The Seven Madmen (10 page)

Erdosain arose wordlessly and dipped his face in the basin several times. When he was out of breath, he took his face out of the water. Then he sat down and let the water dry off the hair around his face. He was bone tired. If only Elsa could see him now! Then she'd have to feel sorry for him! He closed his eyes. Barsut brought up his chair next to him and said:

"I have to tell you the whole story. I'd feel like a worm if I didn't. See, I'm cool as a cucumber right now. Look, if you don't believe me, feel my heartbeat. I'm being totally open with you. Okay now, I
...
I
...
ratted on you to the Sugar Company
...
I was the guy that sent the anonymous letter."

Erdosain didn't even look up. Him, or somebody else, what difference did it make?

Barsut looked at him: he waited for him to react somehow, then said:

"Why don't you say something? Look here, I blew the whistle on you. I wanted to have you in jail and then have Elsa to myself and humiliate her. You can't possibly know how I've spent my nights fantasizing how they'd throw you in jail! There wasn't any place you could get that much money so they'd get you for sure. But, why don't you say something?"

Erdosain looked up. Barsut was there, yes, it was him, and he really was saying those things. Bulging knots of muscles trembled imperceptibly under the skin from his cheekbones to his ears.

Barsut looked down, with his knees on his elbows like a man beside his campfire, and insisted slowly:

"I have to tell you the whole story. Who else is there that I can pour out my heart to? They say, and it's true, that sadness isn't literally in your heart, but still I have to wonder: why go on living? If this is what I'm like, what good is life? See? You have to understand, this is the kind of stuff I've been thinking about a lot lately. Look, I shouldn't even tell you this stuff. How can you be a total bastard to a guy, then turn around and pour out your heart to him, and not feel bad over it? A lot of times, I've wondered: why don't I feel bad about what I do? What good is life if we do really rotten things and don't feel bad? In school what they teach is that a crime will sooner or later make the criminal go mad, so how come in real life you commit a crime and go around not feeling anything?"

Erdosain kept an eye on Barsut and now the man's image was engraved on the depths of his mind. With all his vital forces, he was making a life mask of Barsut's pale face, so exact that it would last for all time.

"Look," Barsut went on. "I knew how mad you were at me, that you'd have killed me just like that, and that made me feel good and at the same time bad. The nights I went to bed thinking how to kidnap you! I thought about sending you a letter bomb, or a snake in a cardboard box. Or I'd hire a taxi to run you over. I'd close my eyes and hours would fly by while I'd think about you two. Do you imagine I loved her?" Erdosain later realized that during that whole night's conversation Barsut avoided calling Elsa by name. "No, I never loved her. But what I wanted was to humiliate her, see? Humiliate her for no good reason: to see you dragged down so she'd be on her knees asking me please to bail you out. See? I never loved her. If I turned you in it was only to humiliate her for being so snooty to me. And when you told me how you'd been stealing from the Sugar Company, wild joy burst out inside me. And before you were through telling me about it, I was saying inwardly: okay, now we'll see where that high and mighty attitude gets her."

Erdosain let the question pop out:

"But weren't you in love with her?"

"No, I never loved her. If you only knew what she's put me through! So now I'm supposed to love her, when she never paid me the least attention? Whenever she looked at me it was like spitting in my face. You were married to her, but you never really knew her! You don't know what kind of woman she is! She could just stand there while you died without the least sign of pity. You know? Something I remember. When the Astraldis went broke and you two were out in the cold, if she'd asked me for everything I had, I'd have given it to her. I'd have given her my whole fortune just to hear her tell me 'thank you.' Just that, 'thank you.' Just to hear those words from her I'd have given literally all I had. But when I brought it up she said: 'Remo is man enough to bring home our bacon.' You don't know her, see. She could watch you die without lifting a finger to help. So I thought. My God, the thoughts that go through a man's head! I threw myself down on the bed and fantasized all kinds of stuff
...
you had killed someone
...
she needed somebody to come to your rescue and came to me, and without ever mentioning my great sacrifices to her, I'd turn everything upside down to get you out of it. What a woman, Remo! I remember she'd be there sewing. I'd have loved to sit by her side, see? just to hold up her sewing for her, and I could tell she wasn't happy with you. I could see it in her face, how tired she always was, the way she smiled."

Erdosain remembered the words Elsa had spoken an hour ago:

"It doesn't matter. I'm happy. You see what a surprise you're in for. You're alone
...
suddenly, creak
...
the door opens
...
and it's me
...
I've come back to you."

Barsut went on:

"And of course, I wondered why she would keep on living with you, with the kind of man you are
...
"

"And I came alone, on foot, through dark streets, seeking you out
...
but you don't see me, you're all alone, your head
...
"

Erdosain felt his thoughts whirling wildly around on top of his brain like a surging maelstrom. The vast whirlpool sucked its spiral down to the ends of his limbs. A whirlpool that touched against his soul, leaving it raw and tender. How much virtue and insight Elsa had shown when she said:

"I always loved you
...
now, too, I love you
...
why did you never before speak like tonight? I feel I'll love you all my life
...
that other man is nothing but a shadow compared to you."

Erdosain was sure that these words rescued his soul for all time, while Barsut went on venting his envy and rage:

"And I'd have liked to ask her what it was she saw in you, make her see you for what you were and shove it in her face what a madman you were, what a bastard, a coward
...
I swear, I'm not saying these things in anger."

"I believe you," said Erdosain.

"Like right now, I look at you and wonder: how does a woman really look at a man? That's something we'll never know. You realize that? To my mind, you were a miserable wretch, a zero in the arithmetic of life. But to her, what were you like? That's what we'll never know. Did you ever figure it out? Tell me frankly: did you ever really truly know what it was your wife saw in you? What did she see in you to make it worth suffering with your oddities and putting up with you like she did?"

Barsut went on in all seriousness. He demanded an answer to his hoarse questions. Sitting there with him, Erdosain felt he was not a man but only an exact copy of himself, a phantom self with a bony nose and bronze hair created inside his head, since these were the very things he had asked himself at other moments. Yes, most likely it was necessary to kill him to live in peace, and the "idea" blossomed serenely within him.

"Easy as slicing a bale of cotton with a sword," Erdosain would later say.

Barsut had no idea that at that very moment Erdosain had just pronounced a sentence of death on him. Later, explaining to me how the notion came to flower inside him, Erdosain told me this:

"Have you ever seen a general in battle?
...
But to make it easier to grasp my point, I'll tell you like an inventor would. For a while you've been looking for the solution to some problem. See, you know you have the clue to it somewhere inside you, only you can't get at it, it's hidden under layers of mystery. One day, when you least expect it, suddenly the plan, the complete finished machine, flashes before your eyes, stunning, because it's all there, perfect. It's like a miracle! Think of a general in battle
...
everything's lost, only then, all at once, clear, exact, he gets this flash that solves everything in a way he'd never dreamed he could do it, and still, he'd had it all the time within his reach, someplace inside him. At just that moment, I saw how I had to have Barsut killed, and sitting right across from me spouting useless words, he didn't imagine me, with my swollen lips, aching nose, holding in this terrific joy, a wild flash like discovering something as inevitable as a law of mathematics. Maybe we have an inner mathematics whose terrible laws are less inviolable than the ones that govern the workings of numbers and lines.
{1}

"Because it's funny. My gums were still bleeding from his beating, which battered into my mind as if by hydraulic power the definitive plans for his death. See? A plan is made out of three general lines, three regular straight lines is all it takes. My joy came bubbling up wildly over the new contours of that freshly minted shape, three lines which for me were: kidnapping Barsut, having him killed, and using his money to set up the secret clan the Astrologer wanted. See? The whole crime just came to me like that, while he was going on gloomily about how we were two damned souls. The whole plan was there, inside me, like they stamped it into iron under thousands of pounds of pressure.

"Ah! How can I explain it to you? All at once I forgot everything, sealed in a frozen block of thought, full of joy, like the dawn coming to some night creature, ending his weariness with the morning after an exhausting night. See? To have Barsut killed by somebody who absolutely had to have the funding for a brilliant scheme. And that new dawn was throbbing inside me, so perfect, so distinct, that often, since then, I've wondered what secret could lie in a man's soul that can come to show him new horizons and awaken him to new sensations that amaze even him by leaping out of sheer illogic."

In the course of this story, I forgot to say that when Erdosain got enthusiastic, he would send a lot of words orbiting around his central idea. He had to try every possible way of expressing it, and a slow frenzy laid hold of him as he spoke and made him see himself as a truly extraordinary man and not some wretch. I had not the slightest doubt he was telling me the truth. What puzzled me was a question I kept wondering about: where did he get the energy to carry on like that for so long? He was always absorbed in self-examination, analyzing everything that went on inside him, as if the sum of all those details could convince him he was really alive. Of this I am certain. Not even a dead man who could somehow talk would have talked more than he did, just to keep up his own belief he was not dead.

Barsut, unaware what had happened inside Erdosain, went on:

"Ah! You don't know her
...
you never knew her. Look, listen to what I'm going to tell you. One afternoon I went to see her. I knew you weren't home, I wanted to be with her, only to see her, even if that was all. I got there all sweaty, I walked I don't know how many blocks in the sun before I worked up to doing it."

"Just like me, in the sun," thought Erdosain.

"And even though I was too poor, you know that, to take a cab, and even when I asked after you, she said to me, 'Sorry, I won't let you in because my husband's not in the house.' See what a bitch?"

Erdosain thought:

"There's still a train to Temperley."

Barsut continued:

"Now me, I could see what a loser you were, so I wondered: what did Elsa see in that man to fall in love with him?"

In a perfectly calm voice Erdosain asked him:

"Does it show on my face I'm a loser?"

Barsut looked up in surprise. For a moment he kept his translucent greenish eyes fixed on Erdosain. The splotch of light falling on him and Erdosain gave everything a dreamlike distance. And Barsut felt as spectral as the other man, because, moving his head painfully, as if all the muscles in his neck had suddenly gone into spasm, he answered:

"No, when I look good and long you're more a guy who has one big obsession
...
but who knows what it is."

Erdosain replied:

"You're a real psychologist. Naturally, I don't yet know what that obsession is but, it's funny, the last thing I thought was that you'd go after my wife
...
and you are so calm telling me this."

"You can't deny I'm being open with you."

"No."

"Besides, I wanted to humiliate her
...
not get her to run off with me, what for? I knew she'd never love me."

"How did you figure that?"

"That's something I don't know. You just do certain things you can't explain. Because I kept on seeing you and you me even when we couldn't stomach each other. I kept coming because my being there made you suffer and me suffer. Every day, I'd tell myself: 'I won't go anymore
...
I won't go anymore
...
' But soon as it was time, I'd be all jittery. It was like they were calling me from someplace and I'd get dressed quick
...
I'd come over—"

Erdosain suddenly had a weird idea and said:

"Off the subject, you know—I don't know if you know, but this morning at the Sugar Company they told me about the anonymous letter. You're the only one to blame, I think you've pretty well admitted it, for all this happening to me, so you have to get me the money to cover. Where am I going to get that much?"

Barsut sat bolt upright in amazement.

"Hey, what's this? Here I'm cuckolded, messed up, Elsa leaves, and I end up acting like a bastard just now, and I'm supposed to go get the money for you? Are you crazy? What's in it for me if I give you six hundred pesos?"

"And seven cents
...
"

Erdosain got up.

"That's your last word?"

"But lookit, how is it I
...
"

"All right, kid. Hold on now. So would you kindly go now, because I want to get some sleep."