Roberto Arlt - The Mad Toy

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.