On Heroes and Tombs, Page 2

  “I came to see you,” Martín said, repeating what Alejandra had said.

  She sat down on the grass. And Martín must have had a look of utter astonishment on his face because she added:

  “Don’t you believe in telepathy? It would surprise me if you didn’t—you look to be exactly the type that does. When I saw you on the bench those other days, I was certain you’d eventually turn around. And wasn’t that what happened? Well, I was also sure you’d remember me this time.”

  Martín said nothing. How many times scenes of this sort were to repeat themselves later: her reading his thoughts and him listening to her in silence! He had a distinct feeling that he knew her, that feeling of having seen someone in a previous life that we sometimes experience, a sensation that resembles reality as dream events resemble those of waking life. And much time was to go by before he would understand why Alejandra seemed in some vague way to be someone he already knew, and then Bruno smiled to himself again.

  Martín looked at her in a daze: her black hair against her pale, matte skin, her tall angular body; there was something about her that was reminiscent of models who appear in fashion magazines, but at the same time she had about her a harshness, a hint of hidden depths not found in such women. Only rarely, indeed almost never, was he to see signs of a gentle side of her, of a sweetness considered to be characteristic of women and above all of mothers. Her smile was cruel and sarcastic, her laughter violent, like her movements and her temperament in general: “It was a great effort for me to learn to laugh,” she said to him one day, “but I never laugh inside.”

  “Nonetheless,” Martín added, looking at Bruno with that sensual pleasure that lovers take in obliging others to recognize the attributes of the creature they love, “it’s quite true, isn’t it, that men—and even women—turn around to stare at her?”

  And as Bruno nodded, smiling inwardly at this naive expression of pride, he reflected that indeed this was quite true, that everywhere and always Alejandra attracted men’s attention, and women’s too. For different reasons, however, because Alejandra could not bear women, she detested them, she maintained that they were a contemptible lot and insisted that she could be friends only with certain men; and women in turn detested her with the same intensity, though for reasons that were precisely the opposite of hers, a phenomenon that aroused in Alejandra little more than the most scornful indifference. Although surely they detested her without ceasing to admire in secret that face that Martín called exotic though, ironically, it was really quite typically Argentine, for this type of face is common in South American countries when the skin color and features of a white are conjoined with the high cheekbones and slanting eyes of the Indian. And those deep, troubled eyes, that large disdainful mouth, that mixture of feelings and contradictory passions that one sensed in Alejandra’s features (a mixture of anxiety and ennui, of violence and a sort of remoteness, of almost fierce sensuality and a kind of vague, profound loathing of her most intimate self) all conspired to give her a face impossible to forget.

  Martín also said that even if nothing had ever happened between the two of them, even if he had been with her or talked with her only once, apropos of some triviality or other, he still would have been unable to forget her face all the rest of his life. And Bruno was of the opinion that this was quite true, for it was more than just a pretty face. Or better put, one could not be certain that she was pretty. It was something else about her. One had only to walk along the street with her for it to be evident that she was vastly attractive to men. She had a certain air about her, at once distracted and intense, as though she were thinking of something that was making her anxious or gazing deep within herself, and he was certain that anyone who chanced to meet her must surely have asked himself: who is this woman, what is she searching for, what is she thinking?

  That first meeting was decisive for Martín. Until that moment women to him were either the pure and heroic virgins of legend, or superficial, frivolous beings, malicious gossip-mongers, selfish hypocrites, grasping deceivers. (“Like his own mother,” Bruno thought that Martín thought.) And then suddenly he found himself with a woman who fitted into neither of these two molds, molds that until that meeting he had believed were the only ones. For a long time he was deeply disturbed by this novelty, this unexpected type of woman who on the one hand seemed to possess some of the virtues of that heroic model that had so excited him in the books he read as an adolescent and on the other hand gave signs of that sensuality he believed to be characteristic of the sort of female he detested. And even after Alejandra was dead, even after having had such an intense relationship with her, he could not contrive to see into that great enigma with any degree of clarity; and he used to ask himself what he would have done at that second meeting had he been able to guess what she was like, what later events revealed her to be. Would he have fled?

  Bruno looked at him in silence: “Yes, what would you have done?”

  Martín stared intently at him in turn and then after a few seconds he said:

  “I suffered so much on account of her that many times I was on the verge of suicide. Yet even if I had known beforehand everything that was to happen to me later, I would still have hastened to her side.”

  “Naturally,” Bruno thought. Moreover, what other man, whether a mere youngster or a mature adult, foolish or wise, would not have done the same thing?

  “She fascinated me like a dark abyss,” Martín added, “and if I was in despair it was precisely because I loved her and needed her. How can something to which we are indifferent plunge us into despair?”

  He remained lost in thought for a long time and then returned to his obsession: stubbornly remembering (trying to remember) the moments spent with her, as lovers reread the old love letter that they keep in their pocket, when the creature who penned it has long since departed forever; and like such a letter, memories gradually aged and fell apart, entire sentences got lost in the folds of his soul, the ink grew fainter and fainter, and with it the beautiful, bewitching words that had created the magic spell. And then it was necessary to strain his memory as one strains one’s eyes and brings them closer to the folded and refolded paper that has turned yellow. Yes, yes, she had asked him where he lived, as she plucked a little weed and began to nibble on the stem (a fact he remembered clearly). And then she had asked him who he lived with. With his father, he answered. And after a moment’s hesitation, he had added that he also lived with his mother. “And what does your father do?” Alejandra had asked him then, a question he did not answer immediately, and then finally he replied that he was a painter. But on uttering the word painter his voice quavered just a bit, as though it were fragile, and he feared that his tone had attracted her attention, as though he were cautiously making his way across a glass roof. And Alejandra had doubtless noted something strange about that word, for she leaned toward him and looked at him closely.

  “You’re blushing,” she remarked.

  “Who, me?” Martín said.

  And as always happens in such circumstances, his face grew redder still.

  “What’s the matter?” she insisted, the little stem of the weed hanging from her lips.

  “Nothing. Why do you ask?”

  There was a moment’s silence, and then Alejandra lay down on her back on the grass again, nibbling at the little stem once more. And as Martín watched a battle between cruisers made of cotton in the sky overhead, she reflected that there was no reason for him to feel ashamed of his father’s failure.

  A ship’s siren blew down at Dársena, and Martín thought “Coral Sea,” “Marquesas.” But he said:

  “Alejandra’s an odd name.”

  “And what about your mother?” she asked.

  Martín sat down and began to pull up little tufts of grass. He found a little pebble and seemed to be studying it, like a geologist.

  “Didn’t you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I asked about your mother.”

  �
€œMy mother is a sewer,” Martín answered in a low voice.

  Alejandra sat halfway up, leaning on one elbow and looking at him closely. Martín sat there in silence, still examining the little pebble, his jaws tightly clenched, thinking sewer, sewermother. And then he added:

  “I’ve always been a bother to her. Ever since I was born.”

  He felt as though fetid poison gases had been injected into his soul at thousands of pounds of pressure. Swelling more dangerously each year, it could no longer be contained inside his body and threatened at any moment to pour out a flood of filth from between the cracks.

  “She keeps screaming ‘Why was I so careless!’ ”

  As though all his mother’s garbage had been continually accumulating in his soul, under pressure, he thought, as Alejandra lay there leaning on one elbow and looking at him. And words like fetus, bath, creams, womb, abortion floated in his mind, like sticky, stinking refuse on stagnant, polluted waters. And then, as though talking to himself, he added that for a long time he had believed that his mother hadn’t nursed him for lack of milk, until one day she screamed at him that she hadn’t done so in order not to ruin the shape of her breasts and explained to him that she had done everything possible to abort herself, short of getting her womb scraped, and that she hadn’t done because she hated feeling pain as much as she adored eating caramels and chocolates, reading radio magazines, and listening to nice hummable tunes. Though she liked classical music and Viennese waltzes—and Prince Kalenderfn1 too, she said, who unfortunately wasn’t around any more. So Martín could imagine how happily she had greeted his birth, after having fought against having him for months, jumping rope like a boxer and punching herself in the belly, the reason why (his mother screamed at him in explanation) he’d turned out to be more or less defective from birth. Only a miracle had kept him from ending up in the sewer, she added.

  He fell silent, examined the little pebble once more, and then flung it far away.

  “That’s doubtless the reason why I always associate her with the word sewer when I think of her.”

  He laughed that laugh of his again.

  Alejandra looked at him, amazed that he still had the courage to laugh. But on seeing his tears she doubtless understood that what she had been hearing was not a laugh but rather (as Bruno maintained) that extraordinary sound that in certain human beings is produced on very rare occasions and that, because of the uncertainties of language perhaps, we persist in classifying as laughter or as weeping; for it is the result of a monstrous combination of facts that are sufficiently painful to produce weeping (and even disconsolate weeping) and of events grotesque enough to make the person want to transform those tears into laughter. There thus results a sort of terrible hybrid manifestation, perhaps the most terrible one a human being is capable of, and perhaps the one most difficult to offer any consolation for, in view of the complex mixture of feelings that provokes it. So that as a consequence we often experience in the face of it the same contradictory feeling as when we are confronted with certain hunchbacks or cripples. Martín’s sufferings had kept piling up one by one on his child’s back like a growing, disproportionate, grotesque burden, so that he constantly felt that he must move carefully and cautiously, proceeding with every step like an acrobat obliged to traverse an abyss on a tightrope while carrying on his back a bulky, stinking burden, tremendous loads of garbage and excrement, along with a pack of howling monkeys, and little jouncing, jeering tumblers, who as he concentrated all his attention on traversing the abyss, the black abyss of his existence, without falling, screamed hurtful things at him, mocked him, and set up an infernal clamor of insults and abuse up there on top of the load of garbage and excrement. A spectacle that (in his opinion) ought to awaken in those witnessing it a mixture of pain and enormous, monstrous hilarity, seeing how tragicomic it was; the reason he did not consider himself to be possessed of the right to abandon himself to pure and simple weeping, even in the face of a being such as Alejandra, a being he seemed to have been waiting a century for; yet on the other hand he thought he had the right, the almost professional right of a clown who has had the greatest possible misfortune overtake him, to convert that weeping into a wry grin. Nonetheless, as he had gone on confessing those few key words to Alejandra, he felt a sort of liberation and for an instant he thought that his grinning grimace might finally turn into a great, convulsive, tender fit of weeping as he fell into her arms, having managed to cross the abyss at last. And that is what he would have done, that is what he would have liked to do, for heaven’s sake, but he did not do so: all he did was bow his head very slightly and turn away to hide his tears.

  3

  But years later when Martín spoke with Bruno of that meeting, scarcely anything remained of it save disjointed phrases, the memory of an expression, of a caress, the melancholy siren of that unknown ship: like fragments of columns. And if any one sentence lingered in his memory, perhaps because of the surprise it had aroused in him, it was one she had uttered at that time, looking at him intently:

  “You and I have something in common, something very important.”

  Words that Martín heard with amazement, for what could he have in common with this prodigious creature?

  Alejandra told him, finally, that she had to leave, but that some other time she would tell him many things, things—and this seemed even stranger to Martín—that she needed to tell him.

  As they parted, she looked at him one more time, as though she were a doctor and he a patient, and added a few words that Martín was to remember forever after:

  “Even though I think I shouldn’t ever see you again. But I’ll see you because I need you.”

  The mere idea, the mere possibility that this girl might never see him again plunged him into despair. What did the reasons that Alejandra might have for not wanting to see him matter? What he wanted with a passion was to see her.

  “Always, always,” he said fervently.

  She smiled and answered:

  “Yes, it’s because that’s the way you are that I need to see you.”

  And Bruno thought that it would take Martín many years more to arrive at the probable meaning of those enigmatic words. And he also thought that if Martín had been older and more experienced at the time, words such as that, uttered by a girl of eighteen, would have left him dumbfounded. But they would also very soon have seemed natural to him, because she had been born mature, or had matured in her early childhood, at least in a certain sense; even though in other ways she gave the impression that she would never grow up: as though a little girl who still plays with dolls were at the same time capable of giving signs of the frightful wisdom of an old man; as though terrible events had precipitated her toward maturity and then toward death without her having had time to abandon the traits of childhood and adolescence once and for all.

  On going their separate ways, after he had walked on a few steps he suddenly remembered or became aware that they had made no plans for meeting again. And turning around, he ran to Alejandra to tell her so.

  “Don’t worry,” she answered. “I’ll always know how to find you.”

  Without thinking those incredible words through and without daring to press the point, Martín turned away and walked off once more.

  4

  Following that meeting, he kept hoping day after day to see her again in the park. Then week after week. And finally, in despair now, month after month. What could have happened to her? Why didn’t she come? Could she be ill? He didn’t even know her name. The earth seemed to have swallowed her up. He reproached himself a thousand times for not even having asked her what her name was. He knew nothing about her. Such stupidity on his part was incomprehensible. He even reach the point of suspecting that the whole thing had been a hallucination or a dream. Hadn’t he fallen asleep on that bench in the Parque Lezama more than once? His dream might have been so vivid that it would later seem to be a real, lived experience. Then he dismissed this idea because he remembered that there
had been two meetings. But then he reflected that this didn’t argue against the whole thing being a dream, since both meetings might have been episodes in a single dream. He had no material object belonging to her that would dispel his doubts, but in the end he convinced himself that all of it had indeed happened and that what was happening now was that he was merely being the idiot that he had always thought of himself as being.

  In the beginning he was miserable, thinking of her night and day. He tried to draw her face, but it came out as no more than a hazy impression, since during the two meetings he had not dared look at her closely save at a few rare moments; hence his sketches were vague and lifeless, resembling many of his previous sketches in which he had drawn the ideal, legendary virgins who peopled his imaginary love-life. But though his drawings were vapid and ill-defined, his memory of the meeting was extremely vivid and he had the impression of having been with someone very strong, with very pronounced traits of character, someone as unhappy and as lonely as he himself was. Nevertheless the face was only a tenuous blur. And in the end the whole thing was more or less like a spiritualist séance, in which a dim, ghostly materialization suddenly gives clear, sharp taps on the table.

  And when his hope was nearly exhausted, he remembered the two or three key phrases of their second meeting. “I think I shouldn’t ever see you again. But I’ll see you because I need you.” And that other one: “Don’t worry. I’ll always know how to find you.”

  Phrases—Bruno thought—that Martín interpreted in the most favorable light possible, as a promise of certain happiness, without noticing, at the time at least, how self-centered they also were.

  And it was true of course—Martín said he then thought—that she was a strange girl, and why should a creature of that sort see him a day or so later or the following week? Wasn’t it quite possible that weeks and even months might go by without her feeling the need to meet him? These reflections raised his spirits again. But later, in moments of depression, he would say to himself: “I’ll never see her again; she’s dead; perhaps she’s killed herself; she seemed desperate and anxious.” He remembered his own thoughts of suicide then. Why shouldn’t Alejandra not have experienced something similar? Hadn’t she in fact said that they resembled each other, that there was something profound that they had in common and that thus made them alike? Couldn’t an obsession with suicide be what she had been hinting at when she spoke of this resemblance between them? But then he reflected that even if she had wanted to kill herself she would have come looking for him before going through with it; not to have done so would have been a sort of trick on her part that seemed inconceivable to him.