The Tunnel

by Ernesto Sabato

The phrase ‘the good old days’ does not mean that bad things happened less frequently in the past, only – fortunately – that people simply forget they happened.

There are times when a person feels he is a superman, until he realizes that he, too, is low, and vile, and treacherous.

Even when you think a person hasn’t the slightest trace of vanity, suddenly you discover it in its most subtle form: the vanity of modesty.

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

Experience has taught me that what seems clear and evident to me is never so to my fellow human beings. I have been burned so many times that now before I justify or explain anything, I mull it over a very long time; almost inevitably, I end up withdrawing into myself and not opening my mouth at all.

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.

THE CRITICS. They are a plague I have never understood. If I were a great surgeon, and some fellow who had never held a scalpel in his hand, who was not a doctor, and who had never so much as put a splint on a cat’s paw, tried to point out where I had gone wrong in my operation, what would people think? It is the same with painting. What is amazing is that people do not realize it is the same, and although they would laugh at the pretensions of the man who criticizes the surgeon, they listen with nauseating respect to the charlatans who comment on art.

was a strange look, unwavering, penetrating; it seemed to come from somewhere in the past.

‘My mind is a dark labyrinth. Sometimes there are flashes, like lightning, that illuminate some of the passageways. I never know why I do certain things. No, that isn’t right…’

‘It isn’t that I don’t reason things out. Just the opposite, my mind never stops. But think of the captain of a ship who is constantly charting his position, meticulously following a course toward an objective. But also imagine that he does not know why he is sailing toward it. Now do you understand?’

‘Haven’t I been telling you I don’t know what I think? If I could say in words what I feel, it would be almost the same as thinking clearly. Isn’t that true?’

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 looked on people with antipathy, even revulsion – especially crowds of people. I have always despised the beach in summer, soccer games, the races, demonstrations. I have felt affection for a few men, and an occasional woman; for some I have felt admiration (I am not an envious man), for others, true sympathy. 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). In general, however, humankind has always seemed detestable.

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.

‘As if someone stranded in a desert suddenly moved with great speed to a different location. You understand? The speed is really unimportant; the person is still in the same desert.’

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.

If only this sensation will let us go...

Then I felt her hand caressing my face, as I had at other times like this. I could not speak. As when I was a boy with my mother, I put my head in María’s lap, and for a long time outside of time, a time composed of childhood and death, we were together.

We passed near a small homestead: a woman standing in the shade of a thatched roof looked up at the train. An opaque thought crossed my mind: ‘I am seeing that woman for the first and last time. I will never in my lifetime see her again.’ My thoughts floated aimlessly, like a cork down an uncharted river. For a moment they bobbed around the woman beneath the thatch. What did she matter to me? 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.

and that the whole story of the passageways was my own ridiculous invention, and that after all there was only one tunnel, dark and solitary: mine, the tunnel in which I had spent my childhood, my youth, my entire life.