The Mad Toy

by Roberto Arlt

  A shudder made the hair on my arms rise up. Faced by a horizon on which the clouds moved like ships, the conviction of an eternal death filled me with horror. Overwhelmed, holding my plate, I went to the trough.

  Oh, if only I could find a way never to die, to live even for only five hundred years!

  The corporal who was putting us through our paces called me over:

  ‘Drodman, Captain Márquez wants to see you.’

  ‘Right away, Corporal.’

  During the exercises I had asked permission via a sergeant to speak with Captain Márquez, to ask him about a trench mortar that I had thought up, which would shoot projectiles that would destroy more men than traditional explosive shrapnel.

  Aware of my vocation, Captain Márquez was used to hearing me out, and while I spoke and drew on his blackboard he would look at me through his glasses with a smile that was part curiosity, part mockery and part indulgence.

  I left the plate in the washing-up bowl and rapidly went over to the officer’s quarters.

  I was in his room. Next to the wall, a camp bed, a bookcase with journals in it and textbooks on military science, and nailed to the wall a blackboard with its chalk-box nailed next to it at an angle.

  The captain said to me:

  ‘Okay, let’s see what this trench cannon is like. Draw it.’

  I took a piece of chalk and made a sketch.

  I began my spiel.

  ‘You know that the large calibre weapons have two main inconveniences, captain: their weight and their size.’

  ‘Yes, and…’

  ‘So, what I’ve thought up is a cannon of the following kind: the large calibre projectile has a hole made in it through the centre, and instead of being placed in a tube, the cannon, it will be put onto a metal bar, like a ring onto a finger, and slide down to the part where the explosive charge is placed. The advantage of my system is that without making the cannon any heavier you will be able to increase enormously the calibre of projectile and the explosive charge it can carry.’

  ‘I get you… It’s all right… But you need to remember this: the thickness of the cannon, its diameter and length, is calculated based upon the calibre of the projectiles it’s going to fire, the weight of the projectiles and the quality of the powder used to fire them. What I mean is that depending on the way in which the powder ignites, the projectile will move in a certain way inside the barrel of the cannon, propelled by the gases of the explosion, so that when the projectile reaches the mouth of the cannon it will have obtained maximum propulsive force from the explosive. Your invention is the exact opposite of this. The explosion takes place and the projectile slides up the bar and the gases, instead of impelling the projectile, will dissipate into the air, which means that if the explosion needs to remain controlled for a whole second, what you will do is reduce this period of control to a tenth of a second, or a thousandth of a second. It’s all topsy-turvy. The bigger the diameter of the projectile, the more resistance it has to overcome, unless you’ve discovered a new form of ballistics, which would be a difficult thing to do.’

  He finished by saying:

  ‘You have to study, study a great deal, if you want to be anything.’

  And I thought, although without daring to say it out loud:

  ‘How am I going to study if I need to learn a trade to earn my living?’

  He continued speaking:

  ‘You’ve studied a lot of maths; what you lack is a base, you should discipline your thought, apply yourself to the study of little practical things, and then maybe you’ll start to be more successful in your ideas.’

  ‘Do you really think so, sir?’

  ‘Yes, Astier. You have undeniable potential, but you have to study, you think that just because you can dream something up then that’s all the work done already, and thinking is only ever the start of something.’

  And I left the room, filled with gratitude towards this man who was serious and melancholic and who was kind enough to encourage me, in spite of military discipline.

  It was two o’clock in the afternoon of my fourth day in the Military Aviation Academy.

  I was drinking mate with a red-haired boy called Walter, who was telling me with an affecting enthusiasm about a small farm his father, a German, had on the outskirts of Azul.

  The redhead said with his mouth full of bread:

  ‘We butcher three hogs every winter for the house. We sell the rest. So one afternoon when it was cold I went into the house and cut myself a chunk of bread, then I went out in the Ford to…’

  ‘Drodman, come here,’ the sergeant shouted to me.

  He was in front of the barracks and was looking at me with an unaccustomed seriousness.

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Get dressed in your civvies and hand in your uniform. You’re out of here.’

  I looked at him carefully.

  ‘Out?’

  ‘Yes, you’re out.’

  ‘Out, sir?’ My voice trembled.

  The officer looked at me pityingly. He was a well-mannered provincial and had only got his wings a few days previously.

  ‘But I haven’t done anything wrong, sir, you know that.’

  ‘Of course I do… But what can I do about it… Captain Márquez gave the order…’

  ‘Captain Márquez? But that’s crazy… Captain Márquez can’t have given the order… Isn’t there some kind of a mistake?’

  ‘They told me Silvio Drodman Astier… There’s no one called Drodman Astier here apart from you, I don’t think, is there? So it’s got to be you, there’s no other way of looking at it.’

  ‘But this is unfair, sir.’

  The man frowned and said to me in a low voice:

  ‘What do you want me to do about it? Of course it’s not right… I think… no, no, I don’t know… I think there’s someone the captain has to fit in somehow… that’s what they told me, I don’t know if it’s true, but because you lot haven’t signed contracts yet, of course they can get rid of whoever they want, and put in whoever they want too. If there was a signed contract then they wouldn’t be able to do anything, but because there’s nothing on paper, then you need to put up with it.’

  I said in supplication:

  ‘What about you, sir, can’t you do anything?’

  ‘What do you want me to do, buddy? What do you want me to do? I’m in the same boat as you; this is what goes on here.’

  The man felt pity for me.

  I said thank you and walked away with tears in my eyes.

  ‘The order comes from Captain Márquez.’

  ‘And it’s impossible to see him?’

  ‘The captain isn’t in.’

  ‘And Captain Bossi?’

  ‘Captain Bossi isn’t in.’

  On the road, the winter sun dyed the trunks of the eucalyptus trees a melancholy red.

  I was walking back to the station.

  Suddenly I caught sight of the Director of the School on the path.

  He was a chubby man, with plump cheeks that were red like a farm labourer’s. The wind blew his cape over his shoulders, and he was leafing through papers and giving brief instructions to the group of officers that surrounded him.

  Someone must have told him what had happened, because the lieutenant colonel lifted his head from his papers, looked around for me, and when he had me in his sights, shouted at me in annoyance:

  ‘Listen, pal, Captain Márquez told me about you. You should be in a technical institute. We don’t need intelligent people here, just brutes for the work.’

  Now I was crossing the streets of Buenos Aires with that shout echoing in my soul.

  ‘And when mother finds out!’ I involuntarily imagined her saying in her tired voice:

  ‘Silvio… have some mercy on us… you don’t work… you don’t want to do anything. Look at the boots I’m wearing, look at Lila’s dresses, all of them patched all over, what are you thinking, Silvio, by not working?’

  My temples felt feverishly hot; I
smelt my sweat, I felt that my face was twisted in grief, deformed by grief, a deep clamorous grief.

  I walked around in an abstracted mood, without knowing where I was going. Sometimes anger struck at my veins, I wanted to shout, to fight the frightening deaf city… And suddenly everything would break within me, everything would announce to me my absolute uselessness.

  ‘What will become of me?’

  At this moment my body weighed down on my soul like a suit that was sodden and too big for it.

  Now, when I go home, maybe mama won’t say anything to me. She’ll open the yellow trunk with a gesture of resignation, take the mattress out of it, put clean sheets on the bed and she won’t say anything. Lila, in silence, will look at me reproachfully.

  ‘What have you done, Silvio?’ And she won’t say anything else.

  ‘What will become of me?’

  Oh, it is your duty to gain knowledge of the miseries of this filthy world, to eat the liver that you asked for in the butcher’s, pretending it was for the cat, to go to bed early so as not to waste the lamp-oil!

  An image of my mother came to me again, her face relaxed into wrinkles of suffering; I thought of my sister, who would never complain and who grew pale in a life bent over her textbooks, and my soul fell from my hands. I felt compelled to button hole passers-by, to take their sleeves and say: ‘I was discharged from the army, just because, do you get it? I think I can work… work with engines… fix aeroplanes… and they’ve discharged me… just because.’

  I said to myself:

  ‘Lila, ah, you don’t know her, Lila is my sister; I thought, I knew we would go to the movies one day, we’d have vegetable soup instead of liver, we’d go out on Sundays, I’d take her to Palermo. But now… Isn’t it an injustice, don’t you agree, an injustice? I’m not a boy. I’m sixteen years old, why would they throw me out? I’d do the work of two normal men, and now… What will my mother say? What will Lila say? Oh, if you only knew her. She’s a serious girl: she gets the highest marks in the Escuela Normal. We had better food at home with what I earned. And now, what am I going to do…?’

  Now it’s night, on Lavalle Street, next to the Palace of Justice I stopped next to a sign.

  FURNISHED ROOMS: I PESO

  I went into the lobby, illuminated weakly with an electric bulb, and paid the amount in a little wooden shed. The owner, a fat man, in shirtsleeves despite the cold, took me to a patio filled with green flowerpots and, waving to the houseboy, shouted at him:

  ‘Felix, this one goes up to 24.’

  I looked up. This patio was the base of a cube, whose faces were formed by five-storey walls, all filled with curtained windows. The lit walls could be seen through some of the windows, others were dark and from somewhere unclear came the noise of women, muffled laughter and the clattering of pots.

  We went up a spiral staircase. The houseboy, a spotty urchin in a blue apron, went ahead of me, dragging his duster, whose threadbare feathers rubbed against the floor.

  We finally got there. The passage, like the lobby, was weakly lit.

  The houseboy opened the door and turned on the light. I said to him:

  ‘Wake me up at five tomorrow, don’t forget.’

  ‘Okay, see you tomorrow.’

  Exhausted by my suffering and my worry I let myself fall onto the bed.

  The room: two iron bedsteads covered with blue mattresses with little white tassels, a varnished iron washbowl and an imitation mahogany table. In one corner the mirror in the wardrobe reflected the door that was more like a plank.

  Sharp perfume floated in the air that was kept prisoner between these four white walls.

  I turned my face to the wall. A previous guest had drawn an obscene picture on it in pencil.

  I thought:

  ‘Tomorrow I may go to Europe…’ And covering my head with the pillow, I fell to sleep, exhausted. It was an extremely heavy sleep, into which there slipped the following hallucination:

  On an asphalt plain, violet stains of oil shone sadly under a reddish-brown sky. At the zenith there was a piece of sky that was the purest blue. Cement cubes were scattered everywhere, pointing up to the sky without any order.

  Some were as small as dice, others as large and voluminous as skyscrapers. Suddenly an arm, horridly thin, stretched up from the horizon towards the zenith. It was yellow as a broomstick and its squared-off fingers were held together and extended.

  I backed off in fear, but the horridly thin arm grew larger, and I, in trying to escape from it, grew smaller, I bumped against the cubes of cement, I hid behind them; to see what was happening I peered out from behind the edge of a cube, and the arm as thin as a broomstick was there, with its stiff fingers, over my head, touching the zenith.

  The light had faded at the horizon, and was now as fine as the edge of a sword.

  And there’s where the face appeared.

  It was a giant bulbous forehead, a hairy eyebrow and a piece of jaw. The eye, the mad eye, was under the wrinkled lid. The cornea was immense, the pupil round and wandering. It winked at me sadly…

  ‘Sir, hey, sir…’

  I sat up with a start.

  ‘You’ve slept in your clothes, sir.’

  I looked sternly at my interlocutor.

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  The boy took a couple of paces backwards.

  ‘I thought I should wake you up because we’re going to share this room tonight. Are you upset?’

  ‘No, why?’ And after rubbing my eyes I swung my feet off the bed and sat on the edge. I looked at him.

  The brim of a black derby hat shaded his forehead and his eyes. His gaze was false, and its velvety sheen was only skin-deep. He had a scar next to his lower lip, by his chin, and his full, too-red lips smiled in his white face. His overcoat was tailored too tight and showed off the shape of his little body.

  I spoke to him brusquely:

  ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Quarter to eleven.’

  I stayed where I was, sleepy. I looked unhappily at my dull shoes, at the point where a few stitches had come loose after a repair, allowing one to see a patch of sock through the hole.

  The young man meanwhile hung his hat on a hook and threw his leather gloves down onto a chair with a tired gesture. I went back to looking at him sidelong, but looked away because he saw me observing him.

  He was well-dressed, and from his rigid starched collar all the way down to his patent leather boots with their cream-coloured spats, one could recognise him as a wealthy figure.

  However, I don’t know why it occurred to me to think:

  ‘He must have dirty feet.’

  Smiling a lying smile he turned his head and a lock of his carefully arranged hair fell down to one side, far enough to cover his earlobe. In a gentle voice, giving me a heavy sidelong glance, he said:

  ‘You seem tired, no?’

  ‘Yes, a little.’

  He took off his overcoat, whose silk lining was rubbed shiny at the creases. A certain greasy smell came from his black clothes and I considered him with sudden unease; then, without thinking about what I was doing, I asked him:

  ‘Are your clothes dirty, then?’

  He understood me immediately, but he answered tangentially:

  ‘Did I hurt you, waking you up like that?’

  ‘No, why would it hurt me?’

  ‘Well, kiddo. Some people get hurt like that. I had a friend in boarding school who had an epileptic fit if you woke him suddenly.’

  ‘Too sensitive.’

  ‘As sensitive as a woman, wouldn’t you say, kiddo, is that it?’

  ‘So you had a friend who was over-sensitive? Look, che, do me a favour and open the door, I’m suffocating in here. Let a bit of air in. It smells of dirty clothes in here.’

  The intruder frowned a little… He went towards the door, but before he got there a number of postcards fell to the floor from his pocket.

  He hurriedly bent down to pick them up, and I approached
him.

  Then I saw: they were all photographs of men and women, copulating in various positions.

  The unknown man’s face was purple. He babbled:

  ‘I don’t know how they got there, they’re not mine, a friend…’

  I didn’t reply.

  Standing next to him, I was looking with terrible fixity at one of the group. He said something, I don’t know what. I wasn’t listening. I looked in shock at a terrible photograph. A woman lying prostrate before a rough man dressed as a porter, wearing only a cap with a rubber visor and a black band round his stomach.

  I turned back to the degenerate.

  He was pale now, with his eager pupils extremely dilated, and a tear shining at his blackened eyelids. His hand fell on my arm.

  ‘Let me stay, don’t throw me out.’

  ‘So you… you’re a…’

  He dragged me to the edge of the bed and threw himself at my feet.

  ‘Yes, I’m one of them, at times.’

  His hand fell on my knee.

  ‘At times.’

  The boy’s voice was deep and bitter.

  ‘Yes, I’m one of them… at times.’ A fearful pain trembled in his voice. Then his hand took my hand and pulled it to his throat so that he could lean his chin on it. He spoke in a very low voice, almost like a sob.

  ‘Oh, if I’d only been born a woman! Why does life have to be like this?’

  The veins in my temples throbbed terribly.

  He spoke to me:

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Silvio.’

  ‘Tell me, Silvio, don’t you despise me…? but no… you don’t have that kind of face… How old are you?’

  I answered hoarsely:

  ‘Sixteen… But, are you trembling?’

  ‘Yes… it’s what you want… come on…’

  Suddenly I saw him, yes, I saw him… His lips were smiling in his flushed face… his eyes were also smiling madly… and suddenly, as his clothes fell away rapidly, I saw the hanging tail of a dirty shirt cover the band of flesh which the women’s stockings he was wearing left exposed.