The Seven Madmen (30 page)

"The man with wings who speaks to me in dreams said the end of the church of darkness is near—"

"And so it must be—because hell grows every day. So few are saved that heaven compared to hell is smaller than a grain of sand next to the ocean. Year after year hell grows, and the church of darkness, that ought to save man, swells the numbers in hell instead, and hell grows, grows, without any chance existing of making it smaller. And the angels gaze in fear upon the church of darkness and fiery hell all swollen like a belly heavy with dropsy."

The Astrologer replied, assuming a lofty tone of voice: "That's why the man with wings has told me: 'Go, O holy man, forth to edify men and announce the glad tidings. And exterminate the Antichrists and reveal your secrets and the secrets of the New Jerusalem to Bromberg the Jew.
'
" Suddenly the Astrologer, taking his companion's arm, said: "Don't you remember when your spirit conversed with the angels and served them white bread at the side of the road, and you bade them sit at the door of your abode and washed their feet?"

"I don't remember that."

"Well, you ought to remember. What will the Lord say if he hears that? How am I to answer for your soul before the Angel of the New Church? He'll say to me: 'What is become of that beloved son, my pious Alfon?' And what will I tell him? That you're an animal. That you've forgotten the days when you lived an angelic life and now you spend the whole day in a corner breaking wind like a mule."

Bromberg objected in a bristly rage: "I do not break wind."

"Yes you do, and it makes a lot of noise, too—but what's the difference?—the Angel of the Churches knows that your soul is aglow with sincere devotion, and that you are an enemy of the King of Babylon, of the Dark Pope, and so you are chosen to be the friend of him who with the mandate of the Lord shall establish the New Church on earth."

The rain beat quietly on the leaves of the fig trees and all the acrid, soft darkness wafted into the night its humid greenery smell. Bromberg predicted gravely:

"And the Pope, the very Pope, in terror, will dash out into the street barefoot, and they'll all shrink back from him in horror and fear and the walls along the roads will spill over with flowers when the Holy Lamb comes by."

"That will happen," continued the Astrologer. "And up in heaven, the doors will open to the sight of all the repentant sinners, the golden portals of the New Jerusalem. Because so great is the charity of God, beloved Alfon, that no man shall enter directly into contact with it without being smitten to earth with his bones jellied."

"That's why I shall bring to men my interpretation of the Apocalypse and then go off to the mountains to do penitence and to pray for them."

"Indeed, Alfon, but now go to sleep because I have to meditate and it is time for the man with wings to come speak words in my ear. And you also must sleep because otherwise, tomorrow, you will have no strength to strangle this reprobate—"

"And the King of Babylon."

"Indeed."

Slowly the Man Who Saw the Midwife walked away from the stairs. The Astrologer went back inside and climbing a staircase to one side of the entry hall, he went into a very long thin room, with beams running exposed across it at the top to hold up the oblique extension of the roof.

The peeling walls held not a single etching. In one corner were the trunks belonging to Gregorio Barsut and under an oeil-de-boeuf window, a red painted wooden bed. A black bedspread contrasted bizarrely with the white sheets. The Astrologer sat down pensively on the edge of the bed. His smock fell half-open, showing his naked, hairy chest. He arched his fingertips covering his seallike mustache, and, frowning, he sat contemplating a trunk in the corner.

He wanted to force his thought to leap upon some extraneous novelty, which by breaking up the mono-rhythm of his feelings would restore him to the frame of mind he had been in before he decided to murder Barsut.

"Twenty thousand pesos," he thought. "Twenty million pesos that will let me set up the brothels and the colony
...
the colony
...
"

Still he could not think clearly. Ideas slipped away from him elusive as shadows, his thoughts, gone berserk with shock, made it impossible to concentrate. Suddenly he slapped his forehead and, jubilant, dragged a box with him into the vestibule, a thick dust sifting from the box's loosely tied top.

Not caring that his smock sleeves were getting all full of white dust, he opened the box. There were lead soldiers mixed in with wooden dolls, and really it was a whole population of clowns, generals, jesters, princesses, and strange roly-poly monsters with lopsided noses and mouths like frogs.

He picked up a piece of rope and, turning to one corner, he fastened it to two nails, thus uniting the angle formed by the two walls with an improvised bisecting line. Then he took several puppets from the box, throwing them onto the bed. Then he strung up each of the figures by the neck, and so engrossed was he in this task, that he failed to notice that the wind was driving the rain in through the open window, as it was raining harder.

He worked enthusiastically. As soon as he had wound cords around the neck of each figure and cut them to varying lengths, he dragged all the puppets by their ropes off to the corner. When it was done, he sat looking at his handiwork. The five hanged figures threw moving hooded shadows on the rose-colored wall. The first, a Pierrot figure without the puffed breeches but a black-and-white checked blouson; the second, an idol with chocolate skin and vermilion lips, whose watermelon head was level with the Pierrot's feet; the third, still lower, was a windup Pierrot, with a bronze plaque in its belly and a monkey's face; the fourth was a blue cardboard sailor, and the fifth an open-nosed black man with a plaster sore showing through the white coating on his patrician neck. The Astrologer contemplated his work in satisfaction. He had his back to the lamp, and his black silhouette projected up to the ceiling. He said aloud:

"You, Pierrot, are Erdosain; you, roly-poly, are the Gold Seeker; you, clown, are the Ruffian; and you, black man, are Alfon. So that's settled, now."

His speech finished, he pulled Barsut's trunk out from against the wall, pulled it up in front of the puppets and sat in front of them. And thus there began a silent dialogue whose questions came from inside him and received their answer inside him when he fixed his gaze upon the figure he was interrogating.

His thoughts became surprisingly clear. He needed to express his ideas by telegraphic, clattering staccato, as if all of him had to keep the rhythm of the thoughts in time with a mysterious trepidation of enthusiasm.

He thought:

"We've got to set up factories for poison gas. To hire a chemist. To think big, not just trucks, cells, great covered structures. Training camp in the mountains, nonsense. Or, no. Yes. No. Also beside Parana River a factory. Cars armor plating chrome steel nickel. Poison gas important. Up in the mountains and in Chaco Forest to spark revolution. Find brothels, kill owners. A killer band in airplane. Everything possible. Each group radio-equipped. Use a code and keep switching the wavelength. Electric current falling water. Swedish turbines. Erdosain's right. Life is so great! Who am I? Production of bubonic bacillus and super strains of typhus. Set up academy comparative studies Russian French Revolution. Movies an important element. Not to be neglected. See filmmaker. Have Erdosain look into that. Filmmaker in the cause of revolutionary propaganda. That's it."

Now the flood of thoughts eased up. He told himself:

"How are we to instill in every mind the revolutionary enthusiasm I bear in my own? There's our problem. What lie or truth do we use? How time goes by. And how sad! Because it's true. There's such sadness within me that if they could only see it they'd be amazed. I carry it all on my own shoulders."

He curled up on the sofa. He was cold. His veins throbbed hard in his temples.

"Time slips away. Just like that. And they all fall down, like so many sacks of potatoes. Nobody tries to take wing and soar. How can I get these clods to take wing? And yet, life can be so much more. More than they've ever imagined. The soul like an ocean surging inside seventy kilos of flesh. That same flesh yearns to soar away. Everything in us longs to soar up to the clouds, to reach hidden lands up there in the clouds—but, how? There's always that 'how' and I
...
here I am, suffering over them, loving them as though I'd given birth to them, because I love those men
...
I love them all. They were just randomly plunked down on earth, and that's not how things ought to be. And yet I love them. I can feel it now. I love Humankind. I love them all as though slender threads bound them to my heart. Through that thread they suck my blood, my life, and yet, in spite of it all, there's so much life in me I'd gladly have millions more of them, to love them even more and give them my life. Yes, give them my life like a cigarette. Now I understand Christ. How much he must have loved Humankind! And yet I'm ugly. My big wide face is ugly. And still I must be beautiful, the way only gods are. But I have a cauliflower ear and a great bony nose like a punched-up boxer's. But what does that matter? I'm a man and that's enough. And I need to conquer. That's it. And I would not give up a one of my thoughts for the love of the most beautiful woman."

Suddenly some earlier words flashed into his memory, and the Astrologer said:

"Why not?
...
We can make cannons, just as Erdosain said. It's an easy procedure. Besides, they don't have to last through a thousand volleys. A revolution that dragged on for that long would be a failure."

The words fall silent inside him. In the darkness a dark pathway opens inside his skull, with exposed beams running across to join the sides, while in a fog of coal dust the blast furnaces, with cooling stations looming like armored men, fill up the space. Clouds of fire flare from the armored slats and the jungle beyond stretches out thick and impenetrable.

The Astrologer feels he has his own personality back, the one that the strange dislocation of time had taken from him.

He thinks, he thinks it is possible to make chrome-plated steel and construct cannons from cast-metal tubes. Why not? His thoughts race on to the possible obstacles with flexibility. Then with the money the brothels bring in land could be bought up in different spots in the country at an insignificant cost. There the members of the society would set up reinforced concrete structures to house the artillery, making them look like storehouses for grain.

He thrilled to the thought of setting up a revolutionary party within the country, one that would rise to arms at a radio-broadcast signal. Why not? Steel, chrome, nickel. The words have taken hold in his head. Steel, chrome, nickel. The head of each cell would be in charge of a battery. So, what will we need? For each cannon to fire four or five hundred rounds. And then machine guns mounted on cars. Why not? For every ten men a machine gun, an auto, a cannon. Why not give it a try?

Slowly, in the depths of the black night, a huge white-hot egg of steel, supported on two columns, slowly moves its point to a great dome. This is the Bessemer steel process driven by hydraulic piston. A shower of sparks and flames pours from the top of the steel egg. Iron is being made into steel, being subjected to a blast of air that makes contact at hundreds of atmospheres of pressure. Steel, chrome, nickel. What is there to lose? He thinks of a hundred details. Not long ago a voice inside him had wondered:

"Why is it the sum total of human happiness would occupy so little space?"

The truth of it saddened his existence. The work should belong to the few. And those few should walk with giant strides.

It is necessary to create the complication. And to see things plain. First to kill Barsut, then to set up the brothel, the training camp in the mountains
...
but, how to dispose of the body? Isn't it idiotic that the man who can easily build a cannon and manufacture steel, chrome, and nickel should have such a hard time figuring out how to get rid of a body? But that's unthinkable
...
it could be burned up
...
five hundred degrees are enough to destroy a body contained in a closed receptacle. Five hundred degrees."

Time and exhaustion go streaming through his mind. He would like not to think, and suddenly his voice, as if independent of his mouth and his will, whispers from inside to distract him a little:

"The revolutionary movement will break out simultaneously in every town in the country. We'll launch an attack on the barracks. We'll start by shooting anybody who gets in our way. A few days beforehand in the capital we'll let loose a few kilograms of a strain of typhus and bubonic plague bacilli. From planes, during the night. Every cell near the capital will cut off railway lines. We'll allow no trains to enter or to leave. Then we'll have the nation's heart paralyzed and black out telegraph communications, too, and with the head men shot, the power is ours. All this is crazy, but quite feasible. And when a person is on the verge of great deeds, he lives in a dreamlike state, like sleepwalking. But still, he makes his way forward with such rapid slowness that once he gets where he's going, it surprises him. To do that, the only indispensable elements are will and money. Besides the cells we can set up a special strike force of murderers and assailants. How many aircraft does the army have? But with the communications all cut off, the barracks under attack, the head honchos shot, who's left to send in the troops after us? This is a country of animals. You have to use a gun. That's indispensable. We'll only get respect with terrorist tactics. That's what a coward mankind is. A machine gun
...
How will they get together troops to send in after us? We've cut off telegraph, telephone, railroads
...
. Ten men can keep a population of ten thousand in fear. To have the machine gun is enough. There are eleven thousand total population. The north country, the great plains, they'll join up when we issue the call. Tucuman, Santiago del Estero, if we play our cards right, are ours for the taking. San Juan's full of crypto-Commies. That just leaves the army. We'll attack the barracks by night. If we get their ammo supply, shoot the guys in charge, and hang the sergeants, with ten men we can take a base with a thousand soldiers, so long as we have machine guns. It's so simple. And hand grenades, what should I do about hand-carried explosive devices? With the element of surprise, simultaneously nationwide, ten men per town and Argentina is ours. The soldiers are young and will come over to our side. We'll make enlisted men into officers and put together a Red Army like nothing anybody's ever seen on this continent. Why not? What's to stop us from striking at the San Martin Bank, assaulting the Rawson Hospital, and taking the Martelli Agency in Montevideo? All we need is three newspaperboys with guts and the city's ours.