The Seven Madmen (34 page)

"Why not, come on." And the Astrologer accompanied him to his bedroom. Erdosain took off his shoes, exhausted by now, and threw his jacket over the bedstead. His eyes burned fiercely, his chest was bedewed with sweat and he thought nothing more.

He awoke when it was dark, to the sound of the Astrologer opening a blind. He turned around surprised, as the other man said to him:

"Finally! You've been sleeping for twenty-eight hours." As he expressed doubt, the Astrologer handed him that day's paper, and, surely enough, two days had passed.

Erdosain leaped out of bed thinking of Hipólita.

"I've got to be going."

"You slept like a dead man. I've never seen anyone sleep like that, with such exhaustion, even neglecting the natural needs of the body
...
but, by the way, where did you get that story about the suicide in the café? I've seen last night's papers and this morning's. None of them has the story. You dreamed it."

"But I could show you the café."

"Well, you dreamed in the café, then."

"Maybe so
...
it doesn't matter. So?"

"It's all done with."

"All of it?"

"All."

"And the acid?"

"We'll pour it down the cesspool."

"So then?"

"It's as if he'd never existed."

Taking his leave of the Astrologer, he was told:

"Come Wednesday at five. We meet that night. Don't forget to get an off-the-rack suit to wear while the tailor does the others. So be there, and don't miss it, since the Gold Seeker, the Ruffian, and others will be, too. We'll exchange ideas, and remember, I'm very interested in the poison gas thing. Draw up a plan for a small factory to make chlorine and phosgene. Ah, and you can figure out what in hell mustard gas is. It destroys anything not protected by waterproofing soaked in oil."

"Phosgene is produced by the reaction of carbon monoxide and chlorine."

"Don't lose any time, Erdosain. A small factory. One that can double as a school for revolutionary chemistry.

Remember our activities can be divided into three sets. The Gold Seeker will run everything related to the colony, you run the industries, Haffner runs the brothels. Now we need money, so there's no time to lose. You have to get to work. What do you say to setting up an industrial complex that's the Argentine equivalent of what Krupp was in Germany? You must have confidence. Many surprises can come out of what we're doing. We're discoverers who have only a vague notion what we're heading for.
{12}
And who even has a vague notion!"

Erdosain fastened his gaze on the man's rhomboid face for a second, then, with a mocking smile, said:

"Do you know you're like Lenin?"

And before the Astrologer could reply, he was gone.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roberto Godofredo Christopherson Arlt was born in Buenos Aires in 1900. He was thrown out of school at the age of eight, reportedly for writing the following note to his teacher:
"Senorita, let us run away to the sea. Dressed in black velvet I shall carry you off to my pirate ship. I swear by the corpse of my hanged father that I love you. Yours till death. Roberto Godofredo
,
Knight of Ventimiglia
,
Lord of Rocabruna, Captain of the Whaler
Taciturn." Despite this lack of formal education, he wrote stories, publishing his first in a neighborhood newspaper when he was fourteen. Arlt left home at sixteen, and for the next six years worked at various jobs in Buenos Aires and Cordoba. His first novel,
El jugete rabioso (The Rabid Plaything)
, took him five years to write and was published in 1925.
Los siete locos (The Seven Madmen),
his second book, was published in 1929, and, although it was awarded a municipal prize, it met with the universal dislike of the critics. The same year, Arlt began writing a column for
El Mundo,
and continued to do so until his death in 1942. 1931 saw the publication of
Los lanzallamas (The Flamethrowers
), the sequel to
Los siete locos;
the next year, Arlt's final novel appeared,
El amor brujo (Love the Sorcerer
). In spite of their popularity with the public, none of these novels received any critical support for some twenty-five years, and, on the advice of a friend, Arlt decided to write a play, "Los 300 Millones" ("The 300 Million"). He produced six more over the course of the next ten years, as well as two volumes of short stories, a collection of his
El Mundo
columns, and a book of commentaries on Spain,
Aguafuertes espanolas (Spanish Etchings
).

In 1942, Arlt died of a heart attack, leaving behind him a play, "El desierto entra en la ciudad" ("The Desert Comes into the City"), which was finally published in 1953. Six years later, Editorial Hachette released a new selection of his columns, and in 1968 his complete plays were published by Schapire. In 1972, the first English translation of his work appeared—a story, "Esther Primavera," was included in an anthology of Latin American fiction and poetry. The next two years brought two more anthologies containing English translations of stories by Arlt. In 1981, a new edition of Arlt's collected works was published in Argentina, with an introductory essay by Julio Cortázar.
The Seven Madmen
is his first novel to appear in English.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Naomi Lindstrom teaches Latin American literature at the University of Texas. She is the author of
Literary Expressionism in Argentina
(1977),
Macedonio Fernandez
(1981), and the forthcoming
Woman's Voice in Latin American Literature
:
Four Fiction Works.

{1}
Commentator's note
:
This part of Erdosain's confessions made me wonder whether the idea of committing a crime might not have already been in his subconscious
,
which would explain his passive response to Barsut's violent attack.

{2}
Commentator's note: Only later was Erdosian to find out that Elsa was then in the care of a Sister of Charity. One gross pass made at her by Captain Bela
ú
nde was enough to alert her to her true situation, and she leapt from the car. Then it occurred to her to turn to a hospital, where the Mother Superior took her in hand
,
realizing she was a woman at the end of her wits.

{3}
Commentator's note: Later Erdosain offered me two explanations for his behavior. The first one is that it gave him great pleasure to fake a state of madness, the kind of pleasure a man gets when he's drunk one glass of wine and then acts drunk in front of his friends to upset them. He smiled sadly as he was explaining it, and told me that when he came down from the acacia
,
he was ashamed of himself, just like some poor slob who gets himself up in a Carnival costume, shows himself off to a bunch of people and, instead of making the strangers laugh, his attempt to be funny only gets him sneered at.
"I
felt so disgusted with myself that I even thought of killing myself and was sorry I didn't have my revolver on me. Later, as I was getting undressed at home, I realized that when I was out there
I
forgot I was carrying the gun in my pants pocket."

{4}
Commentator's note
:
Speaking of those days, Erdosain told me: "I believed my soul had been given to me to enjoy the beauties of the world, moonlight along an orange-tinged cloud crest, a dewdrop trembling on a rose. But, when I was little, I always believed life held in store some sublime and beautiful thing just for me. But when I got a good look at other men's lives, I found out they lived with boredom, as if they lived in a land of perpetual rain, where the rain always pelting down left puddles of water in their eyes and kept them from seeing things clearly. And I could see how souls wandered the earth like fish trapped inside an aquarium
.
Outside of those greenish glass walls was life, all beautiful, singing, soaring high, where everything would be different, full of power and variety, and where the brand-new creatures of a more perfect creation would send their lovely bodies springing through an elastic atmosphere." And then:
"
It's no good, I have to get away from this world."

{5}
Commentator's note
:
Someday I may write the story of Erdosain'
s
ten
"
missing
"
days. Right now I can't possibly do it, be cause there is no room here for another whole book, which is what his account would take up. You'll notice this book only tells what the characters actually did for three days and despite the space I have available I have had to leave out exactly what everyone felt, but their story will be continued in another volume called The Flamethrowers. In the second part
,
which I am now preparing and which Erdosain gave me a good deal of material for, there will be all kinds of amazing stories such as
"
The Blind Prostitute," "Elsa's Adventures,
" "
The Man Who Walked With
Jesus"
and
"
The Poison-Gas Factory."

{6}
Commentator's note: When Barsut was talking with the Astrologer, he said the night before the kidnapping he thought it might be a death trap, and that at the very last only pride kept him from backing out.

{7}
Commentator's note: In the second part of this work we will quote a passage from Barsut's notebook.

{8}
Author's note
:
This novel was written in
1928-29
and published by Rosso in October
1929.
It would be ridiculous to suppose that the Major's remarks were based on the revolutionary movement of September
6, 1930.
Undeniably
,
there is a startling degree of likeness between the declarations of the September
6
group and the Major's, and both bear similar fruit, as shown by the events following the September coup.

{9}
Commentator's note
:
Later it turned out that the Major was no fictitious officer, but the real thing, and that he lied when he said he was playing a part.

{10}
Commentator's note: Later
Hipólita
was to tell the Astrologer:
"
I kneeled to Erdosain exactly when it occurred to me to blackmail you
,
taking advantage of his having told me all about the murder plan."

{11}
Commentator's note
:
Faking Barsut's murder was decided on by the Astrologer at the last minute, after a long talk with that individual.

{12}
The story of the characters in this novel will continue in another volume entitled
The Flamethrowers
.