On Heroes and Tombs
“It was that very summer, in fact, that he gave me that lighthouse,” she said, pointing to one made of little shells standing on a doily.
She rose from her chair and brought the lighthouse over to me to show me the inscription: “Souvenir of Mar del Plata,” and underneath, added in ink, the date: 1948.
Then she went back to the album, as I sat there consumed with anxiety.
In another photograph Señor Etchepareborda appeared at his spouse’s side in the Palermo gardens. In another one I believe he was surrounded by his nephews and his brother-in-law, a certain Señor Rabufetti or something like that. In yet another, celebrating an intimate occasion with the personnel of Los Gobelinos, as Señora Etchepareborda put it, in the El Pescadito restaurant, in La Boca. Et cetera.
There paraded by a series of children lying naked staring at the camera, wedding pictures, other vacations, brothers-in-law, cousins, little lady friends of Señora Etchepareborda’s (the designation she employed for hulking creatures that weighed as much as she did).
I was happy to see her finally close the album and go over to a cabinet to put it back in its drawer. Above this piece of furniture, along with various little statues, was a little motto in a rustic frame that said:
OFFER YOUR HOUSE WITH ALL YOUR HEART
“So there’s nothing new then as far as poor Iglesias is concerned?” I asked.
“No, Señor Vidal. He’s shut up there in his room, poor thing, and doesn’t want to see anybody. I’ll be frank with you, Señor Vidal: it breaks my heart.”
“Yes, naturally. Nobody’s come round to ask about him? Nobody’s taken an interest in his situation?
“Not a soul, Señor Vidal. Not so far, anyway.”
“Curious, most curious,” I muttered, as though to myself.
I had told her that I had contacted the proper agencies. Thanks to this lie I accomplished two ends, both of inestimable value: it put a stop to any personal initiative on her part (an initiative which, as can readily be understood, presented the danger of escaping my control); and at the same time it enabled me to keep track of any possible developments. It must be borne in mind that my plan was not only to use Iglesias to penetrate the secret circle, but also to conduct a prior investigation and confirm certain of my suspicions about the organization: if, without my informing anyone of the printer’s situation, he was located, the very worst of my theory would be verified and I would be obliged to redouble my precautions. But on the other hand, waiting like this was becoming dangerous for me, and out of fear of not being on hand at the right moment, I was growing more and more anxious.
Meanwhile I continued waiting around in utter misery, keeping careful track of the progress of the transformation by examining all the signs and portents. It was at night, in particular, after the street door downstairs had been locked and hence there was no danger of the arrival at the pension of the simultaneously feared and desired messenger (for nothing in this world would I have wanted the Sect to find me there with the printer), that I went up to his room and tried to keep up a conversation, or at least tried to keep him company by listening to the radio with him. Iglesias, as I have said, was becoming more taciturn by the day, and along with his increasing mistrust there was now an almost visible appearance of that icy rancor characteristic of those of his breed. I also watched closely for the purely physical symptoms to develop, and when I shook hands with him I took careful notice of whether his skin had now commenced to secrete that almost imperceptible cold sweat that is one of the attributes revealing the kinship of his breed with toads and saurians and other creatures of that kind.
I would enter, then, after knocking at the door and hearing his Come in, turning on the light switch to the left of the door jamb. Sitting there in a corner, next to the radio, more solemn and self-absorbed by the day, Iglesias would look at me as blind men do, with a blank, empty expression, a trait that in my experience is the very first one they take on in the course of their slow metamorphosis. His dark glasses, the only purpose of which was to conceal his burned-out eye sockets, made his expression all the more striking. I knew very well that behind those lenses there was nothing, but it was precisely that nothing that in the final analysis most overawed me. And I felt that other eyes, eyes located behind his forehead, invisible but more and more implacable and cunning eyes, were riveted on me, scrutinizing my innermost being.
An ungracious word never crossed Iglesias’s lips: on the contrary, he exhibited a more and more pronounced courtesy, of that sort that is typical of natives of certain regions of Spain, that distant courtesy that causes simple peasants of the harsh plateaus of Castille to resemble great nobles of the most aristocratic lineage. But as the days went by one by one, in that oft-repeated scene wherein we sat contemplating each other in frozen silence, like two Egyptian statues, I felt Iglesias’s resentment slowly take possession of every last nook and cranny of his being.
He would sit there smoking without a word. And suddenly, in order to break the intolerable silence, I would say something or other that in the past might have been of interest to the printer.
“The Workers’ Federation has declared a longshoreman’s strike.”
Iglesias would mutter something in a monosyllable, take a deep puff of his cigarette of cheap black tobacco, and then to think to himself: I know your kind, you bastard.
When the situation became unbearable, I would leave. In any event however, these meetings, awkward and uncomfortable as they were, served my purpose: they allowed me to keep my eye on his transformation.
And once out on the street again, I would set out on a night patrol: pretending I was simply out for a breath of fresh air, walking aimlessly along, whistling in the dark, but in reality on the lookout for any and every possible sign of the presence of the enemy.
But in the two days following the appearance on the scene of the tall blond blind man I noticed nothing of any special import.
16
On dropping by the pension for my customary visit with Iglesias on that second night, however, I discovered a new and disturbing sign.
Before going to Iglesias’s room, I was in the habit of paying a call on Señora Etchepareborda in order to do a little investigating. That night she invited me, as usual, to sit down and have a cup of coffee. At the time I thought that Señora Etchepareborda had taken it into her head that I was really dropping round the pension every night to see her, and that Iglesias’s blindness was simply a pretext for my doing so. And as the saying goes in her milieu, I buttered her up: one night I complimented her on her dress, another night I went into ecstasies over some new chrome-plated knickknack she’d added to her collection, and another night I asked her to share with me some of Señor Etchepareborda’s thoughts about life.
That night, as she was fixing the ritual cup of coffee for me, I put my usual questions about Iglesias’s day to her. And as usual, she replied that not a soul had been round to see how the printer was doing.
“I can’t believe it, Señor Vidal. It’s enough to make a person lose their faith in humanity.”
“One should never give up hope,” I answered, borrowing one of Señor Etchepareborda’s lofty phrases. (There were others, such as: “We must have Faith in the Country”; “That’s the Way Life Goes”; “We must have Confidence in the Nation’s Reserves,” all of which were evidence of the precise place that the erstwhile second-in-charge of domestic shipments at Los Gobelinos occupied in the hierarchy, and all of which, now that he was dead, his widow found very moving.
“That’s exactly what my late husband always used to say,” she remarked as she handed me the sugar bowl.
She then brought up the subject of the high cost of living these days. It was all the fault of that bastard Perón. She’d never liked the man—did I know why? Because of the way he rubbed his hands together and smiled: he looked like a priest. And she’d never liked priests, though she respected all religions, she really did (she and her late husband were members of the Escuelas del Hermano
Basiliofn3). And finally she commented on how scandalous the recent increase in electricity rates was.
“Those people do exactly as they please,” she remarked. “Just imagine: only today a man from the electric company came and inspected the entire house to see if all the electrical appliances, the irons, the heaters, and all the rest were in good working order. I ask you, Señor Vidal, do they have the right to go poking their noses all over the house like that?”
Just as horses stop dead in their tracks and rear up when they notice some suspect object on the ground in front of them, tossing their heads and pricking up their ears, I was badly jolted by her words.
“An employee from the electric company?” I said in alarm, practically leaping out of my chair.
“That’s right, a man from the electric company,” she answered, taken aback by my violent reaction.
“What time was all that?”
She thought a moment and then said:
“Around three o’clock this afternoon.”
“A fat man? A man in a light-colored suit?
“Yes, that’s right, a fat man,” she answered, more and more puzzled, looking at me as though I were ill.
“But did he have a light-colored suit on or didn’t he?” I insisted, almost rudely.
“Yes … a light-colored suit … yes, a poplin suit, doubtless, lots of men are wearing them in this weather, one of those lightweight suits.”
She was looking at me in such astonishment that I was going to be obliged to give her some reasonable explanation: otherwise my behavior might strike even that poor stupid creature as suspicious. But what explanation could I give her? I tried to invent something plausible: I spoke of some money that the person in question owed me, then hastily muttered a whole string of words, because I realized that there was no possibility of my saying anything that would really suffice to explain my alarm. I couldn’t tell her, naturally, that my alarm stemmed from the fact that that very afternoon, around three, a fat man dressed in a light-colored poplin suit, carrying a little suitcase and loitering about in the vicinity of number 57, Calle Paso, had attracted my attention. The fact was that this individual had aroused my suspicions at the time, and now that the proprietress of the pension had informed me that he had inspected the place, thus confirming my suspicions, I was frantic.
Later, when I went over all the events that had taken place in the course of my investigation, I decided that allowing my stuperfaction to show when I heard about the man from the electric company and offering Señora Etchepareborda a supposed explanation of my odd behavior had been most imprudent of me. If she had been at all intelligent these two things would have been enough to arouse her suspicions.
But it was not this crack that was to cause the entire edifice that I had so laboriously constructed to come tumbling down. My head was in a whirl that night; I had the feeling that the crucial moment was approaching. The next day I took my place at my observation post at a very early hour, as was my habit, although I was far more nervous than usual that morning. I drank my coffee, unfolded the newspaper, and pretended to be reading it, though in reality my eyes never left number 57. I had become remarkably adept at this bit of playacting. And as Juanito was telling me some bit of news or other about the metalworkers’ strike, I saw, with an almost unbearable rush of emotion, that the man from the electric company had reappeared in the Calle Paso, carrying the same little suitcase and wearing the same light-colored suit as the day before, accompanied this time however by a little short, thin man whose face reminded me of Pierre Fresnay’s. The two of them were walking along talking to each other, and when the fat man murmured something in his companion’s ear, being obliged to bend down in order to do so, the latter nodded his head. When they reached number 57, the little short man entered the building and the man from the electric company walked on toward the Calle Mitre and finally stopped at the corner to wait for his companion, taking out a package of cigarettes and lighting up.
Would Iglesias come downstairs with the other man?
It didn’t seem likely to me, because Iglesias was not the sort to accept an offer or an invitation on the spur of the moment.
I tried to imagine the scene upstairs. What would the man say to Iglesias? How would he introduce himself? In all probability he would pass himself off as a member of the Library for the Blind or the Choral Society or some other such institution; he would tell Iglesias that he had heard about his unfortunate accident, that the organization he belonged to was set up to help the blind, and so on and so forth. But as I say, it seemed unlikely to me that Iglesias would agree to go anywhere with him the moment he met him: he had become too mistrustful. Moreover, there was his pride; as is so often true of Spaniards it had always been touchy, but it had become even more so now that he was blind.
When the emissary came downstairs alone and went off to join the man from the electric company, I was pleased that my suppositions had turned out to be true, for this was proof that my idea of the course that events would take was absolutely correct.
The man from the electric company appeared to listen with great interest to what the little short man had to report, and then, still carrying on an animated conversation, the two of them headed toward the Avenida Pueyrredón.
I ran upstairs to the pension: it was imperative for me to find out immediately what had gone on, but without arousing Iglesias’s suspicions.
Señora Etchepareborda was all aglow as she received me.
“Those people from the society have finally come round!” she exclaimed excitedly, taking my right hand in both of hers.
I tried to calm her down.
“Whatever you do, señora,” I said to her, “don’t let on to Iglesias that I was the one who alerted those people.”
She assured me she had remembered all my instructions.
“That’s perfect,” I replied. “And what are those people going to do for Iglesias?”
“They’ve offered him work.”
“What sort of work?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”
“And what answer did he give them?”
“That he wanted to think it over.”
“Till when?”
“Till this afternoon, because the man’s coming back then. He wants to take him somewhere and introduce him.”
“Introduce him? Where?”
“I don’t know, Señor Vidal.”
I decided I was satisfied with the results of this interrogation and took my leave of Señora Etchepareborda. As I was about to go out the door, I asked:
“Ah, I forgot. What time will that man be back?”
“At three.”
“Perfect.”
Things were beginning to go like clockwork.
17
As on other occasions, my nervousness brought on a sudden call of nature. I went into the Antigua Perla del Once and headed for the toilet. It is curious that in this country the one place where the terms Damas and Caballeros are still used is the place where they invariably cease to be precisely that: Ladies and Gentlemen. I sometimes think this is merely one of Argentina’s many forms of ironic scepticism. As I settled myself in the noxious little stall, I found it confirmed my long-held theory that the bathroom is the last true locus philosophicus we have left, and I began deciphering the palimpsests on the walls. On top of the inevitable, basic LONG LIVE PERON were XXXs violently obliterating the words LONG LIVE, for which someone had substituted DEATH TO, which in turn had been crossed out and superseded by another LONG LIVE, a grandchild of its primogenitor, and so on, alternately, in the form of a pagoda, or rather, a shaky building under construction. To the right and to the left, above and below, with pointing arrows and exclamation points or suggestive drawings, that original expression had been embellished, enriched, interpreted (as though by a race of rabid, pornographic exegetes) by various glosses having to do with Perón’s mother, the social and anatomical characteristics of his wife Eva; and what the unknown defecating scholiast woul
d do were he to have the great good fortune of finding himself in bed with her, or on a chair, or even right there in the toilet of the Antigua Perla del Once. Phrases and expressions of desire that in turn had been partially or totally expunged, distorted, or enhanced by the insertion of a derogatory or laudatory adverb, intensified or attenuated by the intervention of an adjective; with pencils and pieces of chalk of various colors; with illustrative drawings that seemed to have been executed by a drunken, drooling professor of anatomy. And in various blank spots, below or to one side, some of them enclosed in boxes with fancy borders (as in important newspaper ads), in different types of handwriting (anxious or languid, hopeful or cynical, persistent or frivolous, calligraphic or grotesque), were telephone numbers, supplied or wanted, by men possessed of this or that attribute, eager to realize such and such a feat or fantasy, to carry out such and such a combination or scheme, to be a partner in such and such a sadistic or masochistic abomination. Offers and requests that in turn were modified by ironic or insulting, hostile or humorous commentaries by third persons who for some reason were not inclined to participate in the precise arrangement suggested, but who at the same time in some sense (as their addenda proved) desired to share, and were in fact sharing, in that lascivious, delirious magic. And in the midst of that chaos, with pointing arrows, the anxious, hopeful reply of a person indicating where and when he would be waiting for the Cacographic Anal Prince, with a tender little note appended below that would seem to be an inappropriate or incongruous contribution to this lavatory bulletin board: I WILL HAVE A FLOWER IN MY HAND.
“The world hind side to,” I thought.
As on the crime page of the paper, the ultimate truth of the species seemed to be revealed there.