Roberto Arlt - The Seven Madmen

“You can’t deny I’m being completely frank with you.”

“No …”

“And anyway, I wanted to humiliate her, not steal her from you. What would have been the point of that? I knew she would never love me.”

“How did you work that out?”

“That’s what I don’t know. Because people do things they can never explain. Because I kept on seeing you, and you kept on receiving me, even though we couldn’t ‘stand’ each other. I came because that way I made you suffer, and suffered myself. Every day I would tell myself: ‘I’m not going there again … I’m not going there again …’ but as soon as the time arrived, I would get all nervous. It was as though I was being called from somewhere, so I’d get dressed in a hurry … and come over …”

All of a sudden Erdosain had a strange idea:

“While we’re on the subject … I’m not sure if you know, but this morning they discovered the anonymous letter at the Sugar Company. If I can’t pay up by tomorrow, they’ll have me arrested. I think you’ll be the first to admit that the one and only person to blame for all this is you: so it’s you who should give me the money. Where on earth am I to get it otherwise?”

Barsut sat bolt upright in astonishment.

“What’s that? Here I am, cuckolded and beaten like a dog, Elsa’s gone and I’ve done something terrible, and you expect me to come up with the money? Are you crazy? What possible reason could I have for giving you 600 pesos?”

“And seven cents …”

Erdosain stood up.

“Is that your final word?”

“You have to understand … how could I …?”

“Well then, ‘kid’ … we’ll have to wait and see. Now do me a favour and get out, I want to go to sleep.”

“Don’t you feel like going out?”

“I’m tired. Leave me now.” Barsut hesitated, then stood up as well, clutching his hat brim in one hand, and stumbled from the room.

Erdosain heard the street door slam, stood there frowning for a few moments, searched in his pocket for a railway guide, looked up the timetable, then went and washed his face again, and finally combed his hair in front of the mirror. His lip was swollen, and there were red weals round his nose and on the side of his head by the hairline.

He looked round in search of something, spotted the revolver on the floor, stooped to pick it up, and went out. Then he realised he had left the light on, so came back in and turned the lamp off. In the darkness the light continued to gleam in his eyes for a brief moment as he went out again. For the second time that day, he was heading for the Astrologer’s house.

Light shone from the telegraph office door and dimly lit part of the Temperley station platform. Erdosain sat in the darkness on a bench next to the points switches. He was chilled, perhaps with a fever. He felt that the idea of the crime was an extension of his own body, just like the shadow he could cast into the light. A red disc shone at the end of an invisible signal arm: other red and green circles were pinned further off in the darkness, and their reflection fused with the rails as they curved into the night, lending them alternately a bluish or a pink glow. Sometimes the red or green light changed position. Then there was silence, as the chains stopped clanking against their supports, and the wires ceased to hum.

Erdosain was only half-awake.

“What am I doing here? Why am I staying here? Is it true I want to kill him? Or is it because I want to have the will to kill him? Why should that matter? At this very moment, she is rolling around in bed with him. What’s that to me? Before, when she was alone at home and I was in the café, I felt sorry for her, because she was unhappy with me … now it’s different … they’ll be asleep already, she’ll have her head on his chest. Good God! Can this be all there is? To feel lost, all the time lost? But am I really who I am? What if I were someone else? The strange distance! To live so distant from yourself! That’s what I do. Just like him. When he’s not around I can see him for what he is, a poor wretch. He almost broke my nose. How incredible! Now somehow it turns out he’s the one who’s been cuckolded and beaten, and not me! Me! … Really, life is a grotesque joke! Yet there must be more to it than that. Why do I loathe him so much when he’s with me?” Shadows flitted behind the yellow window of the telegraph office.

“To kill him or not to kill him? What does it matter to me? Does it matter if I kill him? Let’s be honest. Is it important to me to kill him? Or is it all the same to me? Is it all the same if he lives? Yet I want to have the will to kill him. If a god appeared before me now and asked: ‘Do you want to have the power to destroy the whole of humanity?’ would I do it? Would I destroy it? No, I wouldn’t. Simply knowing I had the power to do so would rob the idea of all interest. Anyway, what would I do all alone on earth? Watch dynamos in workshops grow rusty, or the skeletons perched astride the furnaces crumble into dust? It’s true he slapped me around, but do I care? What a list! What a collection! The Captain, Elsa, Barsut, the Man with the Hogshead, the Astrologer, the Thug, Ergueta. What a list! Where can all these monsters have sprung from? I’m not at the centre of my being either, I am not who I am, and yet I need to do something to prove my existence, to affirm it. That’s it, affirm it. Because it’s as if I were dead. For the Captain, for Elsa, for Barsut I simply don’t exist. If they like, they can have me arrested, Barsut can slap me again, Elsa run off with someone else under my nose, the Captain can steal her from me again. I’m like the negation of life for all of them. Something like non-being. A man is not simply action, therefore he does not exist. Or does he exist in spite of not being? He is and is not. Take a look at men. Probably they have wives, children, houses. Perhaps they’re all losers. But if anyone tries to break into their home, to steal a cent from them, or lays a finger on their wife, they turn into wild animals. So why didn’t I revolt? Who can answer that for me? I certainly can’t. I only know that’s how I exist, as a negation. And when I say this kind of thing I’m not sad: my soul stays silent, my head empty. Then out of that silence and emptiness a curiosity about killing surges up from my heart. Precisely that. I’m not crazy, because I know how to think, to reason. It’s a curiosity that rises in me, a curiosity that must be my ultimate sorrow, the sorrow of curiosity. Or the demon of curiosity. To find out how I am thanks to a crime. That’s exactly it. To find out how my consciousness and my sensibility react to committing a crime.

“And yet these words don’t make me feel the crime, just as a cable about a disaster in China doesn’t give me the feeling of that disaster. It’s as if someone else were thinking of the murder, and not me. Someone else who like me would be a man who was all surface, the shadow of a man, like in the cinema. He has a silhouette, he moves about, he seems to exist, to suffer, and yet he is nothing more than a shadow. He has no life. I swear to God, all this makes sense. So, what would this shadow man do? He would be aware of what had happened, but would be unable to feel its weight, because he had no volume to absorb it into. He is only a shadow. And I too see what’s happened, but can’t absorb it. This must be a new theory. I wonder what a criminal court judge would make of it? Would he realise how honest I’m being? Do people like that believe in honesty? Things move around me, beyond the limits of my body, but to them my life must be as inconceivable as living on the earth and the moon at the same time. I’m nothing to anyone. And yet, if tomorrow I throw a bomb or kill Barsut, then I become everything, a man who exists, a man who generations of legal experts have prepared punishments, gaols, and theories for. So I, who am nothing, would set in motion that fearful machinery of experts, secretaries, journalists, lawyers, prosecutors, warders, prison vans. Nobody would see me as a poor devil, but as an antisocial being, the enemy society would have to be protected from. That’s so strange! And yet it is only thanks to crime that I can affirm my existence, just as it is only evil which affirms man’s presence on earth. I would be the Erdosain who was predicted and feared, defined by the penal code; among the thousands of anonymous Erdosains who infect this world, I would be the other, authentic Erdosain, the one who is and always will be. All this is very strange. And yet despite everything, darkness does exist, and man’s soul is full of sorrow. Infinite sorrow. But that cannot be all there is to life. Something inside me tells me life cannot be like that. If I could only discover the precise reason why life cannot be that way, I could stick a pin in myself, and all this hot air of lies would be deflated like a balloon. Out of my present state a brand-new man would emerge, a man as powerful as one of the primeval gods of creation. But all this is getting me away from the point. Shall I go and see the Astrologer or not? What will he say when he sees me back again? Perhaps he’s expecting me. Like me, he’s a mystery to himself. That’s the truth of it. He’s as uncertain as I am about where he’s heading. A secret society! For him, the whole of society is summed up in those words: a secret society! Another devil. What a collection! Barsut, Ergueta, the Thug and me … Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t come up with such an assortment. And to top it all, the pregnant blind girl. What a monster!”