Roberto Arlt - The Seven Madmen

The warm smiles the two girls gave him made Erdosain feel a little better. Luciana was blonde, and had a long face with a snub nose and a wide thin mouth with bright pink sensual lips, while there was something of the nun about Elena, with her waxy, oval face and long skirts, her plump pale hands.

“Will you eat with us?” the mother wanted to know.

Noting how little there was in the pot, Erdosain replied that he had already eaten.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes … I’ll just have some tea.” They made room for him at the table, and Erdosain sat down between deaf Eustaquio, who went on puzzling out his magazine, and Elena, who shared out the rest of the stew between Emilio and her mother.

Erdosain looked at them with a sense of pity. He had known them for many years. At first the family had been relatively well-to-do, but then a series of disasters had left them in complete misery. One day Erdosain had bumped into Emilio in the street and had paid them a visit. He had not seen them for seven years and was amazed to find them all living in a wretched hovel when before they had had a maid, parlour and living-room. The three women slept in the same room cluttered with old furniture, that they used to eat lunch and supper in; Emilio and Eustaquio slept in the lean-to kitchen with its tin roof. They took on a fantastic variety of jobs to try to make ends meet: selling brochures, homemade ice cream, dressmaking in the case of the two sisters. One winter they were so hard up they stole a telegraph pole and sawed it up in the night. On another occasion, they took a whole row of fence-posts; the scrapes they got into to raise money amused and at the same time saddened Erdosain.

The first time he had seen them in their new surroundings had been a great shock. The Espila family had moved into a ramshackle three-storey building near Chacarita, divided up by corrugated iron sheets. From the outside the tenement looked like a huge ocean liner, with kids swarming all over it as if it were a religious commune. For days afterwards, Erdosain walked around trying to imagine what the Espila family must have to put up with to live in such a state. Later, when he invented the copper rose, he thought that this new hope might lift their spirits, so with part of the money he stole from the Sugar Company he bought a second-hand accumulator, an amp-meter and the other equipment needed to set up a simple galvano-plastics workshop.

He managed to persuade the Espilas to devote their spare time to his experiments, arguing that if they were successful they would all be rich. And he, whose life was so bereft of consolation or hope, he, who had felt so lost for so long, instilled such keen hopes in them that they agreed to give it a try. Elena began to seriously study galvano-plastics, while Eustaquio learnt how to prepare the chemical baths and to join up the amp-meter wires in series or in opposition, and to measure the resistance. Even their mother took part in the experiments, and when they managed to coat a sheet of tin with copper, they were all convinced that all they had to do was to apply the process to roses, for their fortunes to be made.

Erdosain also spoke of making gold lacework, silver curtains, copper veils for hats. He even mentioned the possibility of a metallic necktie, which astonished them all. Or they could make shirts with metallic fronts, cuffs and collars, by taking cloth, soaking it in a saline solution, then putting it through a galvano-plastic bath of copper or nickel. Gath Chaves, Harrods or San Juan would buy the patent. One day Erdosain, who only half-believed in all this, began to think he had gone too far in stimulating these fantasies, because now, despite the fact that they made no money and were almost dying of hunger, they dreamt at the very least of buying a Rolls-Royce and a mansion, which had to be on Alvear Avenue or nowhere at all. As Erdosain bent over his tea-cup, Luciana, blushing slightly, responded to Emilio’s questioning smile with a shake of the head — but he carried on regardless, blurting out with a ferocious lisp because he had hardly a tooth in his head:

“Gueth what … the rothe is a realithy …”

“Yes, we’ve managed to make one, thank God!”

Luciana jumped up, opened a sideboard drawer, and Erdosain smiled with delight. Between the fingers of the fair maiden gleamed the copper rose. The marvellous metal flower spread its vermilion petals through the wretched hovel. The lamp’s quivering flame picked out a red transparent glow, as if the flower contained a botanical life that had been consumed by the acids, but was its very soul.

The deaf brother lifted his nose from his plate of endives. He looked first at his pictures then at the rose, and exclaimed in a booming voice:

“There’s no two ways about it, Erdosain… you’re a genius …”

“Yeth … with thith we’re bound to be rithch …”

“God willing …” said the old lady.

“Don’t be tho doubting, mother!”

“Was it a lot of work?”

With a serious smile, Elena launched into a scientific explanation: “Listen, Remo, the first time round Emilio here gave it too many amperes, so the rose was singed …”

“And the bath didn’t precipitate?”

“No … so we warmed it up a bit …”

“And then for this one, we added some fixing agent …”

“Thath’s right … a bath of fixer … thlowly …”

Remo examined the rose again, marvelling at its perfection. Each red petal was almost transparent, and below the metal film he could just make out the veins of the natural petal, which the fixing agent had turned slightly black. It weighed hardly anything, and Erdosain added:

“How light it is! It weighs less than a five-cent piece …” But then, noticing a yellow stain on the flower’s pistils that spread up into the petals, he went on:

“When you take the flowers out of the chemical bath you need to wash them very carefully. See these yellow lines? They’re from the cyanide in the bath, which is eating away the copper.”

The circle of heads clustered round him, listening in religious awe. He continued: “It forms copper cyanate, and we don’t want that because it attacks the nickel plating. How long did it take?”

“An hour.”

When Erdosain raised his eyes from the flower, he found Luciana staring at him. Her eyes were velvety with a mysterious warmth, and her broad smile revealed gleaming teeth. Puzzled, Erdosain looked at her. Her deaf brother was examining the rose, while all the other heads peered over his shoulder at the yellow streaks of cyanide. Luciana was still staring at him. All at once, Erdosain remembered that the next morning he was to help kill Barsut, and an intense sadness led him to lower his eyes. This gave way almost immediately to a feeling of anger at these deluded people who had no idea of all the suffering and anguish he had been through over the past few months. He stood up and said:

“All right then, I’ll be seeing you.”

Even the deaf Eustaquio looked up in horror. The old woman stood rooted to the spot, her hand outstretched holding a plate she was about to give him. Elena pushed back her chair: “What’s the matter, Remo?”

“But … Erdosain …”

Elena looked him up and down:

“Is something wrong, Remo?”

“Nothing, Elena, believe me …”

“Are you angry?” asked Luciana, her eyes full of their mysterious, sad warmth. “No, not at all … I really wanted to see you all … but now I have to go …”

“Are you sure you’re not angry?”

“No, señora.”

“I understhand … all the worries you hafth …”

“Shut up, you fool!”

Eustaquio decided to abandon his magazine and repeat what he had said earlier. “I warn you, you’ve got to take this seriously, it means you’ll be rich.”