Roberto Arlt - The Mad Toy

Lucio hid the packages in the wardrobe and then sat pensively on the edge of the table, grasping a knee in both hands.

‘What about the Geography? Where is it?’

The silence weighed down on our sodden spirits, on our livid faces, on our half-open bruised hands.

I got up solemnly, without taking my eyes off the white wall.

‘Give me the revolver, I’ll go.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Irzubeta said as he sat up in the bed, and in the darkness we headed out into the streets without saying a word, with hard faces and slumped shoulders.

I had finished undressing when three frantic blows sounded out on the street door, three urgent blows that made my hair stand on end.

I thought in a panic:

‘The police have followed me… the police… the police…’ My soul panted.

The howling blows were repeated another three times, more anxiously, more furiously, more urgently.

I took the revolver and ran naked to the door.

I had scarcely opened the door when Enrique exploded through it into my arms. Some books fell onto the pavement.

‘Shut the door, shut the door, they’re following me; shut the door, Silvio,’ Irzubeta said in a hoarse voice.

I pulled him in under the balcony that ran round the patio.

‘What is it, Silvio, what’s happening?’ My mother shouted fearfully from her room.

‘Nothing, calm down… a policeman running after Enrique for a fight.’

In the silence of the night, the silence that fear turned into an accomplice of the forces of law and order, a cop’s whistle ran out, and a horse ran at a gallop past the top of the road. And again this terrible sound, multiplied, was repeated at various points in the neighbourhood.

Like streamers, the shrill calls of the policemen crossed the air.

A neighbour opened his street door, we heard people talking, and Enrique and I, in the darkness of the balcony, held tight to one another, trembling. The menacing whistles came from all sides, so many of them; as well as this part of the sinister manhunt, we heard the noise of horses’ harnesses, frantic galloping, sudden pauses on the slippery pavements, the sound of the police men retreating. And I held the quarry in my arms, his body trembling in fear against me, and an infinite compassion pulled me towards this ruined boy.

I dragged him towards my den. His teeth were chattering. Quivering with fear, he fell into a chair and his excited and wide-open fearful eyes fixed on the rosy lampshade.

Once again a horse crossed the street, but so slowly that I thought it would stop in front of my house. Then the policeman geed up his horse and the whistles, which had been becoming ever less frequent, stopped completely.

‘Water, give me water.’

I passed him a bottle and he drank eagerly. The water sang in his throat. A large sigh caused his chest to deflate.

Then, without turning his eyes away from the lampshade, he smiled with the strange and uncertain smile of someone awakening from a hallucinatory fear.

He said:

‘Thank you, Silvio,’ and he carried on smiling, his soul infinitely expansive with the unexpected prodigy that was his salvation.

‘But tell me, how did it happen?’

‘I was walking down the street. There wasn’t anyone around. I turned the corner of South America, and realised that there was a cop looking at me from under a streetlamp. I stopped instinctively and he shouted at me: “What have you got there?” I don’t need to tell you that I ran like the devil. He ran after me, but because he was wearing his waterproof cape he couldn’t catch up with me… I left him in my wake… and then I heard another one coming in the distance on horseback… and all the whistling… the guy running after me was blowing his whistle. So I made an effort and got here.’

‘You see… And all for not leaving the books at Lucio’s house! What if they’d caught you!’

‘They’d have taken us all to the pen.’

‘And what about the books? You didn’t leave the books in the street?’

‘No, they fell here in the corridor.’

When we went to look for them, I had to explain things to my mother:

‘It’s nothing bad. Enrique was playing billiards with another guy and accidentally ripped the felt. The owner wanted to charge him for it and because he didn’t have any money there was a big row.’

We are in Enrique’s house.

A red lightning bolt passes through the little window of the puppet hovel.

In his corner Enrique sits and thinks, and a wrinkle divides his brow from the hairline to his eyebrows. Lucio is smoking, reclined on a heap of dirty clothing, and the smoke from the cigarette fogs over his pale face. Over the latrine, from a neighbouring house, comes the melody of a waltz being picked out slowly on a piano.

I am sitting on the floor. A soldier with no legs, red and green, looks at me from his crumpled cardboard house. Enrique’s sisters are arguing outside in their disagreeable voices.

‘So…?’

Enrique lifts his noble head and looks at Lucio.

‘So?’

I look at Enrique.

‘What do you think, Silvio?’ Lucio continues.

‘We don’t need to do it, we should stop mucking around, if we don’t we’re going to get caught.’

‘The night before last we nearly got nabbed twice.’

‘Yes, it couldn’t be clearer.’ And for the tenth time Lucio reads out an extract from some newspaper: ‘Today at three o’clock in the morning, Officer Manuel Carlés, patrolling Avellaneda and South America Streets, surprised an individual of suspicious appearance carrying a package under one arm. Upon being asked to halt, the unknown individual ran off, disappearing into one of the many patches of waste ground in the environs. The commissioner of Section 38 has taken control of the case.”’

‘So the club is to be disbanded?’ Enrique says.

‘No. Its activities will be halted for an indefinite period,’ Lucio replies. ‘It makes no sense to carry out more jobs now that the police suspect something.’

‘Yes, that would be dumb.’

‘What about the books?’

‘How many are there?’

‘Twenty-seven.’

‘Nine books each… we’ll have to be careful about erasing the stamps from the School Board.’

‘And the light bulbs?’

Lucio replies quickly.

‘Look, che , I don’t want to hear anything more about the light bulbs. I’d rather throw them in the toilet than try to fence them.’

‘Yes, sure, it’s a bit dangerous now.’

Irzubeta is silent.

‘Are you sad, che Enrique?’

A strange smile twists his mouth; shrugging his shoulders, vehemently, sticking his chest out, he says:

‘You’re stopping, right, it’s not a game for everyone, but me, even if I’m on my own, I’m going to continue.’

On the wall of the puppet hovel, the red lightning bolt illuminates the adolescent’s sunken profile.

Because the landlord was going to raise the rent, we moved out of the neighbourhood, switching to a large and creepy house on Cuenca Street, in the depths of Floresta.

I stopped seeing Lucio and Enrique, and a bitter shade of misery ruled over my days.

When I turned fifteen, one evening my mother said to me:

‘Silvio, you need to work.’

I was reading a book at the table and lifted my eyes to look at her with resentment. I thought: work, always work. But I didn’t answer.

She was standing in front of the window. The clear bluish twilight affected her white hair and her yellowish forehead, struck across with wrinkles, and she looked at me sidelong, half ashamed and half pitying and I avoided her eyes.

She carried on, understanding the aggression in my silence.