...
Show More
One of the giants of Latin American literature, Ernesto Sábato (1911-2011) lived most of his life in Buenos Aires, Argentina and periodically committed his own manuscripts to the flames, noting in one interview with wry satisfaction how fire is purifying. Fortunately, in addition to many essays, three of his novels survive. Before commenting on The Tunnel, his first novel written in 1948, some observations on his other two:
On Heroes and Tombs, Sábato’s dark, brooding 500 pager includes an entire hallucinogenic, mindbending section, Report on Blind People. The novel also features young Martin and the object of his obsessive love, Alejandra, a reclusive young lady who deals with serious bouts of madness. With every page turned, a reader is led ever further down murky, winding corridors of memory and imagination. Not an easy read.
And Sábato’s second full-length novel, The Angel of Darkness is even darker and more brooding, where Sábato himself takes on the role of main character and first-person narrator. In one outlandish scene, Sábato has a nightmare where he shows up on his wedding day as groom wearing only his underwear, marrying a television celebrity with blind Jorge Luis Borges standing in as best man. I mention Borges’s blindness since this novel also involves a search for a Society of the Blind rumored to be responsible for all the world’s ills. With its unique combination of magical realism and philosophic reflections, I judge this as one of the greatest novels ever written. However, on this point, I am an army of one since nearly all critics and readers cite this work as dense, heavy and overly cerebral.
Turning to The Tunnel, Juan Pablo Castel, first-person narrator of Sábato’s short novel, is a painter who becomes obsessed with a young woman who has a particular appreciation for a scene in one of his paintings. And although The Tunnel is the same length as Camus’s The Stranger and both are considered works of existential alienation, the obsessive Castel is a universe away from Meursault’s indifference. And to whom may we compare Castel? For my money, narrators in Tommaso Landolfi’s tales of obsession – aristocratic and condescending down to their toes, looking at their fellow humans, even those educated and cultured, or, perhaps, especially those educated and cultured, as a rabble of vulgar, ugly, gluttonous, gross morons.
Back to Castel’s obsession for the young woman. The opening line of the novel: “It should be sufficient to say that I am Juan Pablo Castel, the painter who killed Maria Iribarne.” Hi sits in the room where he is locked up and writes down how once he set eyes on Maria Iribarne he was driven mad by desire. This is one compelling story. Once I started reading, I couldn’t put the book down until I finished. My sense is Sábato wanted his reader to do exactly that – read in one sitting to get the full emotional and psychic impact of Castel’s obsession.
At one point Castel relates a nightmare where he is in an unfamiliar house surrounded by friends and one sinister stranger. We read, “The man began to change me into a bird, into a man-size bird. He began with my feet: I saw them gradually turning into something like rooster claws. Then my whole body began to change, from the feet up, like water rising in a pool. . . . but when I began to speak it was at the top of my voice. Then I was amazed by two facts: the words I wanted to say came out as squawks, screeches that fell on my ears as desperate and alien, perhaps because there was still something human about them, and, what was infinitely worse, my friends did not hear the squawking, just as they had not seen my enormous bird-body.” This nightmare foreshadows a scene in The Angel of Darkness where Sábato walks down a street in Buenos Aires, having been transformed into a half-blind, barely aware, four foot bat.
The theme of blindness pops up continually. Maria Iribarne’s husband is blind. During one emotionally charged conversation, Castel accuses Maria of ‘deceiving a blind man’. At another point, Castel conveys how he was blinded by the painful glare of his own shyness and at still another, how his blindness prevented him from seeing a flaw in an idea. And, turns out, we can see how Castel’s obsession made him blind when it came to Maria. For example, the following exchange where Castel first converses with her:
The hardness in her face and eyes disturbed me. “Why is she so cold?” I asked myself. “Why?” Perhaps she sensed my anxiety, my hunger to communicate, because for an instant her expression softened, and she seemed to offer a bridge between us. But I felt that it was a temporary and fragile bridge swaying high above an abyss. Her voice was different when she added:
“But I don’t know what you will gain by seeing me. I hurt everyone who comes near me.”
