On Heroes and Tombs

  I had the strange sensation that that woman had come to me in response to a mysterious but persistent summons of my own being. I am at a loss even now to explain it: it seemed certain that I was a prisoner of the Sect and that that woman who was now at my side and with whom I would have the darkest and most infernal of copulations was part of, or the beginning of, the Punishment that the Sect had in store for me, but it also seemed certain that it was the end of a long quest that by my own will I had slowly, patiently, and deliberately pursued, to the very end, over the space of many years.

  It was as though a curious double magnetic attraction had been operating. I had been translated like a sleepwalker to the secret realms of the Sect, yet at the same time it seemed as though for years and years I had projected my most obscure and most intimate powers in order to convoke at last, there in that room in Belgrano, the woman that in a certain sense I had most desired in my life.

  A complex sensation, then, at once paralyzed me and intoxicated me: an amalgam of fear and anxiety, of nausea and sensuality. And when I was able at last to open my eyes, I saw that she was standing there naked before me, and from her body there seemed to radiate an electric fluid flowing toward mine and awakening my lust.

  How and by what means could that woman be the Punishment that since time immemorial the Sacred Sect had conceived, sadistically prepared, and was now visiting upon me? In terror, and at the same time with a hope that I ought rightly to call black (the hope that must exist in Hell), I saw how that serpent was preparing to lie with me. In the darkness of tropical nights I had seen the ghostly electricity of Saint Elmo’s fire sparking forth from the masts of ships; and I could now see that that magnetic fluorescence illuminating the room was emanating in like manner from the tips of her fingers, from her hair, from her eyelashes, from the vibrant tips of her breasts straining like compass needles of burning flesh in the field of the powerful magnet that had drawn them through dark and delirious domains.

  A Black Serpent possessed by demons, and yet endowed with a sacred wisdom!

  Motionless, as still as a bird beneath the gaze that hypnotizes it, I saw her draw closer, slowly, voluptuously. And when her fingers touched my skin at last, it was like the electric discharge of the Great Black Ray that haunts the ocean depths.

  A powerful flash of lightning blinded me, and for an instant I had the dizzying, now-certain revelation: IT WAS SHE! In that fleeting instant my mind was a whirlwind, but now, as I await death, I meditate on the mystery of that incarnation, perhaps similar to the one which, convoked by an imperious desire, takes possession of the body of a medium, with the one difference that it was not only the spirit, but the body as well that took on the traits invoked. And I also wonder whether it was my secret and involuntary will that had patiently called forth that incarnation that the Blind Woman so perversely offered me or whether the Blind Woman and all that Universe of the Blind to which she belonged was, on the contrary, a formidable organization in my service, for my voluptuous pleasure, my passion, and in the end my punishment.

  But that instant of lucidity was no more than a lightning flash illuminating the abyss. I then lost all sense of everyday life, all precise memory of my real existence and the consciousness that determines the great and decisive categories within which man must live: Heaven and Hell, good and evil, flesh and the spirit. And time and eternity as well: for I do not know, and shall never know, how long that diabolical carnal union lasted, since in that cavern there was neither light nor dark and everything was a single, infernal long day’s journey into night.

  I do not doubt now that that being could command the inferior powers; powers that, if they do not create reality, are in any event capable of producing terrible simulacra outside of time and space, or even within them, transforming them, inverting them, deforming them. I witnessed catastrophes and tortures, saw my past and my future (my death), felt my time stop, thus conferring on me a vision of eternity, lived whole geological eras and evolved through entire species: I was man and fish, I was an amphibian, I was a great prehistoric bird. But all this is confused now and it is impossible for me to recall the precise metamorphoses I went through. Nor is there any need to do so, for the same union kept repeating itself again and again, obsessive, monstrous, fascinating, lewd.

  I believe I remember a turbulent and torrid landscape of the sort that we imagine covered our planet in archaic periods, with giant ferns everywhere: a cloud-enshrouded, radioactive moon cast its light on a sea of blood licking yellowish shores. Beyond them lay vast stretches of swamp in which there floated the same huge lotuslike flowers as I had seen in my other dream. Like a centaur in heat I galloped across those burning sands, toward a woman with black skin and violet eyes who was waiting for me, howling at the moon. I can still see the mouth and the sex yawning open, blood red, in her coal black sweating body. I entered that idol furiously and had the sensation that it was a volcano of flesh, whose maw was devouring me and whose flaming entrails reached to the center of the earth.

  The maw was still dripping with my blood, awaiting the next attack. Like a lustful unicorn I ran through the burning sands toward the black woman, who waited for me, howling at the moon. I crossed lagoons and stinking swamps, black crows took wing, screaming as I passed, and finally I entered the Deity. I again felt that it was a volcano of flesh that was devouring me, and the maw was still dripping blood as it awaited, howling, the next attack.

  Then I was a serpent crossing hissing, electric sands. Again wild beasts and birds fled in terror as I passed, and I entered the cavity with savage fury. Once more I felt the volcano of flesh, reaching down to the center of the earth. Then I was a swordfish.

  Then an octopus, with eight tentacles that entered the Deity, one by one, and one after the other were devoured by the flesh-volcano.

  The Deity howled once more and again awaited my attacks.

  I was then a vampire. Thirsting for vengeance and blood, I flung myself in fury on the woman with black skin and violet eyes. I felt the volcano of flesh opening its maw to devour me and felt its entrails reaching down to the center of the earth. And its maw was still dripping with blood as I flung myself upon her once again.

  I was then a giant satyr, then a crazed tarantula, then a lewd salamander. And each time I was swallowed up by the furious volcano of seething flesh. Then suddenly a terrible storm broke. Amid flashes of lightning, amid a rain of blood, the Deity with black skin and violet eyes was a sacred prostitute, a cavern and a well, a pythoness and a sacrificial virgin. The hurricane-swept, electric air was filled with screams. On the burning sands, amid a tempest of blood, I was made to satisfy her lust like a magus, like a starving dog, like a minotaur. Only to be devoured yet again. Then I was in turn a fire-bird, a human serpent, a phallic rat. And then I was made to change into a ship with masts of flesh, into a lubricous bell-tower. Only to be devoured yet again. The tempest then became an immense chaos: beasts and gods cohabited with the Deity along with me. The volcano of flesh was then rent to pieces by the horns of minotaurs, voraciously eaten away by giants rats, cruelly devoured by dragons.

  Struck by the lightning bolts, that entire archaic realm shuddered, set aflame by the electric flashes, swept by the hurricane of blood. Then the deadly radioactive moon exploded like fireworks: bits and pieces, like cosmic sparks, hurtled through black space, setting forests afire; a great conflagration broke out, and as it raged in fury it brought on the reign of utter destruction and death. Amid dark screams and cries, bloody tatters of flesh crackled and were borne upward. Whole vast domains turned into yawning chasms or great swamps, by which men and beasts alike were swallowed up or eaten alive. Mutilated beings ran about among the ruins. Severed hands, eyes that rolled and bounced like balls, heads without eyes that groped about blindly, legs that ran about separated from their trunks, intestines that twisted round each other like great vines of flesh and filth, moaning uteruses, fetuses abandoned and trampled underfoot by the host of monsters and abominations. The entire Universe
collapsed on top of me.

  38

  I have no way of discovering now how long that day lasted. When I woke up (to describe what happened in some way or other) I felt that impassable abysses separated me forever from that nocturnal universe: abysses of space and of time. As blind and deaf as a man rising from the depths of the sea, I emerged into everyday reality once again. I ask myself whether this reality is at last the true one. For as my daytime consciousness recovered its strength and my eyes little by little were able to make out the contours of the world round about me, thus bringing the realization that I was in my room in Villa Devoto, in my one room in Villa Devoto that was so familiar to me, I thought in terror that perhaps another, even more incomprehensible, nightmare was just beginning.

  A nightmare that will inevitably end with my death, for I remember the future of blood and fire that it was given me to contemplate in the course of that frenetic magic spell. Strangely enough, no one seems to be pursuing me now. The nightmare of the apartment in Belgrano has ended. I do not know how it is that I am free, here in my own room; no one (it would seem) is keeping watch on me. The Sect must be immeasurably far away.

  How did I arrive back home again? How did the blind let me out of that room in the center of a labyrinth? I do not know. But I do know that all of that happened, exactly as I have recounted it. Including—most importantly—that last dark day.

  I also know that my days are numbered and that death awaits me. And one thing seems strange and incomprehensible to me: the fact that this death that awaits me will come about because in a certain sense I myself have so willed it, for no one will come looking for me here and I myself will be the one who goes, who must go, to the place where the prophecy will be fulfilled.

  Cunning, the will to live, desperation have caused me to imagine a thousand ways of fleeing, a thousand ways of escaping my fate. But how can one escape one’s own destiny?

  I therefore end my Report here, and shall hide it in a place where the Sect cannot find it.

  It is midnight. I am going there now.

  I know that it will be waiting for me.

  Part Four

  * * *

  AN UNKNOWN GOD

  1

  On the night of June 24, 1955, Martín was unable to sleep. He saw Alejandra again, just as she had looked that first time, approaching him in the park; then suddenly there came back to him, in a chaotic rush, memories of tender or terrible moments he had spent with her; and then, once again, he saw her walking toward him at that first meeting; the fabulous, original image of her. Then at last a heavy, lethargic sleep gradually came over him and his imagination began to wander in the ambiguous realm of dreams. It seemed to him he could hear distant, melancholy bells tolling, and a vague moan, perhaps a cry, whose meaning he could not make out. Gradually it turned into a disconsolate, barely perceptible voice calling his name over and over, as the bells tolled more loudly still, until finally they rang out with real fury. The sky, the sky in the dream, seemed to be lighted now by the blood red glow of a fire. And then he saw Alejandra coming toward him in the red shadows, with her face contorted and her arms reaching out toward him, moving her lips as though in anguish and mutely repeating that call. Alejandra!, Martín shouted, his cry waking him from his sleep. When he turned the light on, trembling, he found himself alone in his room.

  It was three o’clock in the morning.

  He lay there for some time not knowing what to think, what to do. Finally he began getting dressed, and as he did so he became more and more anxious, to the point that he suddenly rushed down into the street and hurried to the Olmoses’ house.

  And the moment he spied the bright glow of a distant fire against the cloudy sky, not the slightest doubt remained in his mind. Breaking into a desperate run, he managed to reach the house and immediately fainted amid the crowd of onlookers. When he came to again in a neighbor’s house, he ran back to the Olmoses’, but the police had already removed the dead bodies, and the firemen were now struggling desperately to confine the fire to the Mirador.

  Of that night, Martín remembered isolated incidents that bore no connection to each other: the idea that an idiot might have of a catastrophe. But events appeared to have unfolded thus:

  Around two in the morning (as he stated later), a man who had been walking down the Calle Patricios to Riachuelo saw smoke. Then it turned out that as usual several people had seen smoke or fire or suspected that something was wrong. An old woman who lived in an adjoining tenement declared: “I don’t sleep much, so I smelled the smoke and tried to rouse my son who works at Tamet and sleeps in the same room with me and tell him there was a fire, but he’s a sound sleeper and he told me to let him alone”; “and I was right, you see,” she added with that pride—Bruno thought—that the majority of human beings, and elderly people in particular, take in having correctly prophesied serious illnesses or fatal catastrophes.

  As efforts were being made to put out the fire in the Mirador after the dead bodies of Alejandra and her father had been removed from it, the police carried old Don Pancho out of the house, wrapped in a blanket, sitting there in his wheelchair as always. And what about the madman? And Justina? the neighbors watching the fire wondered. But then they saw a man with gray hair and an elongated head in the shape of a dirigible being led out; he had a clarinet in his hand and appeared to be in rather a happy mood. As for the old Indian maidservant, her face was as impassive as always.

  There were shouts to clear the street. Some of the neighbors gave the firemen and the police a helping hand, salvaging pieces of furniture and clothing. There was lots of running around, and signs of that euphoria with which people witness catastrophes that momentarily free them from a gray and altogether ordinary existence.

  Bruno was unable to ascertain any other fact worthy of mention regarding the events that took place that night.

  2

  The following afternoon, Esther Milberg telephoned Bruno to tell him that she had just read the police report in La Razón (the morning papers had doubtless not had time to include it in their editions). This was the first news that Bruno had had of what had happened: Martín was wandering about the streets of Buenos Aires in a stupor and had not turned up at Bruno’s yet.

  In the first few moments Bruno had no idea what to do. Then, although there was really no point in it, he hurried to Barracas to see what remained of the fire. A policeman kept him from getting any closer to the house. Bruno asked what had become of old Olmos, the maidservant, the madman. On the basis of what the policeman could tell him and the information he obtained later, he arrived at the conclusion that the Acevedos had hastily taken a number of steps, being indignant at and frightened by the news stories that appeared in the afternoon papers (though not as upset by the events themselves, due to the fact, he supposed, that nothing that that family of madmen and degenerates was responsible for could possibly have surprised them), news stories that made the entire family the object of a wave of scandal and gossip, even though the Acevedos and the Olmoses were only distantly related. As a result the Acevedos, the rich and sensible branch that had always tried to keep the Olmoses, that unsavory branch of the family, out of the limelight (and had succeeded to the point that very few of those who belonged to the best circles of Buenos Aires society were aware that there were still Olmoses around, and above all that they were related to the Acevedos), suddenly found their names linked to scandalous events, thanks to the police reports in the papers specifically mentioning the relationship between the two branches of the family. Hence (so Bruno’s thoughts ran) the Acevedos would no doubt have hurriedly taken Don Pancho, Bebe, and even Justina off somewhere, for the express purpose of throwing people off the trail and keeping reporters from exploiting those irresponsible creatures for their own ends. For it was necessary to reject the possibility that the Acevedos had done so out of affection or compassion, knowing as Bruno did the hatred they professed toward these miserable figures who were all that was left of a brilliant past.
>
  That same night when he returned home, he learned from his housekeeper that “that skinny youngster” had come round looking for him, a boy who, according to Pepa’s reproachful expression (for she always seemed to hold Bruno responsible for the shortcomings of his friends) was “a lost soul now as well.” And that “as well” made him smile amid his horror at what had happened, since it indicated a series of failings that his housekeeper had apparently discovered little by little in poor Martín, which had finally reduced him to that ultimate and wretched state that she summed up in the words “a lost soul,” an expression that as it happened was an exact description of the state of mind that Martín was indeed in at the moment: like a child who discovers, in fear and trembling, that he has lost his way in a forest by night. Bruno did not find it at all surprising that Martín had come looking for him. Even though he was a youngster who was extremely reserved, to the point that Bruno had never heard him utter a complete sentence about anything, much less Alejandra, why wouldn’t he have come to him, the only person with whom he could unburden himself of some of his anxiety and perhaps find some sort of explanation, consolation, or support? Bruno, of course, had some idea of the relationship that had existed between Martín and Alejandra, not because Alejandra had told him (she was not the kind of person to share confidences of this sort), but rather because of the sort of silent refuge that that youngster had sought with him, because of the few stammered words he had said about Alejandra from time to time, and above all because of that insatiable thirst that lovers have to hear anything at all that might in any way refer to their beloved (though Martín had not been aware that he was questioning or listening to a man who had also felt a sort of love for Alejandra, even though it was the echo or the false and momentary projection of another love, his real love, for Georgina). But despite the fact that Bruno knew or sensed that Martín had been having a certain type of relation with Alejandra (and the expression “a certain type” was inevitable when it was a question of relations with her), he did not know the details of that love-friendship that he had watched develop with amazement, for even though Martín was an exceptional boy in a number of ways, he was really very young still, almost an adolescent, whereas Alejandra, though only a year older than Martín as measured by the calendar, was possessed of experience that was frightening, and seemingly age-old. An amazement that revealed (Bruno told himself) a persistent and apparently inextinguishable naiveté in his own soul, since he knew very well (though he knew it with his intellect, not with his heart) that nothing pertaining to human beings should ever be cause for astonishment, above all because, as Proust said, the “even thoughs” are almost always unknown “whys,” and no doubt it was precisely that abyss between their spiritual ages and their experience of the world that explained why a woman like Alejandra should have been drawn to a boy like Martín. This intuition of Bruno’s was gradually confirmed after Alejandra’s death and the fire, as he heard those confused but maniacal and at times minute details of Martín’s relationship with her. Details that were maniacal and minute not because Martín was abnormal or a sort of madman, but because the hallucinatory, hopelessly intricate ways in which Alejandra’s mind had always worked forced him to engage in that sort of almost paranoiac analysis: for the pain born of a passion constantly confronted with obstacles, especially mysterious and inexplicable obstacles, is always more than sufficient reason (Bruno thought) to cause the most sensible man to think, feel, and act like someone out of his mind. Naturally Martín did not recount all this when he turned up that first night after Alejandra’s death and the fire after wandering all about the streets of Buenos Aires, still stunned by the tragedy and reduced more or less to the mental state of an idiot; but later, in those few days and nights that followed, until the unfortunate idea of turning to Bordenave occurred to him; those days and nights in which he spent hours at Bruno’s side, sometimes not saying a word and sometimes talking on and on like a person who has been given an injection of some truth serum; or perhaps, to be more precise, one of those drugs that cause tumultuous and delirious images to come suddenly to the surface from the most profound and most secret regions of the human psyche. And years later too, when Martín would return to Buenos Aires from that remote region in the South and come to see him, out of that eager desire (Bruno thought) that causes men to cling to the last remaining traces of a person whom they have loved a great deal, those last traces of body and soul that the beloved has left behind in the world: in the vague, fragmentary immortality of photographs, of words spoken to others at one time or another, of a certain expression that someone remembers, or says he remembers, and even of those small objects that take on an inordinate symbolic value (a little box of matches, a ticket to a movie theater); objects or words that then bring about the miracle of giving that spirit a fleeting, intangible, though despairingly real presence, just as a fond memory is brought back by a breath of perfume or a snatch of music, a fragment that need not be important or profound and may indeed even be an unpretentious and even banal melody that made us laugh in those magic days because it was so vulgar, but that now, ennobled by death and eternal separation, seems moving and profound to us.