On Heroes and Tombs by Ernesto Sábato

Author:Ernesto Sábato
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Classics, Contemporary
ISBN: 9780141986173
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 1961-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

After my death, which is close at hand now, it is my wish that this Report be forwarded to any institute interested in pursuing an investigation of this world that to date has remained unexplored. Hence this Report is limited to FACTS, exactly as I experienced them. Its merit, in my opinion, lies in its absolute objectivity: I wish to tell of my experience as an explorer might tell of his expedition to the Amazon or Central Africa. And although passion and rancor may often tend to cloud my judgment, as is only natural, I am determined to be as accurate and precise as possible and not to allow myself to be carried away by sentiments of this sort. I have had frightful experiences, but for that very reason I wish to keep to the facts, even if these facts may at times shed an unflattering light on my own life. When I have finished, no sensible person can possibly maintain that the aim of this document is to arouse feelings of sympathy toward my person.

Here for instance is one of the unflattering facts about myself that I shall confess to, as proof of my sincerity: I do not have, and never have had, friends. I have, naturally, experienced passions; but I have never felt affection for anyone, nor do I believe anyone has ever felt affection for me.

I have nonetheless had relationships with many people. I have had “intimate acquaintances,” as this equivocal expression goes.

And one of these acquaintances, who plays an important role in what is to follow, was a wizened, taciturn Spaniard named Celestino Iglesias.

I met him for the first time in an anarchist center in the Avellaneda district called Dawn. I frequented anarchist circles because I had vague plans for organizing a gang of armed bandits, which in fact I did organize later; although not all anarchists were holdup men, among their number one came across all sorts of adventurers, nihilists, and in a word that type of enemy of society that had always attracted me. One of these individuals was Osvaldo R. Podestá, who took part in the holdup of the Banco de San Martín and who during the Spanish Civil War was machine-gunned to death by the Reds, near the port of Tarragona, just as he was about to flee the country on an old tub loaded to the gunwales with money and jewels.

It was through Podestá that I met Iglesias: as though a wolf had introduced me to a lamb. For Iglesias was one of those tender-hearted anarchists who wouldn’t have harmed a fly: he was a pacifist, a vegetarian (because he was repelled by the thought of living himself at the expense of the death of another living creature), and he cherished the utopian hope that the world would one day be an affectionate community built together by free and fraternal men of good will. This New World would speak a single language, and that language would be Esperanto. For that reason

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