Robert Kostuck

Robert Kostuck

The False Aleph

 

 

With apologies to the memory of Jorge Luis Borges.

 

 

After everyone else leaves the Chacarita cemetery and the gravediggers finish tamping the soil with their spades, the four of us remain behind.

“Carlos Argentino Daneri was a modernist in the worst sense of the word.” I crush a cigarette underfoot.

“He exemplified the time,” says Adolfo Bioy Casares.

“Many find his poetry obtuse—unable to breath the rarified air—”

“Borges, you’re still upset he won second place in the National Prize for Literature. That was in nineteen forty-three—nine years ago, and you try to erase your jealousy by giving him the accolades he never received.”

“Think of it as an opportunity to add vigor and vinegar to the Argentine literary canon. Eradication is impossible—placing Daneri in the center of the labyrinth will baffle the man of the future.”

“He would be gratified by the comparison to Theseus.”

“Or the horned beast haunting the maze that is contemporary society.”

“He ignored editorial deadlines and abhorred silence.” Silvina Ocampo removes her eyeglasses and dabs at imaginary tears. “An incessant talker. On several occasions I ordered him to shut up. He was oblivious.”

I lean against the plain marker and kick at the pile of dirt already dotted with black ants. Next to it is a granite plinth topped with a marble angel, from a time when the Daneri-Viterbo family could afford such monuments to their dead. Bioy and Silvina begin discussing the next issue of Sur.

“Women were attracted to him because of his sadness.” Silvina’s sister Victoria links arms with me and guides me to a shaded bench. “It was tragic, and therefore, romantic.”

“He told me he was born in Ciudad Eva Perón when it was still called La Plata. I think he was trying to impress me.”

“His mother abandoned the family when he was young. With the first stirrings of the libido he fell in love with Evita when she was just another pretty actress. I often wonder what that moment was like.”

“For women, everything comes back to love.”

“And Carlos Argentino?

“He told me of a vision,” I say. “A moment when the entire world and everything in it was revealed to him, simultaneously. That glimpse of the infinite pushed him over the edge. His so-called opus was an attempt to reproduce a feverish dream. He called that moment the Aleph and showed it to me once. I merely experienced the shock of the new.”
“Jorge Luis.” Victoria removes a compact from her purse and gazes at her reflection. She turns the mirror toward me. “Do you hate reflections and reproduction as much as you hate Carlos Argentino?”

“Pine trees shake like wet linen, panther clouds stalk the rain, the light does a turnabout, puddles reflect solar egg yolks—”

“—spring comes with bedsprings and bleached sheets. Ha! I also memorized Equinox. It’s one of my favorite poems. Admit it, my friend—the memory of Beatriz is breaking your heart.”

She spreads a cloth between us and unpacks a picnic hamper. Empanadas, choripán, milanesas, and alfajores with dulce de leche, oranges, grapes, and plums, sugar cookies, a thermos of coffee, bottles of Cerveza Quilmes.

Our friends sit on a bench next to us.

“A toast,” says Bioy. “To the memory of Carlos Argentino Daneri. May his verses outlast his name, and may his name outlast all of us.”

We lean together and clink bottles. Victoria, bless her, pours her beer on his grave.

The next morning I scrub soiled pen nibs and align blank sheets of paper. All around me books with damaged spines, torn magazines, and fly-specked windows. Beneath a cracked ceiling tile in the contemporary fiction section a puddle grows fuzzy with mold. A barking cough—I rush through skewed stacks and snatch an explicit anatomy book from a nonagenarian. His drool stains a grainy black and white photo of a female breast. I chase him from the library and return to my desk and the galley proofs for my own soon-to-be-published collection of essays, Otras inquisiciones. The critique on Daneri’s incomplete opus, Mi visión del mundo is incomplete. The final lines of his Equinox are the prologue to my essay,

feral varmints toe-tap the distance from bed to kitchen

this quiet story extracts the pink ululation

twists sheaves of algae into already braided hair

yet my closing quote from one of his early ‘nature’ poems, Las Pampas, with its ill-timed caesura,

expect nothing but anticipate, what Argentina reveals

in the blank spaces between what we already know

fails to aesthetically balance the prologue. I resolve to complete the essay before the end of the day. My muse never fails me.

“Beatriz Elena Viterbo.” In the library my voice is the whisper of a falling leaf. Her cameo silhouette in my desk drawer, more precious than any globular liquid Aleph. The thrill of possessing a stolen bit of carved ivory which once held place of honor over her heart (O jealousy!) now more important than the raspy cigarette smoker consonants of her voice, more meaningful than the soapy odor of her blouse, more immediate than her eyes—one green, one brown—which looked into one’s soul and dismissed what they found there. Her fingers floating over the keys of a virginal like tiny birds—

And then it makes sense, a throwaway passage from Daneri’s Los cielo:

diffused warbler smoke, careening canyon doves

empty sparrows push new roads and melt intent ravens

they peep inside me like I owe them something

The perfect close to a perfect essay. Bioy, Silvina, and Victoria will be impressed. I cap the inkwell and place it in the drawer, next to the cameo. Black ink, white ivory—the meaning I once gave that contrast escapes me now.

Completion calls for celebration. I telephone Bioy Casares.

“I’m still digesting yesterday’s picnic,” he says.

“Just you and me.” I hide my manuscript in the desk. “Surely you and Silvina can be parted for one or two hours.”

My assistant accepts the keys to the rare book cases and I leave for an early lunch.

I disembark from the bus on the far side of the street. Zunino and Zungri’s café spreads along one entire block of Calle Garay. Starched businessmen, middle-class married couples, students, and tourists queue outside on the pavement. The home Daneri shared with his cousin Beatriz gone years ago, and with it, perhaps, the Aleph.

On record I’ve expressed the opinion that Daneri’s Aleph was a false Aleph. Yet it was the only one I’ve ever seen, and if it once truly existed it would still be present on the premises of the café, in the exact spot it occupied when the Daneri-Viterbo house still existed. Perhaps the builders turned the cellar of the house into a storeroom, perhaps they retained the original oak stair steps descending into that underworld of delights. If so, then the false Aleph still exists. This is not philosophy, but logic.

I push through the crowd with excuses. Zunino—one can tell him from his twin by a white scar above his left eyebrow—listens to that logic and simultaneously greets customers, shouts at waiters, and rushes to rearrange chairs and tables.

“I’ve read your fantastic stories in Sur. They are incomprehensible to a working man such as myself. Your request is unusual.” He brushes powdered sugar from his silk Italian suit and gestures to the scores of customers and the bustle of digestion. “Come back at two o’clock in the morning, after we close. You can snoop in the cellar all you want. Table for two? Right here by the window so you can study the people and discover what motivates them. That’s what you writers do, isn’t it?”

Bioy Casares is punctual, smartly appointed, constructively critical.

“Growing a beard, my friend?”

“Is it so important?” I rub my chin and wave a hand at the flotsam at other tables. “Who cares?”

“One woman, and that should be enough.”

“Victoria is a dream from the future.”

“And Beatriz?”

“Her spirit waits for me to do the correct thing.”

“You’ve been drinking?”

The implication pulls up a third chair. I conveniently ignore it. We discuss my manuscript, and our fourth ongoing collaboration, Cuentos breves y extraordinarios.

He drives me back to the library in his Ford sedan, a recent and pretentious acquisition.

At work I am so distracted that when a professor from the university asks for the annotated copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions, I hand him a copy of De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

As a child the schoolroom clock moved at the speed of melting ice. Today the hands of a clock appear to freeze or slip backwards, tempting me to alter my versions of the past. I tell my coworkers I am staying late. One of them hesitates before turning off the lights and locking the door. I heat coffee on an electric hot plate and nibble dry biscuits. The desk lamp creates a puddle of light and I lose myself in making slight revisions to the Otras inquisiciones manuscript.

At one o’clock I step outside. A mild spring rain releases nostalgia trapped in the dust of the streets. The bus is empty and the driver changes his sign to Out of Service. I fortify myself with a sip of laudanum.

The San Cristóbal barrio is half asleep. A dog slinks past under orange street lights and two inebriated men argue outside the café. The waiters and cleaners ignore my knocks. Zungri unlocks the door.

“You are expected and welcome—as long as you don’t report us to the health inspector! A joke, Borges, just a joke. Please, sit with me for a few minutes.”

He places sugar cubes on slotted spoons over glasses of verte absinthe and dissolves the sugar with drops of water.

“To your health.”

“My second toast in forty-eight hours,” I say. “Yesterday morning we acknowledged the memory of your nemesis.”

“Daneri? I didn’t know he died. To Daneri, may he find his sacred elf.”

“Aleph. His sacred Aleph. If it still exists in your cellar.”

“Honestly? I think you’re insane. I’m practical yet compassionate to a fault.”

“I may be down there quite a while.”

“The night watchman can let you out,” says Zungri. “Zipacna makes sure nobody runs off with the silverware. I’m joking, Borges!”

My memory of the cellar is at odds with the reality. I see myself—a middle-aged librarian in a brown linen blazer stretched out on the floor, watched over by a curious and angelic kitchen staff above me.

“Turn out the lights, please, and close the door,” I say. “Complete darkness is necessary.”

I’m not surprised, and yet—I am surprised.

The Aleph is as I remember it, precise and untarnished.

Faces, colors, names, fish, tents, caravans, black crepe, cinnamon bark, Ulrikke leading me to a loft, a bar of sulfur in a steamer trunk, languid afternoon curtains above mismatched lovers, the inky letters of a business card, horses on the pampas, an abattoir steaming with blood, alien deserts and full moons, crowded streets and incandescent lights, a knife fight, an Arctic midnight sun, marketplace watermelons, Aztec temples scored with hairline cracks, sprigs of anise, a bowl of American baked beans, ice on the Seine, pulsing arteries on the back of a woman’s hands, a billboard on the Plaza Constitutión, sunflowers, the muddy banks of Río de la Plata, a lecture hall in Paris, dirigibles above Bonn, a glistening snail in a moonlit garden, myself clutching a framed photograph of Beatriz.

Was it the men who demolished Daneri’s house? The builders with their drills and hammers? Or merely the minutely shifting earth and the passage of time? The false Aleph is cracked, fractured, and distorted. It is the difference between a midnight chorus and a well-tuned symphony.

A ghostly hand brushes my cheek. When I reach to touch it, it undergoes a metamorphosis and becomes a beetle. The illuminated pantheon dissolves, fractures into chipped granite angels and stained marble cherubs.

Death’s archetype opens the door and descends the steps. His black hooded cloak, glinting scythe, and shifting hourglass.

“Señor Borges!” Zipacna grinds dust beneath his feet. “I was told to keep an eye on you. Are you ready to come up for air? This? I’m off to a fancy dress party and only waiting on you. Excuse my saying so, but a man of your position and age shouldn’t be lying about in damp cellars.”

“I’m finished.”

“Want to come along? My girlfriend has a sister—”

We part outside the café. I’ve forgotten about the buses—five kilometers to the library and twenty-plus to my flat. I don’t have a choice. My footsteps echo from hard walls.

The night is revelers, honking horns, and the occasional sound of breaking glass. Exhausted, I make a promise to myself to begin the calisthenic exercises that Victoria recommended. I consider the wisdom of wandering the streets of Buenos Aires by night or by day.

My desk drawer quivers with anticipation. The manuscript of Otras inquisiciones flickers with St. Elmo’s fire. Flames fill my sleeves and trousers, ignite a truthfulness that the heart refuses to accept.

I think I will never sleep again, even as it overtakes me.

A drool stain on my blotter. Strong sunlight burns away gold leaf book titles. Hexagonal library rooms recede to vanishing points in all directions and fold in on themselves, a loop the scientists claim is infinity, defined. The cleaner nudges my shoulder.

“Señor Borges.” She plunges a mop into a bucket. “That’s the fifth time this month. Working late and sleeping at your desk. It’s none of my business, but isn’t it time you married and settled down?”

My rumpled suit and unshaven cheeks—people on the morning bus glance and turn away. I must look awful.

The cemetery markers are spotted with moss, industrial dust, and bird feces.

Carlos Argentino Daneri’s grave is overshadowed by Beatriz Elena Viterbo’s angelic monument. I turn the cameo in my hand—it clicks and folds open to reveal a compartment I never knew existed.

Inside is a mirror all of two centimeters in diameter. Reflected there is the source and conclusion of my solitary journey.