The Tunnel

by Ernesto Sabato

I remember so many catastrophes, so many cynical and cruel faces, so many inhumane actions, that for me memory is a glaring light illuminating a sordid museum of shame.

Even a man like Christ – whether real or symbolic – a being for whom I have always felt, indeed, still do, the deepest reverence, spoke words that were motivated by vanity – or at least by arrogance. And what can you say of a Leon Bloy, who defended himself against the accusation of arrogance by arguing he had spent a lifetime serving people who did not deserve to lick his boots. Vanity is found in the most unlikely places: in combination with kindness, and selflessness, and generosity.

Before I go on, I should say that I detest sects, brotherhoods, guilds, groups in general, any assemblage of morons congregating for reasons of profession, tastes, or similar manias. All these cliques have numbers of grotesque characteristics in common: repetition of type, their jargon, their arrogant conviction that they are better than everyone else.

Physically, she seemed not much more than twenty-six, but there was something about her that suggested age, something reminiscent of a person who has lived a long time. Not

gray hair or any purely physical indication, but something undefined, surely spiritual. It may have been her expression, but how physical can an expression be? Was it something about her mouth? Because although the mouth and lips are physical, the way of holding them, even certain lines around them, are spiritual.

There are times I feel that nothing has meaning. On a tiny planet that has been racing toward oblivion for millions of years, we are born amid sorrow; we grow, we struggle, we grow ill, we suffer, we make others suffer, we cry out, we die, others die, and new beings are born to begin the senseless comedy all over again.’ Was that really it? I sat pondering the idea of the absence of meaning. Was our life nothing more than a sequence of anonymous screams in a desert of indifferent stars?

I have always had tenderness and compassion for children (especially when through supreme mental effort I have tried to forget that one day they will be adults like anyone else).

It is incredible to what degree greed, envy, petulance, vulgarity, avarice – in short, the entire spectrum of traits that compose our miserable condition – can be revealed in a face, in a way of walking, in a look.

Experience has taught me just the opposite; it almost never is simple, and when something seems unusually clear, when some action appears to obey a simple logic, there are usually complex motives behind it.

It is curious, but life is a process of constructing future memories; at this very moment, here where I sit facing the sea, I know that I am creating memories that one day will bring me melancholy and despair.

but the minute she stopped crying and a smile started to light her face, I began to find it unnatural that she was no longer upset. It was all right that she should be feeling more cheerful, but it was extremely suspicious that she could feel happy after being called what I called her. It seemed to me that any woman would be humiliated by being called that, even a prostitute. No woman should be able to shift moods so quickly, unless there was a certain truth to what I had said.

In the light of this reasoning, life becomes a long nightmare, but one from which we can be liberated by death – which thus becomes a kind of awakening. But awakening to what? My indecisiveness about plunging into absolute and eternal nothingness had deterred me whenever I was tempted by suicide. In spite of everything, man clings desperately to existence and, ultimately, prefers to bear life’s imperfections, the torment of its sordidness, rather than dispel the mirage through an act of will.