XXXV
It was six P.M. I calculated that with Mapelli’s car the trip would take four hours and that I would be there by ten. ‘A good time,’ I thought.
As soon as I was on the Mar del Plata highway, I speeded up to eighty miles an hour. I was charged with a rare sensuality that today I attribute to the conviction that at last I would accomplish something definite with María. Yes, María had been like someone behind an impenetrable glass wall, someone I could see but not hear or touch; thus separated by the glass wall, we had lived with anxiety and melancholy.
Feelings of guilt, hatred, and love surfaced and disappeared in that sensuality. I had lied about an illness, and that made me sad; when I called the second time I had confirmed my suspicions about Hunter, and that made me bitter. That María could laugh at frivolous things, that she could give herself to that cynic, that womanizer, that phony, pretentious poet! What contempt I felt for her! I took masochistic pleasure in imagining her latest decision, in all its repugnance. On the one hand there was Castel, and our date to meet that afternoon. For what? To talk of dark and disagreeable things, to face each other once more through the glass wall, only to see our anxious and hopeless faces, to try to make out each other’s signs, to try in vain to touch, to feel, to caress through the wall of glass, to dream once more that impossible dream. On the other hand, there was Hunter, and all he had to do was pick up the telephone and call her, and she went running to his bed. How grotesque, how depressing it all was!
I reached the estancia at ten-fifteen. I left the car on the main road so they would not hear the motor, and walked from there. The heat was unbearable; in the oppressive calm, the only sound was the murmur of the sea. From time to time the moonlight broke through the black storm clouds, allowing me to make my way without great difficulty up the drive between the rows of eucalyptus trees. When I reached the house, all the lights on the first floor were on; they must still be in the dining room.
The air was heavy with the breathless and menacing heat that precedes a violent summer storm. It would be natural for them to step outside after dinner. I hid in a place in the park where I could see anyone coming down the main stairs, and I waited.
XXXVI
The waiting was interminable. I do not know how much time passed on the clock, that nameless and universal time of clocks that is alien to our emotions, to our destinies, to the inception and ruin of love, to a death vigil. But by my own time it was a vast and complex temporal space filled with figures and turnings back, at times a dark and tumultuous river and at times a strange calm like a motionless, eternal sea where María and I stood facing each other with ecstatic happiness; then again it was a river pulling us back as if in a dream to our childhoods, and I saw her galloping her horse wildly, her hair streaming in the wind, her eyes hallucinated, and I saw myself in my small town in the south, in my sickroom, with my face pressed to the windowglass, watching the snow, my eyes, too, hallucinated. And it was as if the two of us had been living in parallel passageways or tunnels, never knowing that we were moving side by side, like souls in like times, finally to meet at the end of those passageways before a scene I had painted as a kind of key meant for her alone, as a kind of secret sign that I was there ahead of her and that the passageways finally had joined and the hour for our meeting had come.
The hour for our meeting had come! As if the passages had ever joined; as if we had ever really communicated. What a stupid illusion that had been! No, the passageways were still parallel, as they always had been, only now the wall separating them was like a glass wall, and I could see María, a silent and untouchable figure … No, even that wall was not always glass; at times it again became black stone, and then I did not know what was happening on the other side, what had become of her in those unfathomable intervals; what strange events might be taking place. I was even convinced that during those moments her face changed, that her lips curled with scorn and she was perhaps laughing with some other man, and that the whole story of the passageways was my own ridiculous invention, and that after all there was only one tunnel, dark and solitary: mine, the tunnel in which I had spent my childhood, my youth, my entire life. And in one of those transparent sections of the stone wall I had seen this girl and had naïvely believed that she was moving in a tunnel parallel to mine, when in fact she belonged to the wide world, the unbounded world of those who did not live in tunnels; and perhaps out of curiosity she had approached one of my strange windows, and had glimpsed the spectacle of my unredeemable solitude, or had been intrigued by the mute message, the key, of my painting. And then, while I kept moving through my passageway, she lived her normal life outside, the exciting life of people who live outside, that curious and absurd life in which there are dances and parties and gaiety, and frivolity. And sometimes it happened that when I passed by one of my windows she was waiting for me, silent and anxious (why waiting for me? why silent and anxious?); but at other times she did not come in time, or she forgot that poor caged being, and then I, my face pressed against the wall of glass, watched her in the distance laughing or dancing without a care in the world or, which was worse, I did not see her at all, and imagined her in obscene places I could not reach. At those times I felt that my destiny was infinitely more lonely than I had ever imagined.
XXXVII
After that endless time of seas and tunnels, María and Hunter were coming down the front steps. When I saw them arm in arm, my heart grew as hard and cold as ice.
They came down the steps slowly, obviously in no hurry. ‘Why should they hurry?’ I thought bitterly. And yet María knew I needed her, that I had waited for her that afternoon, that I had lived in anguish every minute of that futile waiting. And yet she knew that in that very same moment she was enjoying so calmly, I was suffering the tortures of the damned in my personal hell of analyzing and imagining. How could such an implacable, cold, unspeakable beast have crept into the heart of this fragile woman! She could look at the stormy sky as she was at this moment, and walk arm in arm (with that grotesque!), walk slowly, arm in arm, around the park, sensually breathe the perfume of the flowers, sit beside him on the grass, all the while knowing that at that very minute I, I who had waited for her in vain, I who had called her home and learned of her return to the estancia, that I would be alone in my black desert, entrails pullulating with voracious worms.
Now she was talking with that monster. What could María have to say to that diseased clown? In what language?
Or was I the clown? Weren’t they laughing at me this very minute? Wasn’t I the imbecile, the ridiculous fool of the tunnel and the secret messages?
For a long while they strolled around the grounds. The storm was nearly upon us, black, ripped by lightning and thunder. The wind was blowing fiercely off the pampas, and the first drops began to fall. They ran into the house to get out of the rain. My heart began to thud painfully. From my hiding place among the trees, I felt as if at last I was about to witness the revelation of an abominable but often-imagined secret.
I watched for lights on the second floor, which was still completely dark. Soon I saw them come on in the center bedroom, Hunter’s room. Everything was normal to this point: Hunter’s bedroom was at the head of the stairs and it was logical that his would be the first light to be turned on. Now I should see lights in the other room. The seconds it should take María to walk from the stairway to her room were counted by the violent beating of my heart.
But the light did not go on.
Oh, God! I haven’t the strength to describe my infinite loneliness! I felt as if the last ship that could rescue me from my desert island had passed in the distance without heeding my calls for help. My body slowly slumped, as if I had become an old man.
XXXVIII
Standing between trees lashed by the wind, soaked by the rain, I sensed the implacable passage of time. Until, through eyes wet with tears and rain, I saw a light in the other bedroom.
What happened then is like a nightmare. Battling the storm, I cl
imbed up an iron window grille to the second floor. I walked along the terrace to the first door. I went inside and looked down the interior gallery for María’s room: a line of light beneath a door led me directly there. Trembling, I gripped the knife and opened the door. ‘Why lock it?’ I could still think with bitterness. From the threshold, I saw María’s hallucinated eyes. I moved toward her, and as I reached her bedside, she said, softly:
‘What are you going to do, Juan Pablo?’
Placing my left hand on her hair, I replied:
‘I have to kill you, María. You left me alone.’
Sobbing, I drove the knife into her breast. Her jaw tightened and her eyelids closed; when I pulled out the bloody knife, she forced open her eyes and looked at me, humble and sad. A sudden fury gave me new strength, and again and again I plunged the knife into her breast and stomach.
Then I found my way back to the terrace and, as if possessed by the devil, almost fell down the iron grille to the ground. For the last time, the lightning illuminated the landscape that had been ours.
I raced back to Buenos Aires. I arrived at four or five in the morning. I telephoned Allende’s house from a bar. I made them wake him, and told him I had to see him without a minute’s delay. I drove to Calle Posadas. The Polish servant was waiting at the street door. When I reached the fifth floor I found Allende standing at the elevator, his useless eyes wide with alarm. I grabbed his arm and dragged him inside. The idiot of a servant followed, mouth agape. I had Allende throw him out. As soon as he was out of the room I shouted at the blind man:
‘I’ve just come from the estancia. María was Hunter’s lover!’
Allende’s face was rigid as death.
‘Imbecile,’ he cried between clenched teeth, his hatred icy.
Exasperated by his incredulity, I shouted again:
‘You’re the imbecile. María was my lover, too, and there were others!’
I felt a rush of horrible pleasure; the blind man stood there as if turned to stone.
‘Yes!’ I shouted. ‘I deceived you and she deceived us both. But now she can’t deceive anyone. You understand? Not anyone! Not anyone!’
‘You mad fool!’ the blind man roared like a wild beast, and rushed toward me, outstretched hands like claws.
I stepped aside and he stumbled over a table and fell. He scrambled to his feet with catlike quickness and chased me around the room, falling into chairs and furniture; he was sobbing, but no tears fell from his eyes, and all the while he was shouting that one word: fool!
I ran down the stairs to the street, knocking down the servant, who tried to stop me. I was consumed with hatred, contempt, and compassion.
When I turned myself in at the police station, it was nearly six.
Through the small window of my jail cell I watched the birth of a new day with a cloudless sky. I thought of all the men and women just waking up, who would eat their breakfast and read the newspapers and go to the office, or feed the children or the cat, or talk about the film they had seen the night before.
I felt that a black chasm was yawning inside me.
XXXIX
In these months I have been locked up I have tried many times to think about the blind man’s last word, that word fool. An infinite weariness, or maybe some obscure instinct, always prevents me. Someday I may be able to do it, and at that time I will also analyze the reasons for Allende’s suicide.
At least I can paint, although I suspect the doctors are laughing behind my back, as I suspect they laughed during the trial when I talked about the scene of the window.
There was only one person who understood my paintings. In the meanwhile, these paintings must only be providing more evidence for their diagnoses. And so every day the walls of this hell will close more tightly around me.
Ernesto Sabato, The Tunnel
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