Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

He was silent for a moment, then added: “We have left the world behind.”

This occurred as the man in the red robes took my hand and the walls around us disappeared, and the blind man with them, leaving just myself and the cool old Dutchman holding hands, surrounded by a name that had become invisible too, UQBAR, a name searching for a space. So the serene gentleman, who I now realized was a serene fool, took out a little book from the folds of his robes — he and I, you understand, suspended there in a world of glass, boundless — and captured the invisible word UQBAR in the blank pages of his book. I glanced at the title on the spine: Moriae encomium. But the pages of the book — I gave a start — were as empty as those of the book he had tried to burn and the blind man urged me to save: The Praise of Folly. That name found the space of a book, and a landscape began to grow around us, as if this could be a new space slowly coming into being in place of the Aleph, in place of the name UQBAR shifting like smoke in the pages of The Praise of Folly. But what were we to think, this serene fool and I, I ask humbly of you, of a place that was ticking away like a time bomb, for this was all you could hear; there was nothing to see, nothing to smell, just the sound tick-tock, tick-tock, and nothing — nothing — as the source of that sound.

Yet, as we peered, overcome by this sensation of floating in a pure vacuum, things started to exist, they came into being: the object only, you see, but not the space that should have surrounded and sustained it.

The man next to me shook violently. Then he tried to kiss my lips. I stepped back (toward what? there was nothing to hold on to) with a grimace of heterosexual disgust; maybe this man thought he was in England, for he was saying: “No, no, do not misunderstand me. My first enthusiasm, you know, was England, going from Holland to England: traveling, I always traveled so much; but only in England was my enthusiasm for being there saluted with kisses. The English greet you with kisses, say goodbye with kisses; everything there is full of kisses: welcome, kiss Erasmus, bye-bye kiss-kiss, Erasmus … Now we are coming, my friend, into a country, a country is appearing … Look!”

He said this as though, indeed, the world were being born, responding to the blind man’s rather intimidating parting phrase: “We have left the world behind.”

But I could not see the world again. I looked at the man who called himself Erasmus, peering intently into the vacuum, and I asked my companion in the vortex of the fast-disappearing world of Uqbar: “Tell me the truth: are you simply remembering these things?”

He looked at me without surprise and said yes, I am only remembering.

The man Erasmus flipped his pages. Now the letters were all there, back in the book, but they were illegible because they were juxtaposed, layers of writing resting on previous layers, a palimpsest that seemed to grow in the same way that time grows: remembering and desiring.

So these things we saw were there only because we remembered them, not even because we desired them. Yet the eye of Erasmus alighted on a word in that jumble of words — that verbal jungle of his making: his writing and all the readings his writing had been submitted to had come together at last — and then he pointed at it with a lonely finger and repeated: TLON, T-L-O-N. He said he had never written or read that word; never, he assured me, and then became silent for what seemed a very long time.

“We are simply duplicating things,” he said at last. “The only new thing in this book is the name of the time from which we are watching the other place, Uqbar. This must be Tlon because we are looking for Uqbar, which has no space, through another country that does not have space either. But look around you. There is no space, yet there is here everything that makes space possible: a pure serial and temporal reality. Space does not live in pure time, where we now are, my friend. But the objects of space do, because they are supported by memory, which is a temporal fact.”

This was all very fine, and I would have accepted the theory with which Erasmus rationalized our situation, if at that moment the blind man had not passed in front of us, hurrying like Alice’s rabbit. And we followed him in haste, past a snowstorm and a shower of roses and a hot river and a naked woods, into a library, yes, a library that was simply a mirror, or a mirror, perhaps, that looked like a library, and in this conjunction of both — mirror and library — we saw the two previous worlds, Uqbar and Tlon, being constantly reproduced by images and words, in a silent dialogue.

“Welcome. You have come to Orbis Tertius,” murmured the blind old man, with an insecure wave of his hand, as though he were flipping through the pages of books in the air. “From here you can see what you could not while you were there.”

This was simply not true: we saw nothing. But we understood that Orbis Tertius was not Tlon or Uqbar: it merely hid them. This was what the blind man did not know and we did. And if that was true, then Uqbar also hid Tlon and Orbis Tertius, and Tlon hid Orbis Tertius and Uqbar. How could this have escaped the blind poet’s attention? Erasmus explained the situation methodically to the sightless one.

“You are right,” the blind man said. “But in the other two countries no one thought of joining a mirror and a library, so that only here can we perceive the reproductive existence of the two other worlds through images and words.”

He offered us some very weak tea drawn from old book leaves and heated to a limp vapor by the reflections of the moon on the glass, as he spoke on about involuted lands, mutually imbricated lands, New Worlds that might exist both in time and in language, although not in space. These New Worlds are only maintained through imagination in its original form, he said, which is myth. Only myth, he assured us, permits the verbal and temporal circulation of involuted worlds, for these worlds — his voice became paler than his tea as he retreated from us slowly into a garden behind the library-mirror — never say their true name, as this garden — he seemed to disappear into a truly impenetrable dimness — is not exactly what it seems …

“I know this!” Erasmus exclaimed in anger as the blind man disappeared. “Why, I almost invented the theory of the illusion of appearance, I was so intent on finding irony behind the dogmas of faith and reason: everything had to be dual, various, different, and now this upstart comes and…”

In his irritation, Erasmus was rapidly flipping again through his volume of The Praise of Folly, sensitive to the touch of its worn calf binding and its heavy lettering, almost in relief, as if Latin, by now, had to be touched to be read: like the blind man’s Braille.

We were in the middle of a garden. We had followed in the blind man’s footsteps, unwittingly or unfeelingly, as we talked. It was a garden of forking paths: a veritable maze. What can you do in a maze? Either stand still or try to get out. We did not know what to do. I started some small talk: Hey, Mr. Erasmus, am I right in surmising that that triple land we just left — Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius — is impossible in space but quite possible in time and language? What three lands? asked Erasmus, spinning on his heels, irritated by our disorientation. I could not remember. I had forgotten. I made an effort. Before that … we … he and I … a fire in the cellar … a stooped, elegant woman … dead, was she?… bones, a photograph … No, of course, we were lost in the garden of forking paths, and this is where our story began.

Nothing had happened before — I laughed nervously — nothing at all. As we walked through the space of this maze, amazed, the pages of yet another book, written in Chinese characters, fell like leaves, indeed like the clues of the treasure hunts of our childhood, and Erasmus and I hurried through the labyrinth of hedges and rosebushes, oppressive because the cloudless, Magritte-like sky opened its windows far above our heads, and in the abrupt corners of this chase we could distinguish well-known, well-worn scenes of the history of the New World: Columbus landing, Vespucci naming, Cortés conquering, Pizarro slaying, Almagro mining the desert, Bolívar plowing the sea, Moctezuma falling stoned to death, Las Casas denouncing, Atahualpa dying, Tupac Amaru rebelling, Aleijandinho sculpting, Sor Juana writing — we saw it all, peering at us as from monstrous flowers with faces, à la Cocteau, until we were back at the original scene, Columbus landing inside the thorny capsule of a rose. And I looked, stopping, panting, at Erasmus, as though incriminating him and his pen pals for inventing the Myth of the Golden Age in the New World and then deserting us with our epic violence, and no golden bough, in our hands: a cross and a sword and our eyes bloodshot through and through, lost in the garden of forking paths — Queen Isabella’s jungle in the New World.