The Seven Madmen (27 page)

"Did you take pleasure in the moment of possession?"

"No
...
but back to what I was saying: I read all kinds of things."

Erdosain warmed to the woman's cynicism, and, feeling tender toward her, he asked:

"Will you give me your hand?"

She gave it to him gravely.

Erdosain took it carefully; then he kissed it and she looked at him at length; but Remo suddenly remembered that man in chains; now he would be awake in the stables, and not letting it chill the sweet warmth lulling his senses, he said:

"Look if you
...
if you asked me to kill myself now, I'd do it gladly."

She looked at him at length through her red eyelashes.

"I say that seriously. Tomorrow
...
today
...
it's better
...
ask me to kill myself
...
tell me, doesn't it seem to you certain people should just disappear from earth?"

"No, that's no way to do things."

"Even though they might turn out criminals?"

"Who's to judge someone else?"

"Then no point us talking about it."

Again they sipped the maté in silence. Erdosain understood the sweetness of many things. He looked at her, then he said:

"What a strange creature you are!"

She smiled, pleased, and rejoicing broke out inside his soul.

"Shall I put in more leaves?"

"Yes."

Suddenly Hipólita looked at him seriously.

"Where did you get that soul you have?"

Erdosain was about to speak about his sufferings, but he felt inhibited and said instead:

"I don't know
...
I've often thought about purity— I would have liked to be a pure man," and, waxing enthusiastic, he went on, "Often I've felt sad over not being a pure man. Why? I don't know. But can you imagine a man with a white soul, in love for the first time
...
and everyone like that? Can you imagine how great love would be between a pure woman and a pure man? Then before they gave themselves to one another, they'd kill themselves—or wait, no; she'd be the one to offer herself to him for one day—then they'd kill themselves, realizing the uselessness of living with no illusions."

"But still, that's not possible."

"But it exists. Haven't you ever noticed how many shopkeepers and dressmakers kill themselves together? They love one another
...
they can't marry
...
they go to a hotel
...
she gives herself to him, and then they kill themselves afterward."

"Yes, but they don't do it with any plan in mind."

"Maybe not."

"Where did you have supper last night?"

Erdosain spoke about the Espilas, explaining to her how those people had fallen into penury.

"And why don't they work?"

"Where do they get work? They look for it and don't find it. That's the terrible part. It even seemed I was seeing how misery had killed off their desire to live. Deaf Eustaquio is good at math—he knows infinitesimal calculus—but it doesn't do him any good. He also knows
Don Quixote
by heart
...
but something's a bit skewed in his reasoning
...
. Here, I'll show how: when he was sixteen they sent him out to buy leaves for maté and he went to a drugstore instead of a grocery. After a lot of explanations, he said that maté leaves were a medicinal product—that that was what botany taught."

"He has no common sense."

"Exactly. Besides, he's a fool for gambles—to solve a riddle he'll miss a meal, and when he has a few centavos he goes to a sweet shop and eats himself silly."

"How odd!"

"But Emilio, he's a good sort. He says—as he's told me, he's sure the psychic state they're in, strange and weak-willed, is a hereditary affliction, and so that's how he runs his life, he's as slow as a tortoise. He can take two hours to get dressed. It's as though he did everything in an atmosphere of extraordinary indecision."

"And the sisters?"

"The poor girls do what they can
...
they sew
...
one looks after a friend's hydroencephalitic child with his head bigger than a pumpkin."

"How dreadful!"

"What I can't understand is how they can get used to all that. That's why after I visited them, I felt I had to give them hope—and since I know how to talk to people, I managed to. And they dedicated themselves to the copper rose."

"What's that?"

Erdosain explained to her about his life as an inventor. It was at the first, right after he married, that he dreamed of getting rich through a discovery. His imagination filled up the nights with extraordinary machines, incomplete pieces of mechanisms that spun their lubricated gears.

"So then you are an inventor?"

"No
...
now I'm not. That did seem important to me then. There was a time when I was hungry—terribly hungry for money—perhaps I was infected with an insanity time has changed
...
. So when I talked to them about it, it wasn't because I was interested in the matter economically, but just to see them full of hope, I had to see with my own eyes those poor girls dreaming about silk dresses, a nice-looking boyfriend, and a car in front of a townhouse they would never have, and now I'm sure they believe in all that."

"Were you always like that?"

"Only some of the time. Has that never happened to you, to get this urge to do charitable deeds? Now I remember this other thing. I'll tell it to you because you were just now asking what kind of soul I had. I remember. A year ago. It was a Saturday and two in the morning. I remember I was sad and I went into a brothel. The lobby was full of people waiting their turn. Suddenly the door opened and the woman stood there—imagine—a little round sixteen-year-old's face
...
blue eyes and a schoolgirl smile. She was wearing a green wrap and was quite tall
...
but she had a schoolgirl face .. She looked around her
...
it was too late; a dreadful black with lips like inner tubes had gotten up and then, after having wrapped us all in a promise, went sadly back to the bedroom, under the hard gaze of the madam."

Erdosain stopped for a moment, then, in a purer and slower voice, he went on:

"Believe me
...
it's a shameful thing to wait in a brothel. You never feel sadder than there with all those pale faces around you trying with false, shifty smiles to hide the terrible urgency of the flesh. And there's something humiliating besides
...
I don't know what
...
but time goes rushing through your ears, while your sharpened hearing listens to the bedsprings groan inside, then silence, then the sound of washing up—but before anyone could take the black man's place, I got up and took that seat. I sat waiting with my heart banging in great thumps, and when she appeared in the doorway I got up."

"That's how it always is—one after another."

"I got up and went in, the door closed again; I left the money on the washbasin, and when she was about to open her wrapper, I took her arm and said, 'No, I'm not in here to sleep with you.' "

Now Erdosain's voice had grown fluid and vibrant. "She looked at me and surely the first thing she thought was that I must be some pervert; but looking at her seriously, believe me, I was moved, and I said to her: 'Look, I came in because I felt sorry for you.' Now we were sitting together on a bureau with a gilded mirror, and she, with her schoolgirl face, was looking me over gravely. I remember! I can still see it. I said, 'Yes, I felt sorry for you. I know you must earn two or three thousand pesos a month
...
and there are families who would be content to live on what you throw away on shoes
...
I know
...
but I felt sorry for you, terrifically sorry, seeing so much beauty so shabbily insulted.' She looked at me in silence, but I didn't smell of alcohol. Then I thought—right then it occurred to me as the black man was going in, to leave you with a sweet memory
...
and the sweetest memory I could come up with was this—to come in and not touch you
...
and then forever afterward you'd remember that gesture.' And see, while I'd been talking the prostitute's wrapper had come open over her breasts, and while above her crossed legs you could
...
suddenly she caught sight of that in the mirror and quickly pulled her robe down over her knees and covered up her chest. That gesture made a strange impression on me
...
she looked at me without saying a word—who knows what she was thinking—suddenly the madam rapped with her knuckles on the door and she looked at me with a pained expression, then her little face turned toward me
...
she looked at me a moment and got up
...
she took the five pesos and forced them into my pocket as she said, 'Don't come back, if you do I'll have the bouncer kick you out.' We were standing up
...
I was headed out the other door, but suddenly, not taking her eyes from mine, she wrapped her arms around my neck
...
she was still looking into my eyes and kissed me on the mouth
...
I can't tell you what that kiss was like
...
she ran her hand across my forehead and said: 'Good-bye, noble man.' "

"And you never went back?"

"No, but I hope we'll meet again someday
...
who knows where, but she, Lucién, will never forget me. Time will go by, she'll go through the most miserable brothels
...
she'll grow horrible, but I'll always remain in her as what I set out to be, as the most precious memory in her life."

The rain beat on the windows of the room and the mosaics of the tiled patio. Erdosain sipped his maté slowly.

Hipólita got up, went over to the windowpanes and peered for a moment into the blackness of the patio. Then she turned around and said:

"Do you know, you're a strange man?"

Erdosain hesitated for an instant.

"I'll tell you the truth—I don't know what's to become of my life—but believe me, I wasn't given the chance to be a good man. Dark outside forces twisted me, pulled me down."

"And now?"

"Now I'm going to do an experiment. I met an admirable man whose firm conviction it is that lying is the basis of human happiness and I'm going along with him in everything he does."

"And does that make you happy?"

"No
...
some time ago I figured out that I was never going to be happy again."

"But do you believe in love?"

"Why talk about it!" But suddenly he realized why he had been rambling on like that a few minutes ago, and he said: "What would you think of me if tomorrow
...
I mean any day
...
if any day now you found out I had killed a man?"

Hipólita, who had sat down, raised her head slowly and leaning it back against the sofa, studied the ceiling for some time. Then, looking down, she said as she filtered a chilly gaze from between red eyelashes:

"I'd think you were immensely unfortunate."

Erdosain got out of his chair, put away the cooker, the leaves, and gourd for the maté in the cupboard, and then Hipólita said to him:

"Come here
...
at my feet here."

He sat on the carpet with one side leaning against her legs, let his head droop onto her knees, and Hipólita closed her eyes.

It was an easy, peaceful feeling. He rested in the woman's lap, and the warmth of her limbs came through the cloth, warming his cheek. Moreover that scene seemed very natural; life was getting to look like a movie, which is what he always tried for, and it did not enter his head to think about Hipólita, stiffly sitting on the sofa, who thought that he was a weak and sentimental man. The ticktock of the clock dribbled out a drop of sound at each movement of the gears; it plopped like dripping water into the cubical silence of the room. And Hipólita said to herself:

"All he'll do in his life is complain and suffer. What good is a fellow like that to me? I'd have to support him. And the copper rose, that's silly. What woman would wear metal ornaments on her hat, that are heavy and going to tarnish? But still, they're all like that. The weak ones are intelligent and useless; the others are boring brutes. I still haven't come across one of them who'd deserve to cut the others' throats or be a tyrant. They're pitiful."

She often thought those things, whenever reality did something to fade the brightly colored version of life her imagination had painted a moment before. She could sort them like eggs by now. That straight-backed, sweet-smelling, severe-looking one who liked to come across as silent and contained, he was a lecherous wretch, and that other little well-dressed one, eternally polite, discreet and sensible, harbored the most horrendous vices, while that lumberjack sort of brute, strong as an ox, was as inexpert as a schoolboy, and so they filed past her eyes, linked together by that same never-flagging desire, they had all at some point let their heads droop over onto her bared knees, while she, alien to the clumsy hands and fits of frenzy that animated those sad puppets thought, bitterly, that a feeling for life was like being thirsty in the middle of a desert.

"That's how it was. All that ever kept men going was hunger, lust, and money. That's how it was."

In anguish, she told herself the only one she had cared for was the pharmacist, who at moments rose above all this vehement carnality, but in the course of the terrible game his workings had gotten gummed up, and now he was lying more broken than any of the other puppets.

What a life she had had! Before, when she was a penniless girl, she thought she would never have money or a fancy house with fine furniture, or shining silverware and china, and to see riches so far beyond her reach made her as sad then as today it did to know that none of the men who would lie in her bed had the makings of a tyrant or a conquerer of new lands.

Hipólita's
Inner Life

What dreams had filled her head!