Free The Seven Madmen by Roberto Arlt

And when he let go of me, I ran crying to my room. My soul was flung down to the depths of darkness by a vast sense of shame. Because those depths of darkness do exist even if you don't think they do."
    Elsa looked at her husband, shocked. The Captain stood there with his arms crossed, listening in a bored sort of way. Erdosain smiled vaguely. He continued:
    "I knew most boys were not beaten by their fathers and in school, when I heard them talking about home, I'd be paralyzed with such terrible psychic pain that if we were in class and the teacher called on me, I would just gape at him dumbfounded, unable to make any sense of his questions, till one day he shouted: 'Are you some kind of idiot, Erdosain, don't you hear me?' The whole class burst out laughing, and from then on they called me 'Erdosain the idiot.' And I felt more wretched, more injured than ever, but I kept quiet about it for fear of my father's whip, and smiled at the boys who insulted me ... only timidly ... See, Captain? They insult you ... and you smile timidly like they were doing you a favor jeering at you."
    The stranger frowned.
    "Later—a moment more, Captain—later they often called me 'the imbecile.' Then suddenly my soul would shrivel away down my nerves, and feeling my soul hiding in shame inside my own flesh destroyed the last bits of my courage. I felt I was sinking farther and farther down and I'd look whoever was insulting me in the eye, then instead of slapping him down, I'd tell myself: 'Can he possibly know how vastly he is humiliating me?' Then I'd go on my way; I grasped that everyone else was just finishing what my father had started."
    "So now," replied the Captain, "I'm dragging you under, too?"
    "No, hey now, not you. Naturally, I've suffered so much that all the fight in me has shriveled inward, to hidden places. So I'm outside it all watching myself and wondering. 'When will all that fight inside of me come bursting out?' And that's the thing I'm waiting for. Some day something will explode in me, a monstrous thing, and I'll be a whole changed man. Then, if you're alive, I'll come looking for you and spit in your face."
    The stranger looked at him calmly.
    "Not from hatred, though, only to try out my fighting spirit, which will be the newest thing in the world for me ... Okay, you can go now."
    The stranger vacillated a moment. Erdosain's eyes were trained on him in a boundless, intense stare. He took the suitcase and left.
    Elsa stood in front of her husband, trembling.
    "Okay now, I'm leaving. Remo ... it had to end like this."
    "But you ... you?"
    "What would you say to do instead?"
    "I don't know."
    "So, see? Please, I want you to keep calm. I left your clothes all ready for you. Put a fresh collar on. You're enough to put any wife to shame, always like that."
    "But you, Elsa ... you? And what about the plans we made?"
    "Illusions, Remo ... splendors."
    "Right, splendors ... but where did you get such a lovely word? Splendors."
    "I don't know."
    "And our life together will be left undone forever and ever?"
    "What alternative is there? But still, I tried to do right. Later, I began to hate you ... but why weren't you the same man you used to be?"
    "Ah, yes ... the same man ... the same ... ."
    Pain weighed upon him like a tropical day with the sun beating down. His eyelids drooped. He felt ready to drop off to sleep. The meanings of words sank into his brain as slowly as a stone into half-congealed water. When the word hit the depths of his consciousness, dark forces tore at his pain. And for that instant, at the depths of his heart, they kept floating and scuttling about as if trapped in a mud puddle, amid weeds and strands of suffering. She went on, in a voice still with deep-seated resignation:
    "It's no good anymore ... I'm going now. Why didn't you behave? Why didn't you go to work?"
    Erdosain was sure that Elsa was as unhappy as he was just then, and a flood of compassion made him fall back on the edge of the chair, his