When Ernesto Sabato passed away on April 30 at the age of 99, he repeated the words of Maria Zambrano to himself: To die, this elusive action which is carried out by obeying, happens beyond reality, in another realm . In his house in Santos Lugarès (“Holy Places” near Buenos Aires), Ernesto Sabato obeys this last injunction. He has been preparing for it for a long time. In Resistance , his moving literary testament published in 2002, he wrote: I forgot large parts of my life, but, on the other hand, certain encounters, moments of danger and the names of those who pulled me out of depressions and bitterness still throbs in my hands. And yours too, you who believe in me, who have read my books and are going to help me die.

Darkness covered the abyss . Ernesto Sabato was there. Between darkness and abyss. In a kind of tunnel. In a permanent genesis. All his novels attest to this. Few writers knew human nature as well as he did. Few writers have so pierced the mystery of the human condition. How did Ernesto Sabato know the nature of man so well? Where did he get this keenness to identify the twists and turns in which Man spends most of his existence struggling?

Ernesto Sabato is the understanding of man through Evil. This is how obscurity extends over all his work. Not by aestheticism, not by will, not by Manichaeism. Ernesto Sabato's characters seek the light, seek to fill their gaps, they seek to breathe the peaks. Unfortunately, Ernesto Sabato's characters can't do anything on their own and the darkness envelops them for this reason, because they search alone, because they are atoms, because they have often lost their person status. Their sense of wonder. But the marvelous cannot be learned. And when it's lost, there's no way to find it. Ernest Sabato had given up educating his time, but not scrutinizing it. In 1985, he began working on the disappeared in Argentina during the dictatorship. He collects testimonies, thousands of testimonies, thousands of cries and cries, they spend weeks and months listening to the tortured people before his eyes. Who, apart from Sabato, could have endured the Evil recounted by the menu, dissected and edified, pulverizing all knowledge and all civilization, Evil inscribed in the skin of one of the most civilized countries, the glory of South America , Argentina? None other than Sabato. Not that he lived it well, not that all these testimonies of rapes, murders, tortures, crimes, obscenities didn't haunt him until the end of his days. Ernesto Sabato was not a superman. He was even convinced that the superman did not belong to man. He was no more able to bear good and bad than you and me. It's just that Ernesto Sabato knew that human nature was contained there. Of course you and I also have the notion. We are aware of the situation. But for Ernesto Sabato it was different. He was not strolling among the corpses. He lived there. He was one with this dark side of life, and his heroes with him.

Evil, but also Grace. Ernesto Sabato lived in Evil. He sat in Evil. He had overcome his fear. He was using his fear. In this, Sabato agrees with Bernanos. He is not afraid of fear. Finally, yes, he is afraid of fear but he also draws his strength from it. In a sense, you see, Fear is still the daughter of God, redeemed on Good Friday night. She is not pretty to look at — no! — sometimes mocked, sometimes cursed, renounced by all. And yet, make no mistake about it: she is at the bedside of every agony, she intercedes for man ( in Dialogue des Carmélites). These words from Bernanos could be from Sabato. It is also this quality that gives Sabato's characters and writings this humanity. It is impossible to read the Argentine author raving about this humanity that is carried by all his characters, good or bad, all without exception. After all the horrors of which Sabato was the scribe he could have thrown away the book of Man. He could have judged, labelled, reduced, the name of the Man no longer expecting anything from him. But no. It is exactly the opposite. He took him in his arms and wanted to understand him again and again.

So of course, if we talk about human nature, it's not very scientific. That's good because Ernesto Sabato hardly ever spoke about it. If you are wondering which in him took precedence: science or metaphysics, you will not have an answer. In the first part of his life, he was a scientist who asked metaphysical questions. The rest of his life he questioned science metaphysically. Ernesto Sabato did not separate the fear of nothingness from the symptoms that this fear produced. He looked the two in the eye. Man is an animal endowed not only with a soul, but with a spirit. The first of the animals to have modified its natural environment through cultivation. As such, he finds himself in an unstable equilibrium between his own body and his physical and cultural environment . This balance is what gets in the way. Our era is entirely based on technology and wants to be sovereign. Technique supposedly makes you strong. Our time refuses to take into account any fragility. Now, if there is one thing that takes us away from human nature, and Ernesto Sabato — like Bernanos, like Jünger — noted it, it is technique. The technique moves away from the man. More precisely, the technique separates the man from the man. Technique is not Evil, but Evil uses technique to alienate man from man. The alienation of man is one of Ernesto Sabato's great themes. I believe freedom was given to us to fulfill a mission and without freedom nothing is worth living. More so, I believe that the freedom that is within our reach is greater than the one we dare to live. It is enough to read History, this great master, to see how many paths man has been able to open with the strength of his wrist, how much man has modified the course of events, with pain, love, fanaticism . This is Ernesto Sabato's will. This is human nature. Sabato's lesson is that there is wonder everywhere, but we are blind to seeing it. This is how we can see old people who barely speak and spend their days staring into the distance, when in fact their gaze is deep within themselves, deep in their memory . Wherever there is life, there is wonder. And even in the deepest recesses of Evil, the marvelous still sits. As long as life is there, the marvelous can arise. Images of men and women struggling against adversity come to mind, like this little pregnant Indian, almost a child, whom I met in the province of Chaco and who tore tears from me with emotion. because she blessed the life she carried within her despite misery and deprivation . Human nature, we tell you. And forgetting human nature is forgetting the marvellous. Man is not a titan and yet modern man continues to live as if he were. And since it is necessary to insist: It is enough to reread Homer, or to remember the pre-Columbian myths. Men believed they were the sons of God, and he who feels he belongs to such a line may well be a serf, a slave, but he will never be a mere cog. Whatever his living conditions, no one can deprive him of his feeling of belonging to a sacred history; his life will always be under the gaze of the gods.

Ernesto Sabato is finally in the light. But his earthly lights will be missed. And it's a bit of our human nature that died with him. He had this function of watchman to remind us of ourselves. From the point of view of modern man, people in the past were less free and their possibilities of choice were reduced. But their sense of responsibility was much greater. It didn't even occur to them that they could be neglecting the duties incumbent on them, not being faithful to the corner of the earth that life seemed to have conceded to them . The resulting question is a tough one. Haven't we reduced everything to nothing? Aren't we re-enacting the scene from Original Sin? What has man put in the place of God? he freed himself neither from cults nor from altars. The altar remains, no longer the place of sacrifice and abnegation, but of well-being, self-adulation, veneration of the great gods of the screen . Are Adam and Eve my ancestors or my future? Ernesto Sabato had only one fear, that the man would confuse the promise "You will be like gods" with the affirmation "We are gods!" ".

Modern times have distinguished themselves by their contempt for the essential attributes and values ​​of the unconscious. The Enlightenment philosophers kicked the unconscious out the door, and it came back through the window. Now, since the Greeks, if not earlier, we know that we must not despise the goddesses of the night, and even less banish them, because they then react by taking revenge in the most ruthless of ways. .

Human beings oscillate between holiness and sin, flesh and spirit, good and evil. And the most serious, the most stupid thing that we have done since Socrates is to want to proscribe their dark side. These powers are invincible. When they were sought to be destroyed, they lurked in the shadows and eventually rebelled with increased violence and evil.

We must admit them and at the same time fight tirelessly for the good. The great religions do not only advocate the good; they command to do so, which proves the constant presence of evil. Life is a terrifying balance between angel and beast. We cannot speak of man as if he were an angel, and we must not. But neither should we speak of him as if he were a beast, because man is capable of indulging in the worst atrocities, but also the highest and purest acts of heroism.

I bow with respect before those who let themselves be killed without trying to return the blow. I wanted to show this supreme goodness of man in simple characters like Hortenzia Paz or Sergeant Soa. As I have said, human beings cannot survive without heroes, without saints and without martyrs, because love, like any act of true creation, is always a victory over evil.

* The quotes from Ernesto Sabato used in this article are all taken from the Resistance book.

From Ernesto Sabato we will read without counting, The Tunnel , and his trilogy of Buenos Aires, Heroes and tombs , and The Angel of darkness .

All his work has been published by Editions du Seuil.