On Heroes and Tombs

  I remained there for a long time, not moving a muscle, divining the repellent life in death that these creatures led.

  When I rose to my feet, I felt as though the convolutions of my brain were full of dirt and covered with spider webs.

  I stood there for a long time on unsteady legs, not knowing what to do. Finally I realized that I ought to make my way toward the part of this great cavern where it seemed to me I could glimpse a sort of very dim, diffuse light. I understood then how closely linked the words light and hope must have been in the language of primitive man.

  The terrain I crossed to reach this light was uneven: in certain places the water came up to my knees and in others it had made the soil underfoot soggy. Thus it seemed to me to be exactly like the bottom of the lagoons of the pampas that I was familiar with as a child: a slimy, spongy mire. I detoured round the places where the level of the water rose and then continued walking in the direction of that faint far-off light.

  36

  The light grew brighter as I walked on, and finally I realized that the cavern that I thought I had been in was really an immense amphitheater opening out on a vast plain bathed in a very pale reddish violet light.

  When I had come far enough out of the amphitheater for my eyes to be able to take in the whole of that unknown sky, I saw that the faint light was coming from a heavenly body perhaps a hundred times larger than our sun, but whose fading gleam indicated that it was one of those stars close to death which with their last remaining energy bathe the frigid and abandoned planets of their universe with a dim glow similar to the one produced in the darkness of a great silent room by a fireplace in which all the logs have been consumed by the flames and all that is left are a few embers about to go out beneath the ashes; a mysterious reddish glow that in the silence of the night always causes us to lose ourselves in nostalgic and puzzling thoughts: thus transported to the most profound depths of our being, we ponder the past, age-old legends, distant lands, the meaning of life and death, until, almost fast asleep now, we seem to be floating on a lake of vague reveries, drifting on a raft that takes us out onto a deep sea on which crepuscular shadows are descending and whose waters are very nearly stagnant.

  A gloomy realm!

  Overwhelmed by the desolation and the silence, I stood there motionless for a long time, contemplating that vast expanse.

  Toward what seemed to me to be the west, in the deep violet twilight of a stormy but motionless sky, as though a great tempest had been frozen in place by a magic sign, against clouds that looked like tattered strips of cotton soaked with blood, there loomed up strange towers of colossal height, ruined by the ages and perhaps too by the same catastrophe that had devastated that dismal realm. Skeletons of huge beeches, whose spectral ash-colored contours stood out in sharp outline against the blood red clouds, appeared to indicate that a fire sweeping the planet had marked the beginning or the end of this cataclysm.

  Amid the towers stood a statue as tall as they. And in its center, at the level of the navel, a phosphorescent beacon sent forth a brilliant beam that I would have sworn blinked on and off, had the death that reigned in that desolate country not been an indication that this blinking light was merely an illusion of my senses.

  I was certain that my long pilgrimage would come to an end there, and that perhaps in those forbidden precincts I would finally discover the meaning of my existence.

  To the north, this melancholy wasteland was bounded by a lunar mountain range that was at least sixty to ninety thousand feet high. This great cordillera was like the spine of a monstrous petrified dragon.

  Toward the southern limits of the plain volcanic craters that resembled lunar cirques were clearly visible. Extinct and apparently ice cold now, they extended across the mineral plain all the way to the unknown territory lying to the south. Were these extinct volcanoes the ones whose streams of molten lava had set this country on fire and burned it to a cinder once upon a time?

  From where I was standing, rooted to the spot in an utter daze, it was impossible to tell whether the colossal towers (perhaps sacred towers used for unknown rites) were standing all by themselves on the plain or whether, on the contrary, they were standing in the middle of the low-lying dead cities, though from that distance there was no sign of such cities.

  The Phosphorescent Eye appeared to be summoning me, and the thought came to me that I was doomed by fate to walk toward the great statue in whose belly the Eye was embedded.

  But my heart seemed to have entered a sort of dormant state, like that of reptiles during the long winter months: it was scarcely beating. And I was aware of a dull pain, as though it had shrunk and turned hard at the very sight of that funereal landscape. There was no sound, no voice, no cracking or creaking noise to be heard in that dismal realm, and an indescribable melancholy rose like a fog from that mysterious, desolate country that lay before me.

  Could those enormously tall towers really be deserted? For an instant I imagined that in another age they might have been the redoubt of fierce, man-hating giants.

  But the Phosphorescent Eye continued to draw me toward it, and little by little that attraction proved stronger than my feelings of utter exhaustion, and at last I began to walk in the direction of the towers.

  For a period of time whose duration it is impossible for me to estimate, for the dying star remained in the same position in the stormy firmament, I slowly made my way across the vast silvery plain.

  And as I walked on, I could see that there was not a single living thing anywhere, that everything had been burned to cinders by the lava or petrified by the burning ashes that that cosmic cataclysm had rained down aeons ago.

  And the closer I came to the towers, the greater their majesty and mystery became. There were twenty-one of them, laid out in a polygon whose perimeter must have been comparable in size to that of Buenos Aires. The stone that they were built of was black, basalt perhaps, and hence they stood out in solemn grandeur above that ashen plain and against that violet sky rent by the ragged purple clouds. And though they were ruined by the ages and the cataclysm, their height was still awesome.

  In the center of them I could now make out clearly the statue of a naked goddess in whose belly the Phosphorescent Eye gleamed.

  The twenty-one towers seemed to be standing guard round about her.

  The statue of the goddess was carved out of ocher-colored stone. Her body was that of a woman, but she had the wings and the head of a vampire, in gleaming black basalt. Her hands and feet ended in powerful talons. The goddess had no face, but where her navel would have been there shone the gigantic eye that had guided and attracted me: this eye might have been an enormous precious stone, a ruby perhaps, but it seemed to me more like the ever-changing reflection of a perpetual inner fire, for its bright glow seemed to be a living thing that in the midst of this gloomy desolation sent a shiver of terror and fascination down my spine.

  This was a terrible nocturnal divinity, a demoniacal specter that surely held supreme power over life and death.

  As I drew closer to the great polygon enclosing the goddess, the mineral plain began to be strewn with mortal remains: a charred museum of horrors. I saw hydras that had once been alive and were now petrified, idols with yellow eyes in silent abandoned dwellings, goddesses with striped skin like zebras, images of a mute idolatry with indecipherable inscriptions.

  It was a country where the one rite celebrated was a petrified Death Ceremony. I suddenly felt so hideously lonely that I cried out in anguish. And in that mineral silence outside of history my cry echoed and reechoed, seemingly down through entire centuries and generations long since gone.

  Then silence reigned once again.

  I realized then that I must go on to the very end. The eye of the goddess gleamed, unmistakably beckoning me, with sinister majesty.

  The twenty-one towers formed the vertices of a polygonal wall, which I approached in stages that became more and more exhausting. And as the distance separating me from this
wall diminished, its height became more awesome. When I reached the foot of it and looked upward, I calculated that that apparently impenetrable wall was as tall as a Gothic cathedral. But the towers were probably a hundred times taller.

  I knew that somewhere in this gigantic perimeter there must be an entrance that would enable me to enter this enclosure. And perhaps it existed for this sole purpose. My mind was now as though possessed by the absolute certainty that everything (the towers, the desolate landscape, the enclosure surrounding the goddess, the dying star) had been awaiting my arrival and that it had not been reduced to nothingness only because it had thus been awaiting me. Hence once I succeeded in entering the Eye, everything would vanish, like an age-old simulacrum.

  This conviction gave me the strength to go on searching for the entrance until I found it.

  And thus, after walking for many exhausting days round and round that colossal perimeter, I finally came upon the door leading inside.

  Just inside this door was a narrow stone stairway ascending to the Phosphorescent Eye. I would be obliged to climb thousands of steps. I feared that vertigo and fatigue might get the better of me. But impelled by a fanatic will and sheer desperation, I began my ascent.

  For a period of time whose duration I was once again incapable of determining precisely (since the star remained in exactly the same position, illuminating that country outside of time), I mounted the endless steps of that stairway, though my lacerated feet and my pounding heart were a measure of that inhuman effort I made amid the silence of the plain reduced to ashes and strewn with idols and petrified trees, with the great Northern Range of mountains looming up behind me.

  No one, absolutely no one, aided me with his prayers or spurred me on by his hatred.

  It was a titanic struggle that I alone was obliged to wage, amid the stony indifference of nothingness.

  The Phosphorescent Eye grew larger and larger as I scaled the endless stairway. And when I stood before it at last, exhaustion and terror forced me to my knees.

  I remained in this position for some time.

  Then a cavernous, imperious voice that appeared to be coming forth from that Eye said:

  Enter now, this is your beginning and your end.

  I rose to my feet, and blinded by the brilliant red glow, I entered.

  An intense but deceptive brightness, characteristic of phosphorescent light, which blurs the contours of things and causes them to vibrate, illuminated a long, very narrow tunnel leading upward, that I was forced to ascend by crawling on my belly. And that bright glow was coming from the end of this tunnel, as from a mysterious underwater grotto. A glow perhaps being emitted by algae, a luminosity at once phantasmagorical and powerful, resembling the one that on nights in the tropics, sailing over the Sargasso Sea, I had seen as I gazed intently down into the ocean depths. A fluorescent combustion of algae which in that silence of the bottom of the sea illuminate regions peopled by monsters: monsters that come to the surface only in most unusual and terrifying circumstances, thus sowing panic among the crews of ships unfortunate enough to find themselves in their midst, to the point that these seamen sometimes go mad and plunge into the water, so that their abandoned vessels, left to their fate, drift helplessly, mute witnesses to catastrophe, for years, for decades, enigmatic ghost-ships, driven hither and thither by the ocean currents and the winds; until the rains, the typhoons of Oriental waters, the powerful sun of the tropics, the monsoons of the Indian Ocean, and time (simply Time) rot and rend their hulls and their masts, until the entire vessel is eaten away by salt and iodine, by marine funguses and fish; and its last remains finally disappear into the ocean depths, often very close to the same monster that brought on the catastrophe and that for years and years, attentively, malevolently, inexorably, has been contemplating the absurd, senseless peregrinations of the doomed vessel.

  Something hideous happened to me as I ascended that slippery, increasingly hot and suffocating tunnel: my body gradually turned into the body of a fish. My limbs slowly metamorphosed into fins and I felt my skin gradually become covered over with hard scales.

  My fish-body could glide through that opening only with the greatest of difficulty now and I was no longer making my way upward by dint of my own effort, since it was impossible for me even to move my fins: powerful contractions of that narrow tunnel that now seemed made of rubber squeezed me tightly but at the same time carried me upward by virtue of their incredibly strong, irresistible suction, toward the end of the tunnel, bathed in a dazzling light. And then I suddenly lost my fish-consciousness. Vast planetary regions and enormous spans of time were devoured in fury. But in the few seconds that it took to ascend to this Center, there passed before my consciousness a dizzying multitude of faces, catastrophes, countries. I saw beings that appeared to be contemplating each other in terror, I saw clearly scenes of my childhood, mountains of Asia and Africa that I had traversed in the course of my life as a world-wanderer, vengeful birds and animals mocking me, afternoons in the tropics, rats in a barn in Capitán Olmos, dark brothels, madmen shouting fateful words that unfortunately were incomprehensible, women lustfully displaying their gaping vulvas, vultures on the pampas feeding on bloated corpses, windmills on my family’s estancia, drunkards pawing through a garbage can, and huge black birds diving down with their sharp beaks aimed at my terrified eyes.

  I imagine that all this took place in the space of just a few seconds. I then lost consciousness and felt that I was suffocating to death. But then my consciousness seemed to be replaced by a sensation, at once vague and extremely powerful, of having at last entered the great cavern and been swallowed up in its warm, gelatinous, phosphorescent waters.

  37

  I don’t know how long I remained unconscious. All I know is that when I came to, I had the impression that I had traversed entire zoological eras and descended into the abysses of some fathomless, archaic, unknown ocean.

  At first I had no notion of where I was, nor did I remember the long pilgrimage to the Deity or the events that had preceded it. I was lying on my back in a bed; my head felt as heavy as though it were stuffed full of iron, and my clouded eyes could scarcely see: the only thing I could make out was a strange phosphorescence that little by little I realized was the same as that in the Blind Woman’s room before I had made my escape. But an invincible torpor prevented me from moving so much as a muscle or even from turning my head from side to side to try to discover where I was. But little by little my memory seemed to reorganize itself, like a communications center after an earthquake, and recollections of my long journey began to come back to me in bits and pieces. Celestino Iglesias, entering the apartment in Belgrano, the passageways, the appearance of the Blind Woman, being trapped in the room, escaping, and finally, the descent to the Deity. I then realized that the phosphorescent light that appeared to bathe the room I was now in was the same as that in the grotto or the belly of the great statue and the same as that seemingly produced in the Blind Woman’s room when she had reappeared.

  Then that memory, as well as what my eyes little by little discerned on the ceiling and the walls, made me suspect that I was once again in the room of the Blind Woman that I had escaped from, or thought I had escaped from, before. My senses seemed gradually to become as acute as they had been before, and although I did not dare turn my head in the direction of the door, I now had the sensation that the Blind Woman was there in the doorway once again. Since I didn’t dare turn my head, I tried to confirm this impression by looking out of the corner of my eye, and even though I was not able to make out any individual details, I glimpsed a woman’s hieratic form.

  I was in the Blind Woman’s room again. And the whole of my pilgrimage through subterranean passages and sewers, my progress through the great cavern, and my final ascent to the Deity had thus been a phantasmagoria conjured up by the magic powers of the Blind Woman or of the entire Sect. Nonetheless, I was reluctant to admit that this was so, for the great devastated plain and those age-old towers an
d that formidable statue seemed more like a nightmare, whereas my descent into the sewers of Buenos Aires and my journey through the subterranean mire inhabited by monsters had, by contrast, the concreteness and the vividness of detail of something that I had actually experienced. And this led me to believe that the rest too, the journey to the Deity, had not been a dream but a reality. At that moment I had neither sufficient lucidity nor the necessary calm to analyze this impression, but I now think that I really and truly did live all that, and that even if by chance I had never left the Blind Woman’s room, her powers had nonetheless caused me to experience everything that I had without moving, as commonly occurs in the magic practiced by primitive cultures; the body sleeps, or appears to sleep, as the soul journeys through distant realms. Hasn’t the soul been conceived of as a bird that can fly to far-distant lands? Once it has escaped its prison of flesh and time, it can wing its way upward to a timeless heaven, where there is no before or after and where the things that are to happen, or will appear to happen, to its own body are already there, for all time, become eternal like statues of Calamity or Misfortune. Hence if every dream is a wandering of the soul through these realms of eternity, every dream, for the person who knows how to interpret it, is a prophecy or a report on what is yet to come. And so it was that on that journey I learned, as Oedipus learned from the lips of Tiresias, the inevitable end that was assigned me.

  I felt the woman approach my bed. More than her footsteps, which could barely be heard in that silence, as though she were barefoot, it was my exacerbated senses that told me that this was so. Lying there motionless, as though petrified, staring up at the ceiling, I nonetheless perceived that she was treacherously creeping closer and closer. And closing my eyes, as if to avert the act that was fated to take place, I said to myself: “She is now only three steps from my bed,” “she is now only two steps away,” “she is right here beside me.” I could feel the presence of that creature at the foot of my bed. I didn’t want to open my eyes, but I knew that she was there waiting, watching me so intently that the suspense was unbearable.