On Heroes and Tombs

  Madmen, like geniuses, rise up in revolt against the limitations of their native land or their time, with results that are frequently catastrophic as they enter that absurd and magic, delirious and tumultuous no-man’s-land that upright citizens contemplate with mixed feelings, ranging from fear to hatred, from apparent scorn to a sort of awed admiration. And yet these exceptional individuals, these men who live outside the law and outside their fatherland still retain, in my opinion, many of the attributes of the country in which they were born and of the men who until yesterday were their fellows, although these attributes are as though deformed by the distorting lenses and badly focused enlargers of a monstrous system of projection. What other sort of madman could Don Quixote possibly have been save a Spanish madman? And though his extraordinary stature and his madness universalize him and somehow make him comprehensible and admirable in the eyes of everyone in the world, he possesses certain traits that could only come into being in that country at once as cruelly realistic and magically absurd as Spain is. And despite everything there was a great deal that was typically Argentine in Fernando Vidal. A large part of his contradictions were, of course, a consequence of his own particular nature, of his sick heredity, and might have manifested themselves in any corner of the globe. But I am convinced that others were a product of his being Argentine, a certain type of Argentine. And though he belonged, on his mother’s side, to an old family, he nonetheless was not, as might be supposed, the pure and simple expression of what is nowadays called the national oligarchy, or at least he did not have those peculiarities that the man in the street expects to find in such persons, in the same way, and with the same superficiality, that he invariably imagines all British to be phlegmatic and is comically disconcerted when he is reminded of the existence of individuals such as Churchill. It is true that those variations that made Vidal depart from the norm could have stemmed on the one hand from his heredity on his father’s side and on the other hand from the fact that the Olmos family was a bit eccentric and empty-headed (although this too is a genuine national characteristic in many old families). This family on the decline gave the impression of being made up of ghosts or absentminded sleepwalkers, amid a cruel reality that they neither felt nor heard nor understood; curiously, and even comically, this immediately gave them the paradoxical advantage of being able to pass through the extremely solid wall of reality as though it did not exist. But Fernando did not resemble this family at all, since he possessed, if only in spurts, in furious bursts, a frenetic energy, though this energy was invariably used to negate or to destroy, this being a trait he had no doubt inherited from his father, a lesser spirit yet one possessed of a dark and violent streak that he had passed on to his son; Fernando, it must be said, hated his father and refused to recognize him because of the very fact that he discovered within himself the attributes of this man whom he hated so passionately and whom he had tried to poison when he, Fernando, was a child. This infusion of the Vidal blood in the old Olmos family produced a violent reaction in Fernando’s case, and later in Alejandra’s, as happens, I believe, with certain sick or weak plants when harmful external stimuli cause cancers to develop that eventually take over and finally kill the entire plant thanks to their monstrous vitality. That is what happened with that old-line Olmos stock, so generous and so pitifully ridiculous in their absolute lack of realism—to the incredible point of going on living in the old house, in what remained of Barracas, where their forebears had had their quinta and where, shut up in the last miserable bits and pieces of that quinta, they now lived out their lives surrounded by factories and tenements, and where the great-grandfather dozed, dreaming nostalgically of the old virtues, swept away forever by the hard days of our era, just as a chaotic din swallows up a soft, innocent ballad of another time.

  I too, in my own way, had been in love with Alejandra, until I realized that it was her mother, Georgina, whom I loved, and who, on rejecting me, threw me into her daughter’s arms. Time made me realize my mistake, and I then returned to my first (and futile) passion; a passion that I imagine will linger on till Georgina dies, as long as I have the least hope of having her at my side. Because, though this may surprise you, she is still alive, not dead as Alejandra believed … or pretended to believe. Alejandra had many reasons to hate her mother, given Georgina’s temperament and her conception of the world, and many reasons for wishing she were dead. But I hasten to assure you that, despite what you might suppose after all this, Georgina is a profoundly good and kind woman, incapable of hurting anyone, especially her daughter. Why then did Alejandra hate her so and why had she mentally killed her off ever since her childhood? And why did Georgina live far away from her and far away from all the Olmoses in general? I don’t know if I can give you any satisfactory answers to these questions and others that may well continue to arise with respect to this family that has weighed so heavily in the balance of my life, and now the life of that youngster. I confess that I had intended to say nothing to you about my love for Georgina, because … well … let us say because I am not one to talk of my personal trials and tribulations. But I now realize that it would be impossible to shed light on certain aspects of Fernando’s personality without telling you something about Georgina, if only a few brief details. Have I already mentioned that she was Fernando’s cousin? Yes, she was the daughter of Patricio Olmos, and the sister of Bebe, the madman with the clarinet. And Ana María, Fernando’s mother, was Patricio Olmos’s sister, do you follow me? So Fernando and Georgina were first cousins. Moreover—and this is something that is highly significant—Georgina bore an amazing resemblance to Ana María: they not only had the same physical features, as was the case with Alejandra too, but also and even more importantly, the same traits of character: she was something like the quintessence of the Olmos family, without the taint of the violent and evil Vidal blood, refined, kindhearted, timid, and a bit dreamy, with a delicate and profoundly feminine sensibility. And as for her relations with Fernando …

  Let us imagine ourselves in a theater, seeing a beautiful woman on the stage whose serious expression, discreet charm, and self-composure attract us. But she is serving as a medium or a subject for an experiment in hypnotism or thought transference being carried out by a powerful, evil-looking man. We have all attended such a spectacle at one time or another and we have all observed how the woman automatically obeys the orders or even the merest glance of the hypnotizer. We have all noted the empty gaze, a bit like a blind man’s, of those subjected to such an experiment. Let us imagine that we feel an irresistible attraction for this woman and that during the intervals when she is awake or fully conscious she gives signs of being favorably inclined toward us. But what can we do when she is in the power of the hypnotizer? We can only feel sadness and despair.

  That was what happened to me with Georgina. And only at a few exceptional moments did that evil force appear to loosen its hold on her, and then (O marvelous, fragile, fleeting moments!) she would lean her head on my breast, weeping. But how precarious those instants of happiness were! She would soon fall under that baneful spell once again and then there was nothing to be done. I could wave my hands in front of her eyes, talk to her, take her by the arm, but she did not see me or hear me or feel my touch in any way.

  And did Fernando love her? And if so, in what way? I could not say for certain. In the first place, I believe he never really loved anyone. Moreover, he was so aware of his superiority that he was never jealous; at most, when he saw a man hovering about her, he would merely make some almost imperceptible sarcastic or scornful gesture. He was well aware that a very slight movement on his part was quite enough to put an end then and there to the least inclination she might be beginning to feel for the man, as a mere flick of a finger is sufficient to cause the sudden collapse of a house of cards that one has been laboriously constructing with bated breath. And she appeared to eagerly await this gesture on Fernando’s part, as though it were his greatest expression of love.

  He was invulne
rable. I remember, for example, when he married. Ah, of course: you naturally didn’t know that. And that too will no doubt surprise you. Not only the fact that he married but the fact that he did not marry his cousin. In reality, when one thinks about it, it would have been almost inconceivable for him to have done so, and if he had it would have been a real surprise. No: he had intimate relations with Georgina in secret, since at the time he was not allowed to set foot in the Olmoses’ house, and I have no doubt that despite his extremely kindhearted nature Don Patricio would have killed him. And when Georgina had her baby girl … well, it would take me a long time to explain everything, and moreover there would be no point in it, so perhaps I need merely say that she left home; more than anything out of timidity and shame, since neither Don Patricio nor his wife María Elena was capable of dealing with her fall from virtue in a crude or crass way; but she left nonetheless, disappearing shortly before Alejandra was born, and I might almost be tempted to say that the earth swallowed her up, as the expression goes. In any event Georgina abandoned Alejandra when the little girl was ten years old. Alejandra then went to live with her grandparents in the Barracas house, and Georgina never went back there, but all of this would take me too far afield if I were to tell you the whole story in detail, but perhaps you can understand it in part if you recall what I have already told you about the hatred, the deadly, mounting hatred that Alejandra felt toward her mother as she grew up. So I’ll go back to what I was telling you about before: Fernando’s marriage. It might come as a surprise to anyone that a nihilist like Fernando, that moral terrorist who felt nothing but scorn for any sort of bourgeois ideas or feelings, could go so far as to actually get married. But he would be much more surprised if he knew how Fernando came to do so, and who his bride was … a sixteen-year-old girl, a very pretty one, and one with a large fortune. Fernando had a penchant for beautiful, sensual women, while at the same time he felt enormous contempt for them; but he was even more attracted to them if they were still of very tender years. I don’t know the details because I never used to see him in those days; and even if I had spent time in his company, I would not have known much more, for he was a man capable of living quite comfortably on two or more entirely different planes at once. But I heard talk here and there, bits of gossip that must have had some truth behind them, an unsavory truth of course, as was invariably the case with all of Fernando’s ideas and actions. People told me, naturally, that Fernando had his eye on the girl’s fortune, that she was a young thing who was completely dazzled by that consummate actor. They added that he had had an affair (some said it had been before the marriage and others that he had gone on with it both during and after the marriage) with her mother, a Polish Jew around forty with intellectual pretentions, who did not get on well with her husband, a certain Szenfeld who was the owner of several textile mills. Rumor had it that while Fernando was having this affair with the mother, the daughter got pregnant and so “he had to marry the girl,” a phrase that really made me laugh when I heard it, since it is utterly absurd to think of Fernando of all people feeling any such moral obligation. Certain informants, who considered themselves more reliable sources than others because they played canasta in the house in San Isidro, maintained that there had been stormy scenes between the actors in that grotesque comedy, scenes full of raging jealousy and violent threats, and that—and this too struck me as particularly amusing—Fernando then maintained that he could not marry Señora Szenfeld, even if she got a divorce, because he belonged to an old Catholic family, and that he was duty-bound, on the other hand, to marry the daughter with whom he had had intimate relations.

  As you may suppose, to anyone who knew Fernando, as I did, these stories that were being whispered about were merely the source of a sort of regretful amusement, though of course there was a certain amount of truth to them, as is always the case with even the most fantastic tales. There were some things however that were demonstrable facts: Fernando did indeed marry a Jewish girl sixteen years old; for a couple of years he lived in a splendid house in Martínez that had been bought and given him as a gift by Señor Szenfeld; he soon squandered the money that he doubtless came into by marrying the girl, and finally the house too went down the drain, whereupon he abandoned her.

  These are facts.

  As for interpretations of these facts and rumors that made the rounds, they would require close analysis. Perhaps it would not be out of place for me to tell you what I think, since these episodes shed some light on Fernando’s personality, though admittedly it is not much more than the light that can be shed on the essence of the devil by learning of some of his tragicomic treacheries. Curious: this is the first time the word tragicomic has come to my mind in connection with Fernando’s personality, but I think it corresponds to the truth. Fernando was basically a tragic figure, but there are moments in his life that border on the humorous, though it is a black humor. In the course of those turbulent events surrounding his marriage he must surely have given vent to one of his fits of black humor and put on one of those infernal comic spectacles in which he took such delight. That phrase reported by the lady canasta players, for example, that phrase about his family’s Catholicism and the impossibility of his marrying a divorcée. A doubly grotesque phrase, because in addition to coming out with it in order to poke fun at the Catholicism of his family and Catholicism in general, and everyone and everybody and any and every moral principle or basic foundation of society, he uttered it to the mother of the girl with whom he was also having intimate relations at the time. This way of mixing the “respectable” and the indecent was one of Fernando’s specialties. The words, for instance, that he is rumored to have uttered so as to be able to keep the splendid house in Martínez for himself: “She has abandoned her home and fireside,” when in actual fact his young wife must have fled it in terror, or what is even more likely, was forced out of it thanks to some diabolical trick of Fernando’s. One of his favorite pastimes was to bring women who were obviously his mistresses home with him, persuading his young bride (his powers of persuasion were very nearly unlimited) to receive them and entertain them; but no doubt he gradually stepped up the experiment so that she would get more and more tired of the whole thing and finally flee the house, which was what Fernando was hoping for. How the property happened to remain in his hands I do not know; but I suppose he must have been clever enough to arrange things with the mother (who still loved him and hence was jealous of her daughter) and with Señor Szenfeld. How the latter could have become friends with someone rumored to be his wife’s lover, how that friendship or the weakness of a man as sharp as a lynx in business could have reached such a point that he gave a luxurious house as an outright gift to an individual who was not only his wife’s lover but was also making his daughter miserable will always be one of the mysteries surrounding Vidal’s enigmatic personality. But I am convinced that in order to achieve such ends Fernando must have brought off some very subtle scheme, not unlike those successfully perpetrated by Machiavellian heads of government against opposition parties that have fallen out with each other. What I think happened is this: Szenfeld hated his wife, who not only cuckolded him with Fernando but also with a partner of her husband’s named Shapiro before Fernando appeared on the scene. Szenfeld must have felt great satisfaction on discovering that at last someone had humiliated and wounded that self-important woman who so often showed nothing but contempt for him; and it was doubtless only a short step from that heartfelt satisfaction to admiration and even affection for Fernando, helped along by the latter’s talent for utterly charming a person when he set his mind to it, a talent that was furthered by his total lack of sincerity and honesty. For sincere and honest persons, by allowing themselves to show in their friendships frank signs of displeasure at the thousand and one minor annoyances that inevitably create momentary resentment between human beings, even the best of them, never manage to produce those miracles of unfailing charm that lie within the powers of cynics and liars; through the same mechan
ism, in a word, by virtue of which a lie is always more pleasing to people than the truth, since the truth concerning even those beings closest to perfection whom we would most like to please and satisfy inevitably has its ugly side inasmuch as even they have their imperfections. Moreover, Señor Szenfeld’s satisfaction was no doubt all the greater on seeing that his wife’s sufferings stemmed from feelings of hurt pride having to do with her age, since Fernando was being unfaithful to her by sleeping with a beautiful girl much younger than herself. And finally (a factor that may also have entered the picture), Szenfeld may perhaps have felt great satisfaction because in this entire affair it was not he, Szenfeld, who came out the loser, since in any case his status as a cuckolded husband had been established previously, but rather Señor Shapiro, who, being the cuckolder, probably had a sense of pride that was much keener, but at the same time more vulnerable, than Señor Szenfeld’s. And Shapiro’s defeat in this area, which was the only one in which he was superior to his partner (for Szenfeld, whatever his shortcomings as a husband might have been, was by common consensus as cunning as a lynx when it came to business), placed him in such a humiliating position that by contrast Szenfeld’s strengths were enhanced and his energies renewed. And this was surely how matters had gone, for not only did the textile firms suddenly embark on new and daring ventures, but following Fernando’s marriage, Szenfeld’s almost protective solicitude toward his partner in the presence of third parties was evident.