The Seven Madmen Read Free Page A

simple schoolgirl dress—a smiling creature, simultaneously timid and daring.
    And Erdosain thought:
    "We will never have sex. To make our love last forever, we will deny our desires, and I will never kiss her mouth, only her hand."
    He pictured this happiness which would purify his life, if such an impossible dream could happen. But it would be easier to make the earth stand still than turn his crazy dream into reality.
    Then he would mutter, discomfited by a vague sense of ill-being:
    "So then, I'll be a pimp." And all at once a terror greater than any other undid the fabric of his thoughts. He felt his soul being bled dry out of every furrow, like a creature pressed in a vise. With his powers of reason paralyzed, he ran off in search of a brothel. Then he knew the full terror of the thief, luminous terror like a sunny day smashing against a convex salt flat.
    He abandoned himself to the impulses that twist a man who finds himself facing jail for the first time, blind forces that impel some wretch to stake his life on a card or a woman. Perhaps seeking in that card or woman a sour, harsh consolation, perhaps seeking in the vilest, lowest depths a certain affirmation of purity that might once and forever save him.
    And in the warmth of the siesta hour, he wandered the sidewalks, whose tiles baked in the yellow sun, seeking the filthiest of whorehouses.
    He liked best the one where he saw orange peels and trickles of ash in the doorway and the windows were lined with red or green flannel and armored with chicken wire.
    He would enter, plunged deep into darkest despair. In the courtyard, under the checkered blue sky, there was usually a bench painted ocher, onto which he would wilt, exhausted, enduring the icy stare of the madam while he waited for one of her girls to show up, inevitably either horrendously thin or horrendously fat.
    And the prostitute yelled from the half-open bedroom door, where a man could be heard getting dressed again:
    "Ready, love?" and Erdosain went into the other bedroom, his ears buzzing and smoke churning in front of his eyes.
    Later he lay back on the bed, varnished a liver-like color, on top of the shoe-grimed covers which protected the mattress.
    Suddenly he felt like crying, like asking that horrible pig of a woman what love was, the angelic love that celestial choruses sang at the foot of the throne of the living God, but anguish formed a plug in his larynx and his stomach was a clenched fist of disgust.
    And as the prostitute let his hand wander over her clothes, Erdosain wondered:
    "What have I done with my life?" A ray of sun bounced off the cobweb-covered transom, and the prostitute, with one cheek against the pillow and one leg resting on his, slowly moved his hand for him while he thought sadly: "What have I made of my life?" Suddenly remorse darkened his soul, he thought of his wife who, in her poverty, had to do laundry although she was sick, and then, filled with self-loathing, he leaped out of bed, paid the girl, and without having taken her, ran off to a new hell to spend the money that was not rightfully his, to descend still farther into his ever-howling madness.
    A Strange Man
    At ten that morning Erdosain arrived at the corner of Peru and Avenida de Mayo. He knew he was doomed to jail, for Barsut would never give him the money. All at once he got a surprise.
    At a café table was the pharmacist Ergueta.
    With his hat down to his ears and his hands touching thumbs across his vast expanse of belly, he sat nodding with a puffed-up, sour expression on his yellow face.
    His glassy, protruding, toad eyes, his great hook nose, his flaccid cheeks, and pendulous lower lip all combined to make him look like a cretin.
    His great hulking body inhabited a cinnamon-brown suit, and from time to time he would bend over and rest his teeth on the pommel of his cane.
    That disgusting habit and his churlish, bored expression made him resemble a white slaver. He suddenly caught sight of Erdosain