The Seven Madmen (14 page)

We got together in a vast room with no furniture, where hardly any light came in.

Erdosain would be sitting on the edge of the chair, hunched over, his elbows on his knees, his fingers splayed across his cheeks, staring fixedly at the floor.

He spoke flatly, without stopping, as if he were reciting a lesson stamped onto the surface of his darkened mind under infinite atmospheres of pressure. The tone of his voice, no matter what he was talking about, never varied, always steady, even, and regular as clockwork.

If he was interrupted, he didn't get mad, he just started up where he left off, supplying extra details as I asked for them, his head bent always over, his eyes fixed on the floor, his elbows on his knees. His story was slowed down because he was so excessively careful not to get anything wrong.

He told me horror story after horror story without showing any reaction. He knew he was going to die, human justice was out there looking for him, full force, but there he was with his revolver in his pocket, his elbows on his knees, his fingers splayed across his face, staring into the dust of the enormous, empty room, not showing the least emotion.

He had grown extraordinarily thin in just a few days. His yellow skin, stretched taut over the flat facial bones, made him look consumptive. Later the autopsy showed that he really was in an advanced stage of tuberculosis.

The second afternoon he was at my house, he told me:

"Before I got married, I felt this horror at the thought of fornication. To my way of thinking, a man only married to be with his wife and enjoy the pleasure of their shared togetherness all the time, talking to each other, sharing love through looks, words, and smiles. True, I was young then, but while I was courting Elsa I felt I had to watch myself all the more closely."

He talked on.

Erdosain never kissed Elsa, because it was enough to be choked up with the dizziness of loving her and since, moreover, he believed that "you don't kiss a nice girl." And so he made a big spiritual thing out of what was really just the hunger of his flesh.

"We always avoided the familiar pronoun for
you,
since I treasured the distance that the more formal pronouns kept between us. Besides, I believed you didn't go calling a nice young lady by the familiar form. I had this concept of the nice girl, a girl who was all purity, perfection, and lily-white. When I was with her I felt no desire, only the restless longing of a delicious joy that brought tears to my eyes. And I was happy because I was loving, suffering, having no notion where it was taking me, and so I made a great spiritual love out of the body's demands, which were what really had me throwing myself at her feet in rapture over her quiet eyes, clean eyes that cut through slowly to the quivering inmost layers of my soul.''

As he spoke, I looked at Erdosain. Here he was, a murderer, a murderer, going on about the subtleties of his ridiculous feelings! He continued:

"And on my wedding night, when we were alone in the hotel room, she unself-consciously took off her clothes with the light on. I was blushing to the roots of my hair and turned away so I wouldn't see her and she wouldn't see my ashamed reaction. Then I took off my collar, coat, and shoes and climbed under the sheet with my pants on. Across her pillow, from amid her black curls, she turned to me and said smiling and laughing an odd laugh:

"Aren't you worried they'll get all wrinkled? Take them off, silly."

Later, there was a mysterious gap between Elsa and Erdosain. She gave herself to him, but in a revolted way as if she'd been cheated out of something, who knows what. And he went on his knees at the head of the bed and begged her to let him have her for just an instant, but she'd turn on him and almost shout, her voice flat with impatience:

"Leave me alone! Can't you see you disgust me?" Fighting back his fear of some looming catastrophe, Erdosain sank back down onto his bed.

"I didn't get in, I just sat there, almost leaning back against the pillow, staring into the dark, but I imagined that she might be sorry to see me sitting like that, all alone in the dark, and then she'd take pity and tell me, 'All right, come here if you want.' But not once, not once, did she say those words, till finally one night I shouted at her in desperation:

"Maybe you like to think
...
I'll just keep on masturbating forever and ever?"

She kept her cool and replied:

"It's no good. I should never have married you."

The Black House

And anguish blossomed inside him, so violently that Erdosain gripped his head, crazed with physical pain. It seemed to him his brain tissue had come loose from his skull and banged against it at the least thought.

He knew he was past the point of no return, cast out from the possible happiness that, someday, smiles on the palest cheek; he grasped how fate had aborted him out into the chaos of that ghastly multitude of hostile men who rubber-stamp life with their overload of sin and suffering.

He no longer had any hope, and his fear of life grew stronger when he thought he would never have dreams to live up to, when, his eyes stubbornly glued to a corner of the room, he realized it was the same to him to be a restaurant dishwasher or a servant in some cathouse.

What did he care! His wretchedness brought him to the level of that silent host of terrible men who by day drag around their misery selling handicrafts or Bibles and by night make the rounds of urinals, exposing their genitals to young people drawn to the same by similar urges.

Knowing these things, he was mired in dark broodings. He felt he was screwed down into a massive block from which he would never escape.

This sense of anguish became so chronic that suddenly he found his soul was saddened by the fate that awaited his body in the city, his body that weighed seventy kilos and that he only saw when he walked in front of a mirror.

At other times in his thoughts he placed himself amid all the comforts and luxuries that there were, pleasures unbounded in space and time, while his present misery had only to do with his body, a suffering body, and something Erdosain no longer regarded as his, though he regretted not having made it happy.

The remorse he felt over his neglected physical self ran deep, as deep as the remorse a mother must feel who can never give her child the things it needs.

Because he never gave his body, which would live so short a time, so much as a decent suit or a scrap of pleasure to get it through life; he had done nothing to please his material being, though his soul had access to all things, even the geography of lands which no man-made technology had yet reached.

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."