On Heroes and Tombs Read online

  Ernesto Sabato

  * * *

  ON HEROES AND TOMBS

  Translated by Helen R. Lane

  Contents

   Foreword

   I The Dragon and the Princess

  II The Invisible Faces

  III Report on the Blind

  IV An Unknown God

     Follow Penguin

  Author’s Note

  There exists a certain type of fictional narrative whereby the author endeavors to free himself of an obsession that is not clear even to himself. For good or ill, this is the only sort of fiction I am able to write. I have found myself forced to write countless numbers of stories, incomprehensible to me, since my adolescence. Fortunately, I made few efforts to see them into print, and in 1948 I decided to publish just one of them, “El Túnel” [The Tunnel]. In the thirteen years that followed I continued to explore that dark labyrinth that leads to the central secret of our life. I tried at one time or another to express in writing the outcome of my research until I grew discouraged at the poor results and ended up destroying the majority of my manuscripts. Today a few friends who have read those that survived have urged me to publish them. I wish to express here my gratitude to all of them for that faith and confidence that unfortunately I have never had myself.

  I dedicate this novel to the woman who has persistently encouraged me at moments when I lacked faith, which is most of the time. Without her I should never have had the fortitude to finish it. And despite the fact that she doubtless deserves something better, with all its imperfections, this belongs to her.

  ERNESTO SABATO

  Foreword

  The initial investigations revealed that the old Miradorfn1 that Alejandra used as a bedroom had been locked from the inside by Alejandra herself. Then (although the amount of time that elapsed cannot be precisely determined by logical deduction) she killed her father with four bullets from a .32-caliber pistol. And finally, she poured gasoline around and set the Mirador on fire.

  The tragedy, which shocked Buenos Aires because this old Argentine family had been a prominent one, appeared in the beginning to have been the consequence of a sudden attack of insanity. But a new element that alters this earlier reconstruction of events has now entered the picture. A curious “Report on the Blind,” which Fernando Vidal finished drafting on the very night of his death, was discovered in the Villa Devoto apartment that he had been living in under an assumed name. Those persons who have examined it agree that it is the manuscript of a paranoiac. Nonetheless it would appear that it lends itself to certain interpretations that throw light on the crime and make the hypothesis of an act of madness less plausible than another more sinister, more obscure explanation. If this line of reasoning is correct, it would explain why Alejandra did not commit suicide with one of the two bullets that remained in the pistol, choosing instead to burn herself alive.

  [Excerpt from a police report published June 28, 1955, in La Razón, Buenos Aires.]

  Part One

  * * *

  THE DRAGON AND THE PRINCESS

  1

  On a Saturday in May, 1953, two years before the events in Barracas, a tall, stoop-shouldered youngster was walking along one of the footpaths in the Parque Lezama.

  He sat down on a bench, near the statue of Ceres, and remained there, doing nothing, lost in thought. “Like a boat drifting on a vast lake that is apparently calm yet agitated by currents far beneath the surface,” Bruno thought when, after the death of Alejandra, Martín recounted to him, in a confused and fragmentary way, some of the episodes connected with that story. And he not only thought this, but understood it—indeed he did!—since that seventeen-year-old Martín reminded him of his own forebear, the remote Bruno whom he glimpsed at times across a distance of thirty years, a nebulous territory enriched and devastated by love, disillusionment, and death. He had a melancholy image of him in that old park, with the dying afternoon light lingering on the modest statues, on the pensive bronze lions, on the paths covered with limp, dead leaves. At this hour when little murmurs begin to make themselves heard, when loud noises fade into the distance little by little, just as overloud conversations in the sickroom of a man fatally ill die away; and then the splash of the fountain, the footsteps of a man walking off, the chirping of birds endlessly stirring about trying to settle themselves comfortably in their nests, the distant shout of a child, become audible, bring with them a strange solemnity. A mysterious event takes place at this time: darkness falls. And everything is different: the trees, the benches, the pensioners lighting a little bonfire of dead leaves, a ship’s siren at Dársena Sur, the far-off echo of the city. That hour when everything enters upon a more profound, more enigmatic existence. And a more fearful one as well for the solitary beings who at that hour continue to sit, silent and pensive, on the benches of the plazas and parks of Buenos Aires.

  Martín picked up a piece of a newspaper someone had thrown away, a piece in the shape of a country: a nonexistent but possible country. Mechanically he read the words referring to Suez, to tradesmen being sent off to prison in Villa Devoto, to what was described as Gheorghiu’s imminent arrival. On the other side, half spattered with mud, was a photograph: PERON VISITS THE TEATRO DISCEPOLO. Lower down was a news item reporting that a war veteran had hacked his wife and four other persons to death with an ax.

  He threw the paper down: “Almost nothing ever happens,” Bruno was to say to him years later, “even when the plague ravages an entire region of India.” Once again, he saw his mother’s painted face saying: “You exist because I was careless.” Courage, yes, courage—that was what she had lacked. Otherwise he would have ended up in the sewer.

  Sewer-mother.

  “When all of a sudden,” Martín said, “I had the sensation that somebody was standing behind me looking at me.”

  For a few seconds he sat there absolutely rigid: a tense, expectant rigidity, as when, in the darkness of one’s bedroom, one thinks one hears a suspicious creak. For he had felt this sensation on the nape of his neck many times before, but usually it was simply annoying or disagreeable; since (he explained) he had always considered himself ugly and ridiculous-looking; and the mere idea that someone might be studying him or simply observing him from behind his back bothered him; this was the reason why he always sat in the seat farthest to the rear in streetcars and buses, or entered a movie house only when the house lights had already been lowered. Whereas at that moment what he felt was something different. Something—he hesitated as though searching for the right word—something disquieting, something similar to that suspicious creak we hear, or think we hear, in the dead of night.

  He made an effort to keep his eyes trained on the statue, but in reality he could no longer see it: his eyes were turned inward, as when we think of past things and try to reconstruct dim memories that require total concentration.

  “Someone is trying to communicate with me,” he thought in agitation.

  The sensation of feeling himself observed exacerbated, as always, his awareness of the things he was ashamed of: he saw himself as ugly, awkwardly proportioned, dull-witted. Even his seventeen years seemed grotesque to him.

  “But what if all that isn’t true?” the girl who was at that moment behind his back was to say to him two years later; an enormous span of time—Bruno thought—because it was not measured in months or even in years, but rather, as is peculiar to this class of beings, in spiritual catastrophes and days of utter loneliness and inexpressible sadness; days that lengthen and become distorted, like shadowy phantoms on the walls of time. “If it’s in no way true,” and she scrutinized him the way a painter observes his model, drawing nervously on her eternal cigarette.

  “Wait,” she said.

&
nbsp; “You’re something besides just a nice kid,” she said.

  “You’re an interesting young man who has real depth, and besides that you’re a physical type that’s extremely rare.”

  “Yes, of course,” Martín agreed, smiling bitterly, as he thought “you see, I’m right,” because all that is the sort of thing people say when you’re not a nice kid, and all the rest really doesn’t matter.

  “But wait, I tell you,” she answered in an irritated tone of voice. “You’re tall and have a very narrow build, like an El Greco figure.”

  Martín grunted.

  “Be quiet, I tell you,” she went on indignantly, like a learned scholar who is interrupted or distracted by trivialities at the very moment that he is just about to come up with the earnestly sought-for definitive formula. And again, drawing greedily on her cigarette, as was her habit when she was concentrating, she added with a furious frown:

  “But, you know: it’s as though you’d suddenly changed your plan to be a Spanish ascetic, because your lips have gotten sensual. And what’s more, there are those melting, liquid eyes of yours. Be quiet, I know that everything I’m saying isn’t to your liking, but let me finish. I think women must find you attractive, despite what you imagine. Then too there’s your expression. A mixture of purity, melancholy, and repressed sensuality. But besides that … wait a minute … An anxiety in your eyes, below that forehead of yours that looks like a balcony jutting out. But I’m not certain that all that is what pleases me about you. I think it’s something else …. The fact that your spirit dominates your flesh, as though you were permanently standing at attention. Anyway, pleases may not be the right word; perhaps you surprise me, or astonish me, or irritate me, I don’t know …. Your spirit ruling over your body like an austere dictator.

  “As though Pius XII were obliged to keep order in a brothel. Come on, don’t get angry—I know you’re an angelical being. Besides, as I’ve already said, I don’t know whether that’s what pleases me about you or whether it’s what I hate most.”

  He tried his best to keep his eyes fixed on the statue. He said that at that moment he felt fear and fascination—fear of turning around and a fascinating desire to do just that. He remembered that once, standing at the very edge of the Devil’s Gorge in Humahuaca, contemplating the black abyss at his feet, an irresistible force had suddenly impelled him to leap to the other side. And at that moment something similar was happening to him: it was as though he felt impelled to leap across a dark abyss “to the other side of his existence.” And then that unconscious yet irresistible force made him turn his head.

  After having caught no more than a glimpse of her, he immediately averted his eyes, his gaze coming to rest on the statue again. He was terrified by human beings: they seemed to him not only unpredictable, but above all perverse and filthy. Statues on the other hand brought him a quiet happiness; they belonged to a beautiful, clean, ordered world.

  But it was impossible for him to see the statue: his eyes continued to retain the fleeting image of the unknown girl, the blue patch of her skirt, the black of her long straight hair, the paleness of her face, riveted on him. These were simply patches shaded in, as in a painter’s quick sketch, without a single detail that might indicate a specific age or a definite type. But he knew—he emphasized the word—that something extremely important had just happened in his life: not so much because of what he had seen, but because of the powerful message he had silently received.

  “You’ve told me so many times, Bruno. That things don’t always happen, that things almost never happen. Someone swims across the Dardanelles, a man assumes the presidency in Austria, the plague ravages an entire region in India, and none of all that has any importance to a person. You yourself have told me that that’s horrible, but that’s the way it is. On the other hand, at that moment I had the distinct feeling that something had just happened. Something that would change my life.”

  He could not say how long a time elapsed, but he remembered that after an interval that seemed extremely long to him he was aware that the girl was rising to her feet and going off. Then as she walked away he took a good look at her: she was tall, she was carrying a book in her left hand, and she was making her way along with a certain nervous energy. Without even being aware of what he was doing, Martín got up and began to walk in the same direction. But almost immediately, on realizing what was happening, and afraid that she might turn her head and see him behind her, following her, he halted. As he watched, he saw her walking uptown along the Calle Brasil toward Balcarce.

  She soon disappeared from sight.

  He slowly made his way back to his bench and sat down.

  “But I was no longer the same person as before,” he said to Bruno. “And I never would be again.”

  2

  He was excited for days afterward. Because he knew he would see her again; he was certain she would return to the same spot.

  During all that time he did nothing but think of the unknown girl, and each afternoon he went back and sat on that same bench, with the same mixed feelings of fear and hope.

  Then one day, thinking that the whole thing had been utterly absurd, he decided to go to La Boca instead of hurrying yet again, like an idiot, to that bench in the Parque Lezama. And he had already gone as far as the Calle Almirante Brown when suddenly he began walking back toward the usual place; slowly at first, and as though hesitating out of timidity; and then faster and faster, finally breaking into a run, as though he were going to be late for a meeting at a time and place already agreed on.

  Yes, she was there. He could see her in the distance walking toward him.

  He halted, his heart pounding.

  The girl walked toward him and when she reached his side she said to him:

  “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Martín felt weak in the knees all of a sudden.

  “For me?” he asked, his face reddening.

  He didn’t dare look at her, but he was nonetheless aware that she was wearing a high-necked black sweater and a skirt that was also black, or perhaps very dark blue (he couldn’t be certain which, and in fact it was not at all important). It seemed to him that her eyes were black.

  “Black eyes?” Bruno commented.

  No, of course not: that had been his first impression. But when he saw her for the second time he was surprised to note that her eyes were dark green. Perhaps that first impression had been due to the dim light, or to the timidity that had prevented him from looking directly at her, or probably to both things at once. He was also able to observe, on meeting her this second time, that the long straight hair that he had thought was coal black in fact had reddish glints in it. Later on he filled in her portrait little by little: full lips and a large mouth, too large perhaps, with lines running downward from the corners, suggesting bitterness and disdain.

  “Imagine explaining to me what Alejandra looks like, what her face is like, how the lines around her mouth are!” Bruno said to himself. And the thought came to him that it was precisely those disdainful lines and a certain dark gleam in her eyes that particularly distinguished Alejandra’s face from that of Georgina, whom he really loved. Because he now realized that it had been she whom he had loved, for when he had thought he was falling in love with Alejandra it was her mother that he had been seeking in her, like those medieval monks who endeavored to decipher the original text beneath the corrections and restorations and substitutions of one word for another. And this folly had been the cause of sad misunderstandings with Alejandra, since at times he had experienced the same sensation that one might feel on returning to one’s childhood home after many years’ absence, trying to open a door in the night, and finding oneself confronted by a wall. Alejandra’s face was almost the exact replica of Georgina’s of course: the same black hair with reddish glints framing it, the same gray-green eyes, the same large mouth, the same Mongolian cheekbones, the same pale matte skin. But that “almost” was unbearable, so subtle and so nearly impercept
ible that it made the illusion all the more profound and all the more painful. For it is true that bones and flesh are not enough to constitute a face, he thought, and that is why it is infinitely less physical than the body: it is characterized by the look in the eyes, the expression of the mouth, the wrinkles, by all that conjunction of subtle attributes whereby the soul reveals itself by way of the flesh. This is the reason why, when somebody dies, his body is at that very instant suddenly transformed into something different, so different that we say “he doesn’t seem like the same person,” despite his having the same bones and the same envelope of flesh as a second before, a second before that mysterious moment when the soul abandons the body, which thereupon lies there as dead as a house when the beings who inhabit it, who above all suffered and loved each other in it, leave it forever. For it is not the walls, nor the roof, nor the floor that give a house its unique character, but rather those beings who bring it alive with their conversations, their laughter, their loves and hates; beings who impregnate the house with something immaterial yet profound, with something as far removed from the material as is the smile on a face, even though this something is expressed through the intermediary of physical objects such as carpets, books, or colors. For although the pictures we see on the walls, the colors in which the doors and windowframes have been painted, the figures in the carpets, the flowers in the rooms, the records and books are material objects (as lips and eyebrows are corporeal), they are nonetheless manifestations of the soul, since the soul is unable to manifest itself to our material eyes save by way of matter; and this is part of the soul’s fragility but at the same time one of its curious subtleties.

  “What’s that you say?” Bruno asked.