Roberto Arlt - The Seven Madmen

“A monster! I’ve often thought it. A lazy, supple, enigmatic monster capable of surprising even yourself with its violent impulses, with the devilish twists it uncovers in the hidden recesses of life, the way it can discover evil from any angle. How often I’ve paused in front of myself, of the mystery that is me, and envied the life of the most humble of men! Ah! Don’t ever commit a crime. Look at how I am. I’m confessing all this to you because yes, I think you may understand …

“And that night? … By the time I reached home it was late. I threw myself down on my bed fully dressed. My heart was beating frantically like a gambler’s must do. In fact, I was not worried about what might happen after the crime, but even as I was on the point of committing it, I was curious to know how I would behave, what Barsut might do, how the Astrologer intended to kidnap him. Whereas novels I had read presented crime as fascinating, to me it seemed no more than a mechanical act — committing a crime is easy; it merely seems so complicated to us because we aren’t used to it, that’s all.

“The truth is I remember just lying there staring at the far corner of the darkened room. Disparate tatters of my former existence floated by as if carried on the wind. I’ve never been able to understand the mysterious way that memory works — how during the most momentous occasions of our lives, an insignificant detail or an image that present concerns have blotted out from our memory, suddenly becomes immensely important. We were unaware that these inner photos even existed, until the thick veil is torn from them. So it was that throughout that night, instead of thinking about Barsut I simply lay there, in that desolate room, like a man waiting expectantly for something to happen, that extraordinary something I’ve so often told you about, which I imagined would give a completely new twist to my life, cancel out my past, show me I was an entirely different man from the one I seemed to be.

“In fact, I wasn’t worried so much about the crime as about something else: what would I be like after it? Would I feel remorse? Would I go mad, or would I end up turning myself in? Or would I simply carry on living the way I had before, suffering from that strange incapacity which robbed my actions of all coherence — what you now say is the symptom of my madness?

“The curious thing is that at times I felt great surges of joy welling up in me, or the need to feign a fit of madness that did not exist. I fought down the urge, and tried to figure out how exactly we were going to kidnap Barsut. I was sure he would put up a fight, but I knew the Astrologer was not someone to get into an affair like that unprepared. I also wondered how Barsut had guessed that the notification from the War Ministry was a fake, and couldn’t help admiring the presence of mind I had shown when he turned his soapy face to me and said, half seriously: ‘It’d be strange, wouldn’t it, if the letter were a forgery?’

“He was a swine all right, but I wasn’t far behind him; perhaps the only difference between us was that he did not have the same curiosity about the low passions which drove him on. In any case, by then I was past caring. It might be me who killed him, or the Astrologer — the fact was I had plunged my life into some monstrous hole where the demons played with my senses like dice in a tumbler.

“Noises reached me from afar; weariness seeped into my bones; at times it seemed to me my flesh was soaking up silence and any chance of rest like a sponge. I kept getting hideous ideas about Elsa; a silent rancour clamped my mouth shut; I was full of pity for my own poor life.

“Yet the only way I could imagine redeeming myself in my own eyes was by killing Barsut, and all at once I would picture myself standing beside him. He was tied up with thick ropes and lay sprawled on a heap of sacks: all I could make out clearly was one green eye in profile, and his pale nose. I bent quietly over his body pointing a revolver: I gently pushed his hair back and told him in a soft voice: ‘You’re going to die, you bastard.’

“The body trembled, and I raised the revolver and held it to his temple, repeating in the same soft voice: ‘You’re going to die, you bastard.’

“His arms writhed under the thick cords; his body was a seething mass of terrified muscle and bone.

“‘Do you remember, you bastard, d’you remember the potatoes, the salad you spilt all over the table? Do I still have the look of an idiot that so annoyed you then?’

“But all of a sudden I became ashamed of taunting him like that, so I said to him — or rather, no, I said nothing to him, but took a sack and pulled it over his head. Underneath the coarse burlap, the head started thrashing about furiously. I tried to force it to the floor to make sure of my aim and to steady the gun barrel, but the sacking slid off his hair and I did not have the strength to control this raging beast snorting desperately in its fight against death. Then when that dream faded, I saw myself sailing through the Malaysian archipelago, or on a ship in the Indian Ocean. I had changed my name, I growled out English: my sadness might have been the same, but now I had powerful arms, and a calm gaze; perhaps in Borneo or in Calcutta, or on the far shores of the Red Sea, or beyond the forests of Siberia, in Korea or Manchuria, I could rebuild my life.”

Gone were the dreams of the inventor and the man who discovered electric rays so powerful they could melt steel blocks as if they were blobs of wax, or who presided over the glass-topped tables of the League of Nations.

At other moments, Erdosain was in the grip of terror: he felt he was in shackles — loathsome civilisation had put him in a straitjacket he had no chance of escaping from. He could picture himself in chains, wearing a striped uniform, trudging slowly in a column of prisoners through mounds of snow towards the forests of Ushuaia. The sky above was as white as a sheet of tin.

This vision drove him wild: consumed by a blind rage, he got up and paced from one end of the room to the other, wanting to beat his fists against the walls, or drill holes into them with his bones. He came to a halt in the door jamb, and crossed his arms tightly as the choking sorrow surged up in him once more. Whatever he did was futile: there was one single, irrefutable reality in his life. Him and the others. There was an unbridgeable distance between him and the others, due to their lack of understanding or to his own madness. Either way, he was doomed. And fragments of his past continued to rise before his eyes: the truth was he wanted above all to escape from himself, to quit once and for all the life that encompassed his body and at the same time poisoned it.

Oh! To be able to enter a new world, with broad avenues stretching out in the forests, where the reek of the wild animals was sweet in comparison to the ghastly presence of man.

He paced round and round, trying to exhaust his body, to tire it out utterly, to crush it until it was so weary he would be unable to form even a single idea.

At nine the next morning, Erdosain went to meet Barsut. They left the house without a word. Later on, Erdosain wondered about that strange journey when the other man went towards his fate without so much as a murmur.

Referring to that occasion, he commented:

“I went with Barsut like a condemned man being taken to his place of execution, drained of all strength; my only sensation was a persistent feeling of emptiness that invaded every pore of my body.

“Barsut himself sat there scowling; I could sense that as he rode along with his elbow on the rail he was gathering his rage, ready to unleash it on the invisible enemy instinct told him was concealed in the house at Temperley.”