The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  The Aleph

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Translated into English by Andrew Hurley

  Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was an Argentine writer who became world-renowned for his short fiction. Among his most famous books are the collections Ficciones (1944) and The Aleph and Other Stories (1949). Borges gleefully dove into many different genres and modes of fiction, while creating tales uniquely his own. His use of traditionally nonfictional approaches camouflaged outrageously strange ideas. Although Borges was not a ‘weird’ writer per se, many of his short stories contain traces of the inexplicable. Borges stories appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction as well as literary journals while he was alive. ‘The Aleph’ (1945), featuring a version of Borges himself, is one of the master’s weird classics.

  O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a King of infinite space.

  Hamlet, II:2

  But they will teach us that Eternity is the Standing still of the Present Time, a Nunc-stans (as the Schools call it); which neither they, nor any else understand, no more than they would a Hic-stans for an Infinite greatnesse of Place.

  Leviathan, IV:46

  That same sweltering morning that Beatriz Viterbo died, after an imperious confrontation with her illness in which she had never for an instant stooped to either sentimentality or fear, I noticed that a new advertisement for some cigarettes or other (blondes, I believe they were) had been posted on the iron billboards of the Plaza Constitución; the fact deeply grieved me, for I realized that the vast unceasing universe was already growing away from her, and that this change was but the first in an infinite series. The universe may change, but I shall not, thought I with melancholy vanity. I knew that more than once my futile devotion had exasperated her; now that she was dead, I could consecrate myself to her memory – without hope, but also without humiliation. I reflected that April 30 was her birthday; stopping by her house on Calle Garay that day to pay my respects to her father and her first cousin Carlos Argentino Daneri was an irreproachable, perhaps essential act of courtesy. Once again I would wait in the half-light of the little parlor crowded with furniture and draperies and bric-a-brac, once again I would study the details of the many photographs and portraits of her: Beatriz Viterbo, in profile, in color; Beatriz in a mask at the Carnival of 1921; Beatriz’ first communion; Beatriz on the day of her wedding to Roberto Alessandri; Beatriz shortly after the divorce, lunching at the Jockey Club; Beatriz in Quilmes with Delia San Marco Porcel and Carlos Argentino; Beatriz with the Pekinese that had been a gift from Villegas Haedo; Beatriz in full-front and in three-quarters view, smiling, her hand on her chin…I would not be obliged, as I had been on occasions before, to justify my presence with modest offerings of books – books whose pages I learned at last to cut, so as not to find, months later, that they were still intact.

  Beatriz Viterbo died in 1929; since then, I have not allowed an April 30 to pass without returning to her house. That first time, I arrived at seven-fifteen and stayed for about twenty-five minutes; each year I would turn up a little later and stay a little longer; in 1933, a downpour came to my aid: they were forced to ask me to dinner. Naturally, I did not let that fine precedent go to waste; in 1934 I turned up a few minutes after eight with a lovely confection from Santa Fe; it was perfectly natural that I should stay for dinner. And so it was that on those melancholy and vainly erotic anniversaries I came to receive the gradual confidences of Carlos Argentino Daneri.

  Beatriz was tall, fragile, very slightly stooped; in her walk, there was (if I may be pardoned the oxymoron) something of a graceful clumsiness, a soupçon of hesitancy, or of palsy; Carlos Argentino is a pink, substantial, gray-haired man of refined features. He holds some sort of subordinate position in an illegible library in the outskirts toward the south of the city; he is authoritarian, though also ineffectual; until very recently he took advantage of nights and holidays to remain at home. At two generations’ remove, the Italian s and the liberal Italian gesticulation still survive in him. His mental activity is constant, passionate, versatile, and utterly insignificant. He is full of pointless analogies and idle scruples. He has (as Beatriz did) large, beautiful, slender hands. For some months he labored under an obsession for Paul Fort, less for Fort’s ballads than the idea of a glory that could never be tarnished. ‘He is the prince of the poets of la belle France,’ he would fatuously say. ‘You assail him in vain; you shall never touch him – not even the most venomous of your darts shall ever touch him.’

  On April 30, 1941, I took the liberty of enriching my sweet offering with a bottle of domestic brandy. Carlos Argentino tasted it, pronounced it ‘interesting,’ and, after a few snifters, launched into an apologia for modern man.

  ‘I picture him,’ he said with an animation that was rather unaccountable, ‘in his study, as though in the watchtower of a great city, surrounded by telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, the latest in radio-telephone and motion-picture and magic-lantern equipment, and glossaries and calendars and timetables and bulletins…’

  He observed that for a man so equipped, the act of traveling was supererogatory; this twentieth century of ours had upended the fable of Muhammad and the mountain – mountains nowadays did in fact come to the modern Muhammad.

  So witless did these ideas strike me as being, so sweeping and pompous the way they were expressed, that I associated them immediately with literature. Why, I asked him, didn’t he write these ideas down? Predictably, he replied that he already had; they, and others no less novel, figured large in the Augural Canto, Prologurial Canto, or simply Prologue-Canto, of a poem on which he had been working, with no deafening hurly-burly and sans réclame, for many years, leaning always on those twin staffs Work and Solitude. First he would open the floodgates of the imagination, then repair to the polishing wheel. The poem was entitled The Earth; it centered on a description of our own terraqueous orb and was graced, of course, with picturesque digression and elegant apostrophe.

  I begged him to read me a passage, even if only a brief one. He opened a desk drawer, took out a tall stack of tablet paper stamped with the letterhead of the Juan Crisóstomo Lafinur Library, and read, with ringing self-satisfaction:

  I have seen, as did the Greek, man’s cities and his fame,

  The works, the days of various light, the hunger;

  I prettify no fact, I falsify no name,

  For the voyage I narrate is… autour de ma chambre.

  ‘A stanza interesting from every point of view,’ he said. ‘The first line wins the kudos of the learnèd, the academician, the Hellenist – though perhaps not that of those would-be scholars that make up such a substantial portion of popular opinion. The second moves from Homer to Hesiod (implicit homage, at the very threshold of the dazzling new edifice, to the father of didactic poetry), not without revitalizing a technique whose lineage may be traced to Scripture – that is, enumeration, congeries, or conglobation. The third – baroque? decadent? the purified and fanatical cult of form? – consists of twinned hemistichs; the fourth, unabashedly bilingual, assures me the unconditional support of every spirit able to feel the ample attractions of playfulness. I shall say nothing of the unusual rhyme, nor of the erudition that allows me – without pedantry or boorishness! – to include within the space of four lines three erudite allusions spanning thirty centuries of dense literature: first the Odyssey, second the Works and Days, and third that immortal bagatelle that regales us with the diversions of the Savoyard’s plume…Once again, I show my awareness that truly modern art demands the balm of laughter, of scherzo. There is no doubt about it – Goldoni was right!’

  Carlos Argentino read me many another stanza, all of which earned the same profuse praise and comment from him. There was nothing memorable about them; I could not even judge them to be much worse than the first one. Application, resignation, and chance had conspired in their composition; the virtues that Daneri attributed to them were afterthoughts. I realized that the poet’s work had lain no
t in the poetry but in the invention of reasons for accounting the poetry admirable; naturally, that later work modified the poem for Daneri, but not for anyone else. His oral expression was extravagant; his metrical clumsiness prevented him, except on a very few occasions, from transmitting that extravagance to the poem.1

  Only once in my lifetime have I had occasion to examine the fifteen thousand dodecasyllables of the Polyalbion – that topographical epic in which Michael Drayton recorded the fauna, flora, hydrography, orography, military and monastic history of England – but I am certain that Drayton’s massive yet limited œuvre is less tedious than the vast enterprise conceived and given birth by Carlos Argentino. He proposed to versify the entire planet; by 1941 he had already dispatched several hectares of the state of Queensland, more than a kilometer of the course of the Ob, a gas-works north of Veracruz, the leading commercial establishments in the parish of Concepción, Mariana Cambaceres de Alvear’s villa on Calle Once de Setiembre in Belgrano, and a Turkish bath not far from the famed Brighton Aquarium. He read me certain laborious passages from the Australian region of his poem; his long, formless alexandrines lacked the relative agitation of the prologue. Here is one stanza:

  Hear this. To the right hand of the routine signpost

  (Coming – what need is there to say? – from north-northwest)

  Yawns a bored skeleton – Color? Sky-pearly. –

  Outside the sheepfold that suggests an ossuary.

  ‘Two audacious risks!’ he exclaimed in exultation, ‘snatched from the jaws of disaster, I can hear you mutter, by success! I admit it, I admit it. One, the epithet routine, while making an adjective of a synonym for “highway,” nods, en passant, to the inevitable tedium inherent to those chores of a pastoral and rustic nature that neither georgics nor our own belaureled Don Segundo ever dared acknowledge in such a forthright way, with no beating about the bush. And the second, delicately referring to the first, the forcefully prosaic phrase Yawns a bored skeleton, which the finicky will want to excommunicate without benefit of clergy but that the critic of more manly tastes will embrace as he does his very life. The entire line, in fact, is a good 24 karats. The second half-line sets up the most animated sort of conversation with the reader; it anticipates his lively curiosity, puts a question in his mouth, and then…voilà, answers it…on the instant. And what do you think of that coup sky-pearly? The picturesque neologism just hints at the sky, which is such an important feature of the Australian landscape. Without that allusion, the hues of the sketch would be altogether too gloomy, and the reader would be compelled to close the book, his soul deeply wounded by a black and incurable melancholy.’

  About midnight, I took my leave.

  Two Sundays later, Daneri telephoned me for what I believe was the first time in his or my life. He suggested that we meet at four, ‘to imbibe the milk of the gods together in the nearby salon-bar that my estimable landlords, Messrs. Zunino and Zungri, have had the rare commercial foresight to open on the corner. It is a café you will do well to acquaint yourself with.’ I agreed, with more resignation than enthusiasm, to meet him. It was hard for us to find a table; the relentlessly modern ‘salon-bar’ was only slightly less horrendous than I had expected; at neighboring tables, the excited clientele discussed the sums invested by Zunino and Zungri without a second’s haggling. Carlos Argentino pretended to be amazed at some innovation in the establishment’s lighting (an innovation he’d no doubt been apprised of beforehand) and then said to me somewhat severely:

  ‘Much against your inclinations it must be that you recognize that this place is on a par with the most elevated heights of Flores.’

  Then he reread four or five pages of his poem to me. Verbal ostentation was the perverse principle that had guided his revisions: where he had formerly written ‘blue’ he now had ‘azure,’ ‘cerulean,’ and even ‘bluish.’ The word ‘milky’ was not sufficiently hideous for him; in his impetuous description of a place where wool was washed, he had replaced it with ‘lactine,’ ‘lactescent,’ ‘lactoreous,’ ‘lacteal’…He railed bitterly against his critics; then, in a more benign tone, he compared them to those persons ‘who possess neither precious metals nor even the steam presses, laminators, and sulfuric acids needed for minting treasures, but who can point out to others the precise location of a treasure.’ Then he was off on another tack, inveighing against the obsession for forewords, what he called ‘prologomania,’ an attitude that ‘had already been spoofed in the elegant preface to the Quixote by the Prince of Wits himself.’ He would, however, admit that an attention-getting recommendation might be a good idea at the portals of his new work – ‘an accolade penned by a writer of stature, of real import.’ He added that he was planning to publish the first cantos of his poem. It was at that point that I understood the unprecedented telephone call and the invitation: the man was about to ask me to write the preface to that pedantic farrago of his. But my fear turned out to be unfounded. Carlos Argentino remarked, with grudging admiration, that he believed he did not go too far in saying that the prestige achieved in every sphere by the man of letters Alvaro Melián Lafinur was ‘solid,’ and that if I could be persuaded to persuade him, Alvaro ‘might be enchanted to write the called-for foreword.’ In order to forestall the most unpardonable failure on my part, I was to speak on behalf of the poem’s two incontrovertible virtues: its formal perfection and its scientific rigor – ‘because that broad garden of rhetorical devices, figures, charms, and graces will not tolerate a single detail that does not accord with its severe truthfulness.’ He added that Beatriz had always enjoyed Alvaro’s company.

  I agreed, I agreed most profusely. I did, however, for the sake of added plausibility, make it clear that I wouldn’t be speaking with Alvaro on Monday but rather on Thursday, at the little supper that crowned each meeting of the Writers Circle. (There are no such suppers, although it is quite true that the meetings are held on Thursday, a fact that Carlos Argentino might verify in the newspapers and that lent a certain credence to my contention.) I told him (half-prophetically, half-farsightedly) that before broaching the subject of the prologue, I would describe the curious design of the poem. We said our good-byes; as I turned down Calle Bernardo de Irigoyen, I contemplated as impartially as I could the futures that were left to me: (a) speak with Alvaro and tell him that that first cousin of Beatriz’ (the explanatory circumlocution would allow me to speak her name) had written a poem that seemed to draw out to infinity the possibilities of cacophony and chaos; (b) not speak with Alvaro. Knowing myself pretty well, I foresaw that my indolence would opt for (b).

  From early Friday morning on, the telephone was a constant source of anxiety. I was indignant that this instrument from which Beatriz’ irrecoverable voice had once emerged might now be reduced to transmitting the futile and perhaps angry complaints of that self-deluding Carlos Argentino Daneri. Fortunately, nothing came of it – save the inevitable irritation inspired by a man who had charged me with a delicate mission and then forgotten all about me.

  Eventually the telephone lost its terrors, but in late October Carlos Argentino did call me. He was very upset; at first I didn’t recognize his voice. Dejectedly and angrily he stammered out that that now unstoppable pair Zunino and Zungri, under the pretext of expanding their already enormous ‘café,’ were going to tear down his house.

  ‘The home of my parents – the home where I was born – the old and deeply rooted house on Calle Garay!’ he repeated, perhaps drowning his grief in the melodiousness of the phrase.

  It was not difficult for me to share his grief. After forty, every change becomes a hateful symbol of time’s passing; in addition, this was a house that I saw as alluding infinitely to Beatriz. I tried to make that extremely delicate point clear; my interlocutor cut me off. He said that if Zunino and Zungri persisted in their absurd plans, then Zunni, his attorney, would sue them ipso facto for damages, and force them to part with a good hundred thousand for his trouble.

  Zunni’s name impressed m
e; his law firm, on the corner of Caseros and Tacuarí, is one of proverbial sobriety. I inquired whether Zunni had already taken the case. Daneri said he’d be speaking with him that afternoon; then he hesitated, and in that flat, impersonal voice we drop into when we wish to confide something very private, he said he had to have the house so he could finish the poem – because in one corner of the cellar there was an Aleph. He explained that an Aleph is one of the points in space that contain all points.

  ‘It’s right under the dining room, in the cellar,’ he explained. In his distress, his words fairly tumbled out. ‘It’s mine, it’s mine; I discovered it in my childhood, before I ever attended school. The cellar stairway is steep, and my aunt and uncle had forbidden me to go down it, but somebody said you could go around the world with that thing down there in the basement. The person, whoever it was, was referring, I later learned, to a steamer trunk, but I thought there was some magical contraption down there. I tried to sneak down the stairs, fell head over heels, and when I opened my eyes, I saw the Aleph.’

  ‘The Aleph?’ I repeated.

  ‘Yes, the place where, without admixture or confusion, all the places of the world, seen from every angle, coexist. I revealed my discovery to no one, but I did return. The child could not understand that he was given that privilege so that the man might carve out a poem! Zunino and Zungri shall never take it from me – never, never! Lawbook in hand, Zunni will prove that my Aleph is inalienable.’

  I tried to think.

  ‘But isn’t the cellar quite dark?’

  ‘Truth will not penetrate a recalcitrant understanding. If all the places of the world are within the Aleph, there too will be all stars, all lamps, all sources of light.’