On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of
almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised
that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The
Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there,
actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite
things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the
teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw
a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it
was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a
mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a
backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I’d seen in the
entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes
of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of
sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled
hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a
sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué
and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny — Philemon Holland’s — and
all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that
the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a
sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw
my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two
mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore
of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the
survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in
Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on
a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the
ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table
(and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters,
which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped
in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once
deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I
saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from
every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph
and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your
face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured
object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon —
the unimaginable universe.
