I have said that composing that piece of trivial nonsense (in the course of which I interpolated, with pseudoerudition, a line or two from the Fafnis-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 pass 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, I acquired a pound sterling; I didn’t look at it all that day, but that night (and others) I placed it under a magnifying glass 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 my idée 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 random object—a coin, say….A short time later, in a bookshop on Calle Sarmiento, I exhumed a copy of Julius Barlach’s Urkunden 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 manageable octavo volume every existing document that bears upon the superstition of the Zahir, including four articles held in the Habicht archives and the original manuscript of Philip Meadows Taylor’s report on the subjects.” Belief in the Zahir is of Islamic ancestry, and dates, apparently, to sometime in the eighteenth century. (Barlach impugns the passages that Zotenberg attributes to Abul-Feddah.) In Arabic, “zahir” means visible, manifest, evident; in that sense, it is one of the ninety-nine names of God; in Muslim countries, the masses use the word for “beings or things which have the terrible power to be unforgettable, and whose image eventually drives people mad.” Its first undisputed witness was the Persian polymath and dervish Lutf Ali Azur; in the corroborative pages of the biographical encyclopedia titled Temple of Fire, Ali Azur relates that in a certain school in Shiraz there was 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 extensive; the author served the Nazim of Hyderabad and composed the famous novel Confessions 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 reference 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 the prisons of that district; 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 Himalayas and armies that resembled other tigers. The painter, a fakir, had died many years before, in that same cell; he had come from Sind or perhaps 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 but that the All-Merciful does not allow two things to be a Zaheer at the same time, since a single one is capable of entrancing multitudes. He said that there is always a Zahir—in the Age of Ignorance 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 He also noted that Allah was inscrutable.
Over and over I read Barlach’s monograph. I cannot sort out my emotions; 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 misfortune, 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. I also recall the remarkable uneasiness I felt when I read this paragraph: “One commentator of the Gulshan i Raz states that ‘he who has seen the Zahir soon shall see the Rose’ and quotes a line of poetry interpolated into Attar’s Asrar Nama (“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 like Morena Sackmann’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 glass, since one side is not superimposed upon the other—rather, it is as though the vision 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 distance—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 rumble, that does not imply the history of the world and its infinite concatenation 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 believed that man is a microcosm, a symbolic mirror of the universe; if one were to believe Tennyson, everything would be—everything, even the unbearable 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 man Borges was. Calling that future terrible is a fallacy, since none of the future’s circumstances 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 pass into one; a complex dream will pass 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 often surprises me upon a bench in the Plaza Garay, thinking (or trying to think) about that passage in the Asrar Nama where it is said that the Zahir is the shadow of the Rose and the rending of the Veil. I link that pronouncement to this fact: In order to lose themselves in God, the Sufis repeat their own name or the ninety-nine names of God 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; perhaps behind the coin is God.
*1 This is Taylor’s spelling of the word.
*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, ha
s ever linked those two figures to the Zahir.
Jack Vance (1916–2013) was born and lived in California, and he worked as a bellhop, an electrician at naval seayards (including Pearl Harbor, leaving a month before the 1941 attack), a seaman with the United States Merchant Marine, a surveyor, and a carpenter before being able to write full-time in the 1970s. His first published story was “The World-Thinker” in the Summer 1945 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, and Vance would go on to publish dozens more stories and well over fifty novels, winning numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Edgar (for mystery stories), as well as the Science Fiction Writers of America Grandmaster Award, induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement. His first book was a collection of linked stories, The Dying Earth (1950), which includes “Liane the Wayfarer.” The book began a popular and influential series of stories and novels set in a far-future world where technology and science have long ago given way to magic. In an appreciation included in The Jack Vance Treasury (2007), George R. R. Martin wrote: “Vance has often been hailed, justifiably, as SF’s preeminent stylist, and it is certainly true that he has a wonderful gift for language, for words and names and colorful turns of phrase. His talents go well beyond that, however. For inventive plots, wry humor, knowing and ironic dialogue, and imaginative panache, he has no equal in or outside of our genre.”
LIANE THE WAYFARER
Jack Vance
THROUGH THE DIM FOREST came Liane the Wayfarer, passing along the shadowed glades with a prancing light-footed gait. He whistled, he caroled, he was plainly in high spirits. Around his finger he twirled a bit of wrought bronze—a circlet graved with angular crabbed characters, now stained black.
By excellent chance he had found it, banded around the root of an ancient yew. Hacking it free, he had seen the characters on the inner surface—rude forceful symbols, doubtless the cast of a powerful antique rune…Best take it to a magician and have it tested for sorcery.
Liane made a wry mouth. There were objections to the course. Sometimes it seemed as if all living creatures conspired to exasperate him. Only this morning, the spice merchant—what a tumult he had made dying! How carelessly he had spewed blood on Liane’s cockscomb sandals! Still, thought Liane, every unpleasantness carried with it compensation. While digging the grave he had found the bronze ring.
And Liane’s spirits soared; he laughed in pure joy. He bounded, he leapt. His green cape flapped behind him, the red feather in his cap winked and blinked…But still—Liane slowed his step—he was no whit closer to the mystery of the magic, if magic the ring possessed.
Experiment, that was the word!
He stopped where the ruby sunlight slanted down without hindrance from the high foliage, examined the ring, traced the glyphs with his fingernail. He peered through. A faint film, a flicker? He held it at arm’s length. It was clearly a coronet. He whipped off his cap, set the band on his brow, rolled his great golden eyes, preened himself…Odd. It slipped down on his ears. It tipped across his eyes. Darkness. Frantically Liane clawed it off…A bronze ring, a hand’s-breadth in diameter. Queer.
He tried again. It slipped down over his head, his shoulders. His head was in the darkness of a strange separate space. Looking down, he saw the level of the outside light dropping as he dropped the ring.
Slowly down…Now it was around his ankles—and in sudden panic, Liane snatched the ring up over his body, emerged blinking into the maroon light of the forest.
He saw a blue-white, green-white flicker against the foliage. It was a Twk-man, mounted on a dragon-fly, and light glinted from the dragon-fly’s wings.
Liane called sharply, “Here, sir! Here, sir!”
The Twk-man perched his mount on a twig. “Well, Liane, what do you wish?”
“Watch now, and remember what you see.” Liane pulled the ring over his head, dropped it to his feet, lifted it back. He looked up to the Twk-man, who was chewing a leaf. “And what did you see?”
“I saw Liane vanish from mortal sight—except for the red curled toes of his sandals. All else was as air.”
“Ha!” cried Liane. “Think of it! Have you ever seen the like?”
The Twk-man asked carelessly, “Do you have salt? I would have salt.”
Liane cut his exultations short, eyed the Twk-man closely.
“What news do you bring me?”
“Three erbs killed Florejin the Dream-builder, and burst all his bubbles. The air above the manse was colored for many minutes with the flitting fragments.”
“A gram.”
“Lord Kandive the Golden has built a barge of carven mo-wood ten lengths high, and it floats on the River Scaum for the Regatta, full of treasure.”
“Two grams.”
“A golden witch named Lith has come to live on Thamber Meadow. She is quiet and very beautiful.”
“Three grams.”
“Enough,” said the Twk-man, and leaned forward to watch while Liane weighed out the salt in a tiny balance. He packed it in small panniers hanging on each side of the ribbed thorax, then twitched the insect into the air and flicked off through the forest vaults.
Once more Liane tried his bronze ring, and this time brought it entirely past his feet, stepped out of it and brought the ring up into the darkness beside him. What a wonderful sanctuary! A hole whose opening could be hidden inside the hole itself! Down with the ring to his feet, step through, bring it up his slender frame and over his shoulders, out into the forest with a small bronze ring in his hand.
Ho! and off to Thamber Meadow to see the beautiful golden witch.
Her hut was a simple affair of woven reeds—a low dome with two round windows and a low door. He saw Lith at the pond bare-legged among the water shoots, catching frogs for her supper. A white kirtle was gathered up tight around her thighs; stock-still she stood and the dark water rippled rings away from her slender knees.
She was more beautiful than Liane could have imagined, as if one of Florejin’s wasted bubbles had burst here on the water. Her skin was pale creamed stirred gold, her hair a denser, wetter gold. Her eyes were like Liane’s own, great golden orbs, and hers were wide apart, tilted slightly.
Liane strode forward and planted himself on the bank. She looked up startled, her ripe mouth half-open.
“Behold, golden witch, here is Liane. He has come to welcome you to Thamber; and he offers you his friendship, his love…”
Lith bent, scooped a handful of slime from the bank and flung it into his face.
Shouting the most violent curses, Liane wiped his eyes free, but the door to the hut had slammed shut.
Liane strode to the door and pounded it with his fist.
“Open and show your witch’s face, or I burn the hut!”
The door opened, and the girl looked forth, smiling. “What now?”
Liane entered the hut and lunged for the girl, but twenty thin shafts darted out, twenty points pricking his chest. He halted, eyebrows raised, mouth twitching.
“Down, steel,” said Lith. The blades snapped from view. “So easily could I seek your vitality,” said Lith, “had I willed.”
Liane frowned and rubbed his chin as if pondering. “You understand,” he said earnestly, “what a witless thing you do. Liane is feared by those who fear fear, loved by those who love love. And you”—his eyes swam the golden glory of her body—“you are ripe as a sweet fruit, you are eager, you glisten and tremble with love. You please Liane, and he will spend much warmness on you.”
“No, no,” said Lith, with a slow smile. “You are too hasty.”
Liane looked at her in surprise. “Indeed?”
“I am Lith,” said she. “I am what you say I am. I ferment, I burn, I seethe. Yet I may have no lover but him who has served me. He must be brave, swift, cunning.”
“I am he,” said Liane. He chewed at hi
s lip. “It is not usually thus. I detest this indecision.” He took a step forward. “Come, let us—”
She backed away. “No, no. You forget. How have you served me, how have you gained the right to my love?”
“Absurdity!” stormed Liane. “Look at me! Note my perfect grace, the beauty of my form and feature, my great eyes, as golden as your own, my manifest will and power…It is you who should serve me. That is how I will have it.” He sank upon a low divan. “Woman, give me wine.”
She shook her head. “In my small domed hut I cannot be forced. Perhaps outside on Thamber Meadow—but in here, among my blue and red tassels, with twenty blades of steel at my call, you must obey me…So choose. Either arise and go, never to return, or else agree to serve me on one small mission, and then have me and all my ardor.”
Liane sat straight and stiff. An odd creature, the golden witch. But, indeed, she was worth some exertion, and he would make her pay for her impudence.
“Very well then,” he said blandly. “I will serve you. What do you wish? Jewels? I can suffocate you in pearls, blind you with diamonds. I have two emeralds the size of your fist, and they are green oceans, where the gaze is trapped and wanders forever among vertical green prisms…”
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