The Seven Madmen (26 page)

"It's you?
...
You!
...
you're here at last!
...
"

Erdosain answered her:

"Yes, it's me
...
. Ah, if you knew how I've looked for you!"

But since that was never to be, his sadness rebounded like a lead ball off a rubber wall. And he could see how his desire to have an unknown whore become seized with pity for him would be, as days went by, as useless as that ball to take a stance against the oppressions of life. Again he repeated to himself:

"Ah! it's you? You
...
Ah! At last you've come, my sad love
...
" but it was no good, he would never find that woman, and a pitiless energy born of desperation swelled his muscles, coursed through the seventy kilos of his weight, as in the cubic space of his chest an enormous sadness made his heart beat heavily.

Tiptoeing down the hall, he went up to his door and sneaked it open. Then, holding out his hands in the dark, he went to the corner where the sofa was and slowly curled up onto it, being careful not to make the springs groan. Later he could not see why that should have mattered to him. He stretched his legs out on the sofa and remained for a few minutes with his hands laced behind his neck. And there was more darkness in him than in that room, which would have been transformed into a wallpapered cube had he switched on the light. He wanted to pin his thoughts onto something objective, but it was no use. So he felt a certain childish fear; for a few minutes he paid close attention, but no sound came and then he closed his eyes. His heart was working in hard thumps, pushing the mass of his blood, and a watery chill made the hair on his back stand on end. With stiff eyelids and body rigid he waited for something to happen. Suddenly he realized that if he kept on like that he would break out in screams of fear, and pulling up his heels, with his legs crossed like Buddha, he waited in the dark. He was utterly annihilated, but he could not call out to anyone, nor could he weep. Yet he could not very well keep on crouching there all night.

He lit a cigarette and a wave of cold immobilized him.

The Lame Whore was standing by the room divider screen, examining him with her cold poison stare. The woman's hair was bound back in halves that covered her ears with their red wings, and her lips were pressed together. Everything about her was overattentive; Erdosain was frightened. Finally he got out:

"You!"

The match burned his fingers, and suddenly, an impulse stronger than his timidity forced him to his feet. He went over to her in the darkness and said:

"You! Weren't you asleep?"

He felt her reach out; the woman held his chin in her fingers. Hipólita said in a deep voice:

"Why aren't you asleep?"

"You are stroking my chin?"

"Why aren't you asleep?"

"You are touching me?
...
But how cold your hand is! Why is your hand so cold?"

"Light the lamp."

As the light poured down, Erdosain stood contemplating her. She sat on the sofa.

Erdosain murmured timidly:

"Shall I sit beside you? I couldn't sleep."

Hipólita made room for him, and next to the stranger, Erdosain could not resist a force that raised his hands, and he brushed her forehead with his fingertips.

"Why are you the way you are?" he asked.

The woman looked at him calmly.

Erdosain contemplated her for an instant with mute desperation and finally took her delicate hand. He would have kissed it, but something went off in the depths of his being and he drooped over into her lap, sobbing.

He wept convulsively in the shadow of the stranger, who sat upright and rested her gaze on his shaking head. He wept blindly, his life twisted with hard fury, holding back screams whose unreleased wrenchings renewed his horrible grief, and suffering poured forth endlessly from him, he was flooded with fresh grief, pain was coming up through his throat in great sobs. Thus he agonized for several minutes, biting his handkerchief to keep from shrieking, while her silence was a softness on which his weary spirit lay down. Then the screaming agony spent itself; the last tears welled up in his eyes, a rough snoring sound came up from his chest and he found it soothing to half lie, wet-cheeked, across the woman's lap. A vast tiredness seized him, the image of his faraway wife vanished off the surface of his pain, and as he lay there, a sunset calm fell, reconciling him to all the disasters laid in store for him.

He raised his flushed face, stamped with the imprint of the folds of her skirt and wet with tears.

She looked at him serenely.

"Are you sad?" she asked.

"Yes."

Then both fell silent and a violet flash lit up the corners of the dark patio. It was raining.

"Shall we drink some maté?"

"Yes."

He heated the water in silence. She looked vaguely at the rain drumming on the panes, while Erdosain readied the leaves. Then, smiling through his tears, he said:

"I have a special way of steeping it. You'll like it."

"Why are you sad?"

"I don't know
...
this anguish
...
I haven't had a tranquil life for some time."

Then they drank the maté in silence, and in that room with the paper peeling off in one corner the woman took on a special perfection, wrapped in her fur coat and with her red hair drawn back in smooth bands that covered the tips of her ears.

With a childish grin, Erdosain added:

"When I'm alone, sometimes I drink."

She smiled in friendly fashion, her legs crossed, a bit bent over, one elbow in the palm of the one hand and the other holding the maté, sipping out of the nickel-plated straw.

"Yes, I was distraught," Erdosain repeated. "But, how cold your hands are!
...
Are they always that cold?"

"Yes."

"Will you give me your hand?"

The stranger straightened up and reached out her hand with great dignity. Erdosain took it carefully in his hands and kissed it, and she looked at him at length, the coldness of her eyes melted into a sudden warmth that flushed her cheeks. Then Erdosain remembered that man in chains, and not letting it blot out the pale happiness now in him, he said:

"Look
...
if you were to ask me to kill myself now, I would do it. That's how happy I am."

The heat that had a moment ago convulsed him with weeping was again dissipated into a cold gaze. The woman looked at him with curiosity.

"But in all seriousness. Look
...
it's better, even
...
ask me to kill myself—tell me, doesn't it seem to you it would be better if certain people just went away?"

"No."

"Even if they do the worst actions?"

"That should be in God's hands."

"Then no point in us trying to discuss it."

Again they drank maté in silence, a silence that came about so he could drink in the sight of the red-haired woman, wrapped in her fur coat, with her transparent hands clasping her knee over the green silk dress.

And all at once, unable to hold back his curiosity, he exclaimed:

"Is it true you were a servant?"

"Yes
...
what's so strange about that?"

"But how odd!"

"Why?"

"It is odd, though. Sometimes I feel as if I'll find in someone else's life what's missing from my own. And then you think how there are these people who have found the secret of happiness
...
and if they would tell us their secret we would be happy, too."

"But, my life is no big secret."

"But you never felt the strangeness of living?"

"Oh, yes, I've felt it."

"Tell me about it."

"It was when I was a little girl. I worked in a beautiful house on Avenida Alvear. There were three girls and four servants. I'd wake up in the morning and it was so hard to believe that I was there living around all this furniture that didn't belong to me and those people who only talked to me so that I'd wait on them. And sometimes it seemed to me that the others all had a niche in life, and fit into their houses, while I felt like I was loose, just barely tied with a cord to life. And their voices would come floating out to me like when you're asleep and can't tell if you're dreaming or you're awake."

"It must be sad."

"Yes, it's very sad to see other people be happy and see how other people can't see how you're unhappy for all your life. I remember how at siesta time I would go to my room and instead of doing my mending I'd think: will I be a servant all my life? And the work wasn't what tired me anymore, it was my thoughts. Haven't you noticed how stubborn sad thoughts are?"

"Yes, they never go away. How old were you then?"

"Sixteen."

"And you'd still never been to bed with a man?"

"No
...
but I was furious—furious at being a servant all my life—besides, one thing happened that really made an impression on me. It was one of the sons. He was engaged and very Catholic. More than once I came on him loving up a cousin who was his fiancée, I remember now, she was a very sensual girl, and I wondered how you could reconcile Catholicism with such nasty stuff. Involuntarily, I got so I was spying on them
...
but even though he was so eager-handed with his fiancée, he was always correct with me. Later I realized I had wanted him
...
but it was too late
...
I was working in a different house
...
."

"And then
...
"

"I could feel my ideas weighing in on me. What did I want from life? Didn't I know, then? Everywhere they were good to me. Since then I've heard people say harsh things about the rich—but I couldn't see it. Think how they lived. So, why should they have to be bad, right? They were the girls of the family, I was the servant."

"And?"

"I remember one day I was on a streetcar with one of my employers. Two young men were having a conversation in one row. How you ever noticed how some days certain words go off like bombs in your ears—as if you'd always been deaf and were hearing people speak for the first time? Anyway. One of these two men was saying 'An intelligent woman, even an ugly one, if she set about selling her favors right would get rich, and if she'd just keep out of love she'd be queen of the city. If I had a sister that's what advice I'd give her.' Those words left me frozen where I sat. That was the instant end of my timidity and when we got to the end of the line it seemed like instead of those strangers having said those words, I had, I who had not even known about them up till then. And for days I puzzled over how one sells her favors."

Erdosain smiled:

"Amazing."

"I spent my next month's pay on a lot of books about prostitution. That was dumb, because they were nearly all pornography—stupid—not even about prostitution, but really about prostituting one's soul running after pleasure. And, can you believe it, not one of my friends could give me an explanation in so many words of prostitution."

"Go on
...
I'm not surprised now Ergueta should fall in love with you. You're an admirable woman."

Hipólita smiled, blushing.

"Don't exaggerate
...
all I am is a sensible one."

"So then, you delicious creature?"

"Silly kid!
...
Anyway—" Hipólita pulled her coat together over her chest and went on: "I went on with my work, all day long, but the work got to seem strange— I mean, while I'd be scrubbing or making a bed, my mind would be off far away and yet so much inside me sometimes I thought if it grew any bigger it would split open my skin. But I couldn't get it figured out. I wrote a bookstore asking if they didn't have a manual for women starting to sell themselves and they didn't answer, till one day I decided to see a lawyer and have him set me straight on the matter. So I went down street after street where the lawyers hung out their signs, sign after sign until, making my way down Calle Juncal, I stopped in front of a splendid house, talked to the doorman, and he ushered me in to see a doctor of jurisprudence. I remember as if it were today. He was a thin, serious man with a face like a perverted bandit, but when he smiled his soul was like some young kid's. When I thought it over later I concluded that he must have been a man who suffered a lot."

She sipped the maté, then, handing it back to him, she said:

"How hot it is here! Could you open the window?"

Erdosain opened one side a crack. It was still raining. Hipólita went on:

"So, not making it a big thing I said, 'Professor, I'm here to see you because I want to know how a woman sells her favors.' He just sat there staring at me in amazement. After a few moments' thought, he said, 'What's your purpose in wanting to know?' And I calmly explained to him my plans and he listened to me attentively, frowning, weighing my words. Finally he said, 'A woman is said to be selling her favors when she carries out sexual acts without love and for profit.' So you mean, I said then, that by selling her body, she can get free of it
...
and then she's free."

"You said that to him?"

"Yes."

"How strange!"

"How do you mean?"

"And then?"

"Hardly saying good-bye, I went out. I was happy, I've never been happier than that day. To sell one's body. Erdosain, that was it, to get free of your body, to have your will free to do anything that popped into your head. I felt so happy that as soon as a nice-looking fellow came along and murmured sweet things to me under his breath, I gave myself to him."

"And then?"

"A real surprise! Because when the man—I told you he was nice-looking—well he fell over like an ox when he was satisfied. The first thing I thought was he must be sick—I never imagined that. But when he explained to me that that was natural for any man, I couldn't help but laugh. So that a man who seems as immensely strong as a bull
...
well, have you ever seen a thief in a room full of gold? Just then I, the servant girl, was that thief in a room full of gold. And I saw the world lay in my hand
...
Later, after I got into prostitution, I resolved to study—yes, don't look so astonished, I read all kinds of things—I came to the conclusion from reading novels that men are ready to see an educated woman as having a great capacity for love
...
I don't know if I'm making it clear
...
I mean that a veneer of education could cover over the merchandise and raise the value."