Roberto Arlt - The Mad Toy

‘Yes, Life… you are pretty, Life… did you know it? From here on in I will love all the pretty things of the Earth… of course… I will worship trees, and houses and the sky… I will adore everything that there is in you… and also… tell me, Life, isn’t it the case that I’m an intelligent kid? Did you ever know anyone like me?’

Then I fell asleep.

The first person to enter the bookshop in the morning was Don Gaetano. I followed him. Everything was as we had left it. The atmosphere was filled with damp, and in the back, on a line of leather-bound spines, a patch of sun came in through the skylight.

I went to the kitchen. The coal had gone out, it was lying in a pool of water that had formed when Stinking God washed the plates.

That was the last day I worked there.

After doing the washing up, closing the doors and opening the shutters, I went back to bed, because it was cold.

On the wall, the sun slantingly reddened the bricks.

My mother was sewing in another room and my sister was preparing her lessons. I got ready to read. On a chair next to the bedstead were the following works:

Virgin and Mother by Luis de Val, Bahía’s Electrical Engineering and Nietzsche’s Antichrist. Virgin and Mother , four volumes of 1,800 pages each, had been lent to me by a neighbour who took in ironing.

When I was sitting comfortably, I looked at Virgin and Mother with little enthusiasm. It was clear that I wasn’t in the mood for some gruesome doorstop, and so I decided to take up Electrical Engineering and set to studying the theory of rotating magnetic fields.

I read slowly and with satisfaction. I thought, once I had interiorised the complex explanation of multiphase currents:

‘It is a sign of universal intelligence to be able to appreciate all kinds of beauty,’ and the names of Ferranti and Siemens-Halske21 sounded harmoniously in my ears.

I thought:

‘One day I too will be able to say in front of a conference full of engineers, “Yes, sirs… the electromagnetic currents the sun generates can be used and condensed.” How stupid, they need to be condensed first, and then used! Damn, how can you condense the sun’s electromagnetic currents?’

I knew, because of various scientific announcements that appeared in the papers, that Tesla,22 the wizard of electricity, had come up with the idea of a ray condenser.

And I dreamt like this until it grew dark, when I heard the voice of Rebeca Naidath, a friend of my mother’s, in the other room:

‘Hello! How are you, Frau Drodman? How’s my little girl?’

I lifted my head from my book in order to listen.

Señora Rebeca was of the Jewish faith. Her soul was petty because her body was small. She walked like a seal and examined everything like an eagle… I hated her because of certain bad things she’d done to me.

‘Is Silvio there? I need to talk to him.’ I was in the next room in a flash.

‘Hello! How are you, Frau, what’s up?’

‘Do you know about mechanics?’

‘Of course… well, I know something. Didn’t you show her the letter from Ricaldoni, mama?’

And it was true, Ricaldoni had congratulated me on some ridiculous mechanical contraptions I had thought up in my leisure hours.

Señora Rebeca said:

‘Yes, I saw it. Here you go.’ And she held out a newspaper and pointed to an advert with her dirt-haloed finger. She said:

‘My husband told me to come and tell you. Read it.’

With her fists on her hips she stuck out her bust towards me. She was adorned with a black hat whose mangy feathers hung down in a lamentable fashion. Her black eyes examined my face ironically, and every now and then, lifting a hand from her hip, she would scratch her curved nose with her fingers.

I read:

‘Apprentice aviation mechanics required. All enquiries to the Military Aviation School. Palomar de Caseros.’

‘Yeah, if you take the train to La Paternal, tell the guard to let you off at La Paternal, you need to take the 88. It’ll leave you right by the door.’

‘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.