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,
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,
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