Ernesto Sábato, the physicist who wrote about blindness and became his country’s witness

There is a photograph of Ernesto Sábato at the Casa Rosada — Argentina’s presidential palace — that tells the story of his life more plainly than any biography could. He is wearing dark glasses and holding a folder that contains approximately fifty thousand pages of testimony from survivors of the military terror that gripped Argentina between 1976 and 1983. He is about to hand this folder to a newly elected president of a country that had spent eight years pretending not to know what was happening inside its own detention centers. Sábato had written three novels about the capacity of human beings to avoid the truth about themselves. Now his country had asked him to document that capacity in historical terms. Nobody who had read those novels should have been surprised by the appointment.

Ernesto Roque Sábato was born on June 24, 1911, in Rojas, a farming town in the Buenos Aires province — the tenth of eleven children of Italian immigrant parents, Francesco Sabato from Fuscaldo in Calabria and Giovanna Ferrari from San Martino di Finita. He grew up at the margin of every center that would later define him. He studied physics at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, earned a doctorate in 1938, and won a fellowship to work in atomic radiation research at the Curie Institute in Paris. His academic record was strong enough that a serious career in science was both possible and expected. He also, during the Buenos Aires years, joined the Communist Youth, rose to become secretary-general of the Federación Juvenil Comunista, and traveled to Moscow in 1934 to attend the International Lenin School.

He returned from Moscow permanently skeptical of any ideology that required the suppression of inconvenient evidence as a condition of its purity. The observation — that closed systems destroy the facts that might challenge them — appears in everything he subsequently wrote. He recognized the same mechanism in Argentine authoritarianism fifty years later. In 1943 he left physics and committed to literature with the same decisiveness he had once brought to science. He never explained the decision as a choice so much as a recognition: one discipline had taught him to measure reality, and the other might teach him what measurement was for.

His first novel, El túnel, published in 1948, is as compressed and relentless as its title suggests. Juan Pablo Castel, a tormented Buenos Aires painter, has murdered a woman named María Iribarne and is writing his account of the act from prison. The confessional form — which draws on Dostoevsky without imitating him — is Sábato’s formal statement about human self-knowledge: Castel can describe exactly what he did and why, with a precision that is both convincing and useless, because precision is not the same as understanding. Albert Camus read the French translation and called it remarkable. Thomas Mann said something similar. The Argentine literary establishment was slower to acknowledge it. What readers on every continent recognized was the novel’s central problem: Castel kills for the right to be understood and, in doing so, demonstrates that he cannot understand anything beyond his own obsession. El túnel runs to about eighty pages. Almost nothing in it is wasted. Its English translation, The Tunnel, appeared in 1988 in a version by Margaret Sayers Peden.

Sobre héroes y tumbas, published in 1961 and translated into English as On Heroes and Tombs, is the work by which Sábato is most widely remembered, and for good reason: it is one of the most ambitious novels written in Spanish in the twentieth century. Its central story follows Martín and Alejandra, two young people in Buenos Aires whose love affair unfolds against the weight of Alejandra’s family history — generations of aristocratic decay and hereditary madness that the novel traces back to the aftermath of civil war. Parallel to this is a historical narrative about General Juan Lavalle’s retreat and death in 1841, woven in to suggest that Argentine history is less a sequence of events than a set of recurring catastrophes that no one learns from. Embedded in the novel’s middle section is the Informe sobre ciegos — Report on the Blind — a paranoid, Kafkaesque monologue in which Alejandra’s father Fernando elaborates an underground conspiracy centered on people who cannot see. The novel ends in fire: Alejandra kills Fernando and burns herself alive in a sealed room. Critics have spent sixty years debating whether the Informe is meant as horror, revelation, or some compound of both. Sábato declined to settle the question. The novel sells steadily in Argentina to this day and remains a standard text in secondary schools across the Spanish-speaking world.

Abaddón el exterminador, published in 1974 and translated as The Angel of Darkness, is the most formally unstable of the three novels — incorporating the author himself as a character, fracturing its narrative into a collage of voices, visions, and documents, and deploying an apocalyptic register that reads, in retrospect, as something close to diagnosis. The military coup that would install Argentina’s most brutal dictatorship came two years later, in 1976. French critics named the novel the best foreign book of 1976. Sábato received the compliment without much visible satisfaction. He had not written it as a warning. He had written it as an honest account of where things stood.

Nunca más

The Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas — CONADEP — was created by President Raúl Alfonsín in December 1983, immediately after the restoration of democracy. Alfonsín asked Sábato to chair it. The commission spent nine months taking testimony, visiting detention sites, and compiling evidence. The resulting report identified approximately nine thousand victims by name and documented three hundred secret detention centers operated by the military between 1976 and 1983. The actual toll was almost certainly far higher; human rights organizations estimated thirty thousand. Nunca más — Never Again — was presented to Alfonsín on September 20, 1984. It immediately became the most-read work of non-fiction in Argentine history. It has never gone out of print.

Sábato’s authorship of the report’s prologue became, over subsequent decades, a source of genuine and serious controversy. The prologue introduced what critics called the teoría de los dos demonios — the theory of two demons — suggesting that political violence had been generated by extremists on both the far left and the far right, and that the state’s response, however monstrous, existed within a context of pre-existing political terror from both sides. Human rights organizations, survivors, and families of the disappeared pushed back sharply. The military had built a systematic, institutionalized apparatus of kidnapping, torture, and extrajudicial murder; the armed left had not operated at anything approaching the same scale or with state sanction. Sábato documented what had happened with unquestionable moral courage; his interpretation of the context in which it happened remains disputed. He was not the first witness to see clearly and theorize imperfectly — but the gap between the document and its prologue is the most consequential thing he wrote, and the most contested.

Nineteen eighty-four was also the year he received the Premio Cervantes, Spain’s highest literary honor. He was only the second Argentine writer to receive it — Jorge Luis Borges had won in 1981. The pairing was not lost on anyone who had followed the decades-long, publicly combative relationship between the two men. They differed on aesthetics, on politics, and on the proper purpose of literature. Borges retreated into formal labyrinths and invented universes; Sábato insisted that literature had no business turning its face away from historical horror. They had argued about each other in print and in person for decades, sometimes with genuine venom, sometimes with the grudging acknowledgment that only intellectual neighbors reserve for each other. That both received the Cervantes, three years apart, on opposite sides of every major literary and political debate of the twentieth century, is one of the more instructive symmetries in Argentine cultural history.

In his final decades Sábato published essays and memoirs — Antes del fin in 1998, La resistencia in 2000, España en los diarios de mi vejez in 2004 — and turned increasingly to painting. He received the Jerusalem Prize in 1989. He was awarded the Legion of Honour by France. His doctors eventually discouraged him from reading and writing, and he honored the prohibition by picking up a brush instead. The theme of blindness that had run through all three of his novels — Fernando’s paranoid underground, the failure of vision in El túnel, the opacity of power in Abaddón — eventually found him in something close to a literal form. He died on April 30, 2011, in Santos Lugares, at ninety-nine years old, having outlasted nearly everyone who had argued with him and most of the systems he had opposed.

What his work continues to argue — across the three novels and the national commission report and the four decades of essays — is the same thing it always did: that the human capacity for darkness is not an aberration but a structure, and that the first duty of literature is not to comfort readers but to ensure they cannot pretend they did not know. In a country that spent years debating how much it knew and when, that argument has not softened with time. El túnel, Sobre héroes y tumbas, and Abaddón el exterminador remain in print in dozens of languages. Nunca más has never gone out of print in Argentina. Between the three novels and the report, Ernesto Sábato left behind more than most writers produce in a lifetime of trying.

Tags: writers, Abaddón el exterminador, Argentine literature, El túnel, Ernesto Sábato, Nunca más

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