Roberto Arlt - The Seven Madmen

“It’s no use now … I’m leaving. Why couldn’t you have been kind to me? Why did you never try?”

In that instant Erdosain was convinced she was as unhappy as he was, and the immense weight of the discovery crushed him on the edge of his seat next to the table, his head buried in the crook of his arm.

“So you’re leaving? You’re really leaving?”

“Yes, I want to see if our lives can be better this way. Take a look at my hands.” As she said this, she took off her right glove and showed him her hand, chapped from the cold, scarred by bleach, pricked by her sewing needle, blackened by her sooty pots and pans.

Erdosain stood bolt upright, transfixed by another hallucination.

He could picture his unhappy wife amid the monstrous turmoil of cement and iron cities, darting down dark streets in the slanting shadows of skyscrapers, beneath menacing lines of high-tension cables, lost among crowds of businessmen dry under their umbrellas. Her tiny face was paler than ever, but even as the stale breath from strangers stung her cheeks, she remembered him:

“Where can my little boy be?”

Erdosain interrupted his vision of the future: “Elsa … you already know … come whenever you want … you can come … but tell me truthfully, did you ever love me?”

Her eyelids fluttered up, her eyes opened wider. Her voice filled the room with human warmth. Erdosain felt he was coming back to life.

“I’ve always loved you … I love you now … never — why did you never talk to me before like you did tonight? I feel I’ll love you always … next to you, he is nothing more than the shadow of a man …”

“My poor soul … what a life we lead … what a life …”

The hint of a smile painfully twisted Elsa’s lips. She stared at him with longing for a moment. Then she said in a grave, pleading tone:

“Look … promise you’ll wait for me. If life is the way you’ve always said it is, I’ll be back. And then, if you like, we can end it all together … does that make you happy?”

Erdosain felt the blood rushing to his temples.

“My soul, how good you are to me … give me your hand,” and while she was struggling to overcome her fright with a timid smile, he began to kiss it. “You’re not angry are you, my love?”

Elsa straightened up, solemnly joyful.

“Look, Remo … I’ll be back, I promise you. And if what you say about life is true … yes, I’ll come, I promise.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, with whatever I possess.”

“Even if you’re rich?”

“Even if I have all the earth’s millions, I’ll come back. I swear it!”

“My poor soul! And you do have a noble soul! And yet you could not see who I was … but that doesn’t matter … what a life we’ve led!”

“Our life … it’s true, what a life! But it doesn’t matter now. I’m so happy. Can you picture how surprised you’ll be, Remo? You’re alone one night … all alone … when suddenly … creak … the door opens … and it’s me … I’ve come back!”

“And you’re wearing a ball gown … white shoes and a pearl necklace.”

“I came alone on foot through the dark streets, searching for you … but you don’t see me, you’re all on your own … your head …”

“Go on, tell me … talk, talk …”

“Your head is in your hands, your elbow propped on the table … you look at me … and all of a sudden …”

“I recognise you and say: ‘Elsa, is that you?’”

“And I reply: ‘Yes, Remo, I came back — d’you remember that night? That night is tonight, and even though the storm is howling outside, we don’t feel any cold or fear. Are you happy, Remo?”

“Yes, I’m happy, I swear to you.”

“Well then, I have to go now.”

“You’re going?”

“Yes …”

The man’s face fell in sudden anguish.

“You’d better leave then.”

“I’ll be back soon, my husband.”

“What was that you said?”

“I’m saying this to you, Remo: wait for me. Even if I have all the world’s millions, I’ll be back.”

“Goodbye then … but give me a kiss.”

“No, when I come back … goodbye, my husband.”

Suddenly Erdosain, overcome by an indescribable impulse, seized her roughly by her wrists.

“Tell me this: have you slept with him?”

“Let go of me, Remo … I didn’t think that you …”

“Admit it: did you sleep with him or not?”

“No.”

The Captain stood in the doorway. Erdosain sensed a vast weariness loosening the grip of his fingers. He felt he was falling, then saw nothing more.

He never knew how he managed to drag himself to his bed.

Time ceased to exist for Erdosain. He closed his eyes, obeying the need for sleep his aching insides were crying out for. If he had had the strength, he would have flung himself down a well. Great bubbles of despair frothed in his throat, choking the air from him, while his eyes became more sensitive to the darkness than a wound to salt. Occasionally he had to clench his teeth to stifle the jangling of his nerves, strung taught as wire in his soft, sponge-like flesh that yielded to the waves of darkness emanating from his brain.

He squeezed his eyes shut as he felt himself falling down a bottomless hole. He dropped further and further — who could say how many leagues his body was stretched to in invisible length, only to find itself still incapable of reaching his plunging consciousness as it vanished into a pit of despair! Ever denser layers of darkness fell from his lids.

His pain-ridden core struggled in vain. There was not a single chink in his soul for it to escape through. Erdosain carried all the world’s suffering inside him, all the grief of denying the world. Where on earth could there possibly be anyone whose skin was so gouged with bitterness? He felt he was no longer a man, but a raw wound that writhed and screamed with every throb of his veins. And yet, he was alive. Alive at a distance yet at the same time horrifically close to his own body. He was no longer an organism encompassing its suffering, but something far more inhuman … a monster-like creature curled up on itself in the black belly of the room. Each layer of darkness pouring from his eyelids was like placenta cutting him off further and further from the world of men. The rows of bricks in the walls grew higher and higher, while fresh outpourings of darkness crashed down into the hole where he lay curled up and throbbing, like a shell in the ocean depths. He did not know himself … he could not believe he was Augusto Remo Erdosain. He grasped his forehead in his fingers, but could recognise neither the flesh of his hands nor that of his brow, as though his body were made of two completely different substances. Who can say what had already died in him? All that remained of his feelings was an awareness which existed outside all that was happening to him, a soul as keenly thin as a swordblade, which slithered like an eel through the murky waters of his life. This consciousness took up no more than a square centimetre of his being. The rest dissolved in the darkness — he was a square centimetre of a man, a square centimetre of existence whose pulsating surface somehow kept this inchoate ghost alive. Everything else in him had died, had been absorbed into the placenta of darkness that insulated him inside this ghastly reality.

He became more and more convinced that he was at the bottom of a concrete block. It was like nothing on this earth! An invisible orange sun in a storm-black sky beat endlessly on its walls. The wing of a solitary bird slashed across the blue sky above, but he was condemned to remain for ever at the bottom of this sullen pit, lit by a storm-orange sun.