by Roberto Arlt
"Easy as slicing a bale of cotton with a sword," Erdosain would later say.
Barsut had no idea that at that very moment Erdosain had just pronounced a sentence of death on him. Later, explaining to me how the notion came to flower inside him, Erdosain told me this:
"Have you ever seen a general in battle? ... But to make it easier to grasp my point, I'll tell you like an inventor would. For a while you've been looking for the solution to some problem. See, you know you have the clue to it somewhere inside you, only you can't get at it, it's hidden under layers of mystery. One day, when you least expect it, suddenly the plan, the complete finished machine, flashes before your eyes, stunning, because it's all there, perfect. It's like a miracle! Think of a general in battle ... everything's lost, only then, all at once, clear, exact, he gets this flash that solves everything in a way he'd never dreamed he could do it, and still, he'd had it all the time within his reach, someplace inside him. At just that moment, I saw how I had to have Barsut killed, and sitting right across from me spouting useless words, he didn't imagine me, with my swollen lips, aching nose, holding in this terrific joy, a wild flash like discovering something as inevitable as a law of mathematics. Maybe we have an inner mathematics whose terrible laws are less inviolable than the ones that govern the workings of numbers and lines.{1}
"Because it's funny. My gums were still bleeding from his beating, which battered into my mind as if by hydraulic power the definitive plans for his death. See? A plan is made out of three general lines, three regular straight lines is all it takes. My joy came bubbling up wildly over the new contours of that freshly minted shape, three lines which for me were: kidnapping Barsut, having him killed, and using his money to set up the secret clan the Astrologer wanted. See? The whole crime just came to me like that, while he was going on gloomily about how we were two damned souls. The whole plan was there, inside me, like they stamped it into iron under thousands of pounds of pressure.
"Ah! How can I explain it to you? All at once I forgot everything, sealed in a frozen block of thought, full of joy, like the dawn coming to some night creature, ending his weariness with the morning after an exhausting night. See? To have Barsut killed by somebody who absolutely had to have the funding for a brilliant scheme. And that new dawn was throbbing inside me, so perfect, so distinct, that often, since then, I've wondered what secret could lie in a man's soul that can come to show him new horizons and awaken him to new sensations that amaze even him by leaping out of sheer illogic."
In the course of this story, I forgot to say that when Erdosain got enthusiastic, he would send a lot of words orbiting around his central idea. He had to try every possible way of expressing it, and a slow frenzy laid hold of him as he spoke and made him see himself as a truly extraordinary man and not some wretch. I had not the slightest doubt he was telling me the truth. What puzzled me was a question I kept wondering about: where did he get the energy to carry on like that for so long? He was always absorbed in self-examination, analyzing everything that went on inside him, as if the sum of all those details could convince him he was really alive. Of this I am certain. Not even a dead man who could somehow talk would have talked more than he did, just to keep up his own belief he was not dead.
Barsut, unaware what had happened inside Erdosain, went on:
"Ah! You don't know her ... you never knew her. Look, listen to what I'm going to tell you. One afternoon I went to see her. I knew you weren't home, I wanted to be with her, only to see her, even if that was all. I got there all sweaty, I walked I don't know how many blocks in the sun before I worked up to doing it."
"Just like me, in the sun," thought Erdosain.
"And even though I was too poor, you know that, to take a cab, and even when I asked after you, she said to me, 'Sorry, I won't let you in because my husband's not in the house.' See what a bitch?"
Erdosain thought:
"There's still a train to Temperley."
Barsut continued:
"Now me, I could see what a loser you were, so I wondered: what did Elsa see in that man to fall in love with him?"
In a perfectly calm voice Erdosain asked him:
"Does it show on my face I'm a loser?"
Barsut looked up in surprise. For a moment he kept his translucent greenish eyes fixed on Erdosain. The splotch of light falling on him and Erdosain gave everything a dreamlike distance. And Barsut felt as spectral as the other man, because, moving his head painfully, as if all the muscles in his neck had suddenly gone into spasm, he answered:
"No, when I look good and long you're more a guy who has one big obsession ... but who knows what it is."
Erdosain replied:
"You're a real psychologist. Naturally, I don't yet know what that obsession is but, it's funny, the last thing I thought was that you'd go after my wife ... and you are so calm telling me this."
"You can't deny I'm being open with you."
"No."
"Besides, I wanted to humiliate her ... not get her to run off with me, what for? I knew she'd never love me."
"How did you figure that?"
"That's something I don't know. You just do certain things you can't explain. Because I kept on seeing you and you me even when we couldn't stomach each other. I kept coming because my being there made you suffer and me suffer. Every day, I'd tell myself: 'I won't go anymore ... I won't go anymore ...' But soon as it was time, I'd be all jittery. It was like they were calling me from someplace and I'd get dressed quick ... I'd come over—"
Erdosain suddenly had a weird idea and said:
"Off the subject, you know—I don't know if you know, but this morning at the Sugar Company they told me about the anonymous letter. You're the only one to blame, I think you've pretty well admitted it, for all this happening to me, so you have to get me the money to cover. Where am I going to get that much?"
Barsut sat bolt upright in amazement.
"Hey, what's this? Here I'm cuckolded, messed up, Elsa leaves, and I end up acting like a bastard just now, and I'm supposed to go get the money for you? Are you crazy? What's in it for me if I give you six hundred pesos?"
"And seven cents ..."
Erdosain got up.
"That's your last word?"
"But lookit, how is it I..."
"All right, kid. Hold on now. So would you kindly go now, because I want to get some sleep."
"You don't want us to go out someplace?"
"I'm tired. Just leave me alone."
Barsut hesitated. Then, getting up and grabbing his hat brim, he made a clumsy exit.
Erdosain heard the door shut behind him, waited a minute, scowling, found a rail schedule in his pocket, checked the schedule, then washed up again and combed his hair in the mirror. He had a purple lip, a red splotch by his nose and another around one temple at the hairline.
He peered around looking for something, saw the gun lying there, picked it up and left. But he had left the light on, so he came back and switched off the lamp. Everything was dark as if the tail end of some light had flashed before his eyes and was gone. For the second time that day he was going to the Astrologer's.
"To Be" by Committing a Crime
One patch of the Temperley platform was lit feebly by the light falling from one door of the telegraph office. Erdosain sat on a bench next to the rail switches in the darkness. He was cold and possibly feverish. Besides, he had a feeling as if his criminal plot were an extension of his body, like a creature of darkness he could thrust out into the light. A red disk glowed at the end of the signal arm; farther on the darkness was studded with other red and green circles and the rails, galvanoplastically fused with the lights, ran off in blue or red arcs into the darkness. Then there was silence; the chain stopping clanking against the pulleys and the noise of metal against stone ended.
He sat submerged in a half sleep.
"What am I doing here? Why do I stay here? Is it true I want to kill him? Or is it really that I want to get up the will to feel like wanti
ng to kill him? Is that the necessary thing? By now, she's romping in bed with him. But what's that to me? Before, when I knew she was home alone, and I was out having a cup of coffee, I felt bad about her. I felt bad knowing she was unhappy with me. They must have dropped off to sleep, her head on his chest. Oh, God! This is what they call life? To be lost, lost for all time! But can I really be who I am? Or am I somebody else? Weird! Lost in weirdness! That's my situation. And his, too! From a distance I see him for what he is, a rat, a loser. He almost broke my nose. But can you believe it! So now it turns out he was the one who was cuckolded and messed up, not me! Me! ... Really, life is slapstick! Only, still, there's something serious about it. Why does it revolt me to even be near him?"
Shadows intermingled in front of the yellow glass panes of the telegraph office.
"To kill him or not to kill him? What's that to me? Does killing him matter to me? So to me it's all the same if he lives or not. Still, I want to work up the will to kill him. If a god appeared to me right now and asked: Do you want the power to destroy mankind? Would I destroy it? No, I would not destroy it. Because being able to do it would make it something totally uninteresting. Besides, what would I do alone on earth? Watch dynamos rust away in workshops and horseback riders' skeletons fall apart in the heat? It's true he slapped me around, but, what's it to me? What a crew! What a zoo! The Captain, Elsa, Barsut, the Astrologer, the Pig-Headed Man, the Ruffian, Ergueta. What a crew! Where did they ever get so many monsters? And me, out of whack, I'm not who I am, and yet I need to do something to be aware of my own existence, to affirm it. Just that, to affirm it. Because I'm like a dead man, I don't exist for the Captain or for Elsa, or Barsut. If they want, they can put me in jail, Barsut can beat me up again, Elsa can run off with another guy and me standing right there, the Captain can run off with her all over again. I'm antilife for all of them. I'm like nonbeing. A man is not like action, and so he doesn't exist. Or does he exist despite not being? He is and he is not. Take those men over there. They must have wives, children, homes. Maybe they're poor wretches. But if somebody tried to come into their homes, get one penny away from them or steal their wives, they'd be tigers. And so, why haven't I put up a fight? Who can answer me that? I myself don't know. I know I exist like that, like antiexisting. And when I tell myself all this, I'm not sad, only my soul falls silent and my head goes empty. Then, after that silence and emptiness, curiosity about the murder plot creeps up out of my heart. Just that. I'm not crazy, since I know how to think, to reason. But this curiosity about the murder comes creeping up from my heart, a curiosity that brings me utter sorrow, the sorrow of curiosity. Or, the demon of curiosity. To find out what I am by committing a crime. That, just precisely. To see what happens in my conscience, my feelings as I commit a crime.
"Yet, these words can't make me feel the crime any more than a telegram about a disaster in China can make me feel the disaster. It's like I wasn't the one planning the crime, somebody else was doing it. Somebody else like me, a man, only with nothing to him, a shadow of a man, an image on a screen. He has a shape, he moves around, he seems to exist, to suffer, but still, he's only a shadow. He has no life. God only knows if this makes any sense. Okay: what all would the shadow-man do? The shadow-man would watch the crime happening, but not feel the impact, because he has nothing for its force to strike against. He's a shadow. I see the crime, too, but don't feel the impact. This must be a new theory. What would a criminal-court judge say to all this? Would he grasp that I really mean it sincerely? But do those people believe in sincerity? Outside of me, of the limits of my body, people go by, but they could no more imagine what my life is like than they could living on the earth and moon both at once. I'm nothing in everyone's eyes. But still, if tomorrow I throw a bomb or murder Barsut, suddenly I'm everything, the man who exists, the man for whom generations of criminologists have prepared punishments, jails, and theories. I, who am nothing, will start up the whole terrible machinery of police, secretaries, reporters, lawyers, prosecutors, jailers, paddywagons, and nobody will see me as a loser, instead I'll be the antisocial man, the enemy who must be kept apart from society. That's really weird! And yet, only crime can affirm my existence, just as evil is all that affirms the presence of man on earth. And I'd be the one and only Erdosain, the genuine one, who is and ever shall be. Really, this is all so weird. Still, despite everything, there is darkness and mankind's soul is sad. Infinitely sad. But that can't be how life is. If tomorrow I figured out why that can't be how life is, I'd pinch myself and disinflate like a balloon spewing out all these lies I'm filled with, and, from what I seem to be now, a brand-new man would emerge, as strong as one of the primal gods who created all things. But I'm off on a tangent. Should I go to the Astrologer or not? What will he say when he sees me back again? Like me, he's a mystery to himself. That's the truth. He has about as much idea where he's going as I do. The secret organization. The whole thing for him is just exactly that: secret organization. Another case of demonic possession. What a zoo! Barsut, Ergueta, the Ruffian, me ... If they tried to, they couldn't get such perfect weirdos. And to top it all, that pregnant blind girl! What an animal!"
The guard passed by Erdosain a second time. Remo realized he was attracting the man's attention so, getting up, he headed for the Astrologer's place. There was no moon. The arc lights shone amid the branches arching over the crossings. Piano music wafted from one house, and as he walked along, his heart shriveled smaller yet, reacting to the anguish that hit him at the sight of the happiness he imagined behind the walls of those houses nestled coolly under shade trees with an automobile in front of the garage.
The Proposal
The Astrologer was getting ready for bed when he heard steps on the path to his house. Since the dog did not bark, he opened the door part way. A parallelogram of light sliced through the dark up to the tops of the pomegranate trees, and now he saw Erdosain coming through that yellow box with light hitting him full in the face.
"Strange!" thought the Astrologer. "I never noticed the kid wears a straw hat! What can he want?" And after checking to see his revolver was tucked in his waistband (it was instinct with him by now), he unlocked the door and Erdosain came in.
"I thought you were in bed."
"Come in."
Erdosain went into the study. The map of the United States was still there with the black flags stuck into the areas the Ku Klux Klan controlled. The Astrologer had been drawing up a horoscope, because the box of compasses lay open on a table. The wind coming through the window grate stirred the papers, and Erdosain, after waiting for his host to put some papers in the cabinet, sat down with his back to the garden.
From his chair, he surveyed the man's broad face, the twisted nose rising from a troubled forehead, the ear doubled back on itself, the massive chest under the black, dull clothing, a copper chain across the jacket, the steel ring with a violet stone on the hand with its gnarled fingers and leathery skin. Now that the man had his hat off his hair turned out to be kinky, tangled, and short. He stretched out his legs and supported his body on the chair arms. With his unshined boots he looked like a mountain man, maybe a gold prospector. "Isn't that what prospectors look like in Patagonia?" wondered Erdosain, and, not grasping how his thoughts had wandered to that, he sat gazing at the map of the United States and repeating to himself the words he had heard the Astrologer say that very afternoon as he pointed out the states to the Ruffian.
"The Ku Klux Klan is strong in Texas, Ohio, Indianapolis, Oklahoma, Oregon..."
"What's that you say there, friend? ... What?"
"Ah, right! ... I came to see you ..."
"I was just going to bed. I'd been working out some idiot's horoscope—"
"If I'm in your way I'll go—"
"No, stay. Did you get in some new mess? What's it now?"
"A lot of stuff. Tell me, if you can—You won't be shocked by my question?—If, to set up your secret society, that is, to get the twenty thousand pesos you need, if to get twenty th
ousand pesos you had to kill somebody, what would you do?"
The Astrologer sat bolt upright in his chair, his body stiffened into right angles by surprise. And even though his head shot up with the impact of the ideas Erdosain gave him, it seemed to sit terribly heavy on his shoulders. He wrung his hands and peered into Remo's face.
"Why do you ask me that?"
"Because I have just the guy with that twenty thousand pesos. We can kidnap him, and, if he won't sign a check for us, torture him."
The Astrologer frowned. Faced with a proposal so fraught with enigmas, he grew more perplexed and began twisting the ring on his right ring finger around in the fingers of his left hand. The violet stone appeared and disappeared in front of the bronze chain, and though he kept his head lowered, under his knitted brow his eyes searched Erdosain's face. And the skewed nose and chin half-sunk in the black fabric of his tie looked, from that angle, set for a fight.
"Okay now, explain the whole thing to me, because I don't follow at all."
Now he sat up and his face looked ready to take punch after punch if need be.
"It's easy, a brilliant scheme. My wife ran off tonight to stay with another man. Then he—"
"Who's he?"
"Barsut, my wife's cousin—Gregorio Barsut, he came to see me and confess he was the guy who turned me in to the Sugar Company."
"Ah! ... So he was the guy who turned you in?"
"Yes, and on top of that—"
"But what would make him go turn you in?"
"How should I know! To humiliate me—What it boils down to is he's half-crazy. He has twenty thousand pesos. His father died in a madhouse. He's going to end up there, too. The twenty thousand pesos are an inheritance from an aunt he got from his father."
The Astrologer squeezed his forehead with his fingers. He was more mixed up than ever. The whole thing intrigued him, but he couldn't get it all straight. He insisted: