Greatness is not a quality one naturally associates with Puerto Alcan, a small town destined to be forgotten. No one who has penetrated beyond the gates of the town could really put his or her finger upon a single thing that one could call "great" beyond that town's own melancholy history. But, to reflect for a moment, even this is hardly great, for that history is not really made up of acts, but of desires; rumours and fables seem to supplant any real events which might otherwise have taken place within it; it is like an imagined history waiting to fill a real place.

If one could pinpoint a consonant mythos, then something admittedly might be established - a shared body of knowledge that would colour the lives of those who lived there in identical ways. But all who live in Puerto Alcan live there alone, at one with their solitude. In fact, they are united by such an absence of ties that it is only when they die that they seem to be together.

For example, were you to single out a man on the street and ask him about Puerto Alcan's greatness, he would doubtless accord you a sad smile, gladly accepting this unfamiliar word and allowing it to graze the spaces in his mind he had set aside for hope and possibility. Without condemnation or censure he would silently add the word to his own collection of fables and fictions. For it is in their small quarries of personal words that each carries that town about with them - words which are not promises, since each accepts from the outset that the town's life is essentially unforthcoming, but rather, words through which one can create new fables, new lies, new ways to protect oneself from seeing too clearly, new ways to defer the final end of mystification.

What everyone forgets though is that there is a greatness to Puerto Alcan, radiant and compelling, and known to all those who have once entered it. True, no one who has once entered Puerto Alcan can ever leave it, so the experience of this greatness must remain a singularity, but nevertheless it exists. It happens like this: the only entrance to the town is by a vast pair of rusty gates, bolted into the grey stone of its ramparts. The greatness of this town is in the design of those gates, whose delicate meanderings of iron and brass seem to pass, without division, into the patterns carved in the stone of the pillars that support them, all-encompassing, like a prayer. In fact, it is easiest to perceive the pattern by looking first to the pillars, where even a child can see that the refoldings and circlings of decoration depict the blooms of flowers twisted among innumerable stalks and leaves. As that pattern passes across the brass and iron of the gates themselves, however, it seems to become more complex, more deluded. There are still shapes that resemble flowers, but the forms have become so knotted that it is almost as if it were this - the obscurity, the tightly drawn self-escaping - which were the essence of the pattern. In places the windings and turnings of iron resemble runes, and it might indeed be that those gates depict the movement from experience to language, demonstrating the endeavour of each image to coalesce with or settle into the words which will give it meaning. At points, where definition seems at its hardest, it is as though there were forms which were both flowers and letters, a hallucinatory alphabet governed by petalled descents, the loopings of letters so frail that even an indeterminate scent seems to stream from them.

At the very centre of the gates there is nothing but a circular space, which neither the runes nor flowers seem capable of entering. They turn back reluctantly, or else seem to throw themselves into it and end in a rusty point. But it should be impossible to say whether that gaping hole, through which one clearly perceives the buildings of Puerto Alcan and even the sky above it, denotes the instinctive failure of that design or its apotheosis.

 

There is a fable that those who enter Puerto Alcan therefore do so in one of two ways: either they see in that circular space an accommodating emptiness which invites them, like the space of a doorway which promises beyond it some unknown room; or else that space is for them the opposite of emptiness - a pure if imperceptible form. For such people, the movement of the design follows the movements of one's own eyes across it, and ultimately the movement of meaning within one's mind. And thus, by ever less sure degrees, one's eyes glide among those patterns, becoming lost within them, ultimately settling with a sense of disorientation upon the inexplicable.

But no one within the walls of Puerto Alcan has ever heard this fable. Those who tell it are those who have never entered; some say, furthermore, that those who tell it are precisely the kind of people who could never enter Puerto Alcan at all. Others say that it is only those who see the empty space who could enter, and those who see the lucent space have no need to do so. Perceiving emptiness, they enter that town without faith, and so it is that all that that town can offer them is to shine back their own lack of faith, presenting them with walls and streets which are merely walls and streets, emptied of meaning by the implicit condemnation with which their new disciples have arrived.

But it might also be the case that those who see the lucent space could not enter either, since already they have transcended all that lies beyond it; if they persisted, there would be nothing new to embrace. And so such people should find themselves entering a town with different but no less terrible prejudices which would annul each wall and street in a different way.

What is certain is that there is as much speculation outside the walls of Puerto Alcan as there is within it, so that there may well be a kind of authenticity in the dream recorded by the mystic Abraham ben Samuel ha-Levi Abulafia, in which he describes a pair of pillared gates set in the heart of the wasteland. From either side, men and women can look at those gates, and, striving to follow the intricate patterns which begin from the pillars of presence and end in the gates of language, they delude themselves that the two could be united by what they seem to see so clearly - the trompe-l'oeil of a town beyond them.