The Seven Madmen (8 page)

"Shut up."

"What for? We'd sit here and grasp, with no need to put it in words, what we were, two losers, one too much more passionate than the other, and when we went to bed together—"

"Remo!"

"Mr. Erdosain!"

"What's this absurd prudishness? By some chance, maybe, you two aren't going to bed together?"

"We can't go on in this vein."

"All right, when we separated we'd have this same idea: all the joy of love and life, and now it's come down to this?
...
And, without saying it, we knew we were thinking the same thought
...
but to change the subject
...
do you two plan to stay on in the city?"

Suddenly Erdosain got that cold good-bye-forever feeling.

He envisioned Elsa on a ship's rail, under a line of round portholes, peering off toward the blue horizon. The sun splashed onto the yellow wood of masts and black handles of the winches. Dusk was falling, but they stayed there with their minds in some other clime; while waitresses flitted by, they stayed there leaning against the railing. The salt breeze fluttered the waves and Elsa looked at the water from whose ever-changing interstices her shadow took heart.

At times she would turn her pale face to look back and then both of them seemed to hear a reproach that welled up from the depths of the sea.

And Erdosain imagined it asking them:

"What have you done to the poor boy?" ("Because, despite my age,. I was really just a boy," Erdosain was later to tell me. "You see, a man who just stands there while another man takes his wife
...
he's a wretch
...
he's really like a kid, see?")

Erdosain came back up out of this vision. The question that had popped up was then stamped into him quite against his will.

"Are you going to write to me?"

"What for?"

"Yes, of course, what for?" he repeated, closing his eyes. More than ever, he felt he had sunk to a depth that no man had even dreamed before.

"Well now, Mr. Erdosain," said the Captain, getting up. "We'll just be on our way."

"You're leaving? You're leaving already?"

Elsa held out one gloved hand.

"You're leaving?"

"Yes
...
I'm leaving
...
you can see how it is
...
."

"Yes
...
I can see
...
."

"Remo, it just wasn't working out."

"Yes, right, sure
...
it wasn't working
...
right
...
."

The Captain, making his way around the table, took up the suitcase, the very same suitcase Elsa had brought along on her wedding day.

"Good-bye, Mr. Erdosain."

"All right, Captain, only
...
one thing
...
you're leaving
...
you, Elsa
...
are leaving?"

"Yes, we're leaving."

"Excuse me, I have to sit down a bit. Just wait a bit, Captain
...
just a moment, here."

The intruder bit back words of impatience. He had a brutal urge to shout at the husband, "You stupid weakling, get ahold of yourself!" but for Elsa's sake he held it in.

Suddenly Erdosain jumped up from his chair. He walked slowly to one corner of the room. Then, wheeling to face the Captain, he said in a very plain voice, which showed a tremendous effort to keep from yelling:

"You know why I don't just kill you like a dog?"

They both turned around, alarmed.

"Because I'm ice-cold."

Erdosain was pacing back and forth across the room with his hands clasped behind his back. They kept their eyes on him, expecting something.

Finally, the husband, managing a pallid grimace of a smile, went on softly in a voice that struggled to avoid tears.

"Yes, I'm ice-cold
...
I'm all cold inside." Now his eyes grew vague, but he was still smiling that weird, unreal smile. "Listen to me
...
you won't understand, but I have it figured out."

His eyes had an extraordinary gleam in them and his voice grew hoarse from the strain of speaking.

"Look
...
my life has been horribly shat on
...
mangled to bits."

He lapsed into silence, standing in one corner of the room. His face still bore the strange smile of a man living out a dangerous dream. Elsa, suddenly irritable, bit one corner of her handkerchief. The Captain, standing beside the suitcase, kept waiting.

Suddenly Erdosain took the gun from his pocket and threw it into a corner. The Browning crashed clattering into the wall and clunked hard onto the floor.

"Some good it's doing me!" he muttered. Then, one hand in his coat pocket and his forehead against the wall, he began to speak slowly: "Yes, my life has been horribly insulted
...
humiliated. You better believe it, Captain. Don't be in such a hurry. Here, I'll tell you a story. My father was the one who started my long trail of humiliations. When I was ten and did something wrong, he'd say, 'Tomorrow I'll beat you good.' Always tomorrow, just like that
...
See? tomorrow
...
and so I'd sleep that night, only badly, tortured sleep, waking up at midnight to look at the windowpanes, terrified it might be day already. But when the moon shone through the window bars, I'd close my eyes and say: there's still a long time to go. But then later I'd wake up again when I heard the roosters start to crow. The moon wasn't there anymore, but a bluish light was coming through the panes, and I'd cover my head with the sheets trying not to see it, but I knew it was there
...
but I knew no human force could drive that light away. And finally when I'd slept a long while a hand would shake my head on the pillow. It was him, telling me in a rough voice, 'Come on
...
it's time.' And while I got dressed slowly, I'd hear him setting the chair out on the patio. Then he'd shout at me again, 'Come on,' and I'd walk right over to him like I was hypnotized; I wanted to say something, but it was impossible with his terrifying eyes on me. He dropped a hand on my shoulder and forced me to kneel. I put my chest against the chair seat, he grasped my head between his knees and suddenly the whip slashed cruelly into my buttocks. And when he let go of me, I ran crying to my room. My soul was flung down to the depths of darkness by a vast sense of shame. Because those depths of darkness do exist even if you don't think they do."

Elsa looked at her husband, shocked. The Captain stood there with his arms crossed, listening in a bored sort of way. Erdosain smiled vaguely. He continued:

"I knew most boys were not beaten by their fathers and in school, when I heard them talking about home, I'd be paralyzed with such terrible psychic pain that if we were in class and the teacher called on me, I would just gape at him dumbfounded, unable to make any sense of his questions, till one day he shouted: 'Are you some kind of idiot, Erdosain, don't you hear me?' The whole class burst out laughing, and from then on they called me 'Erdosain the idiot.' And I felt more wretched, more injured than ever, but I kept quiet about it for fear of my father's whip, and smiled at the boys who insulted me
...
only timidly
...
See, Captain? They insult you
...
and you smile timidly like they were doing you a favor jeering at you."

The stranger frowned.

"Later—a moment more, Captain—later they often called me 'the imbecile.' Then suddenly my soul would shrivel away down my nerves, and feeling my soul hiding in shame inside my own flesh destroyed the last bits of my courage. I felt I was sinking farther and farther down and I'd look whoever was insulting me in the eye, then instead of slapping him down, I'd tell myself: 'Can he possibly know how vastly he is humiliating me?' Then I'd go on my way; I grasped that everyone else was just finishing what my father had started."

"So now," replied the Captain, "I'm dragging you under, too?"

"No, hey now, not you. Naturally, I've suffered so much that all the fight in me has shriveled inward, to hidden places. So I'm outside it all watching myself and wondering. 'When will all that fight inside of me come bursting out?' And that's the thing I'm waiting for. Some day something will explode in me, a monstrous thing, and I'll be a whole changed man. Then, if you're alive, I'll come looking for you and spit in your face."

The stranger looked at him calmly.

"Not from hatred, though, only to try out my fighting spirit, which will be the newest thing in the world for me
...
Okay, you can go now."

The stranger vacillated a moment. Erdosain's eyes were trained on him in a boundless, intense stare. He took the suitcase and left.

Elsa stood in front of her husband, trembling.

"Okay now, I'm leaving. Remo
...
it had to end like this."

"But you
...
you?"

"What would you say to do instead?"

"I don't know."

"So, see? Please, I want you to keep calm. I left your clothes all ready for you. Put a fresh collar on. You're enough to put any wife to shame, always like that."

"But you, Elsa
...
you? And what about the plans we made?"

"Illusions, Remo
...
splendors."

"Right, splendors
...
but where did you get such a lovely word? Splendors."

"I don't know."

"And our life together will be left undone forever and ever?"

"What alternative is there? But still, I tried to do right. Later, I began to hate you
...
but why weren't you the same man you used to be?"

"Ah, yes
...
the same man
...
the same
...
."

Pain weighed upon him like a tropical day with the sun beating down. His eyelids drooped. He felt ready to drop off to sleep. The meanings of words sank into his brain as slowly as a stone into half-congealed water. When the word hit the depths of his consciousness, dark forces tore at his pain. And for that instant, at the depths of his heart, they kept floating and scuttling about as if trapped in a mud puddle, amid weeds and strands of suffering. She went on, in a voice still with deep-seated resignation:

"It's no good anymore
...
I'm going now. Why didn't you behave? Why didn't you go to work?"

Erdosain was sure that Elsa was as unhappy as he was just then, and a flood of compassion made him fall back on the edge of the chair, his head flung down on his arm on the tabletop.

"So, you're going? You're going, for real?"

"Yes, I want to see if our life can get better, see? Take a look at my hands," and, taking off her right glove, she showed him a hand cracked by the cold, eaten by lye, pricked by needles, and blackened by sooty pots.

Erdosain stood up, in the grips of a vision.

He saw his unhappy wife in the vile throes of cities of iron and cement, passing under the dark slashes where the skyscrapers threw down oblique shadows, under a looming tangle of black high-voltage wires. A throng of businessmen shielded by umbrellas passed by. Her little face was paler than ever, but he was in her thoughts even though the breath of strangers touched her cheek.

"Where, where is my little boy?"

Erdosain cut in on his own vision:

"Elsa
...
you know this
...
come back anytime you want
...
you can come back
...
only tell the truth, did you once love me?"

She raised her eyes slowly. Her voice filled the room with human warmth. To Erdosain she seemed to come to life.

"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."

"Darling, my poor darling
...
what life has done to us
...
what life has done."

A painful wisp of a smile turned up the corners of her mouth. Elsa looked at him a moment, her eyes warm. Then, she made a solemn vow:

"Look here
...
wait for me. If life is the way you always told me, I'll return to you, see? and then, if you say so, we can kill ourselves together
...
Are you happy?"

Warm blood surged through the man's temples.

"My love, you're so good to me, love
...
give me your hand," and while she, still overwhelmed, smiled, timidly, Erdosain kissed it. "You're not angry, love?"

She lifted up her head, grave with joy.

"Look here, Remo
...
I'll come back to you, see? And if it's true what you say about life
...
yes, I'll be back
...
I'll be back."

"You'll be back?"

"With everything I have."

"Even if you're rich?"

"Even if I have all the millions on earth, I'll be back. I swear!"

"Darling, my poor darling! You're a pure soul, but yet, you never really knew me
...
it doesn't matter
...
what life has dealt us!"

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

"You're all in a ballgown
...
white shoes and a pearl necklace."

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

"Tell me
...
go on
...
go on .. "Your head sunk into your hand and your elbow on the table
...
you look at me
...
and all at once
...
"

"I recognize you and I say, 'Elsa, is it you, Elsa?'
"

"And I answer: 'Remo, I've come home, remember that night? That night is tonight and outside a cold wind may blow, but we feel neither cold nor pain.' Are you happy, Remo?"