The Seven Madmen (25 page)

The streetlights shone sadly, pouring cataracts of cottony light dribbling down into the grime of the paving stones, and one could scarcely see two steps ahead. An enormous unhappiness within Erdosain made its way along, sadder than a leper.

He now had the feeling that his soul had separated forever from all bonds of affect with earth. And his anguish was that of a man with a sinister cage inside his head, where elastic-muscled, blood-stained tigers yawned amid the bones of sins, with a certain jungle pounce about them.

And Erdosain, as he walked along, thought about his life as though it were someone else's, trying to comprehend those dark forces that crept up from the roots of the body and whipped against the window grilles with a whistling sound.

Immersed in the fog that extended its heavy wetness down to the innermost sacs of his lungs, Erdosain came to Calle Gaona, where he stopped to wipe the sweat off his brow.

He knocked on a wooden door, the only opening in a vast expanse of factory brick, with a kerosene lamp hanging at one side. Suddenly a hand opened the door and a young man, cursing, followed a path twisting alongside a wall, the bricks sinking into the mud with each step. He came up to a door with light shining through its panes, knocked and a hoarse voice shouted out:

"Come in."

Erdosain entered the house.

An acetylene lamp poured its fiery light onto the five heads of the Espila family, who had just looked up from their supper plates. They all greeted him with smiles and cheery voices, while Emilio Espila, a tall bony youth with a good deal of hair, ran over to pump his hand.

Erdosain greeted, one by one, first the old Senora Espila, bowed with age and all dressed in black, then the two young sisters, Luciana and Elena, then old deaf Eustaquio, a grizzled giant of tubercular build, who, as always, ate with his nose buried in his plate and his gray eyes trained on the hieroglyphs of a magazine, deciphering them as he chewed.

A bit of life crept back into Erdosain at Luciana and Elena's friendly smiles.

Luciana was long-faced and blond, with a retroussé nose and long, fine, sinuous lips, blushing pink. Elena was nunlike, with a wax-colored oval face and chubby pale hands.

"Want some supper?" asked the old lady.

Erdosain, seeing how little there was to go around, said he had already eaten.

"You really have, now?"

"Yes
...
I'll have a little tea."

They made room for him at the table, and Erdosain took a seat between deaf old Eustaquio, who kept his eyes glued to his hieroglyphs, and Elena, who was ladling out stew to Emilio and the old lady.

Erdosain observed them with pity. He had known the Espilas for many years. At one time the family lived in relative ease, then a chain of disasters had reduced them to utter misery, and Erdosain, who one day ran into Emilio on the street, visited them. He had not seen them for seven years and was shocked to find them living in such a hole, when before they had had a maid, a front parlor, and a main parlor. The three women slept in that room cluttered with old furniture that at mealtime became the dining room, while Emilio and the deaf man took refuge in a little zinc-plated kitchenette. To make ends meet, they found the oddest bits of work: they sold society guides, home ice-cream crankers, and the two sisters were seamstresses. One winter they grew so poor they stole a telephone pole and sawed it up for logs one night. Another time they stole all the posts out of a fence, and the scrapes they got into to keep body and soul together both amused and horrified Erdosain.

The first time he went to see them was a real shock. The Espilas were living in a big building near Chacarita, a three-level affair subdivided into metal compartments. The building was like an ocean liner, with children popping in and out like a community of cubicle dwellers. For some days Erdosain roamed the streets, thinking of the sufferings the Espilas had to overcome to feel resigned to their catastrophe, and later, when he invented the copper rose, he thought how in order to cheer them along he must give them an infusion of hope, and with part of the money he stole from the Sugar Company he bought a used accumulator and amp meter and the other elements to set up a crude galvanoplastics lab.

And he convinced the Espilas that they should dedicate themselves to that work in their spare time, because if it worked they could all be rich. And he, whose life was devoid of consolation or hope, he, who had gone around for so long as one lost, was the one to fill them with such hopes that the Espilas started in on the experiments, and Elena applied herself seriously to the study of galvanoplastics, while the deaf man prepared the chemical baths and became handy at setting up the amp meter and controlling the resistance. Even the old lady participated in the experiments, and nobody had any doubt but that once they figured out how to copper-plate a tin slat, before long they would be rich if the copper rose did not fail.

Erdosain also talked to them about gold stitchery, silver curtains, coppered veils and even worked up a project for a metallic necktie that astonished them all. They would make shirts with metal cuffs, collars, and fronts, taking cloth, bathing it in a saline solution and then in a galvanoplastic bath of copper and nickel. Gath and Chaves, Harrods, or San Juan's could buy the patent from them, and Erdosain, only half convinced of such practical uses, wondered if he had not been overstimulating their fantasy lives, since now, although they never paid their bills and were about to starve, they saw themselves acquiring at the minimum a Rolls-Royce and a townhouse, which unless it could be on the Avenida Alvear they wouldn't consider. Erdosain bent over his cup of tea, and then Luciana, blushing a little, responded to Emilio's petulant smile with a signal, but he, who for almost total lack of teeth had a terrible lisp, said:

"Lithen
...
we made the rothe—"

"Yes, thank God, we've done it." But Luciana leaped up impatiently, opened the cupboard under the washbasin and Erdosain smiled enthusiastically.

In the hand of the blond girl, the copper rose glistened.

In that sad hovel the marvelous metal flower spread its coppery petals. The flickering of the acetylene lamp played red patterns across it, as though the flower had taken on the botanical life that was now burned off by the acids that made up its soul.

The deaf man took his nose out of his plate of stew and in a solemn voice, after an examination of the hieroglyph of the rose, exclaimed:

"No two ways about it, Erdosain, you're a genius
...
."

"Thoon we'll all be rich—"

"Let's just hope God heard that," muttered the old lady.

"But Mama, don't be such a skeptic!"

"Did you put in a lot of work?"

Elena, with a grave smile and a scientific manner, explained:

"See, Remo, he let the first rose have too many amps and burned it—"

"So there was no problem with the stability of the chemicals in the bath?"

"No, well, yes, we did cool it down a bit."

"To bathe this rose here; we put on the fixer—"

"You know
...
a nice coating of fixer
...
gently
...
."

Remo examined the copper rose again, admiring its perfection. Each red petal was nearly transparent, and under the metal coating the branching nerves of the natural petal barely showed; the chemicals turned them black. The rose was lightweight, and Erdosain added:

"How delicate!
...
It weighs less than a five centavo piece."

Later, looking at a yellow shadow that covered the pistils of the flower, streaking as it settled against the petals, he added:

"But look, when you take the flowers out of the bath you must rinse them in water. You see these yellow streaks? That's where cyanide from the bath is attacking the copper." They formed a huddle around and listened in religious silence. He went on: "Then what you get is cyanate of copper; you don't want that, because it will damage the nickel coating. How long did it take?"

"An hour."

As he looked up from the rose his eyes met Luciana's. The girl's eyes were velvety with mysterious warmth and her smile half revealed her brilliant teeth. Erdosain looked at her in amazement. The deaf man was examining the rose and they all crowded close in and peered attentively at the yellow cyanide stripes. Luciana did not lower her eyes. Suddenly Erdosain remembered that the next day he would be a party to Barsut's murder, and an immense sadness made him cast his eyes to the floor; then, all at once feeling hostile to these people, who were full of hope and unaware of what sufferings and anguish he had borne for months, he got up and said:

"Well, so long."

Even the deaf man was flabbergasted. Elena leaped up from her chair and the old lady froze with one arm holding up a plate she had been about to set in front of Eustaquio. "What's the matter, Remo?"

"Say, hey, Erdosain—" Elena looked at him seriously: "Is something wrong, Remo?"

"Nothing, Elena
...
believe me—"

"Are you angry?" Luciana asked with her eyes full of that mysterious sad warmth.

"No, it's nothing
...
I felt I had to see you
...
but now I must go—"

"You really aren't angry?"

"No, senora."

"You've got tho much on your mind
...
I thee—"

"Shut up, you dolt!"

The deaf man managed to tear himself away from his hieroglyphs to reiterate his earlier claim:

"I'm telling you, take this seriously now, because it will make you rich."

"But nothing's the matter?"

Erdosain got his hat. He felt repugnance at having to mouth useless explanations. It was already resolved. So why talk? Nonetheless, he forced himself to say:

"Believe me
...
I love you all a great deal
...
as always. I'm not angry
...
don't be upset
...
I have more ideas—we'll set up a dye shop for dogs and sell dogs dyed green, blue, violet—you see, I'm brimming over with ideas
...
You'll get out of this misery
...
I'll get you out
...
. You see, I'm running over with ideas." Luciana looked at him with pity and said: "I'll walk you to the door," and they went together as far as the street.

The fog occupied a great cube in the street inside which the wicks of the streetlamps reverberated sadly.

Suddenly Luciana took Erdosain's arm and said in a soft voice:

"I love you, I truly do love you."

Erdosain looked at her ironically, his pain transformed into cruelty. He looked at her.

"I gathered as much."

She went on.

"I love you so much that so you'd like me I learned about high-temperature processes and Bessemer-ing steel. Shall I tell you what a hydraulic lift does or how refrigeration works?"

Erdosain enclosed her in a cold stare, thinking, "This girl is in questionable shape."

"I always was thinking about you. Shall I tell you how to run an analysis on steel and how to smelt copper, how to extract gold from ore, and about recessed-flame furnaces?"

Erdosain, obstinately pressing his lips together, walked down the street thinking man's existence was absurd, and again unjustified rancor sprang up in him against that sweet girl who, pressing against his arm, was saying:

"Do you remember that time you talked about how your goal was to run a high-temperature furnace? I was mad about you then. I set out to study metallurgy. Shall I explain to you the difference between an irregular carbon configuration and a normally occurring molecule? Why don't you say anything, my love?"

The train rumbled by with a muffled clattering far off; the milky fog turned into darkness a little way from the street lamp, and Erdosain would have liked to say something, to reveal his troubles to her, but that clogged-up, hard malignancy kept him stiffly mute beside the girl, who insisted:

"But, what's wrong? Are you angry with us? But we have you to thank for our fortune!"

Erdosain looked her over from head to toe, gave her arm a squeeze and told her in a flat voice:

"You don't interest me."

Then he wheeled around and before she could manage to look at him, he had stepped away and was lost in the fog.

He knew he had been gratuitously crude to the girl, and that knowledge gave him such cruel joy that he muttered with clenched teeth:

"They can all drop dead and leave me in peace."

Two
Souls

At two in the morning, Erdosain was still walking through walls of wind, through downtown streets, in search of a brothel. Waves of muffled noise washed against his ears, but borne along by the frenzy of instinct he walked under the storefronts where the street was darkest. There was a horrible sadness inside him. At that moment he was headed nowhere.

He went along like a sleepwalker with his eyes fixed on the ornaments on top of police helmets, which flashed at each intersection in the cylinders of light flowing from the arc lights. Something extraordinary was impelling his body along with great strides. Thus he reached Plaza Mayo and now, on Cangallo, he left behind the Once Station.

There was a horrible sadness inside him.

His mind, stuck on one thought, repeated:

"It's no use, I'm a murderer," but, suddenly, when some red or yellow cube of light showed the entryway to a brothel, he would stop and hesitate in the wash of reddish or yellowish fog, thinking "No, not this one," and resume his walk.

A silent automobile rolled by him and sped away, and Erdosain thought of the happiness he would never have and his lost youth, and his shadow went racing ahead on the paving stones, then shrank toward him and, not to be trod underfoot, leapfrogged over him, or flickered across a sewer grating. But his anguish grew heavier with each moment, as if it were a mass of water that sloshed him around until he was weak and nauseated. In spite of it, Erdosain imagined that by special providence, he had entered a singular brothel.

The madam let him into the bedroom, he threw himself onto the bed clothed—water was boiling on a kerosene burner in one corner—suddenly the girl appeared, half-naked, and stopping short in surprise, the reason for which only he and she knew, the whore exclaimed: