Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

The old racetrack has been taken over by a winding, circular avenue: Amsterdam Avenue, full of beautiful old trees that seem to survive against the pernicious smog, and cluttered little residences, one hanging for dear life on the shoulders of the next one, as if fearing to fall headfirst into a nonexistent canal.

It is here, walking from the café to the bookstore a few years ago, that I first saw the blind man. I saw him … He walked with a white cane, of course, and this gave him away, certainly not the sureness of his gait. He came out of the bookstore and pointed in a certain direction with the cane. I saw his eyes and was mesmerized: he seemed to be literally looking inside himself, as if this were the only thing that counted in matters of sight — seeing outside being a totally frivolous affair. They were frightening eyes because of this interior depth, but kindly eyes because of their innocent dereliction in a city street.

I could not help following him, as his hatless head let a mane of thinning white hair be blown by the Aztec winds, which carry the bones of Moctezuma and Cortés as part of our everyday national asthma. But as he entered Amsterdam Avenue, I could not help feeling that something beyond sight — internal or external — was leading him to his rendezvous. There was a growing tremor in his hands, and his white hair moved with something more than mere motion. It started getting unseasonably cold; I wished for a muffler, and the blind man, indeed, pulled up his collar.

A boy, no more than ten years old, was sleeping next to a tree on the winding central alley of the avenue, and I saw the old man headed straight at him. He was one of the infinitely sad little boys one finds sleeping or crying in the streets of Mexico, destined to grow up swallowing fire at selected intersections during a perpetual rush hour, in exchange for a few copper coins.

I stepped between the blind man and the sleeping child.

He stopped. But he did not see me, I am sure.

He sniffed, he sensed, he grunted like a docile beast. Then he changed course and the child went on sleeping.

The blind old man hurried off, until he came to a halt before a tiny house done in stucco but in the Dutch style, with high pointed roofs, what we call techos de dos aguas in Spanish, and wooden lattices closed tight over the window panels. But the fastidious Dutch architect of this Hansel and Gretel abode had of course carved out two hearts in the wood, and now I saw the old man come close to them, as if he could see inside the house, as he saw, I am certain, inside himself, I was about to turn away; if he was not blind, then he was just an ordinary man, a Peeping Tom perhaps, walking around with a white stick so as to disguise his vice.

Then the old man extended his arm toward me: he had surely heard my footsteps, as the blind do, because as I halted he said:

“No, don’t stop. Come here and help me. Tell me what you see. Please.”

How was I to refuse this plea? As I said before, he looked extremely innocent, even childlike, as he gazed blindly on the world, and only dangerous — how dangerous, I was yet to know — when he looked inside himself. He needed me to look through those carved Dutch hearts and tell him, somewhat against my better judgment, that there was a fire, a chimney lit up — this was Mexico City in June? — and then, and then a big chair, a wing chair, an old chair — who sits there? — someone with his back to us, I told the blind man, no, now he shows his hand, a pale bony hand, there is a book in his hand, a small bound volume, he … he has thrown it into the fire, I exclaimed!

The blind man went into a fury on hearing this. He grabbed my lapels, almost choked me, screaming: “Don’t let him do it, don’t let him burn the book, he will burn the world, he will burn you and me, he will kill us!” He screamed in such agony that I banged furiously on the door of the house, only to find that the door gave way, creaking slightly, against the pounding of my fists. There was a small foyer, smelling of must and forgotten umbrellas, then the parlor, then my hand rescuing the volume, the blind man behind me, panting, muttering ancient words I could not understand, and before us, sitting in his wing chair, wrapped in velvet ecclesiastical robes of an intense scarlet, his head covered in a skullcap with cloth ears dangling like those of a basset hound, a man of infinitely fine features, with a long thin nose, narrow fleshless lips, and a penetrating gaze at once merry, disillusioned, astounded, forgiving, staring at us as he said: “Close the door, please. I hate drafts.”

But the blind man did not heed him. He lunged toward my hands, sniffing the scorched pages, caressing the rescued book. As he felt its slightly singed corners, he turned on the gracious gentleman sitting before the fire. “You fool! Why did you do this?”

“Look at it yourself. The book is blank. It is a blind book, don’t you see? There are no words on it. Is it simply a fine book for a draftsman? I am not a draftsman. I have had enough portraits made of me. Could I compete with Holbein in drawing myself — or in drawing you?” And he looked at us disdainfully, with an ironical loathing.

“But why destroy the book?” I asked impulsively.

“Because, my friend, I believe that all the wisdom of the world is contained in thirty-two volumes,” replied the thin, spiritual man. “When you travel as much as I do, from my native Rotterdam to Basel to Rome to Paris to Hertfordshire, you must be selective in your reading. I have honed my literate appetites down to thirty-two volumes. There is nothing more to know or that is worth learning. Why should I travel around with excess baggage? What use is there in an empty book, a book of white pages with no script?”

Sadly, the old man fingered the singed book and fluttered its pages. As he did so, the book for an instant seemed to catch fire again. No: it was simply, miraculously, that as the wind rushed through these pages, words appeared on one of them, the first page. And these words were a title. The blind man said it aloud, stopping there, on the first page: The Aleph. And then he told us this story, as the gentleman in sixteenth-century garb reached with trembling hands toward the fire and I started to feel as cold as he:

“A long time ago, Buenos Aires was melting in the summer heat as I visited a house I had reason to be attached to. It was now occupied by my acquaintance Carlos Argentino Daneri, who called himself a poet. Indeed, he went so far as to emblazon his first volume of verse with the blurb Daneri Rival of Borges. Let me tell you: I have yet to publish a book that blurbs: Borges Rival of Daneri! This is to tell you with what lack of personal sympathy I arrived at that house on Garay Street — but also what profound reasons I had to go there, in spite of the present occupancy of the house.

“Carlos Argentino Daneri, like most Latin Americans, had the chance to be Columbus or Quixote. If the latter, Quixote, he discovers new worlds. If the former, Columbus, he describes them. Hardly had I entered the house (for reasons totally alien to his disagreeable presence) when Daneri, my putative literary rival, assailed me with a description of the poem he was working on. And hardly a minute had gone by before I realized that this man was not a poet but a land surveyor: he was enamored of space simply because there was so much of it; space, for him, was exact, millimetric, and realistic.

“Daneri had in mind to set to verse the entire face of the planet, and by 1941, when I visited him, he had already dispatched a number of acres of the State of Queensland, nearly a mile in the course run by the river Ob, a gasworks to the north of Veracruz, the leading shops in the Buenos Aires parish of Concepción, the villa of Marian Cambaceres de Alvear in Belgrano, and a Turkish bath establishment not far from the well-known Brighton Aquarium.