The Seven Madmen Read Online Free PDF

we share the sacred truths with those of little faith?"
    Pain, like a tree forced to grow faster by electricity, spread through the depths of his chest, creeping up his throat.
    Stopping, he felt each spasm of grief hopping like an owl from branch to branch in his misery. He owed six hundred pesos and seven cents, and even though he wanted to push it out of his mind and only think how Barsut and the Astrologer would save him, his thoughts twisted off to a dark street.
    Strings of lights seemed to hang from every ledge. A fog of dust choked the street. But he was off to the land of joy, the whole Sugar Company mess forgotten.
    What had he done with his life? Was this or was this not the right moment to ask? And how could he walk along if his body weighed seventy kilos? Or was he a ghost, a ghost remembering his earthly existence?
    How much seethed in his heart: What about the man who had married a prostitute? What about Barsut, scared of a one-eyed dream-fish and the eldest daughter of the seance lady? And what about Elsa, who wouldn't sleep with him, sending him out on the street? Was he crazy or not?
    He had to wonder because at times he was amazed by the strength of hope that welled up inside him.
    He imagined, peering through a louver in one of those palaces, there would be a "melancholy and taciturn millionaire" (I use Erdosain's exact words), observing him through binoculars.
    And what was really odd was that whenever he thought the "melancholy and taciturn millionaire" could see him, he assumed a careworn, thoughtful expression and stopped watching the rears of passing maids, feigning the utmost paralyzing absorption in some terrible inner struggle. He thought that if the "melancholy and taciturn millionaire" caught him watching the maids' rumps, he might get the idea that he was not troubled enough to be worth rescuing.
    And so Erdosain would wait for the "melancholy and taciturn millionaire" to send for him at any moment, just from seeing his face with its muscles stiff with years of bitter anguish.
    He became so obsessed with it that afternoon he suddenly felt that an idler in a red-and-yellow striped jacket lounging in the door of the hotel and staring at him with bald curiosity was a scout for the "melancholy and taciturn millionaire."
    And the servant called him over. He followed. They went through a garden prickly with cactus into a room where he was left alone for several minutes. The whole building was dark. A lamp in one corner was the only light. On the piano ledge, sheet music wafted the fragrance of continual contact with feminine hands. On a windowsill, draped in violet linen, a marble bust of a woman lay abandoned. Great cushions were upholstered in some Cubist print fabric, and on top of the desk there were black-bronze ashtrays and a multicolored desk set.
    Where in his life could he have encountered a room like the one that now grew in his imagination? He could not remember. But he saw a great ebony frame whose sides ran up to the whitest of ceilings, whose pale plaster threw light onto a seascape: a sinister wooden bridge, under whose massive pilings a multitude of blurry men were seething, splotched with reddish shadows, carting great masses of something beside a tumultuous sea, cast-iron and somehow bloody, from which there arose straight up a stone dock jammed with a confusion of rails and cranes and pulleys.
    Before their marriage, his Elsa had known just such a fine parlor. Yes, perhaps, but why bring that up now? He was the embezzler, the man with the wornout shoes, with the fraying tie, with grease stains on his suit who went off to eke out a living while his sick wife did laundry at home. That was why the "melancholy and taciturn millionaire" had sent for him.
    Erdosain savored his fantasy until he could practically have reached out and touched it, supplementing it with fresh images supplied at the expense of the great invisible lord. He added on a splendid interview with the "melancholy and