On Heroes and Tombs
There are not even two hundred of them, and they are not even soldiers any more: they are defeated, filthy beings, and many of them no longer know why they are fighting. Lieutenant Celedonio Olmos, like all the others, rides along in grim silence, remembering his father, Captain Olmos, and his brother, lying dead in Quebracho Herrado.
Eight hundred leagues of defeats. He understands nothing now, and keeps hearing Iriarte’s malicious words echoing in his mind: the mad general, the man who doesn’t know what he wants. And hadn’t Solana Sotomayor forsaken Brizuela for Lavalle? He can see Brizuela now in his mind’s eye: drunk and disheveled, surrounded by dogs. Let no envoy of Lavalle’s dare approach! And isn’t that girl from Salta riding at his side this very moment? He doesn’t understand anything any more. And everything was so clear two years ago: Freedom or Death. But now …
The world has turned into chaos. And he thinks of his mother, of his childhood. But the figure of Brigadier General Brizuela appears before him once again: a vociferous puppet in filthy rags, surrounded by ferocious mastiffs, baring their teeth in fury. And then the lieutenant tries once again to remember that childhood.
He was walking along, unaware of his surroundings, as what few thoughts remaining in his mind were again fragmented by violent emotions, like buildings destroyed by an earthquake that are shaken by new tremors.
He climbed on a bus and the feeling that the world was meaningless came over him even more forcefully: a bus hurtling along so resolutely and so powerfully toward some destination that he didn’t care at all about, a precise, technically efficient mechanism, transporting a person who had no objective and no longer believed in anything and hoped for nothing and had no need to go anywhere at all; a chaos borne from one place to another thanks to exact schedules, fares, corps of inspectors, traffic laws. And like an idiot he had thrown away the ampoules that would arrest his heart, and looking Pablo up again in order to get some more was like going to a ball in order to meet God or the Devil. But there was still the train, the grade crossing on the Calle Dorrego, maybe there … one second and it would all be over. He remembered the crowd that had gathered that time, what’s happening? what’s happening? impossible to elbow his way to the center of the crowd, he heard people saying how horrible, he wasn’t watching and it hit him, what a terrible way to die, what do you mean? he threw himself in front of it deliberately, he wanted to kill himself, and another person shouting there’s a shoe over here with a foot in it. Or perhaps water, the La Boca bridge, but the water down below was oily and then too there was the possibility of not being able to go through with it or repenting having jumped in those seconds during the fall, fragments of time that, who knows? may be entire existences, as endless and as monstrous as the seconds of a nightmare. Or shutting himself up in a room and turning on the gas after swallowing lots of pills the way Juan Pedro had, but Nené had left the window open just a crack. Poor Nené, he thought with affectionate irony. And his smile in the midst of tragedy was like a little sun appearing fleetingly on a stormy, freezing day of huge floods and tidal waves, as the conductor shouted “end of the line!” and the last passengers got off. What? what? where was he? let’s see, yes, Avenida General Paz, that was where, a big tower; a little kid came running out of the entryway of one of the houses and from inside a woman, surely his mother, shouted after him: “I’m going to beat you black and blue, you thief,” and the little kid ran down the street and around the corner in terror; he had on a pair of short brown pants and a red pullover that stood out against the rainy gray sky like an ephemeral little touch of beauty; a girl appeared, walking along the same sidewalk in a yellow raincoat, and he thought: she’s being sent out to buy groceries or sweet biscuits to eat with maté, her mother or her pensioner father doubtless said to her: “It’s a good afternoon for drinking maté with biscuits, go buy us some,” or perhaps one of those boys that girls call “a special friend” had a day off work and was dropping by the neighborhood to chat with her for a little while, or perhaps she was being sent on some errand by her brother who had a little workshop nearby because now he could see a little garage where a young man who could well be the brother was standing, dressed in a pair of grease-stained blue overalls and holding a wrench in his hand, and saying to the apprentice mechanic: “Get a move on, Perico, and go ask him for the battery charger,” and the apprentice hurried out, but everything was like a dream and what was the point of any of it: battery chargers, wrenches, mechanics, and he felt sorry for the terrified little boy because, he thought, all of us are dreaming and so why punish kids and why fix cars and have crushes on nice boys and then get married and have children who also dream that they’re alive, who have to suffer, go off to war or fight or give up hope all on account of mere dreams. He was simply drifting along now, like a boat without a crew swept along by shifting currents, and moving mechanically like those invalids who have lost almost all will and consciousness and yet allow themselves to be moved by the nurses and obey the instructions they are given with the obscure remains of that will and that consciousness without knowing why. The 493, he thought, I go as far as Chacarita and then I take the subway to Florida and then I walk from there to the hotel. So he got on the 493 and mechanically asked for a ticket, and for half an hour continued to see ghosts dreaming of things that kept them very busy; at the Florida stop he went out the exit on the Calle San Martín, walked along Corrientes to Reconquista and from there headed for the Warszawa rooming house, Accommodations for Gentlemen, went up the dirty, dilapidated stairs to the fourth floor, and threw himself on the wretched bed as though he had been wandering through labyrinths for centuries.
Pedernera looks at Lavalle, who is riding along just a little way ahead, with his gaucho trousers, his torn shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his straw hat. He is ill, thin, subdued: he seems like the ghost, in rags and tatters, of that Lavalle of the Army of the Andes …. How many years have gone by! Twenty-five years of battles, of victories, and defeat. But at least in those days they knew what they were fighting for: they wanted to free the Continent, they were doing battle for the Great Fatherland. But now … So much blood has run in the rivers of America, they have seen so many desperate afternoons, they have heard so many battle cries ring out between brothers. Right here, with no need to look any farther, Oribe is at their heels: didn’t he fight at their side in the Army of the Andes? And Dorrego?
Pedernera gazes soberly at the towering mountain peaks, his eyes slowly survey the desolate valley, he seems to be asking war what the secret of time is …
The twilight darkness silently invaded the corners of the room, causing colors and objects to fade away to nothingness. The mirror on the standing wardrobe, cheap and ordinary as it was, began to take on the mysterious importance that all mirrors (cheap or not) take on at night, just as in the face of death all men take on the same profound, mysterious importance, be they beggars or kings.
Yet he still wanted to see her, one last time.
He turned on the little night lamp and sat down on the edge of his bed. He took the worn photograph out of one of his inside pockets, and moving a little closer to the night lamp, looked at it intently, as though he were examining a scarcely legible document, on whose correct interpretation events of great importance depended. Of the many faces that (like all human beings) Alejandra had, this was the one that belonged most intimately to Martín; or at least the one that had once belonged to him most intimately: a face with the profound and slightly sad expression of someone longing for something that he or she knows, beforehand, to be unattainable, a face full of desire but also already full of despair, as though it were possible for desire (that is to say hope) and despair to manifest themselves at one and the same time. And moreover, a face with that almost imperceptible yet violent expression of hers of scorn for something: for God perhaps or for all of humanity, or more probably, for herself. Or for all of these things together. And not simply scorn but also contempt and even loathing. And yet he had kissed and caressed that terrible
mask during a period that now seemed to him to lie far in the past, although it had lasted until very recently: just as once we have awakened, the imprecise images that moved us in our dreams or terrified us in our nightmares seem infinitely far away. And very soon now that face would be disappearing forever, along with the room, with Buenos Aires, with the entire universe, with his own memory, as though everything had been nothing more than a gigantic phantasmagoria conjured up by an ironic, malevolent sorcerer. And as he further studied that static image, that sort of symbol of impossibility, amid the chaotic thoughts running through his mind he seemed to glimpse, albeit in a very vague, confused way, the idea that he was not killing himself for her, for Alejandra, but for something more profound and more permanent that he was unable to define: as though Alejandra had been nothing more than one of those mirages of an oasis that cause the traveler in the desert to go desperately onward across the burning sands, and whose vanishing can bring on his death: and yet the ultimate cause of his despair (and hence of his death) is not the false oasis but the implacable, endless desert.
His head was a maelstrom, but a slow-moving, ponderous one, made up not of transparent (though raging) waters but of a sticky mixture of refuse, grease, and decomposed corpses, along with beautiful abandoned photographs and the remains of beloved objects, as in great floods. He could see himself, all alone in the afternoon heat, walking along the bank of the Riachuelo, “like a little orphan” (he had once heard a neighbor say), sad and lonely, when after the death of his grandmother he had transferred all his affection to Bonito, who was running along ahead of him, leaping about chasing a sparrow and barking joyously. “What a happy thing it is to be a dog,” he had thought then and had said as much to Don Bachicha, who had listened to him thoughtfully, puffing on his pipe. And suddenly, in the midst of that confusion of ideas and feelings, he also remembered a verse: not one from Dante or Homer, but from a poet who was as fond of wandering about the streets and as humble as Bonito. “Where was God when you went away?” that poor wretch had asked himself when he lost his beloved. Yes, where was God when his mother had jumped rope to kill him? And where was He when Bonito had been run over by the Anglo truck: Bonito, one of this world’s poor insignificant creatures, with blood pouring out of his mouth, with his whole little hind end mashed to a repulsive pulp, and with his eyes looking sadly at him in his terrible agony, as though asking him a mute and humble question: a creature who had no sin to pay for, neither his own nor anyone else’s, so little and so unimportant that he would seem to have deserved at least the grace of a peaceful death in his sleep in his old age, remembering some little pond in summer, some long walk along the banks of the Riachuelo in long-ago happy days. And where was God when Alejandra was with that bastard? And suddenly he also saw that scene from the documentary film that Alvarez kept at his house and would project over and over, out of a sort of masochism: and he could see once more, forever, that seven- or eight-year-old boy, during the exodus across the Pyrenees in the snow, amid the tens of thousands of men and women fleeing toward France, a little cripple, alone and helpless, hurrying along with awkward little hops on his one leg and his little improvised crutch, amid the terrifying anonymous fleeing multitude, as though the nightmare of the bombings in Barcelona would never end and as though he had left not only his leg behind there, on an infernal, nameless night, but also, for days now, days that seemed like centuries, he had also been leaving behind pieces of his soul that he had been dragging along with him out of loneliness and fear.
And suddenly Martín was jolted by an idea. It burst from his excited soul like a great electrical discharge amid huge black storm clouds. If the universe had any reason for being, if human life had any meaning, if God existed, in short, let Him present himself here in this room, this dirty room of his in a cheap rooming house. Why not? Why should He refuse to accept this challenge? If He existed, He was supremely strong, the Almighty. And the strong, the powerful can allow themselves the luxury of being somewhat condescending. Why not? Whom would He profit by not presenting Himself? What sort of pride would He thus satisfy? I’ll give Him till dawn, Martín said to himself with a sort of vindictive pleasure: assigning Him this definite time limit made him suddenly feel possessed of a terrible power and enhanced his feeling of spiteful satisfaction, as though he had said to himself: “We’ll see now, once and for all.” And if He didn’t appear, he would kill himself.
He got up from the bed in great agitation, as though a sudden, monstrous vitality had brought him to life again.
He began to pace back and forth nervously, biting his fingernails and thinking, thinking, as though he were in an airplane plunging toward the earth in a dizzying tailspin which thanks to a superhuman effort he had managed to put on a precarious straight and level course again. And suddenly an indescribable terror rooted him to the spot, tense and rigid.
The thing was, if God did appear, how would He do so? And what would He be like? An infinite, awesome presence, a face, a vast silence, a voice, a sort of gentle, reassuring caress? And what if He appeared and he, Martín, had no way of knowing that He had? He would then have killed himself for no good reason, and by mistake.
There was a deep silence in the room: the sounds of the city down below could scarcely be heard.
He thought that any one of those sounds might well be significant. It was as though he were lost in the midst of a bustling multitude of millions of human beings, obliged to recognize the face of a stranger in this crowd who is bringing him a message that may save him, although he knows nothing about this stranger except that he is the bearer of this message that may be his salvation.
He sat down on the edge of the bed: he was shivering and his face was burning hot. He thought: I don’t know, I don’t know, let Him appear in any way he pleases. Any way at all. If He existed and wanted to save him, He would know how He should appear so as not to pass unnoticed. This last thought calmed him for a moment and he lay down on the bed. But he immediately became agitated again, and soon his state became unbearable. He began to pace up and down the room once again, and then suddenly he found himself out in the street, wandering about aimlessly, as the shipwreck victim, drained of all his strength and huddling in the bottom of his lifeboat, allows it to be swept along by the tempestuous waves and the furious gales.
They have been marching for fifteen hours now in the direction of Jujuy. The general is ill, and has not slept for the last three days; silent and dejected, he sits his horse and lets it take him on, as he waits for the news that his aide-de-camp Lacasa will be bringing him.
The news that Lacasa is bringing! Pedernera and Danel and Artayeta and Mansilla and Echagüe and Billinghurst and Ramos Mejía think. The poor general! We must watch over his sleep, we must keep him from waking up completely.
And here comes Lacasa, driving his mounts to exhaustion to bring news that all of them already know.
So they keep their distance; they do not want the general to notice that none of them is surprised by Lacasa’s report. And from afar, standing apart in silence, with affectionate irony, with gloomy fatalism, they follow that absurd dialogue, that grim report: all the Unitarists have fled to Bolivia.
Domingo Arenas, the military officer in command in Jujuy, has gone over to the Federalists and is waiting for Lavalle in order to finish him off. “Tell them to escape to Bolivia by whatever shortcut they can find,” Dr. Bedoya advised before leaving the town.
What will Lavalle do? What is it that General Lavalle will never do? They all know; no need even to discuss it: he will never turn his back on danger. And they prepare to follow him as he embarks on this last, this fatal act of madness. And at that point he gives the order to proceed to Jujuy.
But the truth is plain to see: their leader is aging by the hour, he feels that death is at hand, and as though he has found himself obliged to live out his natural span, but at an accelerated pace, there is something in his gaze, in his sagging shoulders, a certain ultimate weariness of this man who is only f
orty-five that already portends old age and death. His comrades contemplate him from a distance.
Their eyes follow that beloved ruin of a man.
Frías thinks: “Blue-eyed Cid.”
Acevedo thinks: “You have fought in a hundred twenty-five battles for the freedom of this continent.”
Pedernera thinks: “There, marching toward death, is General Juan Galo de Lavalle, a descendant of Hernán Cortés and Don Pelayo, the man whom San Martín called the First Sword of the Army of Liberation, the man who by putting his hand to the hilt of his saber caused Bolívar to fall silent.”
Lacasa thinks: “On his coat of arms is an arm brandishing a sword, a sword that is never surrendered. The Moors did not bring down that upraised arm, nor did the Spaniards. Nor will that sword be surrendered now. That is certain fact.”
And Damasita Boedo, the girl who rides at Lavalle’s side and anxiously tries to read the face of that man whom she loves but who she feels is in a distant world now, thinks: “General, I would like you to lean on me and find repose, to rest your weary head on my breast, to sleep cradled in my arms. The world could not prevail against you, the world can do nothing to harm a child who sleeps in his mother’s lap. I am your mother now, general. Look at me, tell me that you love me, tell me that you need my help.”