The Tunnel

by Ernesto Sabato

I was filled with an infinite tenderness.

I forgot all my sterile reasoning, my savage deductions. I indulged myself by picturing her face, her expression – that expression that reminded me of something I could not identify – her profound and melancholy way of thinking. I felt that the unfocused love I had nourished through so many years of loneliness had crystallized in María. How could I think such absurd things about her?

My weeping from that other time is futile; futile, too, my waiting on the lonely beach, gazing unblinkingly at the sea. Did you somehow divine my memory, or did you paint the memory of many people like us?

‘My God, my God! Death isn’t my “type,”; either, and yet it often attracts me.

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. It also happens that when we have reached the limits of despair that precede suicide, when we have exhausted the inventory of every evil and reached the point where evil is invincible, then any sign of goodness, however infinitesimal, becomes momentous, and we grasp for it as we would claw for a tree root to keep from hurtling into an abyss.

‘I can’t count the times,’ said María, ‘that I have dreamed of sharing this sea and this sky with you.’

But I could not rid myself of the thought that, for an instant, she was a part of my life that would never be repeated; from my point of view it was as if she were already dead: a brief delay of the train, a call from inside the house, and that woman would never have existed in my life.

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. From that terror was germinating and flowering the kind of humility possessed only by persons who have no choice.