Shrouded Mirrors

Islam holds that on the Day of Judgement, against which there is no appeal, anyone who has perpetrated the image of a living thing will rise again with his works and will be commanded to bring them to life. He will fail and with his image he will be delivered into the flames of hell. As a boy, when looking into large mirrors, I felt the same horror of ghostly duplication or multiplication of the real world. The unceasing, infallible activity of mirrors, the way they dogged all my actions, their cosmic mimicry - until it grew dark - were supernatural. One of my persistent pleas to God and my guardian angel was not to let me dream of mirrors. I know I kept an uneasy eye on them, sometimes fearing they might begin to diverge from reality, sometimes fearing I'd see my face disfigured by an odd affliction. I have just learned that this hideous fear is once again abroad in the land. The story is simple and rather unpleasant.

In about 1927, I met a moody girl - first over the telephone (for Julia began as a nameless, faceless voice) and then, late one afternoon, on a street corner. She had disconcertingly large eyes, straight black hair, and a stiff bearing. She was the grandchild and great-grandchild of Federalists, as I was of Unitarians, and that old blood feud was a link, a shared possession of our country. She lived with her family in a big, run-down, high-ceilinged house in the resentful dullness of genteel poverty. In the evenings - or occasionally at night - we would go for walks in the streets of her neighbourhood, Balvanera. We'd skirt the high wall alongside the railway; following Sarmiento Street we once walked all the way to the wide-open spaces of Parque Centenario. Between us there was no love or pretence of love. Julia gave off an intensity that was quite the opposite of eroticism, and I was afraid of her. The usual way of making up to women is to tell them stories, true or invented, of one's boyhood; I must once have mentioned my problem with mirrors, thereby, in 1928, prompting a hallucination that was to reach full flower in 1931. I've just found out that Julia has lost her mind and that her bedroom mirrors have been covered over, for in them she sees my reflection supplanting hers. She trembles and falls silent and then claims I'm pursuing her by magic.

An unfortunate thraldom to my face this - to one of my ancestral faces. If my features are destined to be hated, I must be hated too. But I no longer care.

[1934]