There was nothing left for me to do but wait in the square.
I went back downstairs, sat down on a bench, and decided to use the time to make a careful study of everything about the place.
I have already said that this complex of buildings is odd, for it occupies the entire length of one block and thus forms a tangent to the circular church. The center section, which touches the church itself, is no doubt the property of the latter, and I presume that it houses the sacristy and other ecclesiastical buildings. But the remainder of the complex, to the left and to the right, has families living in it, as the presence of flowerpots on the balconies, clothes hanging on the lines, cages of canaries, and so on proves. Nontheless the fact that the windows corresponding to the blind people’s apartment had certain things about them that were different did not escape my careful scrutiny: these windows possessed no signs or objects that would indicate that there were people living there, and moreover the shutters over these windows were closed. It might be argued that the blind do not need light. But what about air? Furthermore, these signs bore out the impression I had received when I listened through the door up there on the second floor. As I kept an eye on the door leading out of the building I pondered this curious fact, and after turning it over and over in my mind I reached a conclusion that struck me as surprising but irrefutable: There was no one living in that apartment.
And I say that this conclusion was surprising because if no one lived there why had Iglesias gone inside it with the little short man who looked like Pierre Fresnay? The inference to be drawn from this was also irrefutable: The apartment served solely as an entrance to something else. And I said to myself “something else” because though that “something” might well be another apartment, the apartment next door perhaps, with an inside door connecting the two, it was also possible that it was “something” less easily imaginable, since it had to do with the blind. A secret inside passageway leading to the cellar? This was not unlikely.
I finally decided that it was pointless to continue racking my brains just then, since the moment that the two men came out of the building I would have the opportunity to examine the problem more closely.
I had foreseen that introducing Iglesias into that secret world was going to be a complicated business and therefore take a long time; but it must have been more complicated than I had supposed, for the two of them did not come out of the building again until two o’clock that morning. Around midnight, after eight hours of watching intently and waiting, an hour when the darkness made that strange corner of Buenos Aires more mysterious still, my heart shrank as though it were beginning to suspect that some sort of abominable initiation were taking place in some subterranean place, some damp underground cellar, under the direction of some fearsome blind mystagogue; and as though these ominous ceremonies were a forewarning of the trials that awaited me.
Two o’clock in the morning!
As he came out of the building, Iglesias seemed to be walking much more shakily and uncertainly than when he entered, and I had the feeling that something horrendous was weighing heavily upon him. But perhaps all that was merely the impression I received due to a lugubrious concatenation of circumstances: my ideas concerning the sect, the dim lighting in the square, the immense cupola of the church, and above all the feeble light shed on the stairway by the one dirty bulb hanging above the entryway.
I waited for them to leave, and noted that they headed toward Cabildo. When I was certain they would not be back, I ran to the building.
In the silence of that wee hour of the morning, the sound of my footsteps seemed deafening and each creak of the rickety stairs made me look back over my shoulder.
When I reached the second-floor landing the greatest surprise I had had thus far awaited me: the door of the apartment had a padlock on it! This was something I had utterly failed to foresee.
This discovery filled me with such despair that I was obliged to sit down on the top step of that accursed stairway. I sat there for some time, completely crushed. But soon my brain began to function again and my powers of imagination presented me with a series of hypotheses:
The two men had just left and no one had left after them, hence the padlock had been removed from the door when they entered the apartment and been put back on it again when they left by the man who looked like Pierre Fresnay. Therefore if there were people of some sort living in the place, or if it had a secret passageway to “something” that was lived in, these creatures nonetheless did not enter or leave by way of the door that was there before my eyes. This “something,” then, this apartment or house or cellar or whatever it was, had another exit or various other exits, perhaps leading to other areas in the neighborhood or in the city. Was the door with the padlock reserved for the little short messenger or intermediary then? Yes: for him or for other individuals entrusted with similar missions, each one of whom was to be presumed to be supplied with an identical key. These initial steps in my reasoning process bore out the impression that I had had when I observed the house from the little square: there was nobody living in that apartment. From this I could already safely draw a conclusion of great importance for my future operations: that apartment was merely a passageway TO SOMEWHERE ELSE.
What could that “somewhere else” be? I couldn’t imagine, and the only thing that would solve the question was a daring attempt on my part to force that padlock, enter the mysterious apartment, and once inside it see what it could possibly lead to. For this I would need a picklock, or else I could simply break it open with a pair of pliers or employ some other similar drastic means.
I was so impatient now that I could not wait till the next day. I gave up the idea of breaking the padlock on account of the noise that this would make, and decided that the best thing to do was to ask one of my acquaintances to help me. I went downstairs, walked over to Cabildo, and waited for a taxi to come by, since there was no lack of them at this hour of the morning. Luck seemed to be with me: in a few minutes I flagged one down and ordered the driver to take me to the Calle Paso. I got into the car that I had left parked there and drove to F.’s house in Floresta. I roused him by shouting at the top of my lungs (he’s famous for being an incredibly sound sleeper) and explained that I needed to get a padlock open that very night. Once he was fully awake and realized what sort of lock I wanted him to help me open, he was so indignant that he very nearly went back to bed: waking him up to open a simple padlock was like asking Stavisky for advice on how to swindle someone of a mere thousand francs. I shook him, I threatened him, and finally I dragged him out to the car; racing along as though the organization were about to collapse that very night, I arrived in just over half an hour at the little square in Belgrano. I parked on the Calle Echeverría, and after making sure that no one was around, F. and I got out of the car and walked to the house.
F. got the padlock open in a matter of half a minute, whereupon I told him that he would have to get back to Floresta by himself because I was going to be staying behind in that house for a good long while. This made him more furious still, but I convinced him that I was up to something that was very important to me and anyway it was easy to catch a cab on Cabildo. He haughtily refused the money I tried to give him for taxi fare and went off without even saying goodbye to me.
I must admit that on the way to the Calle Paso there was one question that had plagued me: Why hadn’t there been a padlock on the door when I went upstairs the first time? Well, it was logical that it hadn’t been on the door since the two men had already entered the apartment and had no way to put it back on from the inside. But if that entry to the apartment was so important, as everything seemed to indicate, why was it that they had left the door unlocked like that so that anyone could have gotten in? I told myself that all this was explainable if the little short man had locked the door with a bolt or a crossbar from the inside.
As was only to be expected, inside the apartment it was completely dark and dead silent. The door had opened with a series of creaks that seemed
deafeningly loud to me. I shone my flashlight on the inside of the door and noted with satisfaction that it had a bolt, a copper bolt that was not rusted, thus proving that it was used frequently.
My supposition that the door had been locked from the inside was thus confirmed and along with it the (alarming) hypothesis that that door at no time remained open.
Reflecting on these facts much later, I asked myself why, if this were such an important entry, the door was closed with a padlock that F. had been able to force open in just a shade more than half a minute. This rather striking fact could have only one explanation: it made the place appear to be an ordinary dwelling, a dwelling that for some reason or other was unoccupied.
Though I was quite convinced that no one at all lived there, I entered cautiously and began to shine my flashlight on the walls of the first room. I am not a coward, but anyone in my situation would have felt the same fear I did as I slowly and carefully went through that empty, abandoned apartment engulfed in shadows. And significantly enough, bumping into the walls with my white cane, like a real blind man! I have not given any thought to this disturbing sign until just now, even though I have always been of the opinion that one cannot fight against a powerful enemy for years without coming in the end to resemble him; if the enemy invents the machine gun, sooner or later we too must invent it and use it if we do not wish to disappear from the face of the earth, and what holds good for a gross physical object such as a weapon of war holds good, for more profound and subtle reasons, for psychological and spiritual weapons: pouts, smiles, ways of moving one’s body and betraying others, typical turns of phrase, characteristic feelings, and manner of living; the reason why husbands and wives so often end up being exactly like each other.
Yes: little by little I had acquired many of the faults and virtues of the accursed race. And as is almost always the case, the exploration of their universe had been, as I am just now beginning to see, the exploration of my own dark world.
The beam of my flashlight soon proved to me that there was nothing in this first room: not a stick of furniture, not even a bit of junk left behind; nothing but dust, wooden floors with holes in the planks, and peeling walls from which hung shreds of a wallpaper that had once been luxurious. This examination reassured me somewhat, for it confirmed what I had already suspected as I sat in the little square downstairs: that there was no one living in that apartment. I then went through the rest of the rooms more rapidly and confidently, and they too confirmed that first impression that I had had. And then I realized why it was unnecessary to take excessive precautions with regard to the door leading into the apartment; if a thief chanced to force the padlock he would soon leave, feeling disappointed.
Things were different for me, because I knew that this ghostly house was not an end but a means.
Otherwise one would have to suppose that the insignificant little man who had gone in search of Iglesias was some sort of madman who had brought the Spaniard to a place like this, where, in complete darkness and not even anything to sit on, he had talked to him for ten hours about something that, however terrible it might be, he could just as well have told the printer back in his own room in the pension.
I would have to search for the exit that led somewhere else. The first and simplest thing to look for was a door, either one in plain sight or a hidden one, leading to the place next door; the second and less simple thing (though not thereby less probable, since why should one expect anything connected with such monstrous creatures to be simple?) was to presume that this visible or secret door opened onto a passageway leading to the cellar or to more distant dangerous places. In any case my task now was to search for the secret door.
I first examined all the doors in plain sight: without exception they were doors connecting the various rooms of the apartment. Hence, as was quite predictable, the door I was searching for was one that was invisible, or at least invisible at first glance.
I recalled similar situations that I had seen in movies or come across in adventure novels: a wall panel or a picture frame could well be a secret door. But as there was not a single picture in this abandoned apartment there was no need for me to explore that avenue.
I went through room after room, examining the peeling walls to see if some corner or cornice or plinth concealed an electric button or some other similar mechanism.
I found nothing.
I examined with particular care the two rooms, the bathroom and the kitchen, that had permanent fixtures. Although they were bare of furniture too and in a sorry state, they nonetheless presented greater possibilities than the other rooms. The toilet, which had no seat, offered no major possibilities; nevertheless I tried to move the old hinges of the missing toilet seat, I pulled the chain, took the cover off the toilet tank, tried to press or turn all sorts of stopcocks and faucets, attempted to lift the ancient bathtub off the floor, and so on. I then proceeded to investigate the kitchen in a similar fashion, but turned up nothing.
My examination was so thorough and each step repeated so many times that if I hadn’t known for certain that those two men had been there in that apartment that same afternoon I would have abandoned the entire search.
Discouraged, I sat down on the old gas stove. Previous experience had taught me that once a certain point has been reached, there is no use going over the same ground in one’s mind again and again, for this merely creates a mental rut that prevents one from taking some other approach to the problem at hand.
I began suddenly to munch on my chocolate bars, thinking how comical that would appear to be to an invisible spectator hidden somewhere in the apartment. I was more or less laughing to myself as I pictured how this scene would look to an imaginary observer when a thought suddenly occurred to me that almost gave me heart failure: what proof did I in fact have that there wasn’t SOMEONE watching me from some hidden spot? There were ceilings with cracks in them, there were peeling walls that might well conceal peepholes through which someone might be watching from the apartment next door. I was again overcome with terror and turned off my flashlight for a few moments, as though such a precaution, even after all this time, might be of some use. As I sat there in the dark, trying to detect the significance of the least little creak, I nonetheless had enough good sense to realize that my precaution was idiotic, not only because it was so useless, but also because it might produce precisely the opposite result from what I had intended, for without light I was even more helpless than with it. So I turned on my providential flashlight again, and although I was now even more tense and nervous than before, I did my best to concentrate my thoughts on the mystery that I was going to be obliged to solve.
Obsessed by the thought of peepholes, I began to shine the beam of my flashlight on the various ceilings in the rooms of the deserted apartment and examine them carefully: they were smooth ceilings made of plaster applied over wooden lattices, and in fact great chunks of plaster had fallen off them; there were also many broken moldings. It was therefore possible, of course, for one or several persons to keep watch on the apartment through these holes, but at the same time the ceilings of the various rooms showed no signs of anything resembling an entrance or an exit. Moreover, a ladder would have been necessary in order to reach such an opening, and there wasn’t one anywhere in the apartment. Unless of course the ladder was one of those little rope ladders that could be pulled back up from above after it had been used.
I was looking at the ceilings and thinking about this variation when the solution finally dawned on me: the floors! That was the simplest solution, and as often happens the last one to occur to me.
20
With my nervous tension mounting by the minute, I began to shine my flashlight along the floor, bit by bit, until I found what I was bound to find eventually: an almost imperceptible crack forming a square that was undoubtedly a trap door leading to the cellar. Who would ever have thought however that a second-floor apartment would have an entrance to the cellar? This was more or less confirmation
of my original theory that the apartment was connected to a neighboring one by an invisible door, but who would ever have imagined that that apartment would be the one below? At that moment I was so excited that I didn’t even give a thought to something that might otherwise have caused me to flee in terror: the sound of my footsteps. How could the blind especially, the blind who lived in the apartment below, have failed to notice it? This heedlessness on my part, this careless mistake allowed me to go on with my search, for it is not always the truth that leads to great discoveries. I say this, moreover, in order to put before my readers a typical example of the many errors and omissions that I was guilty of in the course of my investigation, despite the fact that I had kept my brain working feverishly at all times. I now believe that in this type of search there is something more powerful that guides us, an obscure but infallible intuition that is as inexplicable, but at the same time as reliable, as the clairvoyance that enables sleepwalkers to head straight for their objective, their inexplicable objective.
The trap door was closed so tightly that there was no use even thinking of trying to pry it open without the aid of a strong instrument with a thin blade; it was obvious that it opened from below, at an hour agreed on with the emissary. I became desperate at the thought that I would be obliged to carry out this operation that very night, since the following day someone would be sure to notice that the padlock had been forced open and everything would be more difficult, if not impossible. What to do? I had no tools with me. I reviewed in my mind the few things there were in the empty apartment: only in the kitchen and the bathroom was there likely to be anything that would serve my purpose. I hurried to the kitchen and found nothing I could use. I then went into the bathroom and finally decided that the arm of the flotation ball in the toilet might more or less do as a tool. I removed the flotation ball, pulled on the arm of it till it broke off, and ran back to the room where I had discovered the opening in the floor. After working for more than an hour I managed to make a little opening on one side of the trap door by taking advantage of the rough edges of solder left on the metal arm of the flotation ball. I finally slid the arm down into this opening, and using it as a lever, began to pry the trap door open very carefully. After several unsuccessful attempts, I finally managed to raise the trap door up far enough to be able to put my fingers in the opening and complete the operation with my hands. I carefully removed the trap door, laid it to one side, and directed the beam of my flashlight down into the opening. It did not lead, as I had thought, to the apartment downstairs but to a wide spiral staircase enclosed in a metal tube.