Authors: Tomás Eloy Martínez
You don’t even know me, Bonorino. I could sell it, betray you. I could publish the work under my name.
You would never betray me, Cadon. I don’t trust anyone else. I have no friends.
That candid declaration revealed the librarian could not have the aleph. He would only have had to look at it once to know that El Tucumano and I had betrayed him. Carlos Argentino Daneri
hadn’t been able to prevent the demolition of his house either, in Borges’ short story. In the luminous point that reproduced Dante’s Paradise, you couldn’t see the future,
therefore, you couldn’t see reality either. The simultaneous and infinite facts it contained, the inconceivable universe, were only residues of the imagination.
I believed you at least had the aleph, I risked.
He looked at me and started to laugh. There were only five or six teeth left in his huge mouth.
Lie down under the nineteenth step right now and see for yourself if I have it, he said. I’ve spent hundreds of nights there, in a supine position, hoping to see it. Maybe in the past
there was an aleph. Now it’s vanished.
I felt dizzy, lost, loathsome. I took the ledger, which weighed almost as much as me, and I didn’t want to take the volume on labyrinths I’d lent him.
Keep it as long as you want, I said. You’re going to need it more than me in Fuerte Apache.
He didn’t even thank me. He looked me up and down with a brazenness that contradicted his habitual unctuousness. What he did next was even more extravagant. He began to recite, with a
rhythmic and well-modulated voice, a shantytown rap, while clapping his hands:
In the Fort there’s no place to run
/
Life gets blown to kingdom come
/
If I live, it’s
where it smells like dung
/
If I die, it’s a bullet from a stranger’s gun
.
That’s not bad at all, I said. I didn’t know you had such talents.
I’m no Martel but I get by, he answered.
I’d never thought he might know Martel.
What? You like Martel?
Who doesn’t? he said. Last Thursday I went to visit a colleague at the library in Parque Chas. Someone told us he was on a corner, singing. He arrived out of the blue and knocked out three
tangos. We got to hear two. It was supreme.
Parque Chas, I repeated. I don’t know where that is.
Right here, on the way into Villa Urquiza. Strange neighborhood, Cadon. The streets are circular and even the taxis get lost. It’s a shame it doesn’t appear in Prestel’s book,
because of the many labyrinths in the world, that’s the biggest of all.
When they closed the boarding house on Garay Street I went to stay in a modest hotel on Callao Avenue, near Congreso. Although my room overlooked an interior patio, the traffic
noise was enough to drive you crazy at any hour of the day or night. I tried to resume my work in the nearby cafés but people rushed in and out of them all complaining about the government
at the tops of their voices. I preferred to return to the Británico where at least I knew the routine. There I found out from the waiter that El Tucumano was exhibiting his little mirrored
aleph in the cellar of a union office, sharing the proceeds with the night watchman who let him in. Ten or twelve tourists attended the first show, but the second and third had to be canceled due
to lack of interest. I supposed that, ignoring my advice, El Tucumano had omitted the reading of the fragment of Borges I’d pointed out to him:
I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and
nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a tattered labyrinth (it was London).
Exposed without this text, the illusion the
aleph created must have been precarious, and the tourists undoubtedly left disenchanted. To deceive even just ten tourists was a colossal success in those uneasy weeks. No one had any money in
Buenos Aires (including me), and visitors fled the city as if the plague were approaching.
At dusk, when the traffic roared and my intelligence was defeated by the prose of the postcolonial theorists, I kept myself occupied by leafing through Bonorino’s ledger, full of diligent
illustrated definitions of words like dagger, twine, Uqbar,
maté
, fernet, percale, as well as including an extensive section on Argentine inventions such as the ballpoint pen,
dulce de leche
, fingerprinting and the electric cattle prod, two of which were due not to native ingenuity but to a Dalmatian and a Hungarian.
The references were inexhaustible and, if I opened the volume at random, I never encountered the same page, just like in
The Book of Sand
, which Bonorino quoted frequently. One evening I
stumbled upon a long section about Parque Chas, and while I was reading it thought it was about time I went to see the neighborhood where Martel had most recently sung. According to the librarian,
the spot owed its name to some infertile fields inherited by a Doctor Vicente Chas, in the center of which rose the smokestack of a brickworks. Shortly before his death in 1928, Doctor Chas brought
a fierce lawsuit against the municipal government of Buenos Aires, which wanted to close down the furnace because of the damage it was causing to the lungs of the residents of the area, at the same
time as it impeded the extension of the western route of the Avenida de los Incas, blocked by the beastly smokestack. The truth was that the municipality chose this place to implement an ambitious
radial-centric project designed by the young engineers Frehner and Guerrico. The design copied the labyrinth, representing terrestrial sin and the hope of redemption, which lies beneath the cupola
of the San Vitale church in Ravenna.
Bonorino speculated, however, that the circular layout of the neighborhood followed a secret communist and anarchist plan to provide themselves a refuge in times of uncertainty. His thesis was
inspired by the passion for conspiracies that characterizes the inhabitants of Buenos Aires. How else to explain that the major diagonal street was called The Internationale before it became
General Victoria Avenue, or that Berlín Street should figure on some maps as Bakunin, and that a short four-hundred-meter-long road was called Treveris, in allusion to Trier or
Trèves, the birthplace of Karl Marx?
‘A colleague from the Monserrat library, who lived in Parque Chas,’ noted Bonorino in his book, ‘guided me one morning through this tangle of zigzags and detours as far as the
corner of Ávalos and Berlín. To put the difficulties of the labyrinth to the test, he insisted that I go one hundred meters in any direction and then return by the same route. If I
took more than half an hour, he promised to come looking for me. I got lost, although I couldn’t say whether it was on the way out or on the way back.
The intolerable white sun of high
noon had already become the yellow sun which precedes nightfall
, and no matter how many turns I took, I could not manage to get my bearings. On an inspired impulse, my
colleague tracked me down. It was getting dark when he finally saw me on the corner of Londres and Dublin, a few steps from where we’d parted. I seemed shaken and thirsty,
he said. When I returned from the expedition, I developed a persistent fever. Hundreds of people have gotten lost in the deceptive streets of Parque Chas, where the interstice that divides the
reality from the fictions of Buenos Aires would seem to be located. In every great city there is, of course, one of these lines of high density, similar to the black holes in space, which changes
the nature of those who cross it. By reading old telephone books I deduced that the danger point is in the rectangle bordered by Hamburgo, Bauness, Gándara and Bucarelli Streets, where some
of the houses were inhabited, seven decades ago, by Helene Jacoba Krig, Emma Zunz, Alina Reyes de Aráoz, María Mabel Sáenz and Jacinta Vélez, who were later turned into
fictional characters. But the people of the neighborhood situate it on the Avenida de los Incas, where the ruins of the brickworks remain.’
What Bonorino said didn’t help me to understand why Martel had sung in Parque Chas. The delirium about the dividing line between reality and fiction had nothing to do with his earlier
attempts to capture the past – I never believed the singer was interested in the past of the imagination – and some of the popular stories about the adventures of the bandit Pibe Cabeza
16
and other unsavory characters in the labyrinth had no links – if they were true – to the greater history of the city.
I spent two afternoons in the Congreso library to find out about life in Parque Chas. I discovered that no anarchist or communist centers had been opened there. I searched in detail to see if
some of the apostles of libertarian violence – as Osvaldo Bayer called them – had found refuge in the labyrinth before being taken to the prison in Ushuaia or before a firing squad, but
their lives had been spent in more central parts of Buenos Aires.
Since the neighborhood seemed so elusive, I went to get to know it. Early one morning I boarded a bus that went from Constitución to Triunvirato Avenue. I headed west and penetrated into
terra incognita. When I got to Cádiz Street, the landscape changed into a succession of circles – if circles can be successive – and suddenly I didn’t know where I was. I
walked for two hours without getting anywhere. At every bend I saw the name of a city: Geneva, The Hague, Dublin, London, Marseilles, Constantinople, Copenhagen. The houses were side by side, with
no spaces in between, but the architects had devised a way to make straight lines look curved, or vice versa. Although some had pink lintels and others blue porches – there were also smooth
façades, painted white – it was hard to tell them apart: several houses would have the same number, 184 for example, and I thought I saw the same curtains and the same dog poking his
muzzle out the window of more than one of the houses. I walked beneath the pitiless sun without crossing paths with a single soul. I don’t know how I came out to a plaza enclosed by a black
railing. Until then I’d seen only buildings of one or two stories, but around that square were tall towers, also identical, with soccer flags hanging out the windows. I took a few steps
backwards and the towers went out like a match. Again I lost my way in the spirals of low houses. I retraced my route, trying to make every step repeat the ones in the opposite direction, and thus
I found the plaza again, although not at the point from which I’d left it, but diagonally across from it. For a moment I thought I was the victim of a hallucination, but the low green awning
beneath which I’d stood less than a minute ago shone in the sun three hundred feet away, and in its place a business now appeared that called itself the Sandwich Palace, although in fact it
was a kiosk that displayed sweets and soft drinks. It was attended by a teenager in an enormous baseball cap that hid his eyes. I was relieved to finally see a human being who could explain what
point of the labyrinth we were in. I decided to ask him for a bottle of mineral water because I was dying of thirst, but before I finished the sentence the kid said ‘There isn’t
any,’ and disappeared behind a curtain. For a while I clapped my hands to get his attention until I realized that he wouldn’t come back as long as I was there.
Before leaving, I’d photocopied a very detailed map of Parque Chas from the Lumi guide, which showed the ways in and out. On the map there was a grey area that might have been a plaza, but
its shape was an irregular rectangle and not a square like the one in front of me. Unlike the narrow streets I’d walked along before, these ones had no plaques with street names or numbers on
the houses, so I resolved to advance in a straight line from the kiosk towards the west. I had the sensation that, the more I walked, the more the sidewalk lengthened, as if I were moving on an
endless ribbon.
It was noon according to my watch and the houses I passed were shut and, it seemed, empty. I had the impression that time was also shifting in a capricious way, like the streets, but I
didn’t care anymore whether it was six in the afternoon or ten in the morning. The weight of the sun became unbearable. I was dying of thirst. If I saw signs of life in any house, I’d
knock and knock, not stopping until someone appeared with a glass of water.
I began to see shadows moving in one of the side streets, miles away from me, and I felt so weak I feared I might faint right there, with no one to help me. I soon saw the shadows weren’t
hallucinations but dogs that were, like me, looking for somewhere to get a drink and some shade, along with a woman who, at a quick pace, was trying to get past them. The woman was coming towards
me but she didn’t seem to have noticed my existence, and I didn’t notice anything about her other than the sound of her metal bracelets, which months later would have allowed me to
identify her even in the dark, because they always moved at the same rhythm, first a quick jangling of metal and then two slow diapasons. I tried to call her so she could tell me where we were
– I deduced that she knew because she was walking decisively – but before I could open my mouth, she vanished through a doorway. That sign of life gave me strength to keep going. I
walked past two other houses with no one in them and then a façade of sandblasted bricks, with a window grille in the shape of a clover. Contrary to my expectations, there was also a double
door, one side of which was open. I went in. I found myself in a spacious, dark room, with a few sports trophies gleaming on shelves, some plastic chairs and two or three framed moralistic mottoes,
with phrases like
Quality comes from doing things well just once
and
Perfection is in the details but perfection is no detail.
Later I found out that the decoration of the room changed in accordance with the mood of the manager, and that sometimes, instead of chairs, there was a counter, and bottles of gin on the
shelves, but it’s possible that I’m confusing the place with another I went to later, that same day. The scenery in both changed without warning, like in a play. I don’t remember
very much of what happened next because reality was getting blurred and everything I experienced seemed like part of a dream. Even now I’d still think Parque Chas was an illusion if it
wasn’t for the fact that the woman I’d seen an instant earlier was in the room and because I saw her again elsewhere many other times.