Censorship
Sábato por Ermenegildo Sabat (2004)
has muerto
Ernesto Sábato (él no escriba the tilde de su apellido Italian) two months of turning 100 years. Apart from his brief but important literary work, can not fail to mention his role as head of the National Commission on Disappeared People (CONADEP). The commission was charged with investigating human rights violations that occurred in Argentina between 1976 and 1983 at the hands of the Process of National Reorganization. This investigation and subsequent report were reflected in the overwhelming
book Never Again , known worldwide as
Sabato Report, which sets out the evidence of the disappearances and deaths of people during the military dictatorship.
Sabato said goodbye to the initial fragment impressive "Report blind, third of his great novel
On Heroes and Tombs (1961):
Oh, gods of the night!
Oh, god of darkness, incest and crime,
of melancholia and suicide!
Oh, gods of rats and caverns
of bats, cockroaches!
Oh, violent , inscrutable gods
sleep and death!
When did
this will now end my murder? This ferocious clarity that I have now is like a beacon and I can take an intense beam to vast regions of my memory: I see faces, rats in a barn, streets of Buenos Aires and Algiers, prostitutes and sailors move the beam and see distant things : A source in the room, a sultry nap, birds and eyes with a nail spike. Perhaps there, but who knows, may be much further back, now I remember times in remotest periods of my early childhood. I do not know. Who cares, anyway?
I remember, however, the beginning of my systematic research (the other, the unconscious, perhaps the deeper, how I can know?). It was a summer day in 1947, passing by the Plaza de Mayo, San Martín on the street, in the village of the Municipality. I had been absorbed, when suddenly I heard a bell, a bell as someone who wanted to wake up from a dream millennium. I walked, hearing the bell, trying to penetrate the deeper layers of my consciousness: the heard but not listened. Until suddenly the sound subtle but pervasive and obsessive seemed to touch a sensitive area of \u200b\u200bmy self, some of those places where the skin of the self is fine and tenderness, and awoke with a start, as with a sudden danger and evil, in the dark as if my hands had touched the cold skin of a reptile. Before me, mysterious and hard, watching with all his face, saw the blind where she sells trinkets. Had ceased to play his bell, as if he had just moved for me to wake me from my foolish dream, to realize that my previous life had ended as a stupid preparatory stage, and now must face reality. Motionless, his face directed abstract to me, and I halted as a hellish appearance but frigid, we were there for those moments that are not part of the time but give access to eternity. And then when my conscience again to enter the stream of time, I ran away.
Thus began the final stage of my life.
realized from that day can not possibly spend a moment more and should start right now exploring this dark world.
took several months, until one day that fall was the second decisive encounter. I was in full investigation, but my work was delayed by an inexplicable apathy, I now think was probably a false form of fear of the unknown.
watched and studied the blind, however.
I was always worried and I had repeated discussions about their origin, status, mode of live and zoological status. Just beginning at that time to outline my hypothesis of the skin cold and had been insulted by letter and by word of mouth by members of the companies linked to the world of the blind. And with such efficiency, speed and information are always mysterious lodges and secret sects and cults that these lodges are invisibly spread among men and, without your knowing it or even come to suspect, watch us constantly, we pursue decide our fate, our failure and even our death. High degree thing about the cult of the blind, which, to the great misfortune of having their service unnoticed normal men and women: partly deceived by the organization, partly because of a corny propaganda and demagoguery, and finally, to a large extent by fear of punishment and metaphysical that whispers are those who dare to delve into its secrets. Punishments, incidentally, had at that time seemed to have already received complete and the conviction that continue to receive, in an increasingly frightening and subtle, something which, no doubt because of my pride, had no another result that accentuate my indignation and my purpose to take my research to the last stages.
Soledad Gallego Díaz, from Buenos Aires to
The Country .
Self-portrait of Ernesto Sabato