Honor Among Terrorists : TRISTE’S HISTORY <i> By Horacio Vazquez Rial (Readers International: $18.95; 216 pp.) </i>

When the character in Jorge Luis Borges’ brief parable, “Everything and Nothing,” discovers a hollowness at his core, when he finds that “there was no one in him,” he fills the void with a universe of historical invention, fabled imaginings and extravagant language until he becomes William Shakespeare.

When the character in Horacio Vazquez Rial’s novel, “Triste’s History,” discovers a hollowness at his core, “an indifference to all things human and divine,” he fills the void with violence and terror until he becomes a paid assassin.

Each in its own way, both of these empty vessels offer important lessons. Separated though they are by (among other things) centuries, cultures and language, they lead us to the opposite extremes of the human spectrum and leave us there, wondering.

Cristobal Artola is nicknamed Triste, not from sadness but because of his complete detachment from life around him. Born in the vibrant and vicious slums of Buenos Aires, a “meeting point of certain unmemorable destinies,” the future killer drifts through his early years, vaguely curious about his unknown father--an itinerant pimp--and vaguely bewildered by his mother’s touching faith--in God and in Eva Peron.

Once his mother dies and he sets out on his own, Triste’s life loses an anchor he never knew it had. He drifts into work as a pool hustler until, for an obscure reason having nothing to do with right and wrong exactly but everything to do with a peculiar kind of honor, he refuses to throw a game and has his hands shattered as punishment. He falls in love with a prostitute and is shocked to relate to another individual for the first (and only) time in his life. But she is murdered on the job and, as Cristobal discovers while probing her past, has death and betrayal in her own history. His single connection to the living ends up a corpse. It is only the first.

By now in his late teens, Cristobal has become a creature of the mists; “the place he occupied in the world was a murky one where individual features blur and faces . . . become anonymous and unreal.” He is ripe to follow almost any leader in almost any direction. Feeling “a sense of alienation from the events of his time,” Triste is about to be swept up in those events.

The sweeper is the mysterious Agustin Chaves. A Catholic priest, Chaves also is a member of a sinister fascist cult whose goal is “to clean the whole place up.” This it proposes to accomplish, as do such secret societies the world over, by eliminating the usual suspects: communists, socialists, Jews, intellectuals. And this, its leaders decide, is a job for a young, amoral thug like Cristobal Artola.

Tricked into killing his first victim (a Jewish watchmaker), Triste grows into the job. The novel grows with him. The picaresque trappings fall away, replaced by a bleak and rigorous exploration of the nature of the terrorist and the squalid destiny of Argentina around the time of Peron.

Cristobal becomes a character out of Andre Malraux by way of Dostoevsky who kills “because killing gave him occasional moments of ecstacy.” We watch him grope his way toward a rationalization of that stark fact, as he struggles to justify himself by manufacturing a bizarre ethic of terror.

There are things Triste will not do--if only until he does them. At first, he doesn’t want to kill. Then, after he has, he tries to sustain a kind of Wild West fiction: “You either kill a man looking him in the eye or you don’t kill him.” Finally, after breaking that canon, it becomes a job of tedious repetition without standards.

But in the eyes of Vazquez Rial, this struggle, this losing battle for values, makes Cristobal far more honorable than his employers, far more honorable, in fact, than the country that formed him.

In the time of the novel--the late ‘50s to the early ‘70s--Argentina also was a place of lost values, but there was no battle to recapture them. Instead, they just seemed to seep away into the long night, leaving behind a nameless and pointless terror. The final result was the “Dirty War” of the late ‘70s, the gruesome period that made disappeared into a noun.

Into this world the author puts Cristobal, the professional hit man, but makes him into something more valuable than the squalor of his life. Unlike most of his co-workers, Triste still grasps that there are consequences to his actions. This glimmer of understanding does not spare many lives, but it does allow Vazquez Rial to lead us into an exploration of the meaning of terror, the character of terrorists and the fate of an entire nation given over to its grasp.

In a prologue, the author--an Argentine now living in Spain--tells us: “I shall never live in Buenos Aires again.” By the novel’s end, we understand why.