The Seven Madmen Read Online Free PDF Page B

taciturn millionaire," who offered to finance the building of his inventions, and like those crime novel fans who skip the boring bits to get to the denouement, Erdosain shortcut over some of his own imaginative embellishments and got himself back in the street, even though he really already was on the street.
    Then, leaving the crossing of Charcas and Talcahuano or Arenales and Rodríguez Peña, he went hurrying off.
    And he set up great spasms of hope inside himself.
    He would triumph, yes, he would triumph! With the money from the "melancholy and taciturn millionaire" he would set up his electrotechnical laboratory, he would specialize in the study of beta rays, in the wireless transmission of energy and of electromagnetic waves, and with his youth forever preserved, like the absurd hero of an English novel, he would grow older; only his face would pale to the whiteness of marble, and his flashing eyes, deep magus eyes, would seduce every maiden on earth.
    The night began to fall and suddenly he remembered that the only one who could rescue him from his horrible situation was the Astrologer. At this thought, all others fled his mind. Perhaps the man had money. He even suspected him of being a Bolshevik agent sent to spread Communism in the country, since he had a strange scheme for a revolutionary band. Without hesitation, he hailed a cab and told the driver to take him to the Constitution Station. There he got a ticket to Temperley.
    The Astrologer
    The Astrologer lived in a building set in the middle of some wooded acreage. The house was built low and its red roof was visible a long way off through the foliage. In the clearings in the greenery, among tangled grasses and creepers, black-bottomed insects zoomed around all day through a perpetual mist of weeds and stray stalks. Not far from the house, a millwheel limped along on three paddles around a triangular, rusted iron axis, and ahead a bit, over the stables, hung the blue and red panes of some half-destroyed glass paneling. Behind the mill and the house, past the walls, a green mountain range of eucalyptus verged off into blackness, sending crests like mountain peaks into the sea-blue sky.
    Sucking on a honeysuckle, Erdosain walked across the acres to the house. He felt as though he were in the country, very far from the city, and it cheered him to see the house. Although low, it was two-storied, with a decrepit balcony on the second floor and a peeling row of Greek columns at the entrance, marking the end of an unkempt path edged with palm trees.
    The red roof tiles slanted downward, their eaves sheltering the transoms and tiny attic windows, and through the luxuriant greenery of the chestnut trees, over the tops of the pomegranate trees spangled with scarlet asterisks, a zinc rooster stood waving its twisted tail in the shifting wind. All around him the garden burst out in wild profusion, as if trying to become a minor forest, and now, in the still afternoon, in the sun that gave the air a nacreous shimmer, the rosebushes poured out their potent perfume, so piercing that it seemed to fill everything with an atmosphere red and fresh and like a river torrent of water.
    Erdosain thought:
    "Even if I had a silver boat with golden sails and marble oars, and the ocean were to turn seven splendid colors, and a millionairess were blowing me kisses from the moon, I would still be unhappy ... But what's all this rot? It's still better to live out here than back there. Here, I could set up a lab."
    A faucet dripped into a barrel. A dog dozed by an old-fashioned gazebo, and when Erdosain called from the foot of the stairs, the gigantic figure of the Astrologer loomed in the door, wrapped in a yellow smock with his hat pulled down over his eyes, shadowing his wide rhomboidal face. Stray wisps of hair wandered across his temples, and his nose, which had been broken at midpoint, skewed remarkably far to the left. Under his beetle brows round pupils darted, and that hard-cheeked