On Heroes and Tombs

  As for Georgina, I will tell you something about her that is quite typical of her. Fernando’s marriage took place in ’51. At about that time I met Georgina in the Calle Maipú, near the Avenida; something quite unexpected since she very rarely came downtown. At forty, her beauty had faded and she looked much older; she had an air of sadness about her and was quieter than ever; though she had always been reserved and not at all talkative, I found her silence at that moment almost unbearable. As always, I was overcome with emotion. Where had she been hiding herself all these years? In what absurd places was she secretly living out the drama of her life? What had she been doing all this time, what had she been thinking and suffering? I would have liked to ask her all this, but I knew that it was useless; while it was extremely difficult to drag any sort of conversation out of her, it was completely impossible to get her to answer any questions having to do with her personal life. Georgina always seemed to me to resemble those houses that one comes across in remote sections of the city, silent houses whose doors and windows are almost always closed, houses inhabited by enigmatic adults: two brothers who have never married, a recluse who has been the victim of some tragedy, a frustrated, or unknown, misanthropic artist with a cat and a canary; houses that we know nothing of, that are opened up only at a set hour so that foodstuffs can be unobtrusively brought in; opened not to peddlers or delivery boys but simply to the things that they are bringing, that, from behind a door opened scarcely more than a crack, are gathered in by one arm of the solitary inhabitant. Houses in which just a single light burns at night, corresponding perhaps to a sort of kitchen where the solitary occupant both eats his meals and spends his time; the light later on moving to another room, where presumably he sleeps or reads or devotes himself to some absurd labor such as putting a sailboat together inside a bottle. A single light that invariably has moved me to ask myself, as a curious person and one who lives on conjectures, who can that man, or that woman, or that pair of old maids be? And what does he or she live on? A pension, an inheritance? Why doesn’t he or she ever go out? And why does that light stay on till the wee hours of the morning? Is he or she reading perhaps? Or writing? Or can the occupant be one of those lonely and at the same time fearful beings who can face his or her loneliness only with the aid of that great enemy of ghosts, be they real or imaginary, that light represents?

  I had to take Georgina by the arm, and almost shake her before she recognized me. She seemed to be walking along half asleep, carrying a package. And it was still a surprise to see her alive there amid the chaotic hustle and bustle of Buenos Aires.

  A smile stole over her weary face, like the soft glow of a candle being lighted in a dark, silent, dreary room.

  “Come,” I said, taking her to the London.

  We sat down and I put my hand over one of hers. How old and worn out I found her! I had no idea, however, what to say to her or what questions to put to her, since the things that really interested me I could not ask her about, and why even inquire about the others? I confined myself to looking at her, like someone who silently visits scenes from bygone days, gazing tenderly and sadly at the work of the years that her face had undergone: fallen trees, houses that were ruins now, rusted moldings, unrecognizable plants in the former garden, a tangle of weeds and dust on the remains of pieces of furniture.

  But unable to contain myself, with mingled irony and sadness, I commented:

  “So Fernando married.”

  It was something I needn’t have said, though I did so unthinkingly, moved by that abominable combination of emotions, and I immediately regretted having done so. Two barely perceptible tears began to fall from Georgina’s eyes, as though one last small confession, murmured in the faintest of voices, as a consequence of one last brutal blow, had been able to be extracted from someone on the brink of death from starvation and torture.

  It is strange, and not at all to my credit, that at that moment, instead of finding some way of making light of my unfortunate comment, I said testily:

  “And you’re weeping still!”

  For a second her eyes blazed, with an intensity that resembled that of the old days as a memory resembles present reality.

  “I forbid you to pass judgment on Fernando!” she replied.

  I drew my hand away.

  We said no more. We finished our coffee in silence, and then she said:

  “I must go now.”

  The same pain as in the past overcame me, that pain that had lain dormant all those long years since I had given up all claim to her love. Heaven only knew when I would see her again.

  We parted without a word. But after walking a few steps away, she halted for an instant, turned halfway around, almost shyly, and it seemed to me that I caught a glimpse of pain, tenderness, and desperation in her eyes. I thought of running to her and kissing her wrinkled face, her sad eyes, her embittered mouth, and of asking her, begging her to let us see each other again, to allow me to be close at hand. But I refrained from doing so. I knew very well that this was a dream that could never be, that each of us would be obliged to follow our own destiny, without ever meeting, till our death.

  Shortly after that chance meeting, Fernando and his wife separated. I also learned that the house in Martínez, Señor Szenfeld’s famous gift, had been auctioned off and that Fernando had gone to live in a little house in Villa Devoto.

  It is probable that many things had happened in that period and that this sequence of events had been the result of terrible vicissitudes in Fernando’s life: I happen to know, for instance, that at that particular time he had been frequenting the roulette table at Mar del Plata and losing enormous sums. I also heard that he had participated in a real estate deal or some sort of illegal transaction having to do with land out by the Ezeiza airport, although this may well have been an apocryphal story circulated by friends of the Szenfeld family. But it is quite true that he ended up in the very modest little house in Villa Devoto where, as it happened, the “Report on the Blind” was found hidden.

  I have already mentioned the fact that Szenfeld gave Fernando a helping hand. I think now that it would be more apt to say that he “handsomely rewarded him” on the occasion of his incredible marriage. Like many others Szenfeld became entangled in Fernando’s net, to the point that he helped him later on in his real estate speculations and got him out of financial difficulties in the period when he was gambling heavily. Nonetheless, for reasons unknown to me, the old friendship with Señor Szenfeld eventually came to an end—or probably came to an end, otherwise the fact that Fernando spent his last days in such miserable straits is inexplicable.

  The last time I met Fernando on the street (not counting that time I ran into him in the Constitución district, when he pretended he didn’t know me, or perhaps didn’t even see me, since he had already entered that final period when his mind was totally absorbed by his mad obsession with the blind), he was with a very tall, fair-haired individual with a strikingly hard, cruel face. As I had practically knocked Fernando down, he was unable to make his escape and exchanged a few words with me, while the other man stepped a few paces away and looked toward the street after Fernando had introduced him to me: he had a German name that I don’t remember now. A few months later I came across his photograph on the crime page of La Razón; his cruel face with its thin, tight lips was impossible to forget. He was shown alongside other individuals being sought by the police as the bandits suspected of holding up the Flores branch of the Banco de Galicia. A perfect holdup, which the police thought had been the work of wartime commandos. The individual in question was Polish and had been a commando in the Anders resistance group. But his name as given in the paper was not the one that Fernando had introduced him to me by.

  The business of the two different names made me quite certain that the theory the police were going on was the right one. That individual had been planning a big job of some sort at the time I had chanced to run into Fernando. Was Fernando mixed up in some way with this big job? Most proba
bly. As a young man he had been the leader of a gang of thugs and armed bandits from Avellaneda, and moreover, in view of his straitened financial situation it was more than likely that he had returned to his old passion: holding up banks. This was a method that had always seemed to him an ideal one for suddenly getting his hands on a large sum of money, while at the same time it had a symbolic value for him. “The Bank,” he had said to me more than once when we were kids, “the Bank (it always seemed to have a capital letter when he said it) is the temple of the bourgeois spirit.” Yet his name was not one of the ones on the list of suspects being sought by the police.

  After that chance meeting, I had not seen him again during these last two years, during which, to judge by the bizarre writings he left behind, he would appear to have plunged into his mad exploration of the subterranean world.

  He had been obsessed by the blind and blindness for as long as I can remember.

  Shortly before the death of his mother, when we were still living in Capitán Olmos, I remember something that happened that was quite typical of him in this regard. He had caught a sparrow and taken it up to the room he had in the attic under the eaves (the room that he called his little fort), where he had put its eyes out with a needle. Then he let it go, and the bird, maddened with pain and fear, dashed frantically against the walls, unable to find the window and fly out. I had tried to prevent him from mutilating the bird, and felt sick to my stomach. I thought I would collapse as I went down the stairs and was obliged to cling to the banister for some time until I felt all right again, and meanwhile I heard Fernando, there upstairs in the attic, laughing at me.

  Though he had often told me that he put out the eyes of birds and other animals, this was the first time that I had ever actually seen him do so. And also the last. I shall never forget the hideous sensation I experienced that morning.

  Because of this episode I never went back to his house or to the estancia, thereby depriving myself of what for me was the most important thing when I went there: seeing his mother and hearing her talk. But, I now think, I did not return for that very reason, because I could not bear the thought that she was the mother of a boy like Fernando. And the wife of a man like Juan Carlos Vidal, a man I remember with loathing even today.

  Fernando hated his father. He was twelve years old at the time, with the same dark hair and cruel face. And although he detested him, he had many similar traits, not only physical ones but personality traits as well. His face had some of the features typical of the Olmoses: green eyes, prominent cheekbones. All the rest came from his father’s side of the family. As the years went by he denied, more and more vehemently, that he and his father were alike in any way, and I think that this resemblance between them was one of the principal causes of the sudden self-hatred he began to display. His violence, his cruel sensuality—all that came from his father.

  I was afraid of Fernando. He said very little and then all of a sudden he would fly into a blind rage. He had a bitter, mocking laugh. As a reaction, perhaps, against his father, who was a heavy drinker and a woman-chaser, Fernando did not touch a drop of alcohol for many years in his youth and many times I saw him give himself over to a surprising asceticism, as though he were trying to mortify the flesh. Then these ascetic periods would suddenly come to an end and he would devote himself entirely to a sort of sadistic lust, using women only for his own demoniacal satisfaction, while at the same time feeling utter scorn for them and rejecting them immediately afterward with cold, violent irony, blaming them perhaps for his own failings. Despite all his pretenses and all his silly clowning and cutting up, he was at heart a lonely, stoic sort; he had no friends, he wanted none, and was able to make none. I am persuaded that the only person he was fond of was his mother, although I find it very difficult to imagine that youngster being able to be fond of anyone, if by that word we mean expressing some sort of affection, tenderness, or love. It may well be that the only thing he felt for his mother was a sick, hysterical passion. I remember one incident in particular: one day I had painted a watercolor of a sorrel horse named Fritz that Ana María often rode and was very attached to; she was delighted by my portrait of Fritz and gave me a warm, affectionate kiss, whereupon Fernando flung himself on me and began to pommel me; she separated us and scolded Fernando, who then disappeared; when I finally found him, on the bank of the little stream where he usually went to take a dip, I tried to make my peace with him; he listened to me without a word, biting his fingernails as he habitually did when he was upset, and suddenly he leapt upon me with an open penknife in his hand. I fought back desperately, not understanding his fury. I was able to get the penknife away from him and fling it far away, whereupon he let go of me, walked over and picked up his weapon, and to my vast surprise, since I thought he was going to come back over to me and attack me again, he plunged the knife into his own hand. It took me many years to realize what sort of fierce pride lay behind this act.

  Shortly thereafter the incident with the sparrow took place, and I did not see him again; I never returned to his house or to the estancia. We were twelve years old at the time, and a few months later, during the following winter, Ana María died; of a broken heart, some said, and others that she had committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.

  Three years went by before I met Fernando again. I was living in a pension in Buenos Aires, and on those Sundays that seemed endless, all alone with my feeling that fifteen was a ridiculous age to be, my thoughts would insistently return to Capitán Olmos. I believe I’ve already told you that I hardly knew my mother, who died when I was only two. Is it any wonder, then, that for me Capitán Olmos was for the most part the memory of Ana María? I could still see her on those summer afternoons at the estancia, reciting those verses in French that I did not understand but that nonetheless brought me a subtle sensual pleasure, thanks to Ana María’s grave voice. “They are there,” I would think, “they are there.” And in that plural, in an innocent attempt at self-deception by way of the conjugation of a verb in the plural, in the depths of my soul and my will I included her: as though in that old house in Barracas that I knew almost as well as though I had seen it with my own eyes (because Ana María had told me about it so often), her soul in some way lived on; as though in her son, in her loathsome son, in Georgina, in the father and in the sisters, the trace of Ana María, prefigured or disfigured, might be rediscovered. And I would walk round and round the big ramshackle house in Barracas without ever screwing up the courage to knock at the door. Then finally I saw Fernando coming to the house one day and I did not or could not make my escape.

  “Is that you?” he asked with a disdainful smile.

  I was again assailed by that incomprehensible feeling of guilt that I had always had in his presence.

  What was I doing there? His piercing, hate-filled eyes kept me from lying. Moreover, it was pointless: he had already surmised, quite correctly, that I had been prowling round the house. And I felt like a dull-witted delinquent clumsily committing his very first crime, as incapable of telling him of my feelings, my nostalgia, as of writing a romantic love poem amid the cadavers in an autopsy room. Abashed and at a loss for words, I allowed Fernando to take me to the house with him, as though it was clear that this was simply an act of charity on his part, for this would at least give me a chance to see it. And as we crossed the grounds in the dying late afternoon light, I was overwhelmed by the heavy fragrance of the jasmine, a word always pronounced in my mind with an aristocratic a, and a fragrance that would forever mean to me: far away, mother, tenderness, nevermore. In the Mirador I thought I glimpsed the face of an old woman, a sort of ghost in the half-light, who silently withdrew. The main part of the house was connected to the smaller wing with the Mirador by a covered gallery, so that the latter thus formed a sort of peninsula. This smaller wing of the house consisted of two rooms on the ground floor, where in earlier days some of the servants were doubtless housed; the back part of the ground floor of the Mirador (which as I saw af
terward, in the test to which Fernando subjected me, was used as a storage room, with a wooden stairway leading to the upper floor); and a winding metal staircase running up the outside wall to the terrace of the Mirador. This terrace spanned the two large rooms I have just mentioned and was surrounded, as was usual in many buildings of that period, by a balustrade that had now fallen partially to ruins. Without saying a word, Fernando walked along that covered gallery and entered one of the two rooms. He turned the light on and I realized that it must be his own room: in it was a bed, an old dining room table that he used as a desk, a chest of drawers, and a number of rickety and apparently useless pieces of furniture kept there only because there was nowhere else to put them, since the house had undergone a series of reductions in size. The moment we entered the room a boy appeared through a door that led to the second room. Without greeting me, without any sort of explanation, he asked: “Did you bring it?” “No,” Fernando brusquely replied. I stared at the boy in amazement: he was about fourteen, with an enormous elongated head like a rugby ball, a skin like ivory, fine straight hair, a prognathous jaw, a thin, pointed nose, and feverish eyes that gave rise to an instinctive feeling of repulsion on my part: the repulsion that we might perhaps feel on being confronted by a creature from another planet who is almost identical to us, but with certain differences in appearance that for some obscure reason are frightening. “But I asked you to bring it,” the boy said.