The Seven Madmen

by Roberto Arlt

  Hipólita squeezed her forehead between her fingers.

  "But you're a monster!"

  "Now I've come to the end. My life is horrible. I need to create terrible complications for myself ... commit sins. Don't look at me. Possibly ... look ... people don't know what sin means anymore—sin's not just a failing, an error. I've come to see how sin is an act that lets man break the slender thread that kept him linked to God. I'm going to break that slender thread that tied me to divine charity. I feel it. From tomorrow on I'll be a monster on the face of the earth—imagine a creature ... a fetus ... a fetus able to live outside its mother's womb—it never grows ... hairy ... small... without fingernails or toenails it goes among men without being a man ... its fragility horrifies everyone around it, but there's no way of returning it to its womb again. That's what will happen to me tomorrow. I'll cut myself off permanently from God. I'll be alone on earth. My soul and me, just the two of us. And infinity in front of us. Always alone. And night and day—and always a yellow sun. You see? The infinite will grow—a yellow sun hanging overhead and the soul cut off from divine love will wander alone and blind under that yellow sun."

  Something thumped onto the floor, and all at once something extraordinary happened. Erdosain fell silent in amazement. Hipólita was kneeling at his feet. She took his hand and covered it with kisses. In the darkness the woman exclaimed:

  "Let me ... let me kiss your poor hands. You're the most unfortunate man on earth."

  "Get up, Hipólita."

  "No, I want to kiss your feet." He felt her arms hugging his legs. "You're the most unfortunate man on earth! What you haven't been through, my God! How great you are. What a great soul you have!"{10}

  Erdosain made her rise with infinite gentleness. He felt the softening effect of an infinite pity, he drew her to him, he smoothed back the hair over her forehead and said:

  "If you knew how easy it will be to die. Like a game."

  "What a soul you have!"

  "Are you feverish?"

  "My poor boy!"

  "But why? If we've become like gods.... Sit down next to me. Are you fine like that? Look, little sister, everything I've been through is all made up to me now, with what you've just said. We'll live a little longer—"

  "Yes, like an engaged couple—"

  "On the great day only will you become my wife."

  "I love you so much! What a soul you have!"

  "And then we'll go away."

  They said no more. Hipólita's head had fallen forward onto her chest. It was nearly dawn. Then Erdosain eased that tired body onto the sofa. She smiled ex-haustedly, then Remo sat on the carpet, leaned his head on the edge of the sofa, and curled up like that went to sleep.

  A Subconscious Sensation

  Half sitting up on a sofa, with his arms crossed and his hat down over his forehead, the Astrologer was mulling over his various preoccupations that night in the darkened study. The rain beat against the windowpanes, but he did not hear it, totally engrossed as he was in numerous projects. Besides, something strange was happening to him.

  The proximity of the crime to be committed accelerated within the flow of normal time a second, particular time. Thus he got the feeling he was existing in two different frames of time's passage. One, common to all states of normal life, the other fleeting, heavy to his beating heart, running through his meditatively intertwined fingers as water runs out the interstices of a basket.

  And the Astrologer, still inside clock time, felt the other kind of time pour through his brain, rapid and endless, like a film running dizzily by, its juxtapositions of images somehow exhausting, injuring, wounding to the mind, since before one idea could be grasped, it was gone and another took its place. So when he lit a match to check the time, he found only a few minutes had gone by, while in his head those mechanical minutes, impelled along by his anxiety, were a totally different length, one no clock could measure.

  A feeling kept him waiting expectantly in the dark. He knew that any error committed while in such a state could prove fatal.

  The big worry was not Barsut's murder, but just all the care that had to be taken to keep it from becoming a needlessly big problem. Though he tried sketching out his alibi, it was hard to keep at it. He felt the man worrying in the darkness was not him, that he watched his double, a double made out of emotion and looking just like him, with the same rhombus-shaped face, crossed arms, and hat pulled down over the forehead. Nonetheless, he could not really say for sure what thoughts went through the double's mind, so closely linked to him and yet so far beyond his grasp. Because at that moment he felt that his feeling of existing was more important than the existence of his body. Later, puzzling over this phenomenon, he was to say it was his awareness of the different time his emotions ran in, that time inside of the other, mechanical time, like when people say, "That minute seemed like a century."

  Unthinkable, yet it could not be taken lightly since it was a question of taking a man's life, paralyzing the circulation of his five liters of blood, turning all his cells cold, rubbing him out of life like a spot from a piece of paper, leaving behind no trace. Since such a grave problem could not be dismissed, the Astrologer felt how he was himself inside mechanical clock time, the physical him, while in the slower pace of the other time that no clock could tick off, there was his double, pensive, enigmatic, truly mysterious, preparing a set of alibis, perhaps, that would later surprise the thinking man.

  The certainty he had been transformed by the imminent crime into a double mechanism with two different systems of time and two different rates of speed left him feeling drained there in the darkness.

  A terrible weariness seized his whole frame, his sturdy limbs, his joints.

  The rain started the frogs up, sounding like a clacking machine, but he, a man of action, but in such anxiety-induced lassitude, as if they had turned his bones to mush and he could not stand up, "I, a man of action," he told himself, "here I remain, here I am inside my clockwork span of time, throbbing to the beat of another time not my own, that leaves me with my guard down. Because the truth of it is that killing a man is just like slitting a lamb's throat, but other people don't see that, and though they're far from me and my conduct is a mystery to them, this abnormal time brings me closer to them, and I can hardly move, as though they were lurking in the shadows watching me. It must be nervous time that has me all off balance, or the subconscious Astrologer who says nothing but squeezes me out like an orange, creating thoughts I'd never come up with. But still, once Barsut is dead, life will just go on as if nothing had ever happened—and really nothing has unless our cover story falls through."

  He lit another match. The room was shot through with arrowhead shapes of light. Not even a minute had passed. His thoughts came simultaneously and contained in the nothingness of time facts that, if they were given the time they would have needed under normal circumstances, would have taken months and years. He had been born forty-three years and seven days ago, and his past was continually being annihilated as it hit the present, a present so fleeting that it was always the Astrologer of the minute beyond, inside the time of the next coming minute or second. Now his whole life centered on a fact which was not yet a fact, but which would come to be in a few hours, a fact so full of contained violence that it imparted that extraordinary tension to that other, anxiety time that ran alongside clock time.

  And though he had often thought that if it fell to his lot to murder someone he would not let the occasion pass him by, his thoughts returned again to those times of mystery. Then he started up a fantasy about a dictatorship that kept running by means of terror imposed through numerous executions, and the only way to blot out this repugnant momentary impression was to imagine those dead as horizontal men. Indeed, he pictured, lying in the middle of a clearing, the small body of a man, and comparing the dead man's length with the many thousands of kilometers of the earth he tyrannized, he was utterly sure that the life of one man had no value.

  He woul
d consign that man to the worms, and having cleared away the human clutter on one tiny part of the earth, he would proceed to conquer more and more land.

  Then he thought about Lenin, how he had wrung his hands and repeated to the Soviet commissars:

  "What's this garbage? How can we make a revolution if we don't shoot anyone?" And this put joy in the Astrologer's heart. He would set forth such a principle in his own society. The future patriarchs of new races would be brought up to consider murder standard procedure; and again his hopes grew. Then he realized that every innovator has to struggle against the obsolete ideas that have been programmed into him, and that the doubts that plagued him now were the result of a conflict between what society held to be right now and what it would sanction in the future.

  Time ran through his fingers, which, in the course of his ponderings, he had interwoven.

  Today's murderer would be tomorrow's conquering hero, but for now he would have to withstand the bitter warring of the present all mixed in with yesterdays. He got up, angry now. It was still raining. He went out to the stairs, where he stood peering intently into the darkness and wildness, where trees shook under the water buffeting them thickly and heavily. The darkness there seemed to form part of the existence of a monster who was panting heavily in the darkness. The wet ground had turned ocher. And he was a firm man in the night, the metteur-en-scène of grandiose events, and yet no phantom emerged out of the foliage to sanction his attitude. Now he wondered if the men of other ages had suffered such indecision, or if they had marched straight to their goals satisfied that Death would give to their determination the thickness of armor. He told himself that as a philosophical being the only thing that could interest him was the species, not the individual, that it was his feelings that now lay siege to him with scruples, turning the time that must go by into two strange times, all against his will.

  A flash of lightning put blue spaces between the blocks of the mountains of clouds.

  Sopping and with his hair messed up, the Man Who Saw the Midwife stood to one side of the stairs.

  "Ah! It's you!" said the Astrologer.

  "Yes; I wanted to ask you what you think of this interpretation of the verse that says: 'The Heaven of God,' That means clearly that there are other heavens not of God—"

  "Then whose are they?"

  "I mean there can be heavens where God isn't there. Because the verse adds: 'And the New Jerusalem shall descend.' The New Jerusalem? Is that the New Church?"

  The Astrologer meditated an instant. The matter did not interest him, but he knew that to maintain his image with the man he had to answer, and he answered: "We, the illuminati, know secretly that the New Jerusalem is the New Church. That's why Swedenborg says: 'Since the Lord God cannot show himself in person, and having announced that he will come and establish a New Church, then he must do it by means of a man who will not just receive the doctrine of this church, but will also publish it by means of the press ...' but, why do you, without any other passage, think there are several heavens in existence?"

  Bromberg, sheltering under the porch, looked off into the heavy-breathing darkness, shaking under the pummeling of the rain, then answered:

  "Because heavens are something you feel, like love." The Astrologer looked at the Jew in amazement, and the man went on:

  "It's like love. How can you deny love if love is in you and you feel the angels strengthening your love? It's the same with the four heavens. Admittedly, all the words of the Bible are of mystery, since if it weren't that way, the book would be absurd. The other night I was reading the Apocalypse, filled with grief. I was thinking how I'd have to murder Gregorio, and I wondered if it was permitted to shed human blood."

  "But when you strangle someone you don't shed any blood," objected the Astrologer.

  "And when I got to the part about the 'Heaven of God' I understood the reason for mankind's sadness. God's heaven had been denied to them by the church of darkness—and that's why so many sinned so greatly. " In the darkness, the childish voice of Bromberg sounded as sad as though he were lamenting how they had excluded him from the true heaven. The Astrologer argued:

  "The man with wings who speaks to me in dreams said the end of the church of darkness is near—"

  "And so it must be—because hell grows every day. So few are saved that heaven compared to hell is smaller than a grain of sand next to the ocean. Year after year hell grows, and the church of darkness, that ought to save man, swells the numbers in hell instead, and hell grows, grows, without any chance existing of making it smaller. And the angels gaze in fear upon the church of darkness and fiery hell all swollen like a belly heavy with dropsy."

  The Astrologer replied, assuming a lofty tone of voice: "That's why the man with wings has told me: 'Go, O holy man, forth to edify men and announce the glad tidings. And exterminate the Antichrists and reveal your secrets and the secrets of the New Jerusalem to Bromberg the Jew.'" Suddenly the Astrologer, taking his companion's arm, said: "Don't you remember when your spirit conversed with the angels and served them white bread at the side of the road, and you bade them sit at the door of your abode and washed their feet?"

  "I don't remember that."

  "Well, you ought to remember. What will the Lord say if he hears that? How am I to answer for your soul before the Angel of the New Church? He'll say to me: 'What is become of that beloved son, my pious Alfon?' And what will I tell him? That you're an animal. That you've forgotten the days when you lived an angelic life and now you spend the whole day in a corner breaking wind like a mule."

  Bromberg objected in a bristly rage: "I do not break wind."

  "Yes you do, and it makes a lot of noise, too—but what's the difference?—the Angel of the Churches knows that your soul is aglow with sincere devotion, and that you are an enemy of the King of Babylon, of the Dark Pope, and so you are chosen to be the friend of him who with the mandate of the Lord shall establish the New Church on earth."

  The rain beat quietly on the leaves of the fig trees and all the acrid, soft darkness wafted into the night its humid greenery smell. Bromberg predicted gravely:

  "And the Pope, the very Pope, in terror, will dash out into the street barefoot, and they'll all shrink back from him in horror and fear and the walls along the roads will spill over with flowers when the Holy Lamb comes by."

  "That will happen," continued the Astrologer. "And up in heaven, the doors will open to the sight of all the repentant sinners, the golden portals of the New Jerusalem. Because so great is the charity of God, beloved Alfon, that no man shall enter directly into contact with it without being smitten to earth with his bones jellied."

  "That's why I shall bring to men my interpretation of the Apocalypse and then go off to the mountains to do penitence and to pray for them."

  "Indeed, Alfon, but now go to sleep because I have to meditate and it is time for the man with wings to come speak words in my ear. And you also must sleep because otherwise, tomorrow, you will have no strength to strangle this reprobate—"

  "And the King of Babylon."

  "Indeed."

  Slowly the Man Who Saw the Midwife walked away from the stairs. The Astrologer went back inside and climbing a staircase to one side of the entry hall, he went into a very long thin room, with beams running exposed across it at the top to hold up the oblique extension of the roof.

  The peeling walls held not a single etching. In one corner were the trunks belonging to Gregorio Barsut and under an oeil-de-boeuf window, a red painted wooden bed. A black bedspread contrasted bizarrely with the white sheets. The Astrologer sat down pensively on the edge of the bed. His smock fell half-open, showing his naked, hairy chest. He arched his fingertips covering his seallike mustache, and, frowning, he sat contemplating a trunk in the corner.

  He wanted to force his thought to leap upon some extraneous novelty, which by breaking up the mono-rhythm of his feelings would restore him to the frame of mind he had been in before he decided to murder Barsut.

 
; "Twenty thousand pesos," he thought. "Twenty million pesos that will let me set up the brothels and the colony ... the colony ..."

  Still he could not think clearly. Ideas slipped away from him elusive as shadows, his thoughts, gone berserk with shock, made it impossible to concentrate. Suddenly he slapped his forehead and, jubilant, dragged a box with him into the vestibule, a thick dust sifting from the box's loosely tied top.

  Not caring that his smock sleeves were getting all full of white dust, he opened the box. There were lead soldiers mixed in with wooden dolls, and really it was a whole population of clowns, generals, jesters, princesses, and strange roly-poly monsters with lopsided noses and mouths like frogs.

  He picked up a piece of rope and, turning to one corner, he fastened it to two nails, thus uniting the angle formed by the two walls with an improvised bisecting line. Then he took several puppets from the box, throwing them onto the bed. Then he strung up each of the figures by the neck, and so engrossed was he in this task, that he failed to notice that the wind was driving the rain in through the open window, as it was raining harder.

  He worked enthusiastically. As soon as he had wound cords around the neck of each figure and cut them to varying lengths, he dragged all the puppets by their ropes off to the corner. When it was done, he sat looking at his handiwork. The five hanged figures threw moving hooded shadows on the rose-colored wall. The first, a Pierrot figure without the puffed breeches but a black-and-white checked blouson; the second, an idol with chocolate skin and vermilion lips, whose watermelon head was level with the Pierrot's feet; the third, still lower, was a windup Pierrot, with a bronze plaque in its belly and a monkey's face; the fourth was a blue cardboard sailor, and the fifth an open-nosed black man with a plaster sore showing through the white coating on his patrician neck. The Astrologer contemplated his work in satisfaction. He had his back to the lamp, and his black silhouette projected up to the ceiling. He said aloud: