Roberto Arlt - The Seven Madmen

Erdosain went on:

“From time to time it occurred to me how strange it would have been if the other passengers had known that those two men sitting hunched on the leather padding of their seats were a would-be assassin and his victim.

“And yet everything went on as before. The sun shone over the fields: we’d left the meat-packing plants behind, the tallow and soap factories, the glass and iron foundries, the stockyards with cattle sniffing at the posts, the avenues still to be properly surfaced, strewn with rubble and full of ruts. And then beyond Lantis we came on the awful spectacle of Remedios de Escalada, with its ghastly redbrick roundhouses and their blackened openings, where locomotives shunted to and fro under the arches, while in the distance, between the tracks, gangs of poor wretches were shovelling ballast or hauling railway sleepers.”

Further on still, in among a straggling vegetation of plane trees choked by soot and petrol fumes, stood a diagonal line of red cottages where the railway company employees lived, with their tiny gardens, shutters grimy from the smoke, paths of cinders and ashes.

Barsut was lost in his thoughts. Erdosain, to put it precisely, let himself be. If at that very moment he had seen a train hurtling towards them on the same track, he would not have so much as blinked, so little did he care whether he lived or died.

So the journey passed. When they drew into Temperley, Barsut shook himself as if waking with a start from a distressing dream. All he said was: “Which way now?”

Erdosain stretched out his arm, pointing vaguely in the direction they had to go. Barsut set off. They walked in silence down the streets leading to the Astrologer’s house. The soft blue of morning fell on the walls of the diagonal streets.

Shoots, bushes and trees of every shade of green created a jumbled architecture of vegetation, rounded off above their heads by swaying plumes, and crisscrossed by a maze of red woodstems. The gentle breeze seemed to make these fantastic chance constructions of botany float in a golden aura that shone as clear as a concave mirror, and held beneath its dome all the heady perfume of the earth.

“Beautiful morning,” Barsut said.

That was all either of them said until they were outside the property. “This is it,” said Erdosain. Barsut leapt back and, with a piercing look, asked him: “And how do you know this is it, if there’s no number?”

Commenting on this incident later, Erdosain remarked: “It just shows there must be an instinct for crime, one which allows you to lie on the spot without fear of contradicting yourself, similar to the instinct for self-preservation which, just when everything seems lost, enables you to discover means of escape you had never dreamt of.”

Erdosain looked up and said so calmly that he was only later astounded at it: “Because I came snooping round here yesterday. I wanted to see if I could spot Elsa.”

Barsut eyed him suspiciously.

He could have sworn Erdosain was lying, 3but his pride would not allow him to back out, so while Erdosain called, he clapped his hands loudly.

In shirtsleeves, and wearing a straw hat whose broad brim covered half his face, the Man Who Saw the Midwife came out to the red-painted wire gate.

“Is the lady of the house in?” Barsut asked.

Making no reply, Bromberg slid back the bolt and opened the gate: then he set off down a winding path that led to the house through a eucalyptus grove. The two men followed. All at once a voice called out:

“Where are you going?”

Barsut looked round. As he did so, Bromberg turned on his heel, and his arm flashed out as if a spring in it had suddenly snapped.

Barsut’s mouth dropped open in a desperate search for air as he doubled up in pain. He tried to clasp his stomach with his hands, but Bromberg’s arm arched forward again, and a right cross to the jaw rattled Barsut’s teeth.

He fell to the ground and lay slumped so still he might have been dead, with his legs drawn up under him and his lips slightly parted.

The Astrologer appeared, while a serious, almost sad-looking Bromberg leant over the fallen man.

The Astrologer grabbed Barsut’s arms, his hands hooking like claws under the armpits, and the two of them dragged him off to the abandoned coachhouse. As Erdosain rolled back the ochre-painted door, a smell of dry hay and a swarm of insects poured from the black depths within. They put the unconscious Barsut in a horsebox: a heavy chain was secured to one of the posts by a padlock.

The Astrologer wrapped one end of the chain around Barsut’s ankle, knotted the links several times, and fastened it with the padlock, which creaked as he opened it. Straightening up from their prisoner, Erdosain looked at the Astrologer and said:

“Too bad — he hasn’t got his cheque book on him.”

It was ten in the morning. The Astrologer glanced at his watch and said: “I’ve got time to catch the express that gets to Rosario at six. Will you come with me to Retiro?”

“You’re going to Rosario?”

“Yes, I’ve got to send the telegram to his landlady, remember? Do you have her address?”

“Yes, I’ve got all the details.”

“It’s the best way to get hold of Barsut’s stuff without arousing suspicion. Does he keep everything at the rooming-house?”

“Yes, the trunk and two cases.”

“Fine. Now let’s cut the conversation and get down to business. By six this evening I’ll be in Rosario, I’ll send the cable to the landlady, and you call round there tomorrow morning around ten. Play the innocent and ask whether Barsut has reached Rosario yet, because you haven’t heard from him and you know he’s been offered an important job, and so on. How does that sound?”

“Fine.”

At twelve o’clock, the Astrologer was boarding the train.

Footnotes

1Referring to those days, Erdosain told me: “I thought I’d been given a soul to enjoy the beauties of this world: moonlight shimmering behind the orange-hued crest of a nighttime cloud, a drop of dew quivering on the tip of a rose. When I was a child, I even believed life held something sublime and beautiful just for me. But as I came to discover other people’s lives, I found everyone of them was bored, as if they lived in a land where the rain never ceased, and left beams of water deep in their eyes which distorted their vision of the world. Then I understood that souls moved around on this earth like fish trapped in an aquarium. Life, real and wonderful, was beyond the weed-green glass walls: there, everything would be different, full of energy and variety, and the new beings of this more perfect creation would soar through a balmy atmosphere.” And he would add: “It’s hopeless, I have to escape from this world.”

2One day I hope to write the account of how Erdosain spent those ten days. It is impossible for me to do so now, because it would require another book as long as this present one. Bear in mind that this study is confined to only three days of the protagonists’ actions, and that despite the space I have given myself, I can do no more than hint at their subjective states. The action will continue in another volume, to be entitled The Flamethrowers . Erdosain supplied me with copious information for that second part, which will contain such extraordinary episodes as: “The Blind Prostitute”, “Elsa’s Adventures”, “The Man Who Walked with Jesus”, and “The Poison Gas Factory”.

3In a conversation Barsut had with the Astrologer, he said that the night before the abduction he had thought it might be an ambush to kill him, but that at the last moment a sense of pride kept him from backing out.