Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

“I could not stomach this. Even my passion for being in the house on Garay Street, my memory of the woman who died there on a burning February morning (remember, my Northern friends, that the Austral summer occurs during your winter months) after enduring an agony that never for a single moment gave way to self-pity or fear — this memory of mine could not tolerate his assault on literary intelligence. So this was my rival, not only in literary matters but also, who knows (the ways of the flesh are as mysterious as those of the Lord), for the affection of his first cousin, Beatriz Viterbo — ah, cousin, cousine, contiguous flesh, ah, temptation, temptation, thy name is incest, ah, I imagined them together in the flesh whereas I had only been her platonic, lonely suitor. I fled, banging the door on Daneri’s nose, who thought I was consumed by literary envy of his minuscule descriptions of the Australian hinterland (what a redundancy!) and of his ridiculous substitution of blues for azures, ceruleans, and ultramarines. Bah, let him think what he wished. I fled the house on Garay Street quoting Hamlet to myself: ‘Oh God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space…’

“A king of infinite space: Beatriz Viterbo, my lonely love, had died in 1929. By 1941, her cousin was describing a Mexican gasworks as though it were the Proustian towers of Martinville. But a few days later, this same Carlos Argentino, more anxious than angry, phoned me: he was losing his house — his house! the house of Beatriz! The pícaro dared called it his, dared called her his, hissssss! It was about to be taken over and torn down by a neighboring saloon belonging to a certain pair, Zunino and Zungrí, his landlords.

“I must admit I shared his anguish: Beatriz was dead. Now we were both about to lose the space where Beatriz once sat with a Pekinese lapdog, smiling, hand on her chin … But the redoubtable Daneri was not thinking of Cousin Beatriz. He was afraid of losing something, he babbled, the Aleph, in the cellar, beneath the dining room; he discovered it as a child, it was his, his, hissss; he could not finish his poem without it. It was the only place on earth where all places are —seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or admixture …

“I hung up the phone and rushed to the madman Daneri. His craziness filled me with spiteful elation — yet in it I recognized what I was looking for: Cousin Beatriz was a woman, a child, with almost uncanny powers of clairvoyance; but forgetfulness, distractions, contempt, and a streak of cruelty were also part of her. She had the madness of genius and pain. Her cousin had only the madness of prideful stupidity and vanity. I could feel contempt for his madness and love for her madness, but what drove me to their house — all right, their house, yessssss —was a foreboding that the meeting place of madness and this extravagant Aleph, this place of all places, was called death, and that from it the idiotic Daneri was excluded because, like an eternal adolescent, he believed he would never die, whereas, she, she was dead: so she could be, she must be, in a place where he could not see her, but I, who loved her, could. I could because I loved her.

“Let me hasten now: Daneri received me, after making me wait in the living room. He showed me to his cellar, gave me a threadbare pillow, asked me to lie fiat on my back in the darkness and see the Aleph — and if I didn’t see it, he said, my incapacity would not invalidate his experience — which, of course, he had transposed to his epic poem describing the world. But he added: ‘In a short while, you can babble all of Beatriz’s images…’

“So, he had seen me as I waited in the parlor for him to receive me. He had seen me sadly kissing the portrait of Beatriz, murmuring imbecilic words of love: ‘Beatriz, my darling Beatriz, Beatriz gone forever, it’s me, it’s Borges…’

“Now I was alone; in the dark, facing a blindness called the Aleph, and afraid that Daneri, to keep his madness undetected, would have to kill me. I had fallen into his trap, I … I …

“I had now met my own despair as a writer. For what my eyes now beheld was simultaneous, but what I could write about it would have to be successive, because language, alas, is successive. I saw a diameter of little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished: each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was an infinitude of things … I saw the teeming seas; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silver cobweb at the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror … I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam … I saw all the ants on the planet … I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters that Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw the dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood …

“I stopped. I did not see her as I remembered her. I went up the cellar stairs. Carlos Argentino was curious. Had I seen anything? No, I replied. No. So he was not mad. So he was not admirable. So he did not kill me. So he had been with her as I had not.

“I walked out and only then, in the street, did I see what the Aleph had denied me: the spectral image — for it could not have been real, but a reverberation of my dazed eyes in the hot night — of a tall, frail, slightly stooped woman; in her walk there was an uncertain grace, a hint of expectancy…”

He paused for a moment and added: “I had seen precisely everything that negated the laborious efforts of Daneri, and seeing it, I understood that he, too, for all his stupidity, was a writer who had to face the seasons of discontent, trying to wrest language out of the order of succession and into the order of simultaneity, where he might contemplate his own creation as if it were a painting. But Daneri did not understand how to apply this to his own telephone-book writing, alphabetical, consultable, like the Yellow Pages perhaps unreadable. So I went home, sorrowful but determined to learn a lesson from the Aleph. Here it is. I carry it with me always; it became my Bible. It is as simple as taxonomy: a classification, that is a selection, which is necessarily a representation. Carlos Argentino was defeated by space; I wanted to defeat space. So I wrote:

“There is a certain Chinese encyclopedia in which it is written that animals are divided into the following categories:

a. Belonging to the Emperor

b. Embalmed

c. Tamed

d. Suckling pigs

e. Sirens

f. Fabulous

g. Stray dogs

h. Included in the present classification

i. Frenzied

j. Innumerable

k. Drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush

l. Et cetera

m. Having just broken the water pitcher

n. That from afar look like flies…”

As the blind man who called the narrator of his story Borges trailed on into o, p, q, et cetera, I, who had fixed my gaze on him, wondering where he would end, if at all, if ever, as if he had now become sick by proxy with Carlos Argentino’s mania for extension, now disguised as enumeration, I had not seen what the man in the skullcap now bade me see in the fireplace before him: I turned my hypnotic gaze from the blind man, who so pathetically recalled the act of seeing the world, to the serene man who tugged at my coattail and, without a word, bid me look into the fireplace. Again, words were forming in the fire, a U, then a Q, then a B, then an A, finally an R — UQBAR, this name flashed on the tips of the flames, UQBAR, UQBAR, as the blind man suddenly stopped his enumeration and said: “Space is but a sign referring us to a meaning and a meaning referring us back to its sign: the Earth and the Aleph. Once this significance is understood in all of its in-significance, the writer allows a poisoned orchid to flower between the Earth and the Aleph: the personal history of Beatriz Viterbo. And history is time.”