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.

Think how much worse it would be for society if that person were allowed to continue distilling his poison;

As for myself, I frankly confess that I now regret not having used my time to better advantage when I was a free man, that is, for not having done away with six or seven individuals I could name.

Vanity is found in the most unlikely places: in combination with kindness, and selflessness, and generosity.

And in the obscure depths of my being I felt the stirring of vain pride for having come so promptly.

But why do I have this mania to explain everything that happens?

people constantly ask pointless questions, questions the most superficial analysis reveals to be unnecessary.

but there is a logical explanation, and I am sure that if I decide to give it, everyone will agree that I am right.

Experience has taught me that what seems clear and evident to me is never so to my fellow human beings.

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.

all the variations blended into one great jumble. A muddle of sentences I had contrived and memorized in my long preparatory gymnastics swam in my brain.

But with every floor it passed I could feel my determination dwindling and, in inverse ratio, my habitual timidity growing by leaps and bounds.

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.’

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. The sea lies before me, eternal and raging. My weeping from that other time is futile; futile, too, my waiting on the lonely beach, gazing unblinkingly at the sea.

Today I can reflect on how we are blinded by love; how magically love transforms reality. The world, beautiful? What a laugh!

‘If I ever suspect you have deceived me,’ I raged, ‘I will kill you like a dog.’

But such moments of tenderness were growing more infrequent and short-lived, like intervals of sunshine in an increasingly dark and stormy sky.

shadows María never mentioned but I could sense moving silently and darkly in her life.

you feel no passion for him, if you show that making love is a sacrifice you offer in return for his love for you, your admiration for his greatness of spirit, and so on, Allende would never go to bed with you again.

Usually that feeling of being alone in the world is accompanied by a condescending sense of superiority. I scorn all humankind; people around me seem vile, sordid, stupid, greedy, gross, niggardly. I do not fear solitude; it is almost Olympian.

The seduction of suicide lies in its easy oblivion: in one second the whole absurd universe would crumble as if it were a gigantic facsimile, as if the solidity of its skyscrapers, its battleships, its tanks, its prisons, were nothing more than a mirage, as illusory as the skyscrapers, battleships, tanks, and prisons of a nightmare.

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.

I think there are thousands of characters, and in the end it turns out there are only four or five. Isn’t it maddening just when you begin to recognize a man called Alexandre, he’s called Sacha, and then Satchka, and later Sachenka, and suddenly something pretentious like Alexandre Alexandrovitch Bunine, and later simply Alexandre Alexandrovitch. The minute you get your bearings, they throw you off the track again. There’s no end to it; each character is a whole family in himself.

Something deep inside me was telling me to be sad. Worse, being unable to identify the root of that depression was making me irritable and nervous, no matter how much I tried to be calm, or promised myself I would analyze the phenomenon once I was alone.

‘We have no right to think of ourselves. The world is too complex.’ I asked her what she meant by that. She replied even more somberly: ‘Happiness is encircled with pain.’

ebullient.

some Juan or other; she

Oh, God! Why did it have to be ruined by suspicion, by things that could never be explained! How I longed to be mistaken, how I wished that María existed only for that moment. But that was impossible. As I listened to the beating of her heart, and as her hand stroked my hair, somber thoughts were stirring in the darkness of my mind, as if awaiting in a dank cellar the moment to erupt, sullenly splashing and grunting through the mire.

Dear God, how can you have faith in human nature when you think that a sewer and certain moments of Schumann or Brahms are connected by secret, shadowy, subterranean passageways.

The more I thought about it, the more receptive I became to the idea of accepting her love without condition, and the more terrified I became of being left with nothing, absolutely nothing.

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

I felt that a black chasm was yawning inside me.