A Reader on Reading

“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.”

Once the story was finished, Borges published it in Sur, in the issue of September 1945. Shortly afterward, he and Estela Canto had dinner at the Hotel Las Delicias in Adrogué, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. This was a place of great importance to Borges. Here, as a young man, he had spent a few happy summers with his family, reading; here, a desperately unhappy thirty-five-year-old man, he attempted suicide on 25 August 1934 (an attempt he commemorated in 1978, in a story set in the future called “25 August 1983”); here he set his metaphysical detective story, “Death and the Compass,” transforming Las Delicias into the beautifully named villa Triste-le-Roy. In the evening he and Canto walked through the darkened streets, and Borges recited, in Italian, Beatrice’s lines to Virgil, begging him to accompany Dante on his voyage through Hell. This is Dorothy L. Sayers’s translation:

O courteous Mantuan soul, whose skill in song

Keeps green on earth a fame that shall not end

While motion rolls the turning sphere along!

A friend of mine, who is not Fortune’s friend,

Is hard beset upon the shadowy coast.

Canto recalled the lines and told me that Borges had made fun of the flattery Beatrice used to get what she wanted. “Then Borges turned to me,” Canto said, “though he could barely make me out under the misty street lamp, and asked if I would marry him.”

Half amused, half serious, she told him that she might. “But Georgie, don’t forget that I’m a disciple of Bernard Shaw. We can’t get married unless we go to bed first.” To me, across the dinner table, she added, “I knew he’d never dare.”