Chapter 28 Zaire

In Buenos Aires, the zaire is a common twenty-cent coin.My coin has the letters NT and the number 2 cut out with a knife on one side and the year 1929 on the reverse. (At the end of the 18th century, in Gujarat, India, a tiger named Zaire; a blind man in front of the Solo Mosque in Java was stoned to death by believers; King Nadir of Persia ordered an astrolabe to be thrown into the sea; 1892 Before and after, in the Mahdi prison, Rudolf Karl Vonslatin caresses a small compass wrapped in a strip of cloth torn from his turban; One of the pillars has a texture called Zaire; in the Jewish quarter of Tuduan, Morocco, the bottom of a well is called Zaire.) Today is November 13; in the early morning of June 7, the Zaire I'm in my hands; I'm not who I was then, but I can remember and maybe be able to relate what happened.I am Borges, if not quite so.

On June 6, Teodelina Villar died. Around 1930, her photographs appeared extensively in popular magazines; circumstances may suggest that she was considered beautiful, although not all images of her support this assumption.Teodelina Villar was more concerned with perfection than beauty.The Hebrews and Chinese sorted out all the norms of human beings and compiled them into words; the "Mishnah" records that from the early morning on Saturdays, tailors cannot bring needles when they go out; "Book of Rites" says that guests accept the first When taking a glass of wine, you should be dignified; when you accept the second glass, you should show respect and joy.Teodelina Villar's requirements are similar, but stricter, she is like a disciple of Confucius or a person who abides by the Talmud, everything must be done exactly right, impeccable, but Her efforts are all the more admirable, more blunt, because the standards she believes in are not static, but shift with the new trends in Paris or Hollywood.Teodelina Villar is always in the right place, at the right time, and shows the orthodox boredom with the orthodox temperament, yet the boredom, the temperament, the time, the place are almost immediately obsolete, (in Theod In the words of Lina Villar) is utter affectation.Like Flaubert, she pursues the absolute, but only temporarily.She cleans herself up, but her heart is constantly gnawed by despair.As if to escape from herself, she constantly tried to change her image; she was famous for her hair color and hairstyle.Her voice, smile, and look in the eyes often change.Since 1932, she has lost a lot of weight... The war made her think a lot.The Germans have occupied Paris, where are the fashion trends leading?A gringo, whom she had never trusted, took advantage of her good intentions and sold her a batch of cylindrical hats; Hats, just whimsical grotesques.As luck would have it, misfortunes never come singly; Dr. Villar had to relocate to Rue de Arouz, and her daughter's portrait was used in advertisements for skin creams and cars. (Helping cream she's tired of and a car she no longer owns!) She knew that her artistic development needed opportunities; she preferred to step back.Besides, it hurts her to compete with those shallow little girls.Rent was too high for the ominous apartment in Rue de Arrauz; Teodelina Villar died in the South Quarter on June 7, in a stroke of luck.To be honest, at the time I too, driven by the hipster vanity of most Argentines, fell in love with her, and her death brought tears to my eyes.Perhaps the reader has already guessed.

During the vigil, I found that the deceased regained his previous appearance in the process of corruption. In a chaotic moment on the night of June 6th, Teodelina Villar became miraculously what he was twenty years ago; pride, money, youth, self-importance, lack of imagination, high-mindedness and stupidity The look of being together appeared on her face again.I thought vaguely; there is no expression on this face that has excited me so much as it does now;I left her lying frozen among the flowers, with death's perfect contempt.It was about two o'clock in the morning when I came out.The expected rows of low bungalows and two-story buildings outside seemed particularly ethereal in the silence and darkness.I walked down the street in a daze full of grief.I saw a grocery store open on the corner of Chile Street and Taquari Street.Unfortunately, there were three men playing cards in the shop.

The rhetorical method of the so-called oxymoron is to modify a noun with a seemingly contradictory qualitative adjective; the dark light of the Gnostics who believed in mystical intuition, and the black sun of the alchemists belong to this category.It was also an oxymoron that I went out for a drink in the shop after seeing Teodelina Villar for the last time; (The scene of someone playing cards adds to the contrast.) I ordered a glass of orange wine; the zaire was given to me in change;Any coin, I suppose, is a symbol of those endlessly shining coins of history and mythology.I think of Calonte's silver coins; of Belisario's begging silver coins; of the thirty silver coins Judas got for selling Jesus; of the drachma of the courtesan Laise; The ancient coins that were brought out; the translucent coins of the wizards that turned into discs; the inexhaustible denarius of the wandering Isaac Rackden; Ferducci returned the sixty thousand rewarded by the king Silver coins, for they were not gold; the gold ounces that Ahab commanded to be nailed to the mast; the florin of Leopold Bloom; and the fledgling Louis X. The gold louis with the portrait of the sixth identity.As if in a dream, it seemed to me that these many famous associations evoked by coins are important, though inexplicable.I walked on the streets and squares, my pace became faster and faster, and I was so tired that I stopped at a corner.I saw a row of old iron railings; beyond was the black-and-white thin-brick courtyard of the Church of Concepcion.Unknowingly, I made a long detour and returned to the block where the grocery store that had found me the Zaire was located.

I turned the corner, and from a distance I saw black lights on the street corner, which meant that the shop was closed.I got into a taxi on Via Belgrano.I did not sleep, and almost had a sense of joy, thinking that money is the only real thing in the world, because strictly speaking, any coin (say, a twenty-cent piece) contains the future. Various possibilities.Besides, money is an abstract thing, and money is future time.It might be an afternoon in the suburbs, it might be Brahms, it might be a map, it might be chess, it might be coffee, it might be Epictetus's famous saying to despise gold: it is the sea god of Bepharos Proteus is more capricious Proteus.It is unforeseen time, Bergson's time, not the rigid time of Islam or Zeno.Fatalists deny that anything is possible, that is, they believe that everything is predetermined; a coin symbolizes our free will. (I do not doubt that these "thoughts" were the chief form of opposition to Zaire's methods and its diabolical influence.) I fell asleep after thinking hard, but dreamed that I was a coin guarded by a griffin .

The next day, I was convinced I was drunk the night before.I also decided to get rid of the coin that deeply disturbed me.I look at it: nothing special except for some scratches.It would be better buried under the garden or hidden in a corner of the study, but I want it to be far away.That morning, I didn't go to the bridge or the cemetery; I took the metro to Zocalo, and from Zocalo to San Johann and Boedo.I got out of the car in Urquiza without thinking; headed west and then south, walked into a random hotel on a nondescript street, asked for a glass of wine, and paid with the zaire account.I was wearing tinted lenses, and then squinted, not looking at the house number and street name.That night, I took a barbiturate and slept soundly.

At the end of June I was busy with a fantasy novel in which there were two or three charade phrases--substituting "water of swords" for "blood" and "nest of snakes" for "gold".The first-person storyteller is an ascetic who lives in the wilderness, isolated from the rest of the world. (The place was called Nittahead.) Because of his poverty and frugality, some people took him for an angel; but that was a well-intentioned exaggeration, for there is no man without fault.Not to mention, it was this man who killed his father; and his father was a famous wizard who amassed countless treasures with evil methods, and spent his whole life guarding the treasures day and night to prevent greedy people from Crazy fight.Soon, perhaps too soon, the guardianship had to be interrupted: his star told him that the sword that severed the guardianship was forged.That sword's name is Gram.The story, in increasingly twisted tones, extols the sword's brilliance and strength; one passage mentions scales casually; another says that the treasure he guarded was gleaming gold and red rings.We finally understand that the fakir is a dragon named Fafnir, who guards the treasure of the Nibelungen.The appearance of Sigurd brought the story to an abrupt end.

As I have just said, I forgot about the coin for a while while I was writing that nonsense (in which some verses from the "Favnir" were pedantically inserted).There were nights when I was pretty sure I could forget it, but I couldn't help thinking about it.To be sure, I wasted those hours; the beginning was harder than the end.In vain I repeated that that hateful nickel was indistinguishable from the countless others that were identical from hand to hand.Driven by that idea, I tried to transfer my thoughts to other coins, but it didn't work.My experiments with Chilean nickels and cents and Uruguayan coppers all failed. On the 16th of June I got a pound; did not look at it during the day, and looked at it that night (and for several days thereafter) under a powerful electric light with a magnifying glass.Then put it under a piece of paper and trace it out with a pencil.Images of lightning, dragons, and St. George didn't work for me; I couldn't change the fixation.

In August, I decided to see a psychiatrist.I did not tell him all my ridiculous stories; I only said that I was troubled by insomnia, and that I kept thinking of any object, the shape of a chip or a coin... Not long after, I was in Sarmiento Street A bookstore in China found a copy of "Relevant Documents on the History of the Development of Zaire Legends" compiled by Julius Barach (Breslau, 1899). That book pointed out the root of my illness.In the preface the author states that he "has attempted to collect in one easily readable large octavo volume the entire literature dealing with the superstitions of Zaire, including the four articles belonging to the Habicht archives and the Philip Meadows The original manuscript of the Taylor report".It seems that Islam believed in Zaire as early as the 18th century. (Balah refuted Zoldenburg's affiliation with Abu Fida's writing.) The word "Zaire" means "obvious" in Arabic; it is one of the ninety-nine names of God; in In Muslim countries, it refers to those "persons or things with unforgettable characteristics, the image of which can eventually drive people crazy".The first unquestionable testimony was given by the Persian Lutfer Ali Azul.In a biographical encyclopedia called The Temple of Fire, the dervish, who has learned all the time, tells of a brass astrolabe in a school in Meraz, "whoever looks at it and thinks of nothing else and the king ordered it to be thrown into the bottom of the sea, lest people forget about the universe".Meadows Taylor, who once served as chieftain staff in Hyderabad and wrote the famous novel "Confessions of a Killer", gave a more detailed report. Around 1832, Taylor heard a strange saying in the suburbs of Buji: Whoever "sees a tiger" means that person is crazy or a saint.They mean an enchanted tiger, and whoever sees it, no matter how far away, is doomed, because he has thought of nothing but the tiger from then until his death.It is said that an unlucky man fled to Mysore and painted a tiger in a palace.A few years later, Taylor visited the prisons of that state; the Governor showed him a room of four in Nithur Prison, where on the floor, on the walls and on the ceiling was a painting of a tiger by a Muslim dervish (in color, far from being altered by the age). fading, but more vivid).That tiger is made up of countless tigers, which is dazzling to look at; there are many small tigers in the pattern of the tiger skin, and even the ocean, the Himalayas and the army seem to be composed of tigers.The painter died in this cell many years ago; it is said that he was from Sindh or Gujarat, and had planned to draw a map of the world.Traces of that colossal work remain to this day.When Taylor told this to Muhammad Al Yemeni of Fort William, he said to Taylor that there is no creature in the world that does not favor Zahir, but the merciful God does not allow two Zahir to exist at the same time, Because one can overwhelm all sentient beings.He also said that there was only one Zahir throughout the ages, and that Zahir in the age of ignorance was an idol named Yauk, and later an idol from Cholasan with a veil of stone beads or a golden mask. prophet.He also said that God is mysterious and unpredictable.

I have read Ballach's monograph many times, but I can't figure out how I feel; I only remember the despair I felt when I realized that nothing could save me; Relieved; those people's Zaire is not a coin but a marble or a tiger, which makes me jealous.I thought it would be so easy not to think about tigers.I still remember being particularly disturbed when I read this passage: "One of the critics of Gurshan said that roses can be seen soon after seeing Zaire, and he also quoted Atal's "Asi A line from Lal Nama (Book of the Unknown): Zaire is the shadow of the rose and the crack of the veil."

On the night of the vigil for Teodelina, I was surprised not to see her sister, Madame Abascal. In October, a friend of hers said to me: "Poor Julieta, she's turned out to be so queer, she's in Bosch Hospital. She's been pissed off by the nurses feeding her. She can't get over that coin, saying it's related to Morena Sackman's. The car drivers are exactly the same." Time dilutes memory, but deepens Zaire's impression.Before I imagined its front, then its reverse; now I see both sides.It's not that the Zaire seems to be transparent, and the two sides don't overlap; it's that the scene seems to be spherical, and Zaire appears in the center of the ball.I see a transparent and distant figure that is not Zaire: The scornful look of Teodelina, the pain of the flesh.Tennyson said that if we could understand a flower, we would know who we are and what the world is like.He might have meant to say that everything, however small, involves the history of the universe and its infinite causality.He may want to say that every image of the visible world is complete, just as Schopenhauer said, everyone's will is complete.Mystical philosophers considered man to be a microcosm, a symbolic mirror of the universe; according to Nissen, so is everything.Everything, even that insufferable Zaire. Before 1948, Hullita's fate might have befallen me too.People had to feed me and dress me, I couldn't tell the afternoon from the morning, I didn't know who Borges was.It would be false to describe that prospect as dire, since none of its aspects worked for me.Just like saying that the pain of a patient undergoing craniotomy under anesthesia is terrible.In that case, I could not perceive the universe at all, I could not perceive Zaire.Idealists say that dreams are born floatingly, "life" and "dream" are strictly speaking the same word; I will classify thousands of superficial phenomena into one superficial phenomenon, from an extremely complex dream to a very simple Dream.Others may dream that I am crazy, but I dream of Zaire, when all the people in the world are thinking about Zaire day and night, then which is a dream and which is reality, the world or Zaire you? In the silence of the night, I can still walk on the street.At dawn, I used to sit on a bench in Place de Calais thinking (trying to think) about the passage in "Asral Nama" about Zaire being the shadow of the rose and the crack of the veil.I relate that insight to the statement that, in order to become one with God, pantheistic mystics repeat their own name, or the ninety-nine names of God, until those names mean nothing.I long to be on that path.Maybe I'll spend that zaire after thinking it over; maybe God is behind that coin. For Wally Zenner