of imagination, and stolidity can give. My thoughts were more or less these: No version of that face that had so disturbed me shall ever be as memorable as this one; really, since it could almost be the first, it ought to be the last. I left her lying stiff among the flowers, her contempt for the world growing every moment more perfect in death. It was about two o'clock, I would guess, when Istepped into the street. Outside, the predictable ranks of one- and two-story houses had taken on that abstract air they often have at night, when they are simplified by darkness and silence.

Drunk with an almost impersonal pity, I wandered through the streets. On the corner of Chile and Tacuari* I spotted an open bar-and-general-store. In that establishment, to my misfortune, three men were playingtruco*

In the rhetorical figure known asoxymoron, the adjective applied to a noun seems to contradict that noun. Thus, gnostics spoke of a ”dark light” and alchemists, of a ”black sun.” Departing from my last visit to TeodelinaVillarand drinking a gla.s.s of harsh brandy in a corner bar-and-grocery-store was a kind of oxymoron: the very vulgarity and facileness of it were what tempted me. (The fact that men were playing cards in the place in- creased the contrast.) I asked the owner for a brandy and orange juice; among my change I was given the Zahir; I looked at it for an instant, then walked outside into the street, perhaps with the beginnings of a fever. The thought struck me that there is no coin that is not the symbol of all the coins that s.h.i.+ne endlessly down throughout history and fable. I thought of Charon's obolus; the alms that Belisarius went about begging for; Judas' thirty pieces of silver; the drachmas of the courtesan La'is; the ancient coin proffered by one of the Ephesian sleepers; the bright coins of the wizard in the1001Nights, which turned into disks of paper; Isaac Laquedem's inex- haustible denarius; the sixty thousand coins, one for every line of an epic, which Firdusi returned to a king because they were silver and not gold; the gold doubloon nailed by Ahab to the mast; Leopold Bloom's unreturning florin; the gold louis that betrayed the fleeing Louis XVI near Varennes. As though in a dream, the thought that in any coin one may read those famous connotations seemed to me of vast, inexplicable importance. I wandered, with increasingly rapid steps, through the deserted streets and plazas. Weariness halted me at a corner. My eyes came to rest on a woebegone wrought-iron fence; behind it, I saw the black-and-white tiles of the porch ofLa Concepcion.*I had wandered in a circle; I was just one block from the corner where I'd been given the Zahir.

I turned the corner; the chamfered curb in darkness* at the far end of the street showed me that the establishment had closed. On Belgrano I took a cab. Possessed, without a trace of sleepiness, almost happy, I reflected that there is nothing less material than money, since any coin (a twenty-centavo piece, for instance) is, in all truth, a panoply of possible futures.Money is abstract, I said over and over,money is future time. It can be an evening just outside the city, or a Brahms melody, or maps, or chess, or coffee, or thewords of Epictetus, which teach contempt of gold; it is a Proteus more changeable than the Proteus of the isle of Pharos. It is unforeseeable time, Bergsonian time, not the hard, solid time of Islam or the Porch. Adherents of determinism deny that there is any event in the world that ispossible, i.e., that might occur; a coin symbolizes our free will. (I had no suspicion at the time that these ”thoughts” were an artifice against the Zahir and a first manifestation of its demonic influence.) After long and pertinacious mus- ings, I at last fell asleep, but I dreamed that I was a pile of coins guarded by a gryphon.

The next day I decided I'd been drunk. I also decided to free myself of the coin that was affecting me so distressingly. I looked at it-there was nothing particularly distinctive about it, except those scratches.

Burying it in the garden or hiding it in a corner of the library would have been the best thing to do, but I wanted to escape its...o...b..t altogether, and so preferred to ”lose” it. I went neither to the Basilica delPilarthat morning nor to the cemetery*; I took a subway toConst.i.tucionand fromConst.i.tucionto San Juan and Boedo. On an impulse, I got off at Urquiza; I walked toward the west and south; I turned left and right, with studied randomness, at several corners, and on a street that looked to me like all the others I went into the first tavern I came to, ordered a brandy, and paid with the Zahir. I half closed myeyes, even behind the dark lenses of my spectacles, and managed not to see the numbers on the houses or the name of the street. That night, I took a sleeping draft and slept soundly.

Until the end of June I distracted myself by composing a tale of fantasy. The tale contains two or three enigmatic circ.u.mlocutions-sword-water in- steadofblood, for example, anddragon's-bed forgold -and is written in the first person. The narrator is an ascetic who has renounced all commerce with mankind and lives on a kind of moor. (The name of the place is Gnita-heidr.) Because of the simplicity and innocence of his life, he is judged by some to be an angel; that is a charitable sort of exaggeration, because no one is free of sin-he himself (to take the example nearest at hand) has cut his father's throat, though it is true that his father was a famous wizard who had used his magic to usurp an infinite treasure to himself. Protecting this treasure from cankerous human greed is the mission to which the narrator has devoted his life; day and night he stands guard over it. Soon, perhaps too soon, that watchfulness will come to an end: the stars have told him that the sword that will sever it forever has already been forged. (The name of the sword is Gram.) In an increasingly tortured style, the narrator praises the l.u.s.trousness and flexibility of his body; one paragraph offhandedlymentions ”scales”; another says that the treasure he watches over is of red rings and gleaming gold. At the end, we realize that the ascetic is the serpent Fafnir and the treasure on which the creature lies coiled is the gold of theNibelungen.The appearance of Sigurd abruptly ends the story.

I have said that composing that piece of trivial nonsense (in the course of which I interpolated, with pseudoerudition, a line or two from theFafnis-mal) enabled me to put the coin out of my mind. There were nights when I was so certain I'd be able to forget it that I would willfully remember it. The truth is, I abused those moments; starting to recall turned out to be much easier than stopping. It was futile to tell myself that that abominable nickel disk was no different from the infinite other identical, inoffensive disks that pa.s.s from hand to hand every day. Moved by that reflection, I attempted to think about another coin, but I couldn't. I also recall another (frustrated) experiment that I performed with Chilean five- and ten-centavo pieces and a Uruguayan two-centavo piece. On July 16,1 acquired a pound sterling; I didn't look at it all that day, but that night (and others) I placed it under a magnifying gla.s.s and studied it in the light of a powerful electric lamp. Then I made a rubbing of it. The rays of light and the dragon and St.

George availed me naught; I could not rid myself of myidee fixe.

In August, I decided to consult a psychiatrist. I did not confide the entire absurd story to him; I told him I was tormented by insomnia and that often I could not free my mind of the image of an object, any ran- dom object-a coin, say.... A short time later, in a bookshop onCalleSarmiento,I exhumed a copy of Julius Barlach'sUrkunden zur Geschichte der Zahirsage(Breslau,1899).

Between the covers of that book was a description of my illness. The introduction said that the author proposed to ”gather into a single manage- able octavo volume every existing doc.u.ment that bears upon the supersti- tion of the Zahir, including four articles held in theHab.i.+.c.htarchives and the original ma.n.u.script of Philip Meadows Taylor's report on the subject.” Belief in the Zahir is of Islamic ancestry, and dates, apparently, to sometime in the eighteenth century. (Barlach impugns the pa.s.sages thatZotenbergat- tributes to Abul-Feddah.) In Arabic,”zahir” means visible, manifest, evi- dent; in that sense, it is one of the ninety-nine names of G.o.d; in Muslim countries, the ma.s.ses use the word for ”beings or things which have the ter- rible power to be unforgettable, and whose image eventually drives people mad.” Its first undisputed witness was the Persian polymath and dervish LutfAli Azur; inthe corroborative pages of the biographical encyclopedia t.i.tledTemple of Fire,Ali Azurrelates that in a certain school in s.h.i.+raz therewas a copper astrolabe ”constructed in such a way that any man that looked upon it but once could think of nothing else, so that the king commanded that it be thrown into the deepest depths of the sea, in order that men might not forget the universe.” Meadows Taylor's account is somewhat more ex- tensive; the author served the n.a.z.im of Hyderabad and composed the fa- mous novelConfessions of a Thug. In 1832, on the outskirts of Bhuj, Taylor heard the following uncommon expression used to signify madness or saintliness: ”Verily he has looked upon the tiger.” He was told that the refer- ence was to a magic tiger that was the perdition of all who saw it, even from a great distance, for never afterward could a person stop thinking about it. Someone mentioned that one of those stricken people had fled to Mysore, where he had painted the image of the tiger in a palace. Years later, Taylor visited theprisonsofthatdistrict; in the jail at Nighur, the governor showed him a cell whose floor, walls, and vaulted ceiling were covered by a drawing (in barbaric colors that time, before obliterating, had refined) of an infinite tiger. It was a tiger composed of many tigers, in the most dizzying of ways; it was crisscrossed with tigers, striped with tigers, and contained seas and Hi- malayas and armies that resembled other tigers.

The painter, a fakir, had died many years before, in that same cell; he had come fromSindor per- haps Gujarat and his initial purpose had been to draw a map of the world. Of that first purpose there remained some vestiges within the monstrous image. Taylor told this story to Muhammad al-Yemeni, of Fort William; al-Yemeni said that there was no creature in the world that did not tend toward becoming a Zaheer,1 l This is Taylor's spelling of the word.

but that the All-Merciful does not allow two things to be aZaheer at the same time, since a single one is capable of en- trancing mult.i.tudes. He said that there is always a Zahir-in the Age of Ig- norance it was the idol called Yahuk, and then a prophet from Khorasan who wore a veil spangled with precious stones or a mask of gold.

2.

Barlach observes that Yahuk figures in the Qur'an (71:23) and that the prophet is al-Moqanna (the Veiled Prophet) and that no one, with the exception of the surprising correspondent Philip Meadows Taylor, has ever linked those two figures to the Zahir.

He also noted that Allah was inscrutable.

Over and over I read Barlach's monograph. I cannot sort out my emo- tions; I recall my desperation when I realized that nothing could any longer save me; the inward relief of knowing that I was not to blame for my mis- fortune; the envy I felt for those whose Zahir was not a coin but a slab of marble or a tiger. How easy it is not to think of a tiger!, I recall thinking. Ialso recall the remarkable uneasiness I felt when I read this paragraph: ”One commentator of theGuishan i Razstates that 'he who has seen the Zahir soon shall see the Rose' and quotes a line of poetry interpolated into Attar'sAsrarnama('The Book of Things Unknown'): 'the Zahir is the shadow of the Rose and the rending of the Veil.' ”

On the night of Teodelina's wake, I had been surprised not to see among those present Sra. Abascal, her younger sister. In October, I ran into a friend of hers.

”Poor Julita,” the woman said to me, ”she's become so odd. She's been put into Bosch.* How she must be crushed by those nurses' spoon-feeding her! She's still going on and on about that coin, just likeMorena Sack-mann's chauffeur.”

Time, which softens recollections, only makes the memory of the Zahir all the sharper. First I could see the face of it, then the reverse; now I can see both sides at once. It is not as though the Zahir were made of gla.s.s, since one side is not superimposed upon the other-rather, it is as though the vi- sion were itself spherical, with the Zahir rampant in the center. Anything that is not the Zahir comes to me as though through a filter, and from a dis- tance-Teodelina's disdainful image, physical pain. Tennyson said that if we could but understand a single flower we might know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he was trying to say that there is nothing, however humble, that does not imply the history of the world and its infinite con- catenation of causes and effects. Perhaps he was trying to say that the visible world can be seen entire in every image, just as Schopenhauer tells us that the Will expresses itself entire in every man and woman. The Kabbalists be- lieved that man is a microcosm, a symbolic mirror of the universe; if one were to believe Tennyson,everything would be-everything,even the un- bearable Zahir.

Before the year 1948, Julia's fate will have overtaken me. I will have to be fed and dressed, I will not know whether it's morning or night, I will not know who the manBorges was.Calling that future terrible is a fallacy, since none of the future's circ.u.mstances will in any way affect me. One might as well call ”terrible” the pain of an anesthetized patient whose skull is being trepanned. I will no longer perceive the universe, I will perceive the Zahir. Idealist doctrine has it that the verbs ”to live” and ”to dream” are at every point synonymous; for me, thousands upon thousands of appearances will pa.s.s into one; a complex dream will pa.s.s into a simple one. Others will dream that I am mad, while I dream of the Zahir.

When every man on earth thinks, day and night, of the Zahir, which will be dream and which reality, the earth or the Zahir?

In the waste and empty hours of the night I am still able to walk through the streets. Dawn oftensurprises me upon a bench in the Plaza Garay, thinking (or trying to think) about that pa.s.sage in theAsrar namawhere it is said that the Zahir is the shadow of the Rose and the rending of the Veil. I link that p.r.o.nouncement to this fact: In order to lose themselves in G.o.d, the Sufis repeat their own name or the ninety-nine names of G.o.d until the names mean nothing anymore. I long to travel that path. Perhaps by thinking about the Zahir unceasingly, I can manage to wear it away; per- haps behind the coin is G.o.d.

ForWally Zenner

The Writing of the G.o.d

The cell is deep and made of stone; its shape is that of an almost perfect hemisphere, although the floor (which is also of stone) is something less than a great circle, and this fact somehow deepens the sense of oppression and vastness. A wall divides the cell down the center; though it is very high, it does not touch the top of the vault. I, Tzinacan, priest of the Pyramid of Qaholom, which Pedrode Alvaradoburned, am on one side of the wall; on the other there is a jaguar, which with secret, unvarying paces measures the time and s.p.a.ce of its captivity. At floor level, a long window with thick iron bars interrupts the wall. At the shadowless hour [midday] a small door opens above us, and a jailer (whom the years have gradually blurred) oper- ates an iron pulley, lowering to us, at the end of a rope, jugs of water and hunks of meat.

Light enters the vault; it is then that I am able to see the jaguar.

I have lost count of the years I have lain in this darkness; I who once was young and could walk about this prison do nothing now but wait, in the posture of my death, for the end the G.o.ds have destined for me. With the deep flint blade I have opened the breast of victims, but now I could not, without the aid of magic, lift my own body from the dust.