The Seven Madmen

INCOHERENCIES

Erdosain spent the days leading to Barsut’s abduction in a room he rented after paying off the Sugar Company. He had become terrified of going out. He never thought about the planned abduction, and even ceased to visit the Astrologer. Instead, he spent every day in bed, his forehead pressed against his clenched fists on the pillow. Or he would spend hours staring at the wall, up which he imagined he could see wisps of dreams and despair floating.

In all those days he could not even summon up Elsa’s face. “She had vanished so mysteriously from my mind, it took a supreme effort simply to recall any of her features.”

Later he would fall asleep or go over everything again in his mind.¹ He tried in vain to concentrate on two projects he considered important: adapting steam engines to electromagnetics, and the idea of setting up a dog salon where people could get their pets dyed electric blue, their bulldogs bright green, purple greyhounds, lilac fox-terriers, lapdogs with three-toned photos of sunsets printed across their backs, little pooches with swirls like a Persian rug. He was in torment: one afternoon he fell asleep and had the following dream:

He knew one of the Spanish princesses was enamoured of him. This plus the fact that he was his Majesty Alfonso XIII’s lackey made him extremely happy, because it meant he was surrounded by generals constantly trying to discover his secrets. The mirror of a lake nibbled at the trunks of trees permanently in the whitest of white bloom, whilst the lissom princess took him by the arm and said in her Spanish lilt:

“Do you love me, Erdosain?”

Erdosain burst out laughing and replied with an insult: at this, a circle of swords flashed before his eyes and he felt he was drowning, one catastrophe after another tore the continents asunder, but he did not care because he had been sleeping for centuries in a leaden shack at the bottom of the sea. Outside his window one-eyed sharks circled, furious because they had piles, which made Erdosain laugh with the stifled laugh of someone who does not want to be heard. Now all the fish in the sea were one-eyed, and he was the Emperor of the City of One-eyed Fish. An endless wall surrounded the desert at the water’s edge, the green sky was rusting on its bricks, and vast shoals of fat, one-eyed fish, monstrous creatures bulging with marine leprosy, were flung against the sides of the red towers, while a dropsical black man shook his fist at an idol of salt.

At other times, Erdosain recalled moments when he knew beforehand what was going to happen to him, as he had told the Captain that fateful night. He felt a confused sense of dismay, a sense of lying in wait for reality in a way that now led him to say to himself: “I was right; I knew all the time.”

He remembered how one night he had been talking to Elsa and she, in a moment of sincerity, had confessed that if she had not already been married she would have stayed single and taken a lover instead.

Erdosain asked her:

“D’you mean it?”

Elsa replied harshly from the other bed:

“Yes, of course, I’d have taken a lover … what’s the point in getting married?”

Erdosain felt a strange deathly silence creeping over him, laid alongside his prostrate body like a coffin. Perhaps it was at that moment that all the unconscious love a man feels for a woman was destroyed in him, freeing him to face terrible situations that he would otherwise have been unable to cope with. He felt he was deep inside a tomb, that he would never again see the light of day, while in the black silence that filled the room, the phantoms his wife’s voice had summoned floated up before him.

Later, seeking to explain that episode, he recalled he had lain motionless on his bed, afraid any movement he made might tip over this immense unhappiness constantly pressing his horizontal frame up against merciless despair.

His heart was pounding. Each time it contracted, he felt he had to push up the weight of a slippery mass of mud. It was useless for him to try to reach up to grasp the sunlight far above. His wife’s voice still echoed in his ears:

“I would never have married. I would have taken a lover.”

And those few words, which had taken no more than a couple of seconds to utter, would stay with him for the rest of his life. He clamped his eyes shut. The words would be with him all his life, swelling inside him like a malignant growth. His teeth grated. He wanted to suffer still more, to exhaust himself in pain, to bleed himself dry in a slow dripping of anguish. Stiff as a corpse in its shroud, his hands stretched along his thighs. Head locked forward, not daring to breathe, he asked in a rasping whisper:

“And would you have loved him?”

“What for? … Who knows? … oh, and yes, if he was good to me, why not?”

“Where would you have met? They wouldn’t have allowed that kind of thing in your house.”

“In some hotel or other.”

“Ah!”

They fell silent, but walled in his unhappiness, Erdosain could already picture her, walking along the pavement of a street as stony as a river-bed. A dark veil covered half her face, as she walked with rapid, sure steps to the place her chosen desire was leading her. Seeking only to extinguish the last remaining glimmer of hope, Erdosain went on, a feigned smile on his face invisible to her in the darkness. He spoke softly so that she would not notice his lips quaking with rage:

“See how nice it is in a marriage to be able to talk about everything like brother and sister? But tell me, would you have stripped off in front of him?”

“Don’t talk nonsense!”

“No, just tell me: would you have stripped off?”

“Yes … of course! I couldn’t stay dressed, could I?”

Erdosain could not have been more rigid if someone had split his spine with an axe. His throat became as parched as if he had swallowed a mouthful of fire. His heart had almost ceased to beat, and a fog poured from his brain and out of his eyes. He was falling through silence and darkness, floating slowly down into the void while the paralysed block of his flesh only continued to exist in order to register still more deeply the imprint of pain. He did not say a word, though he would have liked to burst out in sobs, to have knelt in front of someone, to get up at that very instant, get dressed, leave the house and go and sleep in some doorway, or on the outskirts of some unknown city.

In his fury, Erdosain finally blurted out:

“Don’t you realise … don’t you realise how terrible what you’ve said is? I ought to kill you! What a bitch you are! I ought to kill you, I really should! Don’t you realise?”

“What’s the matter with you? Have you gone crazy?”

“You’ve ruined my life. Now I know why you never gave yourself to me, why you’ve forced me to masturbate. Yes, that too! You’ve turned me into a rag doll. I ought to kill you. Anyone could come up to me and spit in my face. Don’t you realise? And while I’m stealing and swindling and suffering for you, you … yes, that’s what you’re thinking of. Thinking you would have given yourself to a good man! Don’t you realise? A good man … a good man!”

“Have you gone crazy?”

Erdosain was throwing on his clothes.

“Where are you going?”

Erdosain struggled into his overcoat, then leaning over his wife’s bed, he shouted:

“You want to know where I’m going? I’m going to a brothel, to catch a dose of syphilis!”

INNOCENCE AND IDIOCY

The chronicler of this story would not risk any definition of Erdosain; the misfortunes in his life were so great that all the disasters he was later to cause in league with the Astrologer could possibly be explained by the traumas he suffered during his marriage.

Even when I read over Erdosain’s confessions once more, I can scarcely believe I had to listen to him baring his soul in such a terrifying way, so overcome by anguish he seemed free from all sense of shame.

I remember it well. During the three days he was holed up in my house, he told me everything.

We would meet in a huge, dimly lit room almost bare of furniture. Erdosain would sit perched on the edge of the seat, slumped forward with his elbows on his knees and his face hidden behind his hands. All the time, he stared down at the floor.

He spoke in a monotone, without breaking off, as if he were reciting a lesson etched into the surface of his shadowy consciousness at thousands of pounds’ pressure. Whatever he was talking about, his voice did not vary in the slightest, but kept the steady methodical beat of a pendulum.

If I interrupted him, he did not get annoyed, but began again from the beginning, adding the details I requested, never once raising his head from staring at the floor, his elbows clamped to his knees. He spoke slowly because of the immense attention he paid to each detail, intent above all on dispelling any confusion.

He piled horror on horror without a trace of emotion. He knew he was going to die, that man’s justice was ruthlessly pursuing him, and yet there he was, revolver in pocket, elbows on knees, face hidden behind his hands, staring at the dusty, empty room, and talking without a trace of emotion.

In just a few days he had grown extraordinarily thin. His sallow skin stretched taut over the flat bones of his face gave him a consumptive look. Later on, the autopsy confirmed that the illness was already ravaging him.

The second day he was in my house he told me:

“Before I married, I used to be horrified at the thought of fornication. To my mind, a man married a woman simply to be with her always, to enjoy the pleasure of seeing one another the whole time; to talk to each other, express love through one’s eyes, words and smiles. It’s true I thought that way when I was very young, but when I got engaged to Elsa I felt the need to renew my faith in these things.”

He talked and talked.

Erdosain said he never even kissed Elsa, because he was content to let the vertigo of loving her grip his throat, and also because he believed that “one should not kiss a young lady”. So he converted a craving of his flesh into something spiritual.

“We never addressed each other in a familiar manner either, because I liked the distance that a formal way of speaking created between us. I also thought one should not be too familiar with a young lady. No, don’t laugh. To my mind, a ‘young lady’ was the authentic expression of all that is pure, perfect and innocent. Next to her it was not desire I felt, but the stirrings of a wonderful ecstasy that filled my eyes with tears. And I was happy to suffer for my love, unaware of the real goal of my desire, truly believing it was a spiritual passion rather than a terrible bodily upheaval that made me a willing slave to her cool, level gaze, that searching gaze which slowly penetrated the most tumultuous layers of my spirit.”

I would watch Erdosain while he was talking like this. Here was a murderer, a murderer, talking in this way about the absurd subtleties of our emotions! He went on:

“Then on our wedding night when we were alone in our hotel room, she took off her clothes quite naturally in the lamplight. Blushing to the roots of my hair, I turned away so that she could not see how embarrassed I felt. I removed my shirt collar, my jacket and my boots, then slipped under the sheets with my trousers still on. She turned her head amidst the riot of black curls on her pillow and said with a strange laugh:

“Aren’t you worried about creasing them? Take them off, silly.”

Later on in their marriage, a mysterious distance kept Elsa and Erdosain apart. She gave herself to him, but always with repugnance, as though she felt cheated in some way. When he knelt at her bedside and begged her to surrender to him if only for a moment, she replied in a voice thick with anger: “Let me alone! Can’t you see you disgust me?”

Choking back his fear of catastrophe, Erdosain would roll back on to his own bed.

“I would not lie down, but sit upright, my back propped against the pillow, staring out into the darkness. I knew it made no sense, but I thought that if she could see me lost and alone like that in the shadows, she might have pity on me and at last say: ‘All right, come here if you want to.’ But she never, never said a word to me, until one night I called out in utter despair:

“‘Do you really think … I’ll just masturbate for ever?’ At that, unmoved, she replied: ‘It’s pointless: I should never have married you.’”

THE BLACK HOUSE

Anguish took hold of Erdosain, so painfully that all of a sudden he clasped his head as if the pain was about to drive him mad. As each new idea rocked him, it felt as though his brain matter had shaken loose and was slopping against the walls of his skull.

He knew he was lost beyond redemption, stranded far from even the faint happiness that one day shines on the most pallid cheek. He understood that destiny had flung him into that maelstrom of outcasts who stamp life with the foul imprint of every imaginable vice and suffering.

All his hope had gone. His fear of living intensified still further when he realised he had no dreams to keep him going, when he admitted, eyes obstinately fixed on the far corner of the room, that it was all the same to him if he worked as a dishwasher in a bar or as a brothel porter.

What did it matter to him! Anguish threw him into that silent multitude of fearful men who drag their wretchedness through days of selling knick-knacks or bibles, and then at nightfall begin their tour of public lavatories, where they expose their genitals to tender youths brought there by similar uncontrollable desires.

Erdosain circled endlessly round and round in these grim considerations. He felt as if he was screwed to a huge block of wood from which he would never struggle free.

Anguish took such deep root in him that he suddenly pitied the fate his body might meet in the city, this seventy-kilo body he only saw whenever he passed in front of a mirror.

In earlier times, Erdosain had delved into his mind to enjoy all kinds of luxury and pleasure — the kind of immaterial pleasures not circumscribed by time or physical boundaries. But in his present despair he was unable to escape his body, a suffering body which at times he thought of as no longer his, despite his sense of remorse at never having made it happy.

The remorse he felt towards his own wretched physical being was as deep as the pain a mother must feel at never being able to satisfy her son’s deepest desires.

Erdosain had never offered his doomed flesh either a decent suit or a satisfaction that would reconcile it to life; he had done nothing for the pleasure of his own physical being, whereas he had permitted his spirit everything, even flights of fancy to countries as yet undiscovered by man’s machines.

Time and again he said to himself: “What have I done for the happiness of this wretched body of mine?” In truth, he felt he was bound up in something as separate from himself as wine is to the barrel containing it.

But he came to realise that it was this body of his that was the container of all his doubts and despair, was what fed them with its weary blood; a wretched, shabbily dressed body that no woman would deign to look at, which suffered all the contempt and crushing weight of the passing days simply because his mind had never desired the pleasures it was timidly, silently, crying out for. Erdosain felt sad and sorry for this physical double of his, this distant acquaintance.

So then, like a desperate man who throws himself from a seventh floor, he flung himself into the delicious terror of masturbation, seeking to drown his remorse in a world nobody could ever cast him from, cocooning himself in pleasures that were beyond his grasp in real life, a spectacular array of beautiful bodies he would have needed endless lives and limitless money to really enjoy.

This was a universe of gelatinous ideas, chopped into corridors where obscenity was disguised in silks and brocade, in velvets and expensive, creamy laces; a world bathed in a soft, sponge-like sunset glow. The most gorgeous women in creation strolled by, baring the rounded apples of their breasts to him, or offering their scented lips and lascivious words to a mouth stale from vile cigarettes.

Sometimes they were tall, smart, polished young ladies, at others perverted schoolgirls, an ever-changing world of females that no-one could ever cast him from: him, such a seedy-looking individual that even the madams of the most decrepit brothels eyed him suspiciously, as though he were going to cheat them out of the price of a lay.

He closed his eyes and sank into the oblivion of the burning darkness, like an opium-smoker who enters the sordid den with its Chinese owner stinking of excrement and yet believes he is on the threshold of paradise.

Slowly but surely he slid surreptitiously towards that forbidden pleasure; ashamed but at the same time as excited as an adolescent going into a whorehouse for the first time.

Desire buzzed in his ears like a horsefly, but nobody now could cast him from this sensual darkness.

The darkness was a familiar house where he suddenly lost all notion of everyday life. There, in the black house, he revelled in pleasures which if he had so much as suspected another man of enjoying, he would never have gone near him again.

Although this black house was deep inside himself, Erdosain entered it in the most roundabout way, performing the most tortuous manoeuvres. Yet once he had crossed the threshold he knew there was no turning back, because down its corridors, down a secret corridor draped in shadows, there came to meet him the same fleet-footed woman who one day in the street, on a tram or in someone’s house, had made him stiffen with desire.

Like someone pulling banknotes earned in many different ways from the same wallet, from the recesses of the dark house Erdosain plucked a fragmented but whole woman, made up from a hundred such creatures split by the same desire repeated a hundred times, always blooming anew in their presence.

This imaginary woman had the knees of a girl whose skirt the wind had blown up while she was waiting for a bus; the thighs he remembered from a pornographic postcard; and the sad, wan smile of a schoolgirl he had met a long time ago in a tram; the green eyes of a little dressmaker with spots around her pale mouth, going out on a Sunday evening with a friend to a dance in one of those social clubs where shopkeepers thrust their bulging trouser-fronts at girls who enjoy men.

And this fantasy woman, made up from the bits and pieces of all the ones he had been unable to possess, showed him the same kindness as cautious girls who have fondled their boyfriends’ crotches but still consider themselves decent. She came towards him, wearing a tight orthopaedic girdle that left her slightly splayed breasts free, and her behaviour was above reproach, like that of a proper young lady who knows what’s what, though that does not prevent her allowing her boyfriend’s hands to stray inside her casually undone blouse.

Then he would sink into the depths of the black house. The black house! Erdosain had a fearful memory of those days; he felt he had lived in a real hell, the ghastly image of which he could not shake off for the rest of his days, even when close to death, hounded by the law. Whenever his thoughts turned back to that time, he became sombrely excited and a dull red gleam shone in his eyes. He was so painfully aroused he would have liked to have leapt right over the stars, to burn himself in a bonfire that would cleanse his present of all that terrible, enduring, inescapable past.

The black house! I can still see it now — the haggard face of that sullen man, first tilting up to stare at the ceiling, then lowering his gaze to meet mine while he added, with a frozen smile: “Go on, tell mankind what the black house is. And tell them I was a murderer. And yet I, a murderer, have loved every kind of beauty, and have fought within myself against all the horrible temptations that welled up hour after hour from deep within me. I have suffered for what I am, and for all the others as well, d’you understand? for all the others as well …”

THE NOTIFICATION

The kidnapping took place ten days after Elsa had run away. On the fourteenth of August the Astrologer visited Erdosain when he was out, so he came back to find an envelope pushed under his door. It contained a fake notification from the War Ministry giving Captain Belaunde’s supposed address, plus a curious postscript which read as follows:

“I’ll be waiting for you and Barsut every morning between ten and eleven until the twentieth. Knock and come in straightaway. Don’t come alone.”

The Astrologer’s letter gave Erdosain pause for thought. He had completely forgotten Barsut. First he had decided he had to kill him, then that decision had become shrouded in darkness, and the intervening days when he was shut up alone had now come and gone. “I had to kill Barsut.” Perhaps the key to Erdosain’s madness might be found in an explanation of that “had to”. When I asked him about it, he replied: “I had to kill him, otherwise I could not have lived at peace with myself. To kill Barsut was a prerequisite for living, just as breathing fresh air is for others.”

As soon as he received the letter, he headed for Barsut’s place. Barsut lived in a rooming-house full of a fantastic array of people. The owner devoted herself to spiritualism, had a cross-eyed daughter and was implacable about the rent. Any lodger who was so much as twenty-four hours late in paying was sure to come back in the evening and find all his cases and belongings thrown out into the centre of the yard.

It was nightfall when Erdosain arrived. As he came into the room Barsut was in the midst of shaving. Barsut turned pale and paused with the razor on his cheek, then stared Erdosain up and down and exclaimed: “What on earth are you doing here?”

“Anyone else would have been offended,” Erdosain commented to me later. “But I smiled at him ‘in a friendly way’, because I did feel strangely friendly towards him at moments like that, and handed him the notification from the War Ministry. An inexplicable joy made me nervous: I can remember sitting on the edge of his bed for a minute, then leaping up and pacing up and down the room.”

“So she’s in Temperley. And you want us to go and fetch her?”

“Yes, that’s what I want. I want you to go and fetch her.”

Barsut muttered something Erdosain could not understand, then began to rub the muscles on his arms until there was a pink glow to his skin. He picked up the razor to trim the ends of his moustache, turned his head towards Erdosain and said:

“Y’know something? I never thought you’d have the guts to come and visit me.”

Erdosain withstood the striated green gaze — no doubt about it, the man had the face of a tiger — then folded his arms and argued back:

“It’s true, I thought the same, but as you can see, things change …”

“Are you scared to go alone?”

“No, but I’m interested in getting you involved in the affair …” Barsut clenched his teeth. His chin covered in lather, his brow furrowed, he weighed Erdosain up again and eventually said: “Look, I thought I was bad enough, but I reckon that you … you’re worse than I am. But anyway, it’s in God’s hands.”

“Why do you say that: ‘it’s in God’s hands’?”

Barsut stared into the shaving mirror, arms akimbo. The words he then spoke came as no surprise to Erdosain, who listened to them without a flicker of reaction on his face: “Who’s to say that this notification isn’t a fake and you’re not laying a trap to kill me?”

“How strange a man’s soul can be!” Erdosain commented later. “I heard those words, and not a single muscle of my face moved. How had Gregorio guessed at the truth? I’ve no idea. Or did he simply have the same perverse imagination as me?”

Erdosain lit a cigarette and replied no more than: “Do as you like.”

But Barsut, who seemed in a mood to talk, went on: “Why not though? Answer me that: why not? What’s so strange about you wanting to kill me? It’s only logical. I wanted to steal your wife, I informed on you, I beat you up: good God, you’d have to be a saint not to want to kill me.”

“A saint! no, my friend, that I’m not. But I promise you I’m not going to kill you tomorrow. Some day yes, but not tomorrow.”

Barsut burst out laughing.

“You’re really something, Remo, d’you know that? Some day you’ll kill me. How weird can you get? D’you know what really fascinates me? Imagining the look on your face as you do it. Tell me, will you look serious, or will you be laughing?”

The tone of his questions was grave, but not hostile.

“I’ll probably be serious. I don’t know. Probably. Killing someone is no easy matter, after all.”

“And you’re not scared of prison?”

“No, because if I killed you I’d have taken my precautions, and I’d get rid of your body with sulphuric acid.”

“You’re a monster … oh, by the way, my memory is hopeless: did you pay the Sugar Company back?”

“Yes.”

“Who gave you the money?”

“A thug.”

“You don’t have many friends, but they’re loyal all right … so, what time are you coming for me tomorrow?”

“The Captain goes on duty at eight … so after that …”

“Look, I’m still not convinced you’re telling the truth, but if Elsa is there, I’ll give her such a hiding I warn you it’ll take her a good few years to get over it.”

When Erdosain left he headed straight for a telegraph office and sent a cable to the Astrologer.

THE WORK OF ANGUISH

That night Erdosain could not sleep. He was exhausted. Nor could he concentrate on anything. He tried to explain his state of mind to me in the following terms:²

“It’s as if the soul were floating half a metre above the body. You feel as if all your muscles have crumbled away, an unending sense of anguish. You close your eyes and it’s as if your body were dissolving into nothingness, then all of a sudden you recall a tiny forgotten detail from somewhere out of the thousands of days you’ve lived. Don’t ever commit a crime — it’s the sadness this memory creates rather than the horror that’s so terrible. You feel you’re cutting your links with society one by one, that you’re plunging into a shadowy world of savagery, that you’ve lost all sense of direction; they say — I said it myself to the Astrologer that it’s due to not being a hardened criminal — but that’s not true. In fact, you want to live like everyone else does, to be decent like everyone else, to have a home, a wife, to look out of your window at the passers-by, and yet there is not a single cell of your body left that isn’t marked with the fatal message contained in those words “I have to kill him”. You can argue I’m simply trying to explain away my hatred. How could I not try to do so? I feel as if I’m living a dream. I even realise I’m talking so much because I need to convince myself I am not dead, not because of what’s happened but because of the state something like this leaves you in. Like skin after a bad burn. It eventually gets better, but have you noticed how it looks? All wrinkled, dry, hard, shiny. That’s how one’s soul becomes. It shines so brightly it can blind you. And its wrinkles horrify you. You know you have a monster inside that can break loose at any moment, and you don’t know which way it will leap.

“A monster! I’ve often thought it. A lazy, supple, enigmatic monster capable of surprising even yourself with its violent impulses, with the devilish twists it uncovers in the hidden recesses of life, the way it can discover evil from any angle. How often I’ve paused in front of myself, of the mystery that is me, and envied the life of the most humble of men! Ah! Don’t ever commit a crime. Look at how I am. I’m confessing all this to you because yes, I think you may understand …

“And that night? … By the time I reached home it was late. I threw myself down on my bed fully dressed. My heart was beating frantically like a gambler’s must do. In fact, I was not worried about what might happen after the crime, but even as I was on the point of committing it, I was curious to know how I would behave, what Barsut might do, how the Astrologer intended to kidnap him. Whereas novels I had read presented crime as fascinating, to me it seemed no more than a mechanical act — committing a crime is easy; it merely seems so complicated to us because we aren’t used to it, that’s all.

“The truth is I remember just lying there staring at the far corner of the darkened room. Disparate tatters of my former existence floated by as if carried on the wind. I’ve never been able to understand the mysterious way that memory works — how during the most momentous occasions of our lives, an insignificant detail or an image that present concerns have blotted out from our memory, suddenly becomes immensely important. We were unaware that these inner photos even existed, until the thick veil is torn from them. So it was that throughout that night, instead of thinking about Barsut I simply lay there, in that desolate room, like a man waiting expectantly for something to happen, that extraordinary something I’ve so often told you about, which I imagined would give a completely new twist to my life, cancel out my past, show me I was an entirely different man from the one I seemed to be.

“In fact, I wasn’t worried so much about the crime as about something else: what would I be like after it? Would I feel remorse? Would I go mad, or would I end up turning myself in? Or would I simply carry on living the way I had before, suffering from that strange incapacity which robbed my actions of all coherence — what you now say is the symptom of my madness?

“The curious thing is that at times I felt great surges of joy welling up in me, or the need to feign a fit of madness that did not exist. I fought down the urge, and tried to figure out how exactly we were going to kidnap Barsut. I was sure he would put up a fight, but I knew the Astrologer was not someone to get into an affair like that unprepared. I also wondered how Barsut had guessed that the notification from the War Ministry was a fake, and couldn’t help admiring the presence of mind I had shown when he turned his soapy face to me and said, half seriously: ‘It’d be strange, wouldn’t it, if the letter were a forgery?’

“He was a swine all right, but I wasn’t far behind him; perhaps the only difference between us was that he did not have the same curiosity about the low passions which drove him on. In any case, by then I was past caring. It might be me who killed him, or the Astrologer — the fact was I had plunged my life into some monstrous hole where the demons played with my senses like dice in a tumbler.

“Noises reached me from afar; weariness seeped into my bones; at times it seemed to me my flesh was soaking up silence and any chance of rest like a sponge. I kept getting hideous ideas about Elsa; a silent rancour clamped my mouth shut; I was full of pity for my own poor life.

“Yet the only way I could imagine redeeming myself in my own eyes was by killing Barsut, and all at once I would picture myself standing beside him. He was tied up with thick ropes and lay sprawled on a heap of sacks: all I could make out clearly was one green eye in profile, and his pale nose. I bent quietly over his body pointing a revolver: I gently pushed his hair back and told him in a soft voice: ‘You’re going to die, you bastard.’

“The body trembled, and I raised the revolver and held it to his temple, repeating in the same soft voice: ‘You’re going to die, you bastard.’

“His arms writhed under the thick cords; his body was a seething mass of terrified muscle and bone.

“‘Do you remember, you bastard, d’you remember the potatoes, the salad you spilt all over the table? Do I still have the look of an idiot that so annoyed you then?’

“But all of a sudden I became ashamed of taunting him like that, so I said to him — or rather, no, I said nothing to him, but took a sack and pulled it over his head. Underneath the coarse burlap, the head started thrashing about furiously. I tried to force it to the floor to make sure of my aim and to steady the gun barrel, but the sacking slid off his hair and I did not have the strength to control this raging beast snorting desperately in its fight against death. Then when that dream faded, I saw myself sailing through the Malaysian archipelago, or on a ship in the Indian Ocean. I had changed my name, I growled out English: my sadness might have been the same, but now I had powerful arms, and a calm gaze; perhaps in Borneo or in Calcutta, or on the far shores of the Red Sea, or beyond the forests of Siberia, in Korea or Manchuria, I could rebuild my life.”

Gone were the dreams of the inventor and the man who discovered electric rays so powerful they could melt steel blocks as if they were blobs of wax, or who presided over the glass-topped tables of the League of Nations.

At other moments, Erdosain was in the grip of terror: he felt he was in shackles — loathsome civilisation had put him in a straitjacket he had no chance of escaping from. He could picture himself in chains, wearing a striped uniform, trudging slowly in a column of prisoners through mounds of snow towards the forests of Ushuaia. The sky above was as white as a sheet of tin.

This vision drove him wild: consumed by a blind rage, he got up and paced from one end of the room to the other, wanting to beat his fists against the walls, or drill holes into them with his bones. He came to a halt in the door jamb, and crossed his arms tightly as the choking sorrow surged up in him once more. Whatever he did was futile: there was one single, irrefutable reality in his life. Him and the others. There was an unbridgeable distance between him and the others, due to their lack of understanding or to his own madness. Either way, he was doomed. And fragments of his past continued to rise before his eyes: the truth was he wanted above all to escape from himself, to quit once and for all the life that encompassed his body and at the same time poisoned it.

Oh! To be able to enter a new world, with broad avenues stretching out in the forests, where the reek of the wild animals was sweet in comparison to the ghastly presence of man.

He paced round and round, trying to exhaust his body, to tire it out utterly, to crush it until it was so weary he would be unable to form even a single idea.

THE KIDNAPPING

At nine the next morning, Erdosain went to meet Barsut. They left the house without a word. Later on, Erdosain wondered about that strange journey when the other man went towards his fate without so much as a murmur.

Referring to that occasion, he commented:

“I went with Barsut like a condemned man being taken to his place of execution, drained of all strength; my only sensation was a persistent feeling of emptiness that invaded every pore of my body.

“Barsut himself sat there scowling; I could sense that as he rode along with his elbow on the rail he was gathering his rage, ready to unleash it on the invisible enemy instinct told him was concealed in the house at Temperley.”

Erdosain went on:

“From time to time it occurred to me how strange it would have been if the other passengers had known that those two men sitting hunched on the leather padding of their seats were a would-be assassin and his victim.

“And yet everything went on as before. The sun shone over the fields: we’d left the meat-packing plants behind, the tallow and soap factories, the glass and iron foundries, the stockyards with cattle sniffing at the posts, the avenues still to be properly surfaced, strewn with rubble and full of ruts. And then beyond Lantis we came on the awful spectacle of Remedios de Escalada, with its ghastly redbrick roundhouses and their blackened openings, where locomotives shunted to and fro under the arches, while in the distance, between the tracks, gangs of poor wretches were shovelling ballast or hauling railway sleepers.”

Further on still, in among a straggling vegetation of plane trees choked by soot and petrol fumes, stood a diagonal line of red cottages where the railway company employees lived, with their tiny gardens, shutters grimy from the smoke, paths of cinders and ashes.

Barsut was lost in his thoughts. Erdosain, to put it precisely, let himself be. If at that very moment he had seen a train hurtling towards them on the same track, he would not have so much as blinked, so little did he care whether he lived or died.

So the journey passed. When they drew into Temperley, Barsut shook himself as if waking with a start from a distressing dream. All he said was: “Which way now?”

Erdosain stretched out his arm, pointing vaguely in the direction they had to go. Barsut set off. They walked in silence down the streets leading to the Astrologer’s house. The soft blue of morning fell on the walls of the diagonal streets.

Shoots, bushes and trees of every shade of green created a jumbled architecture of vegetation, rounded off above their heads by swaying plumes, and crisscrossed by a maze of red woodstems. The gentle breeze seemed to make these fantastic chance constructions of botany float in a golden aura that shone as clear as a concave mirror, and held beneath its dome all the heady perfume of the earth.

“Beautiful morning,” Barsut said.

That was all either of them said until they were outside the property. “This is it,” said Erdosain. Barsut leapt back and, with a piercing look, asked him: “And how do you know this is it, if there’s no number?”

Commenting on this incident later, Erdosain remarked: “It just shows there must be an instinct for crime, one which allows you to lie on the spot without fear of contradicting yourself, similar to the instinct for self-preservation which, just when everything seems lost, enables you to discover means of escape you had never dreamt of.”

Erdosain looked up and said so calmly that he was only later astounded at it: “Because I came snooping round here yesterday. I wanted to see if I could spot Elsa.”

Barsut eyed him suspiciously.

He could have sworn Erdosain was lying,³ but his pride would not allow him to back out, so while Erdosain called, he clapped his hands loudly.

In shirtsleeves, and wearing a straw hat whose broad brim covered half his face, the Man Who Saw the Midwife came out to the red-painted wire gate.

“Is the lady of the house in?” Barsut asked.

Making no reply, Bromberg slid back the bolt and opened the gate: then he set off down a winding path that led to the house through a eucalyptus grove. The two men followed. All at once a voice called out:

“Where are you going?”

Barsut looked round. As he did so, Bromberg turned on his heel, and his arm flashed out as if a spring in it had suddenly snapped.

Barsut’s mouth dropped open in a desperate search for air as he doubled up in pain. He tried to clasp his stomach with his hands, but Bromberg’s arm arched forward again, and a right cross to the jaw rattled Barsut’s teeth.

He fell to the ground and lay slumped so still he might have been dead, with his legs drawn up under him and his lips slightly parted.

The Astrologer appeared, while a serious, almost sad-looking Bromberg leant over the fallen man.

The Astrologer grabbed Barsut’s arms, his hands hooking like claws under the armpits, and the two of them dragged him off to the abandoned coachhouse. As Erdosain rolled back the ochre-painted door, a smell of dry hay and a swarm of insects poured from the black depths within. They put the unconscious Barsut in a horsebox: a heavy chain was secured to one of the posts by a padlock.

The Astrologer wrapped one end of the chain around Barsut’s ankle, knotted the links several times, and fastened it with the padlock, which creaked as he opened it. Straightening up from their prisoner, Erdosain looked at the Astrologer and said:

“Too bad — he hasn’t got his cheque book on him.”

It was ten in the morning. The Astrologer glanced at his watch and said: “I’ve got time to catch the express that gets to Rosario at six. Will you come with me to Retiro?”

“You’re going to Rosario?”

“Yes, I’ve got to send the telegram to his landlady, remember? Do you have her address?”

“Yes, I’ve got all the details.”

“It’s the best way to get hold of Barsut’s stuff without arousing suspicion. Does he keep everything at the rooming-house?”

“Yes, the trunk and two cases.”

“Fine. Now let’s cut the conversation and get down to business. By six this evening I’ll be in Rosario, I’ll send the cable to the landlady, and you call round there tomorrow morning around ten. Play the innocent and ask whether Barsut has reached Rosario yet, because you haven’t heard from him and you know he’s been offered an important job, and so on. How does that sound?”

“Fine.”

At twelve o’clock, the Astrologer was boarding the train.

Footnotes

¹ Referring to those days, Erdosain told me: “I thought I’d been given a soul to enjoy the beauties of this world: moonlight shimmering behind the orange-hued crest of a nighttime cloud, a drop of dew quivering on the tip of a rose. When I was a child, I even believed life held something sublime and beautiful just for me. But as I came to discover other people’s lives, I found everyone of them was bored, as if they lived in a land where the rain never ceased, and left beams of water deep in their eyes which distorted their vision of the world. Then I understood that souls moved around on this earth like fish trapped in an aquarium. Life, real and wonderful, was beyond the weed-green glass walls: there, everything would be different, full of energy and variety, and the new beings of this more perfect creation would soar through a balmy atmosphere.” And he would add: “It’s hopeless, I have to escape from this world.”

² One day I hope to write the account of how Erdosain spent those ten days. It is impossible for me to do so now, because it would require another book as long as this present one. Bear in mind that this study is confined to only three days of the protagonists’ actions, and that despite the space I have given myself, I can do no more than hint at their subjective states. The action will continue in another volume, to be entitled The Flamethrowers. Erdosain supplied me with copious information for that second part, which will contain such extraordinary episodes as: “The Blind Prostitute”, “Elsa’s Adventures”, “The Man Who Walked with Jesus”, and “The Poison Gas Factory”.

³ In a conversation Barsut had with the Astrologer, he said that the night before the abduction he had thought it might be an ambush to kill him, but that at the last moment a sense of pride kept him from backing out.