A review by shoba
The Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato

4.0

“…I am Juan Pablo Castro, the painter who killed Maria Iribarne….You may wonder what has motivated me to write this account….I am animated by the faint hope that someone will understand me….There was one person who could have understood me. But she was the very person I killed.”

Earlier during the art exhibition, he noticed she was staring at his painting, at the corner with the window. She was the only one who understood the piece and therefore he believed she must understand him.

“In the upper left-hand corner of the canvas was a remote scene framed in a tiny window: an empty beach and a solitary woman looking at the sea….In my mind that scene suggested the most wistful and absolute loneliness….A young woman I had never seen before stood for a long time before my painting….she stared at the scene of the window, and as she did, I was sure that she was totally isolated from the world….”

He feels he needs to find her. He spots her on an errand, follows her, and introduces himself. The next day he waits in front of the same building and meets her coming out of the subway. He calls her at home to tell her that he always thinks of her. They meet, she acts coy and doesn’t answer his queries. She was cruel, “…all she did was drive me mad with new and more subtle doubts, and that led to new and ever more convoluted questioning.” Often he wants to “seize her arms in an iron grip, twist her backward, and stare into her eyes, trying to force a guarantee that her love was true love.”

He tells her he loves her but believes she doesn’t love him.

“And it was as if the two of us had been living in parallel passageways or tunnels, never knowing that we were moving side by side…finally to meet…before a scene I had painted…a kind of secret sign….” 

He stops working and isolates himself from others. It feels like he was living in a dark and solitary tunnel while she was living a life surrounded by family and friends. He watches from his dark corner at her laughing and dancing as his loneliness grows.