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Roberto Arlt

The Seven Madmen

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

ROBERTO ARLT was born in Buenos Aires in 1900. He had a deeply unhappy childhood and was brought up in the city’s crowded tenement houses — the same tenements which feature in The Seven Madmen. As a journalist, Arlt described the rich and vivid life of Buenos Aires. As an inventor, he patented a method to prevent ladders in women’s stockings.

Roberto Arlt died suddenly of a heart attack in Buenos Aires in 1942. He was the author of the novels The Enraged Toy, The Flamethrowers, Love the Enchanter and several plays. First published in 1929, The Seven Madmen perfectly captures the conflict of Argentine society at a crucial moment in its history.

Nick Caistor is the translator of The Seven Madmen. His “Arlt’s Life and Times” is included as the first of two Afterwords.

Roberto Bolaño’s “The Vagaries of the Literature of Doom” is the second Afterword.

Praise for The Seven Madmen

“If great means anything at all, then Arlt is surely a great writer … he is Latin America’s first truly urban novelist … this is the power which inspired literature possesses” Guardian

“The reader is possessed almost demonically by these characters … an indestructible force of great literature” Julio Cortázar

“Let’s say, modestly, that Arlt is Jesus Christ. Argentina, of course, is Israel and Buenos Aires is Jerusalem … Arlt is quick, a risk taker, adaptable, a born survivor … Arlt is a Russian, a character from Dostoyevsky, while Borges is an Englishman, a character from Chesterton or Shaw or Stevenson … without doubt an important part of Argentinian and Latin American literature” Roberto Bolaño

“Arlt is, plain and simple, the father of the modern Argentinian novel … he is the most important Argentinian novelist, the greatest” Ricardo Piglia

“If ever anyone from these shores could be called a literary genius, his name was Roberto Arlt … I am talking about a novelist who will be famous in time … and who, unbelievably, is almost unknown in the world today” Juan Carlos Onetti

CHAPTER ONE

THE SURPRISE

As soon as he opened the frosted glass door to the manager’s office, Remo Erdosain wanted to turn back; he realised he was a lost man, but it was too late.

Waiting for him were the director, a short squat man with the head of a wild boar, grey hair cropped short in the style of Umberto I of Italy, and an implacable gaze that filtered through grey fish eyes; Gualdi, small, skinny, sweet-tongued, but with a calculating stare; and the assistant manager, son of the man with the boar’s head, a handsome young fellow of thirty, with a shock of white hair and a cynical aspect, his voice gruff and his look as harsh as his father’s. None of the three: the director bending over some accounts, his assistant lolling back in an armchair with one leg dangling over the arm, or Gualdi hovering respectfully next to the desk, bothered to return Erdosain’s greeting. Only the assistant manager lifted his head and said:

“We’ve been told you’re a swindler, who has robbed us of 600 pesos. ”