The Mad Toy

by Roberto Arlt

  Slowly, as if it were a pattern displayed on a wall that the moon made white, I saw the image of the imploring girl next to the black fence pass before my eyes. A cold idea – if she knew what was happening to me at this precise moment – passed across my life.

  I would remember this instant for ever.

  I stepped back shyly and, looking directly at him, said slowly:

  ‘Go.’

  ‘What?’

  I repeated in an even lower voice:

  ‘Go.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘Go, get out, you beast. What have you done with your life? What have you done with your life…’

  ‘No… don’t be like that…’

  ‘You beast… What have you done with your life?’ But I couldn’t bring myself in that moment to tell him all the significant things, all the precious and noble things I had in me, things that instinctively rejected this canker.

  The degenerate stepped back. He drew back his lips to show his fangs, then dived into the bed, and while I climbed fully dressed into my bed he put his hands behind his head and began to sing:

  Rice pudding, rice pudding

  There’s going to be a wedding.

  I looked at him sidelong and then, without any anger, but with a calm that surprised even me, said:

  ‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll break your nose.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll break your nose.’

  Then he turned his face to the wall. A horrible awkward stress weighed down the trapped air. I felt the intensity with which his horrible thoughts made their way across the space between us. All I could see of him was the triangle of black hair that lay on his nape, and then his round, white, untempting neck.

  He did not move, but I was crushed by the intensity of his thoughts… he was following my lead… and I stayed still, feeling a horror that was gradually turning into conformity. And every now and then I looked at him out of the corner of my eye.

  Suddenly his blanket slipped away and I saw his shoulders, his milk-white shoulders that rose above the neatly sewn arc that the neckline of his shirt described over his clavicles…

  A woman’s begging cry burst out in the corridor outside the room:

  ‘No… no… please…’ and the dull shock of a body being thrown against a wall made my soul arch from some primal fear, I hesitated a second, then leapt from my bed and opened the door at the exact moment that the door of the opposite room was closed.

  I leant on the doorframe. No noise came from the room. I turned and, leaving the door open and, without looking at the other man, turned out the light and got into bed.

  I now felt sure of myself. I lit a cigarette and asked my companion:

  ‘Che, who taught you this filthy stuff?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk to you… You’re not nice…’

  I burst out laughing, then carried on speaking more seriously:

  ‘Seriously, che, you know you’re a weirdo? You’re really weird! What do they say about you in your family? And this place? Have you looked at this place?’

  ‘You’re not nice.’

  ‘You’re a saint, right?’

  ‘No, but this is how I’m fated to be… I wasn’t like this earlier, you know? I wasn’t like this at all…’

  ‘Who made you like this, then?’

  ‘My tutor, because my father is rich. After I got through the fourth year of secondary school, they found me a tutor to prepare me for the National School. He seemed a serious enough guy. He had a beard, a pointy blond beard and glasses. His eyes were blue, almost green. I’m telling you all this because…’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I wasn’t like this before… but he made me like this… Then, when he left, I went to find him in his house. I was fourteen. He lived in an apartment in Juncal Street. He was a smart guy. He had a library as big as this room. He was a demon, but how he loved me! I went to his house, the houseboy showed me into his bedroom… He bought me all these silk clothes and knickknacks. I dressed as a woman.’

  ‘What was he called?’

  ‘Why do you want to know his name… He taught in two departments in the National School and hung himself…’

  ‘Hung himself?’

  ‘Yes, he hung himself in a café toilet… Oh, you’re so gullible!… Ha, ha… don’t believe a word I say… It’s all lies… Isn’t it a lovely story?’

  Annoyed, I said to him:

  ‘Come on, che, leave me alone; I’m going to sleep.’

  ‘Don’t be mean, listen up… you’re really moody… you’re not going to believe a word I’ve just said… I told you the truth… all is true… my tutor was called Próspero…’

  ‘And you’ve been like this ever since?’

  ‘What could I do?’

  ‘What do you mean, “What could I do?”… you could have gone to a doctor… some specialist in nervous diseases? Anyway, why are you so dirty?’

  ‘It’s the fashion, lots of guys like dirty clothes.’

  ‘You’re a degenerate.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right… I’m crazy… but what would you have me do? Look… sometimes I’m in my bedroom, it’s night, you have to believe me, it’s like a wave comes over me… I get the smell of rented rooms in my nostrils… I see the light is on and I can’t… It’s like the wind drags me out… I go to see the people who live in those rented rooms.’

  ‘The owners, why?’

  ‘All this searching is pretty sad; us girls have an arrangement with two or three of the guys who have rooms to rent and they give us a ring if some kid turns up who looks worthwhile.’

  After a long pause, his voice became lower and more serious. You might have thought he was talking to himself, venting his troubles.

  ‘Why wasn’t I born a woman?… instead of being a degenerate… yes, a degenerate… I could have been the young mistress of my house, I’d have married a good man and looked after him… and I’d have loved him… instead… like this… bedhopping, shame… guys in white overcoats and patent leather shoes who recognise you for what you are and follow you… and steal everything you’ve got, down as far as your stockings. Oh! If only I could find someone who’d love me for ever, for ever.’

  ‘But you’re crazy! Can you really still dream about such things?’

  ‘What do you know about it! I’ve got a friend who’s been living with a guy who works at the Savings and Loan Bank for three years now… how he loves him…’

  ‘That’s obscene…’

  ‘What do you know? If I could, I’d give all my money to be a woman… a poor little woman… And I wouldn’t care about getting knocked up and cleaning his clothes, as long as he loved me… and went out to work for me…’

  As I listened to him, I was astonished.

  Who was this poor human being who could say such terrible and novel things? Who asked for nothing more than a little love?

  I got up to stroke his forehead.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ he cried out. ‘Don’t touch me. My heart is breaking. Go.’

  Now I was in my bed, motionless, afraid of making any noise that would startle him to death.

  Time passed slowly, and my conscience that was displaced by strangeness and fatigue gathered in this one space the silent pain of our species.

  I still thought that I could hear his words… There was an anguished visage somehow inside his black and twisted face, and with his feverishly dry mouth he cried out into the darkness:

  ‘And I wouldn’t care about getting knocked up and cleaning his clothes, as long as he loved me and went out to work for me.’

  To get ‘knocked up’! The words came so smoothly to his lips!

  ‘Get knocked up.’

  His whole miserable body would become deformed, but ‘she’, made glorious by being loved so deeply, would walk among the crowd and not notice it, only seeing the face of the one to whom she had so happily subjugated herself.

  The trials of being a human! How many sad words did we stil
l keep hidden in our guts!

  The noise of a door being violently slammed woke me up. I quickly turned the lamp on. The young man had disappeared, and there was no trace that anyone had even slept in his bed.

  Laid out on the edge of the bedside table were two five-peso bills. I took them eagerly. My pale face was reflected in the mirror, the white threaded with red veins, and my hair hanging down over my forehead.

  In a low voice, a woman was imploring someone in the corridor:

  ‘Hurry up, for the love of God… if they find out…’

  An electric bell rang distinctly.

  I opened the window that gave onto the patio. A gust of wet air made me shiver. It was still dark, but down in the patio two servants were busy at a lighted doorway.

  I went out.

  My enervation began to dissipate once I reached the street. I went into a milkbar and ordered a coffee. The tables were all filled with taxi drivers and newspaper vendors. The clock hanging over a childishly painted rustic scene struck five.

  I suddenly remembered that everyone here had a home to go to, I saw my sister’s face in my mind’s eye, and I went in desperation out into the street.

  The trials of life came flooding once again into my spirit, the images I did not wish to see or to remember. And with my teeth clenched I walked down the dark alleys, past streets where the shops were protected by metal shutters and wooden boards.

  There was money behind these doors, the owners of these shops were peacefully asleep in their rich bedrooms, and I was wandering the city like a dog.

  I was filled with hatred, I smoked a cigarette and maliciously threw the butt onto some human bundle that was hunched in a shop doorway; a small flame danced among the rags, suddenly the wretch sat up as shapeless as a shadow and I started running, threatened by his gigantic fist.

  In a second-hand shop on the Paseo de Julio, I bought a revolver, loaded it with five bullets and then hopped on a tram and headed to the docks.

  Attempting to realise my desire of going to Europe, I ran up the hanging gangways of the transatlantic liners and offered myself for any task at all to any officer I saw. I went through passageways, into little rooms crammed with luggage and with sextants hanging on the walls, I spoke to men in uniform, who turned round sharply when I spoke to them and who seemed scarcely to understand my query and who waved me away ill-humouredly.

  Over the walkways I saw the sea touching the horizon and the sails of extremely distant boats.

  I walked in a daze, dulled by the bustle, by the screech of the cranes, the whistles and the voices of the porters unloading large bundles.

  I felt a long way from my home; so far that even were I to change my mind about what I had resolved to do I would never be able to go home.

  Then I stopped to talk with the bargees, who laughed at my offers, sometimes coming out of smoky kitchens to answer me, their faces set in brutish expressions, so that I left without waiting for an answer, and I walked along the edge of the docks with my eyes fixed on the oily violet waters that licked the granite with a guttural noise. I was tired. The vision of the enormous slanting ships’ chimneys, the movement of the chains, the shouts of the dockworkers, the loneliness of the slender masts, the attention now divided between a face that appeared at a porthole and a heavy piece of piping suspended over my head by a winch, all that movement composed of a mashing-together of all the voices, whistles, blows and knocks – all of this revealed me to be so small when faced with life that I no longer dared to have any hope.

  The air along the shoreline was riven with a metallic shiver.

  From the shaded streets formed by the high walls of the warehouses I passed out into the terrible clarity of the sun; I was jostled on all sides; the bright flags of the ships rippled in the wind; further down, between a black wall and the red side of a transatlantic vessel, men were incessantly beating the boat with hammers: this huge demonstration of power and wealth, piles of merchandise and animals kicking as they hung in the air, struck at me with anguish.

  And I came to the inevitable conclusion:

  ‘It’s useless, I’ll have to kill myself.’

  I’d had a vague presentiment of this.

  Already I had been seduced by the theatrical glamour that accompanied the idea of mourning at a suicide’s wake.

  I envied the corpses around whose coffins wept beautiful women, and my masculinity was painfully intimidated when I saw them bent over at the side of a coffin.

  I would have liked to have occupied a dead man’s sumptuous bed; like dead men I would have liked to be adorned with flowers and made beautiful by the gentle light of candles, to receive into my eyes and onto my forehead the tears poured out by young ladies in mourning.

  This was not the first time I had had this thought, but at this moment I was touched by its certainty.

  ‘I do not have to die… but I must kill myself,’ and before I could react, the singular nature of this absurd idea took hungry possession of my will.

  ‘I do not have to die, no… I cannot die… but I have to kill myself.’

  Where did this illogical certainty come from, which has since that moment guided my whole life?

  My mind freed itself of secondary sensations; I was only a heartbeat and a clear-sighted eye open to interior serenity.

  ‘I do not have to die, but I have to kill myself.’

  I went up to a zinc warehouse. Nearby a group of young men was unloading bags from a truck, and the ground was covered by a yellow carpet of corn.

  I thought:

  ‘It must be here,’ and realised, as I took the revolver from my pocket, ‘not through the temples, because it’ll make me ugly, but in the heart.’

  Some unshakeable certainty guided my arm.

  I asked myself:

  ‘Where is my heart?’

  The dull blows coming from inside me revealed its position.

  I looked at the cylinder. I had loaded five bullets. Then I pressed the barrel of the revolver against my jacket.

  A sudden lightness made my knees tremble and I leant against the wall of the warehouse.

  My eyes fixed on the yellow carpet of corn, and I pulled the trigger, slowly, thinking:

  ‘I don’t have to die,’ and the hammer fell… But in that very brief instant that separated the blow of the hammer from the action of the fulminant, I felt my spirit spreading out into a shadowy space.

  I fell to the ground.

  When I woke up in bed in my room, a ray of sunlight was tracing the outline of the curtains onto the white wall.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed was my mother.

  She bent her head over me. Her eyelashes were wet, and her sucked-in cheeks seemed dug out of a wrinkled block of tormented marble.

  Her voice trembled:

  ‘Why did you do it?… oh, why didn’t you tell me everything? Why did you do it, Silvio?’

  I looked at her. I met a face that was a terrible image of pity and remorse.

  ‘Why didn’t you come?… I wouldn’t have said anything. It’s fate, Silvio. What would have become of me if the revolver had fired properly? You’d be here now, with your poor little cold face… Oh, Silvio, Silvio!’ And a heavy tear flowed down the red bag under her eye.

  I felt night falling in my spirit and I leant my head on her lap, as I thought I would wake up in a police cell: in the fog of my memory I saw a circle of uniformed men waving their arms above me.

  Chapter 4

  Judas Iscariot

  Monti was an active and a noble man, as excitable as a swashbuckling soldier of fortune, skinny as an impoverished gentleman. His penetrating gaze did not invalidate the ironic smile that curved his thin lips, lips that had the silky threads of his black moustache to overshadow them. When he got angry his cheeks would redden and his lower lip would tremble down as far as his sunken chin.

  The office and paper store of his business consisted of three rooms that he rented from a Jewish furrier, and was separated from the Hebrew’s stinking
storeroom by a corridor that was always filled with dirty redheaded kids.

  The first room was something along the lines of an office-cum-fine paper display room. Its windows let onto Rivadavia Street and the passers-by could see, neatly lined up in a pine display case, reams of salmon-coloured paper, green paper, blue and red paper, rolls of impermeable stiff marbled paper, blocks of silk paper and what was called ‘butter’ paper, cubes of labels with multi-coloured flowers on them, sheaves of rough-surfaced paper with flowers and a watermark in the form of a pale vase.

  On the off-blue wall a print of the Gulf of Naples showed the lacquered blue sea and the dark coast sown with little white squares: the houses.

  In this room, when he was in a good mood, Monti would sing in his clear and tuneful voice.

  I liked hearing him. He sang with feeling; it was clear that by singing he called up the spaces and daydreams of his homeland.

  When Monti hired me on commission, giving me a set of samples of paper classified by quality and price, he said:

  ‘Okay, time to sell. Each kilo of paper gets you three centavos commission.’

  Hard beginnings!

  I remember that for a whole week I spent six hours per day walking pointlessly. It was unreal. I didn’t sell a single kilo of paper after walking forty-five leagues. In desperation I went into greengrocers’ shops, into stores and warehouses, I went round the markets, I stood outside butchers and pharmacies, but all in vain.

  Sometimes people, extremely politely, would send me to the devil, others would tell me to come back next week, others would claim that ‘I’ve already got a salesman who’s been serving me for a while’, others would refuse to see me, some would say that my merchandise was far too expensive, a few would say that it wasn’t of a good enough quality, and some strange people that the quality was too high.

  At midday, when I got back to Monti’s office, I would collapse onto a column made of stacked reams and say nothing, dulled by fatigue and disappointment.

  Mario, another salesman, a sixteen-year-old slacker, tall as a poplar, all arms and legs, laughed at my useless travails.

  How shameless Mario was! He looked like a telegraph pole with a tiny head on top, and a fabulous forest of curly hair on top of the head. He walked with huge strides, with a red leather briefcase under one arm. When he got to the office he would throw the briefcase into a corner and take off his hat, a round derby that was so greasy you could use it to lubricate the axle of a cart. He was a devil for selling and was always happy.