INTRODUCTION
Rodolfo Jorge Walsh (9 Jan 1927 - 25 Mar 1977) was considered to be the founder of investigative journalism in Argentina. He worked at Leoplán, an Argentine literary and journalistic magazine, with Ignacio Covarrubias. He joined the Montoneros guerrilla group in 1973 and was murdered in a shootout with Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada soldiers on March 25, 1977, his body kidnapped and never recovered. His work is very well acclaimed, including "Variations in Red" ("Variaciones en Rojo") (1953), a collection of his short stories; the historical non-fiction novel "Operación Masacre" (1957); and "Who Killed Rosendo?" ("¿Quién Mató a Rosendo?") (1969).
"The Eyes of the Traitor" was published in the May 1953 issue of "Los Cuentos Fantásticos" (#44) and has been republished in a collection of his stories, "'A Tale for Gamblers' and Other Detective Stories" ("Cuento para tahúres y otros relatos policiales") (1996), as well as in the "El terror argentino" anthology (2002) of Argentine horror stories. This translation is based off of the original Los Cuentos Fantásticos publication, which runs slightly longer than the later republication in the "A Tale for Gamblers" anthology. Many thanks to Antonio from Proyecto F for supplying the text.
THE EYES OF THE TRAITOR
On the 16th of February, 1945, Russian troops captured and occupied Budapest. On the 18th, I was arrested. On the 20th, I was released and returned to my duties in the Ophthalmology Department of the Central Hospital. I never knew the reason for my arrest. I also never knew why I was set free.
* * *
Two months later, I had an application in my hands signed by Alajos Endrey, a death row inmate awaiting the execution of his sentence. He offered to donate his eyes to the Institute of Sight Restoration, which I founded at the beginning of the war, and where I performed — although Istvan Vezer and his cabal of upstarts who slandered me and forced me into exile still deny it — eighteen corneal grafts on blind patients. Of these, sixteen were crowned with success. Patient number seventeen stubbornly refused to regain his sight, although the operation was technically perfect. (*)
(*) I think that in this case, psychology was the deciding factor. The patient actually does see, but he doesn't recognize it, because he's afraid to see, because he doesn't want to see, because he isn't used to seeing. There's no other explanation.
Case number eighteen is the subject of this story, which I write in order to pass the hours of my solitary exile, thousands of miles from my native Hungary.
I went to see Endrey. He was in a small, clean cell, where he incessantly paced like a caged beast. There was nothing remarkable about him that would capture the attention of a man of science. He was a small, irritable fellow, with a perpetual expression of harassment in his eyes. There were obvious signs of malnutrition. A quick examination revealed that his cornea was in good condition. I told him that his offer was accepted. I didn't inquire into his motives. I knew them well enough: last-minute sentimentality, perhaps a dark desire to persist, even a small part, incorporated into another man's life. I left through the gray stone corridors, flanked by the indifferent or hostile gazes of the guards.
The execution took place the 20th of September, 1945. I vaguely remember a procession of silent, half-asleep men, a dusty road advancing through some shrubbery, an inconsequential dawn. I improvised an operating table in a zinc-roofed hut fifty paces from the execution site. I thought, idly, that maybe I was the one being executed, that fate was absurd, that death was a trivial custom.
Carefully, I prepared the patient. He was blind since birth, due to a cone-shaped deformation of the cornea, and his name was Josef Pongracz. I stitched threads through the eyelids as to keep them open. During the process, I was surprised by the ghastly discharge.
Two soldiers brought the dead man on a stretcher. A quadruple star of blood decorated his chest. His pupils were dilated in a vague astonishment.
I removed the eye and cut the piece of the cornea intended for the graft. Then I removed the affected area of the patient's cornea and replaced it with the graft (I'll omit the technical details so that my current enemies at the Institute can't claim them).
Ten days later, I removed the bandages. Normally, this is done in gradual stages to avoid making too strong an impression. But this time, Dr. Vendel Groesz from the Institute of Psychiatry was present, who he wanted to observe some the responses, with the patient's consent, of course. Josef stood up and took a couple of hesitant steps. I attentively observed him. His face took on an expression of inexpressible fear. He could see, yet was lost.
He looked around, searching for me among the objects that composed the operating room. When I spoke to him, he recognized me; he wanted to smile. Dr. Groesz ordered him to go over to the window. He hesitated, so I took him by the arm and guided him, as if he were a child. When I put him in front of the window, he closed his eyes, touched the sill, the frame, the glass, over and over again, endlessly. Then he opened his eyes and looked out into the distance.
- "It's getting dark," he said, and began to cry silently.
* * *
Two months later I received a visit from Dr. Groesz. Josef came to see him. He was, he told me, in a disastrous state, in a deep mental depression, aggravated by nightmares and hallucinations: schizophrenia seemed to loom over him.
Two days after the bandages were removed (Dr. Groesz told me) Josef dreamed of a vague panorama, almost devoid of detail: a hill, a road, a gray spectral light. The dream repeated for seven nights in a row. Despite the harmless nature of these representations, Josef always woke up overcome by a dark and unjustifiable terror.
Dr. Groesz consulted his notes.
"-It's if I had been there before, and something terrible was going to happen." These were his very words.
Dr. Groesz confessed that all the usual procedures failed in his case. Whatever Josef's complexes were, they couldn't be related to visual sensations or memories, since he was blind since birth. Since he regained his sight, he was admitted to the Convalescent Institute. He didn't leave the city. He was, therefore, strictly speaking, unaware of what a hill was, or what a dusty mountain road was, unless one could refer to the blind man's imprecise, dimensionless concept as awareness. The panorama that troubled Josef's dreams was not, therefore, a visual memory; nor a recent visual memory modified by peculiar dream symbolism, but an inexplicable, arbitrary product of the subconscious.
- "Dreams," Dr. Groesz said, "however far removed they may seem from experience, are always based on it. Where there's no previous experience, it's not possible to have dreams corresponding to that experience. Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius furit in sensu. This is why blind people don't dream, or at least, their dreams aren't made up of visual representations, but rather, tactile and auditory ones. [Translator's note: Latin, "nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses", a phrase that become widely associated with John Locke, but was previously used throughout the Renaissance, initially as a paraphase of Aristotle, according to Paul Cranefield, possibly as a result of a Renaissance-era translation of Arabic commentary on Aristotle.]
In this case, however, it was a dream of a visual character (whose repetition indicated its importance), prior to any experience of the same order.
Forced to look for an explanation, Dr. Groesz turned to the archetypes or primordial images in Jung - whose theories he rejected as fantastic - a sort of subconscious inheritance that we receive from our ancestors, which can suddenly burst into our dreams, even into our conscious life.
- "I am a man of science," Dr. Groesz unnecessarily explained, "but I can't go without any working hypothesis, however contrary it may be to my experience and my particular way of seeing things. But I had to discard that hypothesis too. You'll soon see why.
"A week later, the bare, stark panorama of the initial dreams began to fill in, like a photograph slowly developing. One night there was a peculiarly shaped stone; the next night, a hut with a zinc roof, sheltered by two gloomy and identical trees; then a sunless dawn; a dog wandering among the trees... Night by night, detail by detail, the picture began to complete itself. In half hour of lengthy disquisition, he was able to describe the exact shape of a tree, the exact shape of some of that tree's branches, and even the shape of some of the leaves. The picture always got perfected. No previous detail disappeared. I've tried him. Every day, I made him repeat the dream from the previous night. It's always the same, exactly, but with one additional detail.
"A week ago, for the first time, he mentioned the five figures to me that appeared in the picture. Five outlines, five dark silhouettes, outlined against the gray dawn. Four of them lined up, facing him; the fifth, off to one side, is in profile. The following night, the five figures were in uniform; the figure on the side held a sword. At first the faces were blurred, almost non-existent; then they became more precise."
Dr. Groesz consulted his notes once more.
— "The figure on the side, holding the sword, is a young, blond officer. The first soldier on the left is short and fat and his uniform is too small for him. The second one reminds him (note carefully: reminds him) of his younger brother; Josef told me, almost crying, that he doesn't have any brothers, he never had any, but this soldier reminds him of his younger brother. The third has a black moustache and a very worn uniform; he avoids looking at him; he has to look off to the side... The fourth is a gigantic man, with a scar running across the left side of his face from his ear to the corner of his mouth like a tortured violet river; a pack of cigarettes is sticking out of his jacket pocket."
Dr. Groesz took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his brow.
- "Yesterday," he said, and from the way he said "yesterday" I knew something terrible was coming, "yesterday Josef saw the whole picture. My God! My God!
"The soldiers were pointing rifles at him, with their fingers on the trigger, ready to fire.
"We immediately admitted him. He refuses to sleep, because he's afraid of dreaming about facing the firing squad, he's afraid of feeling that immediate and unprecedented horror of death. But the picture, which had only appeared in dreams before, now haunts him even when he is awake. He only has to close his eyes, even for a fleeting moment in blinking, to see it: the officer with his sword drawn, the four soldiers lined up in firing position, the four rifles aimed at his heart.
"This morning he pronounced a strange name. I asked him who it was, and he said it was him. He thinks he's someone else. A clear case of schizophrenia."
- "What was that name?" I asked.
- "Alajos Endrey," Dr. Groesz replied.
* * *
Through the recommendation of a high-ranking military officer – whose name, for obvious reasons, I will not mention – I managed to interview the official who directed the Alajos Endrey's execution. He didn't remember me. I, for my part, had barely glanced at him during our previous brief encounter. He agreed, with cold military courtesy, to my preposterous request.
A few minutes later, the four soldiers who formed the firing squad on that gray and near-forgotten September morning were lined up before me. I then saw the picture that the unfortunate Josef had seen through the eyes of the traitor Alajos Endrey:
The first soldier on the left was short and fat, and his uniform was too small for him; in the second I thought I perceived a vague resemblance to Endrey himself; the third had a black mustache and eyes that avoided looking straight ahead; his uniform was very worn. The fourth was a gigantic man, with a scar running down the left side of his face like a tortured, violet river...
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