During the dinner, Canto asked me if I would like to see the manuscript of “The Aleph” (which twenty years later she would sell at Sotheby’s for more than twenty-seven thousand dollars). I said I would. From a grease-aureoled brown folder she pulled out seventeen pages meticulously composed “in the handwriting of a dwarf” (as Borges once described his minuscule, unattached letters), with a few minor corrections and alternative versions. She pointed to the dedication inscribed on the last page. Then she reached over the table, took my hand (I was eighteen and terrified), and put it to her cheek. “Feel these bones,” she ordered. “You can tell I was beautiful then.”
“Then” was 1944, the year Canto met Borges at the house of Adolfo Bioy Casares and his wife, Silvina Ocampo. Ocampo, a fine poet and better short-story writer, was the sister of Victoria Ocampo, the rich and aristocratic founder of the magazine Sur. Bioy, eight years younger than Silvina, was the heir to one of the largest dairy empires in Argentina. His mother’s name, Marta, became the dairy trademark La Martona; Borges and Bioy’s first collaboration had been a series of ads for La Martona yogurt.
Estela Canto’s first encounter with Borges was, from her point of view, far from a coup de foudre. “And yet,” she added with a nostalgic smile, “neither was Beatrice much impressed with Dante.”
As if to justify her reaction, Canto’s description of the forty-five-year-old Borges (later published in her memoir, Borges a contraluz) was deliberately unappealing. “He was plump, rather tall and straight-backed, with a pale and fleshy face, remarkably small feet and a hand that, when clasped, seemed boneless, limp, as if uncomfortable when having to bear the inevitable touch. The voice was shaky, it seemed to grope for words and seek permission.” I once had occasion to hear Borges use the shakiness of his voice to great effect, when a journalist asked him what he admired most in General San Martín, Argentina’s national hero, who had fought against the Spanish in the wars of independence. Borges answered, very slowly, “His bronze busts … that decorate … public offices … and school … playgrounds; his name … repeated … endlessly … in military … marches; his face … on the ten-peso … bill …” There was a long pause during which the journalist sat bewildered. Just as she was about to ask for an explanation of such a curious choice, Borges continued, “… have distanced me from the true image of the hero.”
After the night of her first meeting with Borges, Canto often had dinner at the Bioys’, dinners at which the conversation was lively, since Ocampo had the unsettling habit of springing questions on her guests, such as “How would you commit suicide, given the choice?” One summer evening, as he and Canto were, by chance, leaving together, Borges asked if he could walk her to the subway. At the station, Borges, stuttering, suggested that they might walk a little farther. An hour later they found themselves in a café on Avenida de Mayo. Obviously the talk turned to literature, and Canto mentioned her admiration for Candida, and quoted a section from the end of the play. Borges was enchanted and remarked that this was the first time he had met a woman who was fond of Bernard Shaw. Then, peering at Canto through his incipient blindness, he paid her a compliment in English: “A Gioconda smile and the movements of a chess knight.” They left as the café was closing and walked until three-thirty in the morning. The next day Borges deposited at her house, without asking to see her, a copy of Conrad’s Youth.
Borges’s courting of Estela Canto lasted a couple of years, during which, she said, “he loved me and I was fond of him.” They would go for long walks or for aimless tram rides across the southern neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. Borges was fond of trams: it was on the number 7 tram, on his way to and from his miserable job at a municipal library, that he taught himself Italian by reading a bilingual edition of Dante’s Commedia. “I started Hell in English; by the time I had left Purgatory I was able to follow him in the original,” he once said. When he wasn’t with Canto, he wrote to her, incessantly, and his correspondence, which she later included in Borges a contraluz, is quietly moving. One undated letter, apologizing for having left town without letting her know, “out of fear or courtesy, through the sad conviction that I was for you, essentially, nothing but an inconvenience or a duty,” goes on to confess: “Fate takes on shapes that keep repeating themselves, there are circling patterns; now this one appears again: again I’m in Mar del Plata, longing for you.”
In the summer of 1945 he told her that he wanted to write a story about a place that would be “all places in the world,” and that he wanted to dedicate the story to her. Two or three days later he brought to her house a small package which, he said, contained the Aleph. Canto opened it. Inside was a small kaleidoscope, which the maid’s four-year-old son immediately broke.
The story of the Aleph progressed along with Borges’s infatuation with Canto. He wrote to her, on a postcard, in English:
Thursday, about five.
I am in Buenos Aires. I shall see you tonight, I shall see you tomorrow, I know we shall be happy together (happy and drifting and sometimes speechless and most gloriously silly), and already I feel the bodily pang of being separated from you, torn asunder from you, by rivers, by cities, by tufts of grass, by circumstances, by days and nights.
These are, I promise, the last lines I shall allow myself in this strain; I shall abound no longer in self-pity. Dear love, I love you; I wish you all the happiness; a vast and complex and closewoven future of happiness lies ahead of us. I am writing like some horrible prose poet; I don’t dare to reread this regrettable postcard. Estela, Estela Canto, when you read this I shall be finishing the story I promised you, the first of a long series.
Yours,
Georgie
“The story of the place that is all places” (as Borges calls it in another postcard) begins with the summer of the death of the beautiful Buenos Aires aristocrat Beatriz Viterbo, with whom Borges, the narrator, is in love. Beatriz’s cousin, the pedantic and bombastic poet Carlos Argentine Daneri (it was rumored that Borges based the character on his brother-in-law, the writer Guillermo de Torre, who faithfully subscribed to the vocabulary recommended by the Royal Spanish Academy of Letters), is composing a huge epic poem that will include everything on earth and in Heaven; his source of inspiration is the Aleph, a place in which all existence has been assembled. This place, Daneri tells Borges, is under the nineteenth step down to Beatriz’s basement, and one must lie on the floor in a certain position in order to see it. Borges complies, and the Aleph is revealed to him. “The diameter of the Aleph would not have been more than two or three centimeters, but the entire cosmic space was there, undiminished in volume.” Everything appears before his astonished eyes in a Whitmanesque enumeration: “I saw the populous sea, I saw the dawn and the evening, I saw the crowds of America, a silvery spider’s web in the center of a black pyramid, I saw a broken labyrinth (it was London), I saw eyes very close to me, unending, observing their own reflection in me as if in a mirror …” The list continues for another page. Among the visions, Borges impossibly sees his own face and the faces of his readers — our faces — and “the atrocious remains of that which had deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo.’’ Also, to his mortification, he sees a number of “obscene, incredible, precise letters” that the unattainable Beatriz had written to Daneri. “I was dazed and I wept,” he concludes, “because my eyes had seen that secret and conjectural object whose name men usurp but that no man has ever seen: the inconceivable universe.”