THE TUNNEL OF A MURDERER
THE CLOSURE OF CASTEL
After that confrontation, Maria seemed to move away from Castel. For several days, with desperate despair, he sought her, called her, wrote her; but he did not get any answer until, finally, he got a letter from her inviting him to Hunter's residence.
Castel's stay would be brief and he would spend it in a state of deep sadness. There María returns to talk about the scene of the painting; her words reveal themselves almost as an echo of the feelings of love towards Mary that Castel himself expressed throughout the story:
Sometimes it seems to me that we have always lived this scene together. When I saw that lonely woman in your window, I felt that you were like me and that you were also blindly looking for someone, a kind of mute speaker. From that day I constantly thought of you, I dreamed you many times here, in this same place where I have spent so many hours of my life (101).
However, these tender words, Castel receives them with a nostalgic air; his thoughts are focused on the suspicions he was accumulating against María.
What a pity that underneath there were inexplicable and suspicious facts! How I wished to be wrong, how I longed for María to be no more than that moment! But it was impossible: as I heard the beating of his heart next to my ears and while his hand caressed my hair, dark thoughts moved in the darkness of my head... (102).
Everything that happens around him interprets it univocally to feed his inquina towards her; but, in addition, he is predisposed to find clues that help confirm his conjectures. Thus, first admitted that he devoted himself to observe Hunter with zealous attention to find signs to prove his prejudices: "I monitored the words and gestures of Hunter because I sensed that they would shed light on many things that were happening to me and other ideas they were about to reinforce themselves "(104) and that night, after a series of obsessive reasonings, originating precisely in some gesture that he thought he perceived in Hunter, tells us that he came to the conclusion that he and María were lovers. But, evidently, this conclusion to the one above was already in the mind of Castel as an occurrence or idea when he set out to investigate Hunter thoroughly.
Here we discover a misunderstanding in Castel's procedure: instead of observing the facts, from his interpretation, ideas are formed; he first conceives his ideas and then looks for signs in reality to interpret them according to them. This is the way in which the madman relates to his circumstance: he lives in his head before in the world and tries to bring the world into his head.
The next day, just dawned and without saying goodbye to Hunter or María, he returned to Buenos Aires. Her despair was growing as she became more and more convinced that Maria was to blame for her suffering, until she perceived it as a certainty. After what he calls a "playful but phantasmagoric exam", which consisted of a run over but detail of all the signs that he had been collecting and to which he assigned an unequivocal meaning, he decided to kill María:
My brain was already working with the lucid ferocity of the best days: I clearly saw that it was necessary to finish and that I should not be fooled once again by his sore voice and his comedian spirit. I had to let myself be guided only by logic and I had to carry, without fear, to the last consequences, the suspicious phrases, the gestures, the equivocal silences of María (120).
Those days prior to the crime he would commit defines them as the most atrocious of his life. After suffering a disagreement with María, which he interprets as an abandonment, he resolves to go back to the room, but without announcing himself; a feeling of deep loneliness overwhelmed him. It arrived at night; it is then that the reflections take place that lead him to imagine that his whole life had been spent in a tunnel:
And it was as if we had both been living in parallel passages or tunnels, not knowing that we were next to each other, like similar souls in similar times, to find us at the end of those passages, in front of a scene painted by me, as key destined to her alone, as a secret announcement that I was already there and that the passageways had finally come together and that the hour of the meeting had arrived.
The hour of the meeting had arrived! But had the passageways really come together and our souls communicated? What a stupid illusion of mine had been all this! No, the passageways were still parallel as before, although now the wall that separated them was like a glass wall and I could see María as a silent and untouchable figure... No, not even that wall was always like this: sometimes it came back to be of black stone and then I did not know what was happening on the other side, what was of her in those anonymous intervals, what strange events happened; and I even thought that in those moments his face changed and that a mocking grimace deformed him and that maybe there was laughter crossed with another and that the whole history of the passages was a ridiculous invention or belief of mine and that in any case there was only one tunnel, dark and lonely: mine, the tunnel in which my childhood had passed, my youth, all my life. And in one of those transparent pieces of the stone wall I had seen this girl and had naively believed that she was coming through another tunnel parallel to mine, when in fact she belonged to the wide world, to the boundless world of those who do not live in tunnels; and perhaps she had come out of curiosity to one of my strange windows and had glimpsed the spectacle of my insurmountable loneliness, or had been puzzled by the mute language, the key to my picture. And then, while I was always moving through my passage, she lived out her normal life, the hectic life that those people who live outside, that curious and absurd life in which there are dances and parties and joy and frivolity. And sometimes it happened that when I passed in front of one of my windows she was waiting for me mute and anxious (why waiting for me? And why was she eager and anxious?); but sometimes it happened that she did not arrive in time or she forgot about this poor boxed being, and then I, with my face pressed against the glass wall, saw her in the distance smiling or dancing nonchalantly or, what was worse, not I saw it at all and imagined it in inaccessible or clumsy places. And then I felt that my destiny was infinitely more solitary than what I had imagined (130).
It is clear that the tunnel is the image with which Castel expresses the loneliness in which his existence takes place. We see in this fragment that throughout his reflection the specific form with which that image describes his sensations is varying. In particular, these are three variations that summarize the internal process that Castel has had since he met María.
Start by seeing two parallel tunnels, his and María's, which end up crossing each other. That encounter of tunnels attributes to the scene of the picture; indeed, as we saw earlier, it is in her where the souls of Castel and María congregate in apparent fullness.
But Castel then thinks that this is an illusion of him, that in reality that encounter never existed, that both tunnels are still parallel, that all he gets is to see Maria as if through a glass wall and that he can not even see her from continuous, but at intervals. In this second variation of the image of the tunnels we see that their fears appear, their doubts about María. Who is Mary in those moments when he stops being able to see her? He assumes another; then two Marías coexist in this second variant: the Mary who throws the scene of the small window, which completes him as if she were his twin soul, and that which he supposes because he can not see; but he supposes her frivolous and even laughing at him, mocking his naivety.
Finally, in the last image, María no longer has a tunnel, there is no tunnel other than his; María is part of the external world, of that world that he detests. Here we see that the first María dies, the one that emerged from the painting scene, and only the mundane remains: a frivolous woman who had managed to glimpse that existential loneliness of Castel, but who does not share that reality with him, but rather it is only a spectator who sometimes waits quietly, without ceasing to be the "world without limits of those who do not live in tunnels"; a woman with a normal, frivolous life, who remains mostly alien to him, to his circumstance, and, to such an extent unconcerned about his luck and suffering, that she laughs at him behind his back.
Thus, we see that there are no longer any favorable thoughts of María in Castel, he is convinced that she had deceived him, that she had been laughing at him, about his feelings. And saying "You've left me alone," he kills her by stabbing her.
In relation to the meaning of this crime, Sábato himself gives us a clue that pays the analysis we have been doing:
It could be that by killing his lover, Castel makes one last attempt to fix her for eternity. Although I have also been told that it is a last and catastrophic attempt to possess it absolutely; pointing out that he kills her with a knife in the belly, not with a revolver or strangle her (Sábato: 1964, 16).
It can not be read anymore than a complete alienation in Castel. After his murder, he returns immediately to Buenos Aires and goes directly to Allende´s house. He entered with violence and told the blind man that María was Hunter's lover, hims and many others, but that she could no longer deceive anyone. The blind man, realizing that he had killed her, pursued him crying and repeatedly shouting "foolish", but Castel managed to escape and then turned himself in to the police. Allende, on the other hand, would take his life.
Arriving with the reading to the last chapter we notice that Castel is telling us his story from the confinement, in what seems to be an asylum. In this final chapter he confesses that, despite his efforts, he has not yet managed to understand the meaning of the blind Allende spouting the word foolish, as well as his suicide.[10] These are signs that, apparently, Castel does not manage to interpret; he does not manage to incorporate them into his world at the moment to achieve that homosemantism that Foucault told us about. It is that he does not see beyond his own created reality in which a lying and perverse María deserved to be murdered; perhaps he would think that Allende should have been grateful to have freed him from that woman too. But we know that there are other worlds, other meanings, that are not presented to us since as readers we attend only to the truth referred by a narrator who does not recognize concepts other than those he has constructed with reasonings as obsessive as restricted. Castel is locked in a logic of his own, unable to see in external signs anything other than what fits it.
We recognize there the government of madness. We can already foresee that Castel will not find in the word foolish or in Allende's suicide signs that transport him to other possible worlds or, as one might say in Chestertian terms, to a wider world than that perfectly logical sphere that he himself has built. On the contrary, it will end up interpreting them in such a way that they incorporate into their mental construction, that solitary and cynical world, whose borders will then be reinforced.
In the final sentence of the novel: "And the walls of this hell will be, thus, more and more hermetic every day" (137), that hell of which Castel speaks suggests not the physical prison in which he is imprisoned, but that another prison that is its own conscience, of increasingly solid walls thanks to the perfectly logical design in which its bricks are fitted. So Castel's confinement in an asylum reveals itself to us as a metaphor for his own mental confinement. And solitude and incommunicability of a metaphysical nature ended up taking Castel in the unmistakable form of madness.
[10] Already before, Castel, when knowing Allende, had manifested his aversion for the blind. This theme appears as a germ of what would be the famous "Report on the blind" that Sábato wrote in On heroes and tombs. Sabato associates the domain of conscious reason with clarity and its opposite, the irrational, the subconscious, with darkness. From there, and from what we have been analyzing, this dislike of Castel can be interpreted by the blind Allende. The blind man is the one who lives in darkness even when he keeps his eyes open, his visual incapacity translates as inaccessibility to the realm of pure and clear reason; he moves instead in the field of the subconscious, of the irrational, of what escapes any possibility of rationalization. Whereas Castel, as we have seen, is the one who insists on taking everything into the light of his conscience, of incorporating every sign of reality into its logical construction. Thus, perhaps the existence of the blind is for Castel a threat against his world, the proof that there is outside it a reality that not only escapes his logical construction, but all capture of reason.