by Roberto Arlt
‘Yes, you should go today, Silvio, it would be better,’ my mother said, smiling hopefully. ‘Put the blue tie on. I’ve ironed it and mended the lining.’
With a single bound I was back in my room, and as I got dressed in my suit I listened to the Jew describing, lamenting, a quarrel she’d had with her husband.
‘Oh, what a to-do, Frau Drodman! He comes back drunk, pretty well drunk. Maximito wasn’t there; he’d gone to Quilmes to see about a painting job. I’m in the kitchen, I come out, and he says to me, shaking his fist like that: “Food, pronto… And why didn’t that swine of a son of yours come to work?” What a life, Frau, what a life… So I go into the kitchen and put the gas on, sharpish. I thought that if Maximito came along then there’d be a real row, and I was scared, Frau. Dios mio! So I bring him the frying pan quick with the liver and the eggs fried in butter. Because he doesn’t like oil. And you should have seen him, Frau, he opens his eyes wide open and screws up his nose and says: “Bitch, this is rotten,” and the eggs fresh that morning. What a life, Frau, what a life!… Even the nice soup tureen, do you remember, Frau? Even the nice soup tureen got smashed. I was scared and I left, and he comes after me, bom bom bom, beating his chest with his fists… How horrible, and he was shouting things at me that he’s never said before, Frau: “Pig, I want to wash my hands in your blood!”’
Señora Naidath sighed deeply.
I found the woman’s tribulations diverting. While I tied my tie, I smiled to imagine her gigantic husband, a salt-and-pepper-haired Pole, with a cockatoo’s nose, shouting at Doña Rebeca.
Señor Josias Naidath was a Jew more generous than a Sobieski-era hetman.23 A strange man. He hated Jews so much it made him sick, and his grotesque anti-Semitism displayed itself in an elaborately obscene vocabulary. Of course, this was a generalised hatred rather than a dislike of anyone in particular.
Friends trying to get one over on him had cheated him many times before, but he didn’t want to believe this and in his house, to the despair of Señora Rebeca, one could always find fat badly-turned-out German immigrant adventurers, who stuffed themselves at his table with sauerkraut and sausages, and who laughed slobbery great laughs, rolling their inexpressive blue eyes.
The Jew looked after them until they found work, making use of the contacts he had as a painter and a freemason. Sometimes they robbed him; there was one scoundrel who disappeared over night from a house they were renovating, taking with him ladders, planks and cans of paint.
When Señor Naidath found out that the night watchman, his protégé, had run off like this, his cries reached up to heaven. He was like Thor in a fury… but he didn’t do anything.
His wife was the prototype of the sordid, avaricious Jewess.
I remember that when my sister was younger, she went to visit them in their house one day. She openly admired a beautiful heavily laden plum-tree and, understandably enough, wanted to taste its fruit, and asked shyly if she could have a plum.
And Señora Naidath reproached her:
‘Hijita… If you want to eat plums, you can buy all the plums you want in the market.’
‘Pour yourself some tea, Señora Naidath.’
The Jewess carried on with her lamenting narrative:
‘Then he shouted at me, and all the neighbours heard, Frau, he shouted at me: “You daughter of a Jewish butcher, Jewish pig, protecting your son all the time.” As if he weren’t Jewish, as if Maximito wasn’t his son too.’
But actually, Señora Naidath and her doltish son Maximito worked well together to cheat the Freemason and get money from him that they then spent on fripperies; theirs was a con game that Señor Naidath knew about and which it was enough merely to mention to get him to blow his top.
Maximito, the cause of these ridiculous quarrels, was a twenty-eight-year-old rogue, who was ashamed of being Jewish and of being a painter.
In order to hide his shameful condition, that of being a working man, he dressed himself up as a gentleman, wore spectacles and each night before going to bed rubbed glycerine into his hands.
I knew some juicy stories about his mischievous tricks.
Once he secretly collected some money a bar-owner owed his father. He was twenty years old and thought that he had a flair for music, so he spent the total on a magnificent gilded harp. Maximito explained, on his mother’s urging, that he had won some pesos as a part share in a lottery ticket, and Señor Naidath said nothing, but looked suspiciously at the harp, and the guilty couple trembled like Adam and Eve in Paradise under the gaze of Jehovah.
The days went by. Maximito played the harp and the old Jewess rejoiced. These things happen. Señora Rebeca told her friends that Maximito was a very promising harpist, and people, when they saw the harp in the corner of the dining room, agreed.
However, despite his generosity, Josias was at times a prudent man, and soon realised the scam by which magnanimous Maximito had become the owner of the harp.
And so, Señor Naidath, who was extremely strong, got on top of the situation and, as the Psalmist recommends, spoke little and did much.
It was Saturday, but Señor Josias didn’t give a damn for the precepts of Moses; by way of a prologue he gave his wife two kicks up the backside, then he grabbed Maximito by the shirt-collar and, after giving him a dusting-off, took him out into the street; as for the neighbours who had come out of doors in shirtsleeves and who were having a wonderful time with the ruckus, Señor Naidath threw the harp at their heads from an upstairs window.
This made life much happier for all concerned, and that’s why people said of the Jew that ‘Señor Naidath… he’s a good man.’
I finished sprucing myself up, and went out.
‘Well, goodbye, Frau, say hello to your husband and to Maximito from me.’
‘Aren’t you going to say thank you?’ my mother interrupted.
‘I already said it.’
The Hebrew woman raised her envious little eyes from the slices of buttered bread and weakly held out her hands. I could see that she was already wishing me failure in my venture.
I got to Palomar as it was getting dark.
When I asked the way, an old man who was sitting smoking on a bundle under the green light of the station, indicated to me, with an admirable economy of gesture, a way through the shadows.
I realised that I was dealing with a completely indifferent man; I didn’t want to abuse his reticence, so, knowing almost as much as before I’d asked his help, I said thank you and set off.
The old man called after me:
‘Hey, kid, you got ten centavos?’
I thought about not giving him anything, but I thought that if God existed then he could help me in my task if I helped the old man, and so, not without a certain hidden pain, I went over to give him a coin.
The raggedy man then became more explicit. He got up from his bundle and signalled a point in the darkness with a trembling arm:
‘Look, kid… Carry on, straight on and then the officers’ club is on the left.’
And so I walked.
The wind moved the dry leaves of the eucalyptus, and, striking the tree trunks and the high telegraph wires, whistled howlingly.
Crossing the muddy road, feeling my way along a wire fence, and moving as quickly as the terrain allowed, I reached the building which the old man had pointed out as the Club.
Uncertain, I stopped. Should I call? There was no soldier on guard duty in front of the door, behind the railings.
I went up three steps and then bravely, or so I thought, entered a narrow wooden corridor – the whole building was made out of wood – and stopped in front of the doorway of an oblong room with a table in the middle.
Around the table, three officers, one of them lying on a sofa by the sideboard, another with his elbows on the table, and a third with his feet up in the air, leaning his seatback against a wall, were making desultory conversation in front of five bottles of different colours.
‘What do you want?’
&n
bsp; ‘I’m here because of the advertisement, sir.’
‘The vacancies have been filled.’
I shot back, absolutely tranquil, filled with the serenity that comes after a piece of bad luck:
‘Goodness, that’s a shame, because I’m an inventor myself, I’d have been right at home here.’
‘And what have you invented? Come in, sit down,’ a captain said, sitting up on the sofa.
I replied calmly:
‘An automatic meteor signalling device, and a machine that prints what you dictate to it. I have a letter of congratulation here from Ricaldoni the physicist.’
This aroused the curiosity of the three bored officers, and I realised I had got their attention.
‘All right, sit down,’ one of the lieutenants said, looking me over from head to toe. ‘Explain your famous inventions to us. What were they, again?’
‘An automatic meteor signalling device, sir.’
I leant against the table, supporting myself with my arms, and looked with what I thought was an investigative gaze at the faces with their hard lines and inquisitive eyes, three weather-beaten faces belonging to men used to dominate other men, faces that looked at me with half-curious, half-ironic expressions. And in that moment, just before I began to speak, I thought about the heroes of my favourite books, especially Rocambole: Rocambole with his rubber-visored cap and the rogue’s smile on his twisted lips passed in front of my eyes, pushing me onwards to be confident and strike a heroic pose.
Comforted, sure that I would make no mistakes, I said:
‘Sirs: you know that selenium is a conductor when it is exposed to light, and an insulator in the dark. The signalling device is nothing more than a selenium cell connected to an electromagnet. When the meteor passes over the selenium element, it would trigger a signal, the light of the meteor, concentrated via a concave lens, would turn the selenium into a conductor.’
‘Very good. And the writing machine?’
‘The theory is as follows. In a telephone, sound is converted into an electromagnetic wave. If we use a tangent galvanometer to measure the electrical intensity of each vowel and consonant, then we can calculate the number of ampere-turns needed to make an electronic keyboard that would respond to the electrical intensity of each sound.’
The lieutenant’s frown deepened.
‘It’s not a bad idea, but you aren’t taking into account the difficulty of creating electromagnets that would respond to such small electric variations, and that’s even before you start to think about the different types of voice that there are, or else residual magnetism; another problem, even more serious, the worst, perhaps, is how you make each individual current travel to the correct electromagnet. But have you got Ricaldoni’s letter there?’
The lieutenant bent over it; afterwards he handed it to the other officers and spoke to me:
‘Have you seen it? The problems I noticed have been picked up by Ricaldoni as well. But your idea in principle is very interesting. I know Ricaldoni. He was my teacher. He’s a clever man.’
‘Yes, short and fat, pretty fat.’
‘Would you like to pour yourself a vermouth?’ the captain offered with a smile.
‘Thank you, sir. I don’t drink.’
‘Do you know anything about mechanics?’
‘A bit. Kinematics… dynamics… steam engines and combustion engines; crude oil engines as well. I’ve studied chemistry and explosives too, which is an interesting topic.’
‘Yes it is. What do you know about explosives?’
‘Ask me anything,’ I replied with a smile.
‘Okay, well then, what are fulminates?’
This was beginning to look like an exam, and I replied with an air of wisdom:
‘Captain Cundill, in his Dictionary of Explosives, says that fulminates are the metallic salts of a hypothetical acid called hydrogen fulminate. They can be simple or double.’
‘All right, all right, give me an example of a double fulminate.’
‘Copper fulminate, which forms as green crystals produced when mercury fulminate, a simple fulminate, is boiled with water and copper.’
‘He knows a lot, this kid. How old are you?’
‘Sixteen, sir.’
‘Sixteen?’
‘Are you listening to this, captain? This kid’s got a great future ahead of him. How about we talk to Captain Márquez? It’d be a shame if we couldn’t accept him.’
‘It would indeed.’ The officer from the engineer corps turned to me.
‘Where the devil have you studied all of this?’
‘All over, sir. I don’t know, I go out into the street and I see a machine I don’t know anything about in a workshop somewhere. I stop, and say to myself as I look at the different parts that this bit must work like this, and this bit must do that. And after I’ve made my deductions I go into the shop and ask, and believe me, I’m very rarely wrong. Also, I’ve got a pretty good library, and if I’m not studying mechanics then I study literature.’
‘What?’ The captain interrupted. ‘Literature as well?’
‘Yes, sir, and I’ve got the best authors: Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Baroja.’
‘Che, he’s not an anarchist, is he?’
‘No, sir. I am not an anarchist. But I like to study and to read.’
‘And what does your father think about all of this?’
‘My father killed himself when I was very young.’
They fell suddenly quiet. The three officers looked at me and at each other.
The wind outside whistled, and my brow furrowed even more.
The captain stood up and so did I.
‘Look, buddy, congratulations, come by tomorrow. I’ll try to speak to Captain Márquez tonight, because you deserve a shot. This is what the Argentinian army needs. Kids who want to study.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Tomorrow, if you want to come by, I’ll be happy to see you. Ask for Captain Bossi.’
Heavy with so much happiness, I took my leave.
Now I walked through the shadows, leapt over the fences, with a resonant feeling of courage within me.
Now more than ever I felt that I was to use my existence to fulfil some grand destiny. I could be an engineer like Edison, a general like Napoleon, a poet like Baudelaire, a demon like Rocambole.
I was in the seventh heaven. Because I had won the praise of grown men, I spent nights so overcome with joy that my blood beat against my heart for happiness, and I thought that I was being carried across the world on the shoulders of my happiness, like a symbol of youth.
I think they chose thirty apprentices to study aviation mechanics out of two hundred applicants.
It was a grey morning. The rough field stretched out into the distance. A nameless punishment oozed from its grey-green monotony.
We passed by the closed hangars accompanied by a sergeant, and got into our overalls in the barracks.
It was drizzling, but despite the drizzle we were taken to do exercises on a patch of scrubland behind the canteen.
It wasn’t difficult. As I obeyed the commands given by the voice I allowed the indifferent expanse of the plain to enter into me. This hypnotised my body, letting all the difficult work happen independent of me.
I thought:
‘If she could see me now, what would she think?’
Sweetly, like a shadow on a moonlit wall, I went back over everything to do with her, and in a distant dusk I saw the imploring image of the girl, motionless next to the poplar tree.
‘Let’s see some movement, recruit,’ the corporal shouted at me.
When it was time to eat, splashing through the mud, we went up to the stinking mess-pots. Green firewood was smoking under the pots. We stood close together and held out our tin plates to the cook.
The man dipped his ladle into the swill and stuck a fork into the other pot, then we stood to one side to gobble down our food.
While I ate I remembered Don Gaetano and the cruel woman. And althou
gh they did not exist, I perceived huge expanses of time between my silent yesterday and my quavering present.
I thought:
‘Now that everything has changed, who am I in this too-large uniform?’
Sitting next to the barracks, I saw the rain falling sporadically, and with the plate on my knees I couldn’t take my eyes off the horizon, which appeared to be broken in places, but which was smooth as a band of metal in others and which was so pitilessly excited that its cool height where it fell away cut through to my bones.
Some of the apprentices sitting on the stairs laughed, and others, bent over a water-trough, were washing their feet.
I said to myself:
‘Life’s like this, always complaining about what has happened. The threads of water fall so slowly.’ That was how life was. I left the plate on the ground in order to allow my thoughts free rein.
Would I ever escape from my terrible social condition, would I ever be able to become a gentleman, to stop being someone who went for any job going?
A lieutenant came past and I stood to attention… Then I fell into a corner and the food I had eaten made me feel even heavier.
In the future, would I be one of those men with dirty collars and darned shirts, with a reddish suit and gigantic shoes, with blisters and calluses on my feet from walking so much, from going door to door asking for work?
My soul trembled, what should I do, what could I do to succeed, to earn money, a lot of money? I wasn’t going to find a wallet with ten thousand pesos in it in the street. What to do then? And I didn’t know if I could kill anyone, I wished I at least had a rich relative to kill and inherit from, but I understood that I would never become resigned to the penurious life that the majority of men put up with naturally.
Suddenly it became so clear to me, to my conscience, that this desire for distinction would accompany me throughout the world, that I said to myself:
‘I won’t care if I never have a suit, never have any money, never have anything,’ I confessed to myself almost shamefully. ‘What I want is to be admired by others, praised by others. What do I care if I’m a rake? I don’t care at all… But this mediocre life… To be forgotten when you die, that’s horrible. Oh, if my inventions could only have some success! But I will die one day, and the trains will keep on running, and people will go to the theatre like they always did, and I’ll be dead, good and dead… dead for life.’