The bonfire in the middle of the street was getting bigger and bigger. A bunch of young kids and women threw a confessional on it. People were still bringing statues and paintings to fling into the flames.
One man was dragging a Christ along, and a woman who had just appeared on the scene shouted in a fierce and determined voice:
“Give that to me!”
“The hell with you,” the man said, giving her a withering look.
Someone said:
“She’s from the Foundation.”
“Who? Who?” the cry went up.
The woman followed the man and grabbed the Christ by the feet to keep him from dragging it off with him.
“Let go!” the man shouted.
“Give that to me!” the woman screamed.
And for a moment the Christ remained suspended in the air between the pair of them as they fought over it.
“Come here, señora,” the boy who had brought the statue of the Virgin out of the church said.
“What?” the woman said, without letting go of the Christ’s feet.
“Come over here, and leave the Christ there.”
“What?” the woman said, still beside herself with excitement.
“Here, take this statue instead,” he said to her.
The woman appeared to hesitate, still not letting go of the teetering Christ.
“Please come over here, señora,” the boy said.
Again she appeared to hesitate, but the man tugged hard on the Christ and wrenched it out of her hands. As though she’d lost her wits entirely, the woman watched him walk off and then turned and looked at the Virgin lying on the ground alongside the boy.
“Come over here, señora,” the boy repeated.
The woman came closer.
“It’s the Virgin of the Helpless,” the boy said.
The woman looked at him uncomprehendingly, in apparent disbelief: the boy was a Peronista. She may have thought that he and Martín intended to attack her.
“Yes, señora,” Martín said. “We took the statue out of the church; this boy saved it from going into the fire.”
She drew closer and looked at the boy.
“All right,” she said, “we’ll take it to my house.”
Martín and the boy leaned down to pick up the Virgin.
“No, wait,” she said.
She unbuttoned her coat, took it off, and put it over the statue. Then she tried to give them a hand.
“Let go,” the boy said. “The two of us can carry it alone. Just tell us where we’re to go.”
They started walking, the woman preceding them. A man was following them. The rain was coming down harder now and the boy could feel the Virgin’s star-studded crown digging into his face. He had no idea what was going on any more: everything was all confused.
“Somebody who’s wounded,” they said. “Let us past.”
People stepped aside to let them by.
They walked down Santa Fe to Callao. The reddish glow grew fainter and little by little the gloomy, lonely, chill darkness enveloped them. The rain was falling silently and in the distance occasional shouts, a few shots, and police whistles could be heard.
They reached the woman’s building and took the elevator to the seventh floor. They entered a luxurious apartment and Martín could see that the working-class boy was in a daze: he looked at the maid shyly and diffidently and moved uncertainly amid the dark antique furniture and the objets d’art.
They stood the statue in a corner and perhaps unwittingly the weary, dazed boy leaned his head against the Virgin, as though silently resting. Suddenly he realized that they were talking to him.
“Let’s go,” the woman said to him. “We have to go back now.”
“All right,” the boy answered mechanically.
He looked around, as though searching for something.
“What is it?” the woman asked.
“I’d like …”
“What is it you’d like, my boy? Tell me,” the woman said.
“I’d like a glass of water.”
Some water was brought to him and the boy drank as though he were dried out down to his very bones from the heat of the fire.
“All right, let’s go now,” the woman said.
The rain had let up a little, but the bonfire in front of the church was still burning, though the scene had turned into a silent one: the men and women were mute spectators now, watching in fascination from the sidewalk across the street.
One man had several chasubles under his arm.
“Can I have those chasubles?” the woman asked.
“What did you say?” the man replied.
“The chasubles. I asked you whether I could have them,” the woman said.
The man stared into the fire without answering.
“The chasubles,” the woman repeated calmly—the calm of a sleepwalker. “I want to keep them, for when they rebuild the church.”
The man went on staring into the fire in silence.
“Aren’t you a Catholic?” the woman said with hatred in her voice.
The man continued to stare into the fire.
“Aren’t you baptized?” the woman asked.
The man went on gazing into the flames, but Martín could see that a hard glint had appeared in his eyes.
“Don’t you have children? Don’t you have a mother?”
The man exploded then:
“Why don’t you get on back to the whore of a mother that bore you?”
“I’m a Catholic,” the woman said, in the same impassive sleepwalker’s voice. “I want the chasubles for when they rebuild the church.”
The man looked at her and then, quite unexpectedly, he answered in a normal tone of voice:
“I’m taking them to keep the rain off me.”
“Please give me the chasubles,” the woman calmly repeated.
“I live a long way from here, in General Rodríguez,” the man said. Someone standing behind the obstinate, insistent woman said:
“So you came from General Rodríguez, did you? You’re one of those who set fire to the church a while ago then.”
The obstinate woman turned her head: it was an old man with white hair who had spoken up.
A man in a slouch hat unbuttoned his raincoat and took out a pistol. He looked the old man up and down coldly and contemptuously:
“And who are you to ask questions?” he said.
The man with the chasubles also took out a pistol. A woman with a big kitchen knife in her hand went over to the other woman.
“How’d you like us to shove the chasubles up your ass?” she said to her.
The impassive, madly single-minded woman offered the man with the chasubles an exchange.
“This umbrella’s got a solid gold handle,” she said.
“What did you say?”
“I said I’ll trade you this umbrella for the chasubles. It’s got a gold handle. Look.”
The man looked at the handle.
The woman with the knife held the tip of it against the rib cage of the woman who had proposed this exchange, and repeated the question she had just put to her.
“All right,” the man said. “Give me the umbrella.”
On hearing him agree to the trade, the woman with the knife screamed at him in fury:
“Scoundrel! Sellout!”
“What do you mean, sellout?” the man with the chasubles said with an irritated wave of his hand. “What the hell would I want chasubles for anyway?”
“You’re a scoundrel and a sellout!” the woman with the knife shouted.
The man with the chasubles suddenly became enraged:
“Look, you’d better shut your trap if you don’t want me to pump you full of lead.”
The woman with the knife screamed more insults at him and waved her knife in his face, but he took the umbrella without deigning to answer her back.
The woman walked off with the chasubles, amid hoots and jeers.
Then the man in the
slouch hat said:
“All right, boys, there’s no need for us to hang around here any longer. Let’s go.”
The woman with the chasubles came back over to where Martín and the working-class boy were standing; they had apprehensively moved as far away from the scene as possible. They walked her home to the apartment on the Calle Esmeralda again. And again it seemed to Martín that the boy had an air of sadness about him as he stood at the door slowly looking around at the armchairs, the paintings, the porcelains.
“Come on in,” the woman insisted.
“No, señora,” the boy said. “I’ll be going now. You don’t need me any more.”
“Wait,” the woman said.
The boy obeyed, his manner respectful and dignified.
She looked at him.
“You’re a worker,” she said to him.
“Yes, señora. In a textile factory,” the boy answered.
“And how old are you?”
“Twenty.”
“And you’re a Peronista?”
The boy hung his head in embarrassment and didn’t answer.
The woman gave him a stern look.
“How can you possibly be a Peronista? Can’t you see what atrocities they’re committing?”
“The ones who burned the churches are armed thugs, señora,” he replied.
“What do you mean? They’re Peronistas.”
“No, señora. They aren’t real Peronistas. They aren’t honest-to-goodness Peronistas.”
“What!” the woman said in a fury. “What do you mean by that?”
“May I go now, señora?” the boy asked, raising his head.
“No, wait,” she said, as though she were trying to puzzle something out. “Wait …. Why was it you saved the Virgin of the Helpless?”
“I really couldn’t say, señora. I’m not somebody who likes burning down churches. And anyway, how is the Virgin to blame for all this?”
“For all what?”
“For the bombing in the Plaza Mayo, and I don’t know what all.”
“So bombing the Plaza Mayo strikes you as a bad thing to do?”
The boy stared at her in surprise.
“Don’t you know that we have to get rid of Perón sooner or later? That shameful, wicked, depraved man?” she said.
The boy continued to stare at her.
“Eh? Don’t you think so?” the woman insisted.
The boy bent his head.
“I was in the Plaza Mayo,” he said. “Me and thousands of other comrades. A girl comrade in front of me had her leg blown off by a bomb. One of my friends got his head blown off, and another one got his belly ripped open. There were thousands of dead.”
“Don’t you see then that you’re defending a man who’s nothing but scum?” the woman said.
The boy was silent. Then after a moment he said:
“I’m from a poor family, señora. I grew up in just one room. That’s the only roof over our heads we had—my folks and seven brothers and sisters besides me.”
“Wait, wait!” the woman shouted.
Martín made a move to leave too.
“And what about you?” the woman said to him. “Are you a Peronista too?”
Martín didn’t answer.
He went out into the night.
The dark, frigid sky was like a symbol of his soul. An impalpable drizzle was falling, driven before that wind from the southeast that (Bruno used to say) makes a person who lives in Buenos Aires even more melancholy, so that he looks out at the street through the rain-blurred window of a café and murmurs what shitty weather, while a more reflective sort thinks what infinite sadness.
And feeling the icy drizzle on his face, walking toward nowhere in particular, with a tense frown, his eyes staring fixedly in front of him, as though concentrating obsessively on a vast and enormously complicated enigma, Martín kept repeating three words to himself: Alejandra, Fernando, the blind.
27
He wandered about the streets aimlessly for hours. Then suddenly he found himself in the Plaza de la Inmaculada Concepción, in Belgrano. He sat down on one of the benches. In front of him the circular church seemed to be still living the day’s terror. A sinister silence, the dim light, the drizzle gave this corner of Buenos Aires an ominous air: it seemed as though some powerful and fearsome enigma were hidden in the old building standing at a tangent to the church, and a sort of inexplicable fascination kept Martín’s eyes riveted on this spot that he was seeing for the first time in his life.
Then suddenly a shout almost escaped his lips: Alejandra was crossing the square, heading for that old building.
Sitting there in the darkness beneath the trees, Martín was hidden from her gaze. Moreover, she was moving across the square like a sleepwalker, with that automatism that he had noted many times in her, but that now struck him as even more powerful and impersonal. Alejandra was walking straight across the flowerbeds, like someone moving in a dream toward a fate determined by superior forces. It was evident that she saw nothing, heard nothing as she came across the square. She was walking straight on with the singlemindedness and at the same time the total indifference to her surroundings of a person in a deep hypnotic trance.
She soon reached the arcade of the old building, and heading unhesitatingly for one of the closed, silent doors, she opened it and went inside.
For a moment Martín thought that perhaps he was dreaming or suffering from a hallucination: he had never been in that little Buenos Aires square before, nothing that he was consciously aware of had guided his footsteps there on this gloomy night, nothing could have allowed him to foresee so portentous an encounter. There were too many chance factors involved, and therefore it was only natural that for a moment he should entertain the thought that this was a hallucination or a dream.
But the many long hours that he waited in front of that door left no room for doubt: it was indeed Alejandra who had gone into that building and was still inside, for no earthly reason that he could fathom.
Dawn came and Martín did not dare wait any longer, for he feared that Alejandra would spy him there now that it was daylight. And besides, what would he have learned that would be of any help to him if he did see her come out?
With a sadness that took the form of actual physical pain he left and walked to Cabildo.
A cloudy gray day, tedious and dreary, awoke from the depths of that phantasmagorical night.
Part Three
* * *
REPORT ON THE BLIND
O gods of night!
O gods of darkness, of incest and crime,
of melancholy and of suicide!
O gods of rats and caverns,
of cockroaches and bats!
O violent, inscrutable gods
Of dreams and death!
1
When was the beginning of all this that is about to end in my murder? This fierce clearsightedness I now have is like a searchlight, and I can watch an intense beam advance across vast regions of my memory: I see faces, rats in a barn, streets of Buenos Aires or Algiers, prostitutes and sailors: I move the beam and see things farther away: a spring flowing at the estancia, a stifling-hot afternoon, birds and eyes that I put out with a nail. It was then perhaps, but who knows? it may have been much farther back, in times I don’t remember now, ages and ages ago, in the days long past of my earliest childhood. I don’t know. And besides, what does it matter?
I remember perfectly, on the other hand, the beginnings of my systematic investigation (as for the other one, the unconscious one, perhaps the most profound one, how could I possibly know?). It was a summer day in the year 1947, as I was passing by the Plaza Mayo, along the Calle San Martín, on the sidewalk in front of the City Hall. I was walking along absentmindedly, when suddenly I heard a little bell ring, as though someone were trying to awaken me from a sleep of thousands of years. I walked on, still aware of the little bell that was endeavoring to penetrate to the farthest depths of my consciousness: hearing it without list
ening to it. And then suddenly that faint but piercing and obsessive sound seemed to reach some sensible zone of my self, one or another of those places where the skin of the self is extremely thin and delicate and abnormally sensitive: and I awoke with a start, as though face to face with a sudden, insidious danger, as though in the darkness my hands had touched the ice-cold skin of a reptile. Looming up in front of me, inscrutable and stony, observing me with her entire countenance, was the blind woman who sells trinkets there. She had stopped ringing her little bell; as though she had been shaking it back and forth only for me, to awaken me from my mad sleep, to warn me that my previous existence had come to an end, like a stupid preparatory stage, and that I must now confront reality. There we stood, she stock-still, blank face turned toward me, and I paralyzed as though by an infernal but icy apparition: we remained so for who knows how many of those moments that are not part of time yet open onto eternity. And then, as my consciousness reentered the river of time, I immediately fled.
And that was how the final stage of my existence began.
From that day forth, I knew that I could not lose a single moment, that I must begin, then and there, my exploration of that dark, mysterious universe.
Several months went by, and then one day in the autumn the second decisive encounter took place. I was already deeply involved in my investigation, but had fallen behind in my labors due to an inexplicable apathy, which I now believe was unquestionably a disguised form of fear of the unknown.
Nonetheless I closely observed and studied the blind.
The subject has always been of interest to me, and on a number of occasions I had entered into discussions as to their origin, hierarchical rank, manner of existence, and zoological condition. Despite the fact that at that time I had scarcely begun to lay down the rudiments of my cold-skin hypothesis, I had already been vilified, by letter and in person, by certain members of societies connected with the world of the blind. All this thanks to that most efficient, ultrarapid, and mysterious intelligence network that lodges and secret sects always have; those lodges and sects that are invisibly present everywhere among us men, and that, without our knowing or sometimes even suspecting it, continually spy on us, persecute us, determine our destiny, our downfall, and even our death. This is especially true of the Sect of the Blind, for to the even greater unhappiness and misfortune of the heedless, it has in its service normal men and women: some of them thoroughly gulled by the Organization; others taken in by demagogical, sensationalist propaganda; and finally, a great number of them motivated by the fear of the physical and metaphysical punishments that are rumored to be meted out to those who dare to probe its secrets. Punishments which, let it be said in passing, I had the impression at that time of having already had dealt out to me in part, and the conviction that I would continue to receive them in a more and more subtle and frightful form; the sole result of which, no doubt due to my pride, was to cause my indignation to wax all the hotter and make me all the more determined to pursue my investigations to the very end.