I went down this staircase and thus reached an old cellar located underneath the downstairs apartment. It must have been the cellar of this apartment on the ground floor that through some agreement between the original owners of the two apartments had become the cellar of the second-floor apartment, reached by means of that odd and unexpected stairway.
The cellar was typical of those in many houses in Buenos Aires, but it was completely empty and as deserted as the apartment to which it belonged. Could I have been wrong? Could I have labored so hard only to arrive at an impasse? Even if this were the case, it was imperative that I inspect the cellar carefully, as carefully as I had gone over the entire apartment upstairs.
There was not much to inspect however: its cement walls were smooth and offered few interesting possibilities. As is frequent in this type of building, the cellar had a small grated opening that looked out on the street: through it one could see the dimly lighted little square. Farther on, the cellar made a right-angle turn, thus forming an L, and when I shone the beam of my flashlight into that corner that I hadn’t noticed at first, I saw another opening with a grate, but this one was larger, and looked out on … On what? The cellar of the building next door? Since there was no other exit and that was the only possible answer, the thought occurred to me that the grate might perhaps be removable and thus be the exit that I had been searching for. I grabbed the two bars at each end of the grate and saw that I could easily push it out: my heart began to pound once again.
I laid the false grate to one side and shone my flashlight through the opening. It was not the cellar of the building next door but a passageway, the end of which I could not see, but I naturally attributed this to the fact that the beam of my flashlight was not very powerful.
After I had gone some two hundred yards down the passageway, it made a sharp turn to the right, and in this angle was a stairway with twelve steps (I counted them as I went up so as to calculate how far above the passageway I had gone), and was absorbed in this calculation when to my surprise I saw that the landing where this stairway ended had only one door opening onto it, a very small, low door that I would be able to pass through only by stooping over.
I was not only surprised; I was also annoyed at the thought that this door was about to keep me from entering the key redoubt that night, and “that night” might well mean “forever,” since after all the things that I had done in the fake apartment, the blind would surely take precautions the next day that would make it impossible for me to return. I cursed myself for being so impatient and for having sent F. home too soon, for even though I could not have persuaded him to participate in my great undertaking (which he would undoubtedly have dismissed as the scheme of a madman), I could nonetheless have asked him to accompany me until it became clear that I would no longer need his help. At this moment, for example, how the devil was I going to open this door?
I stood there on the landing, silently reflecting: could it be the entrance to the house or the apartment that I had imagined I would find when I’d been sitting there in the little square? Twelve steps, each of which was some twenty centimeters high, added up to a height of approximately two and a half meters. The apartment was thus located at street level, and it would almost certainly have a normal-sized door on one of the neighboring streets. It might be some sort of shop. I don’t know why the thought came to me that it could be a dressmaker’s or a fashion boutique.
Who would ever have suspected a dressmaker’s shop of being the entrance to the great labyrinth? The fact that the little short man who looked like Pierre Fresnay had not gone in by way of this normal entry was logical however: what could two men, one of whom was blind, be doing at a dressmaker’s? Perhaps one such visit could be made without attracting attention. But if they had come there several times, people would have begun to attach more importance to their visits, and I do not believe that the Lodge would have overlooked the possibility that such “people” might well include an individual such as myself. It was logical, therefore, for them to keep an empty apartment to use as an entry.
All of this went through my mind as I stood there in front of the mysterious little low door. There was not a sound, since at that hour the dressmaker was surely fast asleep: it was now four-thirty in the morning.
My entire effort had gotten me nowhere. And just as when a coup d’état fails the insurgents are called bandits and held up to ridicule, so I now found myself a ridiculous figure: I looked at my white cane and thought to myself: “What a hopeless, picturesque idiot I am!” A grown man, a person who has read Hegel and been an accomplice in a bank holdup, was now in a cellar in Buenos Aires, at four-thirty in the morning, standing in front of a little door that presumably led to the lodgings of a pseudo-dressmaker in the service of a secret society. Wasn’t that absurd? And as I contemplated the white cane, shining the beam of my flashlight on it, with that sort of painful pleasure we feel when we press down on certain spots that are aching, it made my situation seem even more grotesque.
“Well then,” I said to myself, “it’s all over.”
And I was about to grope and fumble my way back along the same labyrinthine path that had led me there when the thought came to me that the little door might not be locked. The very idea excited me and renewed my hopes, for at that moment I failed to draw the conclusion that such a propitious circumstance should have suggested to me: the terrifying conclusion that they were waiting for me.
I went back to the little door, and as I shone my flashlight on it, I had a moment’s doubt. “No, it’s not possible,” I said to myself. “This door is doubtless open only when they are expecting one of the blind and the emissary.”
A presentiment nonetheless guided my trembling hand toward the door handle. I turned it and pushed.
The door wasn’t locked: it had no keyhole!
21
I stooped far enough over to get through the little low door and entered the room. Then I stood up again and raised my flashlight to see where I was.
An ice-cold electric shock ran through me: a face had loomed up before me in the beam of my flashlight.
A blind woman was looking straight at me. It was like an infernal apparition, though the hell it had come from was frigid and black.
It was plain to see that she had not hastened to that little secret door because she had been alerted by the faint noises that I had perhaps made as I entered. No: she was fully dressed and it was obvious that she had been WAITING for me.
I have no idea how long a time I remained petrified by the awesome, icy gaze of that Medusa before I fainted.
I had never fainted before in my life, and later I asked myself whether this phenomenon was brought on by terror or by the magic powers of the blind woman, since, as now seems evident to me, that hierophant had the ability to unleash or to convoke demoniacal forces.
Strictly speaking, I did not faint dead away, that is to say lose consciousness altogether; rather, when I fell to the floor (though it would be more apt to say “When I collapsed”), a drowsiness began to steal over me, a fatigue that rapidly affected my every muscle, as when one suffers a violent attack of the grippe.
I remember the pounding sensation in my temples, growing increasingly intense until at one point I had the feeling that my head might explode like a boiler under thousands of atmospheres of pressure. A sort of fever mounted in my body like a seething liquid in a vessel, as a phosphorescent gleam made the Blind Woman more and more visible amid the darkness.
And then an explosion seemed to rupture my eardrums and I fell, or as I have already said, I collapsed on the floor of that room.
22
I saw nothing more, but I seemed to waken to a reality that appeared to me, or appears to me now, to be more intense than the other one, a reality possessed of the same powerful yet anxious quality as deliriums brought on by fever.
I was in a boat, and the boat was gliding over a vast lake with still, black, bottomless waters. The silence was oppressive and disturbing,
for I suspected that I was not alone, and in that half-light (it was not light from the sun, but rather a weird, ghostly luminosity coming from a nocturnal sun) was being closely watched and observed by beings whom I could not see, but who surely dwelt somewhere beyond reach of my dim vision. What did they expect of me, and above all what awaited me in this desolate, gloomy stretch of stagnant water?
I was no longer able to think, though I still possessed a sort of vague consciousness and memories of my childhood that weighed heavily on me. Birds whose eyes I had plucked out in those bloody years seemed to be flying overhead, gliding above me as though keeping watch over my journey; because without consciously thinking about it, since it was as though I were incapable of thought now, I was rowing in a direction that appeared to be that in which that nocturnal sun would set hours or centuries later. It seemed to me that I could hear the slow, heavy beating of these creatures’ huge wings, as though those birds of my childhood had now turned into immense pterodactyls or giant bats. Above me and behind my back, that is to say to what must have been the east of that vast black stretch of water, I was aware of the presence of an old man, bristling with resentment, also keeping watch over my journey: he had a single enormous eye in his forehead like a cyclops, and he was so huge that his head was more or less at the zenith and his body descended to the horizon. His presence, which I felt with an intensity that was well-nigh intolerable (to the point that I could even have described the horrible expression on his face) was preventing me from turning around, forcing me to keep not only my body but even my face turned in the opposite direction.
“Everything will depend on my being able to reach the shore before the sun sets,” I found myself thinking or saying to myself. I rowed in that direction, but my progress was as slow as in nightmares. As the oars dipped in those black and muddy waters, I could hear their dull splash. Great floating leaves and flowers similar to giant water lilies, but lugubrious, rotten ones, parted with each stroke of the oars. I tried to concentrate on my laborious task, not wanting even to imagine what sort of horrible monsters peopled, I was certain, those foul, fathomless waters: with my eyes fixed on the west, or on what I took to be the west, I confined myself to rowing in that direction, obstinately and fearfully, bending my every effort toward reaching the shore before that sun set.
My progress across the waters was painfully slow and difficult. The sun descended just as slowly toward the west and the fury with which I pushed on those heavy oars that moved so ponderously was motivated by a single anxious thought: to reach the other side before that sun set.
That heavenly body was already nearing the horizon when I felt my boat touch bottom. I dropped the oars and rushed to the prow. I leapt out of the boat and waded through muddy water that came up to my knees, heading toward the shore, which I could already dimly make out amid that semidarkness. I soon felt myself on what might be called terra firma, but was really a swamp, where my progress was as slow and difficult as in the boat: I was obliged to make an enormous effort to pull one foot after another out of the mire so as to be able to take one more step. I was nonetheless so desperate that I struggled on, slowly but steadily. And just as I had previously been possessed by the thought that I had to reach terra firma, I was now obsessed by the idea that I had to reach a mountain, also to the west, that was just barely visible in the distance. “The cavern is there,” I remember thinking. What cavern? And why was it absolutely imperative that I reach it? I did not ask myself any of these questions at the moment, and even today I would be unable to answer them. All I knew was that I had to reach the cavern and enter it, at whatever cost. I must also mention that I could still feel the colossal presence of the unknown man at my back. With his single unblinking eye that gleamed with hatred, he appeared to be watching over and even guiding my journey toward the west, like a treacherous traffic director. His arms, opened wide, spanned the entire sky at my back, with his hands leaning on the north and the south, thus occupying the entire half of the heavenly vault that lay behind me. My situation was such that there was nothing else for me to do but walk westward, and in the midst of that insane reality this struck me as logical and reasonable. My idea was to flee his gaze and take refuge inside the cavern, where I knew that his gaze would at last be powerless. I struggled along in this fashion for what seemed to me to be a year. The nocturnal sun was still going down, and although the mountain was closer now, it was still a frighteningly long distance away. I covered this last stretch fighting against fatigue, fear, and despair. I could feel the Man’s sinister smile at my back. Above me I could feel pterodactyls silently circling, gliding down and sometimes touching me with their great heavy wings. I was terrified not only by this frigid, gelatinous contact but by the possibility that in the end they would pounce upon me with their toothed beaks and pluck out my eyes. I suspected that they were allowing me to wear myself out in a futile effort, to continue my stupid, exhausting journey for years and years and then, when I believed that my goal lay close at hand at last, they would tear my eyes out and thus deprive me of this insane hope.
I began to have this feeling toward the very end of my journey, as though everything had been planned so that it would be as painful for me as possible. “Because if they had plucked my eyes out at the very beginning I would have had no hope at all and would never have attempted this arduous journey across unknown seas and filthy swamps,” I concluded, quite rationally and lucidly.
I could feel the Old Man’s face radiate a sort of fierce joy as I thought all this through. I understood that I had arrived at the truth and that the worst trial of the entire journey now awaited me. I nonetheless felt no desire to look upward, and in any case there was no need to do so: my ears told me that the birds, with their enormous sharp beaks, were beginning to glide closer and closer to my head; I could hear the beating of their heavy wings, wings that must have been several meters long, and from time to time I felt them momentarily brush against my cheeks and skin, lightly but sickeningly.
I had only a short way, a very short way, to go before reaching the cavern that I could already glimpse in the phosphorescent darkness. My body was covered with sticky mire and I was crawling on all fours now. My hands touched snakes and immediately drew away in repugnance: there were countless numbers of them writhing about in the vast swamp, but I was so terrified by what I knew now lay in store for me that they were almost unworthy of my notice.
My exhaustion finally became greater than my desperation and I fell.
I struggled to keep my head out of the mire, raising my forehead in the direction of the cavern, as the rest of my body began sinking into those nauseating waters.
“I have to be able to breathe,” I thought.
But I also thought: “By keeping my head up I am enabling them to get at my eyes.”
The thought came to me that it was as though there were a curse upon me and I was condemned to this horrible operation, and yet at the same time I was freely consenting to this hideous and apparently inescapable rite.
Buried up to my neck in the mud, with my heart beating frantically amid that filth that was holding me fast, with my eyes looking forward and upward, I saw the great birds circling slowly about my head. I saw one of them come gliding downward from behind me; I could see its gigantic silhouette close by, outlined against the setting sun, turning now and gliding back toward me, then landing with a hollow splash on the muddy surface of the swampwater, right in front of my head. Its beak was as sharp-pointed as a stiletto and its expression was as blank as that of blind men, for it had no eyes: I could now see its empty eye sockets. It resembled an age-old divinity at the moment of sacrifice.
I felt that beak enter my left eye, and for an instant I could feel the rubbery resistance of my eyeball, and then I felt the beak penetrate it, cruelly and painfully, and the liquid begin to run down my cheek. By virtue of a mechanism that I still am unable to understand since it seems completely illogical, I kept my head in the same position, as though I were endeavoring to m
ake the great bird’s evil task easier, just as we keep our mouth open and our head still in the dentist’s chair, even though we are suffering intense pain.
And as I felt the liquid of my eye and the blood run down my left cheek, I thought: “Now I am going to have to endure having the same thing done to my other eye.” Calmly, apparently without any sort of hatred (as I remember, this astonished me), the great bird finished its work on my left eye and then, drawing back a little, it repeated the same operation on my right eye. And again I perceived that slight, momentary rubbery resistance of my eyeball, followed immediately by the cruel and painful penetration of the bird’s beak, and once again the gliding of the crystalline liquid and blood down my cheek: liquids that were perfectly distinguishable since the crystalline one was thin and ice cold and the other, the blood, warm and sticky.
Then the great bird took flight and its companions followed after it; I could hear the beating of their heavy wings as they took off and then they flew away. “The worst is over,” I thought.
I could see nothing now, but even with the immense pain and the curious repugnance that I now felt toward myself, I was still determined to drag myself to the cavern.