On Heroes and Tombs
“Thousands, what am I saying, millions of amateur theatrical companies putting on Rope, Mourning Becomes Electra, The Emperor Jones, Desire Under the Elms …. Poor chap! That’s more than sufficient reason for taking to the bottle and not wanting to see a soul! Your group is different, of course, Cristina: in fact you’re not really amateurs any more, since you charge as much as though you were professionals. And that’s all to the good: it’s just not possible for poor people to have to work during the day as sewer cleaners or bookkeepers and then have to play King Lear for nothing at night …. Especially since all those crimes are so exhausting …. Of course there’s always another solution: putting on nice quiet works, with no crimes and no incest. Or one or two crimes at most. But amateur groups are only interested in works with lots of crimes, real mass slaughter, Shakespeare let’s say. Not to mention the work on the side, sweeping out the hall, being responsible for the props, painting the walls, selling tickets at the box office, serving as ushers, scrubbing out the toilets. Just to keep up everybody’s morale. A sort of phalanstery. Everybody taking his turn cleaning the john, with no exceptions. And so one day Señor Zanetta directs the company in Hamlet, and Norah Rolland cleans the loo. On another day the aforementioned Zanetta cleans the double ve-ce and Norah Rolland directs Desire Under the Elms. Not to mention the fact that for two years and a half they’ve all worked like crazy as bricklayers, carpenters, painters, and electricians, fixing up the place. Noble activities in the midst of which they’ve been photographed and interviewed by countless reporters, thus justifying the use of words such as fervor, enthusiasm, noble aspirations, people’s theater, authentic values, and vocation. But naturally this sort of phalanstery sometimes comes a cropper. Dictatorship lurks eternally behind demagoguery. And so Señor Mastronicola, after having cleaned the john two or three times, invents the doctrine whereby Señorita Caca Spaghettini, known in theatrical circles by her nom de guerre Elizabeth Lynch, is altogether too high and mighty, having been corrupted by her rotten, decadent counterrevolutionarypettybourgeois tendencies and hence it is necessary, for the sake of her moral and dramatic education, for her to clean the crapper all during the year 1956, which to add insult to injury also happens to be a leap year. And all of this is complicated by the amorous affaires of Esther Abramovich, who joined the amateur theater group so as to sleep around with anything in pants, as the saying goes, since according to the director she has turned this noble bastion of pure art into a real bawdy house. And then there’s the jealousy of Diana Ferrer, who wouldn’t dream of letting the aforementioned Mastronicola escape her clutches. And then pent-up anger of the young character actor Ramsés Cuciaroni, whom they’ve stuck in the box office out of sheer spite ever since their revolving democracy began to break down. In short, a first-rate bordello. So the best thing, Cristina, is to turn professional the way all of you have. Even though that old gaffer works in some ministry in the daytime, doesn’t he?”
“What old gaffer?”
“Tonazzi.”
“Tonelli …. Tonelli isn’t old. He’s barely past forty.”
“Tiens! I would have sworn he was over fifty at the very least. That just goes to show you what bad stage lighting can do. But he works in an office somewhere in the daytime, doesn’t he? I seem to remember seeing him in the café across the street from the Ministry of Commerce.”
“No, he has a little shop where he sells books and school supplies.”
Wanda’s shoulders were shaking as though she were having an attack of malaria.
“Ah, that’s splendid! I can see now why they gave him the role of the writer. Of course. I must confess he looks more like a government functionary to me, but that’s probably because I was terribly tired last night and what with that business with the electric company the lights are so dim, but that’s not the group’s fault naturally. Well, I’m glad to hear he’s got a little shop anyway. That means he probably doesn’t have to get up very early the days after a performance. Luckily, because his throat must be in a terrible state, the poor thing, what with that accursed mambo-playing next door and the tuba and all. Well, I must be running along, it’s terribly late. Congratulations, Cristina. I bid you a fond farewell, dear girl!”
He kissed Wanda’s cheek, filching a bonbon from her box at the same time.
“Ta-ta, Wanda. And watch your figure. Bye-bye, Cristina, and congratulations again. That ensemble is just darling on you.”
He stretched out a hand to one side to shake Martín’s, as the latter sat there as though turned to stone, and then from above the folding screen separating the boutique from the workroom in the back, he shouted to Alejandra on the other side:
“Mes hommages, darling!”
7
Sitting there petrified on the tall stool, Martín waited for some sign from Alejandra. As soon as Bobby had left, Alejandra motioned to him to come into the back room with her, where she was sketching.
“You see?” she said to him, as though to explain the reason why she hadn’t gotten in touch with him. “I’ve got a tremendous amount of work to do.”
As he mechanically opened and closed his white penknife, Martín watched Alejandra tracing lines on a blank sheet of paper. She went on sketching in silence and time seemed to be passing through blocks of cement.
“Well,” Martín said, summoning all his strength of will, “I’ll be off …”
Alejandra came over to him, gave his arm a squeeze, and said they’d see each other soon. Martín bowed his head.
“We’ll see each other soon, I said,” she reiterated in an irritated tone of voice.
Martín raised his head.
“You know very well, Alejandra, that I don’t want to interfere in your life, that your independence …”
He didn’t finish the sentence, but then he added:
“No, what I mean to say is … at least … I’d like to see you when you’re not pressed for time …”
“Yes, of course,” she conceded, as though thinking it over. Martín’s spirits rose.
“We’ll try to be the way we were before, do you remember?”
Alejandra looked at him with eyes that seemed to betray sadness and disbelief.
“What, doesn’t that seem possible to you?”
“Yes, Martín, yes,” she replied, lowering her gaze and making little doodles on the paper with her pencil. “Yes, we’ll spend a wonderful day together … you’ll see …”
Feeling encouraged, Martín said:
“Lots of our misunderstandings lately have been due to your work, the pressures on your time, the appointments you’ve had to keep …”
Alejandra’s face had begun to change.
“I’ve already explained to you that I’ll be very busy till the end of the month.”
Martín made a great effort not to remonstrate with her, because he knew that recrimination would get him nowhere. But the words welled up from the depths of his mind with silent but uncontainable force.
“It hurts my feelings when I see you keep looking at your watch.”
She raised her eyes and stared at him, frowning. In terror Martín said to himself: not one more word of reproach, yet he added:
“Last Tuesday, for instance, when I thought we were going to spend the whole afternoon together.”
A severe look had already come over Alejandra’s face; it made Martín draw up short as though on the brink of a precipice.
“You’re right, Martín,” she admitted nonetheless.
Martín dared to add then:
“That’s why I’d rather have you be the one to say what day we can see each other.”
Alejandra made some mental calculations and said:
“Friday. I think that by Friday I’ll have finished the things that are most pressing.”
She thought some more.
“But at the last minute there’s always something to do over or something that’s missing, things like that …. I wouldn’t like to keep you waiting …. Don’t you think it would be be
tter to put the whole thing off till Monday?”
Monday! That was almost a week away …. But what could he do but make the best of it and agree?
He tried to dull his mind with work during that endless week, and he also whiled away the time reading, walking about the streets, going to the movies. He sought Bruno out, and even though he was eager to talk about Alejandra, he found himself incapable of even uttering her name. And since Bruno guessed what was going through his mind, he too avoided mentioning her and spoke of other things or dealt in generalities. Martín’s spirits would then revive enough for him to say certain things that also appeared to have some general import, things seemingly pertaining to the abstract and disincarnated world of pure ideas, but in reality they were the barely impersonalized expression of his own hopes and anxieties. Thus when Bruno spoke to him of the absolute, Martín would ask, for example, whether true love were not precisely one of those absolutes; a question in which the word love had about as much to do with the word as employed by Kant or Hegel as the abstract word catastrophe has to do with a train derailment or an earthquake, with their dead and mutilated, with their screams and their bloodshed. Bruno replied that in his opinion the quality of love between two beings who are attached to each other changes from one instant to the next, becoming suddenly sublime, then descending to triviality, then later turning into something affectionate and comfortable, only to turn abruptly into a tragic or devastating hatred.
“Because there are times when lovers do not love each other, or when one of them does not love the other, or detests him, or has contempt for him.”
Meanwhile Bruno thought about the phrase that Jeannette had once uttered to him: L’amour c’est une personne qui souffre et une autre qui s’emmerde. And he remembered, observer of unhappy people that he was, a couple he had seen one day in a deserted corner of a dark café; the man gaunt, unshaven, suffering, reading a letter for the hundredth time—surely one from the woman there with him—reproaching her, taking the absurd piece of paper as proof of heaven only knows what pledges or promises; and each time he concentrated furiously on some phrase or other in the letter, she looked at her watch and yawned.
Then as Martín asked him whether everything ought not to be completely clear and transparent and based on the truth between two beings who love each other, Bruno replied that in almost no instance can the truth be told when it is a question of human beings, since it can only bring pain, sadness, and destruction. He also remarked that he had always held high hopes for his plan to write a novel or a play on this very subject (“but that’s all I am: a man who has plans,” he added with a shy, self-deprecating smile): the story of a youngster who decides always to tell the truth, always, at whatever cost. And of course he sows destruction, horror, and death in his wake, until finally he ends up bringing about his own destruction, his own death.
“So it’s necessary to lie,” Martín concluded bitterly.
“I’m simply saying that it’s not always possible to tell the truth. In fact, strictly speaking, it’s almost never possible.”
“So one lies by omission?”
“Something like that,” Bruno replied, looking at him out of the corner of his eye, fearing he might be hurting his feelings.
“So you don’t believe in the truth then.”
“I believe that there is indeed truth in mathematics, in chemistry, in philosophy. But not in life. In life illusion, imagination, desire, hope count for more. Moreover, do we even know what the truth is? If I tell you that that bit of window over there is blue, I am voicing a truth. But it is only a partial truth, and therefore a sort of lie. Because that bit of window is not all by itself, it’s in a house, in a city, in a physical setting. It’s surrounded by the gray of that cement wall, the clear blue of the sky, those streaks of clouds, and countless other things. And if I fail to mention everything, absolutely everything, I am lying. But saying everything is impossible, even in the case of this window, of a simple bit of physical reality, simple physical reality. Reality is infinite, and furthermore it has infinite shadings, and if I forget a single one of them I am lying. Now just imagine for a moment what the reality of human beings is like, what with their complications and their twists and turns and contradictions; and what is more, they are forever changing. Hence this reality changes with each passing moment, and we no longer are what we were a moment ago. Are we always the same person even? Do we always have the same feelings for instance? One can love someone and suddenly lose all respect for him and even detest him. And if on losing all respect for him we make the mistake of telling him so, this is a truth, but a momentary truth, one that will no longer be true within an hour or the next day or in other circumstances. And yet the person to whom we say that will believe that it is the truth, the truth from first to last, forever and always. And he will be overcome by despair.”
8
And then it was Monday at last.
Seeing her walking toward the restaurant, Martín said to himself that the word pretty was not the right one for her, or even the word lovely; perhaps she could be said to be beautiful, but above all she was regal. Even in her simple white blouse, her black skirt, and her little flat-heeled slippers. A simplicity that brought out her exotic features even more, just as the beauty of a statue is more noticeable in a square that is not decorated in any way. Everything seemed to glow that afternoon. And even the calm weather that day, the lack of wind, the strong sun that seemed to be delaying the arrival of autumn (that autumn, he thought later, that had been lying in ambush somewhere, waiting till he was all alone before unleashing all its sadness), everything appeared to indicate that all the astral signs were favorable.
They walked down to Costanera.
A locomotive was pulling freight cars, a crane was hoisting a machine, a seaplane flew by low in the sky.
“The Progress of the Nation,” Alejandra remarked.
They sat down on one of the benches overlooking the river.
They sat there for nearly an hour not saying a word, or at least not saying anything important, lost in thought, amid that silence that Martín always found so unnerving. Their sentences were as cryptic as a telegram in code and would have made no sense to an outsider: “that bird …,” “the yellow of that smokestack …,” “Montevideo ….” But they did not make plans as they once had, and Martín was careful not to bring up things that risked ruining that afternoon, that afternoon he was treating like a beloved invalid, in whose presence one must speak in a low voice and who must be spared even the slightest momentary annoyance.
But that sentiment—Martín could not help thinking—was by its very essence contradictory, since if he wanted to preserve the happiness of that afternoon it was precisely for the sake of happiness, for what to him was the very definition of happiness: namely, being with her and not simply at her side. Better still: being in her, within each one of her interstices, her cells, her footsteps, her feelings, her ideas; within her skin, on top of her body and inside it, at one with that desired and admired flesh, with her within her: a communion and not a simple, silent, sad proximity. So that preserving the purity of that afternoon by not talking, by refraining from trying to be inside her, was easy, but at the same time as absurd and as pointless as not having any afternoon with her at all, as easy and as senseless as preserving the purity of crystal clear water by not drinking it even if one is dying of thirst.
“Let’s go to your room, Alejandra,” he said to her.
She looked at him gravely and then after a moment said she’d rather go to the movies.
Martín took out his penknife.
“Don’t be like that, Martín. I’m not well, I really don’t feel at all well.”
“You’re radiant,” Martín answered, opening the little blade of the knife.
“I’m not feeling well again, I tell you.”
“It’s your own fault,” he pointed out in a more or less spiteful tone of voice. “You don’t take care of yourself. I saw you eating things just now
that you shouldn’t eat. And what’s more you keep downing one martini after the other.”
He sat there in silence and began to chip slivers of wood from the bench.
“Don’t be that way.”
But as he sat there stubbornly keeping his head down, she put her hand under his chin and raised it up.
“Listen, Martín, we promised each other we’d have a peaceful afternoon together.”
Martín grunted.
“And naturally you think that if we aren’t having a pleasant afternoon it’s not your fault, isn’t that so?” she went on.
Martín didn’t answer; there was no point in doing so.
Alejandra fell silent. Then Martín heard her say all of a sudden:
“All right then. That’s fine with me: let’s go to my house.”
But Martín didn’t say a word. She had already gotten to her feet, and grabbing him by the arm she asked him:
“What’s the matter now?”
“Nothing. You’re acting as though it were a big sacrifice.”
“Don’t be silly. Let’s go.”
They began to walk uptown along the Calle Belgrano. Martín’s spirits had revived and suddenly, as though the idea really appealed to him, he exclaimed:
“Let’s go to the movies!”
“Stop talking nonsense.”
“No, I don’t want you to miss that film. You’ve been waiting to see it for such a long time.”
“We’ll go see it some other day.”
“You really don’t want to go see it?”
If she had said she did, he would have fallen into the blackest mood imaginable.
“No, no.”
Martín felt happiness flow back into his soul, like a mountain river when it thaws. He strode along determinedly, with Alejandra’s arm in his. As they passed the drawbridge they saw a taxi heading toward the river with passengers in it. They motioned to the driver to indicate that they were going back into the city, on the chance that he’d come back that way and pick them up. The driver nodded. The astral signs were definitely auspicious that day.