THE TUNNEL OF A MURDERER
THE EFFECT OF MARÍA IN CASTEL
The meeting between Juan Pablo Castel and María Iribarne took place as a result of a scene in a window that he painted in a painting.[7] Castel noticed how, unlike the rest of the people who ignored her, María watched her closely. This induced him to convince himself that she was able to understand him deeply. He immediately became obsessed with María:
During the months that followed, I only thought of her, of the possibility of seeing her again. And, in a way, I just painted for her. It was as if the small scene in the window began to grow and invade the entire canvas and all my work (Sábato: 1985, 17).
He spent days pondering the way to find her again and imagined various possibilities to enter into conversation with her.
I do not remember now all the variants that I thought. I only remember that there were some so complicated that they were practically useless. It would be a chance too portentous that the reality would then coincide with a key so complicated, prepared in advance ignoring the shape of the lock. But it happened that when I had examined so many convoluted variants, I forgot the order of the questions and answers or mixed them, as happens in chess when one imagines games of memory. And it was also often that he replaced phrases of one variant with phrases of another, with ridiculous or discouraging results (26).
The meticulousness and obsession with which Castel analyzes each alternative of encounter and each possibility of dialogue already reveals to us the germ of madness.
It will be useful to introduce here the definition of madness to which Gilbert K. Chesterton arrives, after realizing —in attention to the fact that "the danger of madness lies in logic; not in the imagination"— an opposition between the figure of the madman and that of the poet or artist:
Anyone who has had the misfortune to speak with people who are in the heart or on the edge of mental imbalance, knows that its most sinister characteristic is a horrible lucidity to capture the detail; A facility to connect two lost things together in your confusing map like a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is very likely that you will have the worst part in the discussion; because in many ways, the mind of the madman is more agile and quick, not being stuck by all the things that have good discernment. It is not stopped by a sense of humor or charity or by the already muted certainties of experience. The madman is more logical, because he lacks certain affections of sanity. The common phrase that applies to insanity, from this point of view is wrong. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. Crazy is the man who has lost everything, except his reason.
The explanations that a madman gives about something are complete and often, in a strictly rational sense, are even satisfactory.
Or to speak with more precision, the insane explanation, although it is not conclusive, is at least irrefutable.
[...]
However, that man is wrong. But if we try to expose his error in exact terms, we will see that it is not as easy as we could suppose. Perhaps the most approximate thing we could do, is to say this: that your mind acts in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is as infinite as a large one; but despite being so infinite, it is not so broad. In the same way, the explanation of the insane is as complete as that of the healthy, but not so vast. A bullet is round like the world, but it is not the world.
There is something like a broad universality; and something like a narrow and restricted eternity (1998, 12).
To these considerations we add those of Foucault, which also start from opposing the figures of the poet and the madman, but now from a perspective that observes the use that they make of the language:
In the margins of a knowledge that separates beings, signs and similarities, and as if to limit their power, the madman assures the function of homosemantism: he gathers all the signs and fills them with a similarity that does not stop proliferating. The poet ensures the inverse function; it has the allegorical paper; under the language of the signs and under the play of his well-cut distinctions, he tries to hear the "other language", without words or discourses, of similarity. The poet brings the similarity to the signs that speak of it, the madman loads all the signs with a resemblance that ends up erasing them (1968, 56).
Practically throughout his story, Castel seems to tend toward this definition of madness: everything is obsessively reasoned, it enumerates different hypotheses and argues logically to arrive at its conclusions. Indeed, it can not be said that reason is what it lacks. What with the running of the narrative we will see that it will be scarce in him is capacity to relativize his reasonings and conclusions.[8]
Finally, Castel finds María in the street. Almost from the first moment his way of addressing her is impetuous and, in the various meetings and communications that successively take place, Castel teaches in an increasingly marked manner an impatience to get from Maria definitions or answers she never gets or that, get them, do not leave it agreeable.
We transcribe below, as an example, two fragments of different dialogues between Castel and María:
—What happens? —I asked for—. Why don´t you speak?
—Me too —she whispered.
—Me too what? —I asked anxiously.
—That I too have not done more than think.
—But think in what? —I kept asking, insatiable.
—In all.
—How in all? In what?
—In the strange thing that is all this... what of his painting... the meeting of yesterday... of today... what do I know
The imprecision has always irritated me.
—Yes, but I told you that I have not stopped thinking about you —I answered—. You do not tell me that you thought of me...
A moment passed. Then she answered:
—I tell you that I have thought of everything.
—You have not given details.
—It's just that everything is so strange, it's been so strange... I'm so disturbed... Of course I thought of you...
My heart hit. I needed details: I'm excited about the details, not the generalities.
—¿But how, how?... —I asked with growing anxiety (46).
—Why did you go to the ranch? —I asked finally, violently—. Why did you leave me alone? Why did you leave that letter in your house? Why did not you tell me you were married?
She did not respond. I squeezed her arm. She moaned.
—You hurt me, Juan Pablo —she said softly.
—Why do not you tell me anything? Why don´t you answer?
She didn´t say anything.
—¿Why? ¿Why?
Finally she answered:
—Why must everything have an answer? Let's not talk about myself: let's talk about you, about your jobs, about your worries. I thought constantly about your painting, about what you told me in the Plaza San Martín. I want to know what you do now, what do you think, whether you have painted or not.
I squeezed her arm again with anger.
—No —I answered—. It's not me that I want to talk: I want to talk about the two of us, I need to know if you love me. Nothing more than that: know if you love me.
Did not answer. Desperate for the silence and for the darkness that did not allow me to guess her thoughts through his eyes, I lit a match. She quickly turned her face away, hiding it. I took her face with my other hand and forced her to look at me: she was crying silently.
—Ah... then you don´t love me —I said bitterly.
While the match went out I saw, however, how she looked at me with tenderness. Then, already in the dark, I felt her hand caressing my head. She told me softly:
—Of course I love you ... why do I have to say certain things?
—Yes —I answered—, ¿but how you love me? There are many ways to love. You can love a dog, a boy. I want to say love, true love, do you understand? (62)
It seems that, in the end, no matter what Maria may say, for Castel it will always be insufficient. And it is that it seeks that she be manifested to him with the absolute strength of an ideal that can only reside in his own mind. Only the silent ideas can be pure; as soon as they become embodied in words, they become realities that, as such, are differently interpretable.
But Castel seems unable to recognize the relative nature of language, does not give to the signs that make up the allegorical role they have; consequently, he seeks that Mary's words, as well as her actions (for which interpretation also means language), fill her desire for absoluteness.
For that reason, after each encounter or dialogue that maintains with her, she will feel frustrated and this frustration will take her to go making considerations about María more and more cruel that will induce him in turn to be more insidious with her. He will thus enter into a kind of vicious circle, in which he will progressively find more arguments against María. Each new word or attitude of her will become food for the misgivings that are nestling against her.
Castel himself tells us the moment in which the first suspicion that he has about María appears. This is produced by the simple fact that when calling her on the phone, as they had been the day before, he does not find her at home and the employee tells him that she went to the country:
I had done so much to see her on the same day and I was expecting such important things from that meeting that this announcement left me stunned. I came up with a series of questions: Why had she resolved to go to the countryside? Obviously, this resolution had been taken after our telephone conversation, because otherwise she would have told me something about the trip and, above all, she would not have accepted my suggestion to speak on the phone the next morning. Now, if that resolution was subsequent to the telephone conversation, would it also be consequence of that conversation? And if it was a consequence, why? Did she want to run away from me once again? Was she afraid of the inevitable encounter the other day?
This unexpected trip to the countryside awakened the first doubt. As always, I started to find suspicious details that had not been important before. Why those voice changes on the phone the day before? Who were those people who "came and went" and who prevented her from speaking naturally? In addition, that proved that she was capable of simulating. And why did that woman hesitate when I asked about Miss Iribarne? But one sentence about everything had been recorded as acid: "When I close the door they know they should not bother me". I thought that around María there were many shadows(49).
We see that Castel begins to think of María as a possible simulator. It is this suspicion, that will feed in each new situation until it will acquire for him the value of certainty, the one that mortifies him and will finally lead him to commit the crime. It is that if Mary is a simulator, then that ideal that Castel believed to materialize in her would be a fraud. But instead of understanding that he is the one who makes an error in pretending to satisfy his desire for totality, he blames María for his frustration. His thoughts and deductions are obsessively focused on it; this leads to Maria being for Castel, either the person who fulfills his desire for totality, or a complete scammer.
As Castel learns more details about María, her situation and her relationships, she acquires a more terrestrial, less celestial appearance in his conscience. The concept María that nests in Castel abandons the plane of the pure idea to take shape from the real María that is being discovered. He learns in the first place that she is married (with a blind man: Allende) and the way in which he finds out, or that she makes him aware of it, leads him to new speculations and conclusions that reinforce the hypothesis that María is a fraud that acts perversely.
However, we still see him doubt Castel of the validity of his conclusions; So, after dismissing them for a moment, he says: "I felt that the anonymous love that I had nurtured during years of solitude had been concentrated on Mary"(57). But although Castel still gives rise to doubt, a pathological behavior is already evident in him: his considerations about María go from one extreme to the other, go and return without nuances or scales of a pure love to an excessive hatred.
The alternations that arise in Castel between his feelings towards María and the lovers coincide with the transits that he makes from his reverie about the mundane aspects of his relationship to the spiritual essence that underlies it, an essence that is always present as of the scene of the painting. Both Castel and María perceive in that scene something that relates them deeply and it is in the moments when they refer to it that their dialogues find a balance, as if there, in the scene of the window, they achieve that pure and full understanding. Thus, in a letter María wrote to Castel:
The sea is there, permanent and rabid. My crying then, useless; also useless my waits on the lonely beach, looking tenaciously at the sea. Have you guessed and painted this memory of me or have you painted the memory of many beings like you and me? But now your figure is interposed: you are between the sea and me (59).
With the remembrance of these words, Castel laments for having killed her: "Oh, and yet I killed you! And I was the one who killed you, I, who saw as through a glass wall, without being able to touch it, your face mute and anxious! Me, so stupid, so blind, so selfish, so cruel!"(60).
However, any attempt to fully express what that scene means to them dies in the attempt; they barely manage to decipher a message of loneliness and hopelessness.[9] Indeed, it is in that scene, in his memory, that Castel manages to feel with Mary that desired communion; but, as soon as his thoughts are directed in another direction, he falls back into an abyss of uncertainty and distrust.
Castel would become María's lover, but the physical union only intensified that dichotomy of feelings that reigned in him:
Far from reassuring me, physical love disturbed me more, brought new and torturous doubts, painful scenes of incomprehension, cruel experiments with María. The hours we spend in the workshop are hours that I will never forget. My feelings, throughout that period, oscillated between the purest love and the most unbridled hatred, before the contradictions and the inexplicable attitudes of Mary; Suddenly I was in doubt that everything was faked(66).
The insecurities that Castel already manifested in the first encounters with Mary take the expression of jealousy and that yearning for absolute spiritual root is shifted to a fever of physical possession. He submits her to cruel interrogations related to all the suspicions that he himself created; his questions derive towards María's relationship with Allende and ends by accusing her of deceiving him: "Deceiving a blind man"(77).
Repent once again Castel of his actions:
How many times this damn division of my conscience has been the culprit of atrocious acts! While one part leads me to take a beautiful attitude, the other denounces fraud, hypocrisy and false generosity; while one leads me to insult a human being, the other is sorry for him and accuses me of what I denounce in others; while one makes me see the beauty of the world, the other shows me its ugliness and the ridiculousness of every feeling of happiness (78).
But he senses that the damage is already irremediably done and it is then that he refers to the feeling of loneliness that usually seizes him:
I returned home with the feeling of absolute loneliness.
Generally, that feeling of being alone in the world appears mixed with a proud feeling of superiority: contempt for men, I see them dirty, ugly, incapable, greedy, rude, mean; My loneliness does not scare me, it's almost Olympic.
But at that moment, as in other similar ones, I found myself alone as a consequence of my worst attributes, of my low actions. In those cases I feel that the world is despicable, but I understand that I am also part of it; In those instants I am invaded by a fury of annihilation, I let myself be caressed by the temptation of suicide, I get drunk, I look for prostitutes. And I feel a certain satisfaction in proving my own baseness and in verifying that I am no better than the dirty monsters that surround me. (80).
This fragment marks the collapse that will be final for Castel. His sense of loneliness will be for him an unequivocal symptom of the failure in his attempt to commune with Mary. That loneliness that in other occasions made him feel superior to the rest, now abyss him until he even thinks about suicide. From now on, his actions will be marked by bitterness and anger. The idea that had been feeding will prevail in him: that María is a simulator.
[7] The picture was entitled "Maternity"; it consisted of a woman who watches a child play and in a small scene, which was seen through a sale, of another woman on a lonely beach contemplating the sea. Castel says when referring to it: "The scene suggested, in my opinion, an anxious and absolute solitude" (Sábato: 1985, 16). However, different analyzes of Freudian cut that were made on this novel were occupied in highlighting the Oedipus complex that would prevail in the character of Castel, mainly as a result of this scene and that in some passage the protagonist referred to his mother with admiration ("it was as good as a human being can be"), while not mentioning his father at any time. From there, these studies aimed to explain the entirety of the novel in terms of this notion of psychoanalysis. We believe that focusing the analysis on such a concept is very limiting. For the rest, although this scene of the painting will have its symbolic importance for us, we understand that the central image and more orientative towards a global explanation is that of the tunnel that, in addition, gives rise to the title of the novel and stands out in the epigraph.
[8] While it is true that Castel is an artist, specifically a painter, it is not the silhouette of the artist that is discovered in the novel. Perhaps a poetic, allegorical Castel can be glimpsed when it is referred to that scene in the painting he painted and which linked it with María, but in all its soliloquy, who is taught as the dominant figure is the crazy reasoner.
[9] We observe that Castel's attitude in relation to his painting differs from that which he expresses with language in general: although he reflects on it and seeks its meanings, it seems that he does not fail to recognize it as an allegory, as an expression of something that it is beyond all possible enunciation.