Roberto Arlt - The Seven Madmen

I would watch Erdosain while he was talking like this. Here was a murderer, a murderer, talking in this way about the absurd subtleties of our emotions! He went on:

“Then on our wedding night when we were alone in our hotel room, she took off her clothes quite naturally in the lamplight. Blushing to the roots of my hair, I turned away so that she could not see how embarrassed I felt. I removed my shirt collar, my jacket and my boots, then slipped under the sheets with my trousers still on. She turned her head amidst the riot of black curls on her pillow and said with a strange laugh:

“Aren’t you worried about creasing them? Take them off, silly.”

Later on in their marriage, a mysterious distance kept Elsa and Erdosain apart. She gave herself to him, but always with repugnance, as though she felt cheated in some way. When he knelt at her bedside and begged her to surrender to him if only for a moment, she replied in a voice thick with anger: “Let me alone! Can’t you see you disgust me?”

Choking back his fear of catastrophe, Erdosain would roll back on to his own bed.

“I would not lie down, but sit upright, my back propped against the pillow, staring out into the darkness. I knew it made no sense, but I thought that if she could see me lost and alone like that in the shadows, she might have pity on me and at last say: ‘All right, come here if you want to.’ But she never, never said a word to me, until one night I called out in utter despair:

“‘Do you really think … I’ll just masturbate for ever?’ At that, unmoved, she replied: ‘It’s pointless: I should never have married you.’”

Anguish took hold of Erdosain, so painfully that all of a sudden he clasped his head as if the pain was about to drive him mad. As each new idea rocked him, it felt as though his brain matter had shaken loose and was slopping against the walls of his skull.

He knew he was lost beyond redemption, stranded far from even the faint happiness that one day shines on the most pallid cheek. He understood that destiny had flung him into that maelstrom of outcasts who stamp life with the foul imprint of every imaginable vice and suffering.

All his hope had gone. His fear of living intensified still further when he realised he had no dreams to keep him going, when he admitted, eyes obstinately fixed on the far corner of the room, that it was all the same to him if he worked as a dishwasher in a bar or as a brothel porter.

What did it matter to him! Anguish threw him into that silent multitude of fearful men who drag their wretchedness through days of selling knick-knacks or bibles, and then at nightfall begin their tour of public lavatories, where they expose their genitals to tender youths brought there by similar uncontrollable desires.

Erdosain circled endlessly round and round in these grim considerations. He felt as if he was screwed to a huge block of wood from which he would never struggle free.

Anguish took such deep root in him that he suddenly pitied the fate his body might meet in the city, this seventy-kilo body he only saw whenever he passed in front of a mirror.

In earlier times, Erdosain had delved into his mind to enjoy all kinds of luxury and pleasure — the kind of immaterial pleasures not circumscribed by time or physical boundaries. But in his present despair he was unable to escape his body, a suffering body which at times he thought of as no longer his, despite his sense of remorse at never having made it happy.

The remorse he felt towards his own wretched physical being was as deep as the pain a mother must feel at never being able to satisfy her son’s deepest desires.

Erdosain had never offered his doomed flesh either a decent suit or a satisfaction that would reconcile it to life; he had done nothing for the pleasure of his own physical being, whereas he had permitted his spirit everything, even flights of fancy to countries as yet undiscovered by man’s machines.

Time and again he said to himself: “What have I done for the happiness of this wretched body of mine?” In truth, he felt he was bound up in something as separate from himself as wine is to the barrel containing it.

But he came to realise that it was this body of his that was the container of all his doubts and despair, was what fed them with its weary blood; a wretched, shabbily dressed body that no woman would deign to look at, which suffered all the contempt and crushing weight of the passing days simply because his mind had never desired the pleasures it was timidly, silently, crying out for. Erdosain felt sad and sorry for this physical double of his, this distant acquaintance.

So then, like a desperate man who throws himself from a seventh floor, he flung himself into the delicious terror of masturbation, seeking to drown his remorse in a world nobody could ever cast him from, cocooning himself in pleasures that were beyond his grasp in real life, a spectacular array of beautiful bodies he would have needed endless lives and limitless money to really enjoy.

This was a universe of gelatinous ideas, chopped into corridors where obscenity was disguised in silks and brocade, in velvets and expensive, creamy laces; a world bathed in a soft, sponge-like sunset glow. The most gorgeous women in creation strolled by, baring the rounded apples of their breasts to him, or offering their scented lips and lascivious words to a mouth stale from vile cigarettes.

Sometimes they were tall, smart, polished young ladies, at others perverted schoolgirls, an ever-changing world of females that no-one could ever cast him from: him, such a seedy-looking individual that even the madams of the most decrepit brothels eyed him suspiciously, as though he were going to cheat them out of the price of a lay.

He closed his eyes and sank into the oblivion of the burning darkness, like an opium-smoker who enters the sordid den with its Chinese owner stinking of excrement and yet believes he is on the threshold of paradise.

Slowly but surely he slid surreptitiously towards that forbidden pleasure; ashamed but at the same time as excited as an adolescent going into a whorehouse for the first time.

Desire buzzed in his ears like a horsefly, but nobody now could cast him from this sensual darkness.

The darkness was a familiar house where he suddenly lost all notion of everyday life. There, in the black house, he revelled in pleasures which if he had so much as suspected another man of enjoying, he would never have gone near him again.

Although this black house was deep inside himself, Erdosain entered it in the most roundabout way, performing the most tortuous manoeuvres. Yet once he had crossed the threshold he knew there was no turning back, because down its corridors, down a secret corridor draped in shadows, there came to meet him the same fleet-footed woman who one day in the street, on a tram or in someone’s house, had made him stiffen with desire.

Like someone pulling banknotes earned in many different ways from the same wallet, from the recesses of the dark house Erdosain plucked a fragmented but whole woman, made up from a hundred such creatures split by the same desire repeated a hundred times, always blooming anew in their presence.

This imaginary woman had the knees of a girl whose skirt the wind had blown up while she was waiting for a bus; the thighs he remembered from a pornographic postcard; and the sad, wan smile of a schoolgirl he had met a long time ago in a tram; the green eyes of a little dressmaker with spots around her pale mouth, going out on a Sunday evening with a friend to a dance in one of those social clubs where shopkeepers thrust their bulging trouser-fronts at girls who enjoy men.

And this fantasy woman, made up from the bits and pieces of all the ones he had been unable to possess, showed him the same kindness as cautious girls who have fondled their boyfriends’ crotches but still consider themselves decent. She came towards him, wearing a tight orthopaedic girdle that left her slightly splayed breasts free, and her behaviour was above reproach, like that of a proper young lady who knows what’s what, though that does not prevent her allowing her boyfriend’s hands to stray inside her casually undone blouse.