The Seven Madmen (23 page)

And though he could not say why, he felt the best of that slimy lot was a vile toad, all of them oozing envy and showing as much fair play as a snake-oil salesman.

Walking past enterprises devoted to the sale of goods, he thought these men had no high aim in life, that they spent their lives in voyeuristic vigilance over their neighbors' intimacy, neighbors as low as themselves, inwardly rejoicing as they mouthed polite distress over others' misfortunes; gossip mongering right and left out of sheer boredom, and suddenly the whole thing made him so angry he felt he had better get away to avoid creating a nasty scene with one of those animals, under whose hardened crusts you could see the soul of the city rising, as low, harsh, and ruthless as themselves.

He had no specific plan; he realized his spirit was soiled with revulsion toward life, and suddenly spotting a streetcar heading out to Plaza Once, he sprinted over to catch it. He bought a round-trip ticket to Ramos Mejia. He could equally well have gone any other route. He was tired, and distressed at the certainty he had cast his soul down a gulch from which it would never emerge. And there, waiting, was the Lame Whore. How nice it might have been to be a ship's captain, to command a superdreadnought. A chimney would vomit torrents of smoke, and there on the bridge he would stand in conversation with one of his subordinates, while in his heart there would remain the image of a woman who perhaps was not his wife. But why was his life always the way it was? And other people's, too, as if that "way it was" was a stamped-on misfortune that only came out clearly on the surface of one's own being, but looked blurry in others.

What had become of that surge of life that courses through some men like the blood of a lion? That surging life that can make a whole existence open up without having had to work away at it and everything fall into place cinematically. Wasn't that what you saw looking at pictures of great men? Who kept around a picture of Lenin arguing in some backstreet room in London, or Mussolini wandering the back roads of Italy? But there they were, presto, haranguing the masses from a balcony or among the broken columns of recent ruins, in casual shoes and a straw hat which did nothing to dim the conquerer's aura about them. And he felt his own life came with quite a different set of images: the Lame Whore, the Captain, his wife, Barsut, all existences that, once removed from his sight, were reduced to the tiny size physical distance confers on objects.

He leaned his head against the windowpane. The car pulled up and came to a stop, then with the second whistle blast it pulled out again; the governing mechanism clanked into place and metal strained angrily against metal.

The red and green lights of the tunnel flashed into his eyes for a moment, then he closed them again. At night, the train communicated its trepidation to the rails, and their combined mass, multiplied by the velocity, stamped onto his thoughts the dizziness of a march that would be just as merciless and dizzying.

Clack
...
clack
...
clack
...
the wheels caught at every juncture in the rails, and this flat, imposing monorhythm eased his anger, lightened his spirit, while his flesh sank back into the half-sleep speed induces in one's senses.

Then he thought Ergueta was surely mad to start with. He remembered how when he was on the brink of ruin Ergueta had said, "Beat it, you creep," and, nestling the back of his head into the seat, he thought about past times, closing his eyes to make out clearly the images of a memory. He was a bit surprised, because it was the first time he had noticed how in a memory certain images appear life-size while other images are like tiny tin soldiers or only appear in profile, with no depth to them. So, next to a corpulent black whose hand wandered up the rear of a small boy, he saw a tiny table on which some weary thieves had lain their heads, while the roof, of regal height, gave it all an air of the most extraordinary desolation against the gray of memory. A dark crowd flowed through the inside of his soul; shade fell like a cloud to cover his pain over with fatigue, and next to the table where the little grownup thieves were sleeping, looming up like a huge ox skull, was the café proprietor, digging his fingers into his bulging arm muscles.

And another memory showed him how correct he had been when he had had a presentiment of his imminent downfall, back when he had not yet even thought of embezzling from his company, but now he was going through those gray stretches searching for an image of his own possibilities.

How many paths branched off through his brain! But now he set off on the path to that diner, that vast diner that occupied the entire space from his forehead through to the nape of his neck, pushed its taciturn mass like a butcher shop sloping at a twenty-degree angle through the inner recesses of his brain. One would expect the tables with the grownup little thieves to go sliding across the floor, but when he thought about it the mass somehow righted itself as though by a counterweight, and his flesh, by now accustomed to the mass of the train times its velocity, settled back into dizzy inertia. Now memory had seized hold of every cell in his being, and the diner appeared before his eyes, a perfect quadrilateral. It seemed to thrust its lines deep into his chest, almost as if were he looking head on into a mirror, he would have seen his body as a narrow room sloping back in perspective. And inside, he walked along a sidewalk filthy with gobs of spit and sawdust, while the frame around this self-portrait edged out into other nearby sensations.

And he thought if the Lame Whore had been sitting beside him, he would have explained to her: "That's me before I became a thief." Erdosain imagined the Lame Whore looking over at him and added in a bored voice:

"Next to the building where they used to publish
Critica,
on Sarmiento, was a diner."

Hipólita looked at him as though asking a question, while the cars clattered infernally as they cut across the Caballito runs. Erdosain imagined he was a character who had renounced a life of crime and reformed, and went on talking to his invisible seatmate:

"Newspaper vendors and thieves gathered there."

"Ah, really?"

The proprietor, concerned lest his motley crew of patrons might smash the windows one day, kept his metal curtain drawn all the time.

The light came into the room through blue-tinted panes so that in that grotto, its walls painted the horrible gray of an immigrant's butcher shop, there floated a shadow that turned the cigar smoke a milky color.

In that shadowy place, with great exposed beams running across the ceiling, and filled with the effluvia of stew and cooking fat, was a dark assortment of what were clearly veteran thieves, their faces shadowed by the visors of their caps and bandannas tied loosely around their throats.

From eleven to two in the afternoon they huddled around the greasy tables, eating rotten clams or playing cards and drinking wine.

In that malodorous fog faces twisted into vile sneers, great globs of spit flew as though someone were being strangled to death, jaws hung slack and lips dangled loosely like funnels, blacks with porcelain eyes and teeth gleaming from between tumescent lips, reaching for the rears of young boys with teeth-gnashing crudity, the human debris of the city, with tiger faces, sunken foreheads, and fixed stares.

Those little clots of benchsitters and others at counters filled the air with their harsh voices. A breed of characters known as "lancers" wandered among them, instantly recognizable by their unstarched collars, gray jackets, and bowler hats costing seven pesos. Some of them were fresh out of jail and carried news of or messages from recent prisoners, others wore eyeglasses to make them look trustworthy. As they came in, they ran an expert eye over the gathering, missing nothing. They spoke in low voices, smiling convulsively, buying strangers beer, and making several mysterious trips in and out in the space of fifteen minutes. The owner of this grotto was an enormous fellow with a huge face like an ox, green eyes, a nose that belled out at the bottom like a trumpet, and thin tight lips.

When he grew angry his roars were enough to scare the sewer rats there, who were afraid of him. He knew how to keep them in hand through a sort of unfocused violence. If someone surpassed the acceptable level of disorder, suddenly the proprietor strode over, the offender knew he was about to get clobbered, but he waited in silence, and then the giant let loose great whacks, using the edge of his fist on the man's skull.

The punishment was meted out in joyful silence, the unfortunate recipient of it was kicked out into the street, and the voices started up again, more nasty and resounding than before, pushing clouds of smoke over toward the glass-paneled door. Sometimes street musicians would wander into this den, frequently a concertina and a guitar.

As they tuned up, an expectant silence seized the animals huddled in corners and an invisible wave of sadness washed through the atmosphere.

The instruments poured forth a plaintive jailhouse tango, and then those wretches would work into its rhythms their own rancors and misfortunes, unconsciously. The silence was like a many-handed monster raising a dome of sound over the heads drooping onto the tabletops. What must have been going through those life-scarred heads! And that dome, tall and somehow terrible, penetrating their very beings, multiplied the languor of the guitar and the concertina, making a divine matter of the suffering of a whore and the horrible boredom of jail that oppresses the heart when one thinks of friends on the outside, taking care of business.

Then in the most scarred-over souls, under the grime life had deposited, flowered an unfamiliar tremor; then it was over and every hand reached out to toss a coin into the musicians' caps.

"I went there," Erdosain said to his hypothetical seatmate. "I sought more anguish, and to be yet more certain I was lost, and to think of my wife who was alone at home, who suffered because she had married a loser like me. How often, in a corner of that diner, did I imagine Elsa running off with another man. And I sunk deeper, and that café was only a taste of what worse things would happen to me later on. And often, looking at those wretches, I thought: Won't I end up just like one of these? Ah, I don't know how, but I've always somehow known what would happen before it did. I've never been wrong about it. You see? And there, in that grotto, one day I found Ergueta lost in thought. Yes, Ergueta. He was alone at a table and some paperboys were looking at him in amazement, although surely others thought he was just an especially well-dressed thief."

Erdosain imagined the Lame Whore now asking him:

"What, my husband was there?"

"Yes, and with that dogcatcher's face of his he was chewing on the head of his cane while a black man massaged a young boy's rear. But he didn't notice a thing. It was like he was nailed down to the café floor. It's true he told me he had come to wait for his connection to give him hot tips on the next race, but really he just was there as though he'd felt lost and wandered in looking for the meaning of life. Maybe that's just what did happen. Looking for the meaning of life by immersing himself in that ratpack. That was when I first found out he was determined to marry a prostitute, and when I asked about the pharmacy, he said he had left the substitute manager from Pico running it, and I could see he was a hardcore gambler. I don't know if you know they threw him out of his club for cheating. They even said he forged tickets, but they never did prove anything. He only talked about you when I asked about his girlfriend, a millionairess from Cachari who was really in love with him.

" 'I broke that off a while ago,' he said.

" 'Why?'

" 'I don't know
...
I just stopped giving a shit
...
I got bored.'

" 'But why did you leave her?' I insisted.

"A harsh light showed in his eyes. He waved the flies off the rim of his beer glass and insisted grouchily :

" 'How should I know!
...
Bored, is all
...
just because I do weird things. And the poor girl loved me. But what would she have done with me. Besides, the thing's done.' "

"So Ergueta said that it was irremediably done?"

"He sure did, he said, 'The thing's done, because tomorrow I'm marrying someone else.' "

The electric train left Flores behind. Erdosain, huddled into his seat, remembered that he looked seriously at the pharmacist, at the shifting movements of the muscles under his face that made him look so malevolent.

"So who are you marrying?"

Ergueta's face went white. He leaned over toward Erdosain winking one eye while the other, immobile, tried to gather in all the surprise Erdosain would show in just a moment:

"I'm marrying the Whore." Then he raised his head and rolled his eyes up. Erdosain just sat there.

The pharmacist had on his face an expression of ecstasy like a holy picture, where a saint always appears clasping his hands against his chest.

And Erdosain remembered how in that place, the black who had hold of a child's rear, now pulled the youth's hands toward his pudenda, while a circle of newspaper vendors were shouting about something and the gigantic proprietor strode across the floor with an order of soup in one hand and one of meat in the other for a couple of sneak thieves off in one corner.

Nonetheless, this decision did not surprise Erdosain. Ergueta was apt to take such resolves, like all frenzied souls who follow the dictates of their obsessions with slow fury, a deep-seated explosion which they never hear go off, but which sends out shock waves that intensify their instincts a hundredfold. Nonetheless, feigning calm:

"The Whore?
...
Who is this Whore?" he asked.

A deep flush rose in Ergueta's face. His eyes were smiling.

"Who is she, you ask?
...
An angel, Erdosain. Right in front of me, I was right there, she tore up a thousand-peso check a lover gave her. She gave the maid a pearl necklace worth five thousand pesos. She gave the doormen at her apartment house her silverware. 'I'll enter into the marriage naked,' she told me."