The Seven Madmen (16 page)

"Nice morning," said Barsut.

And that was all they said till they were in front of the house.

"This is it," said Erdosain.

Barsut leaped back and looking at him, incredibly shrewdly, said:

"How can you know it's it if there's no number on it?"

Speaking later about what happened, Erdosain said:

"You could say there's a crime instinct, an instinct that has you lying, lightning-fast, not worried you'll contradict yourself, an instinct like self-preservation that comes into play at the key moment and lets you lie your way out of it in an uncanny way."

Erdosain looked up and, so unexpectedly cool he would later be amazed, answered:

"Because I was here yesterday to look around. I thought I might see Elsa."

Barsut looked at him warily.

He would have sworn Erdosain was lying,
{6}
but he was too proud to back out, and so, while Erdosain called out, he clapped his hands to announce their arrival.

His face half-hidden by a wide-brimmed boater, in shirtsleeves, the Man Who Saw the Midwife came to the red-painted meshwork fence gate.

"Is the lady in?" asked Barsut.

Bromberg, without deigning to answer, unbolted and opened the garden gate; then he headed off down a meandering path through the eucalyptus grove to the house, and the two men followed. Suddenly a voice called out:

"Where are you guys going?"

Barsut's head jerked around. Bromberg wheeled around on his heels, and as if a spring had snapped in his arm, it shot out like a lightning bolt.

Barsut's mouth gaped frantically after air, and he doubled over instantly. He was about to grab his belly, but Bromberg's arm came at him from a new angle, and the impact to his jaw made his teeth bang together hard.

He went down and lay like a dead man in the grass, his legs crumpled under and his lips slightly parted.

The Astrologer appeared, and Bromberg, gravely, almost sadly, leaned over the fallen man.

The Astrologer got a hold under his arms, hooking his fingers into the armpits, and so they lugged him over to the abandoned coach house. Erdosain rolled the ocher-painted stable door open, and a smell of dry grass and a swarm of insects escaped from the blackness within. They put the unconscious man into one of the stalls; a heavy chain hung from one of the posts, secured by a padlock.

The Astrologer took one end of it to chain up Barsut by the ankle, tied several knots with the links, and fastened it all with a padlock which opened with a creak, and Erdosain, getting up from over the fallen figure, said, looking at the Astrologer:

"Wouldn't you know? The checkbook's not on him."

It was ten in the morning. The Astrologer looked at his watch and said:

"I have time to take the express that gets to Rosario at six. Want to go with me as far as Retiro?"

"How's that, you're going to Rosario?"

"How else do I get the telegram to his landlady? Do you have the address?"

"Yes, everything's set."

"It's the best way to get hold of Barsut's things without arousing suspicion. That's all he keeps in his boardinghouse?"

"Yes, the trunk and two suitcases."

"Great. Let's stop yakking and get to it. At six I'll reach Rosario, I send the telegram to the old lady, you appear at her door tomorrow morning and play dumb, ask if Barsut has gotten into Rosario yet, and since I'm not there yet, you add that you know they've offered me an important job, etc., etc. How does that sound to you?"

"Great."

At twelve the Astrologer was boarding the train.

3

The Whip

The job Erdosain thought up and the Astrologer pulled off was a success, and the Astrologer set up a meeting the next Wednesday for the "heads" to get acquainted.

On Tuesday afternoon at four, the Astrologer went to see Erdosain and tell him that on Wednesday of that week, at nine in the morning, the heads would get together in Temperley.

The Astrologer stayed to visit with Erdosain a few minutes, and as he was going back down the stairs, he got a shock when he checked his watch and told Erdosain:

"Hey—it's four, I have to go a lot of different places. I'll expect you tomorrow at nine. Ah! I've been thinking you're the one logical candidate for Head of Industry. Well, we'll talk tomorrow— Ah! don't forget to present
...
I mean, to draw up plans for hydraulic turbines, the kind for a mountain factory site, simple types. It would be for the training camp and electrometallurgy projects."

"How many kilowatts?"

"I don't know—that's your department. We'll have electric furnaces—anyway, you figure it. Besides, the Gold Seeker is here, tomorrow he'll give you more concrete details. Get set to hear something really big. Damn, it's so late
...
see you tomorrow," and settling his hat on his head, he hailed a cab and got in.

The next day, Erdosain, walking the sidewalks of Temperley, was amazed to find he was finally feeling things might be all right.

He walked slowly. Walking under overbranching arches, he felt enclosed in a vast, oddly built structure. He took pleasure in the inlaid garden paths that sent their red streamers out to the meadowlands, green cloaks bespangled with violet, yellow, and red flowers. He looked up to find the sky full of great fluid depths and felt he was falling dizzily, for suddenly the sky was gone from before his eyes and there remained only a blackness like blindness, and then his thoughts focused on a furtive flutter of silvery atoms, which evaporated away into harsh, dry, terrible blue shades, arching high like caverns of methyl violet. And the joy the morning had given him, the fresh-made pleasure, unified the bits of his personality that his earlier crises and sorrows had pulled apart, and he felt his body all set to spring into any adventure.

"Augusto Remo Erdosain," as if by pronouncing his name he obtained a physical pleasure, paralleling the energy that brisk movement had given his members.

Through slanting streets and cones of falling light, he walked on, feeling the strength of his new-won personality: the Head of Industry. The freshness of the overgrown streets bestowed on him mental riches of every sort. And this fulfillment provided him with balance weight, like a dummy with lead-weighted feet. He thought he would sit through the meeting ironic and scornful, and he felt a wicked disdain for all weaklings on earth. The planet was only for the strong, it belonged to the strong. They would sweep it all clear and stand proudly before that quivering subrace with secretary's butt, armored in grandeur, like cruel and solitary emperors. He saw them in his mind's eye, in a vast room walled with glass and containing a round table. His four secretaries, carrying papers and with pens behind their ears, would come up and consult him, while the workers' delegates stood off in some corner, hats in hand, white old heads bowed low. And Erdosain, turning to them, told them simply: "Tomorrow you be back at work or we'll shoot you." That was it. He spoke few words, quietly, and his arm was exhausted from signing decrees. All that kept him going with the ruthlessness of the age that called for a tiger's savagery, a tiger who could make each dawn resound with gunshots bespeaking nothing good.

Now he strode right up to the Astrologer's house with his heart surging with enthusiasm, repeating the words of Lenin, which lilted a voluptuous refrain:

"What the hell kind of revolution is this if we don't shoot anyone?"

When he got to the house and opened the door part way, he saw the Astrologer coming to meet him, shrouded in a long gray smock and wearing a straw hat.

They shared a friendly, firm handshake as the Astrologer said:

"Barsut's being cool, you know? I don't think he'll give us much trouble about the check-signing. The others are here already, but first let's check on Barsut. Hell, they can wait! See what this means to me? With that money, the world is ours."

Now they were in the study and the Astrologer, twisting his ring with its violet gem and looking at the map of the United States, went on:

"We'll conquer the world, put our 'idea' in action. We can set up a brothel in San Martin or Ciudadela, and for the training camp, Los Santos in the mountains. Who's better for running the bordello than the Melancholy Ruffian? We'll name him Great Patriarch of Brothels."

Erdosain went over to the window. The roses gushed forth sharp, potent scent, filling everything brimful of red fragrance, cool as streamwater. Glassy-winged insects swarmed amid the scarlet spangles on the pomegranate trees. Erdosain just stood there a few seconds. The sight took him back to an afternoon just like this with him in the very same spot. And yet, that night he was in for a shock: Elsa's leaving him.

Endless varieties of green flooded his eyes, but he did not see. In the depths of his being, her cheek against the violet nipples of a square male chest, was his wife, languid, soft-eyed, her lips parting to meet the other man's obscene mouth.

A bird flew past his eyes, and Erdosain turned to the Astrologer and said in the calmest voice he could muster:

"I mean, look, it's up to you, you know?" Then, sitting down, he lit a cigarette and, eyes on his host, who was using a compass to make a circle on the blue map, he asked: "But what is your plan? Is it okay with the Melancholy Ruffian to handle the brothels?"

"Sure, there's no problem there and Barsut won't give us trouble."

"Is he still in the coach house?"

"I thought we should stash him away. I chained him up in the stables."

"In the stables?"

"It's the only safe place to keep him. Besides, the Man Who Saw the Midwife sleeps in a room over the stables—"

"What?—"

"Sometime I'll tell you. He saw the midwife, now he can't sleep nights. So, anyway, I thought you'd—"

"I'm the one who
...
?"

"Let me finish. You see him and see if he won't sign and, see, try to get across our ideas to him—"

"You're going to force him to sign—"

"Did I say that? Now, of course, I'm antiviolence, but you know what I mean. Our plan shouldn't fail over some sentimental squeamishness, you have to get Barsut to see, well, how much we'd hate to resort to applying the hotfoot or even something worse
...
all over a check-signing."

"And you'd do it?"

"Sure, we'd do it because we can't blow this once-in-a-lifetime chance. I was counting on your copperrose invention, but that's so long-term. We can't go asking the Melancholy Ruffian for money. If he doesn't have it, we put him on the spot, and if he does and won't give it to us, we lose a friend. Just because he was generous to you doesn't mean he'll be the same way with us. Besides, the guy's so messed up there's just no telling."

Erdosain gazed through the diamond-shaped windowpanes at the scarlet bursts spangled across the pomegranate treetops. A yellow swath of sunlight sliced the wall high up in the room. Massive sadness flooded his heart. What had he made of his life?

The Astrologer noticed his silence and said:

"Now, look here, Erdosain. We have no choice: it's either go in all the way or just give up. That's life, it's too bad
...
but what can we do? Don't you think I'd rather not have to make any sacrifices, too?"

"Only here it's another guy making the sacrifices—"

"And us, Erdosain, we're doing stuff that could send us to prison for who knows how long. You never read Plutarch's
Parallel Lives
?"

"No
...
"

"Then I'll give it to you so you can read it and see how human life is worth less than a dog's when you have to snuff out that life to get society headed a new way. You know how many murders it takes to bring in a Lenin or a Mussolini? People don't think of that. Why don't they? Because Lenin and Mussolini made it to the top. That's the crux, the thing that justifies any cause, just or unjust."

"And who's going to murder Barsut?"

"Bromberg, the guy who saw the midwife."

"You didn't tell me—"

"No point in it; it was all set." A burst of fragrance flooded the room. The plunking of water into a full barrel stood out clearly. "So far the people in on this are—"

"You, me, and Bromberg—"

"Too many to be in on a secret."

"No, because Bromberg's my slave, he's enslaved to himself, the worst kind of slavery."

"Fine, only you give me a signed document where you and Bromberg confess that you two committed the crime."

"And what do you want that for?"

"To be sure you're not trying to trap me." The Astrologer straightened his hat automatically, held his Oriental face in his great thick fingers and walked to the middle of the room like that, with an elbow cupped in his other hand, and said:

"I can give you what you're asking for easy enough, only bear this in mind. I live only to carry out my plan. Extraordinary times are at hand. I can't tell you about all the amazing things that will happen because I have no time and don't care to go into it now. Beyond any doubt, new times are coming. Who will see them coming? The chosen few. The day I find a man who can replace me and my idea is set in motion, I will go away to meditate in the mountains. Meanwhile, all who stand by me owe me absolute obedience. You should grasp that if you don't want to end up like that guy out there—"

"Hey, what kind of talk is that?"

"The right kind, because I'll sign the statement you're asking for."

"I don't need it—"

"Will you need money?"

"Yes, some two thousand pesos to—"

"Don't tell me— You'll have them."

"Another thing: I want nothing to do with this brothel business—"

"Fine, you'll keep the books, but, you know what we need now? To hit upon some symbol blatant enough to have real mass appeal—"

"Lucifer."

"No, no, that's a mystic symbol
...
too intellectual
...
We need something gross, stupid
...
something that grabs hold of the masses like Mussolini's black shirts—that devil knows his stuff. He figured out the Italian mass mentality was right at the level of the barbershop and operetta star
...
. Anyway, let's see, I have a system mapped out
...
interesting stuff
...
some other day we'll talk about it
...
might tum out to be—"