The Seven Madmen (15 page)

"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, the 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.

Ah! To come into a fresher world with great paths through the woods, where the stench of wild beasts would be incomparably sweeter than the horrible presence of man.

And he walked along; he wanted to stretch his body to the limit, exhaust it once and for all, leave it so thinned out and spent that it would be unable to muster even one idea.

The Kidnapping

At nine in the morning Erdosain went to get Barsut.

They left without a word. Later Erdosain thought back upon this odd trip where Barsut went to meet his fate without putting up any fight at all. Harking back to that trip, he said: "I went with Barsut the way a condemned man goes to the wall, with his strength all gone; with a persistent feeling of there being empty gaps between my vital organs.

"Barsut, for his part, was scowling; I grasped how he, as he sat there by the window, with his elbow on the armrest, was storing up fury to discharge against the unseen enemy that his instinct warned him was lurking in the big old house in Temperley."

Erdosain went on:

"From time to time I'd think how weird it'd be if the other passengers had known that those two men, slouching down into the leather seats, were a future assassin and his chosen victim.

"And even so, everything just went on as always; sunshine fell on the fields, we left behind the meat packers' and plastic and soap plants, the glassworks and foundries, the cattleyards with livestock snuffling around the posts, the streets where paving crews had left deep ruts and piles of material. And after Lanús began that sinister spectacle of Remedios de Escalada, monstrous roundhouses of red brick with gaping black mouths, with locomotives maneuvering under their arches, and off in the distance you could see little bands of wretched men shoveling gravel or hauling railroad ties.

"Farther on, among some rickety-looking banana trees poisoned by the soot and gassy fumes, it cut a diagonal swath lined on both sides with red cottages for the company's employees, with their little tiny gardens, window blinds black with soot, and roads strewn with slag and waste."

Barsut was lost in his own thoughts. Erdosain, to be exact, left himself alone. If just then he'd spotted a train heading straight for them, he would not have blinked; he was numbed to either life or death.

That was how the trip went. When they got to Temperley, Barsut shuddered as if he'd awakened, cold all over after a painful dream, and all he said was:

"Where is it?"

Erdosain lifted his arm, pointing vaguely off in the distance where they should go, and Barsut started out.

Then they went in silence through the streets to the Astrologer's house.

The gentle blue of the morning fell downward to meet the walls along the slanting streets.

Grass and reeds in all shades of green and trees formed great masses of foliage, crested with wavy tufts and sliced through with labyrinthine woody stems. The gently rippling breeze seemed to set these fantastic creations of nature's whimsy afloat in a golden aura, glassy and clear as a crystal paperweight, its roundness entrapping the strong effluvia of the earth.