The Seven Madmen (9 page)

"Yes, I swear to you I'm happy."

"All right, I'm leaving."

"You're leaving?"

"Yes
...
"

A swift spasm of pain contorted his features.

"All right then, go."

"It won't be long, my husband."

"What did you say?"

"Remo, I'm telling you: wait for me. Even if I have all the millions in the world, I'll come back home."

"All right
...
good-bye then
...
only kiss me."

"No, when I get back
...
good-bye, my husband." Suddenly Erdosain, in the grips of a nameless spasm, grabbed her hands brutally hard by the wrists. "Tell me: did you go to bed with him?"

"Let me go, Remo
...
I didn't think you—"

"Confess it: did you or did you not sleep together?"

"No."

In the doorway stood the Captain. A vast weariness made the nerves of his fingers go slack. Erdosain felt himself falling and saw nothing more.

Layers of Darkness

He never knew how he got himself over to his bed.

Time ceased to exist for Erdosain. He closed his eyes in response to his aching body's need for sleep. If he had had the strength, he would have thrown himself down a well. Desperation gathered in great bubbles that blocked his throat, making it hard to breathe, and his eyes grew sensitive to light like a wound to salt. At moments, he gritted his teeth to stifle his crunching nerves, bristly stiff inside his flesh, which was washing away loosely into the waves of darkness that crashed down upon his brain.

He felt himself falling into a bottomless pit and clenched his eyes tighter shut. He did not stop falling, who knows how many leagues his physical self was elongated, endlessly stretched out as his awareness went plunging downward in a great vertical swath of desperation! Layers of darkness, denser and ever denser, fell from his eyelids.

The grief knotted inside him wracked up and down, but it was no good. Nowhere in his soul could it find a crack and slip out. Erdosain bore within him all the grief of the entire world, the pain of the world's negation. Searching the earth over, where could one find a man with his skin more withered and furrowed with bitterness? He no longer felt like a man; he was only a barely covered sore that writhed and screamed with each pulsing of his veins. And yet he was alive. He lived as his body stretched away and as it came swinging back. He was no longer an organism with its suffering, but something more inhuman—perhaps that—a monster furled up tight in the uterine blackness of that room. Each layer of dark that came from his lids was yet more placental tissue forming a wall between him and the universe of men. The walls rose tall in climbing rows of brick, and fresh torrents of darkness gushed into the hole where he lay curled and throbbing like a snail on the ocean floor. He was a stranger to himself
...
he doubted he was Augusto Remo Erdosain. He squeezed his forehead with his fingertips and the flesh of his hand and the flesh of his forehead did not recognize each other, as if his body were of two separate substances. How much of him was already dead? All he could feel was something unconnected to what had happened to him, a soul less than a sword's blade long, slithering eellike through his muddy-watered life. Even his self-awareness shrank to a square centimeter of mind. Yes, his body was only kept plugged in by that square centimeter of mind. Everything else floated off into darkness. Yes, he was a square centimeter of man, a square centimeter of existence, receptive to pain, maintaining the incoherent life of a phantom. Everything else in him was dead, mingling in the placental dark that boxed his atrocious reality in.

He saw ever more clearly that he was sunk in a concrete hole. It was like nothing on earth! An unseen sun lit the walls forever, a turbulent orange. A lone bird's wing slashed across the sky in the rectangle formed by the walls, but he was marooned forever in those noiseless depths, lit by a turbulent orange sun.

Then the whole of his life lay in that meager square centimeter of mind. He could even "see" his heartbeat, and had no defense against that horror that pursued him to the depths of the abyss, sometimes black and sometimes orange. If he relaxed in the least, reality would break out and howl in his ears. Erdosain did not want to, he wanted to look—he could not help but look—and there was his wife down inside a blue-carpeted room. And there was the Captain in one corner. Nobody had to tell him they were in a little bedroom, six-sided and almost completely taken up by a wide, low bed. He did not want to look at Elsa
...
no
...
no
...
he wanted to, but under pain of death he could not have torn his eyes away from that man undressing in front of her—in front of his lawfully wedded wife who was no longer with him—who was with another man. His fear was overcome by a need for more terror, for more suffering, and suddenly, covering her eyes with her fingers, she ran to the naked man, firm and taut, pressed against him unintimidated by the rosy virility erect against the blue background.

Erdosain was flattened by his utter and overpowering horror. If they had run him through a sheet-metal press, his life could not have been mashed thinner. Wasn't that how toads were, squashed into cartwheel ruts in the road, pressed into a mushcake of living tissue? He wanted not to look, he wanted not to so much, for he could see clearly how Elsa leaned onto the man's square, hairy chest and he took her chin in his hand to pull her mouth toward his.

And suddenly Elsa exclaimed, "I, too, my darling
...
I, too." Her face was red with desperation, her clothes whipped about the triangle of her milk-white thighs, and gazing in ecstasy on the man's rigid muscle, she showed her nestled curly hair, her erect breasts—ah! why was he watching?

Elsa
...
Elsa, his lawfully wedded wife, could not span in her little hand the massive virility she caressed. The man, desire howling in his ears, threw one arm over his eyes, but she leaned over to stab words like burning iron into his ears: "You are a finer creature than my husband! My God, what a splendid creature you are!"

Had they screwed him down by his head and neck, boring into his deep-pierced soul, implanting that vision of horror, he could not have suffered more. He was in such pain that if it had suddenly stopped, he would have fragmented into shrapnel. How can the soul hold up under such pain? Yet, he wanted to suffer even more. To be quartered like a steer on the butcher's block
...
and if they threw his butchered quarters into the garbage, he would go right on suffering. There was not a square centimeter of his body free of this high-pressure torment.

Every nerve snapped under that tortuous wrenching tension, and a sudden feeling of repose flooded his members.

He no longer wanted anything. His life ran silently downhill, like a reservoir escaping its ruined dam, and he fell into a lucid, closed-eyed trance state, which did more to alleviate his pain than anesthesia.

He felt his heart beat strongly. With effort, he got his head off the hot pillow and simply lay there with no other sensation of life than the cool freshness on his neck and the opening and closing of heart valves like a vast eye opening its sleep-heavy lids to peer into nothing but darkness. Nothing but darkness?

Elsa was so far from his mind that, in his trance state, he felt they had never even met. He doubted her physical existence. Before, he could see her, but now he could barely manage to recognize her. The truth was that she was no longer herself and he was no longer himself. Now his life ran silently downhill, time flowed backward and, a child, he watched a green tree overshadowing a river forever awakening amid its red-veined rocks. He was a flood of living tissue pouring into darkness. How long till he finally bled dry! And all he felt was the opening and closing of heart valves like a vast eye that opened its sleep-heavy lids to peer into darkness. A street lamp down the block sent a silvery offshoot through a crack to splash against the mosquito screen. His mind painfully cleared.

He was Erdosain. Now he knew who he was. He arched his back with great effort. He spotted a yellow bar of light under the dining-room door. He had forgotten to turn out the light. He should—oh, no! Elsa had left—he owed six hundred pesos and seven cents to the Sugar Company—but no, wait, he doesn't owe anything now, if there's that check
...

Reality, reality!

The slanting parallelogram of light from the street lamp turned the screen to silver and reminded him he was just the same as before, as yesterday, as ten years ago.

He wanted not to see that bar of light, just as when he was little he had not wanted to see the blue light coming in the window, though he knew it was there, though he knew no human force could make that light go away. Yes, just like when his father would tell him he would beat him tomorrow. It wasn't the same now. The light was blue then and this one now was silver, but just as harsh and full of dire truth as the old light. Sweat came to his temples and hairline. Elsa had left, and would she never return to him? What was Barsut going to say?

A Slap in the Face

Suddenly someone was at the door. Erdosain knew who it was and jumped up from the bed. Barsut, as usual, tried to knock without making much noise.

Erdosain shouted in a hoarse voice:

"Come in; why don't you come in already?"

Barsut came in with a backward-leaning stride.

"I'm coming," Remo shouted to him as the visitor came into the dining room.

And when he came in, Barsut had already taken a seat, cross legged, with his back to the door, as usual, and his eyes on the southwest corner of the room.

"What are you up to?"

"How's it going?"

He put one elbow on the table, then leaned his head on that arm and the light made the white fleshiness of his hand copper-red. Under eyebrows slashing upward to his temples, his green eyes, hard and glassy, seemed to harbor a question.

And Erdosain saw that face as if amidst a swarm of lights teeming in the air: his sloped forehead receding to pointy ears, his bony beak like a bird of prey, his chin seemingly flattened to withstand violent abuse, and the oversize necktie that flooded forth from his starchy collar.

In a flat tone, he asked:

"Where's Elsa?"

Erdosain managed to get his wits together.

"She's left."

"Ah
...
"

They fell silent and Erdosain sat contemplating the angle of the gray suit sleeve against the white edge of the table, and the cheek lit with copper-red lamplight to the bony nasal ridge, while the far side of the face remained unilluminated from the hairline to the dimple in the chin, with a special pocket of shadow forming in the bag under the eye. Barsut slowly moved one of his crossed legs.

"Oh!" Erdosain heard, and he responded, "What?"

Erdosain had really only heard that "oh," even though it was uttered a few seconds before.

"Elsa left
...
"

Barsut lifted his head, his eyebrows went up to let more light into his eyes, and with his lips slightly open, he whispered:

"She's gone?"

Erdosain scowled, eyeing the visitor's shoes in a sidelong glance and secretly waiting behind half-closed lids for Barsut's shocked reaction, he let the bomb fall:

"Yes
...
she
...
went
...
off
...
with
...
another man
...
."

And winking his left eye like Ergueta, the pharmacist, he bent his head over. Under the bronze ridge of his eyebrows, his eyes were wary.

Erdosain went on:

"See? There's the gun. I could have killed them, only I didn't. Man is one weird animal, huh?"

"You stood there while he took your wife?"

Erdosain felt the old hatred inside him, heightened by his fresh humiliation, turned into a source of cruel glee and with his voice trembling in his throat, his mouth dry with rancor, he burst out:

"What's it to you?"

A savage slap in the face knocked him off the chair. Later he remembered Barsut's arm swinging toward him and swinging away, kneading his flesh like dough. He covered his face with both hands, he tried to escape that great mass coming at him like some unleashed force of nature. His head thunked against the wall and he fell.

When he came to, Barsut was kneeling beside him. He noticed his collar was undone and water was dribbling down his face. A ticklish pain ran upward through his nasal bridge and he thought he might sneeze at any moment. His gums were bleeding a little and he could feel the exact shape of his teeth pressing against his swollen lips.

Erdosain managed to scrape himself up off the floor and into a chair; Barsut was so pale it looked like two flames were coming out of his eyes. From his cheeks to his ears, taut muscles were knotted into two quivering arches. Erdosain felt he was reeling through some endless dream scene, but he understood it when the visitor took hold of his arm, saying:

"Look, just spit in my face, if you want, only let me say one thing. I have to tell you the whole story. Sit down
...
There, that's good." Erdosain had gotten up without thinking. "Listen, do me a favor. You see how things are, I could clobber you to death
...
I just let my hand get the better of me—I swear—if you want, I'll get on my knees and beg your pardon. If you want, I'll do it willingly. Look
...
ah
...
ah
...
if people only knew."

Erdosain spat blood. A band of heat ran across his forehead and inside his skull, emerging again at the nape of his neck. He was bent over so far his chin was resting on the table edge. Barsut, seeing what kind of shape he was in, asked him:

"Want to wash your face? It'll do you good. Wait a minute, don't you go." And he ran out to the kitchen and came back with a basin of water. "Here, wash up. Do you lots of good. Want me to get you cleaned up here? Look, I'm sorry, I got carried away. But why did you wink like you were making fun of me? Come on, get cleaned up, do it for me."