Roberto Arlt - The Mad Toy

And as my desire develops, I reconstruct in my mind the clothes the courtesan would wear to beautify herself, the well-proportioned hats she uses to cover herself and make herself even more seductive, and I imagine her next to her bed, in a state of semi-nakedness more terrible than complete nudity.

And as my desire for this woman, for any woman, grows slowly within me, I go again and again through my actions and imagine how happy a love of this kind would make me, with its riches and its glory; I imagine the sensations that will fill my body if from one day to the next, having become a wealthy man, I should awaken in that bedroom with my young semi-naked beloved putting on her stockings next to the bed, as I have on occasion seen in dirty magazines.

And suddenly my whole body, my poor man’s body, calls out to the Lord of Heaven:

‘And I, I, my Lord, will never have a lover as beautiful as the ones from the dirty magazines!’

A feeling of disgust began to irritate my life as I spent time in that cavern, surrounded by people who vomited forth nothing more than words of greed and fury. I was contaminated by the hatred that ran across their ugly mugs and there were moments when I perceived inside the box of my skull a slow-moving red mist.

A terrible tiredness crushed my arms. There were times when I wanted to sleep straight through two days and two nights. I had the sensation that my spirit was becoming filthy, that the skin of my spirit was tainted by the leprosy that accompanied these people; a leprosy that cut dark caves into my spirit. I went to sleep half-wild; I woke up silent. Despair swelled my veins, and I felt, growing between my bones and my skin, a force that I had never before sensed. I spent hours with my bitterness, sunk in painful abstractions. One night, Doña María ordered me in a rage to clean the toilet because it was disgusting. I obeyed in silence. I believe I was looking for motives to lead me to some obscure conclusion.

Another night, Don Gaetano, for a joke, put one hand on my stomach and another on my chest when I wanted to leave, just to make sure I wasn’t stealing books, keeping them hidden close to my body. I couldn’t smile or get angry. This was how things had to be, yes, just like this; it was necessary that my life, that life nurtured for nine months in sorrow in a woman’s belly, should suffer all these excesses, all these humiliations, all this anguish.

I started to go deaf at this point. For a few months I lost the ability to perceive sounds. A sharpened silence — silence can even take the shape of a knife — cut at the voices in my ears.

I did not think. My understanding was nothing more than a bowl-shaped pit of grievance that grew deeper and thicker each day. This was how my grievance began to build up.

They gave me a bell, a cowbell. How funny it was — praise be! — to see a lummox of my size performing such a menial task. They set me at the door to the cavern during the hours when there were most people in the street and I rang the cowbell to call people’s attention, to make people turn their heads and look at me, to make people know that this was a place that sold books, beautiful books… and that the noble stories and tales of famous beauties could be purchased from the sly-looking man or the fat, pale woman. And I rang the cowbell.

Many eyes stripped me slowly. I saw faces of women that I would never forget. I saw smiles that still ring in my eyes like jeers…

Ah! The truth is I was tired… but isn’t it written that ‘you will earn your bread by the sweat of your brow’?

And I mopped the floor, asking beautiful women to move their delicate little feet so that I could wipe the spot where they had been standing, and I went shopping with an enormous basket; I was an errand-boy… I suppose that if they had spat in my face then I might have peacefully wiped it away with the back of my hand.

A darkness fell over me, growing ever thicker. My memory began to lose the shapes of faces that I had loved with tearful affection; I began to imagine that my days were separated by wide tracts of time… and my eyes were too dry to cry.

Then I repeated the words that had until now only had a vague meaning in my life.

‘You will suffer,’ I said to myself, ‘you will suffer… you will suffer… you will suffer…

‘You will suffer… you will suffer…

‘You will suffer…’ My words faded away.

This is how I grew more mature during that hellish winter.

One night, in July, just as Don Gaetano was pulling the metal shutter over the door, Doña María remembered that she had left a bundle of clothes that had been brought from the laundry that afternoon. So she said:

‘ Che , Silvio, come on, we’ll get it.’

While Don Gaetano turned the lights back on, I accompanied her. I remember it exactly.

The bundle was in the centre of the kitchen, on a chair. Doña María, her back to me, grabbed the bundle by its topknot. As I looked around, I saw some coals still glowing in a brazier. And in that briefest of instants I thought:

‘Here we go…’ And without hesitation, grabbing a coal, I threw it into a pile of papers that were next to a heavily laden bookcase, while Doña María began walking away.

Then Don Gaetano turned the key in the fusebox, and we were out in the street.

Doña María looked up at the starry sky.

‘Pretty night… it’s going to freeze…’ I too looked up to the sky.

‘Yes, it’s a pretty night.’

While Stinking God slept, I sat up in my pseudo-bed, looking at the white circle of light that came through the bull’s eye from the street and planted itself on the wall.

In the darkness I smiled at my freedom… free… definitely free, because of the sense of manliness my action had given me. I thought of, or rather, I collected moments of delight.

‘Now is the time for cocottes .’

A friendliness, as fresh as a glass of wine, made me fraternise with the whole world in these midnight hours. It said:

‘This is the hour of little girls… of poets… but how ridiculous I am… even so, I would still kiss your feet. Life, Life, how pretty you are, Life… ah! But don’t you remember? I am the delivery boy… the servant… yes, Don Gaetano’s… and even so I love all the most beautiful things of the Earth… I want to be handsome and witty… to wear a bright uniform… to stay silent… Life, how pretty you are, Life… how pretty… Lord, how pretty you are.’

There was a pleasure to be found in smiling slowly. I passed my middle and index fingers over my cheeks. The croaking of car horns that could be heard down there, on Esmeralda Street, was like a hoarse announcement of joy.

Then I leant my head onto my shoulder and shut my eyes, thinking:

‘Which painter could paint the portrait of the sleeping servant, the one who smiles in his sleep because he has set his master’s den alight?’

Then, slowly, my drunken excitement subsided. An irrational seriousness took its place, a serious attitude of the kind that it is a mark of good taste to display in public. And I felt like laughing at this ridiculous, paternalistic seriousness. But because seriousness is hypocrisy, and because ‘conscience’ needs to be acted out in private, I said to myself:

‘You are accused… you are a scoundrel… an incendiary. You have enough remorse for a whole lifetime. You will be interrogated by the police and by the courts and by the devil… prisoner in the dock, this is no joke… you don’t understand that you need to be serious… you’re going to be thrown headfirst into the clink.’

But my attempt at seriousness did not convince me. It sounded empty, like an empty can. No, I couldn’t take this mystification seriously. And now I was a free man, and what did society have to do with this freedom? And now I was free I could do whatever I liked… kill myself if I wanted… but that was a bit ridiculous… and I… I needed to do something beautifully serious, perfectly serious: to love Life. And I repeated: