South American Gothic

By Paul Gray

ON HEROES AND TOMBS by Ernesto Sabato; Godine; 479 pages; $17.95

First published in Argentina in 1961, this long novel had to wait nearly 20 years for a suitable English translation (by Helen R. Lane) and a willing U.S. publisher. In the meantime, Sobre Heroes y Tumbas confirmed Ernesto Sabato's home-grown reputation as one of South America's leading writers and, when translations began spreading, brought him world-class praise. It is good that English-speaking readers can finally join this celebration and sad that they must come so late. Some of the novel's topicality has dimmed over the years; memories of Juan Peron's early days in power were fresher and more highly charged when Sabato wrote than they can be now. Immersed as it is in politics and history, On Heroes and Tombs has itself become something of a historical artifact.

Yet Sabato, now 70, used the trappings of public life in Buenos Aires in the mid-'50s to examine the phenomenon of suffering, a subject immune to passing time or fashions. Argentine life provides surface chaos. An attempt to overthrow Peron brings bombs raining down on a city plaza; Peronists retaliate by sacking and burning Roman Catholic churches. Beneath all this noise, the novel circles slowly around an internal mystery, announced at the outset: a woman named Alejandra murders a man named Fernando and then sets the scene of the crime on fire, immolating herself. The event draws attention because it involves members of a prominent, though sadly faded, old family. Particularly horrified is a dreamy, morose young man named Martin, who has had a tortured affair with Alejandra. Roughly the first half of the novel tells their story.

Meeting him in a public park, Alejandra chooses Martin as a companion for reasons that he never quite fathoms. She is erratic, tempestuous, given to long, unexplained absences and indifferent to Martin's growing passion and love. She takes him to the crumbling family home, populated now by a few aging relatives in varying stages of derangement. She suffers what appears to be an epileptic fit, recovers and falls asleep. Martin watches and realizes that he cannot save her: "It was as if the prince ... had at last found himself before the cavern where the beauty is sleeping, guarded by the dragon. And as if, moreover, he had become aware that the dragon was not a menacing creature there at her side watching over her, as we imagine him in the myths of our child hood, but instead, and much more frighteningly, a creature inside of her: as if she were a dragon-princess."

Alejandra seems fated to go mad and to kill Fernando, the father whom she has tried to repudiate. With its hints of incest and its portrait of a doomed family hagridden by history, Alejandra's tale is South American gothic at its most feverish. But

Sabato interrupts this narrative, just before the murder, with a long and astounding digression, written by Fernando in anticipation of the death that he knows awaits him.

"Report on the Blind" records Fernando's descent into the maelstrom of paranoia. He is convinced that blind people are secretly organized in a vast conspiratorial network and that they "rule the world, by way of nightmares and fits of delirium, hallucinations, plagues and witches, soothsayers and birds, serpents, and in general, all the monsters of darkness and caverns." By spying on an acquaintance who has recently been blinded in an accident, Fernando hopes to penetrate the mysteries of "the Sect"and prove to the world that he is not the victim of a persecution mania. His report, of course, demonstrates the opposite, but its crazed internal logic is eerily persuasive, and frequently hilarious. Fernando sees things in odd ways. He remembers visiting Switzerland: "The first time I passed through that country I had the impression that it was swept down with a broom from one end to the other every morning by housewives (who of course dumped all the dirt on Italy)."

After this monologue, a sustained tour de force, the pace of the novel flags. Fernando's earlier life is filled in; the grieving Martin comes to some acceptance of Alejandra's death. He is comforted by Bruno, an older man who had loved both Alejandra and her mother. Bruno argues that writers can assuage the tragedy that is life: "And thus, in a sense dreaming for everyone, these vulnerable beings contrive to rise above their individual unhappiness and become interpreters and even (suffering) redeemers of the collective destiny."

On Heroes and Tombs is not a tidy novel. Trying to embrace more than it can contain, it strains after the ineffable. Its various parts do not seem to belong together. But the same thing is true of many mythological creatures, odd beasts startled up into life by the stirrings of the unconscious. Sabato's ideas are sometimes commonplace, and his daylight scenes blurred or unconvincing. But he is a powerful and unforgettable dreamer. --By Paul Gray

Excerpt

"How did I arrive back home again? How did the blind let me out of that room in the center of a labyrinth? I do not know. But I do know that all of that happened, exactly as I have recounted it. Including--most importantly--that last dark day.

I also know that my days are numbered and that death awaits me. And one thing seems strange and incomprehensible to me: the fact that this death awaits me and will come about because in a certain sense I myself have so willed it, for no one will come looking for me here and I myself will be the one who goes, who must go, to the place where the prophecy will be fulfilled.

Cunning, the will to live, desperation have caused me to imagine a thousand ways of fleeing, a thousand ways of escaping my fate. But how can one escape one's own destiny?"

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