"Is it gold?"I said.
"I know not. It is the disk of Odin and it has but one side."
It was then I felt a gnawing to own the disk myself. If it were mine, I could sell it for a bar of gold and then /would be a king.
"In my hut I've got a chest full of money hidden away. Gold coins, and they shine like my ax," I told the wanderer, whom I hate to this day. "If you give the disk of Odin to me, I will give you the chest."
"I will not," he said gruffly.
"Then you can continue on your way," I said.
He turned away. One ax blow to the back of his head was all it took; he wavered and fell, but as he fell he opened his hand, and I saw the gleam of the disk in the air. I marked the place with my ax and I dragged the body down to the creek bed, where I knew the creek was swollen. There I dumped his body.
When I got back to my house I looked for the disk. But I couldn't find it. I have been looking for it for years.
The Book of Sand
...thy rope of sands...
George Herbert (1593-1623)
The line consists of an infinite number of points; the plane, of an infinite number of lines; the volume, of an infinite number of planes; the hypervolume, of an infinite number of volumes... No—this, more geometrico, is decidedly not the best way to begin my tale. To say that the story is true is by now a convention of every fantastic tale; mine, nevertheless, is true.
I live alone, in a fifth-floor apartment on Calle Belgrano. One evening a few months ago, I heard a knock at my door. I opened it, and a stranger stepped in. He was a tall man, with blurred, vague features, or perhaps my nearsightedness made me see him that way. Everything about him spoke of honest poverty: he was dressed in gray, and carried a gray valise. I immediately sensed that he was a foreigner. At first I thought he was old; then I noticed that I had been misled by his sparse hair, which was blond, almost white, like the Scandinavians'. In the course of our conversation, which I doubt lasted more than an hour, I learned that he hailed from the Orkneys.
I pointed the man to a chair. He took some time to begin talking. He gave off an air of melancholy, as I myself do now.
"I sell Bibles," he said at last.
"In this house," I replied, not without a somewhat stiff, pedantic note, "there are several English Bibles, including the first one, Wyclif's. I also have Cipriano de Valera's, Luther's (which is, in literary terms, the worst of the lot), and a Latin copy of the Vulgate. As you see, it isn't exactly Bibles I might be needing."
After a brief silence he replied.
"It's not only Bibles I sell. I can show you a sacred book that might interest a man such as yourself. I came by it in northern India, in Bikaner."
He opened his valise and brought out the book. He laid it on the table.
It was a clothbound octavo volume that had clearly passed through many hands. I examined it; the unusual heft of it surprised me. On the spine was printed Holy Writ, and then Bombay.
"Nineteenth century, I'd say," I observed.
"I don't know," was the reply. "Never did know."
I opened it at random. The characters were unfamiliar to me. The pages, which seemed worn and badly set, were printed in double columns, like a Bible. The text was cramped, and composed into versicles.
At the upper corner of each page were Arabic numerals. I was struck by an odd fact: the even-numbered page would carry the number 40,514, let us say, while the odd-numbered page that followed it would be 999.1 turned the page; the next page bore an eight-digit number. It also bore a small illustration, like those one sees in dictionaries: an anchor drawn in pen and ink, as though by the unskilled hand of a child.
It was at that point that the stranger spoke again.
"Look at it well. You will never see it again."
There was a threat in the words, but not in the voice.
I took note of the page, and then closed the book. Immediately I opened it again. In vain I searched for the figure of the anchor, page after page. To hide my discomfiture, I tried another tack.
"This is a version of Scripture in some Hindu language, isn't that right?"
"No," he replied.
Then he lowered his voice, as though entrusting me with a secret.
"I came across this book in a village on the plain, and I traded a few rupees and a Bible for it. The man who owned it didn't know how to read. I suspect he saw the Book of Books as an amulet. He was of the lowest caste; people could not so much as step on his shadow without being defiled. He told me his book was called the Book of Sand because neither sand nor this book has a beginning or an end."
He suggested I try to find the first page.
I took the cover in my left hand and opened the book, my thumb and forefinger almost touching. It was impossible: several pages always lay between the cover and my hand. It was as though they grew from the very book.
"Now try to find the end."
I failed there as well.
"This can't be," I stammered, my voice hardly recognizable as my own.
"It can't be, yet it is," the Bible peddler said, his voice little more than a whisper. "The number of pages in this book is literally infinite. No page is the first page; no page is the last. I don't know why they're numbered in this arbitrary way, but perhaps it's to give one to understand that the terms of an infinite series can be numbered any way whatever."
Then, as though thinking out loud, he went on.
"If space is infinite, we are anywhere, at any point in space. If time is infinite, we are at any point in time."
His musings irritated me.
"You," I said, "are a religious man, are you not?"
"Yes, I'm Presbyterian. My conscience is clear. I am certain I didn't cheat that native when I gave him the Lord's Word in exchange for his diabolic book."
I assured him he had nothing to reproach himself for, and asked whether he was just passing through the country. He replied that he planned to return to his own country within a few days. It was then that I learned he was a Scot, and that his home was in the Orkneys. I told him I had great personal fondness for Scotland because of my love for Stevenson and Hume.
"And Robbie Burns," he corrected.
As we talked I continued to explore the infinite book.
"Had you intended to offer this curious specimen to the British Museum, then?" I asked with feigned indifference.
"No," he replied, "I am offering it to you," and he mentioned a great sum of money.
I told him, with perfect honesty, that such an amount of money was not within my ability to pay. But my mind was working; in a few moments I had devised my plan.
"I propose a trade," I said. "You purchased the volume with a few rupees and the Holy Scripture; I will offer you the full sum of my pension, which I have just received, and Wyclif's black-letter Bible. It was left to me by my parents."
"A black-letter Wyclif!" he murmured.
I went to my bedroom and brought back the money and the book. With a bibliophile's zeal he turned the pages and studied the binding.
"Done," he said.
I was astonished that he did not haggle. Only later was I to realize that he had entered my house already determined to sell the book. He did not count the money, but merely put the bills into his pocket.
We chatted about India, the Orkneys, and the Norwegian jarls that had once ruled those islands. Night was falling when the man left. I have never seen him since, nor do I know his name.
I thought of putting the Book of Sand in the space left by the Wyclif, but I chose at last to hide it behind some imperfect volumes of the Thousand and One Nights.
I went to bed but could not sleep. At three or four in the morning I turned on the light. I took out the impossible book and turned its pages. On one, I saw an engraving of a mask. There was a number in the corner of the page—I don't remember now what it was—raised to the ninth power.
I showed no one my treasure. To the joy of possession was added the fear that it would be stolen from me
, and to that, the suspicion that it might not be truly infinite. Those two points of anxiety aggravated my already habitual misanthropy. I had but few friends left, and those, I stopped seeing. A prisoner of the Book, I hardly left my house. I examined the worn binding and the covers with a magnifying glass, and rejected the possibility of some artifice. I found that the small illustrations were spaced at two-thousand-page intervals. I began noting them down in an alphabetized notebook, which was very soon filled. They never repeated themselves. At night, during the rare intervals spared me by insomnia, I dreamed of the book.
Summer was drawing to a close, and I realized that the book was monstrous. It was cold consolation to think that I, who looked upon it with my eyes and fondled it with my ten flesh-and-bone fingers, was no less monstrous than the book. I felt it was a nightmare thing, an obscene thing, and that it defiled and corrupted reality.
I considered fire, but I feared that the burning of an infinite book might be similarly infinite, and suffocate the planet in smoke.
I remembered reading once that the best place to hide a leaf is in the forest. Before my retirement I had worked in the National Library, which contained nine hundred thousand books; I knew that to the right of the lobby a curving staircase descended into the shadows of the basement, where the maps and periodicals are kept. I took advantage of the librarians' distraction to hide the Book of Sand on one of the library's damp shelves; I tried not to notice how high up, or how far from the door.
I now feel a little better, but I refuse even to walk down the street the library's on.*
Afterword
Writing a foreword to stories the reader has not yet read is an almost impossible task, for it requires that one talk about plots that really ought not to be revealed beforehand. I have chosen, therefore, to write an afterword instead.
The first story once more takes up the old theme of the double, which so often inspired Stevenson's ever-happy pen.
In England the double is called the fetch or, more literarily, the wraith of the living; in Germany it is known as the Doppelgänger. I suspect that one of its first aliases was the alter ego. This spectral apparition no doubt emerged from mirrors of metal or water, or simply from the memory, which makes each person both spectator and actor. My duty was to ensure that the interlocutors were different enough from each other to be two, yet similar enough to each other to be one. Do you suppose it's worth saying that I conceived the story on the banks of the Charles River, in New England, and that its cold stream reminded me of the distant waters of the Rhône?
The subject of love is quite common in my poetry; not so in my prose, where the only example is "Ulrikke." Readers will perceive its formal affinity with "The Other."
"The Congress" is perhaps the most ambitious of this book's fables; its subject is a company so vast that it merges at last into the cosmos itself and into the sum of days. The story's murky beginning attempts to imitate the way Kafka's stories begin; its ending attempts, no doubt unsuccessfully, to ascend to the ecstasy of Chesterton or John Bunyan. I have never merited such a revelation, but I have tried to dream of it. In the course of the story I have interwoven, as is my wont, certain autobiographical features.
Fate, which is widely known to be inscrutable, would not leave me in peace until I had perpetrated a posthumous story by Lovecraft, a writer I have always considered an unwitting parodist of Poe. At last I gave in; the lamentable result is titled "There Are More Things."
"The Sect of the Thirty" saves from oblivion (without the slightest documentary support) the history of a possible heresy.
"The Night of the Gifts" is perhaps the most innocent, violent, and over-wrought of these tales.
"The Library of Babel," written in 1941, envisions an infinite number of books; " 'Undr' " and "The Mirror and the Mask" envision age-old literatures consisting of but a single word.
"A Weary Man's Utopia" is, in my view, the most honest, and most melancholy, piece in the book.
I have always been surprised by the Americans obsession with ethics; "The Bribe" is an attempt to portray that trait.
In spite of John Felton, Charlotte Corday, and the well-known words of Rivera Indarte ("It is a holy deed to kill Rosas") and the Uruguayan national anthem ("For tyrants, Brutus' blade"), I do not approve of political assassination. Be that as it may, readers of the story of Arredondo's solitary crime will want to know its dénouement.
Luis Melián Lafinur asked that he be pardoned, but Carlos Fein and Cristóbal Salvañac, the judges, sentenced him to one month in solitary confinement and five years in prison. A street in Montevideo now bears his name.
Two unlucky and inconceivable objects are the subject of the last two stories. "The Disk" is the Euclidean circle, which has but one face; "The Book of Sand," a volume of innumerable pages.
I doubt that the hurried notes I have just dictated will exhaust this book, but hope, rather, that the dreams herein will continue to ramify within the hospitable imaginations of the readers who now close it.
J. LB.
Buenos Aires, Februarys, 1975
August 25, 1983
I saw by the clock at the little station that it was past eleven. I began walking through the night toward the hotel. I experienced, as I had at other times in the past, the resignation and relief we are made to feel by those places most familiar to us. The wide gate was open; the large country house itself, in darkness.
I went into the vestibule, whose pale mirrors echoed back the plants of the salon. Strangely, the owner did not recognize me; he turned the guest register around for me to sign. I picked up the pen chained to the register stand, dipped it in the brass inkwell, and then, as I leaned over the open book, there occurred the first of the many surprises the night would have in store for me—my name, Jorge Luis Borges, had already been written there, and the ink was not yet dry.
"I thought you'd already gone upstairs," the owner said to me. Then he looked at me more closely and corrected himself: "Oh, I beg your pardon, sir. You look so much like the other gentleman, but you are younger."
"What room is he in?" I asked.
"He asked for Room 19," came the reply.
It was as I had feared.
I dropped the pen and hurried up the stairs. Room 19 was on the third floor; it opened onto a sad, run-down sort of terrace with a park bench and, as I recall, a railing running around it. It was the hotel's most secluded room. I tried the door; it opened at my touch. The overhead light still burned. In the pitiless light, I came face to face with myself. There, in the narrow iron bed—older, withered, and very pale—lay I, on my back, my eyes turned up vacantly toward the high plaster moldings of the ceiling.
Then I heard the voice. It was not exactly my own; it was the one I often hear in my recordings, unpleasant and without modulation.
"How odd," it was saying, "we are two yet we are one. But then nothing is odd in dreams."
"Then ..." I asked fearfully, "all this is a dream?"
"It is, I am sure, my last dream." He gestured toward the empty bottle on the marble nightstand. "You, however, shall have much to dream, before you come to this night. What date is it for you?"
"I'm not sure," I said, rattled. "But yesterday was my sixty-first birthday."
"When in your waking state you reach this night again, yesterday will have been your eighty-fourth. Today is August 25, 1983."
"So long to wait," I murmured.
"Not for me," he said shortly. "For me, there's almost no time left. At any moment I may die, at any moment I may fade into that which is unknown to me, and still I dream these dreams of my double... that tiresome subject I got from Stevenson and mirrors."
I sensed that the evocation of Stevenson's name was a farewell, not some empty stroke of pedantry. I was he, and I understood. It takes more than life's most dramatic moments to make a Shakespeare, hitting upon memorable phrases. To distract him, I said:
"I knew this was going to happen to you. Right here in this hotel, years ago, in one of th
e rooms below, we began the draft of the story of this suicide."
"Yes," he replied slowly, as though piecing together the memories, "but I don't see the connection. In that draft I bought a one-way ticket for Adrogué,* and when I got to the Hotel Las Delicias I went up to Room 19, the room farthest from all the rest. It was there that I committed suicide."
"That's why I'm here," I said.
"Here? We've always been here. It's here in this house on Calle Maipú that I am dreaming you. It is here, in this room that belonged to Mother, that I am taking my departure."
"... that belonged to Mother," I repeated, not wanting to understand. "I am dreaming you in Room 19, on the top floor, next to the rooftop terrace."
"Who is dreaming whom? I know I am dreaming you—I do not know whether you are dreaming me. That hotel in Adrogué was torn down years and years ago—twenty, maybe thirty. Who knows?"
"I am the dreamer," I replied, with a touch of defiance.
"Don't you realize that the first thing to find out is whether there is only one man dreaming, or two men dreaming each other?"
"I am Borges. I saw your name in the register and I came upstairs."
"But I am Borges, and I am dying in a house on Calle Maipú."
There was a silence, and then he said to me:
"Let's try a test. What was the most terrible moment of our life?"
I leaned over him and the two of us spoke at once. I know that neither of us spoke the truth.
A faint smile lit up the aged face. I felt that that smile somehow reflected my own.
"We've lied to each other," he said, "because we feel that we are two, not one. The truth is that we are two yet we are one."
I was beginning to be irritated by this conversation, and I told him so. Then I added: "And you, there in 1983—are you not going to tell me anything about the years I have left?"
"What can I tell you, poor Borges? The misfortunes you are already accustomed to will repeat themselves. You will be left alone in this house. You will touch the books that have no letters and the Swedenborg medallion and the wooden tray with the Federal Cross. Blindness is not darkness; it is a form of solitude. You will return to Iceland."