" Islam tells us that on the unappealable Day
of Judgment, all who have perpetrated images
of living things will reawaken with their works,
and will be ordered to blow life into them, and
they will fail, and they and their works will be
cast into the fires of punishment. As a child, I
knew that horror of the spectral duplication or
multiplication of reality, but mine would come
as I stood before large mirrors. As soon as it
began to grow dark outside, the constant,
infallible functioning of mirrors, the way they
followed my every movement, their cosmic
pantomime, would seem eerie to me. One of my
insistent pleas to God and my guardian angel
was that I not dream of mirrors; I recall clearly
that I would keep one eye on them uneasily. I
feared sometimes that they would begin to veer
off from reality; other times, that I would see
my face in them disfigured by strange
misfortunes. I have learned that this horror is
monstrously abroad in the world again. The
story is quite simple, and terribly unpleasant.
In 1927, I met a grave young woman, first by
telephone (because Julia began as a voice
without a name or face) and then on a corner at
nightfall. Her eyes were alarmingly large, her
hair jet black and straight, her figure severe.
She was the granddaughter and greatgranddaughter of Federalists, as I was the
grandson and great-grandson of Unitarians,*
but that ancient discord between our lineages
was, for us, a bond, a fuller possession of our
homeland. She lived with her family in a big
run-down high-ceiling'd house, in the
resentment and savorlessness of genteel
poverty. In the afternoons— only very rarely at
night—we would go out walking through her
neighbor-hood, which was Balvanera.* We
would stroll along beside the high blank wall of
the railway yard; once we walked down Sarmien
to all the way to the cleared grounds of the
Parque Centenario.*Between us there was
neither love itself nor the fiction of love; I
sensed in her an intensity that was utterly
unlike the intensity of eroticism, and I feared it.
In order to forge an intimacy with women, one
often tells them about true or apocryphal things
that happened in one's youth; I must have told
her at some point about my horror of mirrors,
and so in 1928 I must have planted the
hallucination that was to flower in 1931. Now I
have just learned that she has gone insane, and
that in her room all the mirrors are covered,
because she sees my reflection in them—
usurping her own—and she trembles and
cannot speak, and says that I am magically
following her, watching her, stalking her.
What dreadful bondage, the bondage of my
face—or one of my former faces. Its odious fate
makes me odious as well, but I don't care
anymore. "

― Jorge Luis Borges