To Borges, or about him
You often spoke to me of a blind writer, who was fascinated by mazes and who smiled at even the most dreadful nightmares, while you walked, leaning on my arm—as if I would believe your talk about things that were receding before your eyes day by day. Do you remember when we saw him together after that, wandering in awe past the shop windows? You assured me that he was that blind man, and you were that country bumpkin he brushed off so roughly when you bent to kiss his hand gratefully after he’d pulled you from the path of the car about to take your life.
Don’t say it was a gang of killers who jumped you from behind. That won’t bring you fame or help you to write a good story. It’s embarrassing enough that a man with two circular hollows in place of eyes saw the deadly car before you did and saved you from imminent death.
That day, his visiting card tucked securely in your jacket pocket, he asked you in a fatherly way to visit him so he could show you the manuscript of a new book that no one else had yet seen. He pointed to that grey building of miraculous construction, with its curved façade, its lavish dome—elaborately decorated, a dazzling, pearlescent white—facing the sky, topped by a tiny statue of a naked angel. As he pointed it out with a practised finger, you saw it, in all its mystery, at the end of the street. He told you to go up to the second floor and enter without knocking, since he was used to leaving the door open even when he was sleeping or out strolling in the city centre. You were free to move around the flat as if you were in your own home.
He warned you that you would find all the lights switched off and the French windows open, though not a single ray of light from outside could penetrate the wrought iron bars, even at the height of day. He cautioned you not to run a curious hand over the walls, because there were no light switches. Nevertheless, he joyfully described the massive chandeliers, as old as the building itself, that adorned the lofty ceilings of every room, and rhapsodised about the candelabra that were forged, like statues, into myriad twists and turns, protrusions and hollows: stone, wood, metal all fusing, proclaiming a vitality and beauty that made their original functions seem but an endless insult.
He may—as you enter, stumbling, tentative—be sleeping, or out wandering the city, so he won’t be able to tell you his story in person, in that loud voice the blind often adopt lest their memories betray them. It will be up to you then to pick up the manuscript, the only one in the flat. The blind storyteller traversed miles to complete it here, in the city whose memory he has cherished since his childhood, and from which he guards a tattered photo of himself dressed in frayed robes, sitting astride a huge camel at the base of the Pyramids.
It won’t take you much effort to find the manuscript in the nearest corner of the house, for the library is crammed with innumerable copies. Likewise, copies of it are strewn carelessly every which way, because as he told you, he likes to be able to lay his bony hand on it anytime, anywhere. At first you will be unable to read it; it will be a long while before you find the lines illuminated before your eyes and the pages avidly turning.
You will visit more and more often, tripping each time over the furniture you thought you could easily navigate in the dark. You will discover how, since your last visit, he has rearranged it, and how he has changed the functions of the rooms, so that you find yourself urinating in his bedroom or gazing at the city from the bathroom window. Each time you must discard what you thought you knew, reacquainting yourself with the flat, its resident, and the unusual visitor. And each time you leave the building, you will sense that things have swayed and receded before your eyes since the previous day, and are fading away, until you believe that the apprehensions you used to proclaim, like the writer’s final touches, have started to become a reality. Meanwhile, you yank your arm abruptly from mine, refusing to let me guide your steps; you insist that you walk alone, stretching out your arms to feel the way before you.
Like all of the elderly, with their diminutive statures and twisted shadows, he must enlist your help in the rituals of his madness. Let us play the role of spectator as he dances hysterically with the dervishes, wearing a peaked cap and robes that billow like women’s dresses, a giant tambourine clutched in his hand. Flames blaze from his deadened eyes and dancing butterflies slip from his closed, narrow lips, beneath a maze of wrinkles. He sits submissively in the Buddhist temple and moves, dazed, not believing that Cavafy’s house exists. He weeps in desert monasteries; light floods his face in the tombs of saints. He then makes us wait as he squats inside a circle, gazing into the fire as if imploring the light of his eyes to return or lamenting its passing. He fixes the gaze of the wild-haired pagans upon us while he noses through the crevices of the rocks. He defeats the gamblers one after another, heaping their shabby clothing on our arms and leaving them to their nakedness and their loss. You take a new photograph of him on an old camel at the foot of the Pyramids, and we are expected to believe that this is the same decrepit animal, that its aged black master with his toothless smile is that same child whose face appears beside his, who pushed with curiosity into the frame just before the shutter clicked, to ensure himself a place in the old, forgotten image.
We had to endure all of this madness with forced smiles, as he drank his coffee in a small, faraway coffee shop, or smoked his narghile in a huge dreary hall that resembled a fairy-tale castle. At the end of every visit, he would urge you to keep on coming, and you would assure him apologetically that you had almost finished the manuscript. You did not tell him about your ever-increasing eye problems or how, each visit, you could read fewer pages than on the previous one. He would not forget to grant me a formal smile, one not devoid of affection, as he asked me about writing, and I assured him that I had no relationship with it, either close or distant.
The manuscript dazzled you; he talked to me about it many thousands of times until I grew bored, until I felt the light of my eyes ebb every time you pointed to it. Then I was surprised that you knew it by heart, amazed that you could have memorised all those pages that you had only been allowed to read once, in total darkness and unbearable confusion.
I still cannot picture him as he sat at his desk and I in the chair facing him. With fatherly calm and confidence, he asked what you thought of the manuscript. You loudly recited it all from memory before declaring yourself truly dazzled, stammering, your words tumbling over one another. His mouth opened in a reassuring, frightening smile. He picked up a copy of the manuscript that seemed, the moment he stretched out his hand, to have leapt onto his palm from one of the heaps of copies scattered everywhere around him, some even swimming in the air. Then he pressed a hidden button, illuminating the room and the entire flat for the first time. The chandeliers glowed, flames darted from the mouths of the candelabra, daylight pierced the iron grillwork and danced freely inside the room. It was a glittering, blinding festival of lights of which you had never seen the like, until suddenly you closed your weary eyes and stayed that way for a long time. Even when you had started to become accustomed to the surprise and the light, your eyes remained half-closed, as if you were gazing into millions of suns. Then he began calmly thumbing through the pages before handing you the manuscript to examine it in the light for the first time. You roamed in vain through the thousands of blank white pages and returned to the white cardboard cover, feeling yourself on the verge of insanity. You picked up copy after copy, finding only thousands more blank pages, while his wild laugh rose and swelled, enveloping you, and you discovered—for the first time—the depth of the two hollow caverns embedded in his face, and their singular life, as they narrow, then widen, shorten, then suddenly extend inwards.
I am still trying in vain to recall that moment, as I tighten my grip on your arm while you stumble like a recalcitrant child, trying to escape me, as we pass in front of the building surrounded by walls, its billboard plastered with advertisements, like some historical relic that has been barred to visitors for at least a year because of renovations, and to which you had gone repeatedly, since that was where he lived.
I am still trying to convince myself that this darkness extending as far as my eyes can see is only a temporary predicament, even as it expands and grows more threatening without my being able to do anything about it. Meanwhile, as I check that your body is still under my control, I struggle to evade the malicious question: Why, for a whole hour, did you go on pressing your fingers into my eyes as deep as they would go . . . and why did I suffer not even a moment’s pain, as I felt your features slowly depart from my field of vision?
