The Seven Madmen Read online

  THE

  SEVEN MADMEN

  A NOVEL BY Roberto Arlt

  TRANSLATED BY Naomi Lindstrom

  DAVID R. GODINE • PUBLISHER

  BOSTON

  THE SEVEN MADMEN

  First English language edition published in 1984 by David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. 306 Dartmouth Street

  Boston, Massachusetts 02116

  Copyright © 1958 by Editorial Losada Translation copyright © 1984 by Naomi Lindstrom

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Arlt, Roberto, 1900-1942. The seven madmen.

  Translation of: Los siete locos. I. Title.

  ISBN 0-87923-492-x

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  THE SEVEN MADMEN

  1

  The Surprise

  States of Consciousness

  Terror in the Street

  A Strange Man

  Hatred

  Inventor's Dreams

  The Astrologer

  The Opinions of the Melancholy Ruffian

  The Humiliated Man

  Layers of Darkness

  A Slap in the Face

  "To Be" by Committing a Crime

  The Proposal

  Up the Tree

  2

  Incoherencies

  Naïveté and Idiocy

  The Black House

  The Official Bulletin

  The Work of Anguish

  The Kidnapping

  3

  The Whip

  The Astrologer's Speech

  The Farce

  The Gold Seeker

  The Lame Whore

  Inside the Cavern

  The Espilas

  Two Souls

  Hipólita's Inner Life

  A Crime

  A Subconscious Sensation

  The Revelation

  The Suicide

  The Wink

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  INTRODUCTION

  Recent critical reappraisal has brought Roberto Arlt and The Seven Madmen out of literary obscurity and has accorded both author and novel an important place in the history of Latin-American fiction. Although when first published in 1929, Arlt seemed no more than an unpolished, realistic writer, in the sixties and seventies he attracted the notice of critics searching for the roots of the wildly inventive fiction coming out of contemporary Latin America. Arlt is now recognized as a long-lost ancestor of the so-called "boom" of imaginative fiction which the American reader associates with such names as Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

  Arlt was a newspaperman with a style that was often rough, blunt, and defiantly agrammatical. His unpolished mode of expression and the swarm of low-life characters with whom he populated his novel gave his fiction a naturalistic tone. Many of Arlt's contemporaries saw no more in The Seven Madmen than a harsh, rough-hewn "proletarian" novel, full of scabrous scenes, crude words, sleazy characters, and unforgivable grammar. Arlt caricatures this type of reader aptly when he imagines how a critic will greet his work after The Seven Madmen: "Mr. Roberto Arlt keeps on in the same old rut: realism in the worst possible taste." Arlt himself did much to enhance his image as a "proletarian" author. Disheveled, impulsive, and denunciatory, he looked and acted the part of the angry young man. In his column, he praised a number of socialist realist writers, both Soviet and Argentine. He scorned spelling and proper grammar as elitist, fetishistic concerns, and gave no thought to standardizing his erratic Spanish.

  Thoughtful readers, however, found Arlt singularly imaginative, willing to violate the tenets of realism in favor of bold invention. As Adolfo Prieto puts it, "along with his undeniable realistic intentions, Arlt nurtured a predilection for creating forms in which fantasy and real-life experience played a hallucinatory counterpoint." His fusion of the fancifully distorted and the realistically faithful set Arlt's work apart from that of the social realists of his time. But many who were unsure how to evaluate Arlt's blend of the real and the unreal and his rough, deviant mode of expression simply concluded "that Arlt didn't know how to write." Even readers who appreciated Arlt's originality were hard-pressed to understand it. Thus Arlt, who died in 1942, remained a minor, enigmatic, almost freakish figure in Argentine literary history.

  Then, in the wake of the explosion of Latin-American literature in the fifties and sixties, a new generation of readers rediscovered Arlt and his eccentric fictional experiments. These new Arlt readers had grown up on Borges, Cortázar, Garcia Marquez, and other practitioners of "magical realism," a mythic representation of serious human realities. To such readers, the coexistence of the fantastic and the serious was not a shock. What was surprising was to find such a mélange in a novel written so long before the official boom, which brought worldwide fame to the authors of Latin America, exploded. Thus, people immediately began pointing to Arlt as a misunderstood innovator whose work was inspirational to the latter-day magical realists.

  In recent years, a number of creative writers and literary critics have proclaimed Arlt's seminal influence. Julio Cortázar cited Arlt as one of the two great influences on his literary development, along with Borges. Jorge Lafforgue, the influential critic, wrote: "to avoid any possible misunderstanding let me say here and now: Roberto Arlt and Juan Carlos Onetti represent the beginnings of current Argentine-Uruguayan fiction and I could count on the fingers of one hand figures comparable to them in this part of the world." Juan Carlos Onetti, known in this country for The Shipyard (1958) and A Brief Life (1976), prefaced the Italian translation of The Seven Madmen with this tribute: "if any inhabitant of our humble shores managed to achieve literary genius, his name was Roberto Arlt."

  Ordinary readers, too, had begun to appreciate Arlt. From 1968 on, Latin-American publishing houses began to reprint not only The Seven Madmen but also Arlt's other novels, short stories, newspaper writings, and the dramatic works which occupied his last years. Odd musings and sketches of city life which had only appeared in journalistic form were dug out and published in book form—a sure sign of a writer's canonization. The times had finally caught up with Arlt's dizzying, disconcerting style.

  Readers of contemporary Latin-American authors will immediately recognize the realm of uncertainty and ambiguity that is Arlt's fictional world. The Seven Madmen is the story of a revolutionary conspiracy, and it is the story of human beings in the greatest anguish. Yet neither the reader nor the hero, Remo Erdosain, knows the exact nature of either the conspiracy or the suffering. The conspiracy appears protean: its cryptic leader, the Astrologer, is capable of waxing enthusiastic over Mussolini and the Ku Klux Klan one minute and advancing Bolshevik or anarchist ideas the next. When questioned too closely about the goals and feasibility of his plot, the Astrologer retreats behind a smokescreen of enigmatic language.

  It is equally hard to grasp what exactly ails Arlt's characters. They are tremendously unhappy, but no diagnosis or possible remedy for their sorrow is ever specified. Existential anguish seems at fault when Erdosain broods on his relations with God, his fellows, and destiny, or speaks of crime as a confirmation of selfhood, but shortly afterward, he can be found railing at the capitalist system, bourgeois values, and his alienation as a clerk on a corporate treadmill. Erdosain also exhibits severe psychological disturbances, and the reader is left unsure whether he has entered the realm of existentialism, political protest, or abnormal psychology.

  The reader seeking some central reality to hang on to will get no help from the narrator of The Seven Madmen. To the increasingly unreal tangle of events which form the plot, he adds a few gnarls of his own. He enjoys adding footnotes to the text which contradict statements he himself has asserted as facts. He withholds the info
rmation which the reader needs to make sense of the plot, bombards him with pointless details about the characters' past lives, and claims to possess vast reserves of additional information which he may or may not disclose at a future time. The narrator never reveals his identity or credentials (one may even suspect him of being the Astrologer).

  The reader embarking on the treacherous first reading of The Seven Madmen will do well to remember what he has learned in reading the fiction of the more recent Latin-American authors. Arlt's readers must give up the expectation that, if they read carefully, they will find out what "really" happened among these madmen. They must not belabor separating what the characters fear, hope, or imagine from what the characters actually do. In The Seven Madmen, as in other recent Latin-American fiction, apparent chaos generates meaning and comments on real-world conditions. But the novel requires the cooperation of readers willing to examine man and society through a distorted lens.

  — Naomi Lindstrom

  THE SEVEN MADMEN

  1

  The Surprise

  The moment he opened the door to the manager's office, with its milk-glass panels, Erdosain tried to back out; he could see he was done for, but it was too late.

  They were waiting for him: the manager, a man with a pig's head, a true snout and implacability oozing out of his small fish gray pupils; Gualdi, the accountant, small, slight, bland as honey, with eyes that missed nothing; and the assistant manager, the son of the pigheaded man, thirty, good-looking, his hair gone completely white, an air of great cynicism about him, an edge to his voice and the harsh eyes of his progenitor. These three characters, the boss, bending over the payroll, the assistant manager, lolling in an easy chair with one leg dangling over the back, and Mr. Gualdi standing respectfully by the desk, did not return Erdosain's greeting. Only the assistant manager went so far as to raise his head:

  "We hear that you're an embezzler, that you've taken six hundred pesos from us."

  "And seven cents," added Mr. Gualdi, applying his blotter to the signature on the payroll that his boss had checked off. The latter then looked up from the paper with an abrupt movement of his bull neck. Hands clasped against the front of his jacket, the boss was evidently calculating behind his half-closed lids as he coolly examined Erdosain's gaunt, impassive face.

  "Why are you so badly dressed?"

  "Because I don't make much as a bill collector."

  "What about the money you stole from us?"

  "I didn't steal anything. That's a lie."

  "All right then, can you square up your accounts?"

  "By today at noon, if you want."

  That answer saved him for the moment. The three men exchanged glances, and finally, the assistant manager, with the tacit consent of his father, said:

  "No ... you have until three tomorrow. Bring the payroll with you and all the receipts ... You can go now."

  This turn of events came as such a surprise that Erdosain just kept standing there, forlorn, looking at the three of them. Yes, just looking at them. Mr. Gualdi, who despite his professed socialism had humiliated him so deeply; the assistant manager, who had stared with such rude persistence at his frayed tie; the manager, whose stiff, close-cropped, pig head was aimed right at him, with obscene cynicism seeping through the gray slit in his half-closed lids.

  And still, Erdosain did not leave ... He wanted to find words that would make them grasp the immense sorrow that weighed upon his life; and so he kept on standing there like that, sadly, the great black mass of the iron cash register looming up in front of him, feeling himself grow more hunched with each passing minute while he nervously fingered the brim of his black hat and his eyes took on the sad look of a hunted man. Then, suddenly, he asked:

  "So, can I go now?"

  "Yes ..."

  "No ... Give Suárez the receipts and be here tomorrow at three sharp and have the whole amount with you then."

  "Yes ... the whole amount..." and, turning, he left without saying good-bye.

  He walked down Chile Street to the Paseo Colon. He felt some invisible force fencing him in. The setting sun lit up the most revolting inner recesses of the sloping street. Conflicting thoughts seethed inside him, such a crazy mix that they would have taken hours to sort out.

  Later he realized that he had never even thought to ask who had blown the whistle on him.

  States of Consciousness

  He knew he was a thief. But the name they gave him didn't much affect him. Perhaps the word thief didn't strike a chord with his inner state. What he did feel was a round silence that bored through his skull like a steel cylinder, anesthetizing him to anything unrelated to his unhappiness.

  This circle of silence and darkness cut into the flow of his ideas, so Erdosain could not associate, with his deteriorating reason, his home, now known as a house, with some institution called a jail.

  He thought telegraphically, skipping prepositions, which is enervating. He had known empty hours when he might have committed any crime without feeling the least responsibility. Of course a judge would never understand that sort of thing. But now he was drained empty, he was the shell of a man kept in motion by force of habit.

  If he stayed on at the Sugar Company, it would not be to keep stealing more money but because he was waiting for something extraordinary to happen—immensely extraordinary—that would give his life an unexpected charge and save him from the catastrophe looming in his future.

  Erdosain had a name for the atmosphere compounded of dreaming and restlessness that kept him wandering in circles like a sleepwalker through the days of his life: "the anguish zone."

  Erdosain pictured this zone as lying two meters above the city streets, and he could see it quite graphically, shaped like those great salt flats or deserts that are shown on maps as ovals full of dots, thick as herring roe.

  This anguish zone came out of all the suffering of mankind. And like a cloud of poison gas it moved heavily from one place to another, penetrating solid walls and slicing through buildings without losing its flat, horizontal form; two-dimensional anguish that slashed through throats like a guillotine, leaving an aftertaste of bitter sobbing.

  That was the explanation Erdosain came up with when he felt the first waves of nauseous grief.

  "What am I doing with my life?" he would then ask himself, perhaps hoping to clarify with this question the source of an anxiety that made him long for a life where each tomorrow would not simply be more of today, but something novel and always unexpected, like the sudden turns of plot in an American movie, where yesterday's beggar is today's underground chieftain and the gold-digging secretary is a multimillionairess incognito.

  His thirst for marvels, which could never possibly be slaked—since he was a frustrated inventor and a crook about to land in jail—and the rationalizations and doubts it always entailed left him churning with acidity and gritting his teeth as if he had bit into a lemon.

  At such times, he could fall back on a stock of absurd notions. He imagined that the wealthy, tired of hearing the snivelings of the oppressed, built great horse-drawn cages. Hangmen, picked for their inhuman strength, pursued the wretches with choke collars, until he envisaged a whole scene: a mother, tall and disheveled, ran behind the cage where, from behind bars, her crosseyed child cried out to her, until a "dogcatcher," tired of hearing her screams, knocked her out by clobbering her over the head with the butt end of his whip.

  After this nightmare vision dissolved, Erdosain wondered, in self-revulsion:

  "What kind of soul do I have?" And as his imagination was still racing from the last nightmare scene, he went on to another. "I must have been born to be a lackey. One of those vile perfumed lackeys rich prostitutes keep around to do up their bras, while the lover lounges on the sofa with a cigar."

  And his thoughts again slithered down to the kitchen in the basement of a luxurious mansion. Maids flitted around the table, and there was a chauffeur and an Arab vending garters and perfume. In this setting he would wear
a black jacket that came just to his rear and a little white tie. Suddenly the "master" would call him: a man exactly like him physically, except with a mustache and glasses. He did not know what his boss wanted him for, but he would never forget the funny look the man gave him as he left the estate. And he went back to the kitchen for some locker-room talk with the chauffeur, who delighted the maids and bored the Arab pederast by telling how he had ruined the daughter of a great lady, a child of tender years. And again he repeated to himself: "Yes, I am a lackey. I have the soul of a true lackey," and he clenched his teeth with pleasure at the way he insulted and debased himself in his own eyes.

  At other times he saw himself emerge from the bedroom of some devout old maid, unctuously bearing a heavy chamberpot, but just then he would be met by an assiduous priest, attached to the household, who, with smiling neutrality, would ask:

  "Keeping up with our religious duties, Ernesto?" And he, Ernesto, Ambrosio, or José, would live the slimy life of an obscene, hypocritical servant.

  Just the thought of it sent a shiver of madness coursing through him.

  He knew, ah, how well he knew, that he was bruising and soiling his soul out of sheer perversity. Deliberately wallowing in the mire, he suffered the terror of one who, in a nightmare, falls down the abyss but does not die.

  Because at times he longed for humiliation, like those saints who would kiss the sores of lepers, not from compassion but to be yet more unworthy of God's love, since they would revolt Him by their repulsive deeds.

  But these images faded, and all that was left in his mind was the "desire to know the meaning of life," and he would tell himself:

  "No, I am no lackey ... no, I am not..." and he would have liked to ask his wife to take pity on him, to feel grief and pity for his horrible, vile thoughts. But remembering how she had made so many sacrifices for him filled him with blind fury, and at such times he would have liked to kill her.

  And he knew all too well that some day she would turn to another man and that was yet more fuel added to everything that went to make up his anguish.