Roberto Arlt - The Seven Madmen

The contours of his life were reduced to that square centimetre of feeling. He could even “see” his heartbeat, and it was useless for him to try to spurn this grotesque figure weighing him down on the floor of the abyss, black and orange by turns. If he dropped his guard just a fraction, the reality inside him rose howling round his ears. Erdosain wanted but did not want to look … it was useless … there his wife was, at the far side of a blue-lined room. The Captain was busy in a corner. Erdosain knew, without anyone telling him, that this was a tiny hexagonal-shaped bedroom, almost completely filled by a wide, low bed. He did not want to look at Elsa … no, he did not want to, and yet if he faced death for it, he could not have taken his eyes off the man undressing in front of her … in front of his lawful wife, who was no longer with him but with someone else. Even more powerful than his fear was his need for more terror, more suffering, and then all at once Elsa, who until now had been hiding her face behind her hands, ran over to the naked man with his sturdy legs, his blotched purple manhood erect against the blue background.

Erdosain felt himself crushed by a sense of pure dread. His life could not have been flatter if he had gone through the rollers of a sheet-metal mill. Wasn’t that how toads looked when flattened by a cartwheel on some country track, all squashed and frothing? But he did not want to look, he refused to look with such determination that he managed to see only a blurred outline of how Elsa was leaning against the man’s hairy, bulging chest, while his hands sought out her chin to lift her face to his mouth.

Then suddenly Elsa cried out: “Me too, my darling, me too.” Her face was red with longing, her clothes a whirling mass over her milk-white thighs, her eyes staring wildly at the trembling man’s rigid muscle, as she revealed the unruly curls of her sex, her straining breasts … Ah! … why did he have to look?

It was useless … Elsa … yes, Elsa, his lawfully wedded wife, was trying to caress the whole of the man’s sex with her tiny hand. Groaning with desire, the man clutched his head, covered his face with his forearm, but she leant forward to brand his ears with this burning iron: “You’re more beautiful than my husband! My God, how beautiful you are!”

Erdosain could not have suffered more if someone had twisted his head round on his neck to screw this ghastly vision deep into his soul. He was suffering so much that if there had been any letup in his pain, he would have exploded like shrapnel. How can the soul stand so much pain? And yet he wanted to suffer more. Even if they had put him on a chopping block and sliced him into pieces … even if they had taken the four quarters of his carcass and thrown them into the garbage, he would have gone on suffering. There was not a single square centimetre of his body that was free of this crushing pressure of dread.

All his nerve-strings had snapped as the horrific tension wrenched him apart: until all at once a sudden feeling of calm began to spread through his limbs.

He wanted nothing any more. His life was pouring out silently like a lake after its dam has burst. As he lay there, eyes closed but not asleep, this lucid dissolution was a more effective anaesthetic for his pain than any chloroform-induced sleep.

His heart was pumping strongly. He shifted his head laboriously to lift his scalp from the overheated pillow, and let himself go, without any other sense of being alive than the coolness on the back of his neck and the opening and closing of his heart which, like an immense eye, opened its sleepy lid to acknowledge the darkness, and nothing more. Nothing more than darkness?

Elsa had shrunk so far from his memory that during this hypnotic state he could hardly believe he had ever known her. He doubted whether she even existed. Where before he could see her image so clearly, now he had to struggle to recognise her at all. Now his life was pouring silently out — he contemplated the years speeding backwards, until he was a boy staring at a green tree which shaded the rushing flow of a river full of red-striped pebbles. He himself was a waterfall of flesh in the shadows. Who could say when the draining of his blood would end! The only thing he could feel was the closing and opening of his heart, which like an immense eye lifted its sleepy lid to acknowledge the darkness. A slash of silver from the streetlamp halfway down the street filtered through a chink and fell on the gauze of the mosquito net. Slowly, painfully, he regained a sense of who he was.

He was Erdosain. Now he knew once again who he was. With a huge effort, he sat upright. He could make out a yellow line under the dining-room door. He had forgotten to switch the light off. He owed … Ah! no, no … Elsa has left him … he owes 600 pesos and seven cents to the Sugar Company … but no, he doesn’t owe them any more, he’s got a cheque …

Oh, reality, reality!

The tilted oblong of light from the street which had turned the mosquito net to silver had led him to think he was living as he had before, like the day before, like ten years earlier.

He did not want to see that sliver of light, just as when he had been a boy he had not wanted to be aware of the blue light shining in through the windows, even though he knew it was there, even though he knew there was no force on earth that could extinguish that light. Yes, just like when his father used to tell him that he was going to thrash him “tomorrow”. No, it could not be the same this time. In his childhood, the light had been blue, and now it was silver, although it was equally piercing, just as much a herald of the real world as the earlier one had been. His forehead, the fringe of hair round his temples were soaked with sweat. So Elsa had left, and would never be back? What was Barsut going to say?

Just then, someone came to a halt outside the street door. Erdosain realised it was Barsut, and leapt from his bed. As usual, Barsut began to knock softly as if doing his best to make no noise.

Erdosain growled at him:

“Come on in; what’s the matter with you?”

Barsut came through the door, rocking back on his heels.

“I’m on my way,” Erdosain shouted as the other man entered the dining-room.

By the time he emerged from the bedroom, Barsut was already seated, legs crossed; as ever, he had his back to the door and was staring at the south-east corner of the room.

“How’s things?”

“How’s it going?”

Barsut had propped his elbow on the edge of the table, and sat with his chin in his white hand, which took on a coppery glow in the dim electric light. A questioning look softened the harsh glassy stare of his green eyes beneath eyebrows that seemed to stretch all the way back to his ears.

Erdosain felt he was seeing Barsut’s features through a mist of twinkling lights: the forehead sloping back towards pointed ears, the bony bird of prey nose, the lantern jaw capable of taking the hardest blows, the neat knot of his tie plumping out of its starched collar.

In a strained voice, Barsut asked:

“And Elsa?”

Erdosain pulled himself together.

“She’s gone out.”

“Ah …”

The two men fell silent. Erdosain stared fascinated at the right angle Barsut’s grey sleeve made with the white table edge, and the way the lamp lit his cheek with a coppery glow as far as the ridge of the nose, leaving the entire other half, from the roots of his hair to the cleft of his chin, in a darkness that the pool of shadow under his eye only made deeper. Barsut was shifting his legs uncomfortably.

“Ah!” Erdosain heard, and asked: “What did you say?”

The fact was it was only now that Erdosain heard the “ah” the other man had uttered seconds earlier. “So Elsa’s gone out?” As he said this, Barsut looked up, and his eyebrows lifted to let more light into his eyes. He hissed through half-open lips: