The Seven Madmen 1732 Studios

Spanish · Part Two

El suicida

The Suicide

224 sentences · 115 notes

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  1. 1

    Erdosain stayed at the feet of the Lame Woman for perhaps an hour.

    ErdosainErdosainErdosain · proper nounsubject of permaneció
    permanecióstayedpermanecer · verb, past, indicative, third-person, singularmain verb of the sentence
    aata · prepositionpreposition marking pies
    lostheel · determiner, masculine, pluraldeterminer of pies
    piesfeetpie · noun, masculine, pluraloblique complement of permaneció
    deofde · prepositionpreposition marking Coja
    latheel · determiner, feminine, singulardeterminer of Coja
    CojaLame WomanCoja · proper nounmodifies pies
    quizáperhapsquizá · adverbmodifies hora
    unaanuno · determiner, feminine, singulardeterminer of hora
    horahourhora · noun, feminine, singularoblique complement of permaneció

  2. His earlier emotions were dissolving into his present drowsiness.

  3. He felt himself a stranger to everything that had happened over the course of the day.

  4. Anguish and ill will were hardening in his chest like mud under the sun.

  5. Still, he remained motionless, subject to the power of the dark sleepiness that rose off his exhaustion.

  6. But his brow was furrowing.

  7. And through the fog and the darkness his other despair was growing, the hopeless dread of finding himself lost like a ghost at the edge of a granite breakwater.

  8. The gray waters traced bands of different heights that ran in the opposite direction.

  9. Iron launches carried blurred crowds toward remote trading ports.

  10. There was also a woman done up like a cocotte, with a chin-strap of diamonds, who rested her elbows on a tavern table and pressed her cheeks between her bejeweled fingers.

  11. And while she talked, Erdosain scratched the tip of his nose.

  12. But since this behavior could not be explained, Erdosain recalled that four young girls had appeared, with dresses down to the knee and tangled yellow hair around their horse-like faces.

  13. And the four girls, as they passed beside him, held out a little saucer.

  14. It was then that Erdosain asked himself: "Is it possible that they can feed themselves doing only that?"

  15. Then the star, the cocotte, who beneath her chin wore a double chin of diamonds, answered him yes, that the four girls lived by begging, and she began to speak of a Russian prince, in her most feminine voice, whose way of life, though she tried to liken it, did not match the one the four girls led.

  16. And only then could Erdosain explain to himself satisfactorily why he had been scratching the tip of his nose while the lovely woman talked.

  17. 2

    But his sadness grew when he saw the silent people turn their heads and climb into the cars of a long train, whose blinds were all drawn down.

  18. No one asked about timetables or stations.

  19. Twenty paces away, a desert of dust stretched out its dark frontier.

  20. The locomotive could not be made out, but he did hear the painful screech of the chains as the brakes loosened.

  21. He could run — the train was sliding along slowly — catch it, climb up the little ladder and stay an instant on the platform of the last car, watching how the train picked up speed.

  22. Erdosain was still in time to escape that gray solitude without dark cities... but immobilized by his enormous anguish, he stayed there gazing, with a sob caught in his throat, at the last car with its windows rigorously shut.

  23. 3

    When he saw it enter the curve between the rails that the wall of fog was hiding, he understood that he had been left alone forever in the desert of ash, that the train would never return, that it would go on sliding away in silence forever, with all the blinds of its cars strictly shut.

  24. 4

    Slowly he lifted his face from Hipólita's knees.

  25. It had stopped raining.

  26. His legs were frozen; his joints ached.

  27. He looked for an instant at the sleeping woman's face, blurred in the bluish light coming through the windowpanes, and with extraordinary care he got to his feet.

  28. The four girls with horse-like faces and frizzy yellow hair were still inside him.

  29. He thought:

  30. 5

    "I ought to kill myself... –But on noticing the red hair of the sleeping woman, his ideas took another, heavier turn–: She must be cruel.

  31. And yet I could kill her –he gripped the butt of the revolver in his pocket–.

  32. One shot to the skull would be enough.

  33. The bullet is steel and would make only a tiny hole.

  34. Even so, her eyes would pop out of their sockets, and her nose might bleed.

  35. Poor soul!

  36. And she must have suffered a great deal.

  37. But she must be cruel".

  38. 6

    A cautious malevolence bent him over her.

  39. As he watched the sleeping woman, his eyes were taking on the fixed stare of a madman, while with his hand in his pocket he raised the hammer, squeezing the trigger.

  40. A thunderclap boomed in the distance, and that strange incoherence which veiled his brain drew away from him; then with great care he took up his raincoat, closed the shutters to keep the hinges from creaking, and went out.

  41. 7

    As he went down the stairs he realized with joy that he was hungry.

  42. 8

    He headed for one of the many grill-houses near the Spineto market, and hurriedly walked a few blocks.

  43. 9

    The moon rolled over the violet crest of a cloud; the sidewalks here and there, under the moonlight, looked as if sheeted in zinc; the puddles glittered with depths of dead silver, and with a whirling murmur the water ran, licking the granite curbstones.

  44. So wet was the roadway that the cobblestones seemed welded by a fresh casting of tin.

  45. 10

    Erdosain passed in and out of the sky-blue shadows that slanted across the façades.

  46. The smell of wetness lent the morning solitude a certain seaside desolation.

  47. 11

    Undoubtedly, he was not in his right mind.

  48. He was still preoccupied by the four girls with horse-like faces, and the sinister sea with its waves of iron.

  49. The heavy stench of burnt oil belching from the yellow door of a dairy shop turned his stomach, and so, changing his mind, he headed for a brothel he remembered there being on Calle Paso; but when he arrived, the door was already shut, and bewildered, shivering with cold, his mouth tasting of copper sulfate, he went into a café where the metal shutters had just been raised.

  50. After a long wait, they served him the tea he had ordered.

  51. 12

    He thought about the sleeping woman.

  52. He half-closed his eyes, and resting his head against the wall, he gave himself over with deeper despondency to his sorrows.

  53. 13

    He did not suffer for himself — the man entered under a name in the civil registry — but rather his consciousness, drawing apart from the body, looked at it as at a stranger's, and said to itself:

  54. 14

    –Who will have pity on man?

  55. 15

    And these words, which his mind managed to gather up, troubled him, filling him with a painful tenderness for invisible fellow men.

  56. 16

    –To fall... to fall ever lower.

  57. And yet other men are happy, they find love, but everyone suffers.

  58. What happens is that some realize it and others don't.

  59. Some attribute it to what they do not have.

  60. But what a stupid dream that is.

  61. Still, her face was pretty.

  62. What there was of logic in her was what she said about the adventuring prince.

  63. Ah! to be able to sleep at the bottom of the sea, in a room of lead with thick glass.

  64. To sleep years and years while the sand piles up, and to sleep.

  65. That is why the Astrologer is right.

  66. A day will come when people will make the revolution, because they lack a God.

  67. Men will declare themselves on strike until God makes himself present.

  68. 17

    A bitter smell of cyanide reached him; and perceiving through his eyelids the milky brightness of the morning, he felt himself dissolved, as if he were at the bottom of the sea and the sand kept rising endlessly over his little lead hut.

  69. Someone touched his back.

  70. 18

    He opened his eyes just as the café waiter said to him:

  71. 19

    –You can't sleep here.

  72. 20

    He was about to reply, but the servant moved off to go wake another sleeper.

  73. This one was a heavy man, who had let his bald head drop onto his crossed arms on top of the tabletop.

  74. 21

    But the sleeper did not respond to the waiter's calls, and so, puzzled, the owner came over — a man with mustaches as enormous as bicycle handlebars — and he shook his patron in such a way that the man ended up doubled over the chair, kept from falling only because the edge of the table held him up.

  75. 22

    Erdosain stood up, puzzled, while owner and waiter, exchanging glances, watched the strange customer out of the corner of their eyes.

  76. 23

    The sleeper stayed in an absurd position.

  77. His head fallen on one shoulder, it left visible his flat face, pitted with smallpox scars, with the black circles of a pair of tinted glasses.

  78. A thread of reddish drool stained his green tie, escaping from between his bluish lips.

  79. The stranger's elbow pressed a sheet of written paper against the table.

  80. They understood that he was dead.

  81. They called the police, but Erdosain would not move from the spot, drawn in by the spectacle of the sinister suicide in the black glasses, whose skin was slowly covering over with blue blotches.

  82. And the smell of bitter almonds that hung motionless in the air seemed to escape from between his open jaws.

  83. 24

    A police auxiliary arrived, then a sergeant, later two patrolmen and an inspector officer, and these people prowled around the dead man as if he were a head of cattle.

  84. Suddenly the auxiliary, turning to the inspector officer, said:

  85. 25

    –Don't you know who he is?

  86. 26

    The sergeant pulled from the corpse's pocket a hotel bill, several coins, a revolver, three sealed letters.

  87. 27

    –So this is the one who killed the girl on Calle Talcahuano?

  88. 28

    They took the glasses off the dead man, and now his eyes could be seen, the pupils squinting, the cornea turned upward, the eyelids dyed red as if he had wept tears of blood.

  89. 29

    –Didn't I tell you? –the auxiliary went on–.

  90. Here is his identity card.

  91. 30

    –He was going to go to Ushuaia for the rest of his life.

  92. 31

    Then Erdosain, on hearing these words, remembered as if he had read it long ago.

  93. (And yet it was not so.

  94. The previous morning he had learned of it in a newspaper).

  95. The dead man was a swindler.

  96. He had abandoned his wife and five children to live in concubinage with another woman by whom he had three children, but two nights before, perhaps fed up with his mistress, he had shown up at a hotel on Calle Talcahuano in the company of a seventeen-year-old girl, his new lover.

  97. 32

    And at three in the small hours he gently covered her head with a pillow, firing a shot into her ear.

  98. No one in the hotel heard a thing.

  99. At eight in the morning the killer dressed, left the door ajar, and calling the chambermaid told her not to wake the lady until ten, because she was very tired.

  100. Then he left, and only at noon was the dead woman discovered.

  101. 33

    But what struck Erdosain extraordinarily was the thought that the killer had spent five hours in the company of the dead woman, five hours beside the corpse of the young girl in the solitude of the night... and that he must have loved her very much.

  102. 34

    But had he not thought the same thing hours earlier before the red-haired woman?

  103. Was that an unconscious recollection, or the suicide doubled over there?...

  104. 35

    The Public Assistance wagon arrived and the dead man was loaded aboard.

  105. 36

    Then they questioned him.

  106. Erdosain stated the little he knew as a witness, and went out into the street, intrigued.

  107. A vague and painful question lay at the bottom of his consciousness.

  108. 37

    He recalled now that the corpse had the cuffs of its trousers caked with mud, the shirt dirty and damp, and despite all that, how had he managed to make himself loved by the young girl he killed?

  109. Did love exist, then?

  110. In spite of his two women and his eight scattered children and his debauched life as a thief and swindler, the killer loved.

  111. And he imagined him in the sullen night, there, in that hotel frequented by prostitutes and individuals of undefined profession, in a room with shredded wallpaper, gazing on the blood-soaked pillow at the waxen little face of the girl gone cold.

  112. Five somber hours contemplating the dead woman, who before had held him in her bare arms.

  113. Thinking thus, he reached Plaza Once, painfully stupefied.

  114. 38

    It was five in the morning.

  115. He went into the railway station, looked around, and since he was sleepy he took refuge in a corner of the waiting room.

  116. 39

    At eight, the noise a passenger made with his suitcases woke him from his deep sleep.

  117. He rubbed his aching eyelids with his fists.

  118. In a cloudless sky the sun was shining.

  119. 40

    He went out, boarding a bus headed for Constitución.

  120. The Astrologer was waiting for him at the Temperley station.

  121. His sturdy overcoated figure, with his top hat pulled down over his eyes and his huge mustaches drooping in the Gaulish style, was picked out at once by Erdosain.

  122. 41

    –You're very pale –said the Astrologer.

  123. 42

    –Am I pale?

  124. 43

    –Yellow.

  125. 44

    –I slept badly... and worse, I saw a suicide this morning...

  126. 45

    –All right, here's the check.

  127. 46

    Erdosain examined it.

  128. It was for fifteen thousand three hundred seventy-three pesos; payable to the bearer, but with the date set back by two days.

  129. 47

    –Why did you set the date back?

  130. 48

    –It will inspire more confidence.

  131. The bank clerk knows that if that check had been lost, by the time you showed up to cash it there would already be a seizure order.

  132. 49

    –Did he protest?...

  133. 50

    –No... he was smiling.

  134. That man means to have us all thrown in jail... ah!... before going to the bank, go to a barber's and get yourself shaved...

  135. 51

    –And has the other one been warned?

  136. 52

    –No, when the moment comes we'll wake him.

  137. It was a few minutes until the train's arrival.

  138. Erdosain looked at the Astrologer, smiling, and said:

  139. 53

    –What would you do if I escaped?

  140. The other, his fingers forked, stroked his mustache, and then:

  141. 54

    –That is as impossible as the train coming here not stopping here.

  142. 55

    –But let's admit it for a moment.

  143. 56

    –I cannot.

  144. If for a moment I admitted that, you would not be the one going to cash the check... Ah!... Who was the one who killed himself this morning?

  145. 57

    –A murderer.

  146. Strange.

  147. He killed a young girl who didn't want to go and live with him.

  148. 58

    –Wasted energies.

  149. 59

    –And would you be capable of killing yourself?

  150. 60

    –No... You understand that I am destined for a higher purpose.

  151. Erdosain threw out a strange question:

  152. 61

    –Tell me, do you think redheaded women are cruel?

  153. 62

    –Not so much... rather asexual; hence that coldness with which they examine things makes a sour impression.

  154. The Melancholy Pimp used to tell me that in his long career as a pimp he had known very few red-haired prostitutes... You know.

  155. Don't forget to shave.

  156. Go to the bank at eleven, not before.

  157. You're lunching with me today, right?

  158. 63

    Yes, see you later.

  159. 64

    Behind Erdosain the Major boarded, giving the Astrologer a friendly sign.

  160. Erdosain did not see him.

  161. And already sunk down in his seat, Erdosain thought:

  162. 65

    –He is an extraordinary man.

  163. How the devil has he known that I won't deceive him? If he hits the mark on the other things as he did on this one, he'll triumph –and overcome by the swaying of the train, he dozed off again.

  164. Behind him sat the Major.

  165. And now at the bank, his heart pounding hard, he stepped up to the teller's window when the paying clerk called him:

  166. 66

    –Do you want it in large bills or small?

  167. 67

    –Large.

  168. 68

    –Sign.

  169. 69

    Erdosain signed the back of the check.

  170. He thought they would ask him for an identity card, but the clerk, impassive, his arms shielded by sleeve-guards of glazed cotton, counted out ten thousand-peso bills, five of five hundred, and the rest in smaller coin.

  171. And although Erdosain longed to flee out of fear, he scrupulously recounted the money, put it in his wallet, placed the wallet in his trouser pocket, gripping it tightly, and went out into the street.

  172. 70

    Among forests of white clouds, a spiral of sky appeared like freshly washed metal.

  173. 71

    Erdosain felt happy.

  174. He thought that in other climates and beneath an ever-blue expanse like the one he was looking at, there must exist singular women, with luxuriant heads of hair and smooth faces, with great almond-shaped eyes, shadowy in the darkness of their long lashes.

  175. And that the ever-perfumed air would issue from the grottoes of the morning toward the street-mouths of cities terraced upon the lawns of gardens, overtopping with their spherical towers the plumed crests of the parks and terraces.

  176. 72

    And the Astrologer's rhomboidal face, with the tips of his mustache trailing down along the corners of his lips, and his cab-driver's top hat, filled him with enthusiasm; then he thought that, joined to the society, he could go on with his experiments in electrical engineering, and now he crossed the streets like an emperor come down in the world, not noticing that his bearing seduced the laundresses who passed with baskets under their arms, and stirred the trouser-makers returning from the shops with heavy bundles.

  177. 73

    He would invent the Death Ray, a sinister violet lightning whose millions of amperes would melt the steel of dreadnoughts, as a furnace melts a wafer of wax, and would blast the cities of Portland cement to gravel, as if volcanoes of trinitrotoluene were heaving them up.

  178. He saw himself turned into Master of the Universe.

  179. With a peremptory note he summoned the Ambassadors of the Powers.

  180. He found himself in an immense hall with glassed-in walls, whose center was taken up by a round table.

  181. All around, sunk into the armchairs, sat the old diplomats — bald heads, leaden faces, hard and furtive looks.

  182. Some tapped the glass of the table with the blunt end of a pencil, others smoked in silence, and a gigantic Black man liveried in green stood motionless beside the red velvet of the heavy curtains that covered the entrance.

  183. 74

    And he!

  184. Erdosain, Augusto Remo Erdosain, the ex-thief, the ex-bill-collector, rose to his feet.

  185. His torso, molded by a black double-breasted jacket, was reflected in the glass of the table, with the four fingers of his right hand tucked into his pocket, and some papers in his left.

  186. Now on his feet, he examined with glacial eyes the impassive faces of the Ambassadors.

  187. A terrible pallor held him still with its delicious cold.

  188. Heroes of every age survived in him.

  189. Ulysses, Demetrius, Hannibal, Loyola, Napoleon, Lenin, Mussolini passed before his eyes like great burning wheels, and were lost on a slope of the solitary earth beneath a twilight that was no longer earthly.

  190. 75

    His words fell in short sounds, with solid clashes of steel.

  191. And seduced by the theatricality of the spectacle, he contemplated himself in an imaginary mirror, trembling and enraged.

  192. 76

    He laid down conditions.

  193. 77

    The States were to hand over to him their war fleets, thousands of cannon, and sheaves of rifles.

  194. 78

    Then from each race a few hundred men would be selected, they would be isolated on an island, and the rest of humanity was destroyed.

  195. The Ray blew up the cities, sterilized fields, turned races and forests to ashes.

  196. The memory of all science, of all art and beauty, would be lost forever.

  197. 79

    An aristocracy of cynics, brigands oversaturated with civilization and skepticism, seized power, with him at its head.

  198. And since man, to be happy, needs to rest his hopes on a metaphysical lie, they would strengthen the clergy, would set up an inquisition to cut away every heresy that might undermine the foundations of dogma or the unity of belief that would be the absolute unity of human happiness, and man, restored to the primitive state of society, would devote himself, as in the time of the pharaohs, to agricultural labor.

  199. The metaphysical lie would give man back the happiness that knowledge had withered in the bud within his heart.

  200. His words fell with short, dry sounds, like the clashing of steel cubes.

  201. And he said to the Ambassadors:

  202. 80

    –The city of us, the Kings, will be of white marble and will stand at the edge of the sea.

  203. It will have a diameter of seven leagues and domes of rose copper, lakes and forests.

  204. There will live the professional saints, the rascally patriarchs, the fraudulent magi, the apocryphal goddesses.

  205. All science will be magic.

  206. The doctors will go along the roads disguised as angels, and when men multiply too much, in punishment for their crimes, luminous flying dragons will pour through the air the vibrios of Asiatic cholera.

  207. 81

    "Man will live in the full age of miracle, and will be a millionaire of faith.

  208. By night we will project onto the clouds, with powerful searchlights, the "entry of the Just Man into Heaven".

  209. Can you imagine?

  210. Suddenly, up over the mountains a green and lilac ray springs forth, and the clouds clothe themselves in a garden where the white air floats like snowflakes.

  211. An angel with rose-colored wings crosses the flowerbeds, stops before the gate of Paradise, and with open arms receives the "Just Man", a man of the people, with a battered hat, a long beard, and a cudgel.

  212. Do you understand, you rascals, professionals, cynics, and distinguished ones?

  213. Do you understand?

  214. The angel with the rose-colored wings receives the man who on earth sweats and suffers.

  215. Do you realize how brilliant my idea is, how marvelous the easy miracle?

  216. And the multitudes will worship God on their knees, and only for us will heaven not exist — sad brigands that we are, who hold power, science, and the useless truth".

  217. 82

    He trembled as he spoke.

  218. 83

    –We will be like gods.

  219. We will bestow on men stupendous miracles, delicious beauties, divine lies; we will make them a gift of the conviction of a future so extraordinary that all the promises of the priests will be pale beside the reality of the apocryphal marvel.

  220. And then they will be happy... Do you understand, you imbeciles?

  221. 84

    With a sudden collision a porter flung him against a wall.

  222. Erdosain stopped, terrified, clutched the money convulsively in his pocket, and excited, ferociously gleeful like a little tiger loose in a forest of brick, he spat at the front of a fashion house, saying:

  223. 85

    –You will be ours, city.

  224. 86

    Behind him walked the Major.

The particulars

The text
Los siete locos, Roberto Arlt. Part Two.
Translation
Public-domain Spanish (Arlt, d. 1942). English translation © 2026 1732 Studios, LLC.
Reading aloud
Digital narration, directed by 1732 Studios.
Words
Every word of the text, by letter.
Data
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Two whoopie pies and a pine. An inside joke.