On Heroes and Tombs

  In my view the conclusion is obvious: the Prince of Darkness continues to rule with an iron hand. And the instrument of this rule is the Sacred Sect of the Blind. And all this is so clear that I would be tempted to burst out laughing were I not terror-stricken.

  4

  But let us go back now, once and for all, to the differences. Most importantly, there is an essential disparity between those blind from birth and those who have lost their sight through illness or accident. The newcomers naturally acquire in time a good many of the attributes of the race, in part through the workings of the same process that causes Jews to mimic races in whose midst they live, in spite of the fact that these latter have only hatred or scorn for them. Because, and this is a most singular fact, the hatred of the blind for the sighted is far exceeded by their hatred of newcomers to the world of the blind.

  To what ought we attribute this phenomenon? In the beginning I thought that it might be due to causes similar to those responsible for the tremendous hatred that often exists between neighboring countries or between citizens within a single country; it is a well-known fact that the cruelest wars are civil wars; we need only recall, for instance, the civil strife in Argentina during the last century or the Spanish Civil War. Norma Gladys Pugliese, a little elementary schoolteacher whom I used for several months in order to study certain reactions of people with intellectual pretensions, was naturally of the opinion that hatred and wars among humans were due to a mutual lack of understanding and general ignorance; I was obliged to explain to her that the one way of keeping peace among humans is in fact to prevent them from knowing and understanding each other, this being the sole condition in which this species of animal proves to be relatively kind and just, since all of us are fairly indifferent when it comes to things that are of no interest to us. With the aid of a couple of history books and the crime section of the evening papers in hand, I was obliged to explain the ABCs of the human condition to this poor girl whose mind had been formed by distinguished female educators and who was more or less convinced that teaching people to read and write would resolve mankind’s principal problems: whereupon I had to remind her that it was the most literate nation in the world that had set up concentration camps for mass torture and the incineration of Jews and Catholics. Quite predictably, she leapt out of bed at that point, indignant not at the Germans but at me: for myths are always more powerful than the facts meant to destroy them, and the myth of elementary education in Argentina, however nonsensical and comical it may seem, has always resisted and will continue to resist any number of satires directed against it and any number of demonstrations of the facts.

  But to return to the problem that interests us, I reflected later, when I had studied the Sect and come to know it better, that the prime cause of this hatred of newcomers is caste pride, and as a consequence resentment against those who attempt to enter it and to a certain degree succeed in doing so. This is not a phenomenon peculiar to the blind, of course, since it also occurs in the upper classes of society, where those who, thanks to their immense fortunes or their children’s marriages, have gained access to them, are eventually reluctantly accepted; there is a subtle contempt for them which gradually becomes tinged with a growing resentment as well, perhaps because people who belong by birth to these circles sense, by the very fact of this slow but sure invasion of their world, that they are not as secure and as well-armored as they had imagined and hence begin to experience a paradoxical feeling of inferiority.

  Another factor, finally, also enters into play inasmuch as beings who, the day before, were the unwitting victims of the Sect and the object of its most pitiless acts of aggression now have access to its secrets. They thus become troublesome witnesses who, despite the fact that they do not have the slightest possibility of returning to the world from which they originally came, are nonetheless stupefied to learn of the ideas and the sentiments of these beings that they had imagined as living in a state of utter wretchedness.

  All of this is merely an analysis, however, and what is worse, an analysis by way of words or concepts that are valid only for us. Strictly speaking, we have about as much possibility of understanding the universe of the blind as we do that of cats or snakes. We say: Cats are independent, aristocratic, treacherous, insecure; but in reality all these concepts have only a relative validity, since we are applying concepts and human standards to beings with whom we have nothing whatsoever in common: just as it is impossible for men to imagine gods who do not possess certain human characteristics, no matter how grotesque this will make these divinities appear to be: we need only remember, for instance, that the Greek gods were very often cuckolds.

  5

  I am now about to relate how the printer Celestino Iglesias entered the picture, and how I discovered that I was on the highroad leading to the truth. But first I want to tell who I am, what I do, et cetera.

  My name is Fernando Vidal Olmos. I was born on June 24, 1911, in Capitán Olmos, a little town in the province of Buenos Aires that bears the name of my great-great-grandfather. Height: five feet ten inches; Weight: approximately 155 pounds; Eyes: gray green; Hair: straight and gray; Identifying marks: none.

  My reader may well ask why the devil I am offering this “official” description of myself. But nothing in the human world is mere happenstance.

  When I was little I had the same dream again and again: I saw a child (and curiously enough that child was myself, and I saw and observed myself as though I were another) playing a silent game that try as I might, I was unable to understand. I watched him intently, doing my best to discover the meaning of his gestures, his glances, the words he was murmuring. And suddenly gazing at me with a grave expression, he would say to me: “I am watching the shadow of this wall on the ground, and if it moves I don’t know what may happen.” His words had an air of thoughtful expectancy and at the same time frightful anxiety. And then I too would begin to watch the shadow fearfully. I need hardly add that it was not simply a question of the banal shifting of the position of the shadow as a result of the movement of the sun; it was SOMETHING ELSE. And so I too would begin to peer anxiously at the shadow, until finally I would see it begin to move, slowly but perceptibly. And then I would wake up in a cold sweat, screaming. What did the dream mean? What sort of warning was it, what did it symbolize? I went to bed each night paralyzed by the fear that I would have the dream again. And each morning when I woke up I would breathe a huge sigh of relief when I realized that I had once again escaped that danger. On other nights, however, the dreaded moment would again arrive: I would see the little boy, the wall, and the shadow once again; he would again look at me with a grave expression, again utter the same strange words; and again, after watching the shadow of the wall in fearful expectation, I would finally see it begin to move and change shape. And at this point I would once again wake up in a cold sweat, screaming.

  The dream obsessed me for years, for I realized that, like almost all dreams, it undoubtedly had a hidden meaning, and that in this case it unquestionably foreshadowed something that would one day happen to me. And yet I still am uncertain whether that dream was indeed the foreshadowing of what happened to me later on, or whether it was its symbolic beginning. The first revelation came to me many years ago, when I was not yet twenty and the leader of a gang of armed bandits and thugs (I shall decide later whether I want to tell about that experience). I suddenly realized that reality might begin to take on an entirely different form if I did not concentrate my entire will on keeping it stable. I feared that the world round about me might begin at any moment to move, to become deformed, slowly at first and then very abruptly, to fall apart, to be transformed, to lose all meaning. Like the little boy in the dream, I concentrated all my effort on watching that sort of shadow that the reality surrounding us is, the shadow of some structure or some wall not within our power to contemplate directly. And then suddenly one day (I was in my room in Avellaneda, all by myself, luckily, lying on my bed) I saw, to my horror, that the sha
dow was beginning to move and that that old dream of mine was becoming a reality. I felt a sort of vertigo, lost consciousness, and sank down and down into chaos, but finally I was able, by dint of enormous effort, to float back up to the surface and tie down the fragments of reality that appeared to be trying to drift away. A sort of anchor. That’s it precisely: as though I found myself obliged to anchor reality, but also as though this boat were built of many separable parts and it was necessary to tie all of them down and then let out a huge anchor so that the whole would not go drifting away. Unfortunately, the entire episode was repeated on several occasions, and at times it was an even more overwhelming experience. Suddenly I would feel things begin to slip and slide away, soon followed by everything falling apart, but as I was now familiar with these symptoms, I didn’t simply let go, as I had the first time; instead I immediately set to work with all the energy I could muster. People didn’t understand what was happening to me, they saw me concentrating with my fixed, empty stare and concluded that I was going mad, not realizing that precisely the opposite was happening since this effort enabled me to keep reality in its usual place and state. But at times, however intense my efforts, reality would begin little by little to come apart, to change shape, as though it were made of rubber and enormous tensions were being exerted on it from different points (from Sirius, from the center of the Earth, from everywhere): a face would begin to swell up, like a balloon inflating lopsidedly, the eyes would gradually meet, the mouth would get bigger and bigger till it finally burst, as a hideous grimace pulled the face all out of shape.

  In any event those moments terrified me, and I was tortured by the necessity of keeping my mind alert, attentive, vigilant, and active at all times. I suddenly wished I could be shut up in an insane asylum so as to get some rest, since in such a place no one is obliged to maintain a hold on reality such as it appears to others—as though in such a place one could say (as no doubt one can): all right then, let other people cope with reality as best they can.

  But the worst was not what happened round about me but inside me, for my own self soon began to become deformed, to stretch out of shape, to be metamorphosed too. My name is Fernando Vidal Olmos, and those three words are like a seal, a guarantee that I am “Something,” something well defined: not only by the color of my eyes, by my height and weight, by my age, by the date of my birth and the names of my parents (that is to say by those facts that appear on my identity card), but rather by something more profound, something of a spiritual nature: by a concatenation of memories, of sentiments, of ideas that underlie and support the structure of this “Something” that is Fernando Vidal and not the postman or the butcher. But what is there to prevent this body that has been assigned me from suddenly being inhabited, as a consequence of some cataclysm, by the soul of the janitor or the mind of the Marquis de Sade? Is there perchance some inviolable relation between my body and my soul? It has always seemed amazing to me that a person can grow up, have hopes and dreams, be the victim of disasters, go to war, suffer moral deterioration, change his opinions radically, come to have entirely different feelings, and nonetheless still be called by the same name: Fernando Vidal. Does that have any meaning? Or is it true that despite everything there exists a sort of thread that can be stretched endlessly and yet by some miracle always remain unbroken, that sustains the identity of the self through all these changes and catastrophes?

  I do not know what may be the case with others. All I can say is that in my own case this identity is suddenly lost and this deformation of the self soon takes on enormous proportions: vast regions of my spirit begin to swell up (sometimes I can even feel the physical pressure in my body, in my head especially); they creep like silent pseudopods, blindly and stealthily, toward other regions of the species and in the end toward ancient, shadowy zoological regions; a memory begins to inflate and gradually ceases to be the strains of “The Dance of the Dragonflies” that I heard being played on the piano one night in my childhood, and little by little becomes a stranger and stranger, wilder and wilder music that then turns into cries and groans and finally into terrible shrieks, and then into a tolling of bells that deafens my ears, and stranger still, these sounds begin to turn into an acid or intensely disagreeable taste in my mouth, as though passing from my ears into my throat, and my stomach contracts and I retch with nausea, as other sounds, other memories, other feelings undergo similar metamorphoses. And at such moments the thought sometimes occurs to me that perhaps reincarnation is a fact and that in the most hidden depths of our self memories of these beings that preceded us lie sleeping, just as our bodies preserve traces of fish or reptiles; dominated by the new self and the new body, yet ever ready to awaken and emerge the moment that the forces, the tensions, the screws and bits of wire that hold the present self together work loose and give way, for some reason unknown to us, and the wild beasts and prehistoric animals that inhabit us are unleashed. This is what happens every night as we sleep but suddenly the process becomes uncontrollable and we become subject to nightmares that now unfold in broad daylight.

  But as my will continues to obey me, I feel a certain sense of security, because I know it will enable me to emerge from chaos and reorganize my world: my will is powerful when it is functioning properly. The worst is when I feel my self falling apart in the area of my will as well. Or as though my will still belonged to me, but not the system or the parts of my body that transmit it. Or as though my body were still mine, yet “something” interposes itself between it and my will. For example: I want to move my arm, but it does not obey me. I focus all my attention on this arm, but it does not obey me. I focus all my attention on this arm, I look at it, I make a concerted effort, but I note that it does not obey me. As though the lines of communication between my brain and this arm were cut off. This has happened to me very often, as though I were a region devastated by an earthquake, with great yawning fissures opening up and all the telephone wires down. And in such instances, anything may happen: there is no police force, no army. Any and every sort of calamity may occur, any and every sort of pillage and plundering, any and every sort of depredation. As though my body belonged to another, and I, mute and powerless, were observing the birth of suspect movements, of tremors presaging a new convulsion in this alien territory, until little by little catastrophe takes possession of my body and, finally, of my mind.

  I set all this down so that my readers may understand me.

  And also because many of the episodes that I shall recount would otherwise be incomprehensible and unbelievable. But it so happens that for the most part it was because of this catastrophic split in my personality that they came about; not despite it, but because of it.

  6

  After my death, which is close at hand now, it is my wish that this Report be forwarded to any institute interested in pursuing an investigation of this world that to date has remained unexplored. Hence this Report is limited to FACTS, exactly as I experienced them. Its merit, in my opinion, lies in its absolute objectivity: I wish to tell of my experience as an explorer might tell of his expedition to the Amazon or Central Africa. And although passion and rancor may often tend to cloud my judgment, as is only natural, I am determined to be as accurate and precise as possible and not to allow myself to be carried away by sentiments of this sort. I have had frightful experiences, but for that very reason I wish to keep to the facts, even if these facts may at times shed an unflattering light on my own life. When I have finished, no sensible person can possibly maintain that the aim of this document is to arouse feelings of sympathy toward my person.

  Here for instance is one of the unflattering facts about myself that I shall confess to, as proof of my sincerity: I do not have, and never have had, friends. I have, naturally, experienced passions; but I have never felt affection for anyone, nor do I believe anyone has ever felt affection for me.