The Seven Madmen (32 page)

But his sadness grew when he saw the silent people, turning away, climb into the cars of a long train with all the window blinds pulled down. Nobody asked about itineraries or stations. Twenty paces away, a desert of dust stretched out darkly. He could not make out the locomotive, but he heard the painful clanking of the chains as the brakes were released. He could run, the train started up slowly, catch up with it, climb up the steps, and stand for a minute on the platform of the last car, watching the train pick up speed. Erdosain still had time to get away from this gray solitude without dark cities, but immobilized by his enormous anguish, he stood there looking, a sob trapped in his throat, at the last car with the windows closed tight.

When he saw it go into the curve of rail that the wall of fog covered, he realized he was left forever behind in the ashen desert, that the train would never come back, that it would go always silently onward, with all the windows of its cars closed tight shut.

Slowly he took his face out of Hipólita's knees. It had stopped raining. His legs were frozen and his joints ached. He looked for a moment into the face of the sleeping woman, blurred by the blue-tinged light coming in through the panes, and with extraordinary caution got up. The four girls with horse faces and kinky yellow hair were still with him. He thought:

"I should kill myself." But looking at the red hair of the sleeping woman, his ideas took a more sinister turn.

"It would be cruel, I know. But, I could kill her." He squeezed the butt of his revolver in his pocket. "One shot into the skull would be enough. The bullet is steel and would only make a tiny hole. Well, yes, her eyes would pop out and maybe her nose would bleed. Poor thing! And she must have suffered a lot. But it would be cruel."

A cautious malevolence made him bend over her. As he watched her sleep his eyes assumed a mad fixedness, while with the hand in his pocket he raised the gun, fingering the trigger. Thunder boomed in the distance, and that strange incoherence that shrouded his brain like a veil was gone; then with great care he took up his coat, closed the door with great care to keep it from creaking, and went out.

At the foot of the stairs he realized happily that he was hungry.

He went to one of the grills near Spineto Market, rushing the blocks at a near run.

The moon rode the violet crest of a cloud, the sidewalks stretched out in the moonlight as though zinc-plated, dead silver gleamed in every puddle, and with a whirling purr the water ran up against and lapped the granite curbs. The walkway was so wet that the cobbling seemed freshly soldered to the streetbed.

Erdosain went in and out of the blue shadows that sliced obliquely across the façades. The smell of something wet gave the morning solitude a certain seaborne desolation.

Without a doubt, he was not in his right mind. He was still worrying about the four horse-faced girls, and the sinister sea with iron waves. The heavy odor of burned oil vomiting steadily out the yellow door of a dairy turned his stomach, and then, changing his mind, he headed for a brothel he remembered was on Calle Paso, but when he got there the door was already shut and, disconcerted, shivering with the cold, with a taste like copper sulfate in his mouth, he went into a café where they had just rolled up the iron grating. After a long wait, they served him the tea he had ordered.

He thought about the sleeping woman. He half closed his eyes, and leaning his head against the wall, he let himself sink further into his desolation.

He did not suffer for him, the man whose name appeared on registration lists, but rather now his awareness, at some remove from his body, looked at him as if at a stranger, and wondered:

"Who will have mercy on man?"

And these words, which were the summing-up of his thought, made him churn inwardly, filled with pained tenderness toward his unseen fellowmen.

"To fall
...
to drop ever lower. And yet, other men are happy. They find love, but all suffer. It's just that some figure it out and others never do. Some think it's just because they don't have something. But that's a stupid illusion. But still, she had a beautiful face. What made the most sense was the part she told me about the adventurer prince. Ah! To be free to sleep on the bottom of the sea, in a lead chamber with thick windows. To sleep for years and years while the sand piled up, just sleep. That was why the Astrologer was right. The day will come when people will make a revolution, because they have no God. Men will go on strike until God appears."

A bitter cyanide smell came to him; and sensing through closed eyelids the morning light, he felt watery, as though he were on the bottom of the sea and the sand was piling up endlessly on his lead chamber. Someone touched his shoulder.

He opened up his eyes just as the café waiter said:

"No sleeping in here."

He was going to reply, but the waiter had gone to wake up another sleeper. It was a fat man, who had let his bald head fall onto his arms, crossed on top of the table.

But the sleeper did not respond to the waiter's words, and then, amazed, the owner came up, a man with a mustache as big as bicycle handles, and shook the man in his café until he was doubled over in his chair, still not falling because the table kept him up.

Erdosain got up, astonished, while the owner and the waiter, looking at one another, looked sidelong at the singular customer.

The sleeper remained in an absurd position. His head lolled onto one shoulder, his flat-featured face showed, pockmarked and wearing dark, round glasses. A thread of reddish slaver was staining his green tie, slipping out from bluish lips. The stranger's elbow pressed a sheet of paper with writing down on the table. They realized he was dead. They called the police, but Erdosain did not leave, curious to see the whole spectacle of the suicide in dark glasses, whose skin was slowly becoming covered with blue blotches. And the odor of bitter almonds that hung in the air seemed to come from between his slack jaws.

First a police aide came, then a sergeant, then two patrolmen and an inspector, and they all ringed around the dead man, as though he were a steer. Suddenly the aide, turning to the inspector, said:

"Don't you know who he is?"

The sergeant took out of the dead man's pocket a hotel receipt, several coins, a revolver, and three worn letters.

"So this is the guy who killed the girl in Calle Talcahuano?"

They took the dead man's glasses off, and now his eyes showed, crossed, the cornea turned upward, the eyelids red-tinged as though he had wept tears of blood.

"Didn't I tell you?" went on the aide. "Here's his identification."

"He was going to go to Ushuaia forever."

Then Erdosain, when he heard that, remembered it as if he had read about it a long time ago. (And yet, it was not long ago. He had found out about it the morning before in the paper.) The dead man was an embezzler. He abandoned his wife and five children to go live with another woman by whom he had three children, but two nights ago, maybe having grown tired of the hag, he showed up in a hotel on Calle Talcahuano with a seventeen-year-old girl, his new mistress. And at three that morning he covered her head with a pillow, shooting a bullet into her ear. Nobody in the hotel heard anything. At eight that morning the murderer got dressed, left the door half-open, and calling the employee told him not to wake his wife until ten, because she was very tired. Then he left, and only at twelve did they find the dead girl.

But what most impressed Erdosain was to think that the murderer had spent five hours in the presence of the dead woman, five hours next to the body of the girl in the solitude of night
...
and that he must have loved her greatly.

But had he not harbored the same thought a few hours ago in front of the redheaded woman? Was that an unconscious memory or the suicide doubled over next to him?

The ambulance came up and the dead man was loaded into it.

Then they interrogated him. Erdosain told what little he knew as witness, and went out into the street, still pondering. An undefined and painful question lay at the bottom of his awareness.

He remembered then that the dead man's pants bottoms had been muddy, his shirt dirty and damp, so in spite of everything, how had he made the girl he killed love him? Did love exist then? Despite his two wives and eight children here and there and his life of hustling and embezzling, the murderer felt love. And he imagined him in the harsh night, there, in that hotel frequented by prostitutes and persons whose profession could only be imagined, in a room with the wallpaper peeling off, looking down to see on the blood-soaked pillow the waxen face of the now cold girl. Five sobering hours looking at the dead girl, who had taken him in her naked arms. Thinking these things, he came to the Plaza Once, stunned and in pain.

It was five in the morning. He went inside the railway station, looked around, and since he was sleepy huddled up in a corner of the waiting room.

At eight he was awakened from deep sleep by a passenger bumping his suitcase into things. He rubbed his fists into his sore eyelids. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky.

He went out and took the bus out to Constitution Station.

The Astrologer was waiting for him at the Temperley station.

His sturdy form enveloped in a smock, with the hat pulled down over his eyes and his drooping mustache ends, was spotted right away by Erdosain.

"You're really pale," said the Astrologer.

"I'm pale?"

"Yellow."

"I didn't get a good sleep
...
and worse, this morning I saw a guy kill himself."

"Okay, then, here's the check."

Erdosain looked at it. It was for fifteen thousand three hundred and three pesos, made out to "Cash," but the date was for two days ago.

"Why did he date it for two days ago?"

"It'll look better. See, the teller knows that if the check were lost, then by the time that you showed up to cash it there'd be a stop payment on it."

"Did he protest?"

"No—he smiled. That man plans to send us all to jail
...
ah!
...
before you go to the bank, go to a barbershop and get a shave—"

"And does he know already?"

"No, we'll wake him when it's time."

The train would not arrive for a few minutes. Erdosain looked at the Astrologer, smiling, and said:

"What would you do if I ran away?"

The other man, arching his fingers, sucked on his mustache, and then:

"That's as impossible as for the train that's coming not to stop here."

"But just supposing, then."

"I can't. If I supposed that for a moment, you wouldn't be the one to cash the check
...
Ah! Who was that suicide this morning?"

"A murderer. Funny thing. He killed a girl who wouldn't go live with him."

"Energy lost down the drain."

"Do you think you could kill yourself?"

"No. You see I'm cut out for a higher destiny."

Erdosain asked a strange question:

"Do you think redheads are cruel?"

"Not so much that, but rather asexual; that gives them that coldness toward things that makes such a disagreeable impression. The Melancholy Ruffian told me that in his long career as a pimp he'd known very few redheaded prostitutes. Well, then. Don't forget to get a shave. Go to the bank at eleven, no, before. You're having lunch with me today, right?"

"Yes, see you then."

After Erdosain, the Major got on, waving good-bye to the Astrologer in a friendly fashion. Erdosain did not see him.

Sunken into his seat, Erdosain thought:

"He's an extraordinary man. How is it he can be so sure I won't run out on him? If he's as right the rest of the time as now, he'll win out," and lulled by the rocking of the train he fell asleep again.

The Major was behind him. And in the bank itself, with his heart hammering, he went up to the window when the teller called him:

"Big bills or little?"

"Big."

"Sign here."

Erdosain signed the back of the check. He thought they would ask for identification, but the teller, blank-faced, wearing a jacket with fake alpaca sleeves, counted out ten thousand-peso bills, five five-hundreds, and the rest in small bills. Erdosain would have liked to flee in fear, but he scrupulously counted the money, put it in his wallet, put the wallet back in his pants, keeping hold of it firmly, and went out to the street.

Between forests of white clouds there showed, like clean metal, a curlicue of sky. Erdosain felt happy. He thought that in a different climate, under a perpetually blue sky like the curlicue he could see now there must be astounding women, their hair luxuriant and their faces smooth, their eyes huge and almond-shaped, long lashes casting shadows. And the softly scented air would waft out of the morning countryside into the city intersections, the green lawns terraced to fit the rolling hills, spherical towers rising from the highest elevations of parks and terraces.

And the Astrologer's rhombus face, with his walrus mustache drooping down over the corners of his mouth, and his chauffeur hat, made him enthusiastic; then he thought how being part of the conspiracy would let him continue his experiments with electrotechnology, and now he crossed streets like some emperor fallen upon bad days, not realizing his presence was seducing the washerwomen who went by with hampers under their arms and exciting the seamstresses coming back from their shops with heavy bundles.

He would invent the Death Ray, a sinister violet zap flash of millions of amps that would make the steel of a battleship melt like a bit of wax in an oven and blow whole concrete cities to smithereens, as if volcanos of dynamite had been detonated there. He saw himself, now made Head of the Universe. The Ambassadors of the World Superpowers were at his beck and call. He sat in a vast hall with glass paneling, and in the center a round table stood. All around it, crouching low in their plushy seats, sat the old diplomats, bald, leaden-faced, with hard, shifty eyes. Some drummed with their pencils on the glass tabletop, others smoked silently, and a huge black man in green livery stood motionless beside the red velvet draperies at the entrance.