On Heroes and Tombs

Sábato's Buenos Aires is a haunted southern city: a bench in Parque Lezama where a shy student meets a woman who cannot be saved, a crumbling family mansion in old Barracas, and the paranoid tunnels imagined beneath the streets in the Report on the Blind. The novel keeps the porteño south at its centre, then breaks north for the historical retreat of Lavalle's beaten army.

Martín del Castillo

Parque Lezama

Part I: The Dragon and the Princess

The book opens on a bench here, where a lonely student first meets the restless young woman who will draw him into her family's ruin. Sábato uses the park, on the slope of the old southern city, as the threshold to the whole story.

Part I

explicit The park is named in the novel and is a real public park on the edge of San Telmo, above Barracas.

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