Authors: Tomás Eloy Martínez
There it is. The Library, announced the taxi driver.
He drove down Agüero Street, stopped beside a marble stairway and showed her the ramp to go up to get to the tower. See the sign over the entrance, he said, isn’t this where you
wanted to go?
Could you please wait just one minute? Grete asked.
At the top of the ramp there was a terrace interrupted by a truncated pyramid, with an extractor fan on top. The fact that the McDonald’s bus had not arrived intensified her sense of
emptiness and desertion. She perceived only what was not there and, therefore, didn’t even perceive herself. From one of the terrace parapets she looked over the gardens opposite and the
statues that cut into the horizon. It was the Library, the sign was unequivocal. Nevertheless, she was overwhelmed by a feeling of loss. At some moment during the morning, perhaps when she went
from Florida Street to Lavalle Street without knowing how, all the points of the city had got tangled up. Even the maps she’d seen the previous evening were confused, because the west was
invariably in the north, and the center was tipped out over the eastern edge.
The taxi driver came over without her noticing. A slight breeze stirred up his hair, now towering, electrified.
Look over there, to the left, he pointed.
Grete followed the direction of his hand.
That’s the statue of Pope John Paul II, and the other one, above the avenue, is Evita Perón. There’s also a map of the neighborhood, see? That’s Recoleta, with the
cemetery to one side.
She understood the names, Evita,
the Pope
? However, the figures were unconnected to the place. They both had their backs to the building and all it stood for. Could that really be the
Library? She was starting to get used to words being in one place and what they meant being somewhere else entirely.
She tried to explain, in hand signals, her disorientation and dispossession. The language was insufficient to put forward something so simple, and the hand movements, instead of clarifying
things, tended to modify them. The voice of an animal would have made more sense: the emission of unmodulated sounds indicating desperation, loss. Ex Librory, Grete attempted. Ex, Ex.
But this is the Library, the driver said. Don’t you see we’re here?
Two hours later, in front of the entrance to the boarding house on Garay Street, while she told the story to her traveling companions and I summed it up for the manager and El Tucumano, Grete
still hadn’t determined when they’d begun to understand each other. It was like a sudden pentecost, she said: the gift of languages descended and lit them from within. Maybe she’d
pointed out to the taxi driver some Rosetta stone on the map, maybe he knew that the word Borges would decipher codes and guessed that the Library in question was the extinct, the exanime, the ex,
a city without books that languished in the far south of Buenos Aires. Ah, it’s the other one, the young man had said to her. I’ve taken more than a few musicians to that place:
I’ve taken violins, clarinets, guitars, saxophones, bassoons, people who are exorcising the ghost of Borges because, as you’ll know, he was blind musically as well. He couldn’t
tell Mozart from Haydn and he hated the tango. No he didn’t, I said, correcting Grete when she repeated this detail. He felt that the Genoese immigrants had corrupted it. Borges didn’t
even appreciate Gardel, the taxi driver had told her. Once he went to the cinema to see Josef von Sternberg’s
Underworld
, back when they used to have live acts in between one film and
the next. Gardel was going to sing during the intermission and Borges got irritated, stood up and left. That’s true: he wasn’t interested in Gardel, I told Grete. He would have
preferred one of those improvisers who sang in the local bars in the outskirts at the beginning of the twentieth century, but when Borges returned from his long trip to Europe, in 1921, there were
no longer any worth listening to.
Grete’s shipwrecks of that morning were now a cause for celebration. She’d seen another Buenos Aires from the taxi, she said: a red brick wall beyond which rose marble flowers,
Masonic compasses, angels with trumpets; there you have the labyrinth of the dead – the young man with the tangled hair had told her – they’ve buried all of Argentina’s past
beneath that sea of crosses, and, nevertheless, at the entrance to that cemetery – Grete told us – there were two colossal trees, two rubber trees rising out of some ageless swamp, that
defied time and survived destruction and misfortune, especially because the roots braided together and the tops reached for the light of the sky. Scandinavian skies were never so crystal clear.
Grete was still contemplating it when the taxi turned off down some tedious streets and came out in a triangular plaza on which stood three or four palaces copied from those on Avenue Foch, please
stop here for a moment, Grete had begged, while she observed the luxurious windows, the empty balconies and clear sky above. That was when she remembered a novel by George Orwell,
Coming Up For
Air
, that she’d read in adolescence, in which a character called George Bowling describes himself like this: ‘I’m fat, but I’m thin inside. Has it ever struck you that
there’s a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?’ That was Buenos Aires, Grete said to herself at that moment and repeated
to us later: a delta of cities embraced by one single city, a myriad of tiny, thin cities within this obese unique majesty that allows Madrid-style avenues and Catalan cafés next to
Neapolitan aviaries and Doric bandstands and Rive Droite mansions, beyond all of which, however – the taxi driver had insisted – were the livestock market, with the lowing of the cattle
before sacrifice and the smell of dung, the evening dew, the open plain, and also a melancholy that comes from nowhere except here, from the end of the earth feeling you get when you look at maps
and see how alone Buenos Aires is, how very out of the way.
When we turned onto 9 de Julio Avenue and saw the obelisk in the center, I felt sad thinking we’d be leaving in two days’ time, Grete said. If I could be born again, I would choose
Buenos Aires and I wouldn’t move from this place even if they stole my purse again with a hundred pesos and my Helsingør driver’s license in it, because I can live without those
but not without the light of the sky I saw this morning.
She’d arrived at Borges’ National Library, on México Street, almost at the same time as her tired companions. There too they had to settle for the façade, inspired by
the Milanese Renaissance. When the guide had the group gathered on the sidewalk in front of the building, among broken flagstones and piles of dog shit, she informed them that, completed in 1901,
it was originally destined for the lottery draws and that’s why there were so many winged nymphs with unseeing eyes, which represented chance, and large bronze drums. The spiderweb of shelves
rose through circular labyrinths that emerged, if you knew your way, into a corridor of low ceilings, adjacent to a cupola open over the abyss of books. The reading room had been stripped of its
tables and lamps more than a decade earlier, and the premises were now used for symphony orchestra rehearsals. ‘National Music Center,’ read the sign at the entrance, beside the defiant
doors. On the right-hand wall, there was a slogan written in black aerosol paint: ‘Democracy lasts as long as obedience.’ An anarchist wrote that, said the guide disparagingly. See how
they signed it with an A inside a circle.
That was the penultimate stop before they arrived at the boarding house where I lived. The bus drove them through potholed streets to a café, at the corner of Chile and Tacuarí,
where – according to the guide – Borges had written desperate love letters to the woman who turned down his marriage proposals over and over again and who he tried in vain to seduce by
dedicating ‘The Aleph’ to her, while waiting to see her come out of the building to approach her if only with a look.
I miss you unceasingly
, he told her. His writing, ‘my
dwarf’s handwriting,’ ran in lines that sloped further and further downwards, in a sign of sadness or devotion,
Estela, Estela Canto, when you read this I shall be finishing the
story I promised you.
Borges could only express his love in an exalted, sighing English, he was afraid of tarnishing with his sentiments the language of the tale he was writing.
I’ve always thought the character of Beatriz Viterbo, the woman who dies at the beginning of ‘The Aleph,’ was a direct descendent of Estela Canto’s, I told the
Scandinavians when they were gathered in the front hall of the boarding house.
During the months he spent writing the story, Borges was passionately reading Dante. He’d purchased the three small volumes of Melville Anderson’s translation in the Oxford bilingual
edition, and at some moment must have felt that Estela could guide him to Paradise just as Beatriz, Beatrice, had allowed him to see the aleph. They were both in the past by the time he finished
the tale; both had been cruel, haughty, negligent, scornful, and to both, the imaginary and the real, he owed ‘the best and perhaps the worst hours of my life,’ as he’d written in
the last of his letters to Estela.
I don’t know how much of this could have interested the tourists, who were anxious to see – impossible though it was – the aleph.
Before the guided tour of the boarding house began, El Tucumano took me by the arm and dragged me into the closet where Enriqueta kept the keys and the cleaning supplies.
If the Alé isn’t a person, then what’s with it? he asked me with a touch of impatience.
‘The Aleph,’ I said, is a short story by Borges. And also, according to the story, it’s a point in space that contains all points, the story of the universe in a single place
and a single instant.
How weird. A point.
Borges described it as a small iridescent sphere of blinding light. It’s down in a cellar, when you get to the nineteenth step.
And these characters have come to see it?
That’s what they want, but the aleph doesn’t exist.
If they wanna see it, we’ve gotta show it to ’em.
Enriqueta was calling me and I had to go. In Borges’ story the façade of Beatriz Viterbo’s house is not mentioned, but the tour guide had already decided it was like the one
we were looking at, of stone and granite, with a tall wrought-iron door and a balcony on the right, plus two more balconies on the upper floor, one spacious and curved, which belonged to my room,
and another paltry one, almost the size of a window, which was undoubtedly the scandalous neighbors’. The small cluttered drawing room mentioned in the story was just past the threshold of
the entrance hall and then, at one end of what had been the dining room and was now the reception area, was the way to the cellar, to which one descended down nineteen steep steps.
When the house was converted into rooms to let, the administrator had ordered that the trap door to the cellar be removed and a handrail installed by the steps. He also had them put in two rooms
with a small shared bathroom, widening the pit Carlos Argentino Daneri had once used as a darkroom. Two barred windows at street level let in the light and air. Since 1970, the only occupant of the
cellar, said Enriqueta, is Don Sesostris Bonorino, an employee of the Monserrat Municipal Library, who does not tolerate visitors. She’d never known him to have company. Years ago, he had two
feisty cats, tall and agile as mastiffs, who scared the rats away. One summer morning, when he went to work, he left the windows half open and some swine threw a fish fillet soaked in poison into
the cellar. You can imagine what the poor man found when he came home: the cats were on top of a cushion of papers, swollen and stiff. Since then he keeps himself busy writing an encyclopedia of
the nation that he can never finish. The floor and walls are covered with index cards and notations, and who knows how he manages to go to the bathroom or sleep, because there are index cards all
over the bed too. As long as I can remember, no one’s ever cleaned that place.
And he alone is the owner of the alé? asked El Tucumano.
The aleph has no owner, I said. No one’s ever seen it.
Bonorino’s seen it, Enriqueta corrected me. Sometimes he copies onto the index cards what he remembers, although I think he gets the stories mixed up.
Grete and her friends insisted on going down to the cellar to see if the aleph radiated some aura or signal. Beyond the third step, however, access was blocked by Bonorino’s index cards.
One of the tourists, who looked exactly like Björk, was so frustrated that she stomped back to the bus, not wanting to see anything else.
The conversations in the lobby, Grete’s tale and the brief walk through the ruins of the house, where a few fragments of the old parquet floor still coexisted with the predominant cement
and two or three original handcrafted mouldings, which Enriqueta now used as ornaments, plus the interminable questions about the aleph, had all taken almost forty minutes instead of the ten
anticipated in the itinerary. The tour guide was waiting with her hands on her hips by the door to the boarding house while the bus driver hurried them up with rude blasts of the horn. El Tucumano
told me to keep Grete back and ask her if the group was interested in seeing the aleph.
How am I going to say that? I protested. There is no aleph. And anyhow, Bonorino’s there.
You do what I tell you. If they want to see it, I’ll arrange the show for them at ten. It’ll be fifteen pesos each, tell them.
I gave in and obeyed. Grete wanted to know if it would be worth it and I answered that I didn’t know. In any case, they were busy that night, she said. They were being taken to hear tangos
at the Casa Blanca and then to the Vuelta de Rocha, a kind of bay that formed in the Riachuelo, almost at its mouth, where they hoped a singer whose name they’d refused to divulge would be
performing.
It’ll be Martel, I guessed.
I said so, although I knew it wasn’t possible, because Martel didn’t respond to any other laws but those of the secret map he was drawing. Perhaps the Vuelta de Rocha was on that
map, I thought. Perhaps he only chose places where there was already a story, or where there soon would be. Until I’d heard him sing, I couldn’t prove it.