The Tunnel

  No one seemed to notice the scene: their eyes passed over it as if it were something trivial, mere embellishment. With the exception of a single person, no one seemed to comprehend that the scene was an essential component of the painting. It was the day of the opening. A young woman I had never seen before stood for a long time before my painting, apparently ignoring the large figure of a woman in the foreground, a woman watching her child at play. Instead, she stared at the scene of the window, and as she did, I was sure that she was totally isolated from the world: she neither saw nor heard the people walking by or pausing to view my canvas.

  I watched her nervously the whole time. Then she disappeared in the crowd, while I struggled between a crippling fear and an agonizing desire to call to her. Fear? Of what? Perhaps the same fear you feel when you bet every penny you own on one spin of the wheel. After she was gone I felt irritable, miserable; I was convinced I would never see her again now that she was lost among the millions of anonymous inhabitants of Buenos Aires.

  I went home that night feeling nervous, discontent, dejected.

  I went back every day until the show closed, stationing myself close enough to see everyone who stopped before my painting. But she never returned.

  Throughout the months that followed I thought only of her and of the possibility that I might see her again. And in a way I painted only for her. It was as if the tiny scene of the window had begun to expand, to swallow up that canvas and all the rest of my work.

  IV

  Then one afternoon, finally, I saw her again. She was walking briskly down the opposite side of the street, like someone who must reach a specific place at a specific time.

  I recognized her immediately; I could have picked her out of any crowd. I was filled with indescribable emotion. I had thought about her for so many months, imagined so many things, that when I saw her I did not know what to do.

  In fact I had often thought about this moment, planning in minute detail what I would do in the event I met her. I think I have said that I am very shy; that is why I had thought and thought about a chance meeting, and about how to take advantage of it. The greatest difficulty in such imagined meetings is how to begin a conversation. I know a lot of men who have no difficulty in striking up a conversation with a strange woman. I confess that at one time I envied them greatly, because, although I was never a womanizer – or perhaps precisely for that reason – there were times I regretted not being able to communicate with a woman, that is, on those rare occasions when it seems impossible to accept the idea that she will never be a part of your life. Unfortunately, I was condemned never to be part of any woman’s life.

  In those imagined meetings I had analyzed several possibilities. I know the kind of person I am, and I know that because of my confusion and shyness I am totally lost in any unexpected or unplanned situation. As a result, I had prepared a number of logical, or at least possible, courses of action. (It is not logical that a close friend would send you an insulting anonymous letter, but we all know it is possible.)

  The girl, I could assume, was in the habit of visiting art exhibits. If I saw her there, I could stop beside her and, without too much awkwardness, start a conversation about one of the paintings.

  After examining this possibility in detail, I abandoned it. I never go to art exhibits. For a painter, this may seem a bizarre attitude, but there is a logical explanation, and I am sure that if I decide to give it, everyone will agree that I am right. Well, I may exaggerate when I say ‘everyone.’ No, I know I exaggerate. Experience has taught me that what seems clear and evident to me is never so to my fellow human beings. I have been burned so many times that now before I justify or explain anything, I mull it over a very long time; almost inevitably, I end up withdrawing into myself and not opening my mouth at all. That is why until today I had not decided to tell the story of my crime. Even at this moment, I still do not know whether it is worth the effort to try to explain this quirk of mine about art exhibits; I am afraid, however, that if I do not explain you will think that it is some kind of phobia, when in fact I have a very sound reason for my reluctance.

  Actually, in this case there is more than one reason. Before I go on, I should say that I detest sects, brotherhoods, guilds, groups in general, any assemblage of morons congregating for reasons of profession, tastes, or similar manias. All these cliques have numbers of grotesque characteristics in common: repetition of type, their jargon, their arrogant conviction that they are better than everyone else.

  I can see that I am complicating the problem, but I see no way to simplify it. Besides, anyone who wants to stop reading this account may do so now. He should know immediately that he has my unqualified permission.

  What do I mean when I say ‘repetition of type’? You have undoubtedly noticed how disagreeable it is to be with someone who has a tic in one eye, or whose lip is constantly twitching. Well, can you imagine a club of such people? Such extreme examples are not necessary, however. Merely think of a large family, in which certain traits, certain gestures, certain intonations of voice, are commonplace. I once had the experience of falling in love with a woman (without, of course, declaring it) and then fleeing in terror when faced with meeting her sisters. And something truly horrendous happened to me on a different occasion. I had admired certain traits in a woman I knew, but when I met one of her sisters I was depressed and ashamed for days: the very traits I had found so desirable seemed exaggerated and distorted in the sister, slightly caricatured, but not greatly. If they had been greatly exaggerated they would have been different traits, while in fact they were magnified just enough to seem ridiculous. The vaguely distorted vision of the first woman that I saw in her sister, besides the impression I described, made me feel ashamed, as if in some way I were partly to blame for the slightly ridiculous view I now had of the woman I had so admired.

  Perhaps I see these things because I am a painter. I have noticed that other people seem oblivious of family peculiarities. I should add that I have a similar reaction to painters who imitate great masters, those miserable daubers who paint in the manner of Picasso, for example.

  Then there is the jargon, another of their characteristics that I cannot tolerate. Choose any example you like: psychoanalysis, communism, fascism, journalism. I have no favorites; I find them all repugnant. I offer the first example that comes to mind: psychoanalysis. Dr. Prato is a very talented man, and I believed he was a friend, a true friend. I suffered a terrible disillusionment when people began to persecute me and he took the part of the swine who were doing it. But let’s not go into that. One day, almost as soon as I arrived at his office, Prato told me he had to go out, and invited me to go with him.

  ‘Where?’ I asked.

  ‘To a cocktail the Society is giving,’ he replied.

  ‘What Society?’ I asked with veiled irony, because if there is anything that galls me, it is the way they all use the definite article: the Society, they say, when they mean the Society of Psychoanalysts; the Party, for the Communist Party; the Seventh, for Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

  Prato looked at me, mildly surprised, but I gazed back with absolute innocence.

  ‘Why, the Society of Psychoanalysts, Castel,’ he answered, drilling me with those penetrating eyes Freudians consider necessary to their profession, and also looking as if he were asking himself, ‘What new kind of madness is this guy up to now?’

  I remembered having read something about a meeting or symposium to be presided over by a Dr. Bernard, or Bertrand. Certain that it was not that meeting, I asked him if that was where we were going. He glanced at me with a scornful smile.

  ‘Those charlatans,’ he commented. ‘Ours is the only internationally recognized psychoanalytic society.’

  He sat down again at his desk, shuffled through some papers in a drawer, and finally handed me a letter written in English. I looked at it for the sake of courtesy.

  ‘I can’t read English,’ I explained.

  ‘This is a letter from Ch
icago. It vouches for the fact that we are the only society of psychoanalysts in all Argentina.’

  My face registered admiration and profound respect.

  So we left the office and drove to the cocktail party, where we found a mob of people. Some I knew by name, like Dr. Goldenberg, who had recently made quite a name for himself: in the course of treating a female patient, they had both ended up in a mental institution. He had just been released. I observed him closely, but he seemed no worse than the others. In fact he may even have been more placid, perhaps the result of his recent seclusion. The way he praised my paintings, I knew that he despised them.

  Everything was so elegant that I was embarrassed to be seen in my ancient suit with the baggy-kneed trousers. The source of my uneasiness was not the trousers, however, but something I could not define. It had reached a climax when a beautiful young lady offered me an hors d’oeuvre as she continued her discussion with a colleague over some unimaginable problem of anal masochism.

  I tried to find a quiet corner, but it was impossible. The room was crammed with identical people interminably parroting identical conversations. I fled to the outside world, and when I saw ordinary people (a newspaper vendor, a young boy, someone’s driver), it seemed unreal that such people were milling around in a nearby apartment.

  More than any other, however, I detest groups of painters. Partly, of course, because painting is what I know best, and we all know that we have greater reason to detest the things we know well. But I have still another reason: THE CRITICS. They are a plague I have never understood. If I were a great surgeon, and some fellow who had never held a scalpel in his hand, who was not a doctor, and who had never so much as put a splint on a cat’s paw, tried to point out where I had gone wrong in my operation, what would people think? It is the same with painting. What is amazing is that people do not realize it is the same, and although they would laugh at the pretensions of the man who criticizes the surgeon, they listen with nauseating respect to the charlatans who comment on art. There might be some excuse for listening to the opinions of a critic who once painted, even if only mediocre works. But that is just as absurd; because what could be reasonable about a mediocre painter giving advice to a good one?

  V

  I have strayed from my subject. That is the result of this damned compulsion to justify everything I do. Why the hell should I explain why I do not go to art exhibits? It seems to me that every person has a right to go or not to go, whatever he pleases, without having to sign an affidavit of his reasons. Otherwise, how far might such a mania lead? Well, enough of that, although there is still a great deal I could say about art galleries: the gossiping colleagues, the public’s blindness, the imbecility of those in charge of the hall and hanging the paintings. Fortunately (or unfortunately) that kind of thing no longer interests me. If it did, I might write a long essay entitled ‘On the Manner in Which the Painter May Defend Himself from the Friends of Painting.’

  At any rate, I had to eliminate the possibility of finding the girl at an art exhibit.

  On the other hand, she might have a friend who was also a friend of mine. In that case a simple introduction would do. Blinded by the painful glare of my shyness, I leapt at that possibility. A simple introduction! How easy that would make everything, how pleasant! My blindness prevented me from seeing at once the basic flaw in the idea, that finding one of her friends would be as difficult as finding her, because how could I find her friend if I did not know who she was? And if I knew who she was, why would I seek out a third party? There remained, it is true, the minor advantage of the introduction, which was not to be disdained. But clearly the first order of business was to find her, and then look for a common friend to introduce us.

  Or I would take the opposite approach: to see if by chance any of my friends was a friend of hers. That I could do without having to find her first. All I had to do was ask each of my acquaintances whether they knew a young woman of such and such a height, with hair of such and such a color. However, this plan seemed too frivolous, and I rejected it. I was deterred by the mere idea of posing such a question to someone like Mapelli or Lartigue.

  I want to make it clear that I did not discard this plan because it was unrealistic, but for the reasons I have just stated. There may be those who think it unlikely that an acquaintance of mine might also know her. It might seem this way to a superficial mind, but not to anyone in the habit of reflecting on human nature. There are in our society horizontal strata formed of persons with similar tastes, and within those strata, casual meetings (are there such things?) are not unusual, especially when the cause of the stratification is a quality common to a very few. I have had the experience of running into a person in Berlin, then in a remote village in Italy, and finally in a bookstore in Buenos Aires. Is it reasonable to attribute those repeated meetings to chance? But I am belaboring the obvious: any person devoted to music, or Esperanto, or spiritism, will know that.

  I was forced, then, to fall back on the possibility I dreaded most: a chance meeting on the street. How the hell is it that some men manage to stop a woman and start a conversation with her, even an affair? I rejected out of hand any sequence of events in which I had to make the overtures: my ignorance of the stranger-in-the-street approach, and my looks, forced me to that sad but unshakable decision.

  That left nothing but hope for a lucky break, one of those flukes that happens about once in a blue moon: that she would be the first to speak. So my happiness was tied to a one-in-a-million lottery I had to win to earn the right to play a second time, and in which I would receive the prize only on the wild shot I won a second day. In short, my only hope was that we might meet by chance, followed by the almost total improbability that she would speak first. I felt a kind of vertigo, a mixture of sadness and despair. Nevertheless, I began to lay my plans.

  I envisioned scenes in which she spoke to me – for example, to ask about an address, or where to catch a bus – and from that opening, during months of reflection and melancholy, of rage, of abandon and hope, I constructed an endless series of variations. In one I was talkative, witty (something in fact I never am); in another I was taciturn; in still another, sunny and smiling. At times, though it seems incredible, I answered rudely, even with ill-concealed rage. It happened (in some of these imaginary meetings) that our exchange broke off abruptly because of an absurd irritability on my part, or because I rebuked her, almost crudely, for some comment I found pointless or ill-thought-out. I felt bitter after these frustrated encounters, and for several days I would reproach myself for the clumsiness that had caused me to lose my one opportunity to establish a relationship with her. Fortunately, I would realize finally that everything was only imaginary, and that the actual possibility still existed. Then I would return to my preparations with renewed enthusiasm, imagining new and more fruitful dialogues on some street corner. In general, the greatest difficulty lay in linking her question with something as broad and foreign to her daily concerns as the general nature of art or, at least, her reactions to the scene of the window. Naturally, if you have time and tranquil surroundings, it is always possible to establish that kind of linkage logically; in a social gathering there is more than enough time, and in a certain way you expect to make that leap between totally unrelated subjects. But in the hustle and bustle of a Buenos Aires street, with people sweeping you along as they run to catch a bus, I would have to forfeit the luxury of that kind of conversation. On the other hand, if I cared about my future happiness, I could not forfeit it. So once again I would invent dialogues, the most concise and direct I could devise, that would lead from the sentence ‘Where is the main post office?’ to a discussion of various problems of expressionism or surrealism. It was not an easy task.

  One insomnia-racked night I came to the conclusion that it was pointless and artificial to attempt this kind of conversation and that it would be best to strike boldly to the heart of the matter with a single question, playing everything on one number. For example, ask, ‘
Why did you look only at the window?’ It is not unusual during nights of insomnia to act more decisively than during the daylight hours. The next morning, dispassionately analyzing the new possibility, I decided that I would never find the courage to ask that question point-blank. As always, discouragement drove me to the opposite extreme. I concocted a question so oblique that to reach the point that interested me (the window) would require a lengthy friendship: a question more or less on the order of ‘Do you like art?’

  I cannot remember now all the variations I invented. I remember only that some were so complex that they were useless in practical terms. Chances were nil that fate would offer me an intricate key to a lock of unknown design. It also happened that after examining so many elaborate variations I would forget the sequence of questions and answers, or confuse them, as can happen in chess plays when you imagine a match in your mind. As a result, I often transposed a sentence from one plan to a different one, with truly ridiculous and depressing results. For example, stopping to give her directions, and immediately asking, ‘What do you think about art?’ It was grotesque.

  When I reached that point I took a brief holiday from shuffling combinations.

  VI

  When I saw her walking down the opposite side of the street, all the variations blended into one great jumble. A muddle of sentences I had contrived and memorized in my long preparatory gymnastics swam in my brain. ‘Do you like art?’ ‘Why did you look only at the small window?’ and a dozen others. Most insistent of all arose a question I had rejected as uncouth, one that made me blush, and feel even more ridiculous: ‘Do you like Castel?’