On Heroes and Tombs
How many desolate days he spent there on that park bench! The entire autumn went by and winter came. Winter ended, spring began (it appeared for a moment here and there, fleeting and frigid, like a person peeking out to see how things are going, and then, little by little, showing itself more forthrightly and for longer and longer periods of time) and slowly the sap in the trees began to run more warmly and energetically and leaves suddenly began to appear; and finally in a few weeks the last tag ends of winter retreated from the Parque Lezama toward other remote corners of the world.
The first hot spells of December came then. The jacaranda trees turned violet and the tipa trees were covered with orange blossoms. And then these flowers began to dry up and fall off, the leaves began to turn gold and blow away in the first autumn winds. And then—Martín said—he definitely lost all hope of ever seeing her again.
5
The “hope” of seeing her again (Bruno reflected with melancholy irony). And he also said to himself: aren’t all men’s hopes as grotesque as this one perhaps? For given the ways of the world, we place our hopes in events which bring us nothing but frustration and bitterness once they materialize—the reason why pessimists are recruited among former optimists, since in order to have a black picture of the world it is necessary to have previously believed in that world and its possibilities. And it is an even more curious and paradoxical fact that pessimists, once they have been disillusioned, are not constantly and systematically filled with despair, but rather seem prepared, in a manner of speaking, to renew their hope at each and every instant, although by virtue of a sort of metaphysical modesty they conceal this fact beneath their black envelope of men suffering from a universal bitterness—as though pessimism, in order to keep itself strong and ever-vigorous, needed from time to time the impetus provided by a new cruel disillusionment.
And hadn’t Martín himself (Bruno thought, looking at him there in front of him), a budding pessimist, as is only fitting for every very pure soul prepared to hope for Great Things from men in particular and from Humanity in general, hadn’t Martín himself already tried to commit suicide because of that sort of sewer his mother was? Didn’t this in itself reveal that he had hoped for something different, something incontrovertibly marvelous from that woman? But (and this was even more surprising) after this disaster hadn’t he again come to have faith in women on meeting Alejandra?
And now here he was, a little lost soul, one of many in this city of lost souls. For Buenos Aires was a city positively swarming with them, as was true of every gigantic, frightful latter-day Babylon.
What happens (he thought) is that one doesn’t notice them at first glance, either because a goodly number of them don’t appear to be lost souls, or because in many cases they go out of their way not to appear so. Then too, great numbers of beings who are merely pretending to be so further compound the problem, with the result that one ends up believing that there are no true lost souls.
Because if a man is missing both legs or both arms, we all know of course, or think we know, that such a man is helpless. And at that very instant such a man begins to be less so, because we have noticed him and pity him, we buy useless combs from him or colored photographs of Carlitos Gardel.fn2 Whereupon this mutilated man missing two legs or two arms ceases to be, either partially or totally, the sort of totally lost soul that we are thinking of, to the point that we come to experience a vague feeling of resentment, perhaps on account of the infinite number of absolutely lost souls who at that very instant (because they do not have the nerve or the sense of security or the aggressiveness of the peddlers of combs and colored photos) are suffering in silence and with supreme dignity their lot as authentic wretched creatures.
Those silent and solitary men, for instance, who ask nothing of anyone and speak with no one, sitting brooding on the benches of the great plazas and parks of the city: some of them old men (the most obviously helpless ones, to the point that they ought to prey on our minds less, for the same reason as the peddlers of combs), those old men with pensioners’ canes who watch the world pass by as though it were a memory, those old men who meditate and in their own way perhaps pose once again the great problems that powerful thinkers have posed regarding the overall meaning of existence, the whys and wherefores of everything: weddings, children, warships, political battles, money, kings, and horse or automobile races; those old men who stare into space or appear to watch the pigeons eating little grains of oats or corn, or the superactive sparrows, or the different types of birds in general that fly down onto the plaza or live in the trees of the great parks. By virtue of that notable attribute of independence and super-imposition possessed by the universe, as a banker makes ready to bring off the most formidable operation involving strong currencies that has ever been carried out successfully in the Rio de la Plata (incidentally scuttling Consortium X or fearsome Corporation Y), a bird, a hundred paces away from the Powerful Office, hops across the grass of the Parque Colón, searching here for some little bit of straw for its nest, some stray grain of wheat or rye, some little worm of nutritional interest to it or to its young; while in another even more insignificant stratum, and one in a way even farther removed from everything (not from the Great Banker but from the slender cane of the pensioner), tinier, more anonymous, more secret beings live an independent, and on occasion an extremely active, existence: worms, ants (not only the big black ones, but also the little red ones and others even smaller that are practically invisible) and enormous numbers of other more insignificant tiny creatures, of different colors and very different habits. All these beings live in different worlds that are foreign to each other, except when Great Catastrophes occur, when Men, armed with Fumigators and Shovels, undertake the Fight against the Ants (an absolutely useless fight, let it be said in passing, since it always ends with the triumph of the ants), or when Bankers unleash their Petroleum Wars; so that the infinite number of tiny creatures that until that moment lived on the vast greenswards or in the peaceful subworlds of the parks are wiped out by bombs and gases; while others that are more fortunate, those belonging to those species of worms that are invariably victorious, make hay while the sun shines and prosper with astounding rapidity, as meanwhile, up above, the Purveyors and Manufacturers of Armaments thrive.
But outside of such times of interchange and confusion, it seems a miracle that so many species of beings can be born, develop, and die in the same regions of the universe without being acquainted with each other, without either hating or esteeming each other; like those multiple telephone messages which, we are told, can be transmitted by a single cable without ever getting mixed up with each other or interfering with each other, thanks to ingenious mechanisms.
So (Bruno thought) we have, firstly, the men sitting pensively in the plazas and parks. Some of them look at the ground and take advantage of the myriad anonymous activities of the small creatures already mentioned to distract themselves for entire minutes and even hours: examining the ants, considering their various species, calculating what loads they are capable of transporting, noting how two or three of them collaborate on work that is unusually difficult, and so on. At times, using a little bit of straw or a dry branch of the sort that can readily be found on the ground in parks, these men amuse themselves by turning the ants aside from their frantic trajectories, getting one or another of the most confused ones to climb up the straw and then run to the tip of it, where, after cautious little acrobatic tricks, the creature turns back and runs to the other end, continuing these useless goings and comings until the solitary man tires of the game and out of pity, or more generally out of boredom, leaves the little straw on the ground, whereupon the ant hurries off in search of its comrades, holds a brief and agitated conversation with the first one it meets so as to explain its delay or so as to inform itself as to the General Progress of the Work in its absence, and then immediately resumes its task, joining once again the long, industrious Indian file. Meanwhile the solitary, pensive man returns to his general
and somewhat erratic meditation, which does not fix his attention overmuch on any one thing: looking now at a tree, now at a child playing round about and remembering, thanks to this child, long-gone and now incredible days in the Black Forest or a narrow street in Pontevedra that descends toward the south, as his eyes grow a bit more cloudy, thus accentuating that tearful gleam that the eyes of oldsters have; we will never know if it is due to purely physiological causes or if in some way it is the consequence of memory, nostalgia, a feeling of frustration, or the idea of death, or of that vague but irresistible melancholy that the words THE END always arouse in us mortals at the conclusion of a story that has touched us by its mystery and sadness. Which is the same as saying the story of any man, for what human being exists whose story in the final analysis is neither sad nor mysterious?
But the men sitting pensively on the benches are not always old men or pensioners.
Sometimes they are relatively young men, individuals thirty or forty years old. And—a curious thing, worth pondering (Bruno thought)—the younger they are the more pathetic and helpless they seem. For what can be more frightful than the sight of a youngster sitting brooding on a bench in a public square, overwhelmed by his thoughts, silent and estranged from the world round about him? Sometimes the man or the youngster is a sailor; at other times he is perhaps an emigré who would like to return to his country and is unable to; many times they are beings who have been abandoned by the woman they love; others, beings who are out of step with life, or who have left home forever, or are brooding about their loneliness and their future. Or it may be a youngster like Martín himself, who is beginning to realize, to his horror, that the absolute does not exist.
Or he may also be a man who has lost his son and on returning from the cemetery finds himself alone and feels that his existence lacks all meaning now, reflecting that meanwhile there are men round about him who are laughing or are happy (even though they are so only momentarily), children who are playing in the park, right there (he can see them), while his own son now lies beneath the ground in a little coffin befitting the smallness of his body, which perhaps has finally ceased waging a desperate battle against a horrible, disproportionately powerful enemy. And the man sitting there pensively again ponders, or ponders for the first time, the overall meaning of the world, for he cannot understand why his child has had to die in such a way, why he has had to pay for some remote sin of others with such immense suffering, why his little heart has been overcome by asphyxia or paralysis, as he struggled helplessly, not knowing why, against the black shadows beginning to descend upon him.
And this man is indeed a true lost soul. And, curiously, he may not be poor, he may possibly even be rich, and he may even be the Great Banker who was planning the formidable Operation involving strong currencies, of which disdainful and ironic mention was made earlier. Disdain and irony that (as he now found it easy to understand) turned out, as always, to be excessive, and in the last analysis unjust. For when all is said and done, no man deserves disdain and irony, since sooner or later, with strong currencies or without, misfortunes come his way: the deaths of his children or his brothers and sisters, his own old age, and his own solitude in the face of death. And in the end he turns out to be more helpless than anybody else; for the very same reason that the man at arms who is surprised without his coat of mail is more defenseless than the humble man of peace who, because he has never had a coat of mail, never feels its lack.
6
It was certain fact that since the age of eleven he had never entered any of the rooms in the house, much less that little one that was something like his mother’s sanctuary: the place where, on climbing out of her bath, she spent her time listening to the soap operas on the radio and completing her toilette before going out. But what about his father? Martín had lost track of his habits in recent years and knew only that he spent his days shut up in his studio: in order to reach the bathroom it was not absolutely necessary to pass through his mother’s little room, but it was not impossible to reach the bathroom that way either. Was she perhaps trying to make sure that her spouse would see her there in her intimate sanctuary? Was it her merciless hatred of him that had caused her to conceive the idea of humiliating him to such a point?
Anything was possible.
On not hearing the radio turned on, Martín presumed that she was not in there, because it was utterly inconceivable that she would stay there in her little room amid silence.
In the half-light, the double monster on the divan thrashed restlessly, furiously.
He wandered about the neighborhood like a sleepwalker for a little over an hour. Then he went back up to his room and threw himself on the bed. He lay there staring at the ceiling and then his eyes swept the walls until they stopped at the illustration from Billiken that had been hanging there with thumbtacks in the corners since his childhood: Belgrano making his soldiers swear on the blue and white flag at the crossing of the Salado River.
The immaculate flag, he thought.fn3
And key words of his existence also came to mind: cold, cleanness, snow, solitude, Patagonia.
He thought of taking a boat, a train, but where would he get the money? Then suddenly he remembered the big truck that always parked in the garage near the Sola station; one day, magically, his eye had been caught by the lettering on it: PATAGONIA TRUCKING. Might they need a worker, a helper, anything?
“Sure, kid,” Bucich said, a dead cigar butt dangling from his mouth.
“I’ve got eighty-three pesos,” Martín said.
“Don’t be silly,” Bucich said, taking off his grease-spattered coveralls.
He looked like a circus giant, though a somewhat stoop-shouldered one with gray hair. A giant with the innocent expression of a child. Martín looked at the truck: on the side, in big letters, it said PATAGONIA TRUCKING, and at the back, in gilt letters, it said: MAMA, LOOK AT ME NOW.fn4
“Come on,” Bucich said, his dead cigar butt still dangling from his mouth.
On the wet, slippery pavement a milky, deliquescent red gleamed for a moment. It was immediately followed by a violet flash, only to be replaced once more by the milky red: CINZANO-AMERICANO GANCIA, CINZANO-AMERICANO GANCIA.
“It’s turning cold,” Bucich remarked.
Was it drizzling? No, it was a fog of very fine, impalpable, floating drops. The truck driver walked along in great strides at Martín’s side. He was straightforward and strong: the symbol, perhaps, of what Martín was looking for in that exodus to the south. He felt protected and abandoned himself to his thoughts. Here we are, Bucich said. CHICHIN’S. PIZZA, BEER, WINE, AND SPIRITS. How you doin’, fella? Bucich said to Chichín. How you doin’ yourself? Chichín replied, picking up the bottle of Llave gin. Make it two. This kid’s a pal of mine. Hiya, kid, the pleasure’s all mine, Chichín said. He was wearing a cap and red suspenders over a sunflower-colored shirt. How’s your mom doing? Bucich asked. So-so, Chichín said. Did they run the analysis on her? Yeah. And Chichín shrugged. You know how these things go. Going far away, the cold, clear south. Martín thought to himself. Jumping rope, everything except getting her womb scraped, like boxers, she even punched me in the belly, that’s why you turned out more or less defective of course, laughing rancorously and scornfully, I did everything, I wasn’t going to get my body all out of shape for you she said to him, and he must have been eleven or so. Where’s Tito? Bucich asked. He’ll be along any sec, Chichín said, and he decided to go live up in the garret. What’s the scoop about what happened Sunday? Bucich asked. How the hell should I know? Chichín answered in fury, I swear I don’t get upset any more as she went on listening to boleros, plucking her eyebrows, eating caramels, leaving sticky papers around everywhere, nothing gets me upset any more, Chichín was saying, absolutely nothing, I swear, a dirty, sticky world as he wiped a glass in silent fury and repeated absolutely nothing fleeing to a cold, crystalline world until finally he set the glass down, and looking Bucich straight in the eye he exclaimed losing on account of
a lummox like that, as the truck driver blinked, considering the problem with all the attention due it and commenting No kidding: damn, as Martín kept hearing those boleros, feeling that atmosphere heavy with steam from the tub and the smell of deodorant creams, air that was hot and turbid, a hot bath, a hot body, a hot bed, a hot mother, bed-mother, basketbed, milky legs raised up like in a horrible circus more or less in the same way he’d come out of the sewer and then into the sewer or almost, as a skinny, nervous man came in who said how you doin’? and Chichín said here he is now, Humberto J. D’Arcángelo in person, hiya Puchito how you doin’?, the kid here’s a pal of mine pleased to meet you the pleasure is mine, he said. D’Arcángelo scrutinizing him with those little bird’s eyes, with that anxious expression that Martín was always to see on Tito’s face, as though he’d lost something very valuable and was looking everywhere for it, glancing all about quickly and worriedly, taking everything in.
“Go on. You tell him what happened.”
“That’s right—you miss out on everything tooling along out there in your truck, don’t you?”
“But I don’t get upset any more,” Chichín said yet again. “Nothing, not a single fuckin’ thing upsets me any more, I swear to you on the memory of my mother. An all-time loser like that though. I ask you. But tell this guy, go on, tell him.”