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 was one person who could have understood me. But she was the very person I killed.

And in a way I painted only for her. It was as if the tiny scene of the window had begun to expand, to swallow up that canvas and all the rest of my work.

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

More than any other, however, I detest groups of painters. Partly, of course, because painting is what I know best, and we all know that we have greater reason to detest the things we know well.

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.’

our life nothing more than a sequence of anonymous screams in a desert of indifferent stars?

‘But I don’t know what you will gain by seeing me. I hurt everyone who comes near me.’

I felt what I had so often felt from the first moment in the art gallery: that she was like me.

Again María did not answer. What irritated me about her was not only that she contradicted herself but that it was almost impossible to get her to say anything at all.

Why suffer? 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.

‘My theory,’ he began, ‘is the following. The mystery novel represents in the twentieth century what the romance of chivalry represented in the time of Cervantes. I will go even further:

I had been saddened to think (that is, feel) that María was one of their circle and that somehow she might be like them.

Important letters should be held for at least one day, until all the consequences are carefully weighed.

I slammed down the receiver without another word, and at that moment I truly was determined to kill myself if she did not come to clear matters up. I was strangely satisfied with the decision. ‘She’ll see,’ I thought, as if that would be my revenge.

I made repeated efforts to place them in the proper order, until I had arranged them in this terrible but irrefutable syllogism: María and the prostitute had the same expression; the prostitute was feigning pleasure; María, then, was also feigning pleasure: María was a prostitute.

her fear that she would hurt me – which could only mean, ‘I will harm you with my lies, with my inconsistencies, with my secret actions, with my feigned emotions and sensations,’ since she could never hurt me by truly loving me; the distressing scene of the matches; how at the beginning she had avoided even my kisses, and how she had given herself physically only when faced with the extreme of confessing her aversion or, in the best of cases, a motherly or sisterly affection

her answers that she loved her husband, which only led once again to the inference that she was able to deceive by feigning emotions and sensations;

the phrase that had slipped out when we were sitting on the cliff: ‘as once before I had been mistaken’; with whom: when: how?; the ‘stormy and cruel episodes’ with that other cousin, which also slipped out unconsciously, as proved by her not answering when I had asked ‘what stormy and cruel episodes?’ – she had been so immersed in her childhood that she had not heard me, she simply had not heard me, during what may have been her only truthful confession ever;

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.

And it was as if the two of us had been living in parallel passageways or tunnels, never knowing that we were moving side by side, like souls in like times, finally to meet at the end of those passageways before a scene I had painted as a kind of key meant for her alone, as a kind of secret sign that I was there ahead of her and that the passageways finally had joined and the hour for our meeting had come.

No, the passageways were still parallel, as they always had been, only now the wall separating them was like a glass wall, and I could see María, a silent and untouchable figure…

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.

Oh, God! I haven’t the strength to describe my infinite loneliness! I felt as if the last ship that could rescue me from my desert island had passed in the distance without heeding my calls for help.

And so every day the walls of this hell will close more tightly around me.