This return to metaphysics, on a night like that and on such an occasion, provoked a painful movement of rebellion in my spirit: to deduce the First Cause from its effects had always seemed to me a cold and sterile result of logic, incapable of moving the soul according to love. More precisely, the irruption of The One into my dark night had seemed to be announcing to my soul a bright day of liberation, a recompense for my soul’s tribulations. And just at the point when, in thinking about The One, I touched or believed I was touching the ultimate depths of my being, lo and behold, I stopped thinking about her in order to think about an Other, as though the woman of Saavedra were no more than a bridge of silver offered to I knew not what new pilgrimage of my mind. Rebellion and fatigue — that is what I experienced upon finding myself again at the beginning of a journey, just when I thought I’d arrived at quietude through love and at happiness through quietude. But I immediately noticed that the notion of the Other, suggested by the woman of Saavedra, occurred to me not as a result of a laborious process of reasoning but with the ease of an image that is reflected in water, which enamours the eyes of the one who looks at it, and that makes him8 feel the desire to raise his eyes and look around for the original of the copy.
I stood up from the doorstep, my soul filled with an inexpressible commotion. I began to walk slowly down the solitary street, under the canopy of leaves rustling in the breath of the night. Again I raised my eyes to contemplate the immense troop of stars moving slowly across the sky in a sacred adagio; and for the first time my tenderness turned, not to the visible flock, but to the hidden shepherd who guided it from on high. There was in the night a correspondence of signs, or a concert of voices calling one another in recognition, happy just to be, to float for an instant above nothingness. But my heart, which so many times before had savoured such music solely for its musical delight, now refused to hear it and seemed to rise higher, as though, in abstraction from the music, my heart sought the face of the invisible Strummer. And when I understood that this unknown rapture was due only to the virtue of The One, my soul burned like a fragrant leaf and, become smoke, ascended above its own fire.
X
The story of my life is a succession of endings and rebeginnings, of rises and falls alternating with rigorous precision. Since childhood, I have learned to quail, at my peak moments of joy, for the pain whose advent I know to be imminent; every happy Sunday I’ve ever known has been overshadowed by a threatening Monday. Many have been the moments of marvellous rapture, when my soul, like a sharp sparrowhawk, has savoured the atmosphere of great heights; but the hawk has always come back to earth, its beak empty of any living prey. So it is that the soul, between rising and falling, has begun to dream of a flight without return; and that is why, ever since childhood, there is within her an aching voice that cries out for a never-ending Sunday.
The next day, when the euphoria of that night had dissipated, my spirit began to flag and my mind to doubt the value of its conquest. Withdrawing into myself as so many times before, I noticed that poverty and solitude reigned in my being more than ever. Suspecting that perhaps it had all been a game in my imagination, I rebelled against myself and decided to punish my own madness. Then, carefully reviewing the details of my first encounter with the woman of Saavedra, it seemed to me that something substantial remained. Then I became aware of my urgent need to seek her out and to measure in her presence the precise worth of my turmoil. Truth be told, a second encounter did not seem likely: the friend who had taken me to the house in Saavedra was away from Buenos Aires, and I dared not show up there alone, for fear of revealing my secret. Mulling over schemes, which I promptly rejected, and feeling more and more profoundly the need to see her, I finally resolved to provoke a meeting in Barrancas de Belgrano;9 I knew that The One walked through the park with classmates every afternoon on her way home from school.
I got there in plenty of time and sat down on a stone bench beside a giant magnolia tree. Suddenly, I recall, a vague dread came over me as I imagined the woman of Saavedra soon coming along that very path, its sand crunching beneath her feet. The effects of her first revelation were too present in my memory for me not to fear now the effects of a second revelation. When I imagined her recognizing me, even talking to me, my turmoil reached such a pitch that I got up and took a few steps in flight. But I returned to my bench of stone and, from that moment forward, oblivious of my surroundings, I kept my eyes on the path’s most distant point where she would rise like the dawn. My heart had begun to beat frantically, its drumbeats intensifying as the moment of truth approached. All of a sudden, the magnificent dawn broke. A youthful horde came up the sun-drenched earthen steps of the slope: bright girlish eyes, hair blowing in the breeze, mercurial bodies beneath dresses, tinkling laughter, voices hoisted aloft, the whole spring-like avalanche passed vertiginously before me. In vain did I seek the face of The One amid the flushed faces, her body among the bodies, her voice among the voices: The One was not there, she had not come.
When I came back to myself, night was falling: a chill exhalation from the garden made my body shudder, and I heard the sparrows up in the magnolia tree chattering their goodnight to the fallen sun. I was alone. Around me, the desolation of the earth seemed to well upward as the sky filled out with a multitude of stars. But the solitude of my soul exceeded that of the earth, so much so that I pitied myself; and I would have wept upon the dunes of my own desert, had there remained anything in me capable of crying. I looked into my being for the image of The One, and the desert answered me; I tried to recover at least my mind and my will, but neither responded. To be sure, The One was no longer within me; but neither was I, being outside myself instead. Where? The truth came to me then and there, and I received it with a shudder: until that moment I’d believed the woman of Saavedra, in all the empire of her truth, was within me; as it turned out, however, she did not reside within me, but I within her.
I went home to my room, leaving the Barrancas de Belgrano and crossing the city as it noisily set about its night life. There, between the four walls of my jail cell, the light out, I flopped down fully dressed on my unmade bed, closing the useless eyes of my flesh and the useless eyes of my soul. What my being could not attain in waking consciousness, it found in its other existence, in dreams. For it entered a world of tortured images whose true aspect I shall never remember, but in the midst of which my soul must have suffered terrors so lifelike that they passed into my flesh and jolted my body awake. When I sat up, a deep silence reigned all around, but I was still not free of that phantasmagorical imagery. Then, feeling my way in the dark, I walked over to the window and opened it wide: a spectral dawn light was bathing the rooftops of Villa Crespo as far as the eye could see; the stars were dimming in a sky of nickel; the grey bulk of buildings, the blurry outline of trees, the slow resurrection of colour, the entire old world once again waking up before my eyes exuded at that hour at a vague air of fatigue, an indefinable taste of death. I recall that an early bird, hidden in the paradise trees in the street, croaked two or three broken notes, as if it too were bewailing the fatigue of the world. Then I closed my window and drew the curtains. Having restored my room to nighttime, I went back to bed, longing for silence and oblivion. Upon my eyelids fell a long dreamless sleep, merciful simulacrum of death.