THE ZAHIR
145
of the sixth, Clementina Villar was magically what she had been
twenty years before: her features recovered that authority which is
conferred by pride, by money, by youth, by the awareness of round–
ing off a hierarchy, by lack of imagination, by limitations, by stol–
idity. Somehow, I thought, no version of that face which has disturbed
me so will stay in my memory as long as this one: it is right that it
should be the last, since it might have been the first. I left her rigid
among the flowers, her disdain perfected by death. It must have
been about two in the morning when I went away. Outside, the in–
evitable rows of one- and two-storey houses had taken on the ab–
stract appearance that is theirs at night, when darkness and silence
simplify them. Drunk with an almost impersonal piety, I walked
through the streets. At the corner of Chile and Tacuari I saw an open
shop. And in that shop, unhappily for me, three men were playing
cards.
In the figure of speech called
oxymoron
a word is modified by
an epithet which seems to contradict it : thus, the Gnostics spoke of
dark light)
and the alchemists of a
black sun.
For me it was a kind
of oxymoron to go straight from my last visit with Clementina Villar
to buy a drink at
.a
bar; I was intrigued by the coarseness of the act,
by its ease. (The contrast was heightened by the circumstance that
there was a card game in progress.) I asked for a brandy. They gave
me the Zahir in my change. I stared at it for a moment and went
out into the street, perhaps with the beginnings of a fever. I reflected
that every coin in the world is a symbol of those famous coins which
glitter in history and fable. I thought of Charon's obol; of the obol
for which Belisarius begged; of Judas' thirty coins; of the drachmas of
Lais, the famous courtesan; of the ancient coin which one of the
Seven Sleepers proffered; of the shining coins of the wizard in the 1001
Nights, that turned out to be bits of paper; of the inexhaustible penny
of Isaac Laquedem; of the sixty-thousand pieces of silver, one for
each line of an epic, which Firdusi sent back to a king because they
were not of gold; of the doubloon which Ahab nailed to the mast; of
Leopold Bloom's irreversible florin; of the louis whose pictured face
betrayed the fugitive Louis XVI near Varennes.
As
if in a dream, the
thought that every piece of money entails such illustrious connotations
as these, seemed to me of huge, though inexplicable, importance. My
