On Heroes and Tombs

  “Have you realized that we have lots of things in common?” she asked.

  And Martín thought: Can this be possible? And though he was quite sure that both of them enjoyed looking out across the river, he thought that this was a mere detail compared to all the other differences that separated the two of them, a detail that no one could take seriously, least of all Alejandra herself. Any more than one could take seriously the form in which she had just smilingly phrased her question: like grown-ups suddenly having themselves democratically photographed in the street alongside a worker or a nursemaid, smiling condescendingly. Although it was also possible that that phrase was a key to the truth, and that the fact that both of them were eagerly looking out across the river was a secret formula making them allies for much more important endeavors. But how to know what she was really thinking? And looking at her sitting up there on the crate, he felt nervous, like a person watching a beloved tightrope walker performing at extremely dangerous heights at which no one can come to his aid. He looked at her, an ambiguous, disturbing figure, as the breeze ruffled her straight blue black hair, and outlined her pointed breasts set rather far apart. He watched her smoking a cigarette with a far-off look in her eyes. The wind-swept landscape seemed to be enveloped in a quiet melancholy now, as though the winds had died down and a dense fog lay over it.

  “How nice it would be if one could go far away,” she suddenly remarked. “If one could go far away from this filthy city.”

  It pained Martín to hear that impersonal verb form: if one could go away.

  “Would you go away?” he asked in a choked voice.

  Without looking at him, almost completely absorbed in her own thoughts, she answered:

  “Yes, I’d like it a lot if I could go away. To some far-off place, a place where I didn’t know anybody at all. To an island maybe, one of those islands that must still exist out there somewhere.”

  Martín lowered his head and began to scratch at the crate with his penknife as his eyes scanned the words THIS SIDE UP. Alejandra turned her gaze toward him, and after watching him for a moment, she asked if something was the matter, and as he continued to scratch the wood and look at the words THIS SIDE UP he answered that nothing was wrong, but Alejandra continued to look at him, not seeing him, lost in thought. Neither of them spoke for some time, as it grew darker and the dockside fell silent: the cranes had stopped working and the stevedores and porters were beginning to wend their way homeward or toward the bars along the dockside.

  “Let’s go to the Moscow,” Alejandra said then.

  “To the Moscow?”

  “Yes, in the Calle Independencia.”

  “But isn’t it terribly expensive?”

  Alejandra laughed.

  “It’s a neighborhood bistro. Furthermore, Vanya’s a friend of mine.”

  The door of the place was closed.

  “There’s nobody here,” Martín remarked.

  “Shaddup,” was all Alejandra said, imitating American movies, and knocked on the door.

  After a while a man in shirtsleeves came and let them in: he had straight white hair and a kind, refined face with a permanent melancholy smile. A nervous tic was making his cheek twitch, up near his eye.

  “Ivan Petrovich,” Alejandra said, holding out her hand to him.

  The man raised it to his lips, bowing slightly.

  They sat down next to a window looking out on the Paseo Colón. The place was dimly lighted, with just one feeble little lamp next to the cash register, where a short, plump butterball of a woman with a Slavic face was drinking maté.

  “I have Polish vodka,” Vanya said. “They delivered it to me yesterday—a boat from Poland came in.”

  As he went off to get them some, Alejandra commented:

  “He’s a great guy, but the fat woman—and she pointed toward the cash register—is a vicious bitch. She’s trying to get Vanya put away in an asylum so the place will be all hers.”

  “Vanya? Didn’t you call him Ivan Petrovich?”

  “Vanya is the diminutive of Ivan, dummy. Everybody calls him Vanya, but I call him Ivan Petrovich—it makes him feel as though he’s in Russia. And besides, I think it’s a charming name.”

  “And why should he be put away in an asylum?”

  “He’s a morphine addict and has attacks when he can’t get the stuff. And that’s when the fat woman sees her chance to get what she can while the getting’s good.”

  Vanya brought the vodka, and as he was serving it he said to them:

  “Record player works fine. I have Brahms’s violin concerto—shall I play it? It’s Heifetz, no less.”

  When he left the table, Alejandra commented:

  “You see? He’s generosity itself. He used to be a violinist at the Colón but it’s pitiful to hear him play now. And yet he offers you a violin concerto, with Heifetz playing.”

  She pointed, calling his attention to the walls: Cossacks galloping into a village, Byzantine churches with golden domes, gypsies. The whole scene was clumsily painted and the effect was dismal.

  “I sometimes think he’d like to go back. One day he said to me: ‘Don’t you think that, everything considered, Stalin is a great man?’ And he added that in a certain way he was another Peter the Great and that when everything was said and done, what he was aiming at was the grandeur of Russia. But he said all this in a low murmur, casting continual glances in the fat woman’s direction. I think she can read his lips.”

  From a distance, as though not wanting to bother the young couple, Vanya was going through an elaborate pantomime, pointing to the record player, as though praising Heifetz’s performance. And as Alejandra nodded with a smile, she said to Martín:

  “The world is nothing but filth.”

  Martín reacted violently.

  “No, Alejandra! There are all sorts of nice things in the world!”

  She looked at him, thinking perhaps of his poverty, his mother, his loneliness. And still he was capable of finding the world full of marvelous things! An ironic smile superimposed itself on her original expression of tenderness, causing the latter to contract, as though it were an acid applied to a very delicate skin.

  “What are they?” she asked.

  “There are so many of them, Alejandra!” Martín exclaimed, taking one of her hands and clasping it to his breast. “That music … a man like Vanya … and most of all you, Alejandra … you …”

  “Really now, I can’t help thinking you haven’t ever got past childhood, you dimwit.”

  She sat there for a moment, her mind elsewhere, took a sip of vodka, and then went on:

  “Yes, you’re right of course. There are beautiful things in this world … there’s no doubt of that …”

  And then, turning toward him, she added in a bitter tone of voice:

  “But I’m garbage, Martín, do you hear? You mustn’t have any illusions about me.”

  Martín clasped one of Alejandra’s hands in his, raised it to his lips and kept it there, kissing it fervently.

  “No, Alejandra! Why do you say such a dreadful thing? I know that’s not true. Everything you’ve said about Vanya and lots of other things I’ve heard you say prove that isn’t true.”

  His eyes had filled with tears.

  “All right, never mind, it’s not worth getting upset about,” Alejandra said.

  Martín leaned his head on Alejandra’s breast and nothing in the world mattered now. Looking out the window he could see night descending on Buenos Aires, enhancing his feeling that he was safe and sound here in this refuge, this hidden corner of the implacable city. A question he had never asked anyone (whom could he have asked?) welled up from within him, a question with the clean-cut, shiny edges of a coin that has never been circulated, that millions of anonymous dirty hands have not yet worn thin, deteriorated, and debased:

  “Do you love me?”

  She appeared to hesitate for an instant, but then she answered:

  “Yes, I love you. I love you a lot.”
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  Martín felt magically isolated from the cruel reality of the outside world, as happens in the theater (he thought years later) during the space of time that we are living the world shown onstage, while outside the painful sharp edges of the everyday universe await, the things that will inevitably strike us with brute force the moment the footlights go out and the spell is broken. And just as in the theater the outside world at certain moments manages to reach us there inside, though in an attenuated state, in the form of distant sounds (a car horn honking, a newsboy’s shout, a traffic policeman’s whistle), so too there reached his consciousness, like disturbing little whispers, small facts, certain phrases that clouded the magic and left cracks in it: those words that she had uttered down at the dockside, those words that left him feeling terribly excluded (“I’d like it a lot if I could go away from this filthy city”), and the phrase that she had just uttered (“I’m garbage; you mustn’t have any illusions about me”), words that throbbed like a slight, dull pain in his mind, words that as he sat there with his head leaning on Alejandra’s breast, giving himself over to the marvelous happiness of the instant, swarmed like ants in a deeper, more insidious region of his soul, exchanging whispers back and forth with other enigmatic words: the blind, Fernando, Molinari. But it doesn’t matter, he said to himself obstinately—it doesn’t matter, pressing his head against her warm breasts and caressing her hands, as though he would thus be able to ensure that the magic spell would last.

  “But how much do you love me?” he asked childishly.

  “A lot—I just told you that.”

  Nonetheless her tone of voice seemed distant, and raising his head he looked at her and could see that it was as though her mind were distracted, as though her attention were now focused on something that was not there with him but elsewhere, somewhere far off and unknown.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  She didn’t answer, as though she hadn’t heard.

  Then Martín repeated the question, squeezing her arm as though to bring her back to reality.

  And she said then that she wasn’t thinking about anything: nothing in particular anyway.

  Martín was to experience this sort of absence on her part many times: her eyes wide open and even going on doing this or that, yet at the same time a total stranger to herself, as though she were being manipulated by some remote force.

  Suddenly, glancing over at Vanya, she said:

  “I like people who are failures. Don’t you?”

  He sat there thinking that singular statement over.

  “There’s always something vulgar and horrible about success,” she added.

  After a moment’s silence, she went on:

  “Whatever would become of this country if everyone were a success! I don’t even want to think about it. The fact that so many people are failures helps save us somewhat. Aren’t you hungry?”

  “Yes.”

  She got up from the table and went over to say goodbye to Vanya. When she returned, her face flushed, Martín confessed to her that he was flat broke. She burst out laughing, opened her purse, and took out two hundred pesos.

  “Here, take this. When you need more, just tell me.”

  Embarrassed, Martín tried to refuse the money, whereupon Alejandra looked at him in amazement.

  “Are you crazy? Or are you one of those petty bourgeois who think a man shouldn’t take money from a woman?”

  When they had finished dinner, they headed for Barracas. After crossing the Parque Lezama in silence, they started down Hernandarias.

  “Do you know the story of the Enchanted City of Patagonia?” Alejandra asked.

  “I’ve heard a little about it, not much.”

  “Some day I’ll show you papers that are still in that leather trunk of Major Acevedo’s. Papers about this guy.”

  “This guy? What guy?”

  Alejandra pointed to the street sign.

  “Hernandarias.”

  “Papers in your house? How does that happen?”

  “Papers, names of streets. That’s all we have left. Hernandarias was an ancestor of the Acevedos. In 1550 he headed the expedition in search of the Enchanted City.”

  They walked along for a time in silence and then Alejandra recited:

  Ahí está Buenos Aires. El tiempo que a los hombres

  trae el amor o el oro, a mí apenas me deja

  esta rosa apagada, esta vana madeja

  de calles que repiten los pretéritos nombres

  de mi sangre: Laprida, Cabrera, Soler, Suárez …

  Nombres en que retumban ya secretas las dianas,

  las repúblicas, los caballos y las mañanas,

  las felices victorias, las muertes militares …fn12

  She fell silent again for several blocks, and then suddenly she asked:

  “Do you hear bells ringing?”

  Martín listened intently and answered no.

  “What’s all this about bells ringing?” he asked, intrigued.

  “Nothing; it’s just that I sometimes hear bells that are real and at other times I hear bells that aren’t.”

  She laughed and added:

  “Speaking of churches, I had a strange dream last night. I was in a cathedral, one in total darkness almost, and I was having to walk forward carefully so as not to push people in front of me aside. I couldn’t see a thing, but I had the impression that the nave was jammed with people. With great difficulty I finally managed to work my way up close to the priest preaching in the pulpit. I wasn’t able to hear what he was saying, even though I was very close now, and the worst thing about it was that I was certain that he was addressing me. I could hear a sort of vague murmur, as though he were speaking over a bad phone connection, and this made me more and more anxious. I opened my eyes wide, trying to see the expression on his face at least. And to my horror I saw that he didn’t have a face, his face was just smooth skin, and there was no hair on his head. At that moment the bells began to ring, tolling slowly at first and then gradually they began to peal louder and louder, till finally they were clanging furiously and I woke up. And the curious thing is that right there in the dream, standing with my hands over my ears, I kept saying, as though the very thought horrified me: ‘They’re the bells of Santa Lucía, the church I went to when I was little.’ ”

  There was a pensive look on her face.

  “I wonder what that can possibly mean,” she said then. “Don’t you think dreams have a meaning?”

  “A psychoanalytic interpretation, you mean?”

  “No, no. Well, that too, why not? But dreams are mysterious, and mankind has been reading meaning into them for thousands of years.”

  Then she gave the same strange laugh that had come from her lips a moment before. It was not a healthy or calm laugh, but a nervous, anxious one.

  “I always dream. Of fire, of birds, of swamps that I’m sinking into or panthers that are clawing me to bits, of snakes. But fire especially. In the end, there’s always fire. Don’t you think there’s something uncanny, something sacred about fire?”

  They were almost there. In the distance Martín could already see the big old house with its Mirador up above: the ghostly remains of a world that no longer existed.

  They entered the gate, went through the garden, and walked around to the back of the house: the madman’s absurd but tranquil tootling on the clarinet could be heard.

  “Does he play all the time?” Martín asked.

  “Just about. But after a while you don’t even notice.”

  “Did you know that I saw him the other night as I was leaving? He was listening behind the door.”

  “Yes, he’s in the habit of doing that.”

  They climbed up the winding staircase and Martín again felt the magic of that terrace in the summer night. Anything could happen in that atmosphere that seemed to be situated both outside of time and outside of space.

  They went inside the Mirador and Alejandra said:

  “Sit on the bed. The c
hairs here are dangerous, as you know.”

  As Martín sat down, she flung her purse down and put water on to boil. Then she put a record on: the dramatic chords of the concertina began to take on the configuration of a somber melody.

  “Listen: The words are tremendous.”

  Yo quiero morir contigo,

  sin confesión y sin Dios,

  crucificado en mi pena,

  como abrazado a un rencor.fn13

  After they had drunk the coffee they went out onto the terrace and leaned over the balustrade. The sound of the clarinet could be heard from below. The night was pitch black and stifling.

  “Bruno always says that unfortunately our lives are lived in the form of a rough draft. A writer can always revise something that’s not perfect or simply toss the whole thing into the wastebasket. Not life: there’s no way to correct or clean up or throw away what’s already been lived. Do you realize how awful that is?”

  “Who’s Bruno?”

  “A friend.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Nothing; he’s a contemplative sort, though he claims he’s merely pathologically apathetic. I think he does write though. But he’s never shown anybody what he’s done and I don’t imagine he’ll ever publish anything.”

  “And what does he live on?”

  “His father owns a flour mill in Capitán Olmos. That’s how we came to know each other; he was a very good friend of my mother’s. I think he was in love with her,” she added with a laugh.

  “What was your mother like?”

  “They say she was like me—physically I mean. I hardly remember her. I was only five when she died, you see. Her name was Georgina.”

  “Why did you say she was like you physically?”

  “I meant we looked like each other, that’s all. Because in other ways I’m very different. According to what Bruno tells me, she was a gentle, feminine, sensitive, quiet person.”

  “So who is it you resemble? Your father?”

  Alejandra was silent. Then, stepping away from Martín, she said in a tone of voice that was no longer the same, a harsh, choked voice:

  “Who, me? I don’t know. Maybe I’m the incarnation of one of those demons who are Satan’s familiars.”