On Heroes and Tombs

Sábato frames the entire novel around Alejandra Vidal Olmos, the last daughter of a once-grand, now decaying aristocratic family whose ancestral home, the Mirador, still stands as a monument to a national mythology, heroism, sacrifice, old Argentine nobility, that has curdled into paralysis and rot by the twentieth century. Martín del Castillo, the working-class young man who falls for Alejandra, functions as the novel's outside observer, drawn deeper into the Vidal Olmos family's decay without ever fully understanding what he's looking at, which lets Sábato use him as the reader's own limited vantage point on a family history far darker than Martín, or most readers, can initially imagine.

"Report on the Blind," the paranoid, hallucinatory section narrated by Alejandra's father Fernando, breaks from the rest of the novel's relatively conventional realism to detail his investigation into a secret sect of blind people he believes secretly controls the world's hidden machinery of evil, and whether Fernando's account is delusion, genuine occult conspiracy, or some psychologically coherent third thing is a question Sábato refuses to settle. What the section makes undeniable is the household Alejandra actually grew up in, one organized entirely around her father's escalating paranoia and, the novel eventually confirms, his incestuous claim on his own daughter.

The historical Alejandra, a nineteenth century ancestor whose story runs parallel to the contemporary plot through Argentina's civil wars between Unitarians and Federalists, gives Sábato his title's other half, the heroes and tombs of a national mythology the present-day Vidal Olmos family can only inherit as rot rather than glory. Buenos Aires itself, sketched across the novel in exacting, disenchanted detail, becomes the site where that inherited grandeur and its contemporary decay sit directly on top of each other.

Sábato based the novel's opening frame, and its ending, on an actual 1953 case in Buenos Aires in which a young woman was found to have killed her father and set fire to the room they died in together, a crime that shocked the city precisely because no public account of the family's private life could explain it. Sábato's decision to build four hundred pages of psychological, historical, and philosophical scaffolding underneath that single unexplained newspaper item reframes tabloid violence as the visible tip of exactly the kind of buried, generational corruption most crime reporting has no vocabulary for.