In Buenos Aires the Zahir is a common twenty-centavo coin into which a razor or penknife has scratched the letters N T and the number two; the date stamped on the face is 1929. (In Gujarat, at the end of the eighteenth century, Zahir was a tiger; in Java a blind man in the Sukarta mosque who was stoned by the faithful; in Persia, an astrolabe that Nadir Shah ordered thrown into the sea; in the prisons of Mahdi, in 1892, a small compass, wrapped in a shred of cloth from a turban that Rudolf Karl von Slatin touched; in the synagogue of Cordoba, according to Zotenberg, a vein in the marble of one of the twelve hundred pillars; in the Jewish quarter of Tetuan, the bottom of a well.) Today is the thirteenth of November; last June 7, at dawn, the Zahir came into my hands; I am not the man I was then, but I am still able to recall, and perhaps recount, what happened. I am still, albeit only partially, Borges.

A long, winding opening paragraph you know from the jump will only make sense after another reading or two, or three, or eleven. He is still, more than partially, Borges.

The coin pictured above lacks the etched N T and the number two, but is otherwise the same one Borges is talking about. In the US, a Zahir-obsessed Borges fanatic could buy online a 20-centavo piece just such as this one, no bigger than a nickel, for several hundred times its value — perhaps six or seven dollars. The coin’s melt value would net the buyer roughly half that, around $3.62.

On June 6, Teodolina Villar died. Back in 1930, photographs of her had littered the pages of worldly magazines; that ubiquity may have had something to do with the fact that she was thought quite pretty, although not all the pictures of her unconditionally supported that hypothesis. Furthermore, Teodolina Villar was less concerned with beauty than with perfection. The Hebrews and the Chinese codified every human situation: the Mishnah tells us that beginning at sunset on the Sabbath, a tailor may not go into the street carrying a needle; the Book of Rites informs us that a guest upon receiving his first glass of wine must assume a grave demeanor; receiving the second, a respectful, happy air. The discipline that Teodolina Villar imposed upon herself was analogous, though even more painstaking and detailed. Like Talmudists and Confucians, she sought to make every action irreproachably correct, but her task was even more admirable and difficult than theirs, for the laws of her creed were not eternal, but sensitive to the whims of Paris and Hollywood. Teodolina Villar would make her entrances into orthodox places, at the orthodox hour, with orthodox ornaments, and with orthodox world-weariness but the world-weariness, the adornments, the hour and the places would almost immediately pass out of fashion, and so come to serve (upon the lips of Teodolina Villar) for the very epitome of kitsch. She sought the absolute, like Flaubert, but the absolute in the momentary. Her life was exemplary, and yet an inner desperation constantly gnawed at her. She passed through endless metamorphoses, as though fleeing from herself; her coiffure and the color of her hair were famously unstable, as were her smile, her skin, and the slant of her eyes. From 1932 on, she was studiously slim…

At the time of writing “The Zahir,” Borges was in the midst of a “romantic, exalted” love affair with the Argentine journalist Estela Canto. “Borges’ attitude moved me,” Canto said. “I liked what I was to him, what he saw in me. Sexually I felt nothing for him, he didn’t even make me uncomfortable. His kisses were clumsy, brusque, always poorly timed, and I accepted them condescendingly. I never pretended to feel what I didn’t feel.” Perhaps Borges felt the sting, as his sardonic mock-obituary for Teodolina begins to embody something of a caricature of human vanity; not for nothing is her name a pun on “evil goddess.” In fact, when the story was first published in Los Anales de Buenos Aires in 1947, Teodolina’s name was given as “Clementina,” implying mercy and, uh, clemency. Her new moniker riffs on the Greek thea — from which we take courtly love and the stilnovistis’ women-angel motif — and Latin delirium. “Villar” derives from vilis, cheap and worthless. Combined together, Borges sets up the reader for a burlesque take on stilnovistic poetry and the troubadors’ religion of love.

The war gave her much to think about. With Paris occupied by the Germans, how was one to follow fashion? A foreigner she has always had her doubts about dared to take advantage of her good will by selling her a number of cylindrical chapeaux. Within a year, it was revealed that those horrors had never been worn in Paris, and consequently they were not hats, but arbitrary, unacceptable whims. Dr. Villar had to move to Araoz Street and his daughter’s image began to adorn advertisements for face creams and automobiles. Face creams she once used profusely, automobiles she no longer had! Teodolina knew that the proper exercise of her art required a great fortune; she opted to retreat rather than surrender. And besides — it pained her to compete with mere insubstantial girls. The sinister apartment on Araoz, however, was too much to bear; on June 6, Teodolina Villar committed the solecism of dying in the middle of Barrio Sur. Shall I confess that, moved by the sincerest of Argentine passions, snobbery, I was in love with her, and that her death actually brought tears to my eyes? Perhaps the reader has already suspected that.

“Al parecer,” Canto wrote in Borges a contraluz, her chronicle of her relationship with Borges, “se entregaba completamente, suplicando no ser rechazado, convirtiendo a la mujer en un ídolo inalcanzable, al cual no se atrevía a aspirar. […] Me repetía que él era Dante, que yo era Beatrice y que habría de liberarlo del infierno.” Borges, of course, was no stranger to Dantean allusions, which litter “The Aleph,” despite his vehement denials of their symbolism in favor of (pseudo-)historical materialism: “Beatriz Viterbo really existed and I was very much and hopelessly in love with her. I wrote my story after her death.” Hopeless love for the Beatrice in his life was a condition Borges felt he shared with Dante, writing “Dante profesó por Beatriz una adoración idolátrica […] un amor desdichado y supersticioso.” According to Canto, it was while walking together in the summer of 1945 when Borges proposed to her by quoting from bits of poetry, including Dante, all the while poking fun at the character of Beatrice. “Recitaba versos – la tirada de Beatrica cuando ruega a Virgilio que acompañe a Dante en su viaje a través del infierno. […] Y hacía comentarios burlones sobre Beatrice, que adula a Virgilio para lograr sus propósitos.” The playful interweaving of life and fiction is classic Borges, but when he returned to the theme of the dead woman two years later to write “The Zahir” in response to his own “Aleph,” a newfound, fatalistic despair haunts his writing. By invoking the Commedia‘s setting he appeals for his lover’s grace even as he anticipates his failure, both by his sardonic positioning of Beatrice’s character and his comparison to Dante’s great unrequited love, a scenario he felt powerless not to re-enact.

Of course, as before, he is still Borges. A joke is never far from hand, and aside from the Dantean motives the above passage showcases his humor at its acerbic best.

At wakes, the progress of corruption allows the dead person’s body to recover its former aspect. At one point in the confused night of June 6, Teodolina Villar magically became what she had been twenty years before; her features recovered the authority of that arrogance money, youth, the awareness of being the creme de la creme, restrictions, a lack of imagination, and stolidity can give. My thoughts were no more or less: No version of that face that has so disturbed me shall ever be as memorable as this one; it’s just as well that it was the last, as it could just as well have been the first. I left her lying stiff among the flowers perfecting her contempt for death. It was about two o’clock, I guess, when I stepped into the street. Outside, the predictable ranks of one- and two-story houses had taken on that abstract air they often have at night, when they are simplified by darkness and silence. Drunk with an almost impersonal pity, I wandered through the streets. On the corner of Chile and Tacauri I spotted an open bar-and-general-store. In that establishment, to my misfortune, three men were playing truco. In the rhetorical figure known as oxymoron, the adjective applied to a noun seems to contradict that noun. Thus, Gnostics spoke of a ‘dark light’; and alchemists of a ‘black sun.’ Departing from my last visit to Teodolina Villar and drinking a glass of cheap gin in a corner bar-and-grocery store was a kind of oxymoron: its very vulgarity and accessibility were what tempted me. (The fact that men were playing cards in the place increased the contrast.)

This truly will be Borges’s last visit with Teodolina Villar; though Villar’s first appearance may give the impression of Borges introducing the story’s main character, she will be mentioned only once more in the story, when Borges talks to her sister after the wake. Teodolina’s death bisects the story, for in the next paragraph the titular coin is first glimpsed by the narrator:

I asked the owner for an orange gin; with the change I was given the Zahir; I looked at it for an instant, and then walked outside into the street, perhaps with the beginnings of a fever. The thought struck me that there is no coin that is not the symbol of all the coins that shine endlessly down throughout history and fable. I thought of Charon’s obolus; the alms that Belisarius begged; Judas’s thirty pieces of silver; the drachmas of the courtesan Lais; the ancient coin proffered by one of the Ephesian sleepers; the bright coins of the wizard in the 1001 Nights, which turned into disks of paper; Isaac Laquedem’s inexhaustible denarius; the sixty thousand silver coins, one for every verse of an epic, which Firdusi returned to a king because they were not gold; the gold doubloon nailed by Ahab to the mast; Leopold Bloom’s unreversible florin; the Louis that betrayed the fleeing Louis XVI near Varennes. As though in a dream, the thought that in any coin one may read those famous connotations seemed to me of vast, inexplicable importance. I wandered, with increasingly rapid steps, through the deserted streets and plazas. Weariness halted me at a corner. My eyes came to rest on a weathered wrought-iron fence; behind it I saw the black-and-white tiles of the porch of La Concepción. I had wandered in a circle; I was just one block from the bar where I’d been given the Zahir.

The metaphor of the Zahir is so surface-level as to seem wholly unlike Borges: he’s obsessed with a coin. The coin is Teodolina. Obsession with the coin equals obsession with Teodolina. Where JLB shines through is in the braiding of literary references and metaphysical allusions with the more traditional psychological aspects, which find new depth when set against the intertextual elements.

I turned the corner; the dark facade at the far end of the street showed me that the establishment had closed. Sleepless, possessed, almost happy, I reflected that there is nothing less material than money, since any coin (a twenty centavo piece, for instance) is, in truth, a panoply of all possible futures. Money is abstract, I said over and over, money is future time. It can be an evening just outside the city, or a Brahms melody, or maps, or chess, or coffee, or the words of Epictetus, which teach the contempt of gold; it is a Proteus more changeable than the Proteus of the Isle of Pharos. It is unforeseeable time, Bergsonian time, not the hard, solid time of Islam or the Portico.

Adherents of determinism deny that in the world there is only one possible event, ed ist an event which could have happened; a coin symbolizes our free will. (I did not suspect that these ‘thoughts’ were an artifice against the Zahir and a first manifestation of a demoniacal power.) After long and tenacious musings, I at last fell asleep, but I dreamed that I was the pile of coins guarded by a gryphon.

The next day I decided I’d been drunk, I also decided to free myself of the coin that had so affected me. I looked at it; there was nothing particularly distinctive about it, except those scratches. Burying it in the garden or hiding it in a corner of the library would have been the best thing to do, but I wanted to escape its orbit altogether, and so preferred to lose it. I went neither to the Basilica del Pilar that morning nor to the cemetery; I took a subway to Constitución Station and from Constitución to San Juan and Boedo. On an impulse, I got off at Urquiza; I walked toward the west and south; I turned left and right, with studied randomness, at several corners, and on a street that looked to me like all the others I went into the first tavern I came to, ordered a gin, and paid with the Zahir. I half closed my eyes behind the dark lenses of my spectacles, and managed not to see the numbers on the houses or the name of the street. That night, I took a sleeping pill and slept soundly.

Until the end of June I distracted myself by composing a tale of fantasy. The tale contains two or three enigmatic circumlocutions: ‘water of the sword,’ it says, instead of blood, and ‘bed of the serpent,’ for gold, and is written in the first person. The narrator is an ascetic who has renounced all commerce with mankind and lives on a moor. (The name of the place is Gnitaheidr.) Because of the simplicity and innocence of his life, he is judged by some to be an angel; that is a charitable sort of exaggeration, because no one is free of sin. He himself (to take the example nearest at hand) has cut his father’s throat, though it is true that his father was a famous wizard who had used his magic to usurp an infinite treasure for himself.

Protecting this treasure from mad human greed is the mission to which the he has devoted his life; day and night he stands guard over it. Soon, perhaps too soon, that watchfulness will come to an end: the stars have told him that the sword that will cut him off forever has already been forged. (Gram is the name of the sword.) In an increasingly tortured style, the narrator praises the luster and flexibility of his body; one paragraph offhandedly mentions ‘scales’; another says that the treasure he watches over is of red rings and gleaming gold. At the end, we realize that the ascetic is the serpent Fafnir and the treasure on which the creature lies coiled is the gold of the Nibelungen. The appearance of Sigurd abruptly ends the story.

In recalling Sigur’s killing of Fafnir, Borges reinforces the theme of sexual repression and thwarted romance at the core of “The Zahir.” In the Icelandic Saga, the same sword which “abruptly ends the story” also stands as a taboo against sex, punishable by death: “He said that it had been decreed him that he should accept thus his bridal night, in respect to his wife, or else receive his death.” Alluding to the sword attaches to desire a sexual fear of death. Estela Canto wrote “la actitud de Borges hacia el sexo era de terror pánico, como si temiera la revelación que en él podía hallar.” Curiously, elsewhere in Borges this kind of death constitutes the moment of transcendence, the instant when the spirit is liberated: “Alguna vez […] el predestinado acero del heroe — Sigurd o San Jorge o Tristán — penetrará en la sordida cueva y lo acometerá, lo herirá de muerte y lo salvara.” That moment of transcendence lends “The Zahir” its weighty sense of fatalistic despair, the narrator damned by his own romantic longing.

I have said that composing that piece of trivial nonsense (in the course of which I interpolated, with pseudo erudition, a line or two from the Fafnismal) enabled me to put the coin out of my mind. There were nights when I was so certain I’d be able to forget it that I would willfully remember it. The truth is, I abused those moments; stating to recall turned out to be much easier than stopping. It was futile to tell myself that that abominable nickel disk was no different from the infinite other, inoffensive disks that pass from hand to hand every day. Moved by that reflection, I attempted to think about another coin, but I couldn’t. I also recall another (frustrated) experiment that I performed with Chilean five-and-ten centavo pieces and a Uruguayan two-centavo piece. On July 16, I acquired a pound sterling; I didn’t look at it all that day, but that night (and others) I placed it under a magnifying glass and studied it in the light of a powerful electric lamp. Then I made a rubbing of it. The brilliance and the dragon and St. George availed me naught; I could not rid myself of my idée fixe.

In August, I decided to consult a psychiatrist. I did not confide the entire absurdity of the story to him; I told him I was tormented by insomnia and that often I could not free my mind of an object, any random object, a coin, say. A short time later, in a bookshop on Calle Sarmiento, I exhumed a copy of Julius Barlach’s Urkunden zur Geschichte der Zahirsage (Breslau, 1899).

In that book was a description of my illness. The introduction said that the author proposed to ‘gather into a single manageable octavo volume every existing document that bears upon the superstition of the Zahir, including four articles from the Habicht archives and the original manuscript of Philip Meadows Taylor’s report on the subject.’ Belief in the Zahir is of Islamic ancestry, and dates, apparently, to sometime in the eighteenth century. (Barlach impugns the passages that Zotenberg attributes to Abul-Feddah.) In Arabic, ‘Zahir’ means visible, evident; in that sense, it is one of the ninety-nine names of God; in Muslim countries, the masses use the word for “beings or things which have the terrible power to be unforgettable, and whose image eventually drives people mad.”

In Islamic hermeneutics, the word zahir refers to exoteric readings of the Koran. But within the book lies an unspoken, batin meaning, a reflection of the Sufi belief that every individual has a batin of their own in the world of souls, itself a further manifestation of Allah’s attribute of the Hidden One, who despite occupying every realm can never be perceived. For the Sufi mystic, every manifestation in the world we can perceive is the shadow of an invisible world; every external zahir is a symbolic expression of a batin spiritual reality. It doesn’t take much of a metaphysical leap from there to land among Deleuze’s plane of immanence…

Its first undisputed witness was the Persian polymath and dervish Lutf Ali Azur; in the corroborative pages of the biographical encyclopaedia titled Temple of Fire, Ali Azur relates that in a certain school in Shiraz there was a copper astrolabe “constructed in such a way that any man who looked upon it once could think of nothing else, so that the king commanded that it be thrown into the deepest depths of the sea, in order that men might not forget the universe.” Meadows Taylor’s account is somewhat more extensive; the author served the Nizam of Hyderabad, and composed the famous novel Confessions of a Thug. In 1832, on the outskirts of Bhuj, Taylor heard the following uncommon expression used to signify madness or saintliness: ‘Haber visto al Tigre’ (Verily he has looked on the tiger) He was told that the reference was to a magic tiger that was the perdition of all who saw it, even from a great distance, for they continued to think of it till the end of their days. Someone mentioned that one of those unfortunates had fled to Mysore, where he had painted the figure of the tiger in a palace.

Years later, Taylor visited the prisons of that kingdom; in the jail at Nithur, the Governor showed him a cell on whose floor, walls and vaulted ceiling a Moslem fakir had designed (in fantastic colors, which time, rather than erasing, refined) of an infinite tiger. It was a tiger composed of many tigers, in the most dizzying of ways; it was crisscrossed with tigers, striped with tigers and included seas and Himalayas and armies that resembled other tigers. The painter had died many years before, in that same cell; he had come from Sind or perhaps Gujarat and his initial purpose had been to draw a mapamundi. Of that purpose there remained some vestiges within the monstrous image. Taylor told this story to Muhammad al-Yemeni, of Fort William; al-Yemeni said that there was no creature in the world that did not tend toward becoming a Zaheer, but that the All-Merciful does not allow two things to be a Zaheer at the same time, since only one is capable of entrancing multitudes. He said that there is always a Zaheer and in the Age of Ignorance it was the idol called Yahuk, and then a prophet from Khorsasan who wore a veil studded with precious stones or a mask of gold. He also noted that God is inscrutable.

Borges shared with Edward Gibbon a delight in poking fun at Christianity through the lens of other religions; by treating foreign belief systems with the respect traditionally afford exclusively to Christianity, both writers got their kicks highlighting the foibles inherent to all religion. The idea is to handle the foreign religion with the same reverence and indulgence observe din handling Christianity, knowing full well the argument will sound offbeat and slightly ironic. Somewhere in the back of the reader’s head, the image starts to materialize that all religions — equally quaint, equally false — need a little deflating. So Borges reiterates over and over that belief in the Zahir is a Middle Eastern superstition, a local phenomenon — but what was that etched on the coin?

N T 2. The second book of the Nuevo Testamento is the oldest Gospel, Mark.

Mark 12:28-31:

And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first commandment of all? And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is , Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.

Anyway, on with the story…

Over and over I read Barlach’s Monograph. I cannot sort out my emotions; I recall my desperation when I realized that nothing could any longer save me, the inward relief of knowing that I was not to blame for my misfortune, the envy I felt for those whose Zaheer was not a coin but a slab of marble or a tiger. How easy it is not to think of a tiger, I recall thinking. I also recall the remarkable uneasiness I felt when I read this paragraph: “One commentator of the Gulshan i Raz states that ‘he who has seen the Zaheer soon shall see the Rose’ and quotes a line of poetry interpolated into Attar’s Asrār-Nama (The Book of Things Unknown): ‘the Zahir is the shadow of the Rose and the rending of the Veil.’”

The zahir-batin distinction in Islam manifests in the Sufi language in the form of a series of conceptual oppositions. Sufi literature transformed Arab erotic poetry, imbuing it with a new, highly symbolic language of metaphysical aspiration. Long before the troubadors, the language of love was similarly consecrated in Judeo-Christian literature. A troubador at heart, Borges inverts the situation, using images of myth and mysticism to construct a contemporary narrative of unrequited love.

A professed devotee of the Sufi poet Attar’s The Conference of Birds, here he quotes from his Book of Things Unknown or The Book of Secrets, the Asrār-Nama. Or does he? The line Borges includes never actually appears in Attar’s poem. “Me distrajo la tarea de componer un relato fantástico,” Borges said. “Éste encierra dos o tres perífrasis enigmáticas — en lugar de sangre pone agua de la espada; en lugar de oro, lecho de la serpiente — y está escrito en primera persona.” My dad used to put it rather succinctly: Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Borges’s fanciful line includes two major symbols of Sufism: the rose, symbolizing God’s creation and beauty, and the veil, a typically Borgesian motif, dealing as it does in the mysterious and the hidden. In fact, Borges would title a collection of his poetry La rosa profunda. In the poem “Talismanes,” Borges presents an inventory of personal articles and reminiscences before proclaiming “Ciertamente son talismanes, pero de nada sirven contra la sombra que no puedo nombrar, contra lombra que no debo mobrar.” In another collection, El oro de los tigres, Borges offers another personal catalog in the prose poem “El amenazado”:

Es el amor. Tendré que ocultarme o que huir.
Crecen los muros de su cárcel, como en un sueño altroz. La hermosa máscara ha cambiado, pero como siempre es la unica. ¿De qué me servirán mis talismanes: el ejercicio, la vaga erudición, el aprendizaje de las palabras que usó el áspero Norte para cantar sus mares y sus espadas, ka serena amistad, las galeriás de la Biblioteca, las cosas comunes, los hábitos, el joven amor de mi madre, la sombra militar de mis muertos, la noche intemporal, el sabor del sueño?
Estar contigo o no estar contigo es la medida de mi tiempo.
Ya el cántaro se quiebra la fuente, ya el hombre se levanta a la voz del ave, ya se han oscurecido los que miran por las ventanas, pero la sombra no ha tráido la paz.
Es, ya lo sé, el amor: la ansiedad y el alivio de oír tu voz, la espera y la memoria, el horror de vivir en lo sucesivo.
Es el amor con sus mitologías, con sus pequeñas magias inútiles.
Hay una esquina por la que no me atrevo a pasar.
Ya los ejércitos me cercan, las hordas.
(Esta habitación es irreal; ella no la ha visto.)
El nombre de una mujer me delata.
Me duele una mujer en todo el cuerpo.

Defenseless, the poet is enslaved. Love dons many guises, through which it adopts a singular power; behind every image, every hermosa máscara, lies desire. Of course, love as demonic force is no new concept in literature. But that’s not what Borges is after here. This is a confession, a detailed list of every talisman in the poet’s life he’s constructed in vain to ward off the lure of love. If the naked emotion on display in this poem feels out of step with the intellectual Borges we think we know, he’d agree: “Hay un poema,” Borges would later say, “creo que se llama ‘El amenazado,’ que taché de mis libros porque era demasido íntimo. […] La poesía necesita algo fabuloso, algo ambiguo, y le faltaba a ese poema. Era una especie de interjección que no podia permitirme en público.” He’s not wrong. Borges’s usual taste for fabulism and ambiguity is no where to be seen in “El amenazado,” which lacks his characteristic games of rhetoric and metafiction. Yet still the poem is inescapably Borgesian in its description of a nightmarish, otherwordly terror. To bring it back to “The Zahir,” with the penultimate line — El nombre de una mujer me delata — Borges puns on nombre and sombra, matching names to masks in a suitably shadowy marriage of two themes which would inhabit nearly all his writing. (See also “Ya no sabe amor de mi sombra” in “La vuela a Bunos Aires” or “Secular en la sombra fluyó el amor” in “Ulrica”)

Removing the veil of idolatry of the self to move closer to divine love is the core tenet of Sufism. We need look no further than the 50th chapter of the Koran, the surah Qaf: “We have unveiled you, and today your eye is sharp.” (Another Dantean allusion — to Purgatorio XXXI — may be interpreted in Borges’s use of this image.)

On the night of Teodolina’s wake, I had been surprised not to see amongst those present Sra. Abascal, her younger sister. In October, a friend of hers said to me:

“Poor Julita, she became so strange and they interned her in the Bosch. How she must burden those nurses who spoon-feed her! She goes on and on about that coin, just like Morena Sackmann’s chauffeur.”

Time, which softens memories, only makes the memory of the Zahir sharper. First I could see the face of it, then the reverse; now I can see both sides at once. It is not as though the Zahir were made of glass, since one side is not superimposed upon the other; rather it is as though the vision were spherical and the Zahir flutters in the center. Whatever is not the Zahir appears to me filtered and distant: The scornful image of Teodolina, physical pain. Tennyson said that if we could but understand a single flower we would know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he was trying to say that there is nothing, however humble, that does not imply the history of the world and its infinite concatenation of causes and effects. Perhaps he meant that there is no deed, however humble, that does not imply universal history and its infinite succession of effects and causes. Perhaps he meant that the visible world is complete in each representation, just as Schopenhauer tells us that the Will expresses itself entire in every person. The Kabbalists believed that man is a microcosm, a symbolic mirror of the universe; as would everything, according to Tennyson. Everything, even the unbearable Zahir.

Before the year 1948, Julia’s fate will have overtaken me. I will have to be fed and dressed, I will not know whether it’s morning or night, I will not know who Borges was.

Calling that future terrible is a fallacy, since none of the future’s circumstances will in any way affect me. One might as well maintain that the pain of an anesthetized patient whose skull is being opened is terrible. I will no longer perceive the universe, I will perceive the Zahir. According to Idealist doctrine the verbs ‘to live’ and ‘to dream’ are rigorously synonymous; as for me, thousands of appearances will become one; a very complex dream into a simple one. Others will dream that I am mad, while I dream of the Zahir. When every person on earth thinks, day and night, of the Zahir, which will be dream and which reality, the earth or the Zahir?

In the deserted hours of the night I am still able to walk through the streets. Dawn often surprises me upon a bench in the Plaza Garay, thinking (or trying to think) about that passage in the Asrar Nama where it is said that the Zahir is the shadow of the Rose and the rending of the Veil. I link that pronouncement to this fact: In order to lose themselves in God, the Sufis repeat their own name or the ninety-nine names of God until the names mean nothing anymore. I long to travel that path.

Borges’s closing lines sums up the quest for interpretation reading his stories always begins:

Perhaps I will succeed in wearing away the Zahir by thinking and re-thinking about it; perhaps behind the coin is God.