On Heroes and Tombs

  These were dramatic and tumultuous years.

  I think for example of Carlos, whose real name I never knew. I can still see him in my mind today—an image that still moves me deeply—bending with furious concentration over cheap editions of books costing a mere thirty or forty centavos, moving his lips with enormous effort, pressing his clenched fists against his temples, like a desperate lad, straining and sweating, digging deeper and deeper and finally unearthing a coffer which he has been told contains the key to his miserable existence, the central meaning of his sufferings as a working-class youngster. The Fatherland! Whose fatherland? They had arrived by the millions from caves in Spain, from wretched, poverty-stricken villages in Italy, from the Pyrenees. Pariahs from every corner of the world, crowded into the holds of ships but dreaming: freedom awaits them, they will no longer be beasts of burden. America! The mythical land where people throw money away on the streets. And then came the grinding toil, the miserable wages, the work days twelve and fourteen hours long. In the end that had proved to be the real America for the immense majority: poverty and tears, humiliation and pain, homesickness and nostalgia. Like children taken in by fairy tales and led off into slavery. And then they, or their children, turned their gaze toward other utopias, toward lands of the future described in violent books that at the same time were full of tenderness for their sort, the wretched of the earth, books that spoke to them of land and freedom and drove them to rise up in rebellion. And then great rivers of blood ran in the streets of Buenos Aires, and many men and women, and even the children of these unfortunates, died in 1905, in 1908, in 1910. The Centennial of the Fatherland! Whose fatherland? Carlos asked himself with a sarcastic, sorrowful grimace. There was no fatherland, didn’t I know that? There was the world of the masters and the world of the slaves. “Bread and freedom!” workers who had come from all over shouted, as the lords and masters, terrified and furious, sent the police and the army in against that mob. And so there was more bloodshed and then more strikes and demonstrations and then more attacks against authority and more bombs. And as the son of the lord and master studied in some fancy school in Switzerland or England or France, the son of the nameless worker toiled in the cold storage plants for fifty centavos a day, caught tuberculosis in the ice-cold freezing rooms, and finally died an agonizing death in filthy, anonymous hospitals. And as the rich man’s son in Europe read Keats and Baudelaire, the poor man’s son painfully deciphered, letter by letter, some text by Malatesta or Bakunin, as Carlos was doing at that moment; and a youngster named Roberto Arltfn1 learned in the streets the general meaning of human existence. And then the Great Revolution broke out. The Golden Age was about to dawn! Arise ye wretched of the earth! The Apocalypse of the Powerful. And new generations of poor boys and restless or rebellious students read Marx and Lenin, Gorki and Kropotkin. And one of them was that same Carlos, whom I now see once again, as though he were here before me, as though thirty years had not gone by since, plowing through those books, letter by letter, stubbornly and eagerly. He strikes me now as a symbol of the crash of ’29, when, with the collapse of its temples on Wall Street, the religion of Limitless Progress approached its end. Entire chains of imposing banks went under in ’30, great industries collapsed, tens of millions committed suicide. And the crisis in the world capital of that arrogant lay religion spread in violent tidal waves to the most remote regions of the planet.

  Poverty and cynical disbelief took bitter possession of the vast Babylon. Thugs, lone holdup men, saloons with mirrors handy for target practice, drunks and vagrants, bums, beggars, two-peso whores. And like resplendent emissaries of Punishment and Hope, men and boys who met in miserable little rooms to plan Social Revolution.

  Carlos among them.

  He was one of the links in the chain that brought me back to Fernando, although he immediately kept his distance from him as a saint avoids keeping the Devil company. Perhaps you yourself met him at some time, for he had connections with the anarchist group in La Plata, and it seems to me I even remember his mentioning you at one time or another. I think his bitter experience with Fernando was what turned him away from anarchism and brought him into the Communist movement, although, as you can well imagine, that simple shift of loyalties was not enough to change his basic personality, which remained the same as ever; a personality that explains his expulsion from the Communist movement on the grounds that he was a terrorist. I heard no more of him until 1938, that winter of 1938 when men and women who had managed to cross the Pyrenees after the crushing defeat of the Republicans in Spain began to turn up in Paris as illegal immigrants. Paulina (poor Paulina), whom I hid on several occasions in my room on the Rue des Ecoles, told me how Carlos had died in Spain, in the same tank in which Etchebehere, another Argentine, had met his death. Had Carlos become a Trotskyite then? Paulina didn’t know: she had seen him only once: as much a loner as ever, glum and stoic and impenetrable. Carlos was a religious spirit, a simon-pure one, whose ideals admitted of no compromise. How then could he accept and understand Communists such as Crámer? How could he accept and understand men in general? The Incarnation, Original Sin, the Fall—how could this absolutely pure soul accept this contaminated human condition? But it is an exceedingly curious fact that beings who in a certain way are not human are capable of exercising tremendous influence on those who are merely human. I myself was brought to Communism by the sheer force of Carlos’s presence and his purity, and when he was forced out of the Party, I too left it, perhaps because I was an adolescent who had not yet fully accepted cold, hard reality. I doubt that today I would judge militants such as Crámer, their struggles for personal power, their petty, hypocritical, shabby maneuvers as harshly as I did then. How many men would have the right to do so? And where in heaven’s name would it be possible to find human beings free of such filth save in those realms, almost alien to the human condition, constituted by adolescence, sanctity, or madness?

  Like a messenger who has no knowledge of the contents of the letter that he is bearing, that unknown youngster was the one who was to put me back on Fernando’s path once again.

  In the last days of January, 1930, after spending my vacation in Capitán Olmos, I went back to Buenos Aires, dropped my things off at the pension in the Calle Cangallo, and headed for La Academia almost automatically, out of sheer force of habit. Why was I going to this café? To see Castellanos and Alonso, to follow the moves in the eternal chess games, to see the same things as usual. Because the moment in my life had not yet arrived when I would come to understand that habit is deceptive, that steps we take mechanically do not always lead us to the same reality; because I did not yet know that reality is surprising and, given the nature of men, in the long run tragic.

  Alonso’s chess partner that day was a newcomer who looked like Emil Ludwig. His name was Max Steinberg. It may seem astonishing that unknown persons whom I had apparently run into by sheer chance should lead me to someone who had been born in my very own town, who belonged to a family with such close ties to mine. Here we are obliged to acknowledge the truth of one of Fernando’s eccentric axioms: there is no such thing as mere happenstance, only acts of fate. One finds only what one is searching for, and what one searches for is what is in some way hidden in the deepest and darkest depths of our heart. Because if not, why is it that when two people meet the same person the consequences are not the same for both? Why does meeting a revolutionary lead one of them to revolution and leave the other one indifferent? It would seem, then, that we end up meeting the persons whom we are fated to meet, and thus sheer chance counts for very little. Hence those meetings which in each of our lives seem to us to be utterly surprising, my meeting Fernando again for instance, are simply the result of the workings of those unknown forces that draw us to each other in the midst of an indifferent crowd, as iron filings are attracted at a distance toward the poles of a powerful magnet; movements that would not fail to surprise the filings if they were possessed of the slightest conscious awareness of their acts
, without yet having attained full and total knowledge of reality thereby. Thus we make our way along, a little like sleepwalkers, but at the same time with the unfaltering sureness of step of sleepwalkers, toward beings who in some way have been those to whom we were destined to address ourselves from the very beginning. And I have lapsed into such thoughts because a moment ago I was about to tell you that until my meeting with Carlos my life had been that of almost any student, with his typical problems and illusions, with his jokes in his classrooms or in his boarding house, with his first affairs of the heart and his boldness and his timidity. And even before beginning to set those words down on paper, I realized that all that was not at all certain, that I was about to give a false idea of this period in my life prior to my meeting Carlos, and that this false idea would in turn cause my account of what my meeting Fernando again was really like to come as a surprise. The element of surprise is lessened and generally disappears altogether when we take a closer look at the circumstances that surrounded the happening that is apparently so amazing. And by so doing, we find this happening in the final analysis to belong to the mere world of appearances, being simply the product of shortsightedness, lethargy, and distraction. In those five years, in fact, my life had been one long obsession with that family, and I found myself able to banish from my memory neither Ana María nor Georgina nor Fernando: they were presences palpitating in the very depths of my being and they appeared frequently in my dreams. I also think today that as early as those meetings in 1925 I had repeatedly heard Fernando rehearse his plan of some day forming a gang of armed bandits, thugs, and terrorists. And I now believe that that idea of his, which at the time struck me as patently absurd, nonetheless remained deeply engraved in my subconscious, and perhaps my initial attraction to anarchist groups, without my being aware of the fact, as was the case with so many other inclinations of my spirit, stemmed from Fernando’s ideas and obsessions. I have already explained to you that this man exerted an irresistible and frequently pernicious influence on a great many youngsters, both boys and girls, since his ideas and even his manias were taken up by considerable numbers of people who thus became something like vulgar, confused caricatures of that demon. Hence you can readily understand that, as I explained to you before, my meeting him again was not all that surprising, since of all the persons I met I unconsciously kept my distance from those who did not bring me closer to Fernando, and when I discovered that Max and Carlos belonged to anarchist groups, I immediately joined them too; and since such groups, here as everywhere else in the world, represent very small minorities and those on the margins of society who belong to them always have very close ties among themselves (even though, as in this case, these ties stem, paradoxically, from mutual incompatibility or disapproval), I was fated to meet Fernando again. You may ask me why, if this was my ultimate goal, I did not simply go out to see Fernando at the house in Barracas; I will then be obliged to answer you that meeting Fernando again was in no way a conscious aim of mine, but, rather, an almost unavowable obsession. Neither my reason nor my conscious mind had ever approved of, much less recommended, my going in search of that malicious individual who could only cause me—and did in fact cause me—pain and perturbation.

  There were other factors, however, that worked in favor of that unconscious movement back into Fernando’s orbit. I believe I have already told you that I lost my mother when I was a very small child, and that on top of this misfortune, I was sent for my schooling to a huge city far from home. I was alone, I was shy, and unfortunately I was much too sensitive a youngster. How could the world have helped but appear to me to be a chaos full of evil, injustice, and suffering? How could I have failed to withdraw into my own lonely self and those far-off worlds that fantasy and the novel represent? I scarcely need tell you that I adored Schiller and his robbers, Chateaubriand and his American heroes, Goethe’s Goetz von Berlichingen. I was ripe for reading the Russians and perhaps I would have read them at that point if instead of being the son of a bourgeois family as I was, I had been, like so many other youngsters that I met later on, the son of workers or from a poor family; for to those youngsters the Russian Revolution was the great event of our time, the great hope, and it was far easier to meet young people who were reading Gorki than it was to meet ones who were reading Masilla or Cané. This is one of the vast ironies of our education and upbringing and one of the facts that for so long a time created yawning abysses between us and our own country; by coming into contact with one reality we were alienated from another. But what is our country really, save a series of alienations? Be that as it may, these were the circumstances as I finished my secondary studies and got my diploma in 1929. I still remember how, a few days after the exams were over, the school was suddenly plunged into that total, melancholy solitude so characteristic of educational institutions when all the students have left for the long summer vacation. I felt the need then to see for one last time the place in which five years that would never return had gone by. I went out to the gardens and sat down on the edge of one of the stone flower beds and remained there lost in thought for a long time. Then I got up and walked over to the tree on which I had engraved my initials several years before, when I was still a child: BB, 1924. How lonely I had been in those days! How helpless and sad, a little boy from a small town, in a strange, monstrous city!

  A few days later I went off to Capitán Olmos. This was to be my last vacation in my town. My father was old now, but he was still a cold, harsh man. I felt far removed from him and from my brothers, vague impulses churned within me, but all my desires were uncertain and confused. I sensed that something was about to take place soon, though I could not understand what, even though my dreams and my obsessive prowling about the Vidals’ house might have told me. In any event I spent that vacation looking at my town without seeing it. Many years were to go by, I was to suffer many blows, lose great illusions, and come to know a great many people before my father and my native town were restored to me, so to speak; for the path that one takes back to the most intimate part of oneself always involves a long journey that passes by way of other people and other universes. That was how I was to get my father back. But, as almost always happens, it was too late by then. If I had foreseen back then that that would be the last time I would see him in good health, if I had guessed that twenty-five years later I would find him turned into a filthy heap of rotting bones and entrails, looking at me sadly from the depths of eyes that already scarcely seemed to belong to this world, I would have tried at the time to understand that harsh but good-hearted, strong-willed but candid, violent but incorruptible man. But we always understand the persons who are closest to us when it is too late, and just as we are beginning to master this difficult métier of living it is time for us to die, and more important still, those who would have benefited most from our applying our wisdom to them are already dead and buried.

  When I returned to Buenos Aires I still had no idea what I would study. I liked everything, or perhaps I liked nothing. I liked painting, I liked writing stories and poems. But were these professions? Could you really announce to people in all seriousness that you would like to devote your life to painting or writing? Weren’t they merely hobbies for idle, irresponsible people? All the other young people enrolled at the university seemed so stable, having settled down in medical school or the school of engineering, studying the way to cure a case of scarlet fever or erect a bridge, that I couldn’t help but laugh at myself. It was out of a sort of diffidence, thus, that I entered law school, though in my heart of hearts I was certain that I would never be capable of practicing law.

  I am straying from the subject that interests you, but the fact is that I find it impossible to speak of the persons who have had the greatest importance in my life without saying something about my feelings at the time as well. For how could those persons have been so important to me if not precisely on account of my own anxieties and my own feelings?

  I return, therefore, to Max.

 
As he and Alonso were ending their game of chess I took a good look at him, for I was curious. He was a mild-mannered, easygoing Jew with a tendency to put on weight. He had a big aquiline nose, but on the whole his face, with its high forehead, had a serene nobility about it. And a certain contemplative, reflective composure made it a face that would have seemed more natural in a much older, fully mature man who has experienced many things. He was carelessly dressed, with buttons missing and a clumsily knotted tie; he seemed to have thrown all his clothes on haphazardly, as though out of the simple necessity of not going about the streets naked. I learned later that he did not have the slightest sense of practicalities, or any idea at all of how to handle his money: a few days after receiving his monthly allowance, which he spent as his fancy struck him, he was obliged to pawn his books, his clothes, and a ring that had been a present from his mother and invariably ended up in the pawn shop each month. When I eventually met his family, I discovered that his father was as serene and calm, but also as mad as he was. And thus both father and son turned out to be examples which in no way confirmed the notions of those who have a stereotyped image of the typical Jew. Both were utterly devoid of practical common sense, they were out of their minds (gently, serenely out of their minds), they were peace-loving persons who made good friends, they were much given to reflection and lazy, unselfish and utterly incapable of earning money, lyrically effusive and absurd. Later, when I began seeing Max at his rooming house, I could see with my own eyes the disorderly sort of life he led: he slept at any and all hours and munched on this or that in bed, keeping enormous salami or cheese sandwiches in the drawer of his night table for this purpose. On top of it, close at hand, was an alcohol burner for making maté, of which he drank endless quantities, alternating with cigarettes, without ever getting out of bed. It was there in that wretched, indescribably filthy bed, half dressed, that he did his studying and replayed famous chess matches on his pocket set, constantly consulting manuals and magazines devoted exclusively to chess.