Roberto Arlt - The Seven Madmen

So for a few hours her life took on the delicate, penetrating softness of a vanilla-flavoured cream; she almost felt the melodious sounds of the “yeses” and “noes” in her own throat, to the point where she imagined herself replying to a delightful companion wearing a blue fox fur round her neck.

Her maid’s room was filled with elusive phantoms. Seated in a chair lined with alligator silk, she received friends who had come to say goodbye before a trip to “Paris, France” and talked endlessly about boyfriends. “Her mother wouldn’t allow her to spend her summer holidays with X … because they would be sure to run into S … that gossip who was courting her too assiduously.” Or she saw herself crossing the ocean, which was as flat and calm as the lakes in Palermo Park, sitting in a wicker chair just like the ones she had seen in the photos of the luxury liners, when in reality she was crossing the street to buy groceries at the market. She would be sitting with a Kodak on her lap while a young man would have come, cap in hand, to bow and talk timidly to her.

Her maid’s soul was overflowing with happiness. She thought it must be so wonderful, that if only she had been rich in this way her charity would have been boundless. She pictured herself on a dark winter’s evening scurrying along a miserable street, wrapped in her squirrel coat, to meet an orphan girl, the daughter of a poor blind man. She helped raise her, adopted her as her own daughter, until eventually she came out in society, by now a radiant young beauty, bare shoulders rising out of a frenzy of organdie, while across her clear brow a lock of golden hair perfectly set off the delicate curve of her almond eyes.

Just then a voice called out:

“Hipólita … serve the tea, would you?”

Erdosain suddenly lifted his head and Hipólita said, as if she had been thinking of him:

“You too … you were unhappy too, weren’t you?”

Erdosain took her cold hand and brushed it against his lips.

She went on slowly:

“Sometimes life seems like a bad dream. Now I feel I am yours, the heartbreak from earlier times comes flooding back. Always, everywhere, there is suffering.”

Then she said:

“What do we have to do not to suffer?”

“The problem is, we carry it around inside us. I used to think it was outside, floating in the air … but that was ridiculous: the fact is, unhappiness is within us.”

They fell silent. Hipólita was softly stroking his hair, then all at once took her hand from his head and Erdosain felt it pressed against his lips.

He got up and sat beside her, murmuring:

“Tell me, what have I done for you to make me so happy? Don’t you see you’ve brought heaven within my grasp? I was feeling so bad before …”

“Has no-one ever loved you?”

“I don’t know; but I’d never seen the terrible passion of love. I was twenty when I married, and believed in it as pure spirituality.” He hesitated for a moment, but then got up, blew out the lamp, and sat down on the sofa next to Hipólita. He said:

“Maybe I was a fool. Before we were married, I hadn’t even kissed my wife. I’d never felt the urge to do so, because I mistook the coldness of her feelings for purity … because I thought one should not kiss a decent young woman.”

Hipólita smiled in the darkness. By now, Erdosain was perched on the edge of the sofa, his elbows digging into his knees, his chin cupped in his hands.

A violet lightning flash lit the room fleetingly.

He went on slowly:

“To me, a well brought-up young woman was the true expression of purity. And also … don’t laugh … I was shy … on our wedding night, when she got undressed quite naturally with the light on, I turned my head away, embarrassed … and I got into bed with my trousers on …”

“You did that?” Hipólita’s voice trembled with indignation.

Erdosain began to laugh excitedly:

“Why not?” He started rubbing his hands, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye. “I’ve done that and a lot worse. Not to mention what I will do … ‘The time is at hand,’ your husband used to say. I think he was right. Of course the things I mentioned were from a period in my life when I behaved like an idiot. I’m telling you this so you can be sure that if I did sleep with you I wouldn’t keep my trousers on …”

Hipólita was suddenly anxious. Erdosain kept on glancing at her out of the corner of his eye, rubbing his hands all the time. She said cautiously:

“You must have been ill. Like me when I was a maid. You weren’t in your element.”

“That’s right, not in my element … exactly that. I remember when people called me an idiot.”

“You too?”

“Yes, to my face … I would stand there staring at whoever insulted me, and while all my muscles relaxed and went loose, I asked myself what I had done, at any time in my life, to allow me to bear so much humiliation and cowardice. I suffered so … so much that I often thought of going and offering myself as a servant in some rich man’s house … How could I suffer any more humiliation? So I felt terrified, a ghastly fear of not having any noble goal to my life, no great dream. But now at last I’ve found one … I’ve condemned a man to death … no, don’t stand up … tomorrow, because I’m not doing anything to stop it, a man will be murdered.”

“But that’s not possible!”

“Yes, it is. The man who believes in lies, the one I mentioned to you earlier, needed money to finance his plan. And it will happen, because I want it to. Tomorrow he’s going to give me a cheque to cash. When I do, the condemned man will die.”

“It’s not possible!”

“It is. And what’s more, if I don’t go back, they won’t kill him, because without the money the crime is pointless … it’s 15,000 pesos … I could run off with the money … then his secret society would never happen … and the other man would be saved … d’you follow me? Everything depends on my thief’s honour.”

“My God!”

“I want the experiment to go ahead … isn’t it strange how certain circumstances turn you into a god? For a long time now I’ve been determined to kill myself. If you had said ‘yes’ when I asked you earlier, I would have done it. If you only knew how fine and noble I feel now! Don’t say anything more about the other matter … it’s all settled, and I’m even glad to think of the pit I’m flinging myself into. Can you understand that? And then some day soon … no, it won’t be a day … some night, when I’ve had my fill of all this farce and confusion, I’ll be gone.”

A line creased Hipólita’s forehead. There was no doubt about it: the man was mad. Like the adventuress she was, she was already foreseeing future problems, and said to herself: “you’ll have to be careful where this imbecile is concerned”. Folding her arms across her coat, she asked him:

“But do you have the courage to kill yourself?”

“That’s not the point. It’s not about courage or cowardice. I know deep inside that killing oneself is just the same as going to have a tooth pulled. Once I realise that, I feel perfectly calm. It’s true I had thought of other journeys, other lands, another life perhaps. There’s something in me that wants everything that’s fine and beautiful. I’ve often thought that if … say with those 15,000 pesos I get tomorrow … I could go to the Philippines … or to Ecuador to start a new life, marry a gentle young millionairess … we could sleep our siestas in a hammock under the coconut palms, while black waiters bring us slices of orange … and I would gaze sadly out to sea … d’you know something? … this certainty I have that wherever I go I’ll gaze sadly out to sea … this conviction I can never be happy again … at first it drove me wild … but now I’ve got used to it …”