The A and Z of lost love and mystical experience in two stories: ‘The Aleph’ and ‘The Zahir’

Though ‘El Aleph’ was first published in Sur in September 1945, and was thus the earliest published story in the collection El Aleph (apart from the brief ‘The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths’), it is placed last. The story embodies one of the extremes of Borges's conceptual world, while its twin tale, ‘The Zahir’, represents the other: everything and the one thing; a chaotic world unaffected by structure or symbolism, and the world reduced to one symbol; difference and unity. Given the importance of the opposition for other stories, I will consider them out of order and before the others. Both involve mystical microcosmic images. The aleph is an inch-round point in space where all space coexists; everything in the world is seen from every angle. The Zahir is a coin which symbolizes the world, is unforgettable, and drives its obsessed owner mad as it replaces the world for him. The starting point of both stories is the death of a woman loved by the narrator ‘Borges’, and his way of dealing with her memory is reflected in the nature of the microcosmic image involved. In ‘El Aleph’ Borges wishes to ‘consecrate myself to her memory’ (A 118) by remembering all the images of Beatriz Viterbo. In ‘The Zahir’, he chooses one image of the ever-changing Teodelina Villari. A and Z, reality and plot, omnipotent king and attribute or subordinate, fight for prominence in Emma Zunz's duel with Aaron Loewenthal, and Zaid's duel with Abenjacán (in English unfortunately Ibn-Hakam).

Both stories share the same oxymoronic coexistence of petty, often grotesque, social satire, extreme intellectual intensity and psychological pathos. The beloved dead woman in both is pretty clearly the same woman. Williamson, for example, points out that Beatriz dies in 1929, the same year that Borges receives the Zahir. Much speculation has gone into the identity of the lady in Borges's real life, but it is finally incidental. Williamson argues with much ingenuity that Norah Lange is the woman evoked in both, while Jason Wilson believes that in ‘The Zahir’, the unforgettable woman is Estela Canto, to whom ‘The Aleph’ was dedicated, and with whom he was involved at the time of its writing (Wilson, 128).