On Heroes and Tombs

  She unbuttoned the two top buttons of her blouse and shook the little lapels of it with her two hands as though she were trying to give herself more air. Panting slightly, she went over to the window, took several deep breaths, and after a while seemed to calm down.

  “I was just joking,” she said as she sat down on the edge of the bed as usual, making room for Martín alongside her.

  “Turn the light out,” she said then. “It bothers me terribly sometimes; it makes my eyes burn.”

  “Would you like me to leave? Do you want to sleep?” Martín asked.

  “No, I wouldn’t be able to sleep. Stay, if it doesn’t bore you to just sit here, not talking. I’ll lie down for a while and you can stay right here.”

  “I think it would be better if I left and let you get some rest.”

  With an edge of irritation in her voice, Alejandra answered:

  “Can’t you see I want you to stay? Turn out the night light too.”

  Martín got up and turned out the night light and then sat down again alongside her, with his mind churning, completely puzzled and overcome with shyness and diffidence. Why did Alejandra need him? He for his part thought of himself as a useless, dull-witted sort who could do nothing but listen to her and admire her. It was she who was the strong one, the powerful one; what kind of help could he possibly be to her?

  “What are you sitting there muttering?” Alejandra asked, shaking him by the arm as though to summon him back to reality.

  “Muttering? Nothing.”

  “Well, thinking then. You’re certainly thinking something, you idiot.”

  Martín was reluctant to share his thoughts with her, but he supposed that as usual she’d eventually guess what they were anyway.

  “I was thinking … that … why in the world would you need me?”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m nobody …. You, on the other hand, are a strong person, you have very definite ideas, you’re courageous …. You could defend yourself against a whole tribe of cannibals all by yourself.”

  He heard her laugh. Then she said:

  “I don’t know the answer myself. But I sought you out because I need you, because you … Anyway, what’s the use of racking our brains?”

  “And yet just today, down at the dockside, you said you’d gladly go to some far-off island—isn’t that what you said?” Martín answered with a trace of bitterness in his voice.

  “So what?”

  “You said that you’d go, not that we’d go.”

  Alejandra laughed again.

  Martín took one of her hands in his and asked her in an anxious voice:

  “Would you take me with you?”

  She appeared to be thinking it over: Martín could not make out her features.

  “Yes … I think so …. But I don’t see why you’d find such a prospect pleasing.”

  “Why not?” Martín asked in a hurt voice.

  “Because I can’t bear to have anybody with me all the time and because I’d hurt you a lot, a whole lot,” she answered gravely.

  “Don’t you love me?”

  “Oh, Martín … don’t start bringing up questions like that again …”

  “Well then, it’s because you don’t love me.”

  “Of course I do, silly. But I’d hurt you for the pure and simple reason that I love you, don’t you understand? You don’t hurt people you feel indifferent toward. But the word love, Martín, covers such a lot of territory …. You love a paramour, a dog, a friend …”

  “And what about me?” Martín asked, trembling. “What am I to you? A paramour, a dog, a friend?”

  “I’ve told you I needed you—isn’t that enough for you?”

  Martín fell silent: the derisive phantoms that had been prowling about in the distance drew closer: the name Fernando, the phrase always remember that I’m garbage, her absence from her room that first night. And he thought, sadly and bitterly: “Never, never.” His eyes filled with tears and his head bent forward as though the weight of those thoughts had made it double over.

  Alejandra raised her hand to his face and felt his eyes with the tips of her fingers.

  “I thought as much. Come here.”

  She put one arm round him and held him close.

  “Let’s see if he’s going to be a good boy now,” she said, the way one speaks to a child. “I’ve already said that I need him and love him a lot, what else does he want?”

  She put her lips to his cheek and gave him a kiss. Martín felt a shiver run through his whole body.

  Embracing Alejandra violently, feeling her warm body next to his, he began, as though an invincible power had overcome him, to kiss her face, her eyes, her cheeks, her hair, finally seeking out that large, full-lipped mouth he could feel next to his. For a fleeting instant he was aware that Alejandra was trying to avoid his kiss: her whole body seemed to grow hard and rigid and her arms pushed him away for a moment. Then she suddenly melted and a frenzy seemed to take possession of her. And then something happened that terrified Martín: he felt her hands grip his arms as though they were claws and tear his flesh, as at the same time she pushed him away and sat up.

  “No!” she shouted, getting to her feet and running to the window.

  Martín was terrified and did not dare approach her. He could see her standing there, breathing in great gulps of night air as though she were suffocating, her hair in wild disorder, her breast heaving, her hands clutching the window recess, her arms taut. With a violent tug she ripped her blouse open with both hands, tearing the buttons off, fell to the floor, and lay there rigid. Her face slowly turned purple, and then suddenly her body began to heave convulsively. In a panic, Martín had no idea how to deal with her, what to do for her. When he saw that she was falling, he ran to her and took her in his arms and tried to quiet her. But Alejandra saw and heard nothing: she writhed and moaned, her eyes wide open and delirious. It occurred to Martín that all he could do was carry her over to the bed. He did so and little by little he saw to his relief that she was calming down and that her moans were gradually becoming softer and softer.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, in utter confusion and terror, Martín could see her naked breasts in the gaping neck of the blouse. The thought crossed his mind that in some way he, Martín, was indeed necessary to this tormented, suffering creature. Then he closed Alejandra’s blouse and waited. Little by little her breathing grew quieter and more regular, her eyes had closed now, and she seemed to be asleep. More than an hour went by in this way, and then, opening her eyes and looking at him, she asked for a drink of water. He held her up with one arm and gave her some.

  “Turn out that light,” she said.

  Martín obeyed and sat down alongside her again.

  “Martín,” Alejandra said in a faint voice, “I’m very, very tired, I’d like to sleep, but don’t go away. You can sleep here, next to me.”

  He took off his shoes and lay down at her side.

  “You’re a saint,” she said, curling up next to him.

  Martín felt her suddenly drop off to sleep, as he tried to put his chaotic thoughts more or less in order. But his mind was in such turmoil and his thought processes so incoherent or contradictory that little by little he was overcome by an irresistible drowsiness and the very pleasant sensation (despite everything) of being at the side of the woman he loved.

  But something kept him from dropping off to sleep, and gradually he grew more and more anxious.

  It was as if the prince, he thought, journeying through vast, lonely regions, had at last found himself before the cavern where the beauty is sleeping, guarded by the dragon. And as if, moreover, he had become aware that the dragon was not a menacing creature there at her side watching over her, as we imagine him in the myths of our childhood, but instead, and much more frighteningly, a creature inside of her: as if she were a dragon-princess, an unfathomable monster, at once chaste and breathing fire, at once innocent and revolting: an absolutely pure-hearted child in a com
munion dress, possessed by the nightmares of a reptile or a bat.

  And the mysterious winds that seemed to be blowing out of the dark cavern of the dragon-princess shook his soul and rent it apart; all his conceptions of things were shattered to bits and hopelessly jumbled together; his body shuddered from head to foot with complex sensations. His mother (he thought), his mother, flesh and filth, a hot moist bath, a dark mass of hair and odors, a repugnant manure of skin and warm lips. But (he was trying to impose order on his chaos) he had divided love into filthy flesh and purest sentiment; into purest sentiment and repugnant, sordid sex that he must reject, even though (or because) his instincts so often rebelled, recoiling from their very rebellion with the same horror with which he suddenly discovered his filthy bed-mother’s features on his own face. As though his bed-mother, a treacherous, crawling thing, managed to cross the huge moats that he kept desperately digging each day in order to defend his tower; like an implacable viper, she returned each night, appearing in the tower like a fetid phantom as he defended himself with his clean, sharp-edged sword. And what in the name of heaven was happening with Alejandra? What ambiguous sentiment was now throwing all his defenses into confusion? The flesh was suddenly beginning to appear to him to be spirit, and his love for her was turning into flesh, into burning desire for her skin and her damp, dark dragon-princess cavern. But in heaven’s name why did she appear to defend this cavern with fiery blasts and the furious cries of a wounded dragon? “I mustn’t think,” he said to himself, pressing hard on his temples, trying to keep from thinking as he might try to keep from breathing, doing his best to quiet the tumult in his head. And then, his mind clean and blank now, if only for an instant, he thought with painful clarity BUT THERE ON THE BEACH WITH MARCOS MOLINA, IT WASN’T LIKE THIS. FOR SHE LOVED HIM AND DESIRED HIM AND KISSED HIM WILDLY. So that it was he, Martín, whom she rejected. He gave in to his tension once again, and once again those winds swept through his mind, like a furious storm, as he felt her there at his side, writhing, moaning, murmuring unintelligible words. “I always have nightmares in my sleep,” she had said.

  Martín sat there on the edge of the bed and looked at her: in the moonlight he could scrutinize her face agitated by that other storm, the one within her, the one he never (absolutely never) would know. As though amid mud and excrement, amid shadows there grew a delicate white rose. And the strangest thing of all was that he loved this equivocal monster: dragonprincess, mudrose, childbat, that same chaste, warm, and perhaps corrupt being shuddering there at his side, next to his skin, tormented by heaven only knew what terrible nightmares. And what was most upsetting of all was that though he accepted her as being that, she seemed not to want to accept him: it was as though the little girl in white (amid the mud, surrounded by hordes of bats, filthy, slimy bats) had cried out to him for help, moaning, and at the same time had rejected him, pushing him away from that dark realm with violent gestures. Yes: the princess was writhing and moaning. From desolate regions in darkest shadow she was calling to him, Martín. But he, a poor, hopelessly confused youngster, separated from her by unbridgeable abysses, was unable to make his way to her.

  There was nothing he could do, then, but gaze at her anxiously from this side of those abysses and wait.

  “No, no!” Alejandra exclaimed, thrusting her hands out in front of her as though to push something away. Then finally she awoke and the scene that Martín had already gone through that first night was repeated: he calming her, calling her by name; and she, in some far-off place, emerging little by little from a deep abyss swarming with bats and covered with spider webs.

  Sitting up in bed, hunched over her bent legs, her head resting on her knees, Alejandra came to little by little. After a time she looked at Martín and said to him:

  “I hope you’ve gotten used to it by now.”

  In reply, Martín tried to stroke her face with his hand.

  “Don’t touch me!” she exclaimed, drawing away.

  She got up out of bed and said:

  “I’m going to take a bath. I’ll be back.”

  “What took you so long?” he asked when she finally reappeared.

  “I was terribly dirty.”

  She lit a cigarette and lay down alongside him.

  Martín looked at her: he could never tell when she was joking.

  “I’m not joking, silly; I mean it.”

  Martín said nothing: he simply sat there, as though paralyzed by his doubts, his confused thoughts and feelings. Frowning, he gazed up at the ceiling and tried to order his thoughts.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  He did not reply immediately.

  “About everything and nothing, Alejandra …. To tell you the truth …”

  “Don’t you know what you’re thinking about?”

  “I don’t know anything …. Ever since I met you I’ve been living in the midst of utter confusion. I have no idea what I think or feel …. I haven’t the slightest notion what to do at any time …. Just now when you woke up and I tried to caress you … And before you went to sleep … When …”

  He fell silent and Alejandra said nothing. Neither of them spoke for a long time. The only sound in the room was Alejandra’s breath as she took deep, avid drags on her cigarette.

  “You aren’t saying a word,” Martín commented bitterly.

  “I already told you that I love you, that I love you a lot.”

  “What was it you dreamed just now?” Martín asked in a gloomy tone of voice.

  “Why do you want to know? It’s not even worth talking about.”

  “You see? You have a world of your own that’s unknown to me—how can you say you love me?”

  “But I do love you, Martín.”

  “Sure. You love me the way you would a little kid.”

  She did not answer.

  “You see!” Martín said bitterly. “You see!”

  “No, silly, that’s not it at all …. I’m thinking …. Things aren’t clear at all for me either …. But I love you, I need you, I’m absolutely certain of that …”

  “You wouldn’t let me kiss you. You wouldn’t even let me touch you a minute ago.”

  “Good heavens! Can’t you see I’m sick, that I’m suffering terribly? You can’t imagine the nightmare I just had …”

  “Was that why you went and took a bath?” Martín asked sarcastically.

  “Yes: I took a bath on account of the nightmare.”

  “Can nightmares be washed away by water?”

  “Yes, Martín, with water and a little detergent.”

  “It doesn’t seem to me that what I’m saying is anything to be laughed at.”

  “I’m not laughing, my boy. Or maybe I’m laughing at myself, at my ridiculous notion that I can get my soul clean with soap and water. If you could only see how furiously I scrub myself!”

  “That’s a crazy idea.”

  “Naturally.”

  Alejandra sat up, stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray on the night table and lay down again.

  “I’m young and inexperienced, Alejandra. I’ve little doubt that you find me terribly stupid and backward. But I keep wondering nonetheless: if you don’t like me to touch you and kiss you on the mouth, why is it you asked me to stay and sleep here in this bed with you? That seems to me a cruel thing for you to do. Or is it another experiment, like the one with Marcos Molina?”

  “No, Martín, it’s not an experiment at all. I didn’t love Marcos Molina—I can see that clearly now. But with you it’s different. And it’s really strange—something I can’t even explain to myself: suddenly I need to have you close, to have you next to me, to feel the warmth of your body beside me, the touch of your hand.”

  “But without my really kissing you.”

  Alejandra hesitated a moment before going on.

  “Look, Martín, there are lots of things about me, about … The thing is, I just don’t know …. Maybe because I’m very fond of you … do you understand?”

  ??
?No.”

  “No, of course you don’t …. I can’t even explain it to myself very well.”

  “Won’t I ever be able to kiss you, won’t I ever be able to touch your body?” Martín asked, with childish, almost comical bitterness.

  He saw her raise her hands to her head and press it between them as though her temples ached. Then she lit a cigarette and without a word went over to the window, remaining there until she had finished it. Then she came back to the bed, sat down, gave Martín a long, searching look, and began to undress.

  Almost in terror, like someone who is witness to an act that he has long awaited but that he realizes is also in some way vaguely horrifying once it is actually about to come to pass, Martín saw her body begin to emerge little by little from the darkness. On his feet now, he contemplated in the moonlight her slender waist that a single arm could easily encircle; her wide hips, her high, pointed breasts set far apart, quivering as she moved; her long straight hair fanning out over her shoulders now. Her face was grave, almost tragic, marked by a bitter, dry-eyed despair so intense it was almost electric.

  Curiously, Martín’s eyes had filled with tears and he was shivering, as though suffering an attack of fever. He saw her as an antique amphora, a tall, beautiful amphora of trembling flesh; flesh that at the same time appeared to him to be suffused by an ardent desire for communion, for as Bruno said, one of the tragic frailties of the spirit, yet one of its most profound subtleties, was that it was impossible for it to exist save through the intermediary of the flesh.

  The outside world had ceased to exist for Martín, and now the magic circle isolated him, to the point of vertigo, from that terrible city, from its miseries and its ugliness, from the millions of men and women and children in it—talking, suffering, quarreling, hating, eating. Through the fantastic powers of love all that was abolished; nothing existed save that body of Alejandra’s waiting at his side, a body that one day would die and be corrupted, but at this moment was immortal and incorruptible, as though the spirit that inhabited it were communicating to its flesh the attributes of its eternity. The pounding of his heart demonstrated to him, Martín, that he was ascending to a height never before attained, a summit where the air was completely pure but electric, a lofty mountain perhaps surrounded by a highly charged atmosphere, to immeasurable heights towering far above the dark and pestilential swamps in which he had previously heard grotesque, filthy beasts splashing.