The Seven Madmen (13 page)

It was two years ago. No, three. What was her name? Mar
í
a, Mar
í
a Esther. What was her name? The sweet little face now shares its inner warmth with a night-dark pocket of fantasy. He remembers so many things: He was sitting beside her, the wind was ruffling her black curls, suddenly he reached out and took the girl's warm, live chin in his fingertips. Where is she now? Where might she be living? If he found her again, would he know her? Three years ago. He met her on a train, talked to her off and on over a two-week period, then disappeared. Only that and nothing more. And she didn't know he was married. What would she have said if she found out? Yes, now he remembers. Her name was Maria. But what does that matter? No. There was something more splendid in it, the great sweet fever that flowed from her eyes, which were sometimes green and sometimes hazel.

And her silence. Erdosain remembers stretches of railway travel, sitting beside the girl who has rested her head on his shoulder, he intertwines his fingers in those curls and the fifteen-year-old girl is trembling. If she knew now that he plans to kill a man, what would she say? Perhaps she would fail to grasp what it meant. And Erdosain remembers how, timidly, like the schoolgirl she was, she raised one arm and touched her hand to his stubbled face; and perhaps that joy, the one he lost, might be the very joy we need to smooth away so much ugliness from the human face.

Erdosain now investigates himself with curiosity. Why does he harbor such thoughts? What right does he have? Since when do murderers think? And still, something within him gives thanks to the universe. Is it made of humility or of love? He does not know, but he understands that within the incoherence there is sweetness, he grasps that when some poor soul goes mad, he gratefully leaves behind the sufferings of this earth. And underneath this pity, some implacable, almost mocking force twists his lip to a sneer of contempt.

The gods exist. They live hidden beneath the outer shell of those men who remember life on the planet when the earth was still young. He, too, bears within him a god. Can it be true? He touches his nose, painful from Barsut's beating, and the implacable force insists it is true: he bears a god within him, beneath his aching skin. But is there any provision in the penal code for a homicidal god? What would the presiding judge say if he replied: "I sin because I bear a god within"?

But, isn't it true? This love, this strength that he brings to the breaking day, under the moist trees dripping dew into the darkness, is that not a godlike thing? And again the surface of his soul becomes a contour map of that memory: a pale little oval face with its greenish eyes and black curls that the wind would now and then wrap around her throat. How easily it comes! He has no need to speak a word, so perfect is his delight. Though he could quite conceivably have gone mad with thinking of the schoolgirl under those dew-dripping trees. What other explanation could there be for his soul becoming so different from the soul that tormented him by night? Or, perhaps, can somber thoughts only arise at night? Even so, it doesn't matter. He's a brand new man. He smiles there under the trees. Isn't the whole thing magnificently idiotic? The Melancholy Ruffian, the depraved Blind Girl, Ergueta with his myth of Christ, the Astrologer, all those incomprehensible phantoms, who speak human words, fleshly words, what do they matter to him, leaning on a post by a bushy hedge, feeling life pushing forward to meet and touch him?

He's a brand new man, just from thinking about the girl who rested her head on his shoulder in a railway car. Erdosain closes his eyes. The acrid smell of earth sends a shiver through him. A dizzy spasm courses up his tired body.

Someone else is coming along the road. A harsh whistle sounds from the station. Other men in caps or in twisted, battered hats cross by in the distance.

Really, what the devil is he doing there? Erdosain winks, feeling he's playing a trick on God, playing at being the man who couldn't fend God's curse off his head. Still, waves of darkness pass before his eyes now and then, and a sort of dulled drunkenness is taking hold of his senses. He'd like to violate something. Violate common sense. If a haystack had been handy he would have set it ablaze. Something nasty distorts his face; it wears the harsh expressions of a madman; suddenly he looks at a tree, leaps up, grabs upward and catches hold of a branch, and bracing his feet against the trunk, shoving himself upward with his elbows, he manages to hoist himself up to the fork in the acacia tree.

His shoes slip on the smooth bark, twigs whip back into his face, he reaches out an arm and gets hold of a branch, plunging his face through the dripping leaves. The street below him falls away toward an archipelago of trees.

He is up in the tree. He has violated common sense, just for the hell of it, for no reason, like murdering somebody who happened to walk in front of you to see if the police could track you down afterward. To the east, funereal chimneys are silhouetted against the greenish sky; farther on, green hills like monstrous elephant herds stand in the meadows of Banfield, and the same old sadness comes flooding back. It's not enough to have violated common sense to be happy. But still, he makes a try and says aloud:

"Hey! Sleepy beasties! I swear
...
but, no
...
I want to violate the laws of common sense, you smug little beastie-weasties
...
. No. What I want to do is yell out for daring, for new life. I speak from the treetop, but I'm not your partridge in a pear tree, I'm a Remo in an acacia tree; whoo-oo, you sleepy beasties!"

His energy runs out quickly. He looks around, almost surprised to be where he is, suddenly the face of the faraway girl fragments inside him like flower petals, and, terrifically ashamed of his crazy stunts,
{3}
he comes back down the tree. He is beaten down. He is a loser.

2

Incoherencies

Erdosain spent the remaining days till Barsut's kidnapping holed up in a boardinghouse where he had taken temporary lodgings after paying back the Sugar Company. The thought of going out filled him with dread. He never thought about the planned kidnapping of Barsut, and he even stopped going to see the Astrologer. He spent the whole day in bed with his fists pressed into the pillow and his forehead smashed down against his fists. At other times he would sit staring fixedly for hours at the wall, where he seemed to see slithering mists of dreams and desperation.

During that time, he could never bring back an image of Elsa's face.

Then he would sleep or turn things over in his mind.
{4}
He tried, though it was no use, to occupy his mind with two projects he thought were important: the electromagnetic conversion system for steam engines, and the one for a dog-coloring service which would put on the market electric-blue dogs, green bulldogs, violet greyhounds, lilac for terriers, lap dogs with three-color prints of sunsets across their backs, little bitches with curlicues like a Persian rug. He was off balance: one afternoon he dozed off and had this dream:

He knew he was the lover of one of the princesses, and this in addition to being his majesty's lackey filled him with glee, because the generals were always hanging around him making smutty innuendos. Mirror-smooth water came up to the very trunks of trees that bloomed in perpetual white splendor, while the willowy princess, taking his arm, asked him in lisping Castilian Spanish:

"Oh, Erdosain, dotht thou love me?"

Erdosain, breaking into a snicker, answered the princess's question with a crude remark; a circle of drawn swords flashed before his eyes and he felt he was going under, cataclysmic forces were ripping the continents asunder, but he had lain sleeping for many long centuries in a lead chamber at the bottom of the sea. On the other side of the porthole, one-eyed sharks were swimming about, vile-humored because of their piles, and Erdosain enjoyed a silent glee, sniggering with the muffled chortles of someone trying not to be heard. Now all the fish in the sea were one eyed, and he was the Emperor of the City of One-Eyed Fish. An endless wall ran along the sandy seaside wastes, the blue sky lay rusting against the brick of the wall, and along the walls of the red towers, the waves smashed against myriad fat, one-eyed fish, monstrous big-bellied fish rotting away with sea leprosy, while a dropsied black man threatened them with the butt end of a pagan god made out of salt.

At other times, Erdosain would flash back to past times when he had actually foreseen what was going to happen, just as he had told the Captain that night. Tormenting thoughts attacked all around a reality that now made him exclaim:

"I was right. I saw things the way they were." Thus, he recalled one night he was talking with Elsa and she, in a moment of frankness, confessed that if she were still single, she would take a lover instead of getting married. Erdosain asked her: "Are you serious?" From the other bed, Elsa answered: "Yes, yes, I'd take a lover
...
why get married?" Something strange happened: Erdosain was suddenly aware of the silence of death, a silence stretched out like a coffin entrapping his horizontal body. Perhaps at that moment all the unconscious love man bears toward woman was destroyed within him. And later it would steel him to bear up under terrible situations that would have been insupportable if he had not experienced that moment. It now seemed to him he was at the bottom of a tomb, he thought he would never see the light, and in that weightless, dark silence that filled the room, ghosts stirred, awakened by his wife's voice.

Later, explaining those moments, he remembered that he lay stock still in the bed, afraid of destroying the balance of his boundless unhappiness, which weighed down upon his body, trapping him flat against the surface of an implacable anguish.

His heart pounded heavily. Each systole and diastole seemed to have to fight against the pressure of an elastic mass of mud. And it was no use to try to work his hands toward the sun above. And his wife's voice repeated again in his ears:

"I'd have taken a lover and not gotten married."

And those words, which had taken no more than two seconds' time to say, would echo within him for the rest of his life. He closed his eyes. The words would stay with him for all time, rooted in his inmost self like some organic growth. And his teeth gnashed together. He wanted to suffer even more, to exhaust himself with pain, bleed himself dry in a slow outpouring of grief. And with his hands pressed to his thighs, stiff as a corpse in its coffin, not looking at her, trying to hold his galloping breathing steady, he managed to spit out the question:

"And would you have loved him?"

"What for?
...
Who knows!
...
Yes, yes, if he was nice, why shouldn't I?"

"And where would you have met? Your family would never allow that under their roof."

"In some hotel."

"Ah!"

They fell silent, but Erdosain could see her in the clear-cut misfortune of his life, coming up the sidewalk of a street paved with river stones. She made her way along the wide sidewalk. A dark veil covered half her face, and as she turned her steps toward that place where she deliberately permitted her desire to lead her, she strode briskly and purposefully onward. And, eager to stomp even more on the last bit of hope he still held onto, Erdosain went on, with a faked smile she could not see in the dark, keeping his voice soft so Elsa wouldn't detect the fury that made his lips tremble:

"See? Isn't it nice when a married couple can tell each other everything, as close as a brother and sister? And, tell me, would you have taken your clothes off in front of him?"

"Don't be an idiot!"

"No, tell me; would you have gotten undressed?"

"Well
...
of course! You don't think I'd keep my clothes on!"

If they had split his spine down the middle with an axe, Erdosain could not have gone stiffer. His throat was as dry as if a fiery wind had parched it. His heart was barely beating; his brain felt like a fog was streaming out of his eyes and flowing over it. He fell back into silence and darkness, he plunged gently downward, and the rigid spasm that locked his cubic flesh relaxed, only to leave it sensitive to deeply graven pain. He was silent, but yet he would have liked to burst out sobbing, to fall on his knees, to rise, put on his clothes and go sleep in the doorway of some house in a strange city.

Furious, Erdosain shouted:

"But can you see
...
can you see how horrible this is, the enormity of what you've just told me? I should kill you. You're a bitch! I should kill you, that's right, kill you. See?"

"But what's got into you? Have you gone crazy?"

"You've ruined my life. Now I know why you kicked me out of your bed and sent me off to masturbate! Yes, that's what you made me do! You've reduced me to the shell of a man. I should kill you. Any slob can come up and spit in my face. See? And while I steal and steal and suffer just for your sake
...
oh, yes, that's what you're thinking about. How you'd leap in bed with some fine young man! See? A fine young man, that's all you need, a fine young man!"

"Have you gone crazy?"

Quickly Erdosain pulled on his clothes.

"Where are you going?"

He pulled his coat over his shoulders; then, leaning over his wife's bed, he answered:

"You want to know where I'm going? Out to some cathouse and catch the syph!"

Naïveté
and Idiocy

The compiler of this account would never attempt a definition of Erdosain, for so many traumatic events had blighted his life that the disasters he set off after joining up with the Astrologer could be explained by the psychic damage he sustained during his marriage.

Even now, reading over Erdosain's confessions, I can hardly believe I sat through such horror stories, told with no holds barred and riddled with human pain.

I remember how it was. During the three days he was holed up in my house, he poured it all out to me.