Roberto Arlt - The Seven Madmen

“Yes.”

Erdosain looked up and examined the false officer’s pallid face, as he stared with shifty eyes at a white butterfly fluttering on a patch of green. Erdosain could not help wondering how on earth the Astrologer found creatures like him to join his schemes. It seemed the Astrologer had read his thoughts:

“What about you, Erdosain, how much will you need to set up your galvano-plastics laboratory?”

“A thousand pesos.”

“Oh, so you’re the inventor of the copper rose, are you?” the Major asked.

“Yes.”

“Congratulations. I think it will be a great success. Of course, you’ll have to galvanise the flowers on a large scale.”

“That’s right. I’d thought of doing photography in the same laboratory, to save on the costs.”

“That’s for you to decide.”

“There’s also a trained friend of mine who can help with the galvano-plastics” — when he said that, Erdosain was thinking of the Espila family, who were also possible candidates for the secret society — but the Astrologer interrupted his thoughts by announcing:

“Now the Gold Prospector will give us news of the region where we’re thinking of setting up our camp.” At this, the other man stood up. Erdosain was amazed by his appearance. According to the idea the cinema had given him of this kind of character, he had imagined a giant of a man with a bushy blond beard, who stank of drink. The reality was very different.

The Gold Prospector was a young man of about his own age, with a very pale skin drawn tightly over flat cheekbones, and lively jet-black eyes. By contrast, his enormous barrel chest seemed to belong to someone twice his size. He had spindly bow legs. A revolver butt stuck out between his leather belt and his trousers. His voice was level and clear, but everything about him was ill-assorted, as if he had been put together from bits and pieces which belonged to different kinds of men. His face was that of a cardsharp, used to squinting at his hand; he had a boxer’s chest and the legs of a jockey. And his past was just as odd a jumble as his physique. Up to the age of fourteen he had lived in the countryside, until he killed a thief, and then years later fear of tuberculosis also sent him back to the pampas, where he had spent days and nights galloping incredible distances. Erdosain took an immediate liking to him.

The Gold Prospector unwrapped some rocks. They were chunks of gold-bearing quartz. He said gravely: “And I have with me the analysis certificate from the Department of Mines.”

The stones passed quickly from hand to hand. They all feasted their eyes on them greedily, as their fingers gently stroked the flakes and veins of gold in the quartz. The Astrologer slowly rolled himself a cigarette, all the while observing their faces as the shock of what they were seeing sank in, and temptation gripped their features. The Gold Prospector sat down again and said to them all nonchalantly:

“There is a lot of gold down there which nobody knows about. It’s near Campo Chileno. At first I was in Esquel … in the abandoned workings of a mine … then I went on to Arroyo Pescado … I walked and walked … I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but down there you can travel for days on end without seeming to get anywhere. Anyway, finally I reached Campo Chileno. It’s forest, pure forest for thousands of square kilometres. I was there with the Mask, a prostitute from Esquel who knew a way in because she had been there before with a miner who got killed when they returned to town. People down there kill each other for no reason at all. The Mask was riddled with syphilis and didn’t make it out of the woods. How well I remember her! She had been roaming around down there for more than twenty years. From Puerto Madryn she went to Comodoro, and from there to Trelew, and then Esquel. She knew absolutely all the gold prospectors. First the two of us headed for Arroyo Pescado … that’s forty leagues south of Esquel … but all I found were a few traces of alluvial gold … then we travelled for two weeks through the hills on horseback until we reached Campo Chileno.”

The Gold Prospector narrated all his adventures, his voice cool and steady as he concentrated on the details of his southern odyssey. Listening intently, Erdosain found himself transported into the company of the Mask, crossing immense ravines in the cold and dark, with the purple triangular mass of mountain upon mountain filling the horizon. Then the peaks disappeared as they entered eternal forests of trees with red trunks and dark green foliage; they pushed ever onwards, numbed by the vast smooth expanses of sky like a desert of blue ice.

Oblivious to the astonishment his words had caused, the Gold Prospector went on with the story of his months of adventure, only occasionally gesturing to emphasise a point. All the others were listening with rapt attention.

“Finally, one morning, I reached the black gulch. This was a circle of jagged black basalt rocks, a deep well crested with dark stalagmites, high above which the blue of the sky seemed infinitely sad. A few lone birds strayed over the stone crags that lay in the shadow of even higher peaks … and at the bottom of this hollow was a lake of golden water fed by the silver rivulets of waterfalls that threaded their way down through the undergrowth.”

The Gold Prospector had never before been in such sinister surroundings. Astonished, he halted to gaze at the bronze depths of the lake reflecting the black jutting rocks above. Speckled with green stains and long streaks of malachite, the rock walls fell sheer into the water, in which also shone his pale, bearded face with the immense sky behind it.

Although from its colour the Gold Prospector immediately suspected the water might be full of gold, he dismissed the idea as absurd, because he had never read or heard of anything of the sort. He went on:

“But after I got out of the forest, I was in Rawson one day in a dentist’s waiting-room, and I started to leaf through a copy of a magazine called ‘Medical Weekly’ that I saw on one of the tables there. It was then I made the discovery. I opened the magazine at random, and on the first page I came to, I found an article called: ‘Gold water, or colloidal gold in the treatment of lupus erythematosus’. I started to read it, and discovered that gold can be suspended in water in microscopic particles … and that what was a new phenomenon for me had in fact been discovered by the alchemists, who had called it ‘gold water’. They obtained it by the simplest method imaginable: plunging a white-hot piece of gold into rainwater. I immediately remembered the lake, which I had thought was that colour because of the vegetation in it. Without realising it, I had been standing beside a lake of colloidal gold, formed over countless centuries as water from the cascades passed over veins in the rocks. See what ignorance does for you? If chance had not put that magazine article in my hands, I would never have known the importance of my discovery.”

“So did you go back there?” the Major wanted to know.

“Naturally. I went back only eight months ago, when I wrote to the Astrologer … but I made a mistake … I have to study how to extract the gold … it’s all in seams there … we’d have to work hard, and get divers’ suits, because it’s the lake bottom that is golden, the water itself is colourless.”

Haffner said: “What you say is fascinating. Even if there’s no gold, it sounds better than this lousy city.”

The Major added: “If we set up a camp in Campo Chileno, we’ll need a telegraph office.”

Erdosain replied: “If that’s so, we can install a portable facility with a wavelength of between forty-five and eighty metres. It would cost 500 pesos and have a range of 3,000 kilometres.”