The Mad Toy

by Roberto Arlt

  One of the great things about Arlt’s accuracy in transcribing dialogue is that he is able to give the flavour of a particular character without resorting to stereotype or linguistic cliché. Think for example of the long complaint by Rebeca Naidath, which manages to capture a particularly Jewish style of narration without resorting to clichéd interpolations of Yiddish: ‘schleps’ or ‘schnozzes’ or ‘oy veys’. Of course, this makes Arlt tricky to translate: I should like to note here a major debt to my wife Marian Womack for going through the translation with me several times, on occasions word by word, always to its benefit. Mistakes and infelicities that remain are all mine, of course.

  Finally, a note on the title. The original Spanish title of Arlt’s novel is El juguete rabioso. ‘Rabioso’ normally means ‘angry’, or ‘wild’: my choice of ‘mad’ has here to be taken in the sense of ‘that drives me mad’, or ‘don’t it just make you mad?’ – annoyance rather than insanity. I understand Arlt’s title as suggesting something of the dehumanising fatalism of Gloucester’s ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods’: one can be as angry as one wishes, but our lives are controlled by forces we are unable to dominate. Certainly, the description of Silvio’s career, with its highs and lows, moments of great fortune and periods of despair, gives an overarching impression of an individual being shuttled helplessly from event to event.

  – James Womack, 2013

  The Mad Toy

  Chapter 1

  The Thieves

  When I was fourteen an old Andalusian cobbler, who had his shop next to an ironmonger’s with a green and white façade, in the archway of an old house in Avenida Rivadavia between South America and Bolivia Streets, initiated me into the delights and thrills of outlaw literature.

  The front of the hovel was decorated with polychrome covers of pulp books that told the adventures of Montbars the Pirate and Wenongo the Mohican. On our way back from school, we kids took great pleasure in looking at the prints that hung, discoloured by the sun, on the door.

  Sometimes we’d go in to buy half a pack of Barriletes, and the man would grumble about having to leave his bench to come and deal with us.

  He was slump-shouldered, sunken-cheeked and bearded, and fairly lame as well, with a strange limp, his foot round like a mule’s hoof, with the heel pointing outwards.

  Whenever I saw him I would remember a proverb my mother used a lot: ‘Beware the people marked by God.’

  Normally he’d toss a few phrases my way; and as he looked for some particular half of a boot among the mess of shoetrees and rolls of leather, he would introduce me, with the bitterness of a born failure, to the stories of the most famous bandits of Spain, or else would recite a eulogy for a lavish customer whose boots he had polished and who had given him twenty centavos as a tip.

  As he was a covetous man, he smiled to recall this client, and his filthy smile that didn’t succeed in filling out his cheeks would wrinkle his lip over his blackened teeth.

  Although he was bearish he took a liking to me and for the odd five centavos he’d rent me out the serial novels he had collected over long subscriptions.

  And so, as he gave me the story of Diego Corrientes, he’d say:

  ‘Boy, thith guy… what a guy! He were more beautiful than a rothe and the milithia killed him…’

  The artisan’s voice trembled hoarsely:

  ‘More beautiful than a rothe… but he wath born under an unlucky thtar…’

  Then he would recapitulate:

  ‘Jutht you imagine… he give the poor wha’ he took from the rich… he had a woman at every farm in the mountainth… he were more beautiful than a rothe…’

  In this lean-to that stank of paste and leather, his voice would awaken a dream of green mountains. There were gypsies dancing in the ravines… a mountainous and sensual land appeared before my eyes as he evoked it.

  ‘He were more beautiful than a rothe,’ and then this lame man would vent his sadness by tenderising a sole with his hammer, beating it against an iron plate which he supported on his knees.

  Then, shrugging his shoulders as if to rid himself of an unwelcome idea, he would spit through his teeth into a corner, sharpening his awl on the whetstone with quick movements.

  Later he would add:

  ‘You’ll thee, there’th a beautiful bit when you get to Doña Inethita and Uncle Clodfoot’th inn,’ and, seeing that I was taking the book with me, he’d shout a warning:

  ‘Careful, lad, it cothtth money,’ and turning back to his work he’d lower his head, the mouse-coloured cap pulled down over his ears, rummage in a box with his fingers all dirty from glue and, filling his mouth with nails, would carry on with his hammer, tap… tap… tap…

  These books, which I would devour in their numerous ‘batches’, were stories of José María, the Lightning Bolt of Andalusia, or of the adventures of Don Jaime the Bearded and other rogues, more or less authentic and picturesque, as could be seen from the prints that showed them as follows:

  Horsemen on stupendously saddled colts, with extra-black side burns on their ruddy faces, their bullfighter’s ponytail covered by an extremely shiny cordobés hat, and a blunderbuss mounted in the saddletree. They would usually be offering, with a magnanimous gesture, a yellow bag of money to a widow standing at the foot of a little green hill with a babe in her arms.

  Back then I dreamt of being a bandit and of strangling libidinous senior magistrates; I would right wrongs and protect widows, and I would be loved by exceptional maidens.

  I needed a comrade for my youthful adventures, and this comrade was Enrique Irzubeta.

  Enrique was a layabout who was always known by the edifying nickname of ‘The Faker’.

  His story shows how one can establish a reputation; and how fame, once won, can nurture all those who wish to study the laudable art of leading the ignorant up the garden path.

  Enrique was fourteen when he cheated the owner of a sweet factory, which is clear proof that the gods had decided what the destiny of our friend Enrique would be. But because the gods are crafty at heart, I am not surprised, as I write my memoirs, to discover that Enrique is now being put up in one of those hotels that the State provides for hooligans and rascals.

  The truth is this:

  A certain factory owner, in order to stimulate the sale of his products, announced a competition, with prizes for those who could put together a complete set of the flags of South America which he had had printed on the underside of each sweet wrapper.

  The difficulty lay in finding the wrapper with the flag of Nicaragua, given its extreme scarcity.

  These absurd contests, as you know, excite young boys, who, under the banner of a common interest, add up every day the results of their searches and the development of their patient investigations.

  And so Enrique promised his neighbourhood friends, the carpenter’s apprentices and the dairyman’s sons, that he would fake the Nicaraguan flag if someone brought him a copy.

  The lads were doubtful… they vacillated, knowing Irzubeta’s reputation, even though Enrique magnanimously offered as hostage two volumes of the History of France, written by M. Guizot, so that his probity would not be called into question.

  And so the bargain was struck on the pavement in a cul-de-sac, with green-painted streetlights on the street corners, with few houses and tall brick walls. The blue curve of the sky sat atop the distant brushwood-topped walls, and the street was made all the more sad by the monotonous murmur of endless sawing and the cows mooing in the dairy.

  Later I found out that Enrique, using Indian ink and blood, had reproduced the Nicaraguan flag so convincingly that it was impossible to tell the original from the copy.

  A few days later Irzubeta showed off a brand new airgun that he later sold to a second-hand clothes dealer in Reconquista Street. This happened while brave Bonnot and valiant Valet were terrorising Paris.1

  I had already read the forty-odd volumes that the Viscount of Ponson du Terrail had written about Mother Fipart
’s adopted son, the admirable Rocambole, and I aspired to become a bandit in the high style.

  Well, one summer day, in the sordid neighbourhood grocery shop, I met Irzubeta.

  The hot siesta hour weighed on the streets, and there was I, sitting on a cask of yerba,2 chatting to Hipólito, who took advantage of his father’s being asleep to make bamboo-framework aeroplanes. Hipólito wanted to be a pilot, ‘but first he had to solve the problem of natural stability’. At other times he was preoccupied with perpetual motion and would ask me about the possible implications of his musing.

  Hipólito, with his elbows on a lard-stained newspaper, between the cheese counter and the red levers on the till, listened to my suggestions with the utmost attention:

  ‘A clock mechanism is no use for the propeller. Give it a tiny little electric motor and put the dry batteries in the fuselage.’

  ‘You mean like in submarines…’

  ‘Submarines? What submarines? The only danger is that the current could burn out the motor, but the plane’ll go much more smoothly and you’ll have a while before the batteries die.’

  ‘Che, couldn’t we make the motor work via a wireless telegraph? You’ll have to see how that might work. It’d be great, wouldn’t it?’

  At this moment Enrique came in.

  ‘Che, Hipólito, my mum says do you want to give me half a kilo of sugar on tick.’

  ‘I can’t, che; the old man says that until you sort out your bill…’

  Enrique frowned slightly.

  ‘I’m surprised to hear it, Hipólito.’

  Hipólito added, conciliatory:

  ‘If it was down to me, you know… but it’s the old man, che.’ And he pointed at me, happy to be able to change the subject, and said to Enrique:

  ‘Che, don’t you know Silvio? He made the cannon.’

  Irzubeta’s face lit up respectfully.

  ‘Oh, was that you? Well done. The guy who mucks out the dairy said it fired like a Krupp…’

  While he was talking, I observed him.

  He was tall and skinny. Over his rounded forehead, stippled with freckles, lustrous black hair waved in a lordly fashion. His eyes were the colour of tobacco, slightly slanted, and he wore a brown suit that had been fitted to his figure by hands unskilled in the couturier’s art.

  He leant on the edge of the counter, balancing his chin on the palm of his hand. He seemed to be reflecting on something.

  The adventure of my cannon was a resonant one, and pleasant to remember.

  I bought an iron tube and several pounds of lead from some workers at the electricity company. With these elements I fabricated what I called a culverin or ‘bombard’. The manufacture went as follows:

  Into a hexagonal wooden mould, lined on the inside with mud, I inserted the iron tube. The space between the two interior faces was filled with molten lead. After breaking the covering, I smoothed the underside with a thick file, and then used tin hoops to fix the cannon onto a carriage made out of the thickest planks from a box that had been used to store kerosene.

  My culverin was a handsome object. It could be loaded with projectiles two inches in diameter, the charge for which I placed in powder-filled rough cotton bags.

  As I stroked my little monster, I thought:

  ‘This cannon can kill, this cannon can destroy.’ And the conviction that I had created a danger both mortal and obedient filled me with a mad joy.

  The neighbourhood kids examined it with admiration; it showed them my intellectual superiority, which from that moment prevailed whenever we went on expeditions to steal fruit or else discover buried treasure in the abandoned territories beyond the Maldonado, the stream that divided us from the parish of San José de Flores.

  The day we fired the cannon was legendary. It was in the middle of a clump of Jerusalem thorn, itself in the middle of an enormous patch of waste ground in Avellaneda Street, before you got to San Eduardo, that we made the experiment. A circle of kids stood round me while I, my imagination much excited, loaded the mouth of the culverin. Then, in order to test its ballistic capacities, we aimed it at the zinc tank that was fixed to the wall of a nearby carpenter’s and provided it with water.

  Filled with emotion I touched a match to the fuse; a little dark flame leapt under the sun and suddenly a terrible report enveloped us in a nauseating cloud of white smoke. For an instant we were stricken dumb with wonder: it seemed that in that moment we had discovered a new continent, or had by sorcery been translated into the masters of the earth. Suddenly someone shouted:

  ‘Scram! The fuzz!’

  There was not sufficient time to make a dignified retreat. Two policemen were coming towards us at full pelt, we hesitated… and suddenly with great leaps and bounds we fled, abandoning the bombard to the enemy.

  Enrique’s parting words:

  ‘Che, if you need any scientific data, then I’ve got a collection of Around the World magazine at home and I can lend them to you.’

  From that day forth up until the night of our greatest jeopardy, our friendship was like the friendship of Orestes and Pylades.3

  Such a new picturesque world I discovered in the Irzubeta house!

  Unforgettable people! Three men and two women, and the house governed by the mother, a woman the colour of salt and pepper, with small fish eyes and a large inquisitional nose, and the grandmother bent double, deaf, and blackened like a tree-trunk burnt in a fire.

  With the exception of one absentee, who was the police officer, in that quiet cave everybody lay around unused, in sweet idleness, passing in their leisure time from the novels of Dumas to the comforting sleep of the siesta, and thence to amiable twilight gossip.

  Their worries would spring up at the beginning of the month. At this point they would have to deter their creditors, sweet-talk the ‘Spanish bastards’,4 calming the excesses of the plebeians who tactlessly came right up to the outer door and shouted, asking to be paid for the goods which they had ingenuously handed over on credit.

  The owner of the cave was a fat Alsatian, called Grenuillet. Rheumatic, neurasthenic and in his seventies, he eventually got used to the irregularities of the Irzubetas, who paid him his rent every now and then. Previously he had tried unsuccessfully to evict them, but the Irzubetas were related to long-established judges and other people of that type from the conservative party, which was how they knew themselves to be immoveable.

  The Alsatian eventually resigned himself to waiting for regime change, and the flagrant shamelessness of these idlers reached the point where they would send Enrique to ask the landlord for free tickets to the Casino; his son worked there as a porter.

  Ah! And what well-spiced remarks, what Christian reflections could be heard from the local gossips, who held their conclave in the neighbourhood butcher’s shop, and commented devoutly on their neighbours’ lives.

  This is what the mother of an extremely ugly girl said in reference to one of the young Irzubetas, who had, in a fit of lust, displayed his private parts to the maiden:

  ‘Just you wait, I hope I don’t ever get my hands on him, because it’d be worse for him than if a train ran him over.’

  This is what Hipólito’s mother said, a fat woman with an extremely white face who was always pregnant, as she grasped the butcher’s arm:

  ‘I advise you, Don Segundo, not to trust them an inch. They’ve squeezed so much out of us I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry,’ the brawny man would grumble sternly, fencing with his enormous knife in and out of a lung.

  Ah! And how happy the Irzubetas were. Ask the baker who had the cheek to complain about how far his creditors were in arrears; ask him to say it isn’t so.

  This baker was complaining to one of the girls when he had the bad luck to be overheard by the police officer, who happened to be passing by the house.

  The police officer, accustomed to settle all problems by judicious blows and knocks, and irritated by the insolence displayed in the fact that the baker wante
d to be paid what he was owed, beat the man out of the house with his own fists. This was a salutary lesson in manners, and many people preferred not to demand payment. And so, this family’s life was cheerier than a one-act farce.

  The maidens of the family, past twenty-six and not a boyfriend between them, enjoyed themselves with Chateaubriand, sank back into Lamartine and Cherbuliez. This led them to entertain the conviction that they were part of an intellectual ‘elite’, and it was this that in its turn led them to refer to poor people as riffraff.

  The grocer who tried to get payment for his beans was riffraff; the shopkeeper from whom they had beggingly coaxed a few metres of lace was riffraff; riffraff too was the butcher who lost it when the ladies unwillingly called through his shutters that ‘next month we’ll pay you for sure’.

  The three brothers, hairy and thin, tramps in all their glory, sunbathed throughout the day and when it got dark put on their suits and went off to cultivate love affairs among the dissolute women in the slum districts of town.

  The two blessed and discontented old women squabbled at any moment over trifles, or, sitting with their daughters in the ancient hall, would spy on people through the curtains, or else they gossiped; as they were descended from an official who had served in Napoleon I’s army, I often heard them, from the penumbra that idealised those bloodless faces, dreaming their imperialist myths, evoking the stale splendours of nobility, while on the lonely pavement the lamplighter with his pole crowned by a violet flame lit the green gas lamp.