On Heroes and Tombs

  “Because”—Martín had said to him on his return from the South, raising his head for an instant as he stubbornly looked down at the floor, that typical pose of his that went back to his youth and no doubt his childhood and would never change, one of those poses that, like our fingerprints, are with us till we die—“because you loved her too, didn’t you?”

  A conclusion that—at long last!—he appeared to have arrived at there in the South, during endless nights of silent meditation. And Bruno had merely shrugged his shoulders and said nothing. What could he have said? And how could he have explained to him about Georgina and that sort of mirage of his childhood? Moreover, he wasn’t even certain that it was true, true in the sense at least that Martín might imagine. He had therefore said nothing in reply and merely looked at Martín equivocally, thinking that after several years of silence and remoteness from civilization, years of reflection in those lonely expanses, that stoic youngster still needed to tell his story to someone; and because he still—still!—hoped perhaps to find the key to that tragic and marvelous lack of understanding between him and Alejandra, out of that anxious but ingenuous need that human beings have to find that presumed key, even though in all probability, if such a key in fact exists, it is as vague and mysterious as the very events that it is meant to explain. But on that first night following the fire, Martín seemed like a shipwreck victim who had lost his memory. He had wandered aimlessly about the streets of Buenos Aires and even when he finally found himself in Bruno’s presence he had no idea what to say to him. He saw Bruno there in front of him, smoking, waiting, looking at him, understanding him, but what could he say? Alejandra was dead, dead beyond question, having suffered a horrible death by fire, and everything was pointless and more or less unreal. And when he eventually decided to leave, Bruno took him by the arm and said something to him that he did not altogether understand or that in any case he found it impossible to remember later. Then once he was out on the street again, he began wandering about like a sleepwalker once more, returning to those places where it seemed to him that Alejandra might suddenly appear at any moment.

  But little by little Bruno began learning things, in bits and pieces, in the course of other meetings with Martín, absurd visits that at times were unbearable. Martín would suddenly begin talking like an automaton, babbling disjointed phrases, seemingly searching for some sort of precious trace left in the sands of a beach that have been swept clean by a violent wind blowing off the sea. Fragile footprints of phantoms. He was searching for the key, the hidden meaning. And Bruno might know, he had to know: Hadn’t he known the Olmoses since his childhood? Hadn’t he practically seen Alejandra come into the world? Hadn’t he been a friend of Fernando’s or something of the sort? Because he, Martín, was at a loss to understand any of it: Alejandra’s absences, those peculiar friends of hers, Fernando—what did they all mean? And all Bruno did was look at him, understand him, and doubtless pity him. Bruno learned the most crucial facts when Martín returned from that remote region where he had buried himself, when time seemed to have caused that pain to settle in the very bottom of his soul, a pain that seemed to begin to disturb and agitate him and cloud his mind from the moment he was once again confronted with people and things that were indissolubly connected with the tragedy. And even though by this time Alejandra’s flesh had rotted and turned to dust, that youngster, who had reached full manhood now, nonetheless continued to be obsessed by his love, and there was no way of knowing how many years (until his death, most likely) he would continue to be thus obsessed; this, in Bruno’s opinion, constituted a sort of proof of the immortality of the soul.

  Martín “had” to know, Bruno said to himself with melancholy irony. Of course he “knew.” But how much did he know? And what sort of knowledge was it? For what do we really know about the ultimate mystery of human beings, even those who have been closest to us? He remembered Martín on that first night there at his place; he was reminded of one of those youngsters whose photographs appear in the papers after earthquakes or train derailments in the night, sitting on a bundle of clothes or a pile of debris, with dim, dull eyes, grown suddenly old by virtue of that power that catastrophes have to wreak upon a human being’s body and soul, in a few hours, the devastation that ordinarily is brought on slowly by the years, illnesses, disappointments, and deaths. Then Bruno superimposed upon that desolate image other later ones, in which Martín resembled those wounded veterans who with time rise from their own ruins, with the aid of crutches, far away now from the war in which they nearly lost their lives, but no longer what they once were, since the experience of horror and death now weighs heavily upon them forevermore. Bruno would see Martín there before him, his arms hanging limply at his sides, his eyes riveted on a point usually located behind and to the right of Bruno’s head, seemingly probing his memory with silent, painful cruelty, like a man mortally wounded trying to remove, with infinite care, the poisoned arrow from his torn flesh. “How lonely he is,” Bruno would think then.

  “I don’t know anything. I don’t understand anything,” Martín burst out all of a sudden. “What I had with Alejandra was …”

  And he left the sentence unfinished, as he raised his bowed head and finally looked at Bruno with eyes that seemed not to see him.

  “And yet …,” he stammered, stubbornly and anxiously searching for words, though fearing that he would be unable to communicate the precise nature of “what I had with Alejandra”; a phrase that Bruno, being twenty-five years older, could easily complete: “What I had with Alejandra was at once marvelous and disastrous.”

  “You know …,” Martín murmured, clenching his fingers painfully, “my relations with her were not at all clear …. I never understood …”

  He took out his famous white penknife, examined it, opened the blade.

  “Lots of times I thought it was like a series of powder flashes, of …”

  He searched for an exact comparison.

  “Like explosions of gasoline, that’s it … like gasoline explosions on a dark night, a stormy night …”

  His eyes stared at Bruno again, but undoubtedly they were gazing toward his own inner world, obsessed by that vision.

  It was at this point during his visit that he added, after a thoughtful pause:

  “Even though at times … very few times, it’s true … it seemed to me that she found a sort of respite when she was with me.”

  A respite (Bruno thought) like the one soldiers find in a foxhole or an improvised refuge as they advance across a dark, unknown no-man’s-land amid an inferno of machine gun fire.

  “Yet I wouldn’t be able to say exactly what sort of feelings …”

  Martín raised his eyes again, but really looking at him this time, as though asking him for a key, but as Bruno said nothing, he lowered his gaze once again, examining the white penknife.

  “Of course,” he murmured, “it couldn’t have lasted. It was like in wartime, when one lives from moment to moment … I suppose … because the future is never certain, and always awful.”

  Then he explained to Bruno that the signs of impending catastrophe had already begun to appear in the very midst of that frenzy, just as it is possible to imagine what is about to happen when one is on a train in which the engineer has gone mad. It made him uneasy, but at the same time it attracted him. He looked at Bruno again.

  And then Bruno, simply to be saying something, to break the silence, said:

  “Yes, I understand.”

  But what did he understand? What?

  3

  Fernando’s death (Bruno said to me) has made me ponder not only his life but my own, thereby revealing in what way and to what degree my own existence, like that of Georgina, like that of many men and women, was thrown into upheaval by Fernando’s.

  People keep asking me, pressing me for details: “You who knew him intimately …,” they say. But the words knew and intimately are little short of ridiculous when applied to Vidal. It is quite true that I was close
at hand at three or four decisive periods in his life and that I knew one side of his personality: that side which, like one face of the moon, was turned toward us. It is also quite true that I have certain theories about his death, theories that I nonetheless do not feel inclined to reveal to others, for it is more than likely that any theory one has about him is totally mistaken.

  I was (physically) close to Fernando at several periods in his life, as I have already said: during our childhood in Capitán Olmos, till 1923; two years later, in the Barracas house, after his mother had died and his grandfather had brought him there; then again in 1930, when we were adolescents, in the anarchist movement; and finally, in the fleeting encounters we had in recent years. But in this last period he was already someone completely outside my life, and in a certain sense completely outside everyone’s life (though not Alejandra’s, of course). He was already what is rightly called an alienated man, or one that could be so called, a stranger to everything that we consider, perhaps naively, to be “the world.” And I still remember that day not long ago that I spied him making his way down the Calle Reconquista like a sleepwalker. He seemed not to see me, or pretended not to see me (these two possibilities being equally likely in his case), even though we had not laid eyes on each other for more than twenty years at the time and a normal person would have had any number of reasons to stop and talk with me. And if he did see me, as is possible, why did he pretend not to see me? Since it’s Vidal we’re talking about, it’s impossible for me to give you any clearcut answer. One of the possibilities is that he was going through one of his periods of persecution mania, so that he might well have done his best to avoid me—not despite the fact that I was an old acquaintance, but indeed for that very reason.

  But vast stretches of his life are a closed book to me. I know, of course, that he visited many countries, although if one is talking about Fernando, it would be closer to the truth to say that he “fled” through many countries. There are traces of these travels, these explorations. There are bits and pieces of information about his passage here or there, that came to light through people who saw him or heard stories about him: Lea Lublin met him once in the Dôme in Paris; Castagnino saw him eating in a trattoria near the Piazza di Spagna in Rome, though the moment Vidal realized that he had been recognized he ducked behind a newspaper and pretended to be reading it with all the concentration of someone who is very nearsighted. Bayce confirmed a paragraph in Vidal’s “Report on the Blind”: he had indeed met him in the Tupi-Nambá Café in Montevideo. And that is all. Because we have no sort of detailed or coherent picture of his travels in general, not to mention those far-ranging expeditions of his to the islands in the South Pacific or Tibet. Gonzalo Rojas informed me that he was once told about an Argentine “of such and such a description” who had been going around Valparaíso making inquiries as to the possibility of taking passage on a schooner that periodically called at Juan Fernández Island; by putting together this bit of information and what I knew about his life, the two of us arrived at the conclusion that the Argentine in question was Fernando Vidal. But why would he have wanted to go to Juan Fernández? We know that he had connections with spiritualists and people who dabble in black magic, but the testimony of individuals of this sort must be regarded as dubious at best. Of all these mysterious episodes, the only one that may perhaps be taken to be fact was his meeting with Gurdjieff in Paris, and this we are fairly certain of because of the fistfight he had with him that led to a run-in with the police which went on record. You may point out to me that we have his memoirs, the famous Report. In my opinion we cannot take it to be an objective document, a series of photographs of events that actually happened, so to speak, though there is good reason to regard it as being authentic in a more profound sense. This Report would seem to be an account of his moments of hallucination and delirium, moments which strictly speaking comprised almost the whole of the final period of his life, those moments in which he sequestered himself somewhere or disappeared from sight. On reading these pages I have the sudden impression that Vidal was someone sinking into the depths of Hell, waving his handkerchief to bid us goodbye, and delivering himself of delirious, mocking words of farewell, or desperate appeals for help perhaps, disguised and concealed by his arrogance and his hauteur.

  I am endeavoring to recount this whole story to you from the beginning, but I find myself impelled again and again to speak only in generalities. Indeed, it is impossible for me to entertain a single important thought about my own life that does not in some way have something to do with Fernando’s tumultuous existence. His spirit continues to dominate mine, even after his death. To me this is of no moment: it is not my intention to shield myself from his ideas, those ideas that made and unmade my life, though not his: like those experts who know everything there is to know about explosives and can both arm a bomb and defuse one with no risk whatsoever to themselves. I shall thus forbear henceforth from pondering whatever scruples I may have on the subject, and from engaging in reflections of this sort that are quite beside the point. Moreover, I consider myself to be fair-minded enough to concede that he was superior to me. My respect for him was only natural, to the point that I feel relief and a certain pleasure in recognizing that fact. Nonetheless I was never fond of him, though frequently I admired him. I detested him, yet I was never indifferent to him. He was not one of those beings whom we can watch pass our way with indifference: he instantly attracted us or repelled us, and usually both things at once. He possessed a sort of magnetic power, which could be either one of attraction or of repulsion, and when contemplative or hesitant persons such as myself entered his field, they were driven this way and that, like little compass needles entering regions disturbed by magnetic storms. And in addition to all this, he was an individual whose moods were constantly shifting, ranging unpredictably from the heights of enthusiasm to the depths of depression. This was but one of his hundred contradictions. He was capable of reasoning with an iron logic one minute, and the next he would turn into a madman who, though still seemingly arguing with the greatest rigor, would arrive at the most incredible absurdities, which nonetheless struck him as normal and valid conclusions. One minute he would take great pleasure in conversing brilliantly, and then suddenly he would turn into a haughty loner off in a corner whom no one would have dared say a word to. I have mentioned, I believe, the word lustful as being one of those that might characterize his nature; yet at certain moments of his life he would suddenly give himself over entirely to an extremely rigorous asceticism. At times he was quiet and contemplative; at others he would be caught up in frantic activity. I have seen him, as a child in Capitán Olmos, visit acts of hideous cruelty on defenseless animals and then display a totally incompatible tenderness toward them. Was he putting on some sort of show for my benefit, moved to do so by the irony, the cynicism that was also part of his nature? I have no idea. There were moments in which he appeared to admire himself with a narcissism that was absolutely disgusting, and the next moment he would be delivering himself of the most scornful opinions concerning himself. He would defend Latin America and then laugh at those scholars who have set great value on our way of life in the New World. Yet when someone, swept along by Fernando’s epigrams or sarcasms aimed at one or another of our notables, added some minuscule contribution of his own, he was immediately annihilated by a withering irony aimed in his direction. Fernando was the precise opposite, in short, of what we take a well-balanced person to be, or simply what we consider a person to be, if what differentiates a person from a mere individual like countless others is a certain consistency, a certain constancy and coherency of ideas and feelings. There was no sort of coherency in him, save that of his obsessions, which were thoroughgoing and permanent. He was the diametrical opposite of a philosopher, of one of those men who think and develop a system as a harmonious construct; he was a sort of terrorist of ideas, an antiphilosopher. Nor did his face always appear to be the same face. The truth is that I always thought that several
different persons dwelt within him. And despite the fact that he was no doubt a scoundrel, I would venture to say that he nonetheless possessed a certain sort of purity, though it may well have been an infernal sort. He was a kind of saint of Hell. I once heard him say in fact that in Hell, as in Heaven, there are many hierarchies, ranging from mere average sinners (the petty bourgeois of Hell, he said) to the enormously wicked and desperate, the black monsters privileged to sit at the right hand of Satan; and it is possible that without saying so explicitly he was at that moment expressing an opinion as to his own true condition.