On Heroes and Tombs

  It was through Max that I met Carlos: as though by crossing a fragile rubber bridge that threatened to collapse at any moment, I had reached an incredibly hard and resistant, mineral terrain, a continent of basalt studded with awesome volcanos about to erupt. Over the years I have often noticed how many times there are individuals who serve merely as a temporary bridge between two persons who are destined thereafter to be linked by a profound and permanent bond: like those frail bridges that armies improvise to span an abyss, taking them down again once the troops have gotten across.

  I met Carlos one night in Max’s room. The moment I arrived, the two of them fell silent. Max introduced Carlos to me, but all I caught was his first name. It seems to me that his surname was Italian. He was a very skinny youngster, with bulging eyes. There was something cruel and harsh about his face and his hands, and he impressed me as being extremely reserved and self-absorbed. He appeared to have suffered a great deal, and in addition to his obvious poverty there were, I was certain, other things causing him inner anguish and suffering. Thinking about him later, after he had aroused my intense interest because of his contact with Fernando, it seemed to me that he was pure spirit, as though his flesh had been turned to ashes by fever; as though his tortured, burned-out body had been reduced to a minimum of skin and bones and a very few, but very hard, muscles that enabled him to move and bear the tension of his existence. He did not speak, and his eyes suddenly blazed with indignation, as his lips, seemingly carved into his rigid face with a knife blade, clamped shut to lock in great, anguished secrets.

  The relation between Max and Carlos amazed me at the time: as though a brick of butter were being sliced through with a sharp steel knife. I had not yet arrived at that point in my life when one knows that nothing about human beings ought to surprise us. Today I realize that Max possessed qualities that were precisely the right ones for that friendship that seemed so curious on the surface: his great kindheartedness, which no doubt relieved Carlos’s spiritual tension as water quenches the thirst of a man who has crossed vast desert expanses; and his easygoing, gentle nature, which allowed him to bring together beings as different and as hard as Carlos and Fernando without too violent a clash resulting, as though he served them as a sort of shock absorber. Moreover, what police force anywhere in this world would ever have suspected that a person like Max was on intimate terms with anarchists and gangsters?

  Max first met Fernando one Saturday night in the year 1928, at an anarchist study club in Avellaneda called Dawn, where González Pacheco was giving a lecture on the subject of “Anarchism and Violence.” In those days this problem gave rise to heated debates, in large part as a consequence of Di Giovanni’s terrorist attacks and holdups. These debates were extremely dangerous, for a fair number of those who attended them were armed and the anarchist movement had split up into factions that mortally despised each other. For it is an error to imagine, as those who come to a revolutionary movement from afar or from outside frequently suppose, that all its members are representative of a single well-defined type: this is an error of perspective similar to the one we commit when we attribute very definite characteristic traits to what could be called The Englishman, in capital letters, naively placing persons as unlike as Beau Brummel and a Liverpool docker in the same pigeonhole; or when we insist that all Japanese are alike, ignoring their individual differences or else not even noticing them, by virtue of that psychological mechanism that causes us to perceive mainly the traits common to a group when we observe it from the outside (since they are what is superficially the most noticeable and hence are what first leaps to our eye), though the workings of this mechanism are reversed once we are inside that group, so that what we notice most are the differences (inasmuch as what is important then are the traits that distinguish one member from another).

  But the range of types among anarchists was limitless. There were the Tolstoyans who refused to eat meat because they were against any sort of violent death, and who were frequently theosophists and students of Esperanto as well; and on the other hand there were the proponents of violence even in its most extreme forms, either because they maintained that the only means of combatting the State was through the use of force, or because, as in the case of Podestá, anarchist violence served as an outlet for their sadistic instincts. Then there were the intellectuals or students who had come to the movement through having read Stirner and Nietzsche, as Fernando had, most of whom were extremely stubborn asocial individualists who often ended up supporting Fascism; and alongside them were the nearly illiterate workers who had been drawn to anarchism in their search for some sort of instinctive hope. There were the perennially resentful, who thus vented their hatred of their bosses or society and who frequently turned out to be pitiless bosses themselves once they came into a bit of money, or ended up on the police force; and pure souls full of goodness and nobility, who despite their being good and pure were capable of going so far as to commit violent crimes and even murder (as in the case of Simon Radovitsky, one of those noble souls who, moved by a certain rigorous sense of justice, was led to destroy a man he judged to be guilty of the death of women and innocent children). There was also the sponger, who managed to live very well off anarchism, eating and sleeping for nothing at the houses of comrades, and occasionally ending up stealing this or that from them or taking their wives away from them, and when his host would timidly chide the parasite for such excesses the latter would scornfully answer: “What kind of an anarchist are you anyway, comrade?” And then there was the hobo, the proponent of life lived free as a bird, of contact with the sun and the open air, who went wandering about the countryside with his bundle slung over his shoulder, preaching the good news, finding work harvesting one crop or another, repairing a mill or a plow here and there, and at night, in the farmhands’ quarters, teaching the illiterate ones to read and write or explaining to them in simple but fervent words how a new society was coming, in which there would be neither humiliation nor suffering nor misery for the poor, or reading to them out of some book he carried about with him in his bundle: pages of Malatesta to Italian farm laborers, or Bakunin; as his listeners, not saying a word, squatting on their heels or sitting on an oil drum drinking maté, exhausted from the long day’s work from sunup to sundown, perhaps remembering some far-off Italian or Polish village, would allow themselves to be taken halfway in by that marvelous dream, wanting to believe it but (prompted by the hard reality of every day) imagining it to be impossible, much as those who are overwhelmed by misfortunes nonetheless dream at times of the paradise that awaits them in the end; and perhaps among those peons there might be a native son who thought that God had made the countryside and the sky with its stars for everyone’s benefit alike, that sort of Creole nostalgic for the old, proud, free life of the pampas with no barbed-wire fences, the stoic, rugged individualist from the wide open spaces who in the end was won over to the gospel preached by those remote apostles with peculiar names and embraced, fervently and forever, the doctrine of hope.

  And when on that night in 1928 a Tolstoyan cobbler maintained that no one has the right to kill anyone, much less in the name of anarchism, that even the life of animals was sacred and that was why he was a vegetarian, a young man whom no one remembered having seen before, perhaps eighteen or so, tall and dark-haired, with greenish eyes and a hard, sneering expression on his face, answered:

  “It’s quite likely that by eating lettuce you make your bowels work better, but it seems to me you’ll find it very difficult to overthrow bourgeois society that way.”

  Everyone stared at that young stranger.

  And another Tolstoyan leaped to the defense of the cobbler, recalling the legend of how the Buddha allowed himself to be devoured by a tiger in order to appease the creature’s hunger. But a partisan of justified violence asked what the Buddha would have done if he had seen that the tiger was about to leap not on him, but on a defenseless child. At this point the discussion grew stormy, sarcastic, lyrical, vituperati
ve, stupid, ingenuous, or ferocious, depending on the temperament of the speaker, thus demonstrating once again that a society without classes and without social problems may well prove to be as violent and inharmonious as the present one. They trotted out the same old arguments and the same memories again: wasn’t Radovitsky justified in having killed the chief of police guilty of the May Day massacre of 1909? Didn’t the eight workers killed and the forty wounded cry out for vengeance? Were there not women among the victims? Yes, perhaps. The Bourgeois State, armed to the teeth, implacably defended its privileges, it spared neither people’s lives nor their freedom, justice and honor did not exist for those despots whose one goal was the perpetuation of their privileges. But what about the innocent victims sometimes killed by anarchist bombs? Furthermore, was it possible to arrive at a better society through violence and vengeance? Weren’t anarchists the true repositories of the greatest human values: justice and freedom, brotherhood and respect for every living being? And hence was it admissible that in the name of these lofty principles mere bank tellers or little cashiers in commercial establishments should be blown to bits if in the final analysis they were innocent and were massacred so as to obtain money that to top everything off was being used for dubious purposes? At this moment the debate ended amid a tumult of insults, shouts, and finally shots from firearms. A tumult that González Pacheco was barely able to quiet by calling upon all his talents as an orator and reminding the anarchists present that such behavior merely justified the worst accusations leveled against them by the bourgeoisie.

  It was in those circumstances, Max told me, that he had first met Fernando. The latter’s epigrammatic phrase and striking face had attracted his attention. They left together, with another young man named Podestá, whom I met later. Thus it was that the first step was taken toward the formation of the gang that Podestá undoubtedly wanted to organize and be the head of, though naturally it was Fernando who eventually came to be the leader of it. Osvaldo R. Podestá was an individual I loathed from the very first moment I met him: there was something vaguely suspect and shifty about him. He was mild-mannered, almost effeminate, and relatively cultivated, since he had been in the fourth year of his studies for his bachelor’s diploma when he joined Di Giovanni’s gang. He had a habit of half-closing his eyes and casting sidewise glances at a person that was most unpleasant. Time confirmed that first impression I had had of him, when I discovered the path that his life had taken. After Di Giovanni was shot down and the authorities began to stamp out the movement with all the force of martial law behind them, and after the holdup of the cashier of the Braceras company that he participated in as a member of Fernando’s gang, Podestá fled to Uruguay in a motor launch belonging to smugglers of contraband goods, and from there he went to Spain. In Spain he began to take part in the campaign of armed violence organized by the labor unions in their fight to the death with management (there were three hundred people killed in those years preceding the Civil War), but for some reason unknown to me, he came to be suspected of working hand in glove with the police. As a proof of his loyalty, he offered to kill anybody the anarchists chose. The victim they pointed out to him was the chief of police of Barcelona, and Podestá gunned him down in cold blood, thus apparently getting back in the good graces of the anarchists. But when the Civil War came along, he and his gang committed such atrocities that the Federation of Spanish Anarchists put a price on his head. On learning of this decision, Podestá and two of his friends tried to escape by way of the port of Tarragona, in a motorboat loaded with money and valuables, but they were mowed down with machine guns before they could get away.

  The fact that someone like Fernando should have an individual such as Podestá in his gang is explainable. What beggars believe is that a youngster such as Carlos was capable of participating in the activities of such a group, and the only possible explanation is the absolute purity of his motives and ideals. You must not forget, moreover, that Fernando’s powers of persuasion were unlimited, and it must not have been very difficult for him to prove to Carlos that that was the only possible way of fighting against bourgeois society. Eventually however Carlos left the gang in utter disgust, having realized that the money they obtained in their holdups was not being used to fill the war-chest of any labor union or to aid the families or the helpless children of comrades who had been thrown in prison or deported. In fact he left the group the day he found out that Gatti had not received the funds that Fernando had promised to give him to help him escape from the penitentiary in Montevideo, so that his escape, which could not be postponed, had to be financed with money obtained elsewhere at the last possible moment. Carlos had great respect for Gatti (I myself saw that this was so) and that particular incident finally opened his eyes. You may recall the famous escape from the Montevideo penitentiary, in which fourteen prisoners got out by way of a tunnel more than thirty meters long that had been dug under Gatti’s supervision (his nickname was “The Engineer”), starting from a fake coal yard that coplotters on the outside had set up opposite the prison. Gatti worked scientifically, using a compass and maps, a small electric drill, and a little flatcar on rails, dragged along with ropes so it wouldn’t make any noise, to carry away the dirt that was excavated; this dirt was then put into sacks supposedly containing coal, whereupon trucks came and hauled these fake coal sacks away. This long and complicated operation took a great deal of money, most of which came from holdups. But as you can see, and as Fernando used to say scornfully, in the end it all turned out to be a sort of autophagy: holdups were committed to finance prison breaks by anarchists who’d been put away for previous holdups.

  The anarchists had two major sources for obtaining funds: holdups and counterfeiting. And both activities had their philosophical justifications; since according to certain anarchist theoreticians property is theft, holdups restored to the community something that one individual had illegitimately appropriated, and putting bogus paper money into circulation represented not only an attempt to obtain money to finance prison breaks and strikes but also, especially when engaged in on a grand scale, an attempt to bankrupt the national treasury and cause the state to collapse. Following the historical example of England when it tried to sabotage the Revolutionary government in France by flooding that country with the famous false assignats that it smuggled in on fishing boats, the anarchists often carried off counterfeiting schemes of vast proportions. It was a clandestine task that became one of their chief concerns, and moreover it was not a difficult one for them, given the fact that many militants had a natural bent toward the graphic arts. Di Giovanni set up a large engraving workshop where ten-peso bills were turned out; and a Spanish printer named Celestino Iglesias worked in that shop, a generous and incorruptible man, whom Fernando met at that time and in the years just before his death sought out again to do a counterfeiting job for him, before the accident that cost Iglesias his eyesight.

  But let us go back to our meeting each other again.

  It was in January of 1930. I had gone with Max to see High Treason, and afterward we dropped in at a bar, still in the midst of a discussion we were having about Emil Jannings and the advantages and disadvantages of talkies (like René Clair and Chaplin, Max was horrified by the very thought of sound films). The moment we arrived, we spied Fernando, sitting waiting for Max at the table where Max’s chess board was permanently set up. I recognized him immediately, though he was now a full-grown man; his features had become more pronounced but had not changed, for he belonged to that type of human being who from a very early age already has strong features which the years do not change but merely accentuate. I could have recognized him in the midst of a vast milling crowd; that was how striking and unforgettable the features of that face were.

  I do not know if he really did not recognize me or was simply pretending he didn’t. I held out my hand to him.

  “Ah, Bruno, it’s you,” he commented, shaking hands with me distractedly.

  The two of them stepped away from the
table then and Fernando said a few words to Max in a low voice. I looked at him, still overcome with astonishment, an astonishment that had left me almost speechless. Because even though I later came up with a whole series of explanations as to why I had met up with him again, as I have told you before, at that moment his sudden reappearance on the scene struck me as a sort of miracle. A miracle brought about by black magic.

  As Fernando left, he turned part way round in my direction and gave a vague wave of his hand to bid me goodbye. When Max came back to the table, I asked if Fernando had said anything to him about me, if he had told him how we happened to know each other.

  “No,” he didn’t say anything to me about you,” Max replied.

  To him, of course, our meeting again did not seem all that surprising: there are so many people who know each other in a big city.

  So that was how I came back within Fernando’s orbit, and although I saw him only on very rare occasions, his turns of phrase, his theories, and his sarcasms had an enormous importance for me in that critical period of my life. I never in fact took part in any of the secret activities of his gang, but through Max or Carlos I anxiously followed from afar the outward signs of that stormy existence of his. To what degree and in what way a youngster such as Max could have participated in that organization remains an unfathomable secret to me even today. I think it probable that he played only a peripheral role of some kind in it, or merely acted as a liaison man, for neither his temperament nor his ideas really suited him for action, much less action of that particular sort. And even today I ponder the reason why Max associated himself with that gang. Out of curiosity? Out of a certain atavism or through the influence, however remote, of his family history? Even today I still smile to myself sometimes at how incongruous it was that Max of all people hung out with that gang. He was so accommodating that he would even have found reasons to become friends with the chief of police of Buenos Aires, and there is no doubt that he would have had a good game of chess with him if the opportunity had arisen. It was as wildly irrational to find him in that milieu as it would be to come across someone sitting in an easy chair calmly reading the daily paper in the midst of an earthquake. Surrounded by gangsters and terrorists discussing counterfeiting money, planting dynamite, and digging tunnels Max would offer me his comments on King David, which Honegger was directing at the Colón at the time, or on Taïroff, who was at the Teatro Odeón, or give me a detailed analysis of Capablanca’s best game against Alekhine. Or he would suddenly come out with one of his gently humorous little remarks, as inappropriate in that context as a genteel little glass of port would be at a drinking bout of inveterate gin guzzlers.