Free The Seven Madmen by Roberto Arlt Page B

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