The Seven Madmen (2 page)

That answer saved him for the moment. The three men exchanged glances, and finally, the assistant manager, with the tacit consent of his father, said:

"No
...
you have until three tomorrow. Bring the payroll with you and all the receipts
...
You can go now."

This turn of events came as such a surprise that Erdosain just kept standing there, forlorn, looking at the three of them. Yes, just looking at them. Mr. Gualdi, who despite his professed socialism had humiliated him so deeply; the assistant manager, who had stared with such rude persistence at his frayed tie; the manager, whose stiff, close-cropped, pig head was aimed right at him, with obscene cynicism seeping through the gray slit in his half-closed lids.

And still, Erdosain did not leave
...
He wanted to find words that would make them grasp the immense sorrow that weighed upon his life; and so he kept on standing there like that, sadly, the great black mass of the iron cash register looming up in front of him, feeling himself grow more hunched with each passing minute while he nervously fingered the brim of his black hat and his eyes took on the sad look of a hunted man. Then, suddenly, he asked:

"So, can I go now?"

"Yes
...
"

"No
...
Give Su
á
rez the receipts and be here tomorrow at three sharp and have the whole amount with you then."

"Yes
...
the whole amount
...
" and, turning, he left without saying good-bye.

He walked down Chile Street to the Paseo Colon. He felt some invisible force fencing him in. The setting sun lit up the most revolting inner recesses of the sloping street. Conflicting thoughts seethed inside him, such a crazy mix that they would have taken hours to sort out.

Later he realized that he had never even thought to ask who had blown the whistle on him.

States of Consciousness

He knew he was a thief. But the name they gave him didn't much affect him. Perhaps the word thief didn't strike a chord with his inner state. What he did feel was a round silence that bored through his skull like a steel cylinder, anesthetizing him to anything unrelated to his unhappiness.

This circle of silence and darkness cut into the flow of his ideas, so Erdosain could not associate, with his deteriorating reason, his home, now known as a house, with some institution called a jail.

He thought telegraphically, skipping prepositions, which is enervating. He had known empty hours when he might have committed any crime without feeling the least responsibility. Of course a judge would never understand that sort of thing. But now he was drained empty, he was the shell of a man kept in motion by force of habit.

If he stayed on at the Sugar Company, it would not be to keep stealing more money but because he was waiting for something extraordinary to happen—immensely extraordinary—that would give his life an unexpected charge and save him from the catastrophe looming in his future.

Erdosain had a name for the atmosphere compounded of dreaming and restlessness that kept him wandering in circles like a sleepwalker through the days of his life: "the anguish zone."

Erdosain pictured this zone as lying two meters above the city streets, and he could see it quite graphically, shaped like those great salt flats or deserts that are shown on maps as ovals full of dots, thick as herring roe.

This anguish zone came out of all the suffering of mankind. And like a cloud of poison gas it moved heavily from one place to another, penetrating solid walls and slicing through buildings without losing its flat, horizontal form; two-dimensional anguish that slashed through throats like a guillotine, leaving an aftertaste of bitter sobbing.

That was the explanation Erdosain came up with when he felt the first waves of nauseous grief.

"What am I doing with my life?" he would then ask himself, perhaps hoping to clarify with this question the source of an anxiety that made him long for a life where each tomorrow would not simply be more of today, but something novel and always unexpected, like the sudden turns of plot in an American movie, where yesterday's beggar is today's underground chieftain and the gold-digging secretary is a multimillionairess incognito.

His thirst for marvels, which could never possibly be slaked—since he was a frustrated inventor and a crook about to land in jail—and the rationalizations and doubts it always entailed left him churning with acidity and gritting his teeth as if he had bit into a lemon.

At such times, he could fall back on a stock of absurd notions. He imagined that the wealthy, tired of hearing the snivelings of the oppressed, built great horse-drawn cages. Hangmen, picked for their inhuman strength, pursued the wretches with choke collars, until he envisaged a whole scene: a mother, tall and disheveled, ran behind the cage where, from behind bars, her crosseyed child cried out to her, until a "dogcatcher," tired of hearing her screams, knocked her out by clobbering her over the head with the butt end of his whip.

After this nightmare vision dissolved, Erdosain wondered, in self-revulsion:

"What kind of soul do I have?" And as his imagination was still racing from the last nightmare scene, he went on to another. "I must have been born to be a lackey. One of those vile perfumed lackeys rich prostitutes keep around to do up their bras, while the lover lounges on the sofa with a cigar."

And his thoughts again slithered down to the kitchen in the basement of a luxurious mansion. Maids flitted around the table, and there was a chauffeur and an Arab vending garters and perfume. In this setting he would wear a black jacket that came just to his rear and a little white tie. Suddenly the "master" would call him: a man exactly like him physically, except with a mustache and glasses. He did not know what his boss wanted him for, but he would never forget the funny look the man gave him as he left the estate. And he went back to the kitchen for some locker-room talk with the chauffeur, who delighted the maids and bored the Arab pederast by telling how he had ruined the daughter of a great lady, a child of tender years. And again he repeated to himself: "Yes, I am a lackey. I have the soul of a true lackey," and he clenched his teeth with pleasure at the way he insulted and debased himself in his own eyes.

At other times he saw himself emerge from the bedroom of some devout old maid, unctuously bearing a heavy chamberpot, but just then he would be met by an assiduous priest, attached to the household, who, with smiling neutrality, would ask:

"Keeping up with our religious duties, Ernesto?" And he, Ernesto, Ambrosio, or José, would live the slimy life of an obscene, hypocritical servant.

Just the thought of it sent a shiver of madness coursing through him.

He knew, ah, how well he knew, that he was bruising and soiling his soul out of sheer perversity. Deliberately wallowing in the mire, he suffered the terror of one who, in a nightmare, falls down the abyss but does not die.

Because at times he longed for humiliation, like those saints who would kiss the sores of lepers, not from compassion but to be yet more unworthy of God's love, since they would revolt Him by their repulsive deeds.

But these images faded, and all that was left in his mind was the "desire to know the meaning of life," and he would tell himself:

"No, I am no lackey
...
no, I am not
...
" and he would have liked to ask his wife to take pity on him, to feel grief and pity for his horrible, vile thoughts. But remembering how she had made so many sacrifices for him filled him with blind fury, and at such times he would have liked to kill her.

And he knew all too well that some day she would turn to another man and that was yet more fuel added to everything that went to make up his anguish.

So when he stole the first twenty pesos, he was surprised how easily he could "do it," since before he got started he had thought he would have to overcome any number of scruples which he was no longer in a condition to feel. Then he reflected:

"It's just a matter of working up one's will and doing it, simple as that."

And "it" made life a little easier, with "it" he had money that felt alien, since it was acquired through no effort of his own. And the amazing thing for Erdosain was not the thievery itself, but that his face should show no sign of his crime. He was forced to steal because his monthly pay was so meager. Eighty, a hundred, a hundred and twenty pesos, since it depended on how much he collected; he was paid a commission per hundred pesos of bills he collected.

So, some days he carried four to five thousand pesos on his undernourished person and made do with a stinking, fake leather billfold, inside of which happiness piled up in the form of paper money, checks, money orders, and vouchers.

His wife nagged about the way she was always deprived of this or that; he would hear out her reproaches in silence and later, alone, he would wonder:

"What can I do?"

When he got the idea, when that idea started to grow, how he might steal from his bosses, he felt like an inventor yelling eureka. Steal? But how come he had only thought of it now?

And Erdosain was amazed by his own oversight, even accusing himself of lacking drive, since in those days (three months before the events of this story), he was painfully deprived of all kinds of necessary things, although vast sums of money streamed through his hands every day.

And what made his thievery so easy was the lax way the Sugar Company kept its books.

Terror in the Street

His life was most certainly strange, because sometimes hope welled up inside him and drove him out into the street.

Then he would get on a bus and ride to some ritzy neighborhood like Palermo or Belgrano. He would wander, lost in thought, down quiet avenues, saying to himself:

"Some young creature will spot me, a tall, pale, high-strung young girl, driving aimlessly around in her Rolls-Royce. Suddenly she spots me and knows I will be the one love of her life, and those eyes, that withered foolish suitors, will come to rest on me and will fill with sudden tears."

The dream pried loose from its framework of nonsense and slid slowly down into the shade of the tall facades and the green plantain trees that cast their shadows in triangular shapes on the white tiling below.

"She will be a millionairess, but I will tell her, 'Senorita, I cannot touch you. Even should you offer yourself to me, I would not take you.' She will look at me in surprise, then I will say, 'It's no use, do you understand? It's no use, I am married.' But she will pay Elsa a fortune to divorce me, and then we will marry and sail off to Brazil on her yacht."

And the bare simplicity of his dream took on rich nuances at the word "Brazil," which, hot and fervid, summoned up a pink and white coast, jutting and jettying out at points into the tender blue sea. Now his lady had lost her tragic air and was—under the white silk of her simple schoolgirl dress—a smiling creature, simultaneously timid and daring.

And Erdosain thought:

"We will never have sex. To make our love last forever, we will deny our desires, and I will never kiss her mouth, only her hand."

He pictured this happiness which would purify his life, if such an impossible dream could happen. But it would be easier to make the earth stand still than turn his crazy dream into reality.

Then he would mutter, discomfited by a vague sense of ill-being:

"So then, I'll be a pimp." And all at once a terror greater than any other undid the fabric of his thoughts. He felt his soul being bled dry out of every furrow, like a creature pressed in a vise. With his powers of reason paralyzed, he ran off in search of a brothel. Then he knew the full terror of the thief, luminous terror like a sunny day smashing against a convex salt flat.

He abandoned himself to the impulses that twist a man who finds himself facing jail for the first time, blind forces that impel some wretch to stake his life on a card or a woman. Perhaps seeking in that card or woman a sour, harsh consolation, perhaps seeking in the vilest, lowest depths a certain affirmation of purity that might once and forever save him.

And in the warmth of the siesta hour, he wandered the sidewalks, whose tiles baked in the yellow sun, seeking the filthiest of whorehouses.

He liked best the one where he saw orange peels and trickles of ash in the doorway and the windows were lined with red or green flannel and armored with chicken wire.

He would enter, plunged deep into darkest despair. In the courtyard, under the checkered blue sky, there was usually a bench painted ocher, onto which he would wilt, exhausted, enduring the icy stare of the madam while he waited for one of her girls to show up, inevitably either horrendously thin or horrendously fat.

And the prostitute yelled from the half-open bedroom door, where a man could be heard getting dressed again:

"Ready, love?" and Erdosain went into the other bedroom, his ears buzzing and smoke churning in front of his eyes.

Later he lay back on the bed, varnished a liver-like color, on top of the shoe-grimed covers which protected the mattress.

Suddenly he felt like crying, like asking that horrible pig of a woman what love was, the angelic love that celestial choruses sang at the foot of the throne of the living God, but anguish formed a plug in his larynx and his stomach was a clenched fist of disgust.

And as the prostitute let his hand wander over her clothes, Erdosain wondered:

"What have I done with my life?" A ray of sun bounced off the cobweb-covered transom, and the prostitute, with one cheek against the pillow and one leg resting on his, slowly moved his hand for him while he thought sadly: "What have I made of my life?" Suddenly remorse darkened his soul, he thought of his wife who, in her poverty, had to do laundry although she was sick, and then, filled with self-loathing, he leaped out of bed, paid the girl, and without having taken her, ran off to a new hell to spend the money that was not rightfully his, to descend still farther into his ever-howling madness.