“Love and excrement,” I thought.
And as I buttoned my pants, I also thought: “Damas y Caballeros.”
18
At two P.M. I was already at my observation post in the café, so as to be sure to be there in time. But the little short man who looked like Pierre Fresnay didn’t appear until three. He was making his way down the street without the slightest hesitation this time. As he approached the building he raised his eyes to make sure it was number 57 (because he had been walking with his head down, as though mulling something over in his mind) and then went inside.
I waited for him to come out, my nerves all on edge: the most dangerous part of my adventure was at hand, but even though for a moment I considered the possibility that they might have come round simply to take Iglesias to some mutual aid society or charitable organization, my intuition immediately told me that this would not be the way things would happen at all: they would do this later on. The first step was bound to be something much less banal, such as taking him to some blind man who was more or less of an important figure, one of the liaison men for the leaders of the Sect, for example. What reason did I have to presume that? My thought was that before putting a new blind man in circulation, if I may use such an expression, the hierarchs would want to be thoroughly familiar with his traits of character, his aptitudes, his capabilities, his cleverness or stupidity: a good head of a spy network does not assign one of his agents a mission without having first studied his good and bad points. And it is obvious that it does not require the same talents to take up a collection in the subway as it does to keep a place as important as the Naval Center under constant surveillance (the task assigned a tall blind man of about sixty, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, who sits outside the Center, eternally silent, with his pencils in his hand, somehow reminiscent of an English gentleman who has fallen on bad days because of some frightful turn of fortune). As I have had occasion to say before, there are blind men and blind men, and although they all possess the same essential characteristic, that minimum of physical infirmity that causes them to constitute a particular breed, we must not oversimplify the problem to the point of believing that all of them are equally sly and perspicacious. There are blind men who serve only as shock troops; among their number are the equivalent of stevedores or gendarmes; and then there are the Kierkegaards and the Prousts. Moreover, there is no way of knowing where a human being who enters the sacred sect as a result of an illness or an accident will end up, since, as in wars, there are unbelievable surprises; just as no one would ever have been able to predict that a timid little bank teller from Boston would turn out to be a hero at Guadalcanal, so one is unable to predict the surprising ways in which blindness may promote a concierge or a printer to the very top of the hierarchy: it is said that one of the four top world leaders of the Sect (who live somewhere in the Pyrenees, in one of those enormously deep caves that a group of speleologists tried to explore in 1950, an expedition that ended in a fatal accident) is not a person blind from birth and that, even more amazingly, before going blind he was a humble jockey who raced in the hippodrome of Milan, where he lost his sight in a fall. This is a piece of information I came by through the vaguest of hearsay, as can well be imagined, and although I believe it highly unlikely that a man not blind from birth is a hierarch, I repeat the story simply to give some idea of how a person is able to better himself by losing his sight. The system of promotion in rank is so esoteric that I seriously doubt that anyone will ever know precisely who the Tetrarchs are. The fact is that the world of the blind seethes with rumors and information that is not always correct circulates; in part perhaps because the blind have the same penchant for slander and gossip as all human beings do, though in the case of their breed this propensity reaches pathological proportions; and in part (this is my own theory) because the hierarchs use false information as one of the means of perpetuating the Sect’s aura of mystery and ambiguity, two powerful weapons in any organization of this sort. Be that as it may, if a piece of information is to be believable it must at least be possible in principle, and this supposed case of the ex-jockey suffices to prove to what point blindness can enhance the personality of a quite ordinary individual.
To return to our problem, I surmised that on this first trip outside Iglesias would not be taken to one of the Sect’s exoteric societies, that is to say one of those institutions where the blind exploit poor wretches who can see, or ladies with kind hearts and the brains of a fly, by resorting to the cheapest and most vulgar sort of sentimental demagoguery. I felt, therefore, that this first trip that Iglesias was about to be taken on might very well lead me directly inside one of the secret redoubts of the Sect, with all the dangers that that implied, naturally, but also all the marvelous possibilities. And so when I sat down in the café that afternoon, I had already taken all the measures that seemed reasonable if I were going to go along on such a trip. My reader might reply that it is easy to make reasonable plans for a trip to the Córdoba mountains, but not very understandable how, unless one is mad, one can make reasonable preparations for an exploration of the universe of the blind. Well: the truth is that these famous preparations consisted of hunting up two or three relatively logical things: a flashlight, some concentrated food, and a couple of similar articles. I decided that, as for long-distance swimmers, the best concentrated food for me to take with me would be chocolate.
Equipped with my pocket flashlight, my chocolate, and a white cane that at the last moment it occurred to me might be useful (as an enemy uniform would be for scouts on reconnaissance missions), I waited, so tense and nervous I could scarcely bear it, for Iglesias to come out of number 57 with the little short man. The possibility remained, of course, that Iglesias, being a typical Spaniard, would refuse to accompany the little short man and decide not to abandon his proud solitude, in which case the entire edifice that I had erected would collapse like a house of cards; and my chocolate, flashlight, and white cane would automatically become the grotesque equipment of a madman.
But Iglesias came downstairs!
The little short man was engaged in a lively conversation with him, and the printer was listening to him with his dignity of a wretched Spanish hidalgo who has never humbled himself before anyone and never will. He was walking along clumsily, using in a very gingerly way the white cane that the other man had brought him, suddenly raising it up in the air for several steps as though he were carrying a taper.
How much he still had to learn before his apprenticeship would be over! This observation revived my spirits and I began following along behind them with a certain feeling of self-assurance.
At no time did the little short man give any sign that he suspected I was tailing the two of them, and this too made me feel more sure of myself, to the point in fact of awakening in me a sort of pride that things were turning out exactly as I had calculated in my preliminary studies and my many long years of waiting. For I don’t know if I have mentioned this before, but ever since my abortive attempt to penetrate the world of the blind through the intermediary of the collar-stay peddler in the Palermo subway, I had devoted very nearly all my time to the careful, systematic observation of the visible activity of any blind man I chanced to meet in the streets of Buenos Aires; during this three-year period I bought hundreds of magazines that did not interest me in the slightest; I purchased and threw away dozens and dozens of collar stays; I acquired thousands of pencils and notebooks of every size and description; I attended concerts by blind musicians; I learned Braille and spent endless days in the Library for the Blind. As is readily understandable, this activity involved great risks, since if I aroused the least suspicion, all my plans would go for naught, not to mention the fact that my life itself would be in danger.
But this was unavoidable, and paradoxically, it was my one chance to save myself from these same dangers that threatened my life: more or less like the apprenticeship that, at the risk of death, soldiers being trained to detect mines undergo, since at the most cru
cial point in their training they must confront the same dangers that they are being taught to avoid.
I had nonetheless not been so stupid as to confront those risks without having first taken certain basic precautions: I dressed in different clothes each time; I used false moustaches or beards; I wore dark glasses; I disguised my voice.
I thus investigated many things in the course of those three years. And thanks to this monotonous preliminary labor I was able to enter the secret domain.
And that was how it all ended for me …
Because in these days preceding my death I no longer have the slightest doubt that my fate was foreordained, perhaps from the very beginning of my investigation, from that accursed day on which I shuttled back and forth on the subway between Plaza Mayo and Palermo spying on the blind man. And I sometimes think that the more clever I believed myself to be and the more fatuously I congratulated myself on what I imagined to be my supreme cunning, the more closely I was watched and the more inexorably I brought about my own perdition. I even came to suspect Señora Etchepareborda. How grimly comical I now find the idea that all that mise-en-scène, complete with knickknacks and giant Bambis, with fake photos of a petty-bourgeois couple on vacation, with cute little mottoes in rustic frames, that whole setting in short, which I had superciliously allowed myself to secretly smile at, was in fact nothing but that: nothing but a vulgar, grimly comical mise-en-scène!
These are no more than conjectures, however, although they would appear to be quite close to the truth. And it is my firm intention to speak only of facts. Let us go back, then, to a precise description of events, exactly as they happened.
In the days that preceded Iglesias’s first trip outside the confines of his room, I had studied, as though it were a chess problem, all the variations that this trip might involve, inasmuch as I would have to be prepared for any one of them. It might very well happen, for instance, that those people would come to get him in a taxi or a private car. As I had no intention of missing the most splendid opportunity of my life by not having taken into account such an easily predictable eventuality, I had borrowed a car from R., one of my partners in the money-counterfeiting operation, and kept it permanently parked in the vicinity of number 57. But when I saw the emissary who looked like Pierre Fresnay arriving on foot that day, I realized that this had been a useless precaution. There remained, of course, the variation whereby he would immediately climb into a taxi with Iglesias, and even though finding a taxi in Buenos Aires is as difficult these days as finding a mammoth would be, I kept this possibility in mind when I saw Iglesias come out to the street. But the two of them didn’t stop and stand in front of the doorway of number 57 as though waiting for a taxi to cruise by; on the contrary, without looking either to the right or to the left, the little short man took the printer by the arm and led him off toward Bartolomé Mitre; it was obvious that wherever they were going, they would be using some means of public transportation to get there.
There remained, naturally, the variation whereby the other man, the fat man from the electric company, would be waiting for them somewhere with a car, but this possibility did not strike me as a logical one, since I could see no reason for him not to wait with the car right there in the Calle Paso. On the other hand it seemed reasonable that they would use public transportation such as a city bus or a public minibus, since in all probability they would not want to give the new blind man the immediate impression that they were representatives of a sect that is all-powerful: the modest means they employed, the downright poverty of the resources apparently at their disposal constitute an effective weapon in the midst of a society that is cruel and selfish but inclined toward sentimentality. Although this “but” should by all rights be replaced by the simple conjunction “and.”
I followed them at a prudent distance.
When they reached the corner they turned right and walked on to Pueyrredón, halting at the bus stop. There was a fairly long line of people waiting, both men and women; but at the insistence of a man with a briefcase and glasses, who looked respectable enough but whom I immediately sized up as a real scoundrel, everyone allowed the “poor little blind man” and his guide to go to the head of the line, which then immediately closed up again behind my two men.
There were three numbers painted on the sign at the bus stop, and for me they were the first key to a great enigma: they were not the numbers of the buses that went to Retiro and the Law School, to the Hospital-Clinic complex, or to Belgrano; they went, rather, to the portals of the Unknown.
The two of them boarded the Belgrano bus and I climbed in behind them, after letting a couple of people in ahead of me so as to screen me from their view.
When the bus got to Cabildo, I began to wonder what street in Belgrano they would get off at. The bus continued on without the little short man giving any sign of wanting to get off. Finally, when the bus arrived at Virrey del Pino he began to move to the front of the bus and the two of them stood waiting near the exit door. They got off at Calle Sucre. They walked down Sucre to Obligado, and then straight north along this street to Juramento, and from there to Cuba, again heading north; but when they reached Monroe they went back to Obligado and returned via this street to the little public square that they had already gone past once before, the one on the corner of Echeverría and Obligado.
It was plain to see that they were trying to throw somebody off their track. But who? Me? Any individual such as myself who might be tailing them? This hypothesis was not to be rejected, since I had surely not been the first to have ever tried to enter the secret world. It is more than likely that there have been a great many such persons in the course of human history; in any case, I suspect at least two: one, Strindberg, who paid the price for so doing by going mad; and the other, Rimbaud, whom they had begun to persecute even before his trip to Africa, as the poet hinted in a letter sent to his sister that the critic Jacques Rivière misinterpreted.
There was also reason to suppose that this was an attempt to disorient Iglesias, who now doubtless possessed that extremely acute sense of direction that a man acquires the moment he loses his eyesight. But why?
Whatever the reason, after retracing their steps a number of times, they finally returned to the little square where the Church of the Immaculate Conception stands. For a moment it seemed as though they might go inside, and I thought dizzyingly of crypts and of some secret pact between the two organizations. But instead they headed for that odd corner of Buenos Aires formed by a row of old two-story houses, tangent to the circle formed by the church.
They entered one of the houses through a door leading to the upper floor and began climbing the dirty old wooden staircase.
19
The most arduous and hazardous stage of my investigation now began.
I stopped in the square to reflect on the next steps that I could and should take.
Obviously, I could not follow them immediately, given the dangerous nature of the Sect. Two possibilities therefore remained: either I could wait for them to come out and then once they had gone away go upstairs myself to see what I could discover; or else I could proceed upstairs without waiting for them to come out after prudently biding my time for a while.
Although this second variation was more risky, it also offered more chances of turning up something, for if I didn’t discover anything definite when I went upstairs, there still remained the other possibility of coming back downstairs again and waiting on a bench in the square till they came out. I waited some ten minutes and then began to creep cautiously up the stairs. There was every reason to believe that dealing with Iglesias’s case, or presenting him to the others, or whatever it was that was involved, was not going to be a matter of minutes but of hours; if not, I had a totally mistaken idea of what this organization was like. The stairway was filthy, for it was part of one of those old houses that at one time had had pretensions but nowadays are dirty and run down and have for the most part been broken up into rented apartments since these
old houses are too large for a single poor family and too dilapidated for a family that has more or less made its way up in the world and attained a certain social position. And the thought then crossed my mind that if the house were one of those that had been divided up into apartments, this made my problem vastly more complicated, indeed almost labyrinthine: whom could Iglesias and the other man be going to see, and in which one of the apartments? Moreover, it seemed to me very unlikely that the hierarch, or his liaison man, lived in such humble and indeed downright wretched quarters.
As I went up the stairs, I was overcome with uncertainty and bitterness, for it was discouraging to think that after so many long years of waiting I had quite possibly ended up at the entrance to a labyrinth.
Luckily I am always inclined to imagine the worst. I say “luckily” because this being true, my preparations are always more than adequate for the solution of the problems with which reality subsequently confronts me; since I am thus prepared for the worst, this reality turns out to be less fraught with difficulties than I had foreseen.
And such was the case now, at least insofar as the immediate problem of that house was concerned. As for the rest, for the first time in my life things were worse than what I had expected.
When I reached the second-floor landing, I noted that there was only one door opening onto it and that the stairway ended right there at that floor; hence there was no attic nor were there two apartments; all in all, the problem was as simple as it could be.
I stood outside that closed door for some time, listening intently for the slightest sound of footsteps and all set to run quickly back downstairs. Risking everything, I put my ear to the door and tried to detect any sound that there might be inside, but heard nothing. It gave every sign of being an empty apartment.