The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories

by Jeff Vandermeer; Ann Vandermeer

  ‘I’ll be right over. I want to see it.’

  I hung up before he could tell me not to come. Sometimes learning a fact is enough to make an entire series of corroborating details, previously unrecognized, fall into place; I was amazed that I hadn’t realized until that moment that Carlos Argentino was a madman. All the Viterbos, in fact…Beatriz (I myself have said this many times) was a woman, a girl of implacable clearsightedness, but there were things about her – oversights, distractions, moments of contempt, downright cruelty – that perhaps could have done with a pathological explanation. Carlos Argentino’s madness filled me with malign happiness; deep down, we had always detested one another.

  On Calle Garay, the maid asked me to be so kind as to wait – Sr. Daneri was in the cellar, as he always was, developing photographs. Beside the flowerless vase atop the useless piano smiled the great faded photograph of Beatriz, not so much anachronistic as outside time. No one could see us; in a desperation of tenderness I approached the portrait.

  ‘Beatriz, Beatriz Elena, Beatriz Elena Viterbo,’ I said. ‘Belovèd Beatriz, Beatriz lost forever – it’s me, it’s me, Borges.’

  Carlos came in shortly afterward. His words were laconic, his tone indifferent; I realized that he was unable to think of anything but the loss of the Aleph.

  ‘A glass of pseudocognac,’ he said, ‘and we’ll duck right into the cellar. I must forewarn you: dorsal decubitus is essential, as are darkness, immobility, and a certain ocular accommodation. You’ll lie on the tile floor and fix your eyes on the nineteenth step of the pertinent stairway. I’ll reascend the stairs, let down the trap door, and you’ll be alone. Some rodent will frighten you – easy enough to do! Within a few minutes, you will see the Aleph. The microcosm of the alchemists and Kabbalists, our proverbial friend the multum in parvo, made flesh!

  ‘Of course,’ he added, in the dining room, ‘if you don’t see it, that doesn’t invalidate anything I’ve told you…Go on down; within a very short while you will be able to begin a dialogue with all the images of Beatriz.’

  I descended quickly, sick of his vapid chatter. The cellar, barely wider than the stairway, was more like a well or cistern. In vain my eyes sought the trunk that Carlos Argentino had mentioned. A few burlap bags and some crates full of bottles cluttered one corner. Carlos picked up one of the bags, folded it, and laid it out very precisely.

  ‘The couch is a humble one,’ he explained, ‘but if I raise it one inch higher, you’ll not see a thing, and you’ll be cast down and dejected. Stretch that great clumsy body of yours out on the floor and count up nineteen steps.’

  I followed his ridiculous instructions; he finally left. He carefully let down the trap door; in spite of a chink of light that I began to make out later, the darkness seemed total. Suddenly I realized the danger I was in; I had allowed myself to be locked underground by a madman, after first drinking down a snifter of poison. Carlos’ boasting clearly masked the deep-seated fear that I wouldn’t see his ‘miracle’; in order to protect his delirium, in order to hide his madness from himself, he had to kill me. I felt a vague discomfort, which I tried to attribute to my rigidity, not to the operation of a narcotic. I closed my eyes, then opened them. It was then that I saw the Aleph.

  I come now to the ineffable center of my tale; it is here that a writer’s hopelessness begins. Every language is an alphabet of symbols the employment of which assumes a past shared by its interlocutors. How can one transmit to others the infinite Aleph, which my timorous memory can scarcely contain? In a similar situation, mystics have employed a wealth of emblems: to signify the deity, a Persian mystic speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alain de Lille speaks of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere; Ezekiel, of an angel with four faces, facing east and west, north and south at once. (It is not for nothing that I call to mind these inconceivable analogies; they bear a relation to the Aleph.) Perhaps the gods would not deny me the discovery of an equivalent image, but then this report would be polluted with literature, with falseness. And besides, the central problem – the enumeration, even partial enumeration, of infinity – is irresolvable. In that unbounded moment, I saw millions of delightful and horrible acts; none amazed me so much as the fact that all occupied the same point, without superposition and without transparency. What my eyes saw was simultaneous; what I shall write is successive, because language is successive. Something of it, though, I will capture.

  Under the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness. At first I thought it was spinning; then I realized that the movement was an illusion produced by the dizzying spectacles inside it. The Aleph was probably two or three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained inside it, with no diminution in size. Each thing (the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos. I saw the populous sea, saw dawn and dusk, saw the multitudes of the Americas, saw a silvery spider-web at the center of a black pyramid, saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), saw endless eyes, all very close, studying themselves in me as though in a mirror, saw all the mirrors on the planet (and none of them reflecting me), saw in a rear courtyard on Calle Soler the same tiles I’d seen twenty years before in the entryway of a house in Fray Bentos, saw clusters of grapes, snow, tobacco, veins of metal, water vapor, saw convex equatorial deserts and their every grain of sand, saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget, saw her violent hair, her haughty body, saw a cancer in her breast, saw a circle of dry soil within a sidewalk where there had once been a tree, saw a country house in Adrogué, saw a copy of the first English translation of Pliny (Philemon Holland’s), saw every letter of every page at once (as a boy, I would be astounded that the letters in a closed book didn’t get all scrambled up together overnight), saw simultaneous night and day, saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal, saw my bedroom (with no one in it), saw in a study in Alkmaar a globe of the terraqueous world placed between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly, saw horses with wind-whipped manes on a beach in the Caspian Sea at dawn, saw the delicate bones of a hand, saw the survivors of a battle sending postcards, saw a Tarot card in a shopwindow in Mirzapur, saw the oblique shadows of ferns on the floor of a greenhouse, saw tigers, pistons, bisons, tides, and armies, saw all the ants on earth, saw a Persian astrolabe, saw in a desk drawer (and the handwriting made me tremble) obscene, incredible, detailed letters that Beatriz had sent Carlos Argentino, saw a beloved monument in Chacarita, saw the horrendous remains of what had once, deliciously, been Beatriz Viterbo, saw the circulation of my dark blood, saw the coils and springs of love and the alterations of death, saw the Aleph from everywhere at once, saw the earth in the Aleph, and the Aleph once more in the earth and the earth in the Aleph, saw my face and my viscera, saw your face, and I felt dizzy, and I wept, because my eyes had seen that secret, hypothetical object whose name has been usurped by men but which no man has ever truly looked upon: the inconceivable universe.

  I had a sense of infinite veneration, infinite pity.

  ‘Serves you right, having your mind boggled, for sticking your nose in where you weren’t wanted,’ said a jovial, bored voice. ‘And you may rack your brains, but you’ll never repay me for this revelation – not in a hundred years. What a magnificent observatory, eh, Borges!’

  Carlos Argentino’s shoes occupied the highest step. In the sudden half-light, I managed to get to my feet.

  ‘Magnificent…Yes, quite…magnificent,’ I stammered.

  The indifference in my voice surprised me.

  ‘You did see it?’ Carlos Argentino insisted anxiously. ‘See it clearly? In color and everything?’

  Instantly, I conceived my revenge. In the most kindly sort of way – manifestly pitying, nervous, evasive – I thanked Carlos Argentino Daneri for the hospitality of his cellar and urged him to take advantage of the demolition of his house to remove himself from the pernicious i
nfluences of the metropolis, which no one – believe me, no one! – can be immune to. I refused, with gentle firmness, to discuss the Aleph; I clasped him by both shoulders as I took my leave and told him again that the country – peace and quiet, you know – was the very best medicine one could take.

  Out in the street, on the steps of the Constitución Station, in the subway, all the faces seemed familiar. I feared there was nothing that had the power to surprise or astonish me anymore, I feared that I would never again be without a sense of déjà vu. Fortunately, after a few unsleeping nights, forgetfulness began to work in me again.

  Postscript (March 1, 1943): Six months after the demolition of the building on Calle Garay, Procrustes Publishers, undaunted by the length of Carlos Argentino Daneri’s substantial poem, published the first in its series of ‘Argentine pieces.’ It goes without saying what happened: Carlos Argentino won second place in the National Prize for Literature.2 The first prize went to Dr. Aita; third, to Dr. Mario Bonfanti; incredibly, my own work The Sharper’s Cards did not earn a single vote. Once more, incomprehension and envy triumphed! I have not managed to see Daneri for quite a long time; the newspapers say he’ll soon be giving us another volume. His happy pen (belabored no longer by the Aleph) has been consecrated to setting the compendia of Dr. Acevedo Diaz to verse.

  There are two observations that I wish to add: one, with regard to the nature of the Aleph; the other, with respect to its name. Let me begin with the latter: ‘aleph,’ as well all know, is the name of the first letter of the alphabet of the sacred language. Its application to the disk of my tale would not appear to be accidental. In the Kabbala, that letter signifies the En Soph, the pure and unlimited godhead; it has also been said that its shape is that of a man pointing to the sky and the earth, to indicate that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher. For the Mengenlehre, the aleph is the symbol of the transfinite numbers, in which the whole is not greater than any of its parts. I would like to know: Did Carlos Argentino choose that name, or did he read it, applied to another point at which all points converge, in one of the innumerable texts revealed to him by the Aleph in his house? Incredible as it may seem, I believe that there is (or was) another Aleph; I believe that the Aleph of Calle Garay was a false Aleph.

  Let me state my reasons. In 1867, Captain Burton was the British consul in Brazil; in July of 1942, Pedro Henriquez Ureña discovered a manuscript by Burton in a library in Santos, and in this manuscript Burton discussed the mirror attributed in the East to Iskandar dhu-al-Qarnayn, or Alexander the Great of Macedonia. In this glass, Burton said, the entire universe was reflected. Burton mentions other similar artifices – the sevenfold goblet of Kai Khosru; the mirror that Tariq ibn-Ziyad found in a tower (1001 Nights, 272); the mirror that Lucian of Samosata examined on the moon (True History, I:26); the specular spear attributed by the first book of Capella’s Satyricon to Jupiter; Merlin’s universal mirror, ‘round and hollow and…[that] seem’d a world of glas’ (Faerie Queene, III:2, 19) – and then adds these curious words: ‘But all the foregoing (besides sharing the defect of not existing) are mere optical instruments. The faithful who come to the Amr mosque in Cairo, know very well that the universe lies inside one of the stone columns that surround the central courtyard…No one, of course, can see it, but those who put their ear to the surface claim to hear, within a short time, the bustling rumour of it…The mosque dates to the seventh century; the columns were taken from other, pre-Islamic, temples, for as ibn-Khalduun has written: In the republics founded by nomads, the attendance of foreigners is essential for all those things that bear upon masonry.’

  Does that Aleph exist, within the heart of a stone? Did I see it when I saw all things, and then forget it? Our minds are permeable to forgetfulness; I myself am distorting and losing, through the tragic erosion of the years, the features of Beatriz.

  For Estela Canto

  A Child in the Bush of Ghosts

  Olympe Bhêly-Quénum

  Olympe Bhêly-Quénum (1928–) is a Beninese writer, journalist, literary critic, and researcher. Born in Ouidah, Benin, Bhêly-Quénum won the Grand prix littéraire de l’Afrique noire for Le Chant du lac in 1966. He moved to France in the late 1940s and lives there today. In the 1960s he served as the editor-in-chief of the African magazine L’Afrique Actuelle and then served with UNESCO. His stories and novels originally written in French have been translated into English, German, Czech, and Japanese. ‘A Child in the Bush of Ghosts’ (1950) is a ghost story, perhaps, but also a surreal vision; André Breton famously called the story ‘du rêve a l’état brut’ (dream of the raw).

  When I was eleven years old, one of my uncles one day took me along with him to his farm. His name was Akpoto. He was a handsome man with large black eyes, sturdy and distinguished-looking. We had set out early, and yet the African morning sun had beaten us to it. We had covered more than thirteen kilometers on the district council road; then we had taken the pathway that led to Houêto. A small river, fordable at any time of day, cut across the path of fine golden sand which meandered through a high and dense forest.

  We had crossed the river and continued walking on sand. I loved the softness of that sandy earth; its velvety surface pleasantly caressed the soles of my bare feet. But the joy I felt in walking on that path gradually gave way to fear as we penetrated ever more deeply into the forest. When we left the path for a sodden trail, I suddenly had a feeling that the humidity pervaded my whole body, and the sense of fear became intolerable. I therefore started pestering my uncle with little questions which were as irritating as they were foolish. I kept knocking against him, clung to his hand or moved clumsily in front of him and thus almost succeeded several times in making him fall…

  We were crossing a kind of clearing where the sky above remained invisible as in most of our forests. We had already walked too much. For how long? I can’t say. I was not yet going to school and, naturally, did not know any French, to the utter indignation of my father, the respectable primary school teacher, who always saw me as sickly and unable to stand the hustle and bustle of a school in session. As far as my uncle was concerned, he was able to determine the time of day from the position of the sun through a special kind of sensory perception, or rather intuition. Therefore after having raised his eyes in vain towards the arches of the towering trees hiding the sky from our eyes, he said to me in his gentle voice which I can still hear:

  ‘Wait for me here, I’ll be back in a short while.’

  He left me, plunging with big steps into the bush that stretched out as far as the eye could see. He had put a big orange and four guavas into my hands. Suddenly I felt dead tired. I was gripped by the urge to cry but controlled myself. I’ve never had much use for cry-babies. There is nothing I detest so much as giving unbridled expression to our sorrows. And I waited. Oh, I certainly waited more than I shall ever be able to wait again, but my uncle did not return. There was plenty of time for me to eat two guavas, then my orange, and then I waited again a very long time before munching my two remaining guavas.

  Worn out by the anxiety brought about by seeing nothing but the bush with its frightening calm around me, I sat down on the black forest earth and buried my face in my hands as if I never wanted to see any more of the place where I was. But as the humidity caught hold of me I had to rise again and I started walking without really having any idea of where I was going. I ought to have searched for the path we had followed until then but all my senses were gripped by panic and I marched like an automaton. I wished I could have given out a single scream, whistled, sung or talked loudly, or even just muttered something – anything to assuage the effect of the fear in me, anything to make me feel aware of my person or, simply, to give me the illusion that I still was myself, a human being, alive, finding myself there by chance, but I could not say anything…True to God, it is the only time I remember ever having felt fear.

  I walked on relentlessly, unable to rediscover the path covered with sand; neither did I see the river a
gain, its waters rolling with a sweet music, but I suddenly noticed in front of me a big woman wrapped in a white lappa that concealed her face and covered her feet. She advanced towards me; my heart started pounding fast; I felt as if I were receiving heavy blows from a ram inside me that did not quite succeed in splitting my chest open. I started shouting, no, I would have liked to shout; I felt I was shouting but did not hear myself shouting. I wished I could see the earth opening under my feet but the humus refused to do my bidding.

  Only then did I concede defeat and stretched out my arms to the woman like a baby to its mother. To my surprise the woman passed me by in mute indifference. I looked back. She too had turned her head and before I had time to avert my eyes, she had already uncovered her face. I then saw something frightful: an emaciated face, the face of a fleshless skull, which made a horrid and repugnant grimace at me. I started running head over heels but glanced backwards from time to time. It was to no avail, for I constantly saw the person at a distance of twenty paces behind me, although she was not running.

  But my mad gallop did not last very long; for a few moments after that encounter I found myself right in front of the railroad tracks. My heart was thumping so violently that it seemed to be about to burst my chest. I looked back again and saw my uncle.

  ‘Where have you been? Why did you abandon me in the forest?’ I asked, staring at him in bleak reproach.

  He looked at me with pity because he read the anguish in my eyes; he told me, however, that he had not wasted any time at Houêto:

  ‘I ordered my farm labourers at once to catch the chickens you see here and went myself to dig out cassava tubers for your grandmother and great-aunt. As soon as the job was finished, I returned to the clearing and was greatly surprised not to find you. I then continued my return journey, looking everywhere. All of a sudden I heard a rustle in the bush to my left; at first I thought it was a deer but I changed my mind afterwards when I saw a human shape running helter-skelter; it was you. I could have called you but I preferred to follow you with my eyes, for we were moving along parallel lines. A single step, but a big one, separated me from you, my boy. And then, of course, I had nothing to fear for you, for the bush is not dangerous.’