On Heroes and Tombs

  “I’ve never been anything but affectionate and understanding.”

  Her one reply was to say that she couldn’t stay one minute more: she had to be somewhere at eight o’clock.

  He watched her as she walked off.

  And suddenly he decided to follow her. Could anything worse happen to him if she noticed that he was doing so?

  Alejandra headed along Recova, turned off down Reconquista, and finally entered a little bar and restaurant called the Ukrania. Warily, Martín drew closer and stood there in the darkness peering inside. His heart contracted and turned hard, as though it had been torn from his body and left out on an iceberg, all by itself: Alejandra was sitting across from a man who seemed to Martín to be as sinister as the bar itself. His skin was dark, but his eyes were a pale color, gray perhaps. His straight white hair was combed straight back. His face was hard, with features that looked as though they had been carved out with an ax. A powerful man, possessed of a darkly mysterious beauty. Martín’s pain was so great, he felt so insignificant alongside that unknown man, that nothing mattered any more. It was as though he had said to himself: What worse thing could possibly happen to me now? Fascinated and sad, he could follow the man’s expression, his silences, his gestures. He spoke infrequently, and when he did so his phrases were brief and clipped. His thin, restless hands looked a bit like the talons of a falcon or an eagle. Yes, that was it: everything about that individual was reminiscent of a bird of prey; his thin but powerful aquiline nose; his bony, rapacious, pitiless hands. That man was cruel and capable of anything.

  Martín had the vague feeling that the man looked like someone he knew, but he was unable to pin down who it was. At one point he thought that perhaps he had met him at some time or other, but it was a face that was impossible to forget, and if he had seen him even once he would surely recognize him now.

  Alejandra was talking in a state of great agitation. It was strange: the two of them were cruel creatures and appeared to hate each other, yet that thought did not ease his mind. On the contrary, it made him feel all the more desperate the moment it occurred to him. Why? Suddenly he felt he knew the answer: those two creatures were united by a violent passion. As though two eagles loved each other, he thought. Two eagles that nonetheless could—and perhaps would—rip and claw each other to death with their beaks and talons. And when he saw Alejandra take one of the hands, one of the talons, of that man in one of her hands, Martín felt that from that moment on nothing mattered and the world lacked all meaning whatsoever.

  22

  He was walking about at dawn when the revelation suddenly came to him: that man looked like Alejandra! He remembered instantly the scene in the Mirador, when she had uttered the name Fernando and then denied that she had done so the moment after, as though a name that ought to be kept a secret had escaped her.

  “That was Fernando!” Martín thought.

  The gray green eyes, the slightly slanting cheekbones, the dark complexion and the features of Trinidad Arias! Of course; that explained the feeling that he knew him. He looked a lot like Trinidad Arias, the woman in the portrait that Alejandra had shown him, and a lot like Alejandra. “Everyone except Fernando and me,” Alejandra had said, like someone who has withdrawn from the world and lives a life apart with a man, a man, he now realized, whom she admired.

  But who was Fernando? An older brother: a brother she didn’t want to talk about? The idea that that man could be Alejandra’s brother only halfway eased his mind however, when it should have calmed him altogether. Why (he asked himself) am I not happy at that thought? At that moment he could discover no answer to that question in his mind. He merely noted that despite the fact that he knew he should calm down he was unable to.

  He found it impossible to put his mind at rest and drop off to sleep: it was as though he suspected that a vampire had gotten into the room. He lay there turning the scene that he had witnessed over and over in his mind, trying to discover the cause of his uneasiness. Then finally he thought he’d stumbled on it: the hand! Suddenly overcome with anxiety, he remembered how she had stroked the man’s hand affectionately. That was not the way a sister acted with her brother! And she spent her days thinking of him: him, the hypnotizer! She kept fleeing from him, but sooner or later, like a woman driven out of her mind, she was always forced to return to him. He now believed he had found the explanation for many of her incomprehensible and contradictory actions.

  But the moment he thought he had found the key, he was again confronted with the most puzzling enigma of all: the resemblance. There could be no doubt about it: that man was a relative of Alejandra’s. A first cousin perhaps? Yes: he was her first cousin and his name was Fernando.

  That had to be the answer, for it would explain everything: the striking resemblance between the two of them and her sudden reticence that night when the name Fernando had escaped her lips. That name (he thought) was a key name, a secret name. “Everyone except Fernando and me,” she had said despite herself and then had abruptly fallen silent and not answered his question. Everything was clear to him now: out of lofty pride, the two of them kept altogether to themselves, lived in a world apart.

  Moreover, she loved Fernando, and that was the reason why she had immediately regretted having uttered that revealing name in Martín’s presence.

  He became more and more distraught as the days went by, and finally, unable to bear it any longer, he phoned Alejandra and told her that there was something extremely urgent that he must speak with her about immediately: just one last thing, even though they would never see each other again afterward.

  Yet when they met, he could scarcely get a word out.

  23

  “What’s the matter now?” Alejandra spat out violently, sensing that Martín felt aggrieved about something or other that had happened. And that made her temper flare up because, as she had already told him repeatedly, he had no special claim on her; she had promised him nothing and hence owed him no explanation of any sort. At this point especially, inasmuch as they had decided to end their relationship.

  Martín shook his head to dispute her words, as his eyes filled with tears.

  “Tell me what’s troubling you,” she said to him, shaking him by the arms. She waited a few moments, staring into his eyes the while.

  “I want to know just one thing, Alejandra: I want to know who Fernando is.”

  Her face paled and her eyes flashed.

  “Fernando? How did you come up with that name?” she asked.

  “You mentioned it that night in your room, when you told me the story of your family.”

  “And why does such a silly thing as that matter to you?”

  “It matters more than you can possibly imagine.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it seemed to me you were immediately sorry you’d uttered that word, that name—isn’t that how it was?”

  “Let’s suppose it was. But what makes you think you have the right to cross-question me?”

  “I’ve no right at all; I know that. But I beg you, in the name of whatever is dearest to you: tell me who Fernando is. Is he your brother?”

  “I don’t have any brothers, or any sisters either.”

  “Well then, is he a cousin of yours?”

  “What makes you think he’s a cousin?”

  “You said that everyone in the family except you and Fernando was a Unitarist. Well then, since you’ve said he’s not your brother, he may well be a cousin. Isn’t that right? Isn’t he a cousin of yours?”

  Alejandra finally let go of Martín’s arms, which she had been gripping tightly in her hands, and simply stood there, silent and downcast.

  She lit a cigarette then, and after a time she said:

  “Martín, if you want me to remember you as a friend, don’t ask me questions.”

  “I’m asking you just one question.”

  “But why?”

  “Because it’s very important to me.”

  “Why is it important???
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  “Because I’ve come to the conclusion that you love that man.”

  A cruel expression came over Alejandra’s face again and her eyes flashed with the anger she had always displayed at her worst moments in the past.

  “And on what, pray tell, do you base this conclusion of yours?”

  “On an intuition.”

  “You couldn’t be more mistaken. I don’t love Fernando.”

  “Well then, perhaps I put it badly. What I meant to say was that you’re in love with him. You may not love him but you’re in love with him.”

  His voice broke as he said these last words.

  Alejandra seized his arms with her cruel, strong hands (like his hands, Martín thought with terrible anguish, like his hands!) and shook him, saying in a violent, bitterly resentful tone of voice:

  “You followed me!”

  “Yes!” he shouted. “I followed you to that bar on the Calle Reconquista and I saw you with a man who looks like you, a man you’re in love with!”

  “And how do you know that that man is Fernando?”

  “Because he looks like you … and because you said Fernando was a relative and because it seemed to me that there was some sort of secret between you and Fernando, because it was as though you and he formed something apart, something separated from everybody else, and because you deeply regretted having spoken his name and because of the way you took his hand.”

  Alejandra shook him as though she were striking him, and he let her do so, as though he were merely a limp, inert body. And then she let him go and put her two avid hands over her face, as though trying to scratch herself, and at the same time seemed to be sobbing, in her own way, without a sound and without a single tear. Then he heard her cry from between her half-open hands:

  “You imbecile! You imbecile! That man is my father!”

  And then she ran off.

  Martín stood there rooted to the spot, unable to move, unable to speak.

  24

  As though a great drum roll had announced the dark shadows to come after those terrible words of Alejandra’s, Martín felt as though he were in the midst of an immense black dream that weighed upon him as heavily as though he were sleeping at the bottom of an ocean of liquid lead. For many long days he drifted aimlessly about the streets of Buenos Aires, thinking that that portentous being had appeared out of the unknown and had now returned to the unknown. Home and fireside, he suddenly said to himself, home and fireside. Disjointed words that seemed meaningless, though perhaps they referred to the man who at the height of the storm, when the thunder and lightning become more and more violent amid the darkness, takes shelter in his warm, familiar, welcoming cave. Home and fireside, a brightly lighted, welcoming refuge. The reason why (Bruno said) one always feels more lonely in a foreign country, for one’s native land too was like a home and fireside, like childhood, like a mother’s sheltering arms; and being in a foreign country was as sad as living in a drab, anonymous hotel; without memories, without familiar trees, without a childhood, without ghostly presences: because one’s fatherland was childhood and hence it was perhaps more appropriate to call it one’s motherland, something that shelters and warms when one feels lonely and cold. But when had he, Martín, ever had a mother? Moreover, this fatherland of his seemed so inhospitable, so harsh, so unprotective. Because (as Bruno also used to say, though he did not so much remember this now as feel it physically, as though he were out of doors with no shelter in the midst of a furious storm) our misfortune as Argentines was that we had not yet finished building a nation when the world that had first given birth to it began to creak ominously and then collapse, so that here in this country we did not have even that simulacrum of eternity represented in Europe or in Mexico or in Cuzco by great stone structures centuries old. Because here (Bruno used to say) we are neither Europe nor America, but a region of faults and fractures, an unstable, tragic, turbulent area where everything cracks apart and is ripped asunder. So that here everything was more transitory and fragile, there was nothing solid to cling to, man seemed more mortal and his natural state more ephemeral. And he (Martín), who wanted something strong and absolute to cling to amid catastrophe and a warm cave in which to take refuge, had neither a home nor a homeland. Or what was worse, he had a home built on dung and disillusionment, and a tottering, enigmatic homeland. So that he felt alone, alone, alone: the only word he was able to feel and think clearly, yet one that no doubt expressed all of that. And like a shipwreck victim in the dark, he had flung himself on Alejandra. But that had been like seeking refuge in a cavern from whose depths voracious wild beasts had immediately rushed forth.

  25

  And suddenly, on one of those days that had no meaning, he felt himself swept along by a crowd of people running, as overhead jet planes roared and the crowd shouted Plaza Mayo, amid trucks full of workers madly racing in that direction, amid confused shouts and the dizzying image of planes flying so low they nearly grazed the tops of the skyscrapers. And then the deafening din of bombs exploding, the rattling of machine guns and antiaircraft batteries. And people running still, shoving and pushing their way inside the buildings, but then coming out again the moment the planes had flown past, overcome with curiosity, talking nervously together, till the planes came back and they ran indoors again. Meanwhile other people, taking shelter by simply hugging the walls (as though all this were merely a passing shower), stood staring up at the sky, puzzled or curious, or vaguely waved their outstretched arms in one direction or another.

  And then night fell. And a drizzling rain began to fall silently on a terrified city seething with rumors.fn6

  26

  A dismal loneliness overtook people, and in the night fires stood out with a sinister gleam against the leaden sky.

  The roll of a big bass drum rallying Peronista supporters boomed as for a carnival of madmen. Martín was in front of the church now, swept along by a madly excited, confused crowd of people. Some of them were carrying revolvers or pistols. “They’re men from the Alliance,” someone said. Soon the gasoline they had thrown around the church doors burst into flame. They rushed inside, shouting. They dragged benches over to the doors and the flames leapt higher. Others carried prie-dieus, images, and benches out into the street. The drizzling rain kept falling, ice cold and indifferent. They poured gasoline on everything and the wood burned furiously, amid the freezing gusts of wind. There were shouts and reports of firearms close by; some people ran and others took shelter in the doorways across the street, hugging the walls, fascinated by the flames and the panic.

  Someone grabbed up a statute of the Virgin and was about to throw it into the fire. Someone else, a working-class youngster with Indian features standing alongside Martín inside the church, shouted “Give it to me! Don’t burn it!”

  “What?” the other one said, still holding the statue at arm’s length and looking at the youngster in fury.

  “Don’t burn it, I can make a little dough selling it,” the boy said.

  The man put the statue down, shook his head, and gave it to the boy. Then he began heaving benches and paintings into the fire.

  The youngster had his Virgin now, lying on the floor at his feet. He looked around for someone to help him carry it away. He spied a policeman standing watching the spectacle and asked him to give him a hand.

  “Don’t get mixed up in this, kid,” the policeman advised him.

  Martín went over to him.

  “I’ll help you,” he said.

  “Okay, get hold of the feet,” the working-class youngster said.

  They went outside. It was still raining, but the bonfire in the street was getting bigger and the gasoline and the rain falling were making everything crackle. A tall blond woman with long disheveled hair, clutching a bronze cresset that she was wielding like a truncheon, was dragging along a sack and stuffing it full of religious images and objects.

  “Bastards!” she said.

  “Shut your trap, crazy woman,” they shouted.
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  “Bastards!” she said. “You’ll all go to Hell!”

  She continued on with her big sack, defending herself with the cresset. A youngster fondled her obscenely, another shouted filthy words at her, but she continued on, lashing out with the cresset and repeating: “Bastards!”

  “Clear out of here, you sanctimonious hypocrite!” some of those in the crowd yelled at her.

  But she went on, repeating “bastards” in a hoarse croaking voice, more or less lost in a world of her own, stony-faced and fanatic.

  “She’s nuts, let her alone,” others shouted.

  A woman with Indian features was watching over the fire and poking it up with a big stick, as though a gigantic chunk of meat were being barbecued.

  “She’s a madwoman, let her go,” they shouted again.

  The blond woman continued on with the sack, elbowing her way through the youngsters who were shouting obscenities at her, throwing burning brands at her, and laughing as they tried to feel her up.

  Great flames were now rising from the parish office: they were burning the records and the registers. A dark-haired man in a slouch hat was laughing hysterically and throwing rocks, cobblestones, chunks of pavement.

  The blond woman had disappeared from the section of the street lighted by the fire.

  A joyous carnival music was heard once again.

  In the light of the flames the contortions of the boys in the street band seemed even more fantastic. They were using ciboria as cymbals: decked out in chasubles, they raised chalices and crosses on high, and pounded out the rhythm with gilded cressets. The bass drum boomed out regularly and the boys went on with their wild contortions amid the glow from the fire, still pounding out the rhythm with the gilded cressets.

  Then shots were suddenly heard again, and a group of men came running down the street. No one knew who they were or where they were coming from. Panic ensued, and the cry “It’s the Alliance” went up. Others tried to reassure the crowd, passing the word along to keep calm. Others ran about shouting “Here they come!” and others “Don’t panic, fellows!”