On Heroes and Tombs

  Let us therefore pass over this aspect of the question and examine those facts that will constitute a useful contribution to this Report: the glimpses I had of the forbidden universe.

  My first task, obviously, was to ascertain the precise nature and the degree of sincerity of the hatred that the blind woman professed for her husband, since such a crack in the solid structure of the Sect was one of the possibilities that I had always eagerly sought. I must make it clear however that I did not conduct this inquiry by asking Louise direct questions, since such an interrogation would have attracted her attention and aroused her suspicions; my information was obtained, rather, in the course of long conversations about life in general, and the subsequent analysis, in the quiet of my room, of her replies, her comments, and her silences or her reluctance to answer my questions. I thus arrived at the conclusion, based on what I considered to be reliable evidence, that the blind paralytic was really her husband and that her hatred of him was as profound as her perverse idea of having me possess her in his presence seemed to prove beyond doubt.

  And I have said “seemed to prove beyond doubt” because naturally I immediately suspected that such scenes were deliberately staged in order to trap me, in accordance with the following schema:

  a) she hates her husband;

  b) she hates the blind in general;

  c) I bare my heart to her!

  My experience put me on my guard against such an ingenious trap, and the one and only way of getting at the truth was to investigate the genuineness of this resentment of hers. The fact that I considered most convincing was Louise’s particular type of blindness: the man had lost his eyesight as an adult, whereas Louise had been blind from birth; and I have already explained that those blind from birth have an implacable hatred of newcomers.

  The story of the couple’s relations was this: they had met in the Library for the Blind, had fallen in love, and had decided to live together; a series of quarrels then ensued because of his violent jealousy of her, ending in mutual recriminations and terrible fights.

  According to Louise, the blind man, Gaston, had no reason to be jealous, for she was truly in love with him: he was a good sort, and had a good head on his shoulders. But gradually he became so madly jealous of her that one day he decided to take his vengeance by tying her to her bed, bringing a woman in, and possessing her in Louise’s presence. In the midst of her torment, Louise swore she would get even, and a few days later, as they were leaving their lodgings together (they lived on the fifth floor of a cheap hotel, and in Paris hotels of this sort the elevator is to be used only for going up), when they reached the stairway, she pushed him. Gaston took a terrible tumble all the way down the stairs to the floor below, and as a result of this fall was permanently paralyzed. The one thing that remained intact afterwards was his extraordinarily acute sense of hearing.

  Since he was now incapable of communicating with others, being unable either to speak or to write, no one ever suspected what had really happened and everyone believed Louise’s version of how Gaston had come to fall down the stairs, a story that seemed entirely plausible given the fact that he was blind. Totally powerless to explain what had really happened, and tortured by the scenes that Louise staged with her lovers as her way of avenging herself, Gaston was like a man imprisoned within a rigid carapace with an army of carnivorous ants devouring his living flesh each time the blind woman moaned in passion there in bed with her lovers in his presence.

  Once I was satisfied as to the genuineness of Louise’s hatred of Gaston, I tried to find out something more about him, since one night as I was going over the events of the day in my mind, I was overcome by a sudden suspicion: what if this man, before he went blind, had been one of those nameless, audacious, clearsighted, implacable individuals who for thousands of years have been endeavoring to penetrate the forbidden world of the blind? Wasn’t it possible that having been blinded by the Sect as the first stage of his punishment, he had then been handed over to the terrible perpetual vengeance of that blind woman once she had succeeded, by order of the Sect, in making him fall in love with her?

  I imagined myself for a moment trapped alive inside that carapace, my intelligence unimpaired, my desires perhaps exacerbated, my sense of hearing incredibly acute, listening to that woman who at one time had driven me mad with passion, moaning and howling with her successive lovers. Only the blind could have invented such a torture.

  I got up out of bed in a terrible state of agitation. I couldn’t sleep all night, and for hours I paced back and forth in my room, smoking and thinking. It was absolutely necessary for me to verify this hypothesis in some way or other. But such an investigation of the Sect would be the most dangerous one that I had thus far undertaken. What I would be trying to discover was to what extent Gaston’s martyrdom prefigured my own fate!

  When dawn broke, my head was swimming. I took a bath in order to clear my brain and put these wild imaginings in better focus. Once I had calmed down, I said to myself: if that individual was being punished by the Sect, why had the blind woman provided me with this information calculated to arouse precisely this sort of suspicion on my part? Why had she explained to me that she was punishing him? She could have, and should have, concealed this fact from me if she wanted to trap me. I would never have tumbled to the real significance of the situation had it not been for this information, for I would not have known otherwise that the man could hear what was going on and hence was tormented by it. Even more important, if the aim of the Sect was to cause me to fall into the blind woman’s trap, what need was there to let me see the blind man in that bizarre situation that was bound to arouse my suspicions? On the other hand, I reflected, Domínguez had also gone to bed with that woman in the same circumstances, thus proving that it had nothing to do with my own investigation. This reassured me, but I decided nonetheless to be even more cautious than before.

  That very same day, I had recourse to a stratagem that I had already thought of but that until that moment I had refrained from employing: listening at the door. If the blind woman’s hatred was genuine, it was likely that when the two of them were alone she would also heap abuse on him.

  I went up to the sixth floor in the elevator and then cautiously walked down the stairs to the fifth floor, remaining on each step for five minutes. I eventually reached the door of their room and put my ear to it. I heard Louise’s voice and a man’s. This immediately struck me as significant, since I knew Louise was expecting me, though admittedly not until an hour later. Would she be capable of being with another man until almost the very moment she expected me to arrive? All I could do was wait and see.

  I tiptoed down the hall and waited in a corner, thinking that if anyone passed by that way I would head downstairs and no one would suspect anything. Fortunately there was no one coming in or going out at that hour and I was thus able to wait there till the time Louise had set for me to come, but I did not see a man leave her room. I then thought that some other friend or acquaintance was perhaps chatting with her while she was waiting for me to arrive. In any case, the appointed hour had come, so I went to her door and knocked. Louise came to the door and I went in.

  I very nearly fainted!

  There was not a soul in the room except the blind woman and the paralytic in his wheelchair.

  With my head spinning, it dawned on me what a sinister comedy had been staged for my benefit: a blind man, who was supposedly mute and totally paralyzed, stationed there by the Sect to pose as that bitch’s husband so that I would fall into the trap: her hatred of him, the famous crack, the inevitable confession.

  I ran out of the room, and then, in a rare moment when my mind was lucid and my memory accurate, I recalled that I had been clever enough not to give my address to anyone; not even Domínguez knew where I was living. And I also suddenly remembered that whether or not he was a real paralytic, the fact that that sinister playactor was undoubtedly blind would prevent him from pursuing me down the stairs.

  I rus
hed across the boulevard with the speed of the wind, entered the Jardin du Luxembourg, ran the entire length of it, and left it at the other end, still running. I caught a taxi there, intending to go by my hotel to pick up my suitcase and flee the country without losing a moment’s time. But as I hurriedly made plans for the trip, it occurred to me that even though I had not told a soul where I was living, it was very likely (what am I saying?—it was certain) that the Sect had had someone tailing me from the moment I left Louise’s, having foreseen that I would immediately attempt to light out for some other country. What the devil did it matter if I didn’t pick up my suitcase? I always carried my passport and my money with me. Even more important: not knowing exactly what might happen to me, my long experience in the course of this investigation had led me to take a precaution that now seemed to me to be a veritable stroke of genius: I had valid visas in my passport for two or three countries. Because, as can readily be imagined, the moment the news of what had happened at the place on the Rue Gay-Lussac got out, the Sect would immediately post a guard at the Argentine consulate so as to follow my trail. Once again, in the midst of all my agitation, I experienced an extraordinary feeling of power, thanks to my foresightedness and my cleverness.

  I instructed the taxi driver to take me down the grands boulevards and leave me off at the first travel agency we came to. I went in and bought a ticket on the next plane. It occurred to me that I might be followed to the airport, but then I decided that the Sect would be thrown off the trail because they would be expecting me to show up at the consulate first.

  And that was how I got out of Paris and flew to Rome.

  31

  How many stupid mistakes we make when it seems to us that we are applying the most rigorous logic to the situation in which we find ourselves: Our logic is indeed faultless, we reason magnificently well, given premises A, B, and C. The only thing is that we have not taken premise D into account, not to mention E and F and all the rest of the Latin alphabet and the Cyrillic as well. The same mechanism that allows those clever inquisitors, psychoanalysts, to have untroubled minds after having drawn perfectly valid conclusions from the sketchiest of facts.

  How many bitter thoughts occupied my mind during that flight to Rome! I tried to see the logic that lay behind my ideas, my theories, the events I had lived through, since we can be certain of the future only if we endeavor to discover the laws of the past.

  How many gaps there were in that past! How many careless mistakes! How many naivetés, even yet! It was at that moment that I remembered the Víctor Brauner incident and realized what an equivocal role Domínguez had played in my search. Now, years later, my hypothesis had been confirmed: Domínguez ended up in an insane asylum and committed suicide.

  During the flight I recalled the strange story of Víctor Brauner and I also recalled that when I had first met Domínguez again I had asked him about everyone: Breton, Péret, Esteban Francés, Matta, Marcelle Ferry. Everyone except Víctor Brauner. What a revealing “omission”!

  I shall recount the story of Brauner, in case my readers are not familiar with it. This painter was obsessed by blindness and in a number of his canvases there are likenesses of men with an eye that has been put out or torn from its socket. There is even a self-portrait in which one of Brauner’s eye sockets appears to be empty. And lo and behold, shortly before the war, during an orgy in the studio of one of the Surrealist painters, Domínguez, who’d been drinking heavily, threw a glass at someone; the person he was aiming at stepped aside and it missed him, but it put one of Víctor Brauner’s eyes out.

  Ask yourselves now whether there is any point in talking about sheer chance, whether sheer chance has any meaning at all in the affairs of men. On the contrary, men move like sleepwalkers toward ends that very often they are aware of only in the form of the vaguest of intuitions, but at the same time they are attracted to them as the moth is drawn to the flame. It was thus that Brauner was drawn to the glass hurled by Domínguez that put one of his eyes out; and it was thus that I was drawn to Domínguez in 1953, not knowing that once again it was my fate that was leading me to him. Of all the persons I might have contacted in that summer of 1953, my one thought had been to look up the man who in some way or other was in the service of the Sect. The rest is obvious: the painting that caught my eye and filled me with terror, the blind model (a model on this one occasion only), the farcical scene that took place as the two of them had intercourse and I watched them from my observation post up in the loft, my coming to be on intimate terms with the blind woman, the drama staged before the paralyzed man in the wheelchair, et cetera.

  A word of caution to the naive:

  NOTHING HAPPENS BY CHANCE!

  And above all a word of caution to those who will read this Report after I am dead and decide to pursue my research and go even further than I was able to. I have had many a hapless precursor: Maupassant (who paid the price for his audacity by going mad), Rimbaud (who despite his fleeing to Africa also ended up a victim of wild delirium—and of gangrene), and so many other nameless heroes we have never heard of whose fate it was to end their days, unknown to anyone in this world, between the four walls of a madhouse, in the torture chambers of political police, asphyxiated in wells, swallowed up by swamp waters, eaten alive by giant ants in Africa, devoured by sharks, castrated and sold to Oriental sultans, or, like myself, destined to die by fire.

  From Rome I fled to Egypt, and from there traveled by boat to India. As though Destiny had preceded me and were waiting for me there, I soon found myself in a bordello of blind women! In terror I fled to China and from there I went to San Francisco.

  I spent a few quiet months in the pension of an Italian woman named Giovanna and then finally decided to return to Argentina when to all appearances nothing suspect had happened in some time.

  Once back in Argentina, having learned my lesson, I kept on the alert, hoping to enter the secret universe by latching on to an acquaintance or a relative who had been blinded by accident.

  My readers already know what happened after that: the printer Celestino Iglesias, waiting, the accident, waiting once again, the apartment in Belgrano, and at last the hermetically sealed room where I believed I would meet the end that my destiny had in store for me.

  32

  I do not know whether it was due to my fatigue, to the long, nerve-racking hours of waiting, or to the stuffy air in the room, but I began little by little to be overcome by drowsiness and finally I fell into a troubled half-sleep, or so it seems to me today, haunted by nightmares that appeared to be endless, mingled with or elaborating upon memories such as the story of the elevator or the Louise episode.

  I remember that at a certain moment I thought I was smothering to death, and in desperation I got to my feet, ran to the doors, and began pounding furiously on them. Then I took off my suit coat and finally my shirt as well, because everything seemed like an enormous weight pressing down on me and suffocating me.

  Up to this point, I remember everything very clearly.

  I do not know, on the other hand, whether it was my pounding on the doors and my shouts that caused them to open the door, revealing the Blind Woman standing there.

  I can still see her, a hieratic form outlined in the doorframe, surrounded by a light that seemed vaguely phosphorescent. There was a sort of majesty about her, and from her bearing and above all her face there emanated an irresistible fascination, as though in the door-frame, erect and silent, a serpent had appeared, with its eyes riveted upon me.

  I struggled to break this spell that held me paralyzed: it was my intention (an absurd one, doubtless, yet more or less logical if one takes into account the fact that it was my last and only hope) to fling myself upon her, knock her over if necessary, and then find an exit leading to the street and make a run for it. But the fact of the matter was that I could scarcely remain on my feet: a torpor, an enormous exhaustion was gradually overtaking every last one of my muscles, the exhaustion of a sick man suffering an acute attac
k of fever. And in fact my temples were pounding harder and harder, to the point that at one moment it seemed as though my head were about to explode like a gas storage tank.

  I was still just conscious enough, however, to tell myself that if I did not take advantage of this opportunity to make my escape, I would never have another one.

  With an immense effort of will I marshaled all my remaining strength and flung myself on the Blind Woman. I shoved her violently aside and rushed into the next room.

  33

  Stumbling about in the darkness of this room, I searched for a way out. I opened a door and found myself in another room, even darker than the one I had just been in, where I again knocked over tables and chairs in my desperation. Feeling my way along the walls, I searched for another door, found one, opened it, and again found myself in a dark room, even more pitch black than the one before.

  I remember that in the midst of my total mental disarray I thought: “I’m lost.” And as though I had used up every last bit of my strength, I sank to the floor, all hope gone: I was surely trapped in a labyrinth that I would never get out of. I must have lain there for several minutes, panting and sweating. “I must not lose my presence of mind,” I told myself. I tried to collect my thoughts and suddenly remembered that I had a cigarette lighter with me. I lit it and saw that the room was empty and that it had another door. I went over to it and opened it: it led to a corridor, the end of which I could not see. But what other possibility was there except to venture down it? Moreover, a little reflection sufficed to prove to me that my previous conclusion that I was lost in a labyrinth was obviously a mistaken one, since the Sect would surely not condemn me to such an easy death.