On Heroes and Tombs

  Two details corroborate my reconstruction: her clothing had been ripped off her and was found scattered all over the floor of the elevator amid the filth; many of her bones also lay scattered about, as though they had been torn from her body one by one by the cannibal concierge. On the other hand, his own putrefied body, partially reduced to a skeleton, lay on its side, all in one piece.

  In my desperation, my thoughts ranged even farther and I conjectured that my fate had perhaps been sealed from the moment that I had had my adventure with the blind peddler of collar stays, and that for more than three years I had believed that I had been following the blind when in reality it had been they who had been dogging my footsteps. The thought came to me that the search that I had carried out had not been a product of my will or of my famous freedom but the work of fate, that I was destined to pursue the men belonging to the Sect so as thus to pursue my own death, or something worse than my death. What certain knowledge did I have of the fate that now lay in store for me? Might the nightmare that I had just endured be merely a presentiment of things to come? Might they not pluck my eyes out? Might those huge birds not be symbols of the cruelly successful operation that now awaited me? And finally, hadn’t I remembered in the nightmare how as a youngster I had mercilessly plucked out the eyes of cats and birds? Might I not thus have been condemned to this fate from my childhood?

  25

  These conjectures, along with other memories having to do with my research on the blind, occupied that day. Every once in a while I would think again of the Blind Woman, her disappearance, and my subsequent imprisonment in this room. As I pondered the tragedy in the elevator it occurred to me that my punishment might be to die of hunger in this strange room; but I immediately realized that such punishment would be an extremely merciful one by comparison with that dealt out to those two unfortunate creatures. Dying of hunger in the dark? My naive hope of a fate as kind as that almost made me laugh.

  As I was reflecting there in the dead silence of that room, I thought I heard the sound of muffled voices coming through one of the doors. I stood up without making any noise and walked in my bare feet over to that door, the one presumably leading to the room at the front of the building. I cautiously put my ear to the crack: complete silence. Then, feeling my way along the walls, I went over to the other door and repeated the operation: I had the impression that the persons talking in the next room fell silent the moment I put my ear to the door.

  I had moved as quietly as I could but they had doubtless heard me. Nonetheless I stood with my ear to the door for a long time, listening intently. But I could not make out the slightest sound of voices or the slightest movement. I presumed that the Council of the Blind was assembled there on the other side of the door, not one of them moving a muscle as they waited for me to stop behaving so stupidly. Realizing that the only thing I would gain by my spying would be to cause all of them to become even more annoyed, I retraced my steps, being less cautious this time since I presumed that they had already discovered what I had been up to. I flung myself down on the bed and decided to have a cigarette. What else was there for me to do? Moreover, I was certain that that council would soon announce what they had decided to do with me.

  Until that moment I had not given in to my desire to smoke, so as not to consume the little oxygen that according to my calculations was reaching me from the feeble currents of air coming through the cracks. But, I said to myself, at this point what kindlier fate could possibly await me than suffocating to death from cigarette smoke? From then on I began to smoke like a chimney, with the result that there was even less breathable air in the room than before. Thoughts and memories kept coming to my mind, in particular those having to do with acts of vengeance perpetrated by the Society. And I began to analyze the Castel affair again, a crime that had been the talk of Buenos Aires not only because of the people involved but because of the report sent by the murderer to a publishing house from the insane asylum to which he had been committed. It interested me enormously for two reasons: I had known María Iribarne, the murder victim, and knew that her husband was blind. It can readily be imagined then why I was so eager to meet Castel, and also why my terror kept me from doing so, inasmuch as it was more or less like thrusting my head directly into the lion’s mouth. What else could I do then except read and study his report in minute detail? “I have always been prejudiced against blind people,” he confessed. When I read that document for the first time, I was literally stupefied, for in it Castel spoke of the cold skin, the moist hands, and other characteristics of the race that I too had observed and been obsessed by, such as the tendency to live in caves or dark places. Even the title of his report made me shudder, for it struck me as highly significant: he had called it “The Tunnel.”

  My first impulse was to rush to the insane asylum and see the painter to find out how far he had gotten in his investigations. But I immediately realized that this was as dangerous as exploring a gunpowder factory in the dark by striking a match to light one’s way.

  Unquestionably Castel’s crime was the inexorable result of an act of vengeance on the part of the Sect. But what, exactly, was the mechanism employed? For years I tried to take it apart and analyze it, but I was never able to get to the bottom of the sort of ambiguity that is typical of every operation planned and executed by the blind. I will set forth my conclusions here, conclusions that soon ramify like the paths of a labyrinth:

  Castel was a well-known figure in intellectual circles in Buenos Aires, and therefore his opinions on any subject were doubtless also well known. It is scarcely possible that he could have managed to conceal an obsession as thoroughgoing as his about the blind. Through Allende, María Iribarne’s husband, the Sect decided to wreak its vengeance on Castel.

  Allende ordered his wife to go to the art gallery where Castel’s latest paintings were being shown. She was to give signs of great interest in one of them, stationing herself before it as though contemplating it ecstatically, for a long enough time for Castel to notice her and study her, and then she was to disappear. Disappear, that is, in a manner of speaking. As invariably happens with the Sect, the pursuer becomes the person pursued, but in such a way that sooner or later his intended victim falls into his hands. Castel finally meets María again, falls hopelessly in love with her, and like a madman (and a fool) “pursues” her from one end of the city to the other and even goes to her house, where María’s husband himself shows him a love letter addressed to her. This is a key fact: how to explain such a move on the husband’s part unless it was intended to further the Sect’s sinister purposes? Castel was tormented by this inexplicable fact, and what happened thereafter is not worth repeating here: I need only mention that Castel became madly jealous, eventually murdered María, and was committed to an asylum for the criminally insane; thus the plan of the Sect came off perfectly and there was not the least danger of the details of it ever coming to light. Who is going to believe arguments put forth by a madman? All this is as clear as day thus far. The ambiguity and the labyrinth begin at this point, for the following possibilities present themselves:

  María’s death had been decided upon as a way of ensuring that Castel would be punished by being shut up in the insane asylum, but Allende, who really loved and needed his wife, was not let in on this plan. Hence what seemed to Allende a “senseless” crime, and his desperation in the final scene.

  María’s death had been decided upon and Allende was aware of this decision. Here two subpossibilities present themselves: A. The decision was accepted by Allende with resignation, because he loved his wife but at the same time was obliged to pay for some misdeed that he had committed before he went blind, a misdeed that we have no knowledge of and that he had already partially paid for by being blinded by the Sect.

  B. The decision was received by Allende with satisfaction, for he not only did not love his wife but in fact hated her violently and thus hoped to avenge himself for her numerous betrayals of him. How to reconcile this variatio
n with Allende’s desperation at the end? Very simple: it was mere playacting for the gallery, and also playacting forced upon him by the Sect in order to make any clues to this complicated act of vengeance impossible to follow.

  There remain variations of the variations that are not worth my going to the trouble to describe since each one of you can easily try your hand at inventing them as an exercise, and a very useful one, since one never knows when and how one may be caught up in one of the Sect’s darkly ambiguous machinations.

  As for myself, that affair, which happened shortly after my adventure with the blind man peddling collar stays, threw me into a panic. I was terrified and decided to cover up my tracks by putting not only time but space between me and him. I fled the country. For many readers of these memoirs, this step that I took may appear to be an exaggerated reaction on my part. The lack of imagination of those persons who believe that in order to discover a truth it is necessary to keep one’s “proper sense of proportion” in the face of the facts has always made me laugh. These midgets imagine (for they too have an imagination, of course, albeit a dwarf-sized one) that reality is no bigger than they themselves are, and that it is no more complex than their fly’s brains. Those individuals who call themselves “realists” because they are incapable of seeing beyond their own noses confuse Reality with a Circle-Two-Meters-in-Diameter centered on their own simple brains. Hicks from the provinces who laugh at what they are unable to understand and refuse to believe anything that lies outside their famous circle. With typical peasant cunning, they invariably turn a deaf ear to madmen who come to them with plans to discover America, but can easily be conned into buying a public mailbox on the corner the minute they come down to the city. And they tend to find logical (another of their favorite words!) things that are merely psychological. What is familiar thus becomes what is reasonable, through the workings of the same mechanism whereby the Laplander finds it reasonable to offer his wife to the passing traveler, whereas this strikes a European as madness. This sort of mistrustful troublemaker has successively refused to believe in the existence of the antipodes, the machine gun, microbes, and hertzian waves: realists whose particular distinguishing characteristic is their rejection of future realities, generally by way of mocking laughter, violent resistance, and sometimes even prison sentences or commitment to an insane asylum for those who do believe in such realities.

  Not to mention that other supreme aphorism: “a proper sense of proportion.” As though there had ever been anything important in the history of mankind that was not a gross exaggeration, from the Roman Empire to Dostoevski!

  But enough talk of stupidities; let us return to the one subject that ought to be of interest to mankind.

  I decided to leave the country, and though my first thought was to do so by crossing the Delta in one of the boats belonging to smugglers who were friends of F.’s, it then occurred to me that this would get me no farther than Uruguay. The only possible solution, then, was to get myself a fake passport. I hunted up a certain Nassif the Turk, who provided me with one in the name of Federico Ferrari Hardoy, one which, among many others stolen by Nassif’s gang, had not yet been used. I chose this particular one because at one time I had had a little run-in with Ferrari Hardoy and this gave me a chance to commit a few misdeeds in his name.

  But even though I had this document in hand, I decided it would be wiser to board a smuggler’s boat and cross the Delta to Montevideo. So I went to El Carmelo, and from there I took a bus to Colonia, and then another bus to Montevideo.

  I got a visa stamped in my passport at the Argentine consulate and bought a ticket on an Air France plane leaving two days later. What to do during this two-day wait? I was tense and nervous. I walked down the Avenida del 18 de Julio, visited a bookstore, drank quantities of coffee and cognac to combat the intense cold. But the day went by so slowly I was in despair: I couldn’t wait for the moment to put an ocean between me and the blind man peddling the collar stays.

  I naturally didn’t want to run into anybody I knew. But unfortunately (and not by chance, but by a stroke of bad luck, and through carelessness on my part, since I ought to have spent those two days in some section of Montevideo where there would have been no possibility at all of running into people I knew), Bayce and a blonde girl, a painter whom I had met previously in Montevideo, spied me in the Tupi-Nambá Café. There was a third person with them, wearing blue jeans and odd shoes: a skinny young man, a typical highbrow intellectual, whom I was quite sure I had met somewhere before.

  There was no way out: Bayce came over to where I was sitting and took me back to his table, where I said hello to Lily and struck up a conversation with the man in the strange-looking shoes. I told him I thought we’d met before. Hadn’t he been in Valparaíso at one time? Wasn’t he an architect? Yes, he was an architect, but he’d never been in Valparaíso.

  This intrigued me. As is understandable, I found his denial suspicious. It seemed too much of a coincidence: not only did I have the impression that I had met him before, but I had correctly surmised that he was an architect. Could he be denying that he had ever been in Valparaíso in order to keep me from coming to dangerous conclusions?

  I was so upset and anxious (my reader must bear in mind that the episode with the blind collar-stay peddler had taken place just a few days before) that it was impossible for me to make much sense of the conversation between these three people. They spoke (naturally) of Perón, of architecture, of some theory or other, of modern art. The architect had a copy of Domus with him. They lavished praise on a sort of ceramic rooster, which I was obliged to have a look at despite my uneasiness: it was by an Italian named Durelli or Fratelli (what did the name matter?), who had surely stolen the idea for it from a German named Staudt, who in turn had stolen it from Picasso, who in turn had stolen it from some black in darkest Africa, who was the only one who had not pocketed a single dollar from his rooster.

  The architect was still very much on my mind: the more I looked at him the more certain I was that I had met him somewhere before. His name was Capurro, he said. But was that his real name? Of course; my suspicions were absurd: he was from Montevideo, Bayce and Lily were friends of his; how could he have given me a false name? Well, it wasn’t important: the name he gave could be, and surely was, his real one, but had he lied when he said he’d never been in Valparaíso? If so, what was he hiding? With my mind in a whirl, I tried my best to remember whether there was anyone in that group in Valparaíso that I had known there who had ever mentioned anything having to do with the blind, either directly or indirectly. It seemed significant to me, for example, that this person appeared to be particularly interested in roosters, since the inevitable fate of fighting cocks is to be blinded in combat. No, I could remember no previous conversations among that group having to do with blindness. And suddenly it occurred to me that perhaps it was not in Valparaíso that I had seen this man before, but in Tucumán.

  “Have you ever been in Tucumán?” I asked him point-blank.

  “In Tucumán? No, I’ve never been there either. I’ve been to Buenos Aires lots of times, of course, but I’ve never been in Tucumán. Why do you ask?”

  “It’s just an idle question really. It’s simply that I have the feeling I’ve met you before and I’ve been wondering where it could have been.”

  “Well, old pal, most likely you saw him right here in Montevideo at one time or another,” Bayce said, laughing at my persistence in pursuing the subject.

  I shook my head and sat there lost in thought again as they went on talking about the rooster in Domus.

  I invented some excuse or other to leave, said goodbye to them, and went off to another café, still pondering the question as to where I’d run into the architect before.

  I tried to reconstruct my past contacts with the Tucumán group, people who, as always, I had used to camouflage my real activities. That was only natural: I had had no intention of hanging out with local counterfeiters or of allowing myself to be seen i
n the company of petty hoodlums from the provinces. To aid me in my reconstruction I telephoned a girl I knew, an architect I’d slept with in the past.

  I went to her place to see her. She had made her way up in the world, and was now teaching at the university and collaborating with a group of young architects who were designing some sort of building or other in Tucumán that she showed me later on: a factory or a school or a sanitarium. I have no idea what it was, because as everyone knows buildings these days are all alike: they can as readily house a machine shop as a kindergarten. This is what they call functionalism.

  As I have said, my friend had prospered. She no longer lived, as she had in Buenos Aires, in a shabby little student’s room. She now lived in a modern apartment that reflected her personality. When the maid let me in I very nearly left then and there, thinking that nobody lived there. But on lowering my eyes, I spied the furniture, all of it just a few inches off the floor, as though for the use of crocodiles. A foot and a half higher up the apartment was entirely empty. Nonetheless, once I was inside, I saw that one enormous stretch of blank wall was hung with just one painting, the work of one of Gabriela’s friends doubtless: on a steel gray monochrome background was a single vertical line, drawn with a ruler, and some ten inches to the right of it a tiny little ocher circle.

  We stretched out on the floor, in very uncomfortable positions: Gabriela crawled to a little table no more than ten inches high to serve coffee in little ceramic cups without handles. As I burned my fingers the thought came to me that unless I could down half a dozen whiskies I’d never get my body temperature up high enough in that refrigerator of an apartment to sleep with Gabriela again. I had already resigned myself to my fate when her friends arrived. As they came across the room I realized that one of them was a woman, though she was wearing blue jeans. The other two were architects, one of them the husband of the woman in pants and the other apparently a friend of Gabriela’s or a lover. They were all dressed in blue jeans and odd boots of the sort that army recruits used to wear but that nowadays must be made to measure for the School of Architecture.