Roberto Arlt - The Seven Madmen

The words Elsa had spoken scarcely an hour earlier floated into Erdosain’s mind: “It doesn’t matter … I’m 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 … it’s me, I’ve come back.”

Barsut went on: “And of course I kept asking myself what made her put up with the life she led with you, alongside a man like you …”

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

Erdosain felt as if all these thoughts were swirling around the top of his brain like a whirlpool. The huge vortex drilled down into the roots of his being. As it whirled giddily round, it drew a fresh, painful tenderness from his soul. How comforting Elsa’s words had been, how extraordinary!

“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, that next to you he is nothing more than the shadow of a man.”

Erdosain felt sure these words would save his soul, although Barsut continued to pour out his jealous spite:

“More than anything, I wanted to ask her what she saw in you — to dissect you in front of her eyes and show her until she was sick of it that you were no more than a madman, a swine, a coward … I swear there’s no anger in me as I tell you all this.”

“And I believe you,” Erdosain replied.

“Right now, looking at you, I ask myself: what does a woman see in a man? That’s something we’ll never know, don’t you agree? To me, you’re nothing more than a poor wretch, someone you can knock out of the way with a blow. But what exactly are you to her? That’s what’s so hard to fathom. D’you think you ever knew? Tell me honestly: did you ever know in your heart what you meant to your wife? What did she see in you to withstand so much at your side, to put up with you the way she did?”

How solemn Barsut was! His hoarse questions demanded an answer. Sitting so close to him, Erdosain felt him not as another man, but as his double, a phantom with a bony nose and bronze-coloured hair who had suddenly become part of his own consciousness, because Barsut was posing him precisely the same questions as it had done in the past. It dawned on him with a cold certainty: for him to live in peace, he would have to get rid of Barsut.

“Like plunging a sword into a bale of cotton,” Erdosain later remarked.

Barsut had not the faintest idea that at that very moment Erdosain had condemned him to death. When Erdosain was explaining to me how the idea came to him, he said:

“Have you ever seen a general on the field of battle? … But to explain it more clearly, I’ll speak as an inventor: for a long time, you search for the solution to a problem. You know for certain that the answer, the secret, is somewhere within you, but you can’t get at it because it’s hidden beneath so many layers of uncertainty. Then one day, when you least expect it, the plan, the complete vision of the machine, suddenly appears before your eyes, and you’re dazzled by its simple perfection. It’s a miracle! Imagine a general on the battlefield … everything seems lost, but then suddenly he discovers a perfect, simple solution, one he would never have imagined he knew, but which had been there all the time, within his grasp, deep within himself. At that instant I knew I needed to have Barsut killed. Opposite me, he went on pouring out senseless words, oblivious to the fact that, with my puffy mouth and swollen nose, I was having to contain this explosion of joy, this sense of amazement similar to the one you feel when something you discover is as inevitable as a law of mathematics. Perhaps there’s also a mathematics of the spirit, whose terrible laws are merely not as inflexible as those governing the relations between numbers or lines. 1Here’s the strangest thing. That slap which made my gums bleed was like the stamp of a hydraulic press casting the outlines of a murder plot on to my consciousness. D’you follow me? A plan consists of three main lines, the combination of three straight lines, nothing more. And my excitement stamped out the cold imprint of those three guidelines, which took the following shape: abducting Barsut, having him killed and then using the money to set up the secret society the Astrologer was dreaming of. D’you follow me? The plan for the crime came to me spontaneously, while Barsut was whining on about how both our souls were damned. It was traced as clearly on my mind as if it had been stamped on a metal sheet at thousands of pounds’ pressure.

“How can I explain it to you? All at once I forgot everything: I was caught up in an icy, joyous contemplation of him, which came over me like the dawn an inveterate night-owl welcomes because it soothes his exhaustion after a wearisome, dissolute night. D’you follow me? Having Barsut killed by someone who needed money urgently to carry out his master plan. And this new dawn stirring inside was so perfectly part of me, I have often wondered since what secrets a man’s soul must contain for it to constantly astound him with fresh vistas of this sort, reveal things to him which are so apparently inexplicable that they leave him stunned.”

In my retelling of this episode, I have omitted to mention that when Erdosain got carried away, he would circle around his central “idea” with a torrent of words. In the grip of a slow frenzy which as he spoke gave him the feeling of being extraordinary rather than a useless nobody, he had to exhaust every last possibility of expression. I had no doubt he was telling the truth. What confused me was the question I kept asking myself: where did this man get the strength from to bear the sight of himself like this for so long? It seemed his whole vocation was to look into himself, to analyse what was going on inside him, as if the very accumulation of details could convince him he was really alive. I insist: a dead man blessed with the power of speech could not have said more than Erdosain did, to persuade himself he was not in fact dead.

Without the slightest idea of all that was happening in Erdosain, Barsut went on:

“Ah, you don’t know her … you’ve never known her. For example … listen to what I’m going to tell you. One evening I came to see you, but I knew you weren’t in, it was her I really wanted to see — nothing more than that. I arrived in a lather, I don’t know how many blocks I’d walked in the sun before I plucked up enough courage.”

“Just like me, in the sun,” thought Erdosain.

“I walked, even though as you know I can well afford a taxi. Then when I asked after you she said, without moving from the doorway:

“‘I’m sorry, I can’t ask you in because my husband’s not here.’ D’you see what a bitch she is?”

Erdosain thought:

“There’s still a train to Temperley.”

Barsut continued:

“As far as I could tell, you were nothing more than a poor devil, so I kept wondering: what could Elsa have seen in this dimwit for her to fall in love with him?”

In the calmest of voices, Erdosain asked him:

“And you can see from my face that I’m such an idiot?”

Barsut looked up in surprise. For a moment, he kept his flashing green eyes fixed on Erdosain.

The curtain of light that fell on their two heads created an illusion of great distance. It seemed Barsut realised he was as much a phantom as the other man, because he shook his head with great difficulty, as if his neck muscles had suddenly gone stiff, and replied:

“No, now I look at you closely, you seem more like someone with an obsession … God knows what.”

Erdosain laughed:

“You’re a real psychologist. Of course, I’ve no idea either what the obsession might be … but it’s strange, it never occurred to me you would think of trying to take my wife from me … and how calmly you say these things!”