Roberto Arlt - The Seven Madmen

The rain started up the brief croaking mechanism of the frogs in the ditches, but he, the man of action, pounded by anxiety to the point where he felt all his bones had been flattened until he could not even stand, said to himself: “I, a man of action, am unable to move, stuck in this mechanical measure of time while I am prey to another time I have no control over — a time which makes me drop my guard. Because while there’s no doubt that killing a man is as simple as slitting a lamb’s throat, that’s not how it seems to others — and although they are remote, and my behaviour is a mystery to them, this abnormal time draws them closer, so that I can barely move, as if they were all there in the shadows, spying on me. It must be this subconscious time that’s paralysing me, the subconscious Astrologer who’s keeping his ideas to himself, and leaving me as limp as a squeezed orange when it comes to thinking up the ideas I need. And yet, once Barsut is dead, life will go on as if nothing had happened … and the truth is, nothing will have happened, if only this state of mind passes.”

He lit another match. Arrowheads of moving shadow flickered round the room. Scarcely a minute had gone by. His thoughts were simultaneous, and swept together in this absence of time facts which, if they had taken place in real time, would have needed months if not years to become apparent. So, he had been born forty-three years and seven days earlier, but this past was constantly being swallowed up by the present, which itself was so fleeting it was always the Astrologer of the next minute who was being consumed in the instant. Now his life was pointed towards an action that did not as yet exist but which in a few hours would be a fact; it was as if he were a bow drawn back within mechanical time, a bow whose primed violence conveyed a dim sense of its extraordinary tension to that ordinary clock time.

Despite the fact that he had always said that if he had the chance to kill someone he would not miss the opportunity, he still found himself worrying about this mysterious other time. Then he began to imagine a dictatorship which would keep itself in power through terror imposed by a whole series of executions; picturing all the people shot as horizontal corpses helped him escape from his fears of the moment. He conjured up the image of a tiny man stretched out in the midst of a huge plain, and comparing the length of this dead body with the thousands of kilometres he ruled over, he convinced himself that the life of one man was insignificant.

So the man would rot underground, while he, rid of this human obstacle that measured less than a tiny fraction of the lands he controlled, would go on to further glorious conquests.

Then he thought of Lenin rubbing his hands and telling the Soviet commissars: “This is madness. How can we make a revolution if we don’t shoot anyone?” The Astrologer’s heart leapt for joy. He would make sure his society adopted the same principle. The future founders of races would be instilled with this strict political discipline; the thought gave him fresh impetus. Then it occurred to him that any innovator has to struggle against outmoded ideas that form part of his own make-up, and he saw that all his current hesitations were a result of a conflict between principles yet to impose themselves and those already established.

Time slipped through his fingers, clasped together in thought.

Today’s murderer would be tomorrow’s conqueror, but in the meantime he had to put up with the sordid resistance of a present mixed with all it contained of the past. He stood up, feeling angry. It was still raining. He went out to the front steps, and stood there staring out into the darkened garden, where the slow, heavy rainfall was making the trees and shrubs quiver. It seemed as though the dark shadows were a monster panting heavily in the black night. The soaked earth had turned a dark ochre colour … and there he was, a strong man in the night, the driving force for great events, and yet no phantom rose out of the darkness to confirm his presence. He wondered whether men in earlier times had been so indecisive, or if they had marched off to their destinies happy in the knowledge that death was sufficient armour for their struggle. Was death that important, though? He told himself that as a philosophical being all that could possibly interest him was the species, not the individual; but at the same time his feelings were assailing him with doubts, splitting the time he needed into two against his will.

A flash of lightning drove blue distances between the mountainous banks of cloud. Soaking and dishevelled, the Man Who Saw the Midwife was standing beside the steps.

“Oh, it’s you!” the Astrologer gasped.

“Yes, I wanted to ask how you interpret the verse from the Bible that says: ‘the heaven of God’. Surely that means there are other heavens not of God’s making …”

“Whose are they then?”

“I mean, it could be that there are heavens where God does not exist. Because the verse goes on: ‘And the new Jerusalem will descend.’ The new Jerusalem? Does that mean the new church?”

The Astrologer thought for a moment. He wasn’t interested in the matter, but he knew that to keep his prestige in the other man’s eyes he would have to say something, so he replied:

“We, the enlightened ones, secretly know that the new Jerusalem is the new church. That’s why Swedenborg says: ‘Since our Lord cannot show himself in person, and given that he has announced that he will come and establish a new church, it follows that he will do this by means of a man, who not only will receive the doctrine of this church but will publish it in the press …’ But why from just this one reference do you assume that there must be various heavens?”

Bromberg came and sheltered under the porch. He stared out at the wet, panting darkness and said:

“Because heavens are something you feel, like love.”

The Astrologer stared at him in surprise, but the Jew went on:

“It’s like love. How can you deny love if it’s inside you and you feel the angels making it stronger all the time? It’s the same with the four heavens. Everything in the Bible is a mystery, of course, otherwise the book would be completely absurd. The other night I was reading the Book of Revelation. I was sad at the thought we had to kill Barsut, and wondered if it was permitted to shed human blood.”

“There’s no blood shed when you strangle someone,” the Astrologer observed wryly.

“And when I got to the part speaking of the ‘heaven of God’ I understood why mankind was so sad. God’s heaven had been denied it by the church of darkness … and that’s why men have sinned so much.”

In the darkness, Bromberg’s childish voice sounded as mournful as if he were lamenting being cast out of the true heaven. The Astrologer put in:

“The winged man who speaks to me in my dreams has told me that the end of the church of darkness is nigh …”

“That must be true … because hell is growing day by day. So few people are saved that compared to hell, heaven is the size of a grain of sand next to the ocean. Hell grows year after year, and the church of darkness which should have saved mankind only swells its numbers; so hell grows and grows, with no chance of ever shrinking. And the angels look on in fear at the church of darkness and the fiery hell that is swollen like the belly of a dropsy victim.”

The Astrologer answered, in a lofty tone:

“That’s why the winged man told me, ‘Go, holy man, to enlighten mankind and preach the good news. Drive out the antiChrist and reveal the secrets of the new Jerusalem to Bromberg’” — at this, he seized his companion by the arm and said — “Don’t you remember when your spirit talked to angels and you served them white bread at the roadside, then sat them on your doorstep and washed their feet?”