by Roberto Arlt
A large door showed passers-by what the cavern contained, and out on the street there hung volumes of stories for vulgar imaginations, Geneviève de Brabant and The Adventures of Musolino. Across the street, just as in a beehive, people buzzed around the entrance to a cinema, where the bell rang incessantly.
At the counter next to the door, Don Gaetano’s wife attended customers: she was a fat and pale woman with chestnut hair and eyes that were admirable for their expression of green cruelty.
‘Is Don Gaetano in?’
The woman pointed out a large man in shirtsleeves, who was in the doorway watching people come and go. He had a black tie round his naked neck, and the hair that hung uncontrolled over his forehead allowed the points of his ears to show through its ringlets. He was a good-looking man, vigorous and with dark skin, but under his long eyelashes his large watery eyes did not inspire confidence.
The man took the letter that recommended me, and read it; then, giving it to his wife, he started to examine me.
A large wrinkle crossed his forehead, and by his spying, ingratiating attitude you could see that he was a naturally suspicious and devious man who was also sickly-sweet, who faked his sugared kindness and who was falsely indulgent in his loud laughter.
‘So you already worked in a bookshop?’
‘Yes, boss.’
‘And the other bookshop did lots of business?’
‘Enough.’
‘But it didn’t have as much books as here, eh?’
‘Not even one-tenth as much.’
Then he spoke to his wife:
‘And His Worship won’t come to work no more?’
His wife said in a bitter voice:
‘These lousy bums are all the same. When they’ve had enough to eat and learnt how to work then they go.’
She said this, and then she leant her chin into the palm of her hand, showing a strip of naked arm under the sleeve of her blue blouse. Her cruel eyes were fixed on the bustling street. The cinema bell kept on ringing, and a sunbeam came down between two high walls to light the dark front of Dardo Rocha’s building.16
‘What do you want to earn?’
‘I don’t know… You tell me, boss.’
‘Okay, look… I’ll give you a peso and a half, plus room and board, you’ll live like a king here, that’s for sure.’ The man bowed his unruly head. ‘There’s no timetable here… the busiest hours are from eight p.m. to eleven…’
‘What, eleven o’clock at night?’
‘What do you care, a kid like you’s up till eleven anyway watching the girls go by. And in the morning we get up at ten.’
Remembering the positive opinion Don Gaetano had of the person who recommended me, I said:
‘That’s fine, but because I need the money you’ll have to pay me every week.’
‘What, you don’t trust us?’
‘No, señora, but because we need things in our house and we’re poor… You understand…’
The woman turned her aggressive gaze back to the street.
‘Okay,’ Don Gaetano continued, ‘come to my house at ten tomorrow; we live in Esmerelda Street.’ And he wrote the address down on a piece of paper and gave it to me.
The woman didn’t respond to my farewell. Motionless, with her cheek on the palm of her hand and her naked arm pressing down on the spines of some books, with her eyes staring at the front of Dardo Rocha’s house, she seemed the dark genius of the book-cave.
At nine o’clock in the morning I stopped outside the house where the bookseller lived. After I had rung the bell, to hide from the rain I hid myself in the porch.
An old man with a beard, with his neck smothered in a green scarf and his cap hanging down to his ears, came out to meet me.
‘What do you want?’
‘I’m the new employee.’
‘Come up.’
I climbed the stairwell with its dirty uppers.
When we got to the corridor, the man said:
‘Please wait.’
Through the glass panes of the street window that looked out onto the balcony, one could see the chocolate-coloured iron sign of a shop. The rain flowed slowly down its varnished convexities. In the distance, a chimney between two water tanks threw out great canvases of smoke into the space that was being stitched up by needles of rain.
The nervous sound of the tram bell was repeated regularly, and there were violet sparks jumping between the trolley and the shuddering cables; the croaking crow of a rooster came from I don’t know where.
A sudden sadness overcame me as I faced the house and its neglect.
The glass in the doors was unshaded, the shutters were closed.
In a corner of the hall, on the dusty floor, someone had abandoned a crust of dry bread, and in the air there hung the smell of sour paste: the stink of long-wet dirt.
‘Miguel,’ the woman’s disagreeable voice came from inside.
‘Coming, señora.’
The old man lifted his arms into the air and with his fists clenched went to the kitchen that lay across a wet patio. I heard the voices of Don Gaetano and his wife.
‘Miguel.’
‘Señora.’
‘Where are the shirts that Eusebia brought?’
‘In the small trunk, señora.’
‘Don Miguel,’ the man said sarcastically.
‘Yes, Don Gaetano.’
‘How are things with you, Don Gaetano?’
The old man moved his head from side to side, raising his disconsolate eyes to the heavens.
He was thin, tall, with a long face and a three-day beard on his flaccid cheeks and the sad expression of an abandoned dog in his unfocused eyes.
‘Don Miguel.’
‘Yes, Don Gaetano.’
‘Go and buy me an Avanti.’
The old man set off.
‘Miguel.’
‘Señora.’
‘Bring a half kilo of sugar cubes, and make sure they weigh them right.’
A door opened, and Don Gaetano came out, holding his trousers up with both hands and with a broken-off piece of comb suspended in his curly hair over his forehead.
‘What’s the time?’
‘I don’t know.’
He looked out at the patio.
‘Bloody weather,’ he muttered, and started to comb his hair.
When Don Miguel came back with the sugar and the cigars, Don Gaetano said:
‘Bring me the basket, then you take the coffee to the shop,’ and, putting on a greasy felt hat, he took the basket the old man brought him and then passed it on to me, saying:
‘Let’s go to the market.’
‘The market?’
He picked up on what I said.
‘A piece of advice, che Silvio. I don’t like saying things twice. Anyway, buying in the market you know what you eat.’
I came sadly after him with the basket, a ridiculously large basket, which chittered as it banged against my knees and made the disgrace of being poor all the deeper, all the more grotesque.
‘Is the market far away?’
‘No, kid, here in Carlos Pellegrini,’ and then seeing me down in the mouth he said:
‘It’s like you were ashamed to carry the basket. An honest man shouldn’t be ashamed of nothing, as long as it’s work.’
A dandy whom I nudged with the basket gave me a furious glare, a rubicund porter who had been wearing his uniform with its magnificent livery and gold trim all morning looked at me ironically, and a little urchin who was passing by, as if by accident, gave the bottom of the basket a kick, and the radish-red basket, ridiculously large, made me the focus of all the world’s ridicule.
‘Oh the irony! I, who had dreamed of being a bandit as great as Rocambole, and a poet with the genius of Baudelaire!’
I was thinking:
‘Do you need to suffer this much to live…? All of this… to walk with a basket in front of splendid shopfronts…’
We spent almost the entire morning walking through th
e Mercado del Plata.
Truly, Don Gaetano was a great man!
To buy a cabbage, or a slice of pumpkin or a handful of lettuce, he would go through all the stalls arguing, having intense and bitter arguments with the grocers over five centavos, trading insults in a dialect I did not understand.
What a man! He behaved like a cunning peasant, a con-artist who pretends to be dumb and who makes a joke of it when he realises that he can’t cheat someone.
As he sniffed out bargains he would mingle with the cleaners and the servants to get involved in things that should have held no interest for him, he behaved like a mountebank, a barker, and when he got close to the tin counters of the fish stalls he would examine the gills on the hake and the pejerreys,17 he would eat prawns, and all this without even buying a single shrimp, he’d go on to the tripe sellers, then the chicken sellers, and before buying anything he would smell the merchandise and smell it mistrustfully. If the stallholders got annoyed, he’d shout at them that he didn’t want to be cheated, that he knew very well that they were thieves, but that they were much mistaken if they thought that he was a fool just because he was such a simple person.
His simplicity was an act, his stupidity hid a really active cunning.
This is how it went:
He would choose a cabbage or a cauliflower with a truly exasperating patience. He would be ready to pay the price that was asked him, but suddenly would discover another one that looked larger or tastier, and this was enough for an argument to brew between Don Gaetano and the stallholder, each of them trying to rob the other, to cheat their fellow man, even if it was only of as much as a single centavo.
His bad faith was astonishing. He never paid what was asked, only what he offered. Once I had put the produce into the basket, Don Gaetano would step away from the stall, sink his thumbs into the pockets of his jacket, take out the money, count it, count it and recount it, and then throw it down onto the counter as if he were doing the stallholder a favour, and then move quickly away.
If the owner shouted after him, he would reply:
‘Estate buono.’18
He had the urge to keep moving, he was a glutton for looking at things, he went into ecstasies when he saw all the produce because of the money it represented.
He would go up to the pork sellers and ask them the price of their sausages, he would look carefully at the rosy pig-heads, turn them over in his hands slowly under the bland gaze of the bulky owners in their white aprons, scratch his ear, look with lust at the ribs hanging from their hooks, the pillars of sliced fatty bacon, and then, as if he were resolving a problem that had been tormenting his mind, would head off to another stall to snaffle a slice of cheese or count how many asparagus there were in a bunch, to get his hands dirty with artichokes and turnips, to eat pumpkin seeds or hold eggs up to the light and rejoice in the heaps of wet butter, solid, yellow, still smelling of whey.
We ate at around two in the afternoon. Don Miguel with his plate balanced on top of a kerosene flask, I standing at one corner of a table covered in books, the fat woman in the kitchen and Don Gaetano at the counter.
We left the cave at eleven p.m.
Don Miguel and the fat woman walked in the middle of the well-lit street, carrying the basket in which the coffee-making equipment banged around; Don Gaetano, his hands buried in his pockets, his hat on the crown of his head and a curl of hair hanging over his forehead, and I went after them, thinking how long my first day had been.
We went up to the house and when we got to the corridor Don Gaetano asked me:
‘Brought a mattress, did you?’
‘No. Why?’
‘There’s a bed, but no mattress.’
‘And there’s nothing to cover myself with?’
Don Gaetano looked around, then opened the door to the dining room; there was a heavy furry green cloth on the table.
Doña María had already gone into the bedroom when Don Gaetano grabbed the cloth at one end and threw it in a bad-tempered way over my shoulder, and said:
‘Estate buono.’ Without replying to my goodnight, he shut the door in my face.
I was disconcerted, standing in front of the old man, who showed his indignation with a dirty blasphemy (‘Ah! Stinking God!’) and then walked off with me following.
The garret where lived the scrawny old man, whom from that moment onwards I called Stinking God, was an absurd triangle under the roof, with a little round window that gave onto Esmerelda Street and its electric lighting. The glass in the bulls-eye was broken, and gusts of wind entered through the gap, causing the yellow tongue of a candle to dance in the saint’s alcove in the wall.
There was a scissor-bed against the wall: two crossed sticks with a canvas nailed to it.
Stinking God left to urinate on the terrace, then sat down on a box, took his hat and his boots off, wrapped his scarf round his neck and, prepared to face the cold of the night, got carefully into the scissor-bed, covering himself up to the chin with the covers, which were in fact sacks filled with worn-out rags.
The fading light of the candle illuminated his profile, his large red nose, his flat brow with its wrinkles, and his shaved head with a few remnants of grey hair over the ears. Because the draught annoyed him, Stinking God stuck a hand out, took his hat and pulled it down over his ears, then he took the butt-end of a cigar out of his pocket, lit it, threw out large mouthfuls of smoke and, with his hands behind his head, looked at me sombrely.
I started to examine my bed. Many people must have suffered in it, so bad was its state. The points of the springs had pierced the mattress, and they stayed sticking up in the air like fantastic corkscrews, and the staples that were supposed to hold the sides together had been replaced by pieces of wire.
But it was obvious that I wasn’t going to spend the night in ecstasy, and after testing its stability, I took off my boots in imitation of Stinking God, then wrapped them in a newspaper to serve as my pillow, then wrapped myself in the green cloth, lay down on the treacherous bed and resolved to sleep.
It was indisputably a bed for the extremely poor, a bad joke, the grumpiest bed I have ever known.
The springs sank into my back: it was as if the points wanted to drill through the flesh between my ribs; the steel mesh that was rigid in one spot sunk down inconsiderately in another, just as, by the miracle of elasticity, it lifted up in a third point; with every movement you made the bed would yelp, screech with amazing noises, like an unoiled gearbox. Furthermore, I couldn’t find a comfortable position, the stiff knap of the cloth scratched against my throat, the edges of the boots were making my neck lose all sensation, the spirals of the bent springs were pinching my flesh. So:
‘Hey, Stinking God!’
Like a tortoise, the old man stuck his little head out into the air from its sackcloth shell.
‘What is it, Don Silvio?’
‘How come they haven’t thrown this horrible bed out?’
The venerable old man, rolling his eyes, replied with a deep sigh, calling on God to witness all the iniquities of which mankind was capable.
‘Tell me, Stinking God, isn’t there any other bed…? It’s impossible to sleep on this one…’
‘This house is hell, Don Silvio… a pit of hell.’ Lowering his voice, afraid of being overheard: ‘It’s… the wife… the food… Oh Stinking God, what a terrible house this is!’
The old man put out the light and I thought:
‘I am indeed going from bad to worse.’
Now I heard the noise of rain on the zinc roof of the attic.
Suddenly I heard a muffled sobbing. It was the old man who was crying, crying out of misery and hunger. And this was my first day.
Sometimes, at night, there are faces that appear, faces of women who wound you with the sword of sweetness. We move apart, and our soul remains shadowy and alone, as happens after a party.
Unusual apparitions… they disappear and we never hear of them again, but even so they accompany us at night, their eye
s fixed on our own fixed eyes… and we are wounded with the sword of sweetness, and imagine how the love of these women will be, these faces that enter into your own flesh. An anguished desert of the spirit, a transient luxury that is both harsh and demanding.
We think how each one would bend her head towards us, to have her half-open lips pointing towards the sky, how she would allow herself to faint from desire without spoiling for a moment her face throughout this ideal moment; we think how her own hands would tear at the laces of her corset…
Faces… faces of young women ready for joyous torments, faces which cause a sudden faintness to burn in one’s entrails, faces in which desire does not spoil the ideal nature of the moment. How do they come to occupy our nights?
I have spent hours on end chasing after, in my mind, a woman who during the day left the desire for love in my bones.
I would consider her charms slowly, charms that were ashamed of being so adorable: her mouth made for nothing other than lengthy kisses; I imagined her willing body holding tight to the flesh of another person, flesh that called for her to abandon herself, and imagined her insisting that she would enjoy her abandonment; I saw the magnificent smallness of her vulnerable parts, my vision filled with her face, with her body that was so young for torment and for motherhood; I would stretch out an arm to my own poor flesh: in punishing it, I allowed it to attain pleasure.
At this moment Don Gaetano came in from the street and headed towards the kitchen. He looked at me with furrowed brows, but did not say anything, and I leant over the jar of paste I was using to repair a book, thinking: there’s going to be a storm here.
It was the case that, with brief bright periods, the couple fought.
The pale woman, immobile, her elbows on the counter, her hands buried in the folds of her green shawl, followed her husband’s movements with cruel eyes.
Don Miguel, in the little kitchen, was washing the plates in a greasy basin. The tips of his scarf touched the edges of the vessel and a red and blue checked apron tied to his belt with twine protected him from splashes.
‘What a house this is, Stinking God!’
I should explain that the kitchen, the site of our meetings, was in front of a stinking latrine, a corner of the cave behind the bookshelves.