Let me state my reasons. In 1867, Captain Burton was the British consul in Brazil; in July of 1942, Pedro Henríquez Ureña* discovered a manuscript by Burton in a library in Santos, and in this manuscript Burton discussed the mirror attributed in the East to Iskandar dhu-al-Qarnayn, or Alexander the Great of Macedonia. In this glass, Burton said, the entire universe was reflected. Burton mentions other similar artifices—the sevenfold goblet of KaiKhosru; the mirror that Tãriq ibn-Ziyãd found in a tower (1001 Nights, 272); the mirror that Lucían of Samosata examined on the moon (True History, 1:26); the specular spear attributed by the first book of Capella's Satyricon to Jupiter; Merlin's universal mirror, "round and hollow and . .. [that] seem'd a world of glas" (Faerie Queene, 111:2,19)—and then adds these curious words: "But all the foregoing (besides sharing the defect of not existing) are mere optical instruments. The faithful who come to the Amr mosque in Cairo, know very well that the universe lies inside one of the stone columns that surround the central courtyard.. .. No one, of course, can see it, but those who put their ear to the surface claim to hear, within a short time, the bustling rumour of it. ... The mosque dates to the seventh century; the columns were taken from other, pre-Islamic, temples, for asibn-Khaldün has written: In the republics founded by nomads, the attendance of foreigners is essential for all those things that bear upon carpentry."
Does that Aleph exist, within the heart of a stone? Did I see it when I saw all things, and then forget it?
Our minds are permeable to forgetfulness; I myself am distorting and losing, through the tragic erosion of the years, the features of Beatriz.
For Estela Canto
[1] I do, however, recall these lines from a satire in which he lashed out vehemently against bad poets: This one fits the poem with a coat of mail Of erudition; that one, with gala pomps and circumstance. Both flail their absurd pennons to no avail, Neglecting, poor wretches, the factor sublime—its LOVELINESS!
It was only out of concern that he might create an army of implacable and powerful enemies, he told me, that he did not fearlessly publish the poem.
[2] "I received your mournful congratulations," he wrote me. "You scoff, my lamentable friend, in envy, but you shall confess—though the words stick in your throat!— that this time I have crowned my cap with the most scarlet of plumes; my turban, with the most caliphal of rubies."
Afterword
Aside from "Emma Zunz" (whose wonderful plot—much superior to its timid execution—was given me by Cecilia Ingenieros) and "Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden" (which attempts to interpret two supposedly real occurrences), the stories in this book belong to the genre of fantasy. Of them, the first is the most fully realized; its subject is the effect that immortality would have on humankind. That outline for an ethics of immortality is followed by "The Dead Man"; in that story, Azevedo Bandeira is a man from Rivera or Cerro Largo and also an uncouth sort of deity—a mulatto, renegade version of Chesterton's incomparable Sunday. (Chapter XXIX of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire tells of a fate much like Otalora's, though considerably grander and more incredible.) About "The Theologians," suffice it to say that they are a dream—a somewhat melancholy dream—of personal identity; about the "Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz," that it is a gloss on the Martín Fierro. I owe to a canvas painted by Watts in 1896 the story called "The House of Asterion" and the character of its poor protagonist. "The Other Death" is a fantasy about time, which I wove under the suggestion of some of Pier Damiani's arguments. During the last war, no one could have wished more earnestly than I for Germany's defeat; no one could have felt more strongly than I the tragedy of Germany's fate; "Deutsches Requiem" is an attempt to understand that fate, which our own"Germanophiles"(who know nothing of Germany) neither wept over nor even suspected. "The Writing of the God" has been judged generously; the jaguar obliged me to put into the mouth of a "priest of the Pyramid of Qaholom" the arguments of a Kabbalist or a theologian. In "The Zahir" and "The Aleph," I think I can detect some influence of Wells' story "The Cristal Egg"(1899).
J. L. B.
Buenos Aires, May 3,1949
Postscript (1952): I have added four stories to this new edition. "Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth" is not (I have been assured) memorable, in spite of its bloodcurdling title. We might think of it as a variation on the story of "The Two Kings in Their Two Labyrinths," interpolated into the l001 Nights by the copyists yet passed over by the prudent Galland. About "The Wait" I shall say only that it was suggested by a true police story that Alfredo Doblas read me, some ten years ago, while we were classifying books—following the manual of the Bibliographic Institute of Brussels, I might add, a code I have entirely forgotten save for the detail that God can be found under the number 231. The subject of the story was a Turk; I made him an Italian so that I could more easily get inside his skin. The momentary yet repeated sight of a long, narrow rooming house that sits around the corner of Calle Paraná, in Buenos Aires, provided me with the story titled "The Man on the Threshold"; I set it in India so that its improbability might be bearable.
J. L. B.
Foreword
For Leopoldo Lugones*
The sounds of the plaza fall behind, and Ienferthe Library. Almost physically, I can feel the gravitation of the books, the serene atmosphere of orderliness, time magically mounted and preserved. To left and right, absorbed in their waking dream, rows of readers' momentary problems in the light of the "scholarly lamps," as a Miltonian displacement of adjectives would have it. I recall having recalled that trope here in the Library once before, and then that other adjective of setting— the Lunario 's"arid camel," and then that hexameter from the AEneid that employs, and surpasses, the same artifice: Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram.