The Seven Madmen (4 page)

At other times he would make fun of his clairvoyant hunches and of a ghost he claimed to see in a corner of his boardinghouse bathroom, a huge woman with a broom in her hands and thin arms and a harpy's eyes. At other times, he confessed if he was not already mad he would end up that way. Erdosain pretended to be worried about Barsut's health, asked about his symptoms, advising him to rest and stay in bed, and when he said that too often Barsut would ask sneeringly:

"Does it bother you that much, my being here?"

At other times, Barsut would be wild with crazy glee, like an uncommunicative wino who just managed to set off a big oil fire, and prancing around the dining room, clapping Erdosain on the back, he would keep asking him with tiresome persistence, "How goes it? How's it going?"

Barsut's eyes were glittery, and Erdosain sat there sadly, shriveled, wondering why he shrank back from confrontation with that man who was forever on his chair edge, with his eyes on that one corner of the room.

And they avoided one another's eyes.

Between them there was a dark, unfocused stalemate. One of those no-win situations that two men who hate each other can get locked into and never get out of.

Erdosain loathed Barsut, but it was a gray, complicated loathing, made of bad fantasies and worse possibilities. And what compounded the hatred was the lack of any concrete motive.

Sometimes he would sit inventing horrible revenge ploys, and, scowling, would rain imaginary disasters on his guest's head, but the next time Barsut came to the door, Erdosain would start trembling like an adulteress at her husband's knock, and once he even scolded Elsa for being so slow to open up for Barsut, then rationalized away his cowardly behavior this way:

"He'll think we don't want to let him in. If that's really true, then we should just tell him not to come anymore."

There was no concrete motive, and that inward-turned hatred spread through him like a cancer. Erdosain saw Barsut's every move as a fresh reason to burn with fury and wish horrible deaths on him. And Barsut, as if he were aware of his host's inner thoughts, would seem all the more eager to carry on in the most vulgar, disgusting vein. Erdosain would never forget one especially gross stunt.

One night they had gone out for a drink. Along with the drinks, the waiter brought some potato salad with mustard. Barsut pinioned a piece of potato with such a greedy stab of his toothpick that he splattered the salad all over the tabletop, coated with grime from people's dirty hands and cigarette ash. Then Barsut, sneering, scooped it up bit by bit, and when he got to the last piece, he used it to sop up the mustard smeared over the marbletop and then popped it into his mouth with a nasty grin.

"Why don't you just lick the marble?" asked Erdosain in disgust.

Barsut shot him a funny look, virtually a provocation. Then he put his head to the countertop and used his tongue to wipe the marble clean.

"Is that what you wanted?"

Erdosain turned pale.

"Have you gone crazy?"

And suddenly Barsut all laughing and friendly, seized with that vague frenzy that had been hanging darkly over him all afternoon, leaped up and vainly attempted to make things all right.

Erdosain would never forget it: the close-cropped head, bronze-colored, right down against the marble top with its tongue protruding into the slime on the yellowish stone.

And he often imagined that Barsut thought of him from then on with the hatred you feel for anyone you have let have too close a look at you. But he could not stop exposing himself, and the moment he got to Erdosain's house he would start baring his unhappy soul endlessly, even though he knew Erdosain gloried in his wretchedness.

In truth, Erdosain egged him on; in a seizure of crazed pity, he would play father confessor to Barsut, who would forget he was Erdosain's enemy when he gave him such sober advice. But his hatred would come out with a vengeance when the nasty gleam in Erdosain's eyes showed that his pity was about at an end and a vile joy was appearing at the spectacle of this life coming apart at the seams, since even though Barsut had money enough to live on from his assets, he still was haunted by the fear of going mad like his father and brothers.

All at once, Erdosain looked up. The black with the wing collar finished picking his lice, and now the three pimps were divvying up bundles of money under the greedy gaze of the cabbies who, at the other table, watched from the corners of their eyes. The black, gripped by the sight of money, seemed to be verging on a sneeze as he turned mournful eyes to the toughs.

Erdosain got up and paid. Then he went out saying:

"If Gregorio won't cough up, I'll try the Astrologer."

Inventor's Dreams

If someone had told Erdosain that a few hours later he would be plotting Barsut's murder and would look on with near calm as his wife deserted him, he would not have believed it.

He spent the whole afternoon just wandering. He felt a need to be alone, to forget human voices and stand apart from his surroundings like a man in a strange city where he missed his train connection.

He walked past the lonely crossing of Arenales and Talcahuano Streets, past the crossing of Charcas and Rodr
í
guez Peña, past the corner of Montevideo and Avenida Quintana, savoring the sight of magnificently constructed neighborhoods, forever off limits to the poor. His feet, on the white sidewalks, squished the fallen leaves from banana trees, and he looked up at those great oval-paned windows, like leaded mirrors with white curtains inside. It was a world apart, set inside the grimy city he knew, a world apart to which his heart now beat in slow, heavy longings.

Stopping, he eyed the ritzy garages that almost glistened and the green-tufted cypresses inside the gardens defended by rampart walls, or by ironwork solid enough to halt a charging lion. The red-paved walkway slithered among the ovals of greenery. A gray-hatted governess was strolling down the street.

And he owed six hundred pesos and seven cents!

He gazed a long time at those balustrades that glowed against the black balconies with their rounded golden railings, those windows painted dove gray or the palest shade of café-au-lait, those windowpanes so thick they must have made passersby look bent and wavy. The filmy curtains, so light that their names must have a lilt like the names of exotic countries. How different it must be to love in the shadow of that tulle that turns light to half-shadow and modulates sounds.

But still he owed six hundred pesos and seven cents. And the voice of the pharmacist rang in his ears:

"You're right—the world is full of wretches, burnt-out cases
...
so what do we do about it?
...
How can we share the sacred truths with those of little faith?"

Pain, like a tree forced to grow faster by electricity, spread through the depths of his chest, creeping up his throat.

Stopping, he felt each spasm of grief hopping like an owl from branch to branch in his misery. He owed six hundred pesos and seven cents, and even though he wanted to push it out of his mind and only think how Barsut and the Astrologer would save him, his thoughts twisted off to a dark street.

Strings of lights seemed to hang from every ledge. A fog of dust choked the street. But he was off to the land of joy, the whole Sugar Company mess forgotten.

What had he done with his life? Was this or was this not the right moment to ask? And how could he walk along if his body weighed seventy kilos? Or was he a ghost, a ghost remembering his earthly existence?

How much seethed in his heart: What about the man who had married a prostitute? What about Barsut, scared of a one-eyed dream-fish and the eldest daughter of the seance lady? And what about Elsa, who wouldn't sleep with him, sending him out on the street? Was he crazy or not?

He had to wonder because at times he was amazed by the strength of hope that welled up inside him.

He imagined, peering through a louver in one of those palaces, there would be a "melancholy and taciturn millionaire" (I use Erdosain's exact words), observing him through binoculars.

And what was really odd was that whenever he thought the "melancholy and taciturn millionaire" could see him, he assumed a careworn, thoughtful expression and stopped watching the rears of passing maids, feigning the utmost paralyzing absorption in some terrible inner struggle. He thought that if the "melancholy and taciturn millionaire" caught him watching the maids' rumps, he might get the idea that he was not troubled enough to be worth rescuing.

And so Erdosain would wait for the "melancholy and taciturn millionaire" to send for him at any moment, just from seeing his face with its muscles stiff with years of bitter anguish.

He became so obsessed with it that afternoon he suddenly felt that an idler in a red-and-yellow striped jacket lounging in the door of the hotel and staring at him with bald curiosity was a scout for the "melancholy and taciturn millionaire."

And the servant called him over. He followed. They went through a garden prickly with cactus into a room where he was left alone for several minutes. The whole building was dark. A lamp in one corner was the only light. On the piano ledge, sheet music wafted the fragrance of continual contact with feminine hands. On a windowsill, draped in violet linen, a marble bust of a woman lay abandoned. Great cushions were upholstered in some Cubist print fabric, and on top of the desk there were black-bronze ashtrays and a multicolored desk set.

Where in his life could he have encountered a room like the one that now grew in his imagination? He could not remember. But he saw a great ebony frame whose sides ran up to the whitest of ceilings, whose pale plaster threw light onto a seascape: a sinister wooden bridge, under whose massive pilings a multitude of blurry men were seething, splotched with reddish shadows, carting great masses of something beside a tumultuous sea, cast-iron and somehow bloody, from which there arose straight up a stone dock jammed with a confusion of rails and cranes and pulleys.

Before their marriage, his Elsa had known just such a fine parlor. Yes, perhaps, but why bring that up now? He was the embezzler, the man with the wornout shoes, with the fraying tie, with grease stains on his suit who went off to eke out a living while his sick wife did laundry at home. That was why the "melancholy and taciturn millionaire" had sent for him.

Erdosain savored his fantasy until he could practically have reached out and touched it, supplementing it with fresh images supplied at the expense of the great invisible lord. He added on a splendid interview with the "melancholy and taciturn millionaire," who offered to finance the building of his inventions, and like those crime novel fans who skip the boring bits to get to the denouement, Erdosain shortcut over some of his own imaginative embellishments and got himself back in the street, even though he really already was on the street.

Then, leaving the crossing of Charcas and Talcahuano or Arenales and Rodríguez Peña, he went hurrying off.

And he set up great spasms of hope inside himself.

He would triumph, yes, he would triumph! With the money from the "melancholy and taciturn millionaire" he would set up his electrotechnical laboratory, he would specialize in the study of beta rays, in the wireless transmission of energy and of electromagnetic waves, and with his youth forever preserved, like the absurd hero of an English novel, he would grow older; only his face would pale to the whiteness of marble, and his flashing eyes, deep magus eyes, would seduce every maiden on earth.

The night began to fall and suddenly he remembered that the only one who could rescue him from his horrible situation was the Astrologer. At this thought, all others fled his mind. Perhaps the man had money. He even suspected him of being a Bolshevik agent sent to spread Communism in the country, since he had a strange scheme for a revolutionary band. Without hesitation, he hailed a cab and told the driver to take him to the Constitution Station. There he got a ticket to Temperley.

The Astrologer

The Astrologer lived in a building set in the middle of some wooded acreage. The house was built low and its red roof was visible a long way off through the foliage. In the clearings in the greenery, among tangled grasses and creepers, black-bottomed insects zoomed around all day through a perpetual mist of weeds and stray stalks. Not far from the house, a millwheel limped along on three paddles around a triangular, rusted iron axis, and ahead a bit, over the stables, hung the blue and red panes of some half-destroyed glass paneling. Behind the mill and the house, past the walls, a green mountain range of eucalyptus verged off into blackness, sending crests like mountain peaks into the sea-blue sky.

Sucking on a honeysuckle, Erdosain walked across the acres to the house. He felt as though he were in the country, very far from the city, and it cheered him to see the house. Although low, it was two-storied, with a decrepit balcony on the second floor and a peeling row of Greek columns at the entrance, marking the end of an unkempt path edged with palm trees.

The red roof tiles slanted downward, their eaves sheltering the transoms and tiny attic windows, and through the luxuriant greenery of the chestnut trees, over the tops of the pomegranate trees spangled with scarlet asterisks, a zinc rooster stood waving its twisted tail in the shifting wind. All around him the garden burst out in wild profusion, as if trying to become a minor forest, and now, in the still afternoon, in the sun that gave the air a nacreous shimmer, the rosebushes poured out their potent perfume, so piercing that it seemed to fill everything with an atmosphere red and fresh and like a river torrent of water.

Erdosain thought:

"Even if I had a silver boat with golden sails and marble oars, and the ocean were to turn seven splendid colors, and a millionairess were blowing me kisses from the moon, I would still be unhappy
...
But what's all this rot? It's still better to live out here than back there. Here, I could set up a lab."

A faucet dripped into a barrel. A dog dozed by an old-fashioned gazebo, and when Erdosain called from the foot of the stairs, the gigantic figure of the Astrologer loomed in the door, wrapped in a yellow smock with his hat pulled down over his eyes, shadowing his wide rhomboidal face. Stray wisps of hair wandered across his temples, and his nose, which had been broken at midpoint, skewed remarkably far to the left. Under his beetle brows round pupils darted, and that hard-cheeked face, with furrows grooved deep into its surface, seemed sculpted in lead. How that head must have weighed on its bearer!