How nice to have a neighbor who speaks English, I said in English. From his indifferent expression, I surmised he hadn’t understood a word.
I’m preparing a National Encyclopedia, he answered. If you wouldn’t mind, I’d appreciate if you could tell me about some of the Anglo-Saxon working methods one of these days. I’ve heard a lot about Oxford and Webster’s, but I’m not able to read them. I know more things than a normal man of my age knows, but what I’ve learned is what no one teaches.
What use would Prestel’s book be to you, then? The labyrinths in there are designed to confuse, not to clarify.
I’m not so sure. For me, they’re paths that don’t allow one to retreat, or a way of moving without ever leaving the same spot. When we see the image of a labyrinth we think, erroneously, that its shape comes from the lines that draw it. It’s the opposite: the shape is in the blank spaces between these lines. Will you lend me the vade mecum?
Of course, I said. I’ll bring it down to you tomorrow.
I would have gone back up to my room to get it, but I’d arranged to meet El Tucumano at the Británico at one-thirty and I was already late. Since we’d met the Scandinavians, my friend had been obsessed with setting up an aleph show for tourists in the cellar and he needed to get Bonorino either out of the way or on board. The venture seemed ludicrous to me, but I was in fact the one who finally found the solution. The librarian was fanatical about order, and he’d notice if any one of his index cards had been moved. Beyond the fifth step, the little square cards, of varying colors and sizes, formed a spiderweb the design of which only he knew. If anyone so much as brushed one of them with their foot on the way down the steps, Bonorino would cry to the heavens and run off to get the police. El Tucumano had tried to approach the cellar several times without success. I, on the other hand, had managed to capture the old man’s interest by showing him an anthology I had with me, Índice de la nueva poesía americana, which contained three poems by Borges that had never appeared anywhere else: ‘The Guitar,’ ‘To Serrano Street’ and ‘Dusk,’ and the first version of ‘Dulcia linquimus arva.’ I imagined a scholar like Bonorino wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation of seeing how Borges gradually got rid of rhetorical impurities as he progressed from one draft to the next.
I waited for El Tucumano in the reserved room of the café. I liked to make out the silhouette of the palms and tipa trees in the Parque Lezama from there, and to imagine the great masonry urns in the Central Avenue, on clay pedestals with identical bas-reliefs depicting the goddess of fertility. The place was hostile in the early hours and no one dared walk through it. For me it was enough to know it was on the other side of the street. That park was the birthplace of Buenos Aires and spread out from its slopes over flat countryside, defying the ferocity of the southeasterlies and the voracious river mud. At night it felt more humid there than in other parts of the city, and people were stifled in the summer and chilled to the bone in winter. The Británico, however, managed to make it imperceptible.
In the middle of October the weather had been good, and I’d lost many hours of work listening to the waiter tell of the times of patriotic fervor, during the Falklands war, when the café had to call itself the Tánico, and enumerate the times Borges had stopped in for a glass of sherry, and Ernesto Sabato had sat at the very table I was occupying at that moment to write the first pages of his novel On Heroes and Tombs. I knew the waiter’s stories were mythologies for foreigners, and that Sabato didn’t have to go so far away to write when he had a comfortable studio in Santos Lugares, outside the city limits, with a huge library to which he could turn when he needed inspiration. Just in case, I never sat at that table again.
El Tucumano arrived half an hour late. I never went anywhere without my copy of Índice – for which any used book dealer would have paid five hundred dollars at that time – and a couple of books of postcolonial theory, with which I planned to analyse the concept of the nation by way of the tangos Borges mentioned. During the first few hours after midnight, however, my attention flew off in any direction, be it the Quilmes Cristal bottles or the double gins customers ordered, or the flank attack on the black king on the chessboard where two solitary old men battled. I emerged from my distraction when El Tucumano put a spherical prop in front of my eyes; it was about the size of a ping-pong ball, like a Christmas tree ornament. The surface was covered in tiny mirrors, some of them colored, and it sparkled in the lamplight.
The alé is more or less like this, no? he said with a swagger.
Perhaps it might be a good decoy for the unwary. Certain details fit Borges’ narration: it was a small iridescent sphere, however, its brilliance wasn’t intolerable.
More or less, I answered. We tourists will swallow any old baloney.
I tried playing around with Buenos Aires’ subterranean lexicon, but what came naturally to El Tucumano confused me. Sometimes, in the reflections I wrote for my thesis, one or another of these fleeting words would slip out. I’d get rid of it as soon as I noticed, because when I returned to Manhattan I would have forgotten them. The language of Buenos Aires shifted so quickly that the words appeared first and then reality arrived, and the words carried on when reality had already left.
According to El Tucumano, an electrician could illuminate the sphere from within or, even better, train a ray of halogen light on it to give a certain spectral appearance. I suggested that to increase the dramatic effect he could play a cassette of Borges listing what he saw in the aleph in his unsteady voice. He loved the idea:
See that, beastie? If it wasn’t for Don Sexotrix, we could be making a killing, we’d break Buenos Aires.
I couldn’t get used to El Tucumano calling me beastie, tiger, titan. I preferred the more affectionate names that sometimes slipped out when it was just the two of us. It didn’t happen very often, only when I begged him or showered him with gifts. Almost all our private moments were lost in discussions of strategies to exploit the false aleph, which El Tucumano, for some reason, saw as a brilliant business opportunity.
The following night I went to the cellar with the Prestel volume in hand. Standing by the banister, Bonorino was taking notes in an enormous notebook, the kind they use for accounts. I saw him copy a few phrases onto the colored index cards, which were piled on the second and third step: the green rectangles on the left, the yellow rhomboids in the middle, the red squares on the right. ‘I have in mind,’ he said, ‘the route of the Lacroze streetcar from Constitución to Cabildo, in 1930. The vehicles left the station and then went past the sleepy houses of the south, along Santiago del Estero Street, and Pozos, and Entre Ríos. Only when it reached the Almagro neighborhood did it veer off to the north, then covered in vegetable patches and vacant lots. It was another city, I’ve seen it.’
I kept admiring that display of topographical erudition, while Bonorino, pencil in hand, feverishly wrote down the route. I would have liked to verify if everything he said was true. I made a note in the book by John King I had with me: ‘Lacroze, line 4. Bonor. says streetcars were white with green stripe.’ The librarian poured what he knew out onto the index cards, but I could never figure out what his classification criteria were, what information went with which color.
For several minutes, with the Prestel open, I talked to him about the intricate mandalas outlined in the floors of French cathedrals: Amiens, Mirepoix and especially Chartres. He replied that the ones we had in front of our noses and let pass unnoticed were more fascinating. Since the conversation was going on for longer than I’d expected, I had the providential idea of inviting him to come to the Británico for a cup of tea, knowing he never went out. He scratched his bald head and asked me if I’d mind having it down there, in his little kitchen.
I instantly accepted, although I felt a twinge of guilt for delaying that night’s reading. When I got to the third step down to the cellar, I realized I couldn’t go any further. The cards were spread out all over the place, in such a strange order that they seemed alive an
d capable of imperceptible movements. Please, wait till I turn out the light, said Bonorino. Although the only lamp that illuminated the space was a twenty-five-watt bulb, further dimmed by the fly shit that covered it, the absence of that light was enough to make the stairs disappear completely. I felt a boneless hand take me by the elbow, dragging me downwards. I say dragging and I’m mistaken, because in reality I floated, weightless, while I heard around me a crackling that must have been the cards moving out of my way.
The librarian’s dwelling was miserable. Since the windows at street level were permanently shut since the episode with the cats, it was almost impossible to breathe. I’m sure that if someone were to try and light a match it would have gone straight out. I saw a shelf with ten or twelve books, among which I distinguished the Sopena thesaurus and a biography of Yrigoyen by Manuel Gálvez. The walls were covered from floor to ceiling with greasy papers, stuck one on top of the other like the pages of an almanac. There I saw drawings that perfectly reproduced the inner workings of a Stradivarius, or indicated how high voltage electricity was distributed from an iron nucleus, or duplicated a Querandí mask, or imitated systems of writing I’d never seen or imagined. They seemed like dispersed fragments of an endless dictionary.
I carefully observed his lair while Bonorino was busy leafing through Prestel’s thick volume. Over and over again I heard him say, looking at the drawing of the city of Jericho trapped in a labyrinth of ramparts and the mysterious Swedish labyrinth of Ytterholmen, this meaningless phrase: ‘If I want to get to the center I must not leave the edge, if I want to walk to the edge I cannot move from the center.’
Besides being shut up, the cellar was covered in films of dust that were stirred by the slightest provocation. At one end, beneath the window, I saw a dilapidated bedstead with a blanket of some indiscernible color. A shirt or two hung from nails in the few spots that hadn’t been invaded by the notes; beside the bed, two fruit crates served, perhaps, as stools or nightstands. The little bathroom had no door and consisted of a toilet and a sink, where Bonorino must have got all his water from because the kitchen area, smaller than a cupboard, had only a board and a gas camp stove.
Bonorino’s language contradicted his asceticism: it was florid, elliptical and, most of all, evasive. I never managed to get him to respond to my questions directly. When I wanted to know how he’d come to be living in the boarding house, he gave me a long sermon on poverty. With great difficulty I discovered the previous owner had been an arthritic Bulgarian aristocrat, to whom Bonarino read in the evenings from the few novels he got from the Monserrat library. I deduced this from a myriad of phrases among which I remember, because I wrote it down: ‘I had to skip from the felonies of Monsieur Danglars and Caderousse and didn’t stop until Inspector Javert fell into the mud of the Seine.’ I asked him if this meant he’d read The Count of Monte Cristo and Les Misérables in one sitting, impossible feats even for the insomniac teenager I’d been, and he answered with another riddle: ‘Nothing hard lasts forever.’
While we talked, I noticed that the floor underneath the bottom step was clean and clear, and I imagined that Bonorino often lay down there, flat on his back, as Borges’ story decreed. I assumed that this was how he contemplated the aleph and I felt, I confess, a despicable envy. It seemed unfair that this Quasimodo of a librarian had appropriated an object we all had a right to see.
The tea we drank was cold and after fifteen minutes of conversation I was fainting with boredom. Bonorino, though, was chatting away with enthusiasm, the way lonely people do. Patiently, I gradually plucked a few interesting facts from his luxuriant loquacity. That’s how I found out he’d never paid a cent for the hovel, so it would be easy to get him evicted. No one coveted the basement room, because it was an unhealthy cell, suitable only for storing tools and beverages. But if the aleph was still in that place, then it was worth more than the building, more than the whole block, and maybe as much as Buenos Aires, since it held all that the city was, is and would be. However, although I mentioned Borges’ story again and again, Bonorino avoided the subject and preferred to admire the beauty of the Seaver passage, remembering the gentle slope, the slate-roofed houses, the steps that went up to Posadas Street. He suggested we go for a walk there some time and I didn’t dare tell him the passage had disappeared decades before, when 9 de Julio Avenue was extended as far as the walls of Retiro.
I got to the Café Británico at two-thirty in the morning. Six or seven tables were occupied, double the usual number at that hour. I saw the regular chess players, a couple of actors on their way back from the theater and a failed songwriter who was tuning individual chords on his guitar. I noticed they were all moving nervously, like birds on the eve of an earthquake, but neither I nor anybody else would have been able to say why at that moment.
That night I made very little progress on my thesis and, when I realized it was all coming out badly, I tried to read a few books on postcolonial theory, but I couldn’t even concentrate enough to take notes. I couldn’t keep the idea of getting Bonorino out of the way so El Tucumano could set up his show out of my head. Although I did almost everything El Tucumano asked of me, what I really wanted was to have the cellar to myself. In my flashes of rationality, I realized the existence of the aleph was illusory. It was one of Borges’ fictions, which took place in a building that had been demolished over half a century ago. ‘I’m going crazy,’ I said, ‘I’ve got a screw loose.’
I shoved the idea away and it came straight back. Even against all notions of reality, I believed the aleph was below the last step of the cellar and that, if I lay down in a supine position on the floor, I’d be able to see it the way Bonorino saw it. Without the aleph, the librarian wouldn’t have been able to draw the inside of a Stradivarius with such precision or reproduce the moment when Borges and Estela Canto kissed in the Parque Lezama. It was an indestructible sphere fixed in a single point in the universe. If the boarding house was struck by lightning or Buenos Aires ceased to exist, the point would still be there, perhaps invisible to those who didn’t know how to see it but no less real for that. Borges had been able to forget. I was tirelessly tormented by it.
Until then my days had been routine and happy. In the afternoons I sat in the cafés and visited second-hand bookstores; in one of them I found a first edition of The Early Italian Poets, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, for six dollars, and Samuel Johnson’s book on Shakespeare published by Yale for a dollar fifty, because the covers were bent. Since before I arrived, unemployment was increasing unchecked and thousands of people were selling off their assets and leaving the country. Some hundred-year-old libraries were being sold by weight, and book dealers sometimes bought things without any idea of their value.
I also liked going to El Gato Negro Café, on Corrientes Street, where I was lulled by the aroma of oregano and paprika, or sitting by the window at El Foro to watch the young lawyers go past with their entourage of clerks. On Saturdays I preferred the sunny sidewalk terrace of La Biela, across from the Recoleta, where all the apt phrases that occurred to me for my dissertation were destroyed by the intrusion of mime artists and the frightening tango spectacles in the open space in front of the Church of Pilar.
Sometimes, around ten in the evening, I’d drop into La Brigada, in San Telmo. There was a market there that stayed open till late and it was old like the century we’d left behind. At the entrances, strings of Bolivian women were stationed with their colored outfits selling bags of mysterious spices that they spread out over a piece of cloth. Inside, in the maze of galleries, kiosks of toys bumped up against stalls selling buttons and lace, like in an Arab souk. The nucleus of the square was full of sides of beef hung from hooks beside heaps of kidneys, tripe and blood sausages. In no other place in the world have things kept the flavor they’d had in the past as much as in this Buenos Aires that was, however, no longer almost anything like what it once had been.
It’s always difficult to find a spot in La Brigada. To demonstrate that the meat
is tender, the waiters cut it with the edge of a spoon, and it’s worthwhile closing your eyes as the first bite touches your tongue, because that way the pleasure cleaves to the memory and stays in it. When I didn’t want to eat alone, I approached the tables of movie directors and actors and poets who congregated there, and asked if I could join them. I’d learned when it was appropriate and when not.
The heat began in November. Even the little kids who went from place to place with wheelbarrows full of old cardboard, to sell for ten centavos a kilo, got their sorrows out of their souls and whistled music so good you could lean your head back on it: the poor kids put their hands in their pockets and all they found was the good weather, which was enough to let them forget for a moment the scorching bed where they wouldn’t sleep that night.
When I got to La Brigada I saw a couple of young television actors at a table near the window. Valeria was with them and, from the drawings she was sketching for them on a piece of paper, it seemed like she was explaining some tango steps. I hadn’t seen her since the night of my arrival, but her face was unforgettable because she reminded me of my maternal grandmother. She greeted me with enthusiasm. I noticed she was bored and hoping someone would rescue her.
These two guys have to dance tomorrow in a film and they don’t even know the difference between a ranchera and a milonga, she told me. They both nodded, as if they hadn’t heard.
Take them to La Estrella or La Viruta or whatever that place is called tonight, I answered. I turned to the young men and told them: Valeria is the best. I saw her teach a bow-legged Japanese man. By three in the morning he was dancing like Fred Astaire.
She’s a lot older than us, one pointed out, stupidly. Older women don’t turn me on, so I can’t learn this way.
Old or young, we’re all the same size in bed, I said, copying Somerset Maugham or maybe Hemingway.
The conversation languished and for a few minutes Valeria tried to keep it lively by talking about The Swamp, an Argentine film that reminded her of the hysteria and negligence in her own family, and therefore continued to vex her. The young men, on the other hand, had left before it finished: Graciela Borges’ acting was divine, but we couldn’t handle so many dogs in every scene, they said. They were barking all the time, even the cinema smelled of dog shit.
The Tango Singer Page 7