On Heroes and Tombs

  Beginning on September 2, events followed one upon the other in rapid succession: student demonstrations, shooting in the streets, then the death of a student, Aguilar, strikes, and finally the revolution of September 6 and the fall of President Yrigoyen. And that turn of events (as we now know) marked the end of an entire era in the country’s history. From then on we would never again be what we had been before.

  With the military junta and the declaration of a state of siege the entire movement suffered a terrible blow; premises occupied by workers and students were broken into, foreign workers were deported, the insurgents were tortured and the ranks of the revolutionary movement decimated.

  In the midst of all the chaos, I lost sight of Carlos, but I suspected that he was involved in something extremely dangerous. And when on December 1 I read in the papers about the holdup of the Braceras cashier, in the Calle Catamarca, I instantly recalled a long and highly suspect stroll that Carlos had taken in my company in that neighborhood, for the ostensible purpose of looking for a good place to set up a clandestine printing plant. I had no doubt that that holdup had been the work of Fernando’s gang, and my suspicions were later confirmed. That operation was in fact the last one in which Carlos participated, for around about that time he had finally become convinced that the objectives that Fernando was pursuing had nothing in common with his own. And even though Fernando had taken it upon himself to undermine Carlos’s sympathies for Communism by cynical but devastating arguments, Carlos joined a Communist party cell in Avellaneda. On a number of occasions I had heard those arguments of Fernando’s, sarcastic arguments that Carlos would listen to with his gaze fixed on the floor and his jaws tightly clenched. This was at a time when Carlos was already being worked on by Communist youngsters and he was beginning to discover considerable advantages in this other movement: Communists seemed to be fighting for something solid and definite, they were demonstrating that terrorism on an individual basis was either useless or actually detrimental to the cause of revolution, they were criticizing, with serious and well-founded arguments, a movement that had sanctioned the rise of gangs such as the one led by Di Giovanni, and, finally, they were putting forward convincing proof that the only effective weapon against the organized power of the bourgeois state was the organized power of the proletariat. But unlike other anarchists, Fernando did not criticize the Communist movement for advocating the formation of a new régime that threatened to be even more oppressive than the one preceding it, or for militating in favor of the setting up of a dictatorship that would suppress individual freedom for the good of the future community as a whole: no, what he reproached the Communist movement for was its mediocrity and its hopes of solving man’s ultimate problems by way of steel mills, hydroelectric dams, shoes, and a decent diet.

  What horrified me was not that Fernando should try to destroy Carlos’s new-found faith with sophistical arguments, but the fact, rather, that Communism and anarchism alike meant absolutely nothing to him, and that his sole aim in letting loose with his dialectical weapons was to destroy a person as helpless as Carlos.

  But, as I say, this was before the Braceras holdup. After that I did not see Carlos again until 1934. As for Fernando, I lost sight of him for the next twenty years.

  My having met Fernando again and the crisis I was going through, one that made me feel even more lonely than during the last years of my secondary studies, made me more eager than ever to return “to the Vidals,” to a degree that became almost intolerable.

  I had always been a quiet, reflective sort, and suddenly I had found myself amid a raging torrent, just as a mountain river in flood sweeps along with it many things that moments before had been placidly contemplating the world. For that very reason, that entire period now seems to me, with the passage of the years, as unreal as a dream, as seductive (but also as remote) as the world of a novel.

  With my world suddenly complicated by the activities of the police and by my relation with Carlos, with my pension having been broken into by the forces of law and order, I was obliged to take refuge with Ortega, an engineering student who in those days had been trying to woo me over to Communism. He lived near Constitución, on the Calle Brasil, in a pension run by a Spanish widow who adored him. It was not hard for him, therefore, to come up with a temporary solution to my problems: he simply removed various odds and ends from a little room overlooking the Calle Lima and brought in a mattress for me to sleep on.

  I slept very fitfully that night. When I woke up at dawn, I found myself almost in a state of terror; I did not remember immediately what had happened the preceding day and before I was fully awake I looked about in vast surprise at the puzzling reality that surrounded me. For we do not wake up all at once, but rather it is a gradual, complex process whereby little by little we recognize the world that we belong to, as though we were a traveler returning from a very long journey through dim and distant continents, in the course of which, after centuries of obscure existence, we have lost all memory of our previous existence, remembering of it only incoherent fragments. And after a span of time impossible to measure, the light of day begins to feebly illuminate the exits leading out of those labyrinths so full of anguish, whereupon we anxiously break into a run and head toward the everyday world. And we arrive at the edge of sleep like exhausted shipwreck victims who finally reach the shore after a long battle with the storm. And there, still partially unconscious, but feeling our fear gradually draining away, we begin to recognize with gratitude some of the attributes of the everyday world, the tranquil and comfortable universe of civilization. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry tells how after an anxious battle with the elements, lost somewhere out over the Atlantic, when he and his mechanic had lost almost all hope of ever reaching land, they finally spied a faint little light on the African coast, and touched down safely on their very last gallon of fuel; and how the cup of café au lait that they then drank in a little shack was the humble but transcendental symbol of contact with the whole of life, the trivial but miraculous reunion with existence itself. In the same way, when we return from that universe of sleep, an ordinary night table, a pair of worn shoes, a familiar lamp, are deeply moving lights shining on the coast that we are eager to reach: safety. That is why we are overcome with apprehensions when one of the fragments of reality that we begin to be able to make out is not the one that we were expecting: that little night table we know so well, our pair of worn shoes, the familiar lamp. Which is what usually happens to us when we wake up all of a sudden in a strange place, in a bare, cold, anonymous hotel room, or in the bedroom to which chance circumstances have unexpectedly taken us the night before.

  Little by little I realized that that room was not mine and at the same time began gradually to remember the previous day with people’s lodgings being broken into and police swarming all over. Now, in the dawn light, that entire day struck me as absurd and totally alien to my spirit. It was borne in upon me once more that the irrational violence of the events that were taking place was beginning to touch even the lives of people who weren’t at all the violent sort. Through a curious chain of circumstances I, who am persuaded that I was born for contemplation and passive reflection, had found myself in the midst of confusion and even extremely dangerous events.

  I got up, opened the window, and looked down at the indifferent city.

  I felt lonely and distraught. Life seemed a complicated and hostile business.

  Ortega appeared, cracking jokes about the anarchists with his usual healthy optimism. And before going off to his classes at the university he left me one of Lenin’s works that he recommended that I read, for in it Lenin sets forth a definitive critique of terrorism. Having read, at a friend’s suggestion, the memoirs of Vera Figner, who had been buried alive in the Czar’s prisons as a consequence of the anarchists’ terrorist attacks, I was unable to read that pitilessly sarcastic analysis of Lenin’s with any sort of sympathy. “Petty-bourgeois desperation.” How grotesque those romantics appeared to be in the implac
able light of Marxist theory! As the years have gone by, I have gradually come to realize that reality was closer to Lenin’s view of it than to Vera Figner’s, but my heart has always remained faithful to those pure-hearted, slightly mad heroes.

  Time suddenly seemed to have stopped for me. Ortega had urged me not to go out of the pension for a few days, and wait and see what course events would take. But after three days I could bear being cooped up no longer and began to go out, thinking it would be impossible for the police to recognize a youngster who had no criminal record.

  At noon I went into one of the cafeterias on Constitución and had lunch. I found it strange to come across so many unconcerned people, seemingly without a care in the world, in the streets and cafés. Up there in my little room I was reading revolutionary works and had the feeling that the whole world might explode at any moment; then when I went out, I found life going on as usual, peacefully and calmly: office workers were going off to their jobs, tradesmen were selling their wares in their shops, and one could even see people lazing on the benches in the squares, just sitting there watching the hours go by: all of them equally dull and monotonous. Once again, and this would not be the last time, I felt more or less as though I were a stranger in the world, as though I had awakened in it all of a sudden and had no notion of its laws and its meaning. I wandered aimlessly about the streets of Buenos Aires, I watched its people, I sat down on a bench in the Plaza Constitución and meditated. Then I would return to my little room, feeling lonelier than ever. And it was only when I buried myself in books that I seemed to be in touch with reality again, as though that existence out in the streets were, by contrast, a sort of vast dream unfolding in the minds of hypnotized people. It took me many years to realize that in those streets, in those public squares, and even in those business establishments and offices of Buenos Aires there were thousands who thought or felt more or less as I did at that moment: lonely, anguished people, people pondering the sense and nonsense of life, people who had the feeling that they were seeing a world that had gone to sleep round about them, a world made up of men and women who had been hypnotized or turned into robots.

  And in that solitary redoubt I began to write stories. I now realize that I would write whenever I was unhappy, whenever I felt alone or not properly attuned to the world in which it had been my fate to be born. And I think it likely that that is always the case, that the art of our time, that tense art that tears itself into bits and fragments, is invariably created out of our maladjustment, our anxiety, and our discontent—a sort of attempt at reconciliation with the universe on the part of that race of vulnerable, restless, covetous creatures that human beings are. For animals do not need art: they are content simply to live, since their existence slips peacefully by, in harmony with their instinctual needs. A bird needs only a few little seeds or worms, a tree to build its nest in, great open spaces to spread its wings in; and its life goes by from its birth to its death in a felicitous rhythm that is never violently shattered either by metaphysical despair or by madness. Whereas man, on raising himself up on his two hind legs and fashioning the first ax from a sharp-edged stone, laid down thereby the foundations of his grandeur but also created the sources of his anguish: for with his hands and with the tools made by his hands he was to erect that very strange and very powerful construct that is called culture and by so doing initiate the great rent in his very being, since he ceased thenceforth to be a mere animal yet at the same time had not reached the point of being the god that his mind prompted him to think he was. He will thenceforth be that miserable dual being who moves and lives between the earth of the animals and the heaven of his gods, that being who has lost the earthly paradise of his innocence and not yet reached the heavenly paradise of his redemption. That pain-racked, sick-spirited being who will ponder, for the first time, the reason for his existence. And thus his hands, and then that ax, that fire, and then science and technology will each day deepen the abyss separating him from his primordial race and his animal felicity. And the city will eventually be the last stage in his mad career, the supreme expression of his self-pride, and the ultimate form of his alienation. And then discontented beings, more or less blind and more or less mad, will fumble about trying to recover that lost harmony through mystery and blood, creating through painting or writing a reality different from the wretched one that surrounds them, a reality that often seems fantastic and demented but that, curiously, turns out in the end to be more profound and more real than everyday reality. And thus, in a sense dreaming for everyone, these vulnerable beings contrive to rise above their individual unhappiness and become interpreters and even (suffering) redeemers of the collective destiny.

  But my unhappiness has always been a twofold one, for my weakness, my contemplative turn of mind, my indecision, my apathy have always kept me from attaining that new order, from creating that new cosmos that the work of art represents; and I have always ended up falling from the scaffoldings of that passionately desired construction that would save me. And having once fallen, badly battered and doubly saddened, I have hastened to seek out mere humble human beings.

  And so it was that time too: my constructions were all nothing but dull experiments that miscarried, and again and again, with each failure, as has happened every time that I have felt lonely and confused, in the midst of my loneliness I could hear, there in the depths of my mind, mingled with the dimly remembered murmurs of a ghostly mother I had scarcely known, the gentle, quiet voice of Ana María, the only approximation to a flesh-and-blood mother I had ever known. It was like the echo of those bells of the engulfed cathedral of legend, set to ringing by wind and storm. And as always when my life grew dark, that remote tolling began to ring in my ears more and more loudly, like a summons, as though it were saying: “Don’t forget that I am always here, that you can always hasten to my side.” And suddenly, on one of those days, the summons grew so insistent that it was irresistible. I immediately leapt out of bed, where I was in the habit of spending long hours lost in fruitless reflection, and hurried off, with the sudden anxious thought that I ought to have done so long before, to recover what remained of that childhood, that river, those long-ago afternoons at Ana María’s estancia. The house of Ana María.

  I was mistaken, for our anxieties do not always lead us to the truth. Meeting Georgina again was not a meeting of our minds or hearts, but rather the beginning of a new sort of unhappiness that in a certain sense has lasted to this very day and that will surely linger on until the day I die. But this story is not the one that interests you.

  I saw her a number of times, it is true; I often walked about those streets of other days with her; she was kind to me. But who has ever maintained that it is only those who are wicked who can make us suffer?

  She not only said very little, but what few words she did utter were spoken reluctantly, as though she were living in constant fear. It was not Georgina’s words that made me understand what she was at that time in her life or explained the sufferings she was undergoing. It was her paintings. Have I already told you that she had been painting ever since she was a little girl? I don’t mean to say that her paintings were in any way direct self-revelations, since there were not even any human figures in them, let alone any sort of “story.” They were still lifes: a chair alongside a window, a vase of flowers. But what a miracle: we say “chair” or “window” or “clock,” words that designate mere objects in that cold and indifferent world that surrounds us, and yet we thereby communicate something mysterious and indefinable, something that is like a key, like a pathetic message from the innermost depths of our being. We say “chair,” yet we do not mean “chair,” and we are understood. Or at least we are understood by those to whom this cryptic message is secretly addressed, and it passes intact above the heads of the indifferent and hostile crowd. Thus that pair of wooden shoes, that candle, that chair are not saying something about those wooden shoes, that pale candle, or that chair with a woven straw seat; what they are “about” is Va
n Gogh, Vincent (above all Vincent): his anxiety, his anguish, his loneliness; so that what they really are is his self-portrait, the description of his most profound and most painful anxieties. Using those indifferent external objects, those objects of that cold, rigid world that is outside of us, that perhaps existed before us and that very probably will continue to exist, icy and indifferent, when we are dead and gone, as though these objects were no more than shaky, temporary bridges (as words are for the poet) thrown up to enable us to traverse the abyss that forever opens up between the universe and ourselves; as though they were symbols of that profound secret that it reflects; indifferent, objective, gray objects for those incapable of understanding the key to them, but warm and vibrant and full of secret intentions for those who possess that key. For in reality these painted objects are not objects belonging to that indifferent universe but objects created by this solitary, desperate being, anxious to communicate, who does with objects what the soul does with the body: impregnating it with its desires and its feelings, manifesting itself in the wrinkles of its flesh, the gleam in its eyes, the smiles and the corners of its mouth: like a spirit seeking desperately to manifest itself through the alien body, the sometimes grossly alien body, of a hysteric or a cold professional medium.