Synopsis: “Hell so feared” (El infierno tan temido) is one of Juan Carlos Onetti’s most acclaimed short stories. Published in 1957 in the magazine Ficción and later collected in the book El infierno tan temido y otros cuentos (1962), it tells the story of the turbulent relationship between Risso, a widowed journalist, and Gracia César, a young actress twenty years his junior. The bond, marked by passion and misunderstanding, soon begins to show cracks. One night, in the newsroom where he works, Risso receives an envelope containing a disturbing photograph. This first discovery marks the beginning of a perverse ritual that will become a relentless mechanism of revenge and humiliation.
Hell so feared
Juan Carlos Onetti
(Full story)
The first letter, the first photograph, reached the newspaper between midnight and close. He was pounding on the machine, a little hungry, a little sick from coffee and tobacco, surrendered with familiar happiness to the march of the phrase and the docile appearance of the words. He was writing “it should be noted that the commissars saw nothing suspicious and not even unusual in the consecrating victory of Play Boy, who knew how to take advantage of the winter court, dominate as an arrow in the decisive instance”, when he saw the hand Ink-stained red of Partidarias between her face and the machine offering her the envelope.
—This one’s for you. They always glimpse the correspondence. Not a damn citation of the clubs, then they come to cry, when the elections approach no space seems enough. And it’s already midnight and tell me what you want me to fill the column with.
The envelope said his name, Careers Section, El Liberal. The only odd thing was the pair of green stamps and the Bahia stamp. He finished the article when they came up from the workshop to claim it. He was weak and happy, almost alone in the excessive space of the writing, thinking about the last sentence: «We affirm it again, with the objectivity that for years we have put in all our assertions. We owe ourselves to the amateur public. The black man in the background was rummaging through envelopes from the archive and the mature Socialist woman was slowly removing her gloves in her glass cabinet, when Risso carelessly opened the envelope.
He had a picture, postcard size; it was a brown photo, dim in light, in which hatred and squalor grew in the dark margins, forming thick indecisive stripes, like relief, like beads of sweat surrounding an anguished face. He saw by surprise, he did not finish understanding, he knew that he was going to offer anything to forget what he had seen.
He put the photograph in his pocket and put on his overcoat while Social left his glass booth smoking with a fan of papers in hand.
“Hello,” she said, “see me, at this time, the sarao has just ended.
Risso was watching her from above. The light, dyed hair, the wrinkles on his neck, the double chin that fell round and pointed like a small belly, the tiny, excessive joys that adorned his clothes. «She is a woman, she too. Now I look at the red handkerchief at her throat, the violet nails on her old fingers, dirty with tobacco, the rings and bracelets, the dress that a couturier and not a lover gave her in return, the endless perhaps crooked heels, the curve sad to the mouth, the almost frantic enthusiasm that it imposes on smiles. Everything will be easier if I convince myself that she too is a woman. »
—Looks like something done for pleasure, planned. When I arrive you leave, as if you were always shooting at me. It’s polo cold outside. They leave me the material as promised, but not even a name, an epigraph. Guess, get it wrong, post some fantastic nonsense. I do not know any other names than the contracting parties and thank God. Plenty and bad taste, that’s what there was. They entertained their friends with a brilliant reception at the home of the bride’s parents. Nobody well gets married on Saturday. Get ready, a polo cold is coming from the rambla.
When Risso married Gracia César, we all joined in silence, the pessimistic predictions suppressed. At that time, she was watching the inhabitants of Santa María from the billboards of El Sótano, Cooperativa Teatral, from the walls made dilapidated by the end of autumn. Intact at times, with pencil mustaches or torn by rancorous nails, by the first rains others, she turned her head half to look at the street, alert, a little defiant, a little excited by the hope of convincing and being understood. Betrayed by the shine on the tear ducts that the Orloff Studios photographic enlargement had imposed, there was also in his face the farce of love for the whole of life, covering the determined and exclusive search for happiness.
Which was fine, he must have thought, desirable and necessary, coinciding with the result of multiplying Risso’s months of widowhood by the sum of countless identical Saturday mornings when he had been repeating polite attitudes rightly. waiting and familiarity in the brothel on the coast. A glint, that of the eyes on the poster, was linked to the frustrated dexterity with which he re-knotted the always brand new and sad mourning tie in front of the mobile oval mirror in the brothel bedroom.
They were married, and Risso believed that it was enough to continue living as always, but dedicating to her, without thinking, without thinking about her, the fury of his body, the maddened need for absolutes that possessed him during the long nights.
She imagined in Risso a bridge, a way out, a beginning. She had gone through two courtships as a virgin – a director, an actor – perhaps because for her the theater was a profession as well as a game and she thought that love should be born and kept apart, uncontaminated by what is done to earn money and oblivion. With both, she was condemned to feel the fatigue of rehearsals, the effort of adaptation, the vigilance of her voice and her hands at appointments in the squares, the boulevard or the café. He sensed his own face always a second before any expression, as if he could look at it or touch it. She acted spirited and incredulous, she was hopelessly measuring her farce and that of the other, the sweat and dust from the theater that covered them, inseparable, signs of age.
When the second photograph arrived, from Asunción and with a visibly different man, Risso feared, above all, that he would not be able to bear an unknown feeling that was neither hate nor pain, that he would die with him without name, which was related to injustice and fatality, to the first fear of the first man on earth, to nihilism and the principle of faith.
The second photograph was given to him by the police, on a Wednesday night. Thursdays were the days when he could dispose of his daughter from ten in the morning until ten at night. He decided to tear the envelope without opening it, put it away and only on Thursday morning, while his daughter was waiting for him in the pension room, did he allow himself a quick glance at the cardboard, before tearing it on the waterclós: here too the man was from behind.
But I had looked at the photo of Brazil many times. He kept it for a whole day and at dawn he was imagining a joke, a mistake, a temporary absurdity. It had already happened to him, he had woken many times from a nightmare, smiling servilely and grateful to the flowers on the bedroom walls.
He was lying on the bed when he extracted the envelope from the sack and the photo from the envelope.
“Well,” he said aloud, “it’s okay, it’s true, and it is. It is not important, even if I did not see it, I would know what happens.
(Taking the photo with the self-timer, developing it in the darkened room, under the red, encouraging glow of the lamp, she probably anticipated this reaction from Risso, this challenge, this refusal to free herself in the She had also foreseen, or only barely wished, with little, ill-known hopes, that he would unearth a message of love out of blatant offense, astonishing unworthiness.)
He protected himself again before looking: «I’m alone and I’m dying of cold in a boarding house on Piedras Street, in Santa María, at any dawn, alone and sorry for my loneliness as if I had sought it, proud as if I would have deserved it.”
In the photograph, the headless woman was ostentatiously digging her heels on the edge of the couch, awaiting the impatience of the dark man, magnified by the inevitable close-up, she would be sure that it was not necessary to show her face to be recognized. On the back, its calm handwriting read “Memories of Bahia.”
On the night corresponding to the second photograph, he thought he could understand the totality of the infamy and still accept it. But he knew that deliberation, persistence, the organized frenzy with which revenge was carried out were beyond his reach. He measured his disproportion, he felt unworthy of so much hatred, so much love, so much will to make people suffer.
When Gracia met Risso she was able to assume many current and future things. He guessed his loneliness by looking at his chin and a button on his vest; He guessed he was bitter and not beaten, and that he needed revenge and didn’t want to know. For many Sundays she looked at him in the square, before the performance, with careful calculation, his sullen and passionate face, the sticky hat left on his head, the great indolent body that he was beginning to let grow fat. She thought of love the first time they were alone, or of desire, or desire to soften the sadness on the man’s cheekbone and cheek with her hand. He also thought of the city, in which the only possible wisdom was to resign in time. He was twenty and Risso was forty. She began to believe in him, discovered intensities of curiosity, told herself that one truly lives only when every day surprises him.
During the first weeks he locked himself in to laugh alone, he imposed fetishistic adorations, he learned to distinguish moods by smells. He oriented himself to discover what was behind the voice, the silences, the tastes and the attitudes of the man’s body. He loved Risso’s daughter and modified her face, exalting her resemblances to the father. She did not leave the theater because the Municipality had just subsidized it and now she had a secure salary in El Sótano, a world separated from her home, her bedroom, the frantic and indestructible man. He wasn’t looking to get away from lust; he wanted to rest and forget her, allow the lust to rest and forget. She made plans and fulfilled them, she was sure of the infinity of the universe of love, sure that each night would offer them a different and newly created wonder.
“Everything,” Risso insisted, “absolutely anything can happen to us and we will always be happy and loving each other. All; Either God invents or we invent.
In reality, he had never had a woman before and believed he was fabricating what they were now imposing on him. But it was not she who imposed it, Gracia César, Risso’s workmanship, segregated from him to complete it, like air to the lung, like winter to wheat.
The third photo took three weeks. It also came from Paraguay and it did not come to the newspaper, but to the pension, and the maid brought it to him at the end of an afternoon when he woke up from a dream in which he had been advised to defend himself from fear and insanity while preserving all future photographs in the wallet and make it anecdotal, impersonal, harmless, through a hundred distracted glances a day.
The maid knocked on the door and he saw the envelope hanging from the slats of the blind, he began to perceive how it distilled in the gloom, in the dirty air, its noxious condition, its vibrating threat. She was looking at him from the bed like an insect, like a poisonous animal crushing itself while waiting for carelessness, for the right mistake.
In the third photograph she was alone, pushing the shadows of a poorly lit room with her whiteness, her head thrown painfully back towards the camera, her shoulders half covered by loose, robust and quadruped black hair. So unmistakable now as if he had had himself photographed in any studio and posed with the most tender, meaningful and oblique of his smiles.
I only had now, Risso, an irremediable pity for her, for him, for all the lovers they had loved in the world, for the truth and error of their beliefs, for the simple absurdity of love and for the complex absurdity of love created by men.
But he also tore this photograph and knew that it would be impossible for him to look at another and continue living. But in the magical plane in which they had begun to understand each other and to dialogue, Gracia was forced to find out that he was going to tear up the photos as soon as they arrived, each time with less curiosity, with less remorse.
On the magical plane, all the rude or timid urgent men were nothing more than obstacles, inescapable postponements of the ritual act of choosing in the street, in the restaurant or in the cafe the most credulous or inexperienced, to whom they could lend themselves without suspicion and with a comical pride to the exposure in front of the camera and the shutter, at least unpleasant among those who might believe that memorized business traveler’s argument.
—I’ve never had a man like that, so unique, so different. And I never know, stuck in this life of the theater, where I will be tomorrow and if I will see you again. I want to at least look at you in a photograph when we are away and I miss you.
And after the almost always easy conviction, thinking about Risso or stopping thinking for tomorrow, fulfilling the duty that had been imposed, he arranged the lights, prepared the camera and turned on the man. If she thought of Risso, she would recall an old event, she would reproach him again for not having hit her, for having pushed her away forever with a faded insult, a clever smile, a comment that mixed her with all the other women. And without understanding; demonstrating despite nights and phrases that he had never understood.
Without excess of hope, sweaty bustled through the always sordid and hot hotel room, measuring distances and lights, correcting the position of the man’s stiff body. Forcing, with any resource, decoy, crapulous lie, to be directed towards her by the cynical and distrustful face of the man on duty. He tried to smile and tempt, he imitated the affectionate clicks that are made to newborns, calculating the passage of seconds, calculating at the same time the intensity with which the photo would allude to his love with Risso.
But since he could never know this, since he was even unaware if the photographs reached Risso’s hands or not, he began to intensify the evidences of the photos and turned them into documents that had very little to do with them, Risso and Gracia.
He went so far as to allow and order the faces thinned by desire, stupid by the old male dream of possession, to face the camera hole with a hard smile, with an embarrassed insolence. He considered it necessary to let himself slide on his back and introduce himself into the photograph, to make his head, his short nose, his large undaunted eyes descend from the nothing beyond the photo to integrate the dirt of the world, the clumsy, erroneous photographic vision, the satires of love that he had sworn to send regularly to Santa Maria. But his real mistake was changing the envelope addresses.
The first separation, six months after the wedding, was welcome and exaggeratedly distressing. The Sótano —now Municipal Theater of Santa María— went up to El Rosario. She reiterated there the same old mind-boggling game of being an actress among actors, of believing in what was happening on stage. The public was enthusiastic, applauded or did not allow themselves to be carried away. Programs and reviews were printed from time to time; and people accepted the game and prolonged it until the end of the night, talking about what they had seen and heard, and paid to see and hear, conversing with a certain desperation, with a certain spurred enthusiasm, of performances, sets, speeches and plots.
So the game, the remedy, alternately melancholic and intoxicating, that she began by slowly approaching the window that fell on the fjord; shuddering and muttering to the entire room: “Maybe… but I also lead a life of memories that remain strange to others,” was also accepted in El Rosario. Cards always fell in response to the one she threw, the game was formalized and it was impossible to get distracted and look at it from the outside.
The first separation lasted exactly fifty-two days and Risso tried to copy into them the life he had led with Gracia César during the six months of their marriage. Going at the same time to the same cafe, the same restaurant, seeing the same friends, repeating silences and loneliness on the boulevard, walking back to the boarding house suffering stubbornly from anticipations of the meeting, removing excessive images on the forehead and in the mouth that were born of perfected memories or unrealizable ambitions.
It was ten or twelve blocks, now alone and slower, through nights disturbed by warm and icy winds, on the restless edge that separated spring from winter. They served him to measure his need and helplessness, to know that the madness they shared had at least the greatness of lacking a future, of not being a means to nothing.
As for her, she had believed that Risso gave a motto to common love when he whispered, stretched out, with fresh amazement, overwhelmed:
—Anything can happen and we will always be happy and loving each other.
The phrase was no longer a judgment, an opinion, it did not express a wish. It was dictated or imposed on them, it was a check, an old truth. Nothing they did or thought could weaken madness, dead-end love, or disruption. All human possibilities could be used and everything was condemned to serve as food.
He believed that outside of them, outside the room, there was a wall devoid of meaning, inhabited by beings that did not matter, populated by worthless facts.
So she only thought of Risso, of them, when the man began to wait for her at the theater door, when he invited her and led her, when she herself took off her clothes.
It was the last week in El Rosario and she considered it useless to talk about it in the letters to Risso; because the event was not separate from them and at the same time it had nothing to do with them; because she had acted like a curious and lucid animal, with a certain pity for the man, with a certain disdain for the poverty of what he was adding to her love for Risso. And when he returned to Santa María, he preferred to wait until a Thursday night – because on Thursdays Risso did not go to the newspaper – until a night without time, until an early morning identical to the twenty-five they had lived.
He began to tell it before undressing, with the pride and tenderness of having simply invented a new caress. Leaning against the table in his shirtsleeves, he closed his eyes and smiled. Then he made her undress and asked her to repeat the story, now standing, moving barefoot on the carpet and almost without moving, from the front and in profile, turning her back to her and balancing her body while supporting it on one leg and the other. Sometimes she saw Risso’s long and sweaty face, his heavy body leaning on the table, protecting the glass of wine with her shoulders, and sometimes she just imagined them, distracted by the desire for fidelity in the story, by the joy of reliving that peculiar intensity of love that he had felt for Risso in El Rosario, with a man with a forgotten face, with no one, with Risso.
—Well; Now you’re dressing again, ”he said, in the same astonished, hoarse voice that had repeated that anything was possible, that everything would be for them.
She examined his smile and put her clothes back on. For a while they were both looking at the pictures on the tablecloth, the stains, the ashtray with the broken-billed bird. After he finished dressing and left, he dedicated his Thursday, his day off, to talking with Dr. Guiñazú, convincing him of the urgency of divorce, making fun of the reconciliation interviews in advance.
There was then a long and unhealthy time when Risso wanted to have her again and simultaneously hated the grief and disgust of every imaginable reunion. He decided later that he needed Gracia and now a little more than before. That reconciliation was necessary and that he was willing to pay any price as long as his will did not intervene, as long as it was possible to have her again at night without saying yes or even with his silence.
He rededicated Thursdays to go for a walk with his daughter and to listen to the list of fulfilled predictions that his grandmother repeated after dinner. He had cautious and vague news from Gracia, he began to imagine her as an unknown woman, whose gestures and reactions had to be guessed or deduced; like a woman preserved and lonely among people and places, who was predestined for him and whom he would have to love, perhaps from the first meeting.
Almost a month after the beginning of the separation, Gracia distributed contradictory addresses and left Santa María.
“Don’t worry,” Guiñazú said. I know women well and something like that was waiting. This confirms the abandonment of the home and simplifies the action that cannot be harmed by an evident delaying maneuver that is showing the unreason of the defendant.
It was a humid beginning of spring, and many nights Risso would walk back from the newspaper, from the coffee, giving names to the rain, stoking his suffering as if blowing an ember, pushing it away to see it better and more incredible, imagining acts of love never lived to be quickly remembered with desperate greed.
Risso had destroyed, without looking, the last three messages. He felt now, and forever, in the newspaper and in the boarding house, like a vermin in its burrow, like a beast that hears the hunters’ shots bouncing off the door of his cave. He could only save himself from death and the idea of death by forcing himself into stillness and ignorance. Curled up, he waved his whiskers and his snout, his paws; he could only wait for the exhaustion of other people’s fury. Without allowing himself words or thoughts, he was forced to begin to understand; to confuse Grace who was looking for and choosing men and attitudes for the photos, with the girl she had planned, many months ago, dresses, conversations, makeup, caresses her daughter to conquer a widower applied to grief, this man who he earned a meager salary and could only offer women an astonished, loyal, incomprehension.
He had begun to believe that the girl who had written him long and exaggerated letters in the brief summer separations of their courtship was the same one who had sought his despair and annihilation by sending him the photographs. And he came to think that, always, the lover who has managed to breathe in the stubbornness without consolation of the bed the dark smell of death, is condemned to pursue — for him and for her — destruction, the definitive peace of nothingness.
I was thinking of the girl who walked arm in arm with two friends in the afternoons of the boulevard, dressed in the wide and inlaid dresses of hardened fabric that memory invented and imposed, and who was going through the opening of the Barber that crowned the band’s Sunday concert to look at it for a second. He was thinking of that flash of lightning in which she turned her angry expression of offer and defiance, in which she showed him the almost manly beauty of a pensive and capable face, in which she chose him, stupid by widowhood. And, little by little, he was admitting that this was the same naked woman, a little thicker, with a certain air of aplomb and having settled down, who sent him photographs from Lima, Santiago, Buenos Aires.
Why not, he came to think, why not accept that the photographs, their laborious preparation, their punctual delivery, originated in the same love, in the same capacity for nostalgia, in the same congenital loyalty.
The next photograph came from Montevideo; neither to the newspaper nor to the pension. And he did not get to see her. He was leaving El Liberal one night when he heard the limping of old Lanza chasing him on the steps, the shuddering cough behind him, the innocent and tricky sentence of the prologue. They went to eat at the Baviera; And Risso could have sworn afterwards to have been knowing that the careless, bearded, sick man, who put in and took out a moistened cigarette from his sunken mouth at the table, did not want to look into his eyes, who recited obvious comments about the news that UP had sent to the newspaper during the day, it was impregnated with Grace, or the frantic absurd aroma that love exudes.
“Man to man,” Lanza said resignedly. Or as an old man who has no more happiness in life than the debatable of continuing to live. From an old man to you; and I don’t know, because you never know, who you are. I know of some facts and have heard comments. But I no longer have an interest in wasting time believing or doubting. It does not matter. Every morning I verify that I am still alive, without bitterness and without giving thanks. I drag a sick leg and arteriosclerosis through Santa María and through the writing; I remember Spain, I correct the evidence, I write and sometimes I talk too much. Like tonight. I received a dirty photograph and it is not possible to doubt who sent it. Nor can I guess why they chose me. On the back it says: “To be donated to the Risso collection”, or something similar. It arrived on Saturday and I spent two days wondering whether to give it to him or not. I came to believe that the best thing was to tell her because sending that to me is madness without extenuating circumstances and it may be good for you to know that she is crazy. Now you are aware; I only ask your permission to tear up the photograph without showing it to you.
Risso said yes, and that night, looking until morning at the light of the street lamp on the ceiling of the room, he realized that the second misfortune, revenge, was essentially less serious than the first, betrayal, but also much less bearable. His long body felt exposed like a nerve to the pain of the air, without protection, without being able to invent relief.
The fourth photograph not directed at him was thrown on the table by his daughter’s grandmother, the following Thursday. The girl had gone to sleep and the photo was back in the envelope. It fell between the siphon and the carafe, long, pierced and tinted by the reflection of a bottle, displaying enthusiastic letters in blue ink.
“You’ll understand that after this…” Grandma stammered. She stirred the coffee and looked at Risso’s face, searching his profile for the secret of universal filth, the cause of her daughter’s death, the explanation of so many things she had suspected without the courage to believe. You’ll understand, ”he repeated furiously, his voice comical and aged.
But he didn’t know what needed to be understood, and Risso didn’t understand even if he tried, looking at the envelope that was left facing him, at an angle leaning on the edge of the plate.
Outside the night was heavy and the open windows of the city mixed with the milky mystery of the sky the mysteries of the lives of men, their cares and their customs. Rolled over on his bed, Risso believed that he was beginning to understand, that like a disease, like a well-being, understanding occurred in him, freed from will and intelligence. It happened, simply, from the contact of his feet with his shoes to the tears that reached his cheeks and neck. The understanding happened in him, and he was not interested in knowing what it was that he understood, while he remembered or was seeing his crying and his stillness, the elongated passivity of the body in the bed, the sagging of the clouds in the window, old scenes and future. He saw death and friendship with death, the arrogant disregard for the rules that all men had consented to abide by, the true wonder of freedom. He tore the photograph to pieces on his chest, without taking his eyes off the whiteness of the window, slow and dexterous, afraid of making noise or interrupting. Then he felt the movement of a new air, perhaps breathed in childhood, that filled the room and spread with inexperienced laziness through the streets and unsuspecting buildings, waiting for him and giving him protection tomorrow and in the following days.
He was getting to know until dawn, like cities that had seemed unattainable, selflessness, happiness without cause, acceptance of loneliness. And when he woke up at noon, when he loosened his tie and belt and wristwatch, as he walked to the putrid stormy smell of the window, a fatherly affection for men and for what men had done invaded him for the first time and built. He had resolved to find out Gracia’s address, call her, or go live with her.
That night in the newspaper he was a slow and happy man, he acted with the clumsiness of a newborn, he fulfilled his quota of pages with the distractions and mistakes that it is common to forgive a stranger. The great news was the impossibility for Ribereña to run in San Isidro, because we are able to report that the credit of stud El Gorrión woke up today manifesting ailments in one of the front oars, showing inflammation of the rope, which says clearly the entity of evil that afflicts him.
– Remembering that he did Horse Riding, “Lanza said,” one tries to explain that confusion by comparing it to that of the man who risked his salary to a piece of information that they gave and confirmed to the caretaker, the jockey, the owner and the horse itself. Because although he had, as will be known, the most excellent reasons for suffering and simply swallowing all the sleeping pills stamps from all the Santa María apothecaries, what he was showing me half an hour before doing so was nothing other than reasoning and the attitude of a scammed man. A man who had been safe and secure and is no longer safe, and cannot explain how it could be, what miscalculation caused the collapse. Because at no time did she call the mare that was distributing the foul photographs all over the city a mare, and she did not even agree to walk on the bridge that I was extending to her, hinting, without believing it, the possibility that the mare (in leathers and raised as preferred to divulge, or pampering on stage the ovarian problems of other mares made famous by the universal theater), the possibility that she was crazy to tie. Any. He had been wrong, and not by marrying her but at another moment that he did not want to name. It was his fault and our interview was unbelievable and gruesome. Because he had already told me that he was going to kill himself and he had already convinced me that it was useless and also grotesque and again useless to argue to save him. And he spoke coldly to me, not accepting my pleas for him to get drunk. He had been wrong, he insisted; him and not the damn creep who sent the photograph to the little girl, to the College of Sisters. Perhaps thinking that Sister Superior would open the envelope, perhaps hoping that the envelope would reach the hands of Risso’s daughter intact, sure this time of hitting what Risso had truly vulnerable.
THE END
1957
