On Heroes and Tombs
Fernando turned out the lights, the three of them hid, and I began fumbling about in the dark searching for them. I soon recognized Bebe, who had simply sat down on his bed. But Fernando had made it a rule of the game that I was to find and recognize at least two of the three of them.
There was no one else in that room. There remained the other room and the woodshed to explore. Stumbling now and again in the dark, I carefully went all round Fernando’s room, till I thought I heard the sound of someone breathing amid the silence. I prayed it wasn’t Fernando, since for some reason coming upon him this way in the dark struck me as a hideous prospect. Listening intently, I cautiously continued to move in the direction from which that muffled sound seemed to be coming. I bumped into a chair. Still feeling about to the right and to the left with my arms stretched out in front of me, I reached one of the walls: it was damp and dusty, with wallpaper that had come unstuck. Running one hand along the wall, I moved to my right, the direction the muffled echo of breathing seemed to me to be coming from. My hands touched a standing wardrobe first, and then my knees bumped into Fernando’s bed. I bent over and felt around to check whether one of the two of them was sitting or lying on it, but there was no one there. Following the edge of the bed now, still heading toward my right, I came across the little night table with the lamp on it first and then the peeling wall again. I was certain now: the sound of breathing was becoming more distinct, turning into a very slight but increasingly nervous panting, doubtless because I was getting closer and closer. An absurd emotion made my heart pound, as though I were on the verge of discovering some terrible secret. I was now moving ahead very slowly, almost imperceptibly. And then suddenly my right hand brushed against a body. I drew it back as though I had touched a red-hot branding iron, for I realized instantly that it was Georgina’s body.
“Fernando,” I said in a low voice, lying out of a sort of shy embarrassment.
But she did not answer me.
My hand reached out toward her again, fearfully but eagerly, though this time I raised it to the level of her face. I found her cheek and then her mouth, tense and trembling beneath my fingertips.
“Fernando,” I lied again, feeling my face turn red, as though the two of them could see me.
Again she did not answer me, and even today I wonder why. But at that moment I took it that she was thereby giving me permission to proceed with my investigation, since if she had been following the rules laid down by Fernando, she should already have announced that I had guessed wrong. It was as though I were committing a robbery, but a robbery to which the victim readily assents, and even today this still amazes me.
My hand lingered, trembling and hesitant, on her cheek, brushed across her lips and eyes, as though the gesture were a sign of recognition, a shy caress (have I already told you that in these two years Georgina had grown by leaps and bounds and changed enormously, that that adolescent girl was beginning to resemble Ana María?). She was breathing in intense, agitated gasps, as though she were making some sort of tremendous physical effort. For an instant I came close to shouting “Georgina!” and then running out of the room in desperation. But I contained myself and continued exploring her face with my hand, without her making any sort of move to draw away, an attitude on her part that perhaps was responsible for arousing my absurd hope that has lingered for so many long years, to this very day.
“Georgina,” I finally said, in a hoarse, barely intelligible voice.
And then, about to burst into tears, she exclaimed in a low voice:
“That’s enough! Leave me alone!”
And she ran to the door.
I slowly followed her out of the room, in a dull stupor, feeling that something very confused and contradictory had happened, though I had no idea what it meant. My legs were shaky, as though I had been in some sort of great danger. When I went into the other room, where the light was on now, only Bebe was in there: Georgina had disappeared. Fernando turned up almost immediately thereafter, scrutinizing me with a somber look in his eyes, as though that perverse fire burning within him was now blazing amid shadows.
“You won,” he commented in a dry, overbearing voice. “As a prize, you have earned the privilege of being subjected to a more important test tomorrow.”
I realized this meant that I should leave and that Georgina would not appear again. Clarinet in hand, his mouth gaping open, Bebe stared at me with his mad, gleaming eyes.
“Very well,” I said, heading for the door.
“Tomorrow night, after dinner, at eleven,” Fernando called after me.
All that night I pondered what had happened to me and what might happen the following day. The thought that Fernando might go even farther along the same path terrified me, though I had no clear notion why. Yet somehow I realized that Georgina had been the central figure in his strange game. Why hadn’t she said that it was not Fernando the moment I uttered his name? Why had she gone along with the whole thing in silence, as though expressly permitting my hand to touch her as it had?
The next night, on the stroke of eleven, I appeared in Fernando’s room. He and Georgina were already there waiting for me. I noted in Georgina’s eyes an expression of fearful expectancy, accentuated by the dead-white pallor of her face. With the cold preciseness of a leader of a patrol going out on scout duty, Fernando gave me my instructions:
“Old Escolástica lives up there in the Mirador. At this time of night she’s already asleep. You are to take this flashlight and go in, walk over to a chest of drawers that is on the side of the room opposite the bed, open the second drawer from the top, find a hatbox that’s inside it, and bring it back down here.”
In a ghostly whisper, her eyes riveted on the floor, Georgina said:
“No, not the head, Fernando! Anything else, but not the head!”
“What else would be of any importance?” Fernando sneered, with a scornful gesture. “The head, I said.”
I was about to faint, for I remembered the story Georgina had told me. It wasn’t possible; such things simply didn’t happen in real life. Moreover, what reason was there for me to do such a thing? Who was forcing me to?
“Why do I have to do it? Who’s forcing me?” I said in a quavering voice.
“What do you mean why? Why does anyone climb the Aconcagua? There’s no point whatsoever in climbing the Aconcagua, Bruno. Can it be that you’re yellow?”
I realized that there was no way out: I had to go through with it.
“All right then, give me the flashlight and tell me how you get up there.”
Fernando handed me the flashlight and was on the point of telling me how to get up to the Mirador when I said:
“Wait a minute! What if the old lady wakes up? She may wake up and start screaming. What should I do then?”
“The old lady can hardly see or hear or even move any more. Don’t worry. The worst thing that can happen is that you might have to come back down without the head, but I hope you’ll have the guts to bring it back with you.”
I have already explained that underneath the Mirador there was a storage room with an old wooden stairway leading to the floor above. Fernando led me to this storage room, which didn’t even have an electric light, and said to me:
“When you get upstairs you’re going to come to a door that doesn’t have a lock. Open it and go inside the Mirador. We’ll be downstairs in my room waiting for you.”
He left and I stood with the flashlight in the middle of that dark storage room, listening to my heart pounding with anxiety. After a few moments during which I asked myself again what sort of madness all this was and who or what was forcing me to go upstairs if not my own stupid pride, I put my foot on the first step. I went up the stairs, so slowly that I was ashamed of myself—but I did go up them.
And at the top of the stairs I found the little landing with the door leading to the aged madwoman’s room. I knew that she was very nearly a helpless cripple, but I was nonetheless so terrified that I was dripping with sweat
and afraid I was going to vomit. And to top it all off, I noticed that my body or my sweat stank unbearably. But I could not turn back now, and this being the case the best thing to do was to get the whole business over with as quickly as possible.
I turned the doorknob very carefully, trying not to make the slightest sound, since naturally the whole affair would be less hideous if the madwoman didn’t wake up. The door swung open with a creak that seemed tremendously loud to me. The room was pitch dark. For a moment I hesitated between shining the flashlight on the old woman’s bed to see if she was asleep and the fear of waking her up by doing precisely that. But how could I go into that strange room with a madwoman shut up inside it without at least seeing whether she was asleep or sitting up in bed watching me? With a feeling of both repugnance and fear, I aimed the beam of the flashlight around the room in a circular sweep, trying to locate the bed.
I nearly fainted. The old woman wasn’t asleep at all; she was standing alongside her bed looking at me, wide-eyed with terror. She was so old she looked mummified, and was very tiny and terribly thin: a sort of living skeleton. From lips dry as parchment there came out something apparently having to do with the Mazorca, but I couldn’t swear to that, for the moment I spied her standing there in the darkness I ran out the door and down the stairs. On reaching Fernando’s room I fainted dead away.
When I came to, Georgina was holding my head in her arms and great tears were falling from her eyes. It took me some time to remember what had happened just before I fainted and when I did I felt endlessly ashamed of myself. I was alone with Georgina. Fernando had doubtless gone off to his room after delivering himself of some sort of venomous, sarcastic comment on my utter lack of courage: I was certain of it.
“She was still up,” I stammered.
Georgina did not say anything: she simply sat there silently weeping.
Those two cousins began to be an indecipherable enigma to me, an enigma that at once attracted me and frightened me. They were like two officiants celebrating a strange rite, one whose meaning I was unable to comprehend and one which threatened to involve horrendous things. At one moment I was convinced that Fernando was making fun of me and the next I feared that he was setting some sort of sinister trap for me. Those two cousins lived apart from the rest of the household, all by themselves, like a king with a single subject, although it would be more apt to describe them as a high priest with a single believer; and it was as though by appearing on the scene I had become the single victim of that dark and mysterious cult. Fernando had nothing but scorn for the rest of the world, or else haughtily ignored it, whereas he demanded of me something that I could not clearly discern, something, I think, that was related to deeply disturbed feelings, to dark emotions and secret sensual pleasures such as Aztec priests must have felt as they stood atop their sacred pyramids tearing the warm, palpitating heart out of the breasts of their sacrificial victims. And what I now find even more inexplicable, I too submitted with a certain dark sensuality to that sacrifice at which Georgina officiated like a terror-stricken hierophant.
For these episodes were only the beginning. Many strange, perverse rituals followed one upon the other until the day I fled, until I realized, in fear and anguish, that that poor creature was blindly carrying out Fernando’s orders, as though in a hypnotic trance.
Today, thirty years later, I am still trying to understand the precise relationship that existed between the two of them, and I still find it impossible to do so. They were like two opposed universes, and yet they were intimately united by an incomprehensible but powerful bond. Fernando dominated Georgina, but I could not say for certain that a sacred terror was all that bound her to her cousin: it sometimes seems to me that she was also moved by a sort of compassion. Compassion for a monster like Fernando? Yes. She would suddenly flee in the face of his demoniacal acts and I have seen her weeping in horror in some dark corner of the house in Barracas. But I also remember her stoutly defending him in a most maternal way when I attacked him. “You can’t imagine how much he suffers,” she would say to me. Today, when I can look back calmly at his personality and many of his acts, I readily grant that Fernando did not have that sort of cold indifference said to be typical of the born criminal; as I told you before, one had the impression, rather, that he was caught up in a chaotic, desperate inner struggle. But I must also confess that I do not possess sufficient nobility of soul to feel compassion for beings such as Fernando. Georgina, on the other hand, possessed such loftiness of soul.
What manner of sufferings? you may ask me. Many, and of every conceivable sort: physical, mental, even spiritual. Those that were physical and mental manifested themselves clearly. He was the victim of hallucinations; he had dreams that nearly drove him mad; he would suddenly faint dead away. And even when he did not lose consciousness altogether, I have seen him blank out, so to speak, struck dumb, neither seeing nor hearing those round about him. “He’ll be over it in a few minutes,” Georgina would say to me then, hovering anxiously about him. At other times (Georgina told me) he would say to her: “I can see you, I know I’m here beside you, yet I also know that I am somewhere else, somewhere very far away, locked up in a dark room. They’re coming after me to pluck my eyes out and kill me.” He would sometimes be in a state of violent euphoria and then suddenly lapse into a state of absolute passivity and melancholy: at such times, according to Georgina, he would turn into the most defenseless and helpless creature in the world, and like a little child he would come and curl up on her lap.
I naturally never saw him in any of the humiliating states, and I think that if I had Fernando would have been capable of murdering me. But it was Georgina who told me about them and she was a person who never lied. Nor do I believe that Fernando ever feigned any of these things that happened in her presence, despite the fact that he was a past master at playacting.
The side I did see of him was always his most disagreeable one. He considered himself, for instance, above social conventions and above the law. “The law applies only to unlucky bastards,” he maintained. For some reason that I fail to understand, he was passionately interested in money, but I think he saw in it something over and above what it represents to ordinary people. He saw it as something magic and demoniacal, and a favorite word of his for it was “Gold.” Perhaps his passion for alchemy and magic stemmed from this strange attraction. But his sick nature was even more evident when it came to anything having to do, either directly or indirectly, with the blind. The first time that I personally saw this manifest itself was back in the early days when we were still in Capitán Olmos. We were walking down the Calle Mitre toward his house when suddenly we spied the blind man who played the drums in the village band coming toward us. Fernando almost fainted and had to cling to my arm to stay on his feet, and I noticed then that he was shaking all over like someone suffering from an attack of malaria and that his face had turned as ashen and rigid as a dead man’s. It took him a long time to pull himself together; he was obliged to sit down on the curb, whereupon he fell into a rage at me, insulting me hysterically because I had held him up by the arm to keep him from falling.
That hallucinatory period of my life came to a sudden end one day in the winter of 1925. When I arrived at the Barracas house, I found Georgina in bed in her room, weeping. I hastened to caress her, to ask her why she was in tears, but the only words she could get out were: “I want you to leave, Bruno, and not come back. Go now and don’t ever come back, I beg you!” I had known two Georginas: one who was sweet and feminine like her mother; and another totally under the sway of Fernando’s demoniacal powers. And I now saw yet another Georgina, her spirit broken, defenseless and terror-stricken, who was asking me to go away and never come back. Why? What terrible truth was she trying to hide from me? She never told me, although later, with the passage of the years and what I had learned from life, I suspected what it was and my suspicions were confirmed. But what was most distressing about all this was neither Georgina’s terror nor the des
truction of a delicate and tender soul thanks to Fernando’s diabolical turn of mind; what was most distressing was that she loved him.
I stupidly pressed for an explanation that day, but finally I realized that there was nothing I could do or should do in that little corner of the world that seemed to conceal an ominous secret.
I did not see Fernando again until 1930.
It is always easy to prophesy about the past, Fernando used to say sarcastically. Today, thirty years later, the meaning of little things that happened back in those days, seemingly fortuitous incidents of no importance, has now become clear; just as for the reader who has just finished the last page of a long novel and the characters’ destinies are sealed forever, as death seals them forever in real life, phrases as seemingly prosaic as “Alexey Fyoderovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district” take on in retrospect a profound meaning, and very often a tragic one. We never know, until the end, if what happens to us on an ordinary day like any other is history or mere happenstance, if it is everything (however trivial it may appear) or nothing (however painful it may be). Events insignificant in themselves caused Fernando’s path and mine to cross again, after many years of carefully keeping my distance from him, as though he were inevitably destined to play a role in my fate and as though my efforts to avoid him had all been in vain.
As I think back now on those long-ago days, what comes to my mind are words such as chess, Capablanca and Alekhine, Al Jolson, Singing in the Rain, Sacco and Vanzetti, Sandino and Nicaragua. A strange, melancholy mixture! But is there any series of words put together from memories of the days when we were young that is not strange and melancholy? Everything that these words suggest was to culminate in that difficult but fascinating era in which national life and our own personal lives were to undergo radical change. A moment closely linked in fact to Fernando’s very presence, as though he were an obscure symbol of that period in my life and at the same time the chief cause of the changes I underwent. For that year, 1930, was one of the crucial moments in my life, that is to say, a moment when I pondered the whole of it and passed judgment on it, and everything began to become shaky beneath my feet: the meaning of my existence, the meaning of my country, and the meaning of humanity in general, for when we pass judgment on our own existence we inevitably judge all mankind, though it might also be said that when we begin to judge all mankind it is because in reality we are examining the depths of our own consciousness.