The Aleph, according to Borges, was a glowing sphere – hidden in the basement of a house in Buenos Aires – that contained all the places in the universe. That sphere is inconceivable in terms of human experience, but I am sure that all of us keep a particular Aleph in the basement of our memory. And in that Aleph – much more modest, much more limited – are hidden all the places that define the universe we have known. If we apply it to the city we have lived in, that Aleph – that tiny sphere – contains all the other places that form part of our city. For the people of Palma, our particular Aleph contains all the other places that make up Palma and have been Palma and will be Palma. Or to put it more schematically, all of us from Palma keep a tiny Aleph – I would call it the Palmeph – that contains everything that Palma is and everything that Palma has been and also everything that Palma will be.
In my case, the Aleph of Palma was hidden in a Swedish bar in Son Armadans, near the Anglican Church, in Almirante Cervera street. That bar was always closed because we children who lived in El Terreno and Porto Pi used to pass by there very early in the morning, on our way to school. That bar had no name, or at least I don’t remember any sign or neon or signpost. The only thing that identified it was a faded flag painted next to the door. None of us had ever seen that flag before, until we learned much later that it was the Swedish flag (a yellow cross on a light blue background). When we children would walk past it, we would peek inside the shop. From the street you could only see the bar and one or two stools and a row of bottles on a shelf. Everything else was dark, very dark, but the bottles gave off a faint glow against the darkness. When I felt sad, and that was often, I would go to the Swedish bar – even though I didn’t know it was a Swedish bar at the time – and peek into that interior where you could only see the bottles lined up on the shelf. Just by looking in there, just by looking at those bottles, you felt safe from harm.
I have tried to find out the name of that Swedish bar in Almirante Cervera street. I’ve looked in Palma guidebooks, I’ve asked my friends, I’ve consulted blogs about El Terreno and Son Armadans, but so far no one has been able to give me an answer. No one remembers seeing a bar with a tiny flag – a yellow cross on a blue background – painted next to the entrance. Nobody remembers the bar, the dark bottles, the stools lined up in perfect order. I myself often go back to Almirante Cervera street and look for the place where I remember the bar was. I walk along the street, look at the buildings -almost all of them new – and calculate where it was supposed to be. It’s no use: there’s not a single trace of it left. Was it real, I ask myself, did it ever exist? The Aleph that I keep in my memory tells me that yes, that bar was real. But nothing can prove to me that the bar ever existed. Worse still, nobody remembers it and nobody seems to have seen it. So perhaps the only real thing is that faint glimmer that comes to me from I don’t know where and makes me believe that that bar, of which there is no trace left, once existed. The Aleph, yes, it is real, the only real thing. And the rest, we will never know.
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