On Heroes and Tombs
And Bruno (not Martín, of course), Bruno thought that at that moment Alejandra uttered a silent but dramatic, perhaps tragic, prayer.
And he too—Bruno—would think immediately thereafter that that supplication had gone unheard.
18
When Martin awoke, the first morning light was already entering the room.
Alejandra was not lying beside him. He sat up in bed anxiously and saw that she was leaning on the windowsill, pensively looking out.
“Alejandra,” he said lovingly.
She turned around with an expression that seemed to reveal a brooding, anxious sadness, as though melancholy thoughts were preying on her mind.
She came over to the bed and sat down.
“Have you been up long?”
“Quite a while. But I often get up during the night.”
“Last night too?” Martín asked in amazement.
“Of course.”
“How come I didn’t hear you?”
Alejandra bowed her head, looked away, and with a frown, as though to emphasize her preoccupation, was about to say something, but in the end said nothing.
Martín looked at her sadly, and although he did not exactly understand the reason for her melancholy, it seemed to him he could perceive the distant sound of it, a vague, mysterious sound.
“Alejandra …” he said, looking at her fervently. “You …”
She turned and looked at Martín then, with an ambiguous expression on her face, and said:
“I what?”
And without waiting for his pointless reply, she went over to the night table, searched about for her cigarettes, and walked back over to the window.
Martín’s eyes followed her anxiously. He feared that, as in children’s fairy tales, the palace that had magically arisen in the night would disappear without a sound in the light of dawn. Some vague presentiment told him that that harsh creature he was so afraid of was about to reappear. And when Alejandra turned toward him again after a moment, he realized that the enchanted palace had returned to the realm of nothingness.
“I told you I’m garbage, Martín. Don’t forget that I warned you.”
She turned away again and looked out the window, continuing to smoke in silence.
Martín felt ridiculous. He had pulled the sheet up over himself on noticing her cold, hard expression and he told himself he ought to get dressed before she looked at him again. Trying not to make noise, he sat down on the edge of the bed and began putting his clothes on, without taking his eyes off the window and dreading the moment when Alejandra would turn around. And once he was all dressed, he waited.
“Are you through dressing?” she asked, as though she had known all the time what Martín was doing.
“Yes.”
“Well, leave me here alone then.”
19
That night Martín had a dream: in the midst of a crowd, a beggar whose face it was impossible for him to see approached him, took his bundle off his shoulder, put it down on the ground, untied the knots, opened it, and laid its contents out before Martín. Then the beggar raised his eyes and murmured something unintelligible.
In and of itself, there was nothing terrible about the dream: the beggar was simply a beggar, and there was nothing out of the ordinary about his gestures. Martín nonetheless awoke in the grip of a terrible anxiety, as though everything in the dream were the tragic symbol of something beyond his understanding; as though he had been handed a letter of crucial importance, and on opening it he had found the words in it indecipherable, disfigured, and effaced by time, dampness, and the folds in the paper.
20
When, years later, Martín tried to discover the key to his relations with Alejandra, among the things he related to Bruno was the fact that, despite her violent changes of mood, he had been happy for several weeks. Bruno raised his eyebrows and horizontal furrows visibly crossed his forehead when he heard such an unexpected word uttered in connection with anything having to do with Alejandra, and since Martín understood that little tacit commentary of Bruno’s, he added, a moment’s reflection:
“Or rather: almost happy. But immensely so.”
Because the word happiness, in fact, was not an appropriate one for anything in any way related to Alejandra; yet for all of that it had been something, a feeling, or a state of mind, that came closer to what is commonly called happiness than anything else, even though it never reached the point of being absolute and perfect happiness (and hence the “almost”), in view of the uncertainty and the insecurity of everything having to do with Alejandra. And it had been something that had attained what might be called the utmost heights (and hence that “immensely”), heights on which Martín had felt that majesty and that purity, that sensation of fervent silence and solitary ecstasy that mountain climbers experience on the loftiest peaks.
Bruno looked at him thoughtfully, leaning his chin on his fist.
“And what about Alejandra?” he asked. “Was she happy too?”
A question marked, even if involuntarily, by an almost imperceptible, affectionate note of irony, similar to that which might be attached to the question: “Everything going well at your house as usual?” addressed to a member of the family of one of those specialists from Texas who are experts at putting out oil field fires. A question whose subtly incredulous overtones Martín may not have noticed, but whose formulation in precisely those words gave him pause, as though he had not previously given any serious thought to the matter one way or another. So that after a moment’s silence, he answered (already disturbed by Bruno’s doubt, which had rapidly though wordlessly communicated itself to his own mind):
“Well … maybe … during that period …”
And Martín sat there pondering what measure of happiness Alejandra might have felt, or at least manifested: in a smile, a song, a few words. Meanwhile Bruno said to himself: Well, why not? What is happiness, after all? And why wouldn’t she have felt happy with that youngster, at any rate at those moments when she had won a victory over herself, during that period when she was forcing her body and her mind to do fierce battle so as to free herself from demons? With his head resting on one fist, he continued to look at Martín, trying to understand Alejandra a little better through Martín’s sadness, his hopes even after everything was over, his fervor; with the same melancholy attentiveness (Bruno thought) thanks to which one more or less finds that a distant and mysterious country that one has once visited with passion is suddenly brought to life again through the accounts of other travelers, even though one’s own journey through that country has been along other paths, in other times.
And the same thing happened as almost always occurs when opinions are exchanged and a certain common ground is arrived at in which neither party’s opinion has the rigidity and the dogmatic quality displayed at the beginning of the discussion: while Bruno ended up conceding that Alejandra might well have felt some type or some measure of happiness, Martín, for his part, reexamining memories (an expression, a grimace, a sarcastic laugh) came to the conclusion that even during those few weeks Alejandra had not been happy. How otherwise to explain her frightful collapse later? Didn’t that collapse mean that within her tormented spirit a terrible battle had continued to be waged between those demons that he knew existed, but that he more or less put out of his mind, as though in this purely magical way be were capable of doing away with them altogether? And not only did he recall words freighted with meaning that had attracted his attention from the very beginning (the blind, Fernando), but also gestures and sarcastic remarks about third parties such as Molinari, silences and moments of reticence, and above all that alienation in which she appeared to live for days on end, periods during which Martín was convinced that her mind was elsewhere, and during which her body remained as abandoned as those of savages when their soul has been torn out of them by witchcraft and wanders about in unknown regions. And he also recalled her abrupt changes of mood, her accesses of raging fury, and her dreams of which s
he had occasionally given him a vague and troubled account. Nonetheless he still believed that in that period Alejandra had loved him intensely and had had moments of tranquility or of peace if not of happiness; for he remembered beautiful, calm afternoons that they had spent together, the silly, affectionate phrases that couples exchange at such times, the little gestures of tenderness and the friendly jokes. And in any case she had been like one of those combatants who come back from the front, wounded and battered, bled white and nearly helpless, and who little by little come back to life, in quiet, serene days spent at the side of those who care for them and restore them to health.
He passed on some of these thoughts to Bruno, and Bruno sat there pondering the matter, not really persuaded that it had been that way either, or at least not that way entirely. And as Martín looked at him, waiting for a reply, Bruno growled something unintelligible, words as unclear as his thoughts.
Martín did not see things clearly either, and in truth he was never able to explain to himself why the progress that Alejandra had seemingly made had assumed the form or developed along the lines that it had, even though he felt more and more inclined to believe that Alejandra never emerged completely from the chaos in which she had been living before he met her, despite the fact that she had managed to have calm moments; but those dark forces at work within her had never abandoned her, and had again exploded in all their fury toward the end, as though once she had exhausted her capacity to fight back and once she had realized her failure, her desperation had reappeared with redoubled violence.
Martín opened his penknife and allowed his memory to wander back over that period that now seemed extremely remote to him. His memory was like an old, nearly blind man who, cane in hand, goes feeling his way along paths of yesteryear that are now overgrown with weeds. A landscape transformed by time, by calamities and tempests. Had he, Martín, been happy? No, what an absurdity to think so. There had been, rather, a succession of ecstatic moments and catastrophic ones. And he remembered once again that dawn in the Mirador, hearing as he was finishing getting dressed that terrible phrase of Alejandra’s: “Well, leave me here alone then.” And after that walking down the Calle Isabel la Católica like an automaton, completely bewildered and upset. And then the days that followed, days when he was out of work, lonely days waiting for some favorable sign from Alejandra, other moments of vast exhilaration, and then disillusionment and pain again. Yes, he was like a maidservant who each night was taken to the enchanted palace, only to awaken each morning in the palace pigsty.
Part Two
* * *
THE INVISIBLE FACES
1
A curious fact (curious when viewed from the perspective of later events): Martín had seldom been as happy as in the hours preceding the meeting with Bordenave. Alejandra was in an excellent mood and had wanted to go to the movies: but she did not even get out of sorts when Bordenave caused this plan of hers to come to nothing by telling Martín that he would meet with him at seven. And as Martín was on the point of stopping this or that person on the street to ask how to get to the American bar where Bordenave had said he would be, Alejandra kept dragging him away by one arm, as though she were familiar with the place. This was the first thing that marred the happiness of that afternoon.
A waiter pointed Bordenave out to him. He was with two other men, talking with them at a table with some sort of papers in front of them. Bordenave was a man of about forty, tall and elegantly dressed, bearing a rather marked resemblance to Anthony Eden. But eyes with an ironic little glint in them, and a certain crooked smile gave him a very Argentine air. “Ah, it’s you,” he said to Martín, and apologizing to the other two gentlemen for leaving them, he invited him to sit down with him at a nearby table. But as Martín stammered something and looked in Alejandra’s direction, Bordenave, after allowing his eyes to linger on her for a few seconds, said: “Ah, very well, let’s join her over there then.”
The instant antipathy that this man aroused in Alejandra was obvious to Martín, for she drew birds on a paper napkin during the entire conversation between the two of them: one of the signs of her displeasure that Martín knew only too well. Upset by her sudden change of mood, Martín had to concentrate in order to follow what Bordenave had to say, which appeared to have little to do with the reasons for which Martín had come to meet him. In a word, Bordenave struck him as an unscrupulous adventurer but what was most important was that D’Arcángelo and his father would not be thrown out of their lodgings.
On leaving the bar, he and Alejandra crossed the street and sat down on a bench in the square. Martín, in an anxious mood, asked her what sort of person Bordenave had seemed to her to be.
“What sort do you suppose? An Argentine, of course.”
In the light of the match struck for her cigarette, Martín noted that her face had taken on a hard, set expression. Then she just sat there, saying nothing. Martín for his part wondered what could have made her mood shift so suddenly and so drastically, but it was evident that Bordenave was the cause. Speaking at one point of the Italians who had been with him at the other table, Bordenave had spoken, unnecessarily, of certain things they had done that had rubbed him the wrong way. What could all that be about anyway? What was certain was that it was Bordenave’s appearance on the scene that had disturbed the peace that had reigned before that, like a snake gliding into a well of crystal clear water from which we are drinking.
Alejandra said she had a headache and would rather go home now and go to bed. And as he was about to say goodbye to her on reaching the Calle Río Cuarto, she finally opened her mouth to say that she would have a word with Molinari about him, but not to get his hopes up.
“How shall I go about getting in to see him? Will you give me a letter to him?”
“We’ll see. Maybe I’ll just telephone him and then leave you a message.”
Martín looked at her in astonishment. A message? Yes, she’d leave word for him as to what Molinari had said.
“But …” he stammered.
“But what?”
“What I mean is … Can’t you tell me what he’s had to say when we see each other tomorrow?”
Alejandra’s face looked older all of a sudden.
“Look. Right now I can’t tell you when we’ll be seeing each other.”
In consternation, Martín stammered something about the plans they had made that very afternoon for what they would do together the following day, whereupon Alejandra exclaimed:
“I don’t feel well! Can’t you see that?”
Martín turned around to leave as she was opening the front gate, and had already begun to walk off when he heard her calling after him.
“Wait.”
In a less peremptory tone she said to him:
“I’ll phone Molinari tomorrow morning, and leave you a message at noon.”
She was already inside the gate when she added with a harsh, malicious laugh:
“Take a good look at the secretary he’s got, the blonde.”
Martín stood there staring at her in bewilderment.
“She’s one of his mistresses.”
Those were the things that happened that day. Some time was to pass before Martín thought again about that meeting with Bordenave, as after a crime a place or an object that no one had previously thought was important is examined carefully.
2
Years later, when Martín came back from the South, one of the subjects of his conversations with Bruno was the relationship between Alejandra and Molinari. Martín had begun speaking of Alejandra again—Bruno thought—like someone trying to restore a soul that has already started to decompose, a soul that he would have liked to be immortal but that he now was aware was cracking apart and falling to pieces little by little, as though accompanying the gradual putrefaction of the body, as though it were impossible for it to survive any longer without its physical support and could linger on only so long as the subtle emanation that had disengaged itself from that body at the
instant of death lingered on: a sort of ectoplasm or radioactive gas that in turn will slowly fade away: an emanation that some people consider to be the ghost of the dead person, a ghost that for a time vaguely retains the form of the being who has disappeared, but then becomes more and more immaterial until it finally dissolves into the ultimate nothingness; it is at this moment, perhaps, that the soul vanishes forever, if one excepts those fragments of it, or echoes of fragments of it, that linger on—but for how long?—in the soul of others, of those who knew and hated or loved that being who has disappeared.
And so Martín tried to recover fragments; he wandered down certain streets once more, went back to certain places, had conversations with Bruno, madly gathered together little things, a word or two here and there, like those family members, crazed with grief, who go about doggedly collecting the mutilated bits and pieces of a loved one’s body at the spot where the plane crashed; not immediately however, but a long time later, when those remains are not simply mutilated but decomposed as well.
In no other way could Bruno explain why Martín insisted on recalling and analyzing that business with Molinari. And as Bruno thus reflected upon the body and the disintegration of the soul, Martín, talking more or less to himself, said that in his opinion that absurd interview with Molinari was doubtless a key moment in his relationship with Alejandra; an interview that at the time seemed surprising to him, both because Alejandra had arranged it for him, knowing full well that Molinari would not give him work, and because an important, very busy man like Molinari had devoted such a lot of his time to an insignificant youngster like him.