So I made my way down the corridor, slowly and anxiously, since my lighter provided only a very feeble light; moreover I flicked it on for only a few moments at a time in order not to use up the fuel in it too fast.
After some thirty steps, the corridor ended at a stairway leading downward, like the one that I had taken from the very first apartment to the cellar, that is to say a stairway enclosed in metal tubing. It doubtless passed through the apartments or houses and led to the cellars and underground sewers of Buenos Aires. After some thirty feet or so, the stairway was no longer enclosed and passed through vast open spaces that were nonetheless pitch black. They might have been basements or storage rooms, though in the tiny flickering flame of my lighter it was impossible for me to see very far.
34
As I descended I heard the unmistakable sound of running water, thus leading me to believe that I was approaching one of those underground sewers that form an immense, labyrinthine network stretching for thousands and thousands of kilometers beneath the city. In fact I soon ended up in one of those fetid tunnels, at the bottom of which was a rushing torrent of foul-smelling liquid. A light far off in the distance probably indicated the location of a storm drain or a manhole leading up to the street or perhaps the place where this tunnel that I was in joined one of the main sewers. I decided to head in that direction. I had to pick my way along the narrow walkway that runs along the edge of these tunnels, for losing my footing in such a place could be not only indescribably sickening but fatal as well.
Everything was sticky and disgusting. The walls of the tunnel were damp, with little trickles of water running down them, doubtless infiltrations from strata above.
My thoughts had dwelt on this subterranean network more than once in my life, no doubt on account of my tendency to ponder such things as cellars, wells, tunnels, caves, caverns, and everything that in one way or another is related to that enigmatic subterranean reality: lizards, snakes, rats, cockroaches, weasels, and the blind.
The abominable sewers of Buenos Aires! A hideous inferior world, the fatherland of filth! I imagined splendid salons up above, full of beautiful, refined women, of prudent, dignified bank directors, of schoolteachers saying that one mustn’t write bad words on walls; I imagined starched white aprons, diaphanous evening dresses of tulle or delicate chiffon, poetic phrases whispered to one’s beloved, stirring discourses on civic virtues. Meanwhile here below, in obscene and pestilential tumult, there rushed along, mingled in a single stream, the menstrual blood of those romantic, beloved women, the excrement of those ethereal young girls dressed in tulle and chiffon, the condoms used by dignified bankers, aborted fetuses by the thousands, the remains of meals of millions of homes and restaurants, the immense, the immeasurable Refuse of Buenos Aires.
And everything was heading toward the Nothingness of the ocean by way of secret subterranean conduits, as though Those Up Above wanted to forget, to refuse to recognize the existence of this side of their reality. As though heroes in reverse, such as myself, were condemned by fate to the infernal and accursed labor of bringing this reality to light.
Explorers of Filth, witnesses to Refuse and Bad Thoughts.
Yes, I suddenly felt myself to be a sort of hero, a hero in reverse, a black and repugnant hero, but a hero nonetheless. A sort of Siegfried of darkness, advancing in the shadows and the stink with my black banner whipping in the hurricane blasts of Hell. But advancing toward what? That was what I was unable to discern then, and what, even today, in these moments just before my death, I still am unable to understand.
I finally arrived at what I had thought would be a storm drain, since the feeble light that had helped me make my way along the tunnel was coming from there. But in fact it was the place where the conduit in my tunnel emptied into another much larger one whose waters almost roared as they rushed along. At that spot, far overhead and to one side, was a little opening that I calculated to be about three feet long and approximately ten inches wide. It was impossible even to think of trying to get out through it since it was so narrow and above all so inaccessible. Disappointed, I headed to my right then, so as to follow the much larger sewer that I had now come upon, my thought being that by so doing I would be bound sooner or later to reach the place where it emptied, providing that the stifling, mephitic air didn’t cause me to lose consciousness and fall into the filthy current before I got there.
But I could not have walked more than a hundred steps when, to my great joy, I spied a little stone or cement stairway leading up from the narrow walkway that I was so cautiously picking my way along. It was doubtless one of those manholes used by workers when they are obliged to enter these caverns from time to time.
My spirits revived by the very sight of this little stairway, I began climbing up it. After some six or seven steps it turned to the right. I continued on up the stairs for about the same distance and reached a landing leading to a new passageway. I began to walk along it, and finally arrived at another little stairway like the others. But to my vast surprise, it led down instead of up.
I was puzzled and stood there for some time hesitating as to what to do. Should I go back the way I had come till I reached the vast sewer and continue walking along the edge of it till I found a stairway leading up? I was surprised that this new stairway led down, when logically it should have led up. I decided, however, that the previous little stairway going up, the passageway that I had just come through, and this new little stairway going down no doubt formed a sort of bridge passing over a transverse sewer, as in subway stations where there is a transfer point for another line. I thought that in any event if I continued on in the direction I was going, I was bound to come out on the surface some way or other. So I walked on: I went down the new stairway and then followed the passageway that it had led to.
35
The farther I went along this passageway, the more it resembled a tunnel in a coal mine.
I began to feel a damp cold and then I noticed that I had been walking for some time on ground that was wet, doubtless because of the trickles of water silently flowing down the walls that had become more and more rough and cracked. They were no longer the cement walls of a passageway built by engineers but rather, it appeared, the walls of a tunnel carved out of the very subsoil of the city of Buenos Aires.
There was less and less oxygen in the air, or perhaps this was a subjective impression due to the darkness and the narrowness of the walls hemming me in inside this tunnel that seemed to be endless.
I also noted that the floor of the tunnel was no longer horizontal but rather slanted slowly downward, though not on an even slope, as though the tunnel had been excavated by following the irregularities of the terrain. In other words, it was no longer something planned and constructed by engineers with the aid of suitable machinery; one had the impression, rather, of being in a crude subterranean tunnel dug by men or prehistoric animals who had taken advantage of, or perhaps widened, natural fissures and the beds of underground streams. This impression was borne out by the amount of water in the tunnel; there was more and more of it now, making my progress more and more difficult. At times I waded through mud and mire and then reached sections that were firmer and rockier underfoot. The water was now filtering through the walls in heavier and heavier streams. The tunnel gradually widened out, until I suddenly realized that it was leading to a cavern that must have been immense, for my footsteps echoed as though I were inside a gigantic vault. Unfortunately, with only the feeble light of my cigarette lighter, it was impossible for me to make out precisely how large it was. I also noted a sort of fog, formed not by water vapor but due rather, as a very strong odor seemed to indicate, to the slow spontaneous combustion of some sort of rotten wood.
I had stopped dead in my tracks, intimidated I think by the sheer size of this vast, vague grotto or vault. I could feel the water covering the surface underfoot; not stagnant water however, for it was flowing in a direction that I presumed would lead to one of those underground lak
es such as speleologists explore.
The absolute solitude, the impossibility of making out the precise size of this monstrous cavern in which I found myself and the extent of those waters that seemed to me to be immense, the vapor or smoke that was making me dizzy and sick to my stomach all contributed to my anxiety, to the point that it became unbearable. I felt utterly alone in the world and like a sudden flash of lightning the idea crossed my mind that I had descended to its very origins. I felt at once enormously important and utterly insignificant.
I feared that those vapors would sooner or later so intoxicate me that I would fall into the water and drown, at the very moment that I was about to discover the central mystery of existence.
From that moment on I am unable to distinguish between what actually happened to me and what I dreamed or what they made me dream, to the point that I am no longer certain of anything, not even of what I think happened in the years and even the days immediately preceding this, so that today I would even doubt that the entire Iglesias episode ever took place, except that I know for certain that he lost his eyesight in an accident that I myself witnessed. But everything else that happened after this accident I remember with that feverish clarity and intensity that events have in a long and horrendous nightmare: the pension on the Calle Paso, Señora Etchepareborda, the man from the electric company, the emissary who looked like Pierre Fresnay, entering the apartment in Belgrano, the Blind Woman, being trapped in that room waiting for the verdict.
My head began reeling, and being certain that sooner or later I would lose consciousness, I somehow had the good sense to go back to a spot where the water was not as deep, and once there I collapsed in utter exhaustion.
I then heard, in a dream I suppose, the sound of the waters of the little stream called Dead Indian Brook lapping on the stones as it empties into the Arrecifes River, back on our land in Capitán Olmos. I was lying on my back in the meadow, on a summer afternoon, hearing in the distance, far in the distance, the voice of my mother, who as usual was softly humming a song as she bathed in the little stream. This song that I could now hear seemed to be a happy one at first, but then it began to make me more and more anxious: I wanted to understand what she was singing and though I tried desperately to do so I was unable to, and my anxiety became more and more unbearable as the thought possessed me that the words of the song were crucial, a matter of life or death. I woke up shouting: “I can’t understand!”
As often happens to us when we awaken from a nightmare, I tried to figure out where I was exactly, what my real situation was. There were many times, even after I was grown up, when I used to think that I was waking up in the room I slept in as a child there in Capitán Olmos, and it would take me long, frightening minutes to come back to reality, to the room where I in fact was, to the present: struggling like a person who is drowning, someone who fears that he will again be swept up by the dark and tumultuous river from which he has just begun to emerge, after painful effort, by clinging to the edges of reality.
And at that moment, when the anxiety brought on by that song or moan had become so severe that it was intolerable, I felt that strange sensation again and tried desperately to hang on to the edges of the reality to which I was awakening. Except that now this reality was even worse: as though I were awakening to a nightmare, so to speak. And my cries, which came back to me in the form of muffled echoes bouncing off the giant vault of the cavern, finally roused me to my true situation. Amid the empty silence and the darkness (my lighter had disappeared in the water when I collapsed on the ground) the words I had cried out on awakening resounded again and again until they died out at last in the distance and the darkness.
When the last echo of my cries had faded away in the silence, I sat there for a long while, completely overwhelmed: it was as though for the first time I was suddenly fully aware of my utter solitude, of the pitch black darkness round about me. Until this moment, or rather until the moment immediately preceding the dream of my childhood, I had been caught up in the vertigo of my investigation, as though irresistibly impelled by mad, unconscious forces; and the fears and even the terror that I had experienced up to that point had been incapable of holding me back; my entire being seemed to have been swept up in a mad dash to the abyss that nothing could stop.
As though it were an illusion, I now remembered the tumult in the world above, the other world, the chaotic Buenos Aires peopled by frenetic windup dolls: all that seemed to me to be a childish phantasmagoria, insubstantial and unreal. Reality was this other one here where I was. And all by myself there, at the very apex of the universe, as I have already explained, I felt at once immensely important and utterly insignificant. I have no idea how long I remained in this sort of stupor.
But the silence was not an unbroken, abstract block; rather, little by little it began to take on that complexity that it acquires when one is surrounded by it for long, anxious stretches of time. And then one notices that it is peopled with little irregularities, with sounds that are imperceptible at first, with indistinct echoes, with odd creaking noises. And as when one gazes patiently at the damp spots on a wall and gradually begins to be able to make out the outlines of faces, of animals, of mythological monsters, so in the vast silence of that cavern my attentive ear little by little discovered meaningful structures and forms: the characteristic murmur of a distant waterfall; the muffled voices of men speaking together cautiously; the whisperings of creatures who were perhaps very close by; mysterious faltering prayers; the cries of night birds. An infinity of sounds and signs, in short, arousing new terrors or absurd hopes. Because just as Leonardo did not invent faces and monsters in damp spots but rather discovered them in those labyrinthine redoubts that he frequented, so there was every reason to believe that it was not my anxiety and my terror that made me imagine that I could hear the meaningful sounds of muffled voices, of prayers, of the beating of wings or the cries of giant birds. No, my anxiety, my imagination, my long and terrifying apprenticeship as an investigator of the Sect, the increasing refinement of my senses and the acuteness of my intelligence during my long years of research allowed me to discover voices and malevolent forms that an ordinary person would never have noticed. I had already had my first premonitions of that perverse world in the nightmares and deliriums of my earliest childhood. Everything I did or saw later in the course of my life was related in some way or other to the secret designs of that universe, and facts that meant nothing to ordinary people leapt to my eye, in clear and precise outline, as in those drawings for children where one is supposed to find the dragon hidden among the trees and brooks. And thus, while the other children hurried through the pages of Homer, finding them a bore and reading them only because they were assigned them by their teachers, I felt my first shudder of terror when the poet describes, with frightening power and almost mechanical precision, with the perversity of a connoisseur and violent, vengeful sadism, the moment when Ulysses and his companions run a red-hot stake through the great eye of the Cyclops and make it boil in its socket. Wasn’t Homer himself blind? And another day, on opening my mother’s big mythology book, my eye chanced to fall on the passage that read: “And I, Tiresias, as punishment for having seen and desired Athena as she was bathing, was struck blind; but the Goddess, taking pity on me, gave me the gift of understanding the speech of birds that prophesy; and that is why I say to you, Oedipus, that you are that man who unwittingly killed his father and married his mother, and for so doing you are to be punished.” And as I have never believed in sheer chance, even as a small child, that game, for I believed that Tiresias was merely playing a sort of game, struck me as a prophetic sign. And from that moment on I could not banish Oedipus’s terrible end from my mind: putting his own eyes out with a pin after hearing those fateful words that Tiresias had uttered and being present when his mother hanged herself. Nor could I banish from my mind my intimate conviction, that with time became stronger and stronger and more and more well founded, that the blind rule the world, by way o
f nightmares and fits of delirium, hallucinations, plagues and witches, soothsayers and birds, serpents, and in general, all the monsters of darkness and caverns. It was thus that I was little by little able to make out the abominable world that lay behind appearances. And it was thus that I began to train my senses, exacerbating them through passion and anxiety, hope and fear, so as to be able in the end to see the great forces of darkness as the mystics are able one day to see the god of light and goodness. And I, a mystic of Refuse and Hell, can and must say: BELIEVE IN ME!
Thus, in that vast cavern I spied at last the outskirts of the forbidden world, a world to which few mortals save the blind appear to have had access. They have paid for their discovery with terrible punishments and until today no testimony of theirs concerning this world has ever incontestably reached the hands of men who in the world above continue to live their naive dream, scornfully dismissing any sort of account of this forbidden world or shrugging their shoulders when confronted with signs that ought to have awakened them: a dream, a fleeting vision, a tale told by a child or a madman. And only as a mere pastime have they read the truncated reports of those few who may have succeeded in entering the forbidden world, writers who also ended their lives as madmen or suicides (Artaud, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, to name three) and who therefore have earned only that condescending mixture of admiration and disdain that grownups display toward children.
I could hear, then, invisible beings moving about in the darkness, hordes of huge reptiles, snakes writhing one atop the other in the mud like worms in the decayed dead body of a giant animal; enormous bats, a sort of pterodactyl whose immense heavy wings I could now hear beating, sometimes lightly brushing my body and even my face in a most repulsive way; and men that had ceased to be really human, for either because of their perpetual contact with these subterranean monsters, or because of the necessity of moving continually over swampy terrain, they no longer walked upright but instead crawled along on their bellies through the mud and the filth that accumulated in these caverns. Things that I cannot claim to have seen with my very own eyes (given the eternal darkness that reigns in this world), but I have nonetheless been able to intuit them, thanks to unmistakable signs: a panting, a sort of grunting, a kind of splashing about.