by Roberto Arlt
And often he reflected:
"What have I done for the happiness of this wretched body?"
Because, in all truth, he felt trapped inside something as alien to him as a barrel is to the wine it holds.
Then he had to think how it was his body that held his soul-searchings, fed them off its tired blood; a wretched, poorly clothed body that no woman would look at twice, and felt despised, felt the days weighing down on it, and all because his thoughts had never wanted the kind of fulfillment it longed for timidly, in silence.
Erdosain was flooded with pity, sorry for his physical double, almost a stranger to him.
Then, like a desperate man hurling himself from the seventh floor, he threw himself into the delicious terror of masturbation, trying to drown his remorse in a world from which nobody could exile him, amid all the fine delights that were far from his life, amid striking, splendid bodies, such as could only be enjoyed at the greatest outlay of existences and money.
It was a universe of gelatinous ideas, running off down corridors where obscenity was got up in silk and brocade and velvet and fabulous laces, a world that emitted a soft, spongy glow. The most beautiful women in all creation streamed by, baring their ripe-apple breasts to him, and offered his mouth, stale from vile cigarettes, their fragrant lips and words charged with sensuality.
Now they were willowy, delicate, glossy young things, now they were decadent schoolgirls, a world of ever-changing femininity where no one could kick him out, him, the poor slob that madams of even the sleaziest cathouses eyed with suspicion as if he might gyp them out of the price of fornication.
He closed his eyes and came into that blazing darkness, heedless of everything, like some opium smoker who enters a disgusting den, where the Chinese dealer smells of dung, and thinks he's regaining paradise.
And for a moment he slithered surreptitiously into that underground joy, ashamed, but with the eagerness of a young man entering his first brothel.
Desire buzzed like a hornet in his ears, but no one could tear him away from that sensual darkness.
This darkness was a familiar house where he suddenly left behind all of his everyday life. There, in the black house, terrible pleasures seemed merely everyday, though if he had suspected that sort of thing in anyone else's life, he would never again have had anything to do with him.
Though this black house lay within Erdosain, he came to it by devious routes, tortuous maneuvers, and once inside the door he knew there was no turning back, for coming down the halls of the black house to meet him, through one special corridor always swathed in shadow, was the fleet-footed woman who one day, on the sidewalk or in a streetcar, had swelled him with desire.
Like someone drawing from his wallet money earned in various ways, Erdosain drew from the bedrooms of the black house a woman fragmentary and yet complete, a woman made out of a hundred women broken into pieces by a hundred desires, always the same, rekindled at the approach of such women.
Because this woman had the knees of a girl whose skirt had blown high in the wind as she waited for the bus, and the thighs he remembered having seen on a dirty postcard, and the sad, faded smile of a schoolgirl he met long ago on a streetcar, and the greenish eyes of a seamstress with a pale mouth and pockmarked skin who went out Sunday night with a girlfriend to those recreation centers where storekeepers rub their crotches nuzzling-tight against little girls who like men.
This random woman, put together out of bits of all the women he had not been able to have, knew just how far to let things go, like fiancées who may have slipped a hand between their boyfriends' legs but can still count as virgins. She came up to him. Her rump fit snugly into an orthopedic girdle, which let her slightly off-center breasts hang free, and her behavior was beyond reproach like some well-schooled young lady who keeps her head, but not so much that her boyfriend's fingers can't wander into her accidentally unbuttoned blouse.
Then he fell away backward into the depths of the black house. The black house! Erdosain would always recall those days with a shudder; he felt he had lived within a hell and its infernal substance was stuck fast to him for as long as he lived, even a few days before his death, with justice on his trail. When he turned his thoughts back to that time, he grew morose and agitated, a red flame blazed before his eyes, and his painful fury burned so fiercely he would have liked to leap beyond the stars, to be consumed in a great fire that would purge his present of all that terrible, persistent, inescapable past.
The black house! I can still see it now—the taut face of that silent man, who suddenly lifted his face to the ceiling, then lowered his eyes to be level with mine and, with a cold smile, added:
"So now, tell mankind what the black house is like. And that I was a murderer. And yet I, the murderer, have loved everything beautiful and have fought within myself to drown all the horrible temptations that hour after hour came creeping up from deep inside me. I've suffered for what I am, and for other people, too, you see that? for other people, too ..."
The Official Bulletin
The kidnapping occurred as planned ten days after Elsa ran off. The fourteenth of August, Erdosain was visited by the Astrologer, but, since he was out, when he came back he found an envelope shoved under the door. Inside was a faked official bulletin from the Ministry of Defense, giving Erdosain the supposed address of Captain Belaunde and an odd postscript that read like this:
"I will wait for you until the twentieth every morning—you bring Barsut along. Knock and come in without waiting. Don't come see me alone."
Erdosain read the Astrologer's letter and was plunged into thought. He had forgotten about Barsut. He knew he had to kill him, then having decided that, he let it fall away into darkness, and the days that passed during that time and streamed by in a daze were gone for all time. "I had to kill Barsut." The reason behind that "had to" could serve as the key to Erdosain's madness. When I asked him to tell me about it, he answered: "I had to kill him, because otherwise I couldn't have any peace in life. To kill Barsut was a precondition for existing, the way fresh air is for other people."
So, as soon as he got the letter, he went to see Barsut. That man lived in a boardinghouse on Uruguay Street, a dark, dingy dwelling place housing a fantastic universe of the most wildly varied human beings. The landlady of the whole place was in contact with the spirit world, had a cross-eyed daughter, and as far as collecting rent went, had no mercy. A boarder who was even twenty-four hours behind with the rent could expect to come home that night and find his trunks and belongings out in the middle of the patio.
He arrived late that day at Gregorio's house. Gregorio was just shaving when Erdosain came into the room. Barsut stood frozen, pale, with the razor in mid-stroke on his cheek, then looking Erdosain over from head to foot, he exclaimed:
"What do you want, barging in here like this?"
"Anyone else would have been offended," Erdosain commented later. "I gave him a 'friendly' smile because just then I happened to feel like a friend of his, and without saying anything I handed him the official bulletin from the Ministry of Defense. I was all on edge from an unexplainable joy, I remember I only stayed a minute sitting on the edge of his bed, then I was up and pacing nervously all over the room."
"So she's out in Temperley. And you want us to go out and get her?"
"Yes, that's what I want. And you go in after her." Barsut muttered something Erdosain didn't catch, then he started giving his arm muscles a rubdown and his skin took on a rosy glow. He was going to shave his whiskers; he stopped with the razor in midair and, turning his head, said:
"You know what? I never thought you'd get up the nerve to come see me."
Erdosain took the full force of those streaky green eyes turned on him, really the man had a tiger face, and after crossing his arms he answered:
"I know, I'd never have thought so either, but, you know, things change."
"You scared to go out there alone?"
"No, I'd just like to see how you pull it off."
Barsut clenched his teeth. With his chin slathered in shaving cream and his forehead vigorously furrowed he considered Erdosain and finally said:
"Look, I thought I was a rat, but I think you ... you're worse than me. Well, God only knows what I should do."
"Why do you say that God knows?"
Barsut stood in front of the mirror, put his fists against his waist, and what he said was no surprise to Erdosain, who took these words without moving a muscle in his face:
"Who's to say that bulletin isn't a phony and you're not leading me into a trap?"
"The human soul is such a mystery!" Erdosain later commented. "I listened to those words and not a muscle in my face moved. How had Gregorio guessed at the truth? I don't know. Or did he share my wicked imagination?"
He lit a cigarette and answered only:
"Do what you like."
But Barsut, who was warming to the subject, argued:
"But why not? Tell me this: why not? Don't you have every reason to want to kill me? It makes sense. I tried to take your wife away from you, I ratted on you, I beat you up, what the hell! You'd have to be some kind of saint not to want to kill me."
"A saint? No, buddy, a saint I'm not. But I swear I'm not going to kill you tomorrow. Some day, maybe, but not tomorrow."
Barsut burst out laughing cheerily.
"You know, Remo, you're really something? Some day you'll kill me. That's funny! You know what I think is the interesting part? To see the look on your face when you kill me. Tell me, are you going to play it straight or have a good laugh?"
It was a friendly question, one that demanded an answer.
"Maybe I'll play it straight. I don't know. I think I will. You know it's no joke to kill another person."
"Aren't you afraid of jail?"
"No, because if I were to kill you I'd take care and I'd destroy your dead body with sulphuric acid."
"You're a savage.... Say, my memory's not so good: Did you pay off the Sugar Company?"
"Yes."
"Who gave you the money?"
"A hustler."
"You don't have many friends, but they're true-blue ... So, when will you come by tomorrow for me?"
"The man goes on duty at eight so ... so that—"
"Look, I'm not so sure this is on the level, but if I find Elsa I'll give her the back of my hand so she'll taste it for the next few years."
When Erdosain left, he went to the telegraph office and sent the Astrologer a wire.
The Work of Anguish
That night he didn't sleep. He was terribly tired. Nor did he think about anything. He tried to define for me how it felt:{5}
"Your soul is like it's a meter outside of your body. It's like your muscles are totally dissolving and your anxiety is boundless. You close your eyes and it's as if your body's dissolving away into nothingness, suddenly you recall some odd detail from one of the thousands of days you've lived; never commit a crime, because it's not so much horrible as it is sad. You feel you're cutting away, one by one, the links that bind you to civilization, that you're going back to the dark barbarian world, that you'll lose whatever it was you steered by; they say and I said it myself to the Astrologer that it's all because we're not educated about crime properly, but, no, that's not the problem. Really, you want to live like other people, be as straight as other people, have a wife, a home, look out the window and see the people going by, and still there's not a cell left in your body that's not contaminated with these fateful words: I have to kill him. You'll say I'm rationalizing away my hatred. So why shouldn't I reason about it? When I get to feel like I'm living in a dream, I can see how I talk so much to convince myself I'm not dead, not because of what happened but because of the state you're left in after you do it. It's like your skin after you burn it. It heals, only have you seen what it's like afterward? All wrinkled, dry, tight, shiny. That's the way your soul is afterward. And sometimes it's got such a shine it burns your eyes. And it's so wrinkled it disgusts you. You know you're carrying around a monster that might get loose any moment and head off in any direction.
"A monster! I've often thought about it. A calm, resilient, indecipherable monster, that would shock even you with its violent drives, with how it seeks out some vantage point in the inner folds of life and spies on your infamies from every angle! How often I've pondered myself, the mystery of myself, and envied the simplest man his life! Ah! Never commit a crime. Look what's become of me. I tell you this stuff just because, maybe because you understand me ...
"And that night? ... I came home late. I threw myself down on the bed with my clothes on, I felt a rush like a gambler might feel in my racing heartbeat. Really I didn't think what might happen after the crime, I just went up to the moment of it and wondered how I'd act, what Barsut would do, how the Astrologer would kidnap him, and I saw the crime I'd read about in novels was all tricked up; I grasped how crime is a mechanical business, that it's simple to commit a crime, and it only seems tricky to us because we're not used to it.
"So much so, really, that I remember I just lay there with my eyes fixed on one corner of the darkened room. Bits of my old life, in fragments, streamed before my eyes as if windblown. I never have grasped the mysterious workings of memory, how at key moments in our lives, suddenly the insignificant detail and the image that has lain buried years and years, overshadowed by the present, take on an almost extraordinary importance. We didn't know those inner photographic images even existed and suddenly the heavy veil that shrouds them rips away, and so, that night, instead of thinking about Barsut, I just let myself lie there in that sad boardinghouse room, the way a man would lie when he's waiting for something, that something I've so often talked about, and that, to my mind, should get my life all freshly turned around, wipe away the past, and show me a new version of myself completely different from what I was.
"In truth, I was not much worried about the crime, only I kept puzzling over this: how would I emerge after the crime? Would I suffer remorse? Would I go mad, end up turning myself in? Or would I simply go on living like I had so far, still stuck with that singular impotence that left everything I did in life in that incoherent state you now say is just part of my madness?
"The funny thing is, sometimes I'd feel great surges of joy, feel like laughing like I'd been seized with madness when I hadn't; but when I fought down the urge, I'd try to figure out how we would kidnap Barsut. I was sure he'd put up a fight, but the Astrologer wasn't the sort to go into such a project without due precautions. At other times, I'd try to second-guess how Barsut had hit on the bulletin from the Ministry of Defense being phony and congratulate myself for keeping so perfectly cool, when he turned his lathery face to me and, almost as a joke, said:
" 'Wouldn't it be funny if the bulletin was faked?'
"The truth was, he was a rat, but I wasn't all that much better; maybe the difference was he wasn't eager to understand his low passions the way I'd have been. Besides, it was no big deal to me then. Maybe it'd be me who'd kill him, maybe the Astrologer, but either way I'd thrown my life away down some monstrous hole, where demons played with my senses like dice in a shaker.
"Faraway sounds reached me; weariness seeped through my joints; at moments it felt like my flesh, like a sponge, sucked in silence and repose. I kept getting these twisted ideas about Elsa, unspoken anger knotted my jaw muscles; I felt the wretchedness of my poor life.
"Yet, the only way I could redeem myself in my own eyes was to murder Barsut, and suddenly I'd picture myself standing over him; he was bound by heavy ropes and lying on a pile of sacks; all you could make out clearly was one green eye in profile and a pale nose; I bent over his body gently, brandished a revolver, tenderly pushed back the hair off his forehead and told him very softly:
" 'You're going to die, scum.'
"His arms were writhing even under those heavy bonds, it was a desperate struggle of frightened bones and muscles.
" 'Do you recall, you scum, do you remember the potatoes, t
he salad that slopped all over the table? Do I still have that loser's face that bugged you so much?'
"But I was overcome with shame for going on at him like such a bastard, so I'd tell him, I mean I wouldn't tell him anything, I took a sack and put it over his head; under the heavy sacking, his head writhed furiously; I tried to steady it against the floor, so the bullet would do its job and the revolver stay steady; and the sacking slipped all over his hair and nothing I could do was any use against that desperate, panting animal, fighting death. If that dream faded away, I'd imagine myself traveling through the archipelago of Malaysia, on a sailing ship in the Indian Ocean. I'd changed my name, I mouthed English words; even if I carried the same weight of grief inside, now my arms were strong and my eyes untroubled; maybe in Borneo, maybe in Calcutta or past the Red Sea, or on past the taiga, in Korea or Manchuria, my life would recharge."
Certainly this was no longer the inventor who was fantasizing, or the man who discovered electric rays that could melt huge chunks of steel like wax strips, or who would preside over the glass-top table of the League of Nations.
At other times terror took hold of Erdosain; he felt he was fettered or that the rotten social order had him straitjacketed and he couldn't get loose. He saw himself in chains, in prison stripes, filing slowly in a long trail of prisoners south to Ushuaia through vast snowdrifts. The sky above was white as plated tin.
This image set him ablaze, blind with slow fury he got up and, pacing the room, he had the urge to pound on the walls with his fists, he'd have liked to thrust his bones clean through the walls; then he stopped short by the doorjamb, crossed his arms, pain slithered up to his throat once more, nothing he could do helped, and in his life there was only one visible, unique, absolute reality. He and everybody else. Between him and everyone else was a gap, maybe from their failure to understand him, or maybe his craziness. But either way, he was no less unhappy because of it. And once more the past thrust its fragments before his eyes; in truth, he would have liked to flee from himself, just jettison forever the life that trapped and poisoned his body.