The Seven Madmen
Page 16
"If you can get up some money fast, there's a terrific cathouse up for grabs. First-rate facilities, bar and grill, a big nightly turnover. The owner's an Uruguayan and he's asking fifteen thousand pesos cash up front, but I think he'll come down to ten thousand now and the other five in a year."
"Can you come here Friday?"
"Sure."
"Okay, check with me Friday, I think we can swing it."
"Cheers." With that, the Ruffian left.
The Gold Seeker
After Haffner left, Erdosain, who had been eager to talk with the Gold Seeker, said good-bye to the Astrologer and the Major. Erdosain was getting uneasy again. Before he left, the Astrologer took him aside to say:
"Be sure to come at nine tomorrow, the check must be cashed."
"That" had slipped his mind. Erdosain looked all around as though he had been stunned, hit hard. He had to talk to someone; to forget the part he had to play, which loomed up blackly and made his heart pound in the blazing noonday sun.
The Gold Seeker had somehow struck a responsive chord in him. So he went up to him and said:
"Can we talk a bit? I want to talk with you about those places down South."
The man checked him over with glittery eyes and said:
"Sure. Fine. I've been impressed with you."
"Thank you."
"Especially from what the Astrologer told me about you. You know, your plan to use plague bacilli for the revolution is really fine?"
Erdosain looked up. It almost shamed him to be praised so much. Could someone possibly be all that taken with the theories he thought out?
The Gold Seeker persisted:
"That and the poison gas are first class notions. See? Put a cannister right at Police Headquarters when we know the number one bastard is in there. Poison them all like the rats they are!" And he laughed so hard three birds took flight from out of a nearby lime tree. "Yes, Erdosain my friend, you do think of things. Plague and chlorine. You see how we'll spark the city to revolution? I can see the day already, scared businessmen trying to beat it out of their moleholes, we'll be cleaning up the planet with a machine gun. Not bad. With a thousand pesos you can get a good machine gun. Goes off two hundred fifty times a minute. Not bad. And then the cannisters of gas ... Ah! They ought to print your plans in the papers, believe me—"
With this question Erdosain cut short the panegyric:
"But you did find gold? ... the gold—"
"Surely you don't take that story at face value."
"A story? So the gold then ... ?"
"Exists, it exists all right—only it has to be located."
Erdosain was so disappointed the Gold Seeker added:
"Hey, now, look, I talked to you because the Astrologer told me you could be the one to do it."
"Yes, but here I thought—"
"What?"
"That in all those lies, the part about gold was true."
"It is true, in a way. The gold exists—it just needs finding. You should be glad it's all set up to go after it. Or do you think those animals would take action without fancy lies being dangled in their faces? Ah! I've given it thought. That's the beauty of the Astrologer's theory: you can only get people moving with lies. He makes up lies as convincing as truths; guys who would never have gotten off their duffs, who'd lost their last hopes, are like new men after a dose of his lies. What more do you want? Look, that's how most things work anyway and who objects? Everything's done for show— look, nobody says it but society needs little lies to keep running. So what's so sinful about the Astrologer's plan? He just has instead of dull little lies a big, eloquent, transcendental lie. The Astrologer, with his stunts, doesn't seem all that extraordinary and he isn't—and then again he is; he is—because he has nothing to gain from his lies, and he isn't because all he does is use the same principle as any other bamboozler or rainmaker or reorganizer of mankind. If one day they write up his life, people who can read it dispassionately will say he had greatness, since to implement his ideals all he used was the means available to any charlatan. And what looks to us excessive and disturbing is just the reaction of weak, mediocre spirits who only have faith in programs carried out complicatedly, mysteriously, never simply. And yet you can see how great actions really are simple, like Columbus using an egg to make his point."
"The truth of lies?"
"But that's it. The thing is we're not bold enough to start enormous undertakings. We have to think it's more complicated to run a country than a household, and we want events to be as thrilling as our silly romanticism demands."
"But in your heart of hearts, I mean, do you have much hope of the plan really succeeding?"
"Absolutely, and believe me, at the very least we'll run the country... if not the world. We'll have to. What the Astrologer has mapped out is to save the souls of men crushed under the mechanization of our civilization. No ideals are left intact. No symbols exist for good or evil. The Astrologer last time talked about colonies founded in the old days by misfits who were marginal in their own countries. We'll be like that, but making the Society a sort of vigorous workout—stuff to seduce the shopkeepers who go faithfully to Westerns. Do you know what kind of havoc we can bring about? ... As a last resort we can do spot bombings, sit back and watch people quake in their boots. What do you think gang warfare was? Some men who didn't know what else to do with their excess adrenaline. So they got it out working over some poor slob in the street.
"Look ... Comodoro ... Puerto Madryn, Trelew, Esquel, Arroyo Pescado, Campo Chileno, I know the roads and places where no roads go ... really ... we'll organize a wonderful youth corps"—he was getting excited—"you don't think there's gold? You're like a kid you say has eyes bigger than his stomach at the dinner table. In our country, everything's gold."
Erdosain felt sucked into the man's ardor. The Gold Seeker was speaking convulsively, his eyes and brows were atwitch with tics, and he kept a friendly hand on Erdosain's arm.
"Believe me, Erdosain ... so much gold—more than you could imagine—but that's not the point. The point is: time's awasting. Esquel, Arroyo Pescado, Rio Pico ... Campo Chileno ... leagues ... days and days on the road, and, you know, to register a horse not worth ten pesos you ride for weeks, time's meaningless there. It's so big ... enormous ... eternal there. There, you have to see it's true. I remember when The Mask and I went through Arroyo Pescado. Not just gold— red gold. There's the cure for civilization-sick souls. We'll send our people to the mountains. Look, I'm twenty-seven, and more than once I've looked at death down a gun barrel." He took out his revolver. "See that sparrow?" It was fifty paces off; he raised the revolver to chin level and squeezed, and with the detonation the bird plunged straight down off its branch. "See? That's the death I've looked in the face. Nothing to grieve about there. Look, I'm twenty-seven. Arroyo Pescado, Esquel, Rio Pico, Campo Chileno ... we'll claim those great wild stretches ... we'll form the campaign of New Joyfulness. The Order of the Knights of Red Gold. You think I'm raving. Not a bit! You have to have been there to see. And then you grasp the necessity, the utter necessity, of a natural aristocracy. To laugh at solitude, risk, sorrow, sun, wasteland as far as you can see, you're a new man—above those slaves withering away in the city. You know, don't you, about the anarchist, socialist proletariat of our cities? All cowards. Instead of pitting themselves against mountains or wilderness, they prefer keeping cozy and entertained in the city to the heroic solitude of the desert. What if all the factory workers, seamstresses, all the cogs in the parasitic mechanism of the city took off for the desert—if each pitched a tent down South? Now do you see why I'm with the Astrologer? We young people will make a new life; we'll be the ones. We'll be an outlaw aristocracy. We'll shoot the Tolstoy-idealist intellectuals and put the rest to work. That's why I admire Mussolini. He found Italy playing a mandolin and gave it a club; he turned an operetta kingdom into Europe's watchdog, overnight. Cities are cancer in this world. They annihilate men, make them cowards, wily, envious, then
envy and cowardice structure society around their needs. If those sheep had any fight in them they'd tear it down. To put faith in the herds is like trying to catch the wind. You see how Lenin fared with his Russian peasant. But now it's organized and I can only say: people who don't fit into today's cities should head for the desert. That's the Astrologer's point. He's right. When the first Christians couldn't take city life they took to the desert. There they made their own happiness. But in today's cities, those at the bottom of the pyramid form committees."
"You know, I like the way you speak of the desert?"
"Of course, Erdosain. The Astrologer says: People who can't take the city shouldn't bother the ones who enjoy it. Malcontents and misfits from the city have the mountains, plains, the banks of great powerful rivers."
Erdosain never expected such violence from the Gold Seeker. As though reading his mind, the man went on: "We'll preach violence, but not accept any theoretical-violence types into the cells, we'll demand a proof of obedience to our society from whoever wants to show us how he hates civilization. See the point of the colony? Hard work will make him a superman. Then he'll be given power. Don't monastic orders run like that? Isn't that the army system? Stop gaping, I'll tell you how in business ... for instance at Gath and Chaves, at Harrods, the employees tell me personnel is under discipline that makes the army's like a toy. See, Erdosain, we have nothing new here. We just put a splendid goal in place of the petty one."
Erdosain felt little in front of the Gold Seeker. He envied him his violence and was irritated at how he kept laying down undeniable truths, and would have liked to contradict him, but said inwardly:
"I'm a dull character next to him, one more sordid, cowardly city man. Why can't I be so aggressive, so full of hate? He's right. And I smile at what he says, prudently, as if afraid he'll slap me down, and really his violence scares me and his courage annoys me."
"What are you thinking?" asked the Gold Seeker.
Erdosain kept looking at him, then:
"I thought, how sad to have been raised a coward."
The Gold Seeker shrugged it off.
"You may think you're cowardly if you've never had to stake your life on anything. When your life hangs from a trigger pull, I'll see if you're a coward or not. In the city you don't get a chance to be brave. You know if you smash someone's face, the cops will come around, so it's easier to leave justice up to the authorities. A matter of realities. You grow used to giving in, you knuckle under...."
Erdosain looked at him. "You're quite a fellow."
"Look, don't worry about courage. You'll pick it up fast—you'll be a brave soul before you know it... just a matter of getting started."
At one o'clock they parted.
The Lame Whore
That same day, just as Erdosain was nearly up the spiral staircase, he saw standing on the landing a woman in a fur coat and green hat talking with his landlady. He heard a "Here he is now" which meant they were waiting for him, and as he stopped, the stranger turned to him and asked:
"You're Mr. Erdosain?"
"Where have I seen that face?" wondered Erdosain as he responded affirmatively to the stranger, who went on to introduce herself.
"I am Mr. Ergueta's wife."
"Ah! You're the Lame Woman?" but suddenly, realizing this clumsy slip had the landlady so curious she had to inspect the stranger's feet, Erdosain apologized in embarrassment:
"Sorry, I'm just not... See, I wasn't expecting ... won't you come in?"
Before opening the room to her, Erdosain apologized all over again for the condition the guest would find it in, and Hipólita, smiling ironically, replied:
"That's quite all right."
Still Erdosain did not much like the cold way she looked out of her transparent verdigris eyes. And he thought:
"One of those perverse types," since he had noticed under her green hat her red, red hair was drawn smoothly down either side of her face to cover her ears. He looked again at her unblinking red eyelashes and her lips that seemed inflamed against her face with its plague of freckles. And he thought—how very unlike the woman in the photograph.
She stood facing him, observing him as if thinking:
"So he's the man," and he, next to the woman, felt her presence as incomprehensible, as if she didn't exist or at some inner level was miles off. But yet she was there and something had to be said, and since it was all he could think of he said, after turning on the light and offering the woman a seat while he sat on the sofa:
"So, you're Ergueta's wife? Very good."
He couldn't fit the sudden appearance of this being in with his own chaos. He felt filled with curiosity, but he wanted to feel something else, a familiarity with the woman's face, its oval shapes suggesting the red of copper, like the sunbeams through rain that in holy pictures are always breaking into a thousand rays from behind the clouds. And he said to himself:
"Here I am, but where is my soul?" And so he said again, "So you're Ergueta's wife. Very good."
She had crossed her legs and was tugging her skirt well down over her knee, so that the cloth bunched in her bright pink fingers, and raising her head as if it were hard to do so under unfamiliar circumstances, she said:
"You must do something for my husband. He's gone mad."
"Even that doesn't arouse my curiosity," thought Erdosain, and satisfied he had stayed as emotionless as the stereotype tycoon, he added, secretly pleased to play the uncaring man, "So he's gone mad, has he?" but all at once, realizing he couldn't keep up the role, he said, "You know what? You just gave me this stunning news and yet I have no reaction. I don't like being empty of emotion like this; I want to feel, but I'm like a sack of potatoes. You must forgive me. I don't know what it is with me. You forgive me, don't you? Yet I wasn't always like this. I remember I was happy as a lark. Bit by bit I changed. I don't know, I look at you, I want to feel like your friend, and I can't. If you were dying, maybe I wouldn't even hand you a glass of water. See? And yet.... But where is he?"
"He's a patient at Las Mercedes."
"But that's odd! Weren't you living in El Azul?"
"Yes, but we've been here for two weeks."
"And when did it happen?"
"Six days ago. Even I can't figure it out. It's what you were saying only about me. Sorry if this is wasting your time. I thought of you, you knew him, he was always telling me about you. When did you last see him?"
"Before he got married.... Yes, he told me about you. He called you the Lame Whore."
To Erdosain Hipólita's soul seemed to be filling her eyes with beauty. He felt he could speak to her about anything. The woman's soul stood there without moving, as if in receptive anticipation. She rested her folded hands on her skirt above the knee, and the very way she sat invited his confidences. What had happened that morning at the Astrologer's house seemed far removed, only some branches against the sky flashed across his memory at times, and the flow of fragmented images somehow gave him an unjustified sense of peace. He wrung his hands with satisfaction and said:
"Please don't take this as an offense ... but I think he was crazy when he married you."
"Tell me... did you know him before he married me?"
"Yes ... besides, I remember he used to pore over his Bible, because among other things he would talk to me about new times to come, the fourth seal and things along those lines. Besides, he gambled. He always intrigued me because he was like a man in a nonstop frenzy."
"Exactly. A frenzy all the time. He once even staked five thousand pesos on a poker game. He sold my jewels, a necklace a friend had given me—"
"What? But didn't you give that necklace to the maid right before you married him? That's what he told me. That you gave her the necklace and the silverware—and the check for ten thousand pesos that other man gave you—"
"Do you think I'm mad? Why would I give my maid a pearl necklace?"
"Then he lied."
"So it would seem."
"But how odd!"
"And, of course, he lost—"
"No, with seven hundred pesos he won seven thousand. You should have seen him coming in ... without a word ... I thought: So! he lost—but the odd thing is he was frightened by his own good luck—but I was just sure something would happen. At ten that night he still wasn't back and I went to bed; at one or so his footsteps in the room woke me up, and I was about to turn on the light when he just leaped over and grabbed my arm, you know how terribly strong he is, he got me out of bed in my nightgown and dragged me through the halls to the hotel door."
"And you?"
"I didn't scream because I knew it would drive him wild. At the hotel door he stood looking at me like he didn't know me, his forehead all full of wrinkles and his eyes all huge. There was this wind that bent the trees right over, I covered myself with my arms, and he kept his eyes on me, when a patrolman came up to us, while the doorman grabbed his arms from behind, the noise woke him up. He was shouting so you could hear clear down the block: this is the whore—the one who loved the ruffians whose flesh is as the flesh of mules—"
"But how do you remember those words?"
"It's like I can see it all over again. There he was trying to get back in the door, the patrolman trying to pull him into the street, the doorman with a stranglehold on him, trying to weaken him, and I just hoping things would somehow come to an end, because people were gathering and instead of helping the policeman they were staring at me. Luckily I always wore a long nightgown.... Finally with the help of all those other patrolmen that someone inside the hotel had summoned, they got him down to the station. They thought he was drunk but it was an attack of insanity—that's what the doctor said. He was raving about Noah's Ark—"