Roberto Arlt - The Seven Madmen

“So why carry on with the experiment?”

“Why? I feel I still haven’t got to the bottom of myself … this crime is my last hope … and the Astrologer knows that, because when I asked him if he wasn’t afraid I would run off with the money, he answered: ‘No, not for the moment, no … you more than anyone need this to be able to escape from your anxiety …’ So you can see how caught up in it I am.”

“I’d never have dreamt it. They’re going to kill him in Temperley?”

“Yes. And yet … Who knows? Anguish! Have you any idea what that means? To feel that anguish has made you rotten to the core like syphilis? Listen, I’ll tell you something that happened four months ago: I was waiting for the train in a country station. It was going to arrive in forty-five minutes, so I walked across to the town square. A few minutes later, a young girl about nine years old came to sit beside me on the bench. We began to talk … she was wearing a white schoolgirl’s apron … she lived in one of the houses opposite … Slowly, unable to control myself, I turned the conversation to an obscene topic … but cautiously, feeling my way. I was obsessed with an appalling sense of curiosity. Hypnotised by some kind of instinct, the child listened to me trembling … while slowly my face took on a criminal look … so that back in the signalmen’s box two railway workers began to watch me closely … but still I revealed to her the mystery of sex, and encouraged her to lead her friends astray …”

Hipólita squeezed her temples between her fingers.

“You’re nothing but a monster!”

“Now I’ve reached the end. My life is a disaster … I have to create the foulest messes for myself … to commit sin. Don’t look at me. Perhaps … listen: people have forgotten the meaning of the word sin … sin is not simply a mistake … I’ve come to realise that sin is an act by which a man breaks the slender thread still linking him to God. It means God is denied him for ever. Even if after committing the sin that man’s life were purer than the purest saint’s, he could never reach God again. And I’m going to break the slender thread that connected me to divine charity. I know it. As from tomorrow, I’ll be a monster on the face of this earth … just picture it, a little creature … a foetus … a foetus that was somehow living outside its mother’s womb … unable to grow … covered in hair … tiny … with no fingernails … walking among men without being one itself … its fragility horrifying all those around it … and yet there’s no force on earth capable of restoring it to the lost womb. That’s what’s going to happen to me tomorrow. I’ll cut myself off from God for ever. I’ll be alone on this earth. My soul and me, just the two of us. With infinity in front of us. Alone for ever. Night and day … under a yellow sun. Can you picture it? Infinity growing all the time … a yellow sun up above, and the soul which cut itself off from divine charity wandering alone and blind under that yellow sun.”

The floor shook with a dull thud, and all of a sudden something extraordinary happened. Aghast, Erdosain fell silent. Hipólita was kneeling at his feet … She took his hand and smothered it with kisses. In the darkness she exclaimed:

“Let me … let me kiss your poor hands. You’re the unhappiest man on earth.”

“Get up, Hipólita. It’s you who have suffered so much! Get up, please, I beg you …”

“No, I want to kiss your feet” — he could feel her arm, clutching his legs — “You’re the most unfortunate man on earth! How you’ve suffered, dear God! How noble you are … how noble your soul is!” 4

With infinite tenderness, Erdosain lifted her up. Overwhelmed by a sense of infinite pity, he drew her close to him, smoothed the hair on her brow, and said:

“If you only knew how easy it will be for me to die. Just like a game.”

“What a noble soul you have!”

“D’you have a fever?”

“Poor boy!”

“Why? We’re like gods. Come and sit beside me. Is that all right? Look, little sister, all my suffering has been erased by your words. We can live a little longer …”

“Like an engaged couple …”

“And when the great day arrives, you’ll be my bride.”

“I love you so much! … What a noble soul!”

“Then we’ll leave all this behind.”

They said nothing more. Hipólita’s head lay across his chest. It was almost dawn. Erdosain stretched her tired body out on the sofa … she gave an exhausted smile; then he sat down on the rug, leant his head against the edge of the sofa, curled up and fell asleep.

That same night, reclining on his sofa in his darkened study with his arms folded and his hat down over his eyes, the Astrologer was pondering the problems facing him. He could dimly hear the rain beating on the window-panes, but his mind was fixed on his many plans. And something strange was happening to him.

As the moment for the crime drew near, he felt a second, personal sense of time growing within the space of normal time. So he felt he existed in both of these times. One was that of all the normal states of life, the other was fleeting but heavy, part of his heartbeats, slipping through his fingers locked in meditation like water out of a reed basket.

So the Astrologer, held within clock time, could feel this other accelerated time speed endlessly through his brain like a cinema film that has slipped and spools out its images, in a blurred, exhausting way that exasperated him, because before he could clearly grasp an idea it had vanished and been replaced by another. So much so that when he lit a match to look at his watch, he found only a few minutes had passed, whereas he had thought that those mechanical minutes, speeded up by his anxiety, had been so long they were immeasurable.

This feeling kept him on the look-out in the dark. He understood that any mistake he made in his current state could be fatal to him later on.

He was not so much concerned about Barsut’s murder as about the precautions needed to keep it from assuming too much importance. And even though he was supposed to be working out an alibi, he found it difficult. He felt that the person sitting there in the dark was not him, but his double, someone forged by emotion to his exact same shape, with the same oblong features, folded arms, and hat down over his eyes. But he found himself unable to fathom the thoughts of this double so closely linked to himself, yet so distant from his understanding. At these moments he felt that this sensation of existing had taken over from his mere bodily existence. When he came to explain this feeling later on, he said it was the awareness of the different time-scale that emotions moved in, set inside that other clock time — like people who say: “that minute seemed like a century”.

This inability to think was important because he had to take a man’s life, to stop the circulation of his five litres of blood, to turn all his cells cold, rubbing him out of life like a blot from a piece of paper, leaving no trace behind. Since the Astrologer could not rid himself of such a weighty problem, he sensed that his physical being was part of mechanical, clock time, whereas his double was located in the slowed-down speed of this other time that no clock could measure — and that this double was also deep in thought, in not just an enigmatic but a truly mysterious way, busy with who knew what alibis that would later take the thinking man completely by surprise.

The certainty that the impending crime had transformed him into a twin mechanism with two such different rhythms and pauses left him limp and sombre in the darkness. A terrible weariness overwhelmed his muscles, his powerful limbs, the joints of his bones.