When I came through The Tunnel
“Our whole life is a series of anonymous cries in a desert of indifferent stars’’ — Ernesto Sabato, The Tunnel
I wonder how we read the books that we do read. How did we make the choice? Who showed us the way to a book? And what does the book really mean to us? Life to me seems like a random splatter of ink — where no one splatter is the same as the other. And yet, they are all the same; we are all the same. We constitute patterns that we are too close to; we are oblivious, yet purposeful. I cannot otherwise explain why a book written decades before my birth, in an alien tongue and culture, should make me feel the unease of having reopened a can of worms.
The Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato is no pleasure read: It is a perversely poetic confession of all things base; of all things (in)human. The obsessive protagonist, Juan Pablo Castel, is an artist who speaks to the reader from his prison cell. He has murdered the only person who he knew understood his work; his mind and soul. Maria Iribarne’s death seems destined from the moment she stands captivated by an image within an image painted by her to-be killer, Castel. Her moments of rapture in front of Castel’s painting, Maternity, signals the beginning of a whirlwind romance that is highly unlike the stereotype. Mired in Castel’s obsessive need to know and possess Maria exclusively, their romance has to strive to survive.
While the reader is made painfully aware of Castel’s obsessions, he or she is left equally unaware of the secrets in Maria’s life that seem to be driving Castel over the edge. As the plot proceeds to reveal Castel compulsively interrogating every word uttered by Maria; as his mind works itself into a frenzy of hypotheses, we remain in the dark along with our protagonist. Neither Castel nor the reader is given any conclusive evidence towards Maria’s guilt or innocence. The writing is powerful enough to diminish the distance between reader and character; the fire of Castel’s suspicions burns within us too; and in the end when he has murdered her, we are reduced to feeling vindicated. As if we were Castel; as if all this insanity was justified; as if Maria deserved it.
And then we are struck by the blow of reality and it becomes clear once again who we are. We are the reader; not the character. We realise that an essential boundary has been erased. The damage is done. It is a disturbingly successful piece of writing that sheds more light on the real us than we might have ever asked for. This is a nocturnal illumination, to use an expression from the book itself. There is nothing sunny, bright and beautiful about what we are shown about ourselves. The book declares its victory in those moments when we feel it is a work of brilliance and yet there is that nagging sense of hard-fed morality that is hinting otherwise. While our collective social conditioning cries foul, we are left confused by our instinctive appreciation of this book that chronicles the basest of human emotions, thoughts and actions.
The book derides everything we are told is good; is desirable. We are brought in contact with ideas and thoughts that we do have, but have learnt to control and reject as ‘bad/ wrong’. It is a book that decimates all the centuries of civilisation. Instead, it transports us instantaneously to that brink of barbaric originality.
