Roberto Arlt - The Seven Madmen

Now Erdosain begins to question himself. Why is he thinking all this? What right does he have? Since when do apprentice murderers think? And yet despite everything, there is something in him which gives thanks to the universe. Could it be humility or love? He does not know, but he perceives there is a sweetness in this very lack of coherence, it seems to him that when a poor soul is driven mad, it is thankful to abandon the sorrows of this earth. And underpinning this feeling of pity, an irresistible, almost ironic force leads him to curl his lip in disdain.

The gods exist. They live concealed under the skin of certain people who can remember life on this planet when the earth was still young. Erdosain also has a god within him. Could it be possible? He feels his nose, still throbbing from the beating Barsut has given him, and the irresistible force once again insists: he does have a god concealed beneath his painful skin. Does the penal code provide for the punishment of a murderous god? What would the judge say if he answered him: “I sin because I have a god inside me”?

And yet, isn’t it true? This love, this strength that flows through him in the dawn under the trees dripping dew, is it not proof of his godlike nature? Once more the memory stands out on the surface of his mind: a pale, oval face with green eyes and black curls that the breeze blew across her throat. How simple it all is! He is in such a trance he has no need to say anything. Although he might just as well have gone mad thinking like this about the schoolgirl under the dripping trees. What other reason could there be for his soul being so different from when it kept him in torment the previous night? Or can it be that at night we think only dark thoughts? Even if this is true, it does not matter. He is another man now. He is smiling under the trees. Isn’t it all wonderfully absurd? The Melancholy Thug, the depraved blind girl, Ergueta and his Christ myth, the Astrologer, all those incomprehensible phantoms who speak a human language, who put flesh on words, what are any of them compared to him as he leans on a post by a climbing wistaria, as he feels life surging through his breast?

He is another man, from the simple fact of having thought of the child resting her head on his shoulder in a train compartment. Erdosain closes his eyes. The acrid smell of earth makes him shiver. A feeling of giddiness rises from his weary body.

Someone comes towards him on the path. A raucous whistle reaches him from the station. Other men in caps or lopsided hats pass by in the distance.

What on earth is he doing here? Erdosain blinks one eye, aware he is cheating on God, playing out the comedy of someone unable to avoid God’s curse on him. Yet now and again flashes of darkness pass before his eyes, and a kind of dull intoxication takes hold of his senses. He wants to violate something. To violate common sense. If there had been any bundles of hay nearby, he would have set fire to them … his face swells with a repugnant look, takes on the vile expression of madness; suddenly he sees a tree, jumps into the air, grabs on to a branch, clings to it while he scrabbles with his feet on the trunk, gets his elbows over the top, and manages to pull himself up into the fork of the acacia.

His shoes slip on the shiny bark, twigs whip against his face, but he clambers upright holding on to another branch, and peers through the wet leaves. Down below, the road winds among islands of trees.

Now he is up in the tree. He has violated common sense, for the sake of it, for no reason, like someone who kills a passer-by simply because he bumped into him, to see if the police will track him down. Over in the east, gloomy chimneys stand out against the green-streaked sky; beyond them mounds of green fill the lowlying land of Banfield like monstrous herds of elephants; and still he feels desolate. He knows now it is not enough to violate common sense to feel happy. He makes one last effort and shouts out loud:

“Hey, you sleeping beasts! Hey! … I swear that … but no … I want to violate the laws of common sense, so stay calm, little animals. No. What I really want to preach is daring, a new life. I am speaking out of a tree, but I’m not ‘up a gum tree’, it’s an acacia: Hey, you sleeping beasts!”

His strength quickly drains away. He looks all around as if surprised at finding himself in this position, then all at once the face of the distant girl blooms in his mind like a flower. Suddenly ashamed of the scene he is making, 3he climbs down from the tree. He is vanquished. A broken man.

Footnotes

1This chapter in Erdosain’s confessions led me to wonder whether the idea of the crime he was going to commit did not already exist in his subconscious mind, which would serve to explain his passivity in the face of Barsut’s aggression.

2It was only later Erdosain learnt that at that very moment Elsa was being looked after by a sister of charity. A single ill-advised gesture from the Captain had been enough for her to realise the predicament she had got herself into, and she had leapt from the vehicle they were in. She decided to go to a hospital, where she was taken in by the mother superior, who realised she was dealing with a woman at her wits’ end.

3Erdosain offered me two explanations for this state. The first was that he was immensely pleased at pretending to be mad, like someone “who has drunk one glass of wine but pretends to be drunk to his friends, in order to trick them”. Erdosain gave a sad smile while he was explaining all this, and told me that when he climbed down out of the acacia he felt ashamed in the same way as someone who dresses up for Carnival and shows off in front ofa group ofstrangers, but instead of making them laugh, elicits only a contemptuous remark. “I was so sick of myself I even thought of committing suicide, and was sorry I didn’t have my revolver with me. It was only when I was getting undressed back at home that I realised I’d forgotten I had my gun in my trouser pocket.”

Erdosain spent the days leading to Barsut’s abduction in a room he rented after paying off the Sugar Company. He had become terrified of going out. He never thought about the planned abduction, and even ceased to visit the Astrologer. Instead, he spent every day in bed, his forehead pressed against his clenched fists on the pillow. Or he would spend hours staring at the wall, up which he imagined he could see wisps of dreams and despair floating.

In all those days he could not even summon up Elsa’s face. “She had vanished so mysteriously from my mind, it took a supreme effort simply to recall any of her features.”

Later he would fall asleep or go over everything again in his mind. 1He tried in vain to concentrate on two projects he considered important: adapting steam engines to electromagnetics, and the idea of setting up a dog salon where people could get their pets dyed electric blue, their bulldogs bright green, purple greyhounds, lilac fox-terriers, lapdogs with three-toned photos of sunsets printed across their backs, little pooches with swirls like a Persian rug. He was in torment: one afternoon he fell asleep and had the following dream:

He knew one of the Spanish princesses was enamoured of him. This plus the fact that he was his Majesty Alfonso XIII’s lackey made him extremely happy, because it meant he was surrounded by generals constantly trying to discover his secrets. The mirror of a lake nibbled at the trunks of trees permanently in the whitest of white bloom, whilst the lissom princess took him by the arm and said in her Spanish lilt:

“Do you love me, Erdosain?”

Erdosain burst out laughing and replied with an insult: at this, a circle of swords flashed before his eyes and he felt he was drowning, one catastrophe after another tore the continents asunder, but he did not care because he had been sleeping for centuries in a leaden shack at the bottom of the sea. Outside his window one-eyed sharks circled, furious because they had piles, which made Erdosain laugh with the stifled laugh of someone who does not want to be heard. Now all the fish in the sea were one-eyed, and he was the Emperor of the City of One-eyed Fish. An endless wall surrounded the desert at the water’s edge, the green sky was rusting on its bricks, and vast shoals of fat, one-eyed fish, monstrous creatures bulging with marine leprosy, were flung against the sides of the red towers, while a dropsical black man shook his fist at an idol of salt.