Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

by William Kennedy

  Sábato follows this with an episode from June of 1955, when the Argentine navy rose against Perón in a coup d’état that failed, but led to Perón’s overthrow three months later. In reprisal for the uprising, Perón’s troops burned Catholic churches, since the church had sided against him. Martín moves through the debacle of church burnings, with Perón, in absentia, created in the image of a cruel Antichrist.

  This concludes the first two sections, or half the novel. Sábato here imposes a novella, his 139-page, first-person Report on the Blind, written by Fernando, and recounting his paranoid fantasies about a conspiracy of blind people ruling the world “by way of nightmares and fits of delirium, hallucinations, plagues and witches, soothsayers and birds, serpents …” (Birds play a major role in the book; Fernando as a child put out the eyes of a bird with a needle, then released it inside a room.)

  The Report is a tour de force which is brilliant in its excesses, a surreal journey into the depths of Fernando’s personal Boschian hells, which, in their ultimate landscapes, are provinces of a “terrible nocturnal divinity, a demoniacal specter that surely held supreme power over life and death.” This ruling specter is a faceless goddess with the wings and head of a vampire and a single gigantic phosphorescent eye shining where her navel would have been. Her realm is

  a charred museum of horrors. I saw hydras that had once been alive and were now petrified, idols with yellow eyes in silent abandoned dwellings, goddesses with striped skin like zebras, images of a mute idolatry with indecipherable inscriptions. It was a country where the one rite celebrated was a petrified Death Ceremony. I suddenly felt so hideously lonely that I cried out in anguish. And in that mineral silence outside of history my cry echoed and reechoed, seemingly down through entire centuries and generations long since gone.

  Fernando realizes he must enter the giant vampiric goddess and he does enter what is clearly the vulva of the goddess:

  Something hideous happened to me as I ascended that slippery, increasingly hot and suffocating tunnel: my body gradually turned into the body of a fish. My limbs slowly metamorphosed into fins and I felt my skin gradually become covered over with hard scales … powerful contractions of that narrow tunnel that now seemed made of rubber squeezed me tightly but at the same time carried me upward by virtue of their incredibly strong, irresistible suction.”

  The consequence of this rising is a transcendent orgasm:

  I saw … afternoons in the tropics, rats in a barn … dark brothels, madmen shouting words that unfortunately were incomprehensible, women lustfully displaying their gaping vulvas, vultures on the pampas feeding on bloated corpses, windmills on my family’s estancia, drunkards pawing through a garbage can, and huge black birds diving down with their sharp beaks aimed at my terrified eyes.

  He awakens in the room of the Blind Woman, whom he has met almost at the outset of his descent and he perceives her to be the instrument conceived by the sacred Sect of the Blind to punish him. He anticipates the “most infernal of copulations” with her, which he senses will be the end of his lifelong quest for an unknown destiny. He imagines himself a centaur attacking the Blind Woman outside time and space, he becomes a lustful unicorn, a serpent, a swordfish, an octopus attacking her insatiable maw again and again, a giant satyr, a crazed tarantula, a lewd salamander. Excessive?

  And again an orgasm:

  … men and beasts alike were swallowed up or eaten alive. Mutilated beings ran about among the ruins. Severed hands, eyes that rolled and bounced like balls, heads without eyes that groped about blindly, legs that ran about separated from their trunks, intestines that twisted round each other like great vines of flesh and filth, moaning uteruses, fetuses abandoned and trampled underfoot …

  He awakens in his own room, finishes writing his Report on the Blind, hides it, and goes to meet his fate, “to the place where the prophecy will be fulfilled.” He goes to his daughter’s home where she shoots him and then immolates herself.

  What is one to make of such events? A sizable body of criticism and analysis of the novel, and of Sábato’s other work has appeared in the Spanish language since the book was published in 1962. Sábato has also discussed its meaning in a dialogue with himself included in El Escritor y Sus Fantasmas (“The Writer and His Phantoms”) in 1963, but critics disagree on precise meanings. Sábato’s own ambivalence contributes to the confusion, for instance his prefatory note about his “obsession” not being clear even to him. He has said that his questions to himself in the 1963 book were the synthesis of what many journalists and readers had asked him. Was the conflict in the novel representative of the actual conflict going on in Argentina? Was Alejandra an image of the country?

  Sábato has said that this was “a curious hypothesis,” and that such an idea about Alejandra had never occurred to him. But perhaps it is a valid idea, for he sought to create a “very Argentine woman,” one for whom he had a passion: “A woman with whom I myself could have fallen in love.”

  One suspects that Sábato is being somewhat disingenuous here, for he has relied heavily on overt symbolic statement: the dates of Fernando’s death and Perón’s overthrow coinciding; and Martín saying after his first meeting with Alejandra that she was “a being he seemed to have been waiting a century for.” The author has also seen to it that Alejandra looks like not only her own mother, Georgina, who was Fernando’s cousin, but also Fernando’s mother, who was an object of Fernando’s pubescent passion. Alejandra is thus the personification of womanhood in three generations (all targets of Fernando’s lust) and the last female member of the aristocratic Olmos line.

  But she also stands for Sábato’s definition of the feminine principle. In a work called Heterodoxia, a collection of brief essays on life and literature, he wrote the following, under the title “Feminine-Masculine”:

  The principles coexist in each human being.

  Feminine: night, chaos, unconsciousness, body, curve, softness, life, mystery, contradiction, indefiniteness, “corporal” feelings—taste, touch. Origin of the baroque, the romantic, the existential.

  Masculine: day, order, consciousness, reason, spirit, rectitude, hardness, eternity, logic, definition, “intellectual” feelings—hatred, vision. Origin of the classical, the essential.

  These feminine attributes apply perfectly and repeatedly to Alejandra, and the masculine attributes are parceled out, although sparingly, to the young, conscientious and intellectual Martín, who in the final section of the book transcends his despair over Alejandra’s death and becomes the spiritual inheritor of the future.

  Further, Sábato links both male and female archetypes to Fernando and his unity with the demonic female goddess. The author has made Fernando a gangster, a cruel and violent child who grows into a cruel and violent man, a shrewd manipulator of people, power and money, an anarchist, an autocrat, a tyrant and ultimately a maniacal solipsist. Does the description fit Perón?

  In 1956 Sábato wrote an open letter titled The Other Mask of Perónism and in it defined “Perónist” as a person whose basic doctrine was “the elevation of Colonel Perón by any method.” He saw Perón as an “empiricist without scruples, an aeronaut disposed to throw any ballast overboard, any person, any theory, any promise, any system that obstructed his unbridled ascent.”

  He theorized further that Perón’s ascent was not explainable by reason but by the passion of the masses who backed him. And the masses, he added, are feminine—that is to say, in his view, illogical, romantic, sentimental. Sábato feuded publicly with Borges in 1956 on the role the masses played in elevating Perón to power and maintaining him there, and at several points throughout his work he seems both accuser and apologist of the masses for what they did to the nation. They were wrong, but I understand them, is his tone.

  His imposition of femininity on the masses has a historical counterpart, for Perón broke with Argentine political tradition, embraced feminism (however self-servingly), won for women the right to vote, and in 1951 they voted overwhelmingly
for him. His wife Evita though heavily dependent upon Perón (a pussycat feminist herself) was also a powerful influence in attracting the masses to his cause. And as a postscript, when he returned to power in 1973 only to die a year later, his wife Isabel ran the government for two years.

  Victoria Ocampo, the grand dame of Argentine letters, took exception to Sábato’s views of women when he published an article, “On the Metaphysics of Sex,” in her magazine Sur, in 1952. She argued convincingly that he was stereotyping women; he countered that she was a “furious priestess of Bacchus, ready to tear me apart alive and eat me raw,” and insisted that feminism was really masculinism.

  Whatever one thinks of Sábato’s views of women thirty years ago, the point here is that they fused with his political views and his unconscious (which he felt was also feminine) and formed the ideological and phantasmagorical basis for On Heroes and Tombs. The politics are transformed into a paranoiac’s incestuous cravings for his daughter, and hers for him; their coupling becomes a nightmarish trip into the vulva of the goddess, and the cloacal wasteland of Fernando’s personal, private hell is a reflection of the tyranny, tortures and killings of the regime.

  Incest as the spiritual metaphor for politics is a striking invention, but Sábato is doing more than this. He has said that the novel’s four main personages, Bruno, Martín, Alejandra and Fernando, are all phases of himself. Their dialogue, he says, represents his own internal struggles. Martín is his innocent young manhood, Fernando his dark side. He is a strong proponent of a “national literature” which expresses the fundamental problems of the nation, but the fundamental problems of the human heart have equal primacy for him.

  He believes a novel should reflect the fact that life is not explicable, that it is full of overheard whispers, fleeting vision’s, incomprehensible facts; and so he stocks his work with such characters, who pass through only to make a speech and move off to oblivion. The incest is never confirmed, only alluded to by Martín’s glimpse of the passionate hand-holding by Fernando and Alejandra. Is Alejandra the Blind Woman of Fernando’s paranoid fantasy? That would explain a great deal. But Sábato does not confirm this.

  His aim, he wrote in El Escritor y Sus Fantasmas, is to create “beings who can never decide from within if the changes in their destinies are the consequence of their efforts, their failures, or the course of the universe.”

  Why, for instance, should a spiritually cunning and promiscuous woman be drawn to an innocent like Martín? And why did Martín begin to behave like a paranoiac himself when speaking of Alejandra to Bruno, spewing out a flood of minute details as only madmen do? Was it because Alejandra’s mind was ensnaring him as it had presumably ensnared Fernando’s? Says Bruno: “… the pain born of a passion constantly confronted with obstacles, especially mysterious and inexplicable obstacles, is always more than sufficient reason … to cause the most sensible man to think, feel, and act like someone out of his mind.”

  The book, then, is a psychological melodrama as well as a work of politics, a cultural history as well as a bizarre dream of infernal order; and not least in Sábato’s aesthetic priorities, it is a book of hope.

  El Túnel was a cornerstone for On Heroes and Tombs, the story of a painter who falls in love with a married woman and then murders her when he discovers she has betrayed him. Prefigured are the paranoia, the love which becomes obsessive, the blindness (of the woman’s husband), the violence. This book earned Sábato the praise of Thomas Mann, Graham Greene and Albert Camus, and gave him instant international status as a novelist.

  But Sábato saw El Túnel as a work of his youth, a work that embraced only the negative side of his personality, his “black and hopeless side.”

  Martín comes to this sense of hope in the depths of his gloom after Alejandra’s suicide. In an alcoholic stupor he stumbles onto Fernando’s hellish terrain—“a vast swampy plain, amid filth and corpses, amid excrement and mire that might swallow him up … repellent landscape crawling with worms, running with his little crutch toward the place where the face seemed to be waiting for him …”

  The face belongs to a woman, Hortensia Paz, who brings Martín to her home and helps him sober up from his despair. She is the mother of an infant, is living alone, is very poor and struggling, but insistent to Martín about the positive values: “… there are so many nice things in life.” There’s the baby, music, flowers, birds, dogs. “It’s a shame the cat from the café ate my canary. It was such good company.… It’s so beautiful to be alive!” Hortensia (her name means “Garden of Peace”) succors Martín, draws him instantly up from the dismal swamp. He gives her his grandmother’s ring as he leaves.

  This lapse on Sábato’s part, this ascent into the empyrean realm of Norman Vincent Peale, is repellent not in its Pollyanna hopefulness but in its absence of imagination and its facile reduction of 465 pages of dire complexity to a barrage of pop sloganeering. But Sábato means for Martín to come out of his depression alive and with a complete skin, and he recovers his stride effectively by giving Martín a ride to Patagonia with a trucker named Bucich.

  This scene is largely dialogue and resembles Hemingway in its pithy understatement. Bucich, who has been on the Patagonia run for years, and who values the stars, wishes he’d been an astronomer. He’s a realist, Bucich; he remembers his father’s futile search for gold as far south as Tierra del Fuego, remembers an Englishman who told his old man: “Why don’t you settle down here instead of wandering all over looking for gold? What’s gold around here is sheep-raising, and I know what I’m talking about.”

  The message, of course, is not lost on Martín. The air on the southern pampa suddenly seems more decent to him. He feels useful. He is up from the sewer now and he sits by the fire waiting for the meat to cook. “The sky was crystal clear, and the cold intense. Martín sat there staring thoughtfully at the flames.”

  Counterpoint to Martín’s Patagonia excursion is what I judge to be the best writing in the book, the conclusion of the final days of the retreat of General Juan Galo de Lavalle (an authentic figure) and his rebel forces, defeated in 1841 by the allies of Juan Manuel de Rosas, the caudillo who ruled Argentina from 1829 to 1852. An ancestor of the modern Olmos family rides with Lavalle, not only maintaining the historical thread, but also serving as a juxtaposed figure to Martín—two youths whose powerlessness in the face of oppressive life is told in parallel stories.

  Lavalle dies a hero to revolutionary fervor, but Sábato wants us to see also his mundane side, and he ends the book with Lavalle’s mythic figure appearing to an old Indian. Lavalle rides a white charger and wears a cavalry saber and a high-crested grenadier’s helmet.

  “Poor Indian,” the narrator concludes, “if you only knew the general was only a man in rags and tatters, with a dirty straw hat and a cape that had already forgotten the symbolic color it once was.… If you only knew he was simply a miserable wretch among countless other miserable wretches!”

  Wretches all, we read Sábato and we shudder, we exult, we are bewildered, fearful, mesmerized.

  1981

  Julio Cortázar:

  A Manual for Manuel

  This is Julio Cortázar paying his dues—his first effort at a political novel, the obligatory genre for Latin American writers. It is willfully experimental, the author tells us, with authentic political clippings from newspapers interwoven with an absurdist’s tale of leftist intrigue and kidnapping. Cortázar half apologizes for the concoction: “Proponents of reality in literature are going to find it … fantastical while those under the influence of fiction will doubtless deplore its deliberate cohabitation with the history of our own times.”

  Cortázar has had a reputation as an avant-gardist since the publication (in Spanish in 1963, in English in 1966) of Hopscotch, a do-it-yourself novel in which, with the help of an author’s road map, one may read chapter 73 first, then travel back to chapter 1, then on to 2, then to 116, then to 3, then 84 and so on. The novel was highly regarded throughout the world and ea
rned Cortázar a reputation as one of the principal, if elder (he was born in 1914) figures in the so-called Latin literary “boom”—which includes Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier and a dozen or two others. This sort of listing (used here to make the point) is always unfair, for it reinflates the best-known Latin names, who are not necessarily the authors of the best new Latin novels. Cortázar’s new one is not one of the best. He wants it to be important, and at times, excruciatingly, it is, mainly for what it tells of political torture, violent punishment of innocents, murderous fascist depravity and casual cruelty toward social nonconformists.

  The English-, French- and Spanish-language clippings about these topics, strewn through the novel, are the real power of the book, and have an impact reminiscent of John Dos Passos’s accumulations of authentic 1930s tidbits in his trilogy U.S.A. Cortázar’s clips go beyond Dos Passos’s in their singlemindedness: which is to touch the open nerve of political oppression in contemporary Latin America, and to point the finger at the United States for its expedient morality in defending, training and funding the multiform sadists in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua and so on. With these antifascist clippings he is creating a scrapbook for the Manuel of the title—an infant at the time of the novel’s events, who will presumably grow up to learn the truth of his era from this data. What the author is also doing is documenting the defiant, self-sacrificial and not quite hopeless (or so it seems) gesture a handful of manic Marxists make toward the oppressor.

  He moves in and out of the mind of a number of too thinly defined characters. But, owing to the nature of his absurdist approach, we never inhabit the psyche of any of his people, not even of his intermittent first-person narrator, Andrés, who is the most developed character of all. And without the intimate connections to his people, Cortázar delivers up to us only literary and socialist artifacts. Puppets. And who really cares whether a puppet laughs or cries?