The art of confessing: Notes on Sabato's The Tunnel (1948)
The confession of murder may be the first line of a novel. Sabato has made this clear, defining a narrative course that offers as bait, as an advance, precisely the last knockdown of the story, simultaneously weighing the transit of its protagonist as an object of desire, as a literary purpose. This may imply that he liked to mock his readers, or that the writing of a text about heartbreak and loneliness dispenses —paradoxically— with love and company as an intention.
This gesture, more than a parabolic device, is an affirmation of the fragility of memory. In the mind of a women’s murderer, the incessant question turns from moralizing the past, to de-ontologizing it. What importance does it have if the past time was better? Time melts mutating into a range of perverse predilections: I, for example, characterize myself by preferably remembering bad facts. Sabato sets out, perhaps in his most famous work, to particularize the whys, that is, to celebrate the artist's vanity. How do you deal with the figures in a painting that, rebelling against the hand of the tyrant demiurge, escape from their small windows and unfold into beings of flesh and blood?
Juan Pablo Castel, beyond the simplisms that reduce him to a despicable misogynist, kills because he was understood. It is a flourish to disguise the horrifying fact of being discovered within-oneself, in the only valid and fully justified intention of a painting. The artist in question denies conglomerates and collectives, mocks the poses and the deep and forced looks with which Freud’s decrepit portrait intimidates the neophytes of psychoanalytic societies, despises the beaches in summer, claims the despotic individualism of the übermensch: in isolation, he has regained his Olympic dignity. The first of his victims should not have been a woman, but an ordinary art critic and his opinology niff who does not even know how to take a brush, but who believes can dilute the ink with his stinking drool.
Alfred Kubin, Untitled (The Eternal Flame), watercolor and ink on papel, ca. 1900.
So much anger and discontent. So much uncertainty. The need for her to speak first. The obsession to pathetically rehearse the failed lines of an automaton devoid of charm. The delirious soliloquy of the metropolitan mobs and his fixation on always choosing fantasy. Castel, although Maria could show him some deference, insisted until the boredom in quantifying the physical intensity of a glance, otherwise always contingent. How can one not despair when looking that Sabato, so close to Borges, fled his life in terror from blindness? The blind are, for Sabato, the venom, the molt, the constriction, the poison, the peccatum originale. María Iribarne was an impossible of vision, a cavern’s hologram from which no shadows emanate, but the calmest darkness. Clearly, this was not a world for painters.
Maria's impression brought Castel closer than ever to his natura lapsa, to the false homage of future memories. The glass wall, the tunnel, the chimerical pretense of being with a silent shadow: living inside (or outside) was the assumption of polarized ways of seeing. The deceptions, the subtle truths of cursing, the methodical doubt, the threat of gutting her like a dog: the jealousy that those letters were not his, that her phantasmagorical secrecy could actually sleep with a blind veteran, anachronistic Buenos Aires’ Salvador. Annihilate the will as turning off a switch or the blade of a breaker box... battle against the iniquity of all suicidal hope in an awakening. Castel, in his debacle, had to become such an unclean specimen, even underworldly, to the point of trying to manipulate her, his female hallucination, with the tricks of a coward who does not know how to live.
In his latest peacemaking outpost, Castel acknowledges, dialectically, the mediocre character of others in the essence of all originality: it is the double-edged sword that a reputable artist freely wields. His subsequent offensive knows in advance that the inevitable fatality is precipitated by his own folly: Maria was never company, but offered herself as an isolation from his loneliness. Going this far was to prefer the skull cracked by the river's pebbles... was to reject Die Brücke. Dig the nails into her neck, tear her apart, and drive desperately to the ends of the earth to dump her body near Cabo Corrientes.
Sabato always knew of the wounds that a letter can confer. The strained relationship between communication and the compulsion of modernity: the schizoid oscillation of sending a lethal dart of Argentine characters and living to die repenting. To kill Maria was, for Juan Pablo, to recognize the hatred that he felt against himself, to rumble the transposition of her intoxicating scent in the services of a Romanian streetwalker. His gesture illuminated the conduit between the sewers and Brahms, from Corbatta to Madí. How many apples, Castel? How many? If you only wanted to be a volcano, not architecture, to be debris and hell, a llenç cremat a-la-Miró.
Yours was always black stone, Castel; anonymity, ridicule, contempt. The only transparency of your loneliness was the invention of light: the denial of your blindness. So the window was the key to your painting; that's why you rave with the blood of Maria, an implausible crimson juice from an immaculate crotch. It was your ultraviolet gaze that let out the last boat, the last supper, the spittle to the unintelligible blindness of the others. Yours is the cave, insensatus. In the confinement, between suicide, the wall and the mockery of the doctors, the being of your painting, out there, is now hers.
Notes:
The work that illustrates this writing is a watercolor and ink on paper, ca. 1900, by the Austrian expressionist sculptor and illustrator Alfred Kubin. It is part of the drawing and printing department’s collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. I’d like to thank the museum for authorizing the use of this image.
The edition that has been used for this text is Seix Barral’s, published in 2004 (in its 26th 2014 reprint). ISBN-13: 978-970-749-008-6.