Roberto Arlt - The Mad Toy

‘What will become of me?’

Oh, it is your duty to gain knowledge of the miseries of this filthy world, to eat the liver that you asked for in the butcher’s, pretending it was for the cat, to go to bed early so as not to waste the lamp-oil!

An image of my mother came to me again, her face relaxed into wrinkles of suffering; I thought of my sister, who would never complain and who grew pale in a life bent over her textbooks, and my soul fell from my hands. I felt compelled to button hole passers-by, to take their sleeves and say: ‘I was discharged from the army, just because, do you get it? I think I can work… work with engines… fix aeroplanes… and they’ve discharged me… just because.’

I said to myself:

‘Lila, ah, you don’t know her, Lila is my sister; I thought, I knew we would go to the movies one day, we’d have vegetable soup instead of liver, we’d go out on Sundays, I’d take her to Palermo. But now… Isn’t it an injustice, don’t you agree, an injustice? I’m not a boy. I’m sixteen years old, why would they throw me out? I’d do the work of two normal men, and now… What will my mother say? What will Lila say? Oh, if you only knew her. She’s a serious girl: she gets the highest marks in the Escuela Normal. We had better food at home with what I earned. And now, what am I going to do…?’

Now it’s night, on Lavalle Street, next to the Palace of Justice I stopped next to a sign.

FURNISHED ROOMS: I PESO

I went into the lobby, illuminated weakly with an electric bulb, and paid the amount in a little wooden shed. The owner, a fat man, in shirtsleeves despite the cold, took me to a patio filled with green flowerpots and, waving to the houseboy, shouted at him:

‘Felix, this one goes up to 24.’

I looked up. This patio was the base of a cube, whose faces were formed by five-storey walls, all filled with curtained windows. The lit walls could be seen through some of the windows, others were dark and from somewhere unclear came the noise of women, muffled laughter and the clattering of pots.

We went up a spiral staircase. The houseboy, a spotty urchin in a blue apron, went ahead of me, dragging his duster, whose threadbare feathers rubbed against the floor.

We finally got there. The passage, like the lobby, was weakly lit.

The houseboy opened the door and turned on the light. I said to him:

‘Wake me up at five tomorrow, don’t forget.’

‘Okay, see you tomorrow.’

Exhausted by my suffering and my worry I let myself fall onto the bed.

The room: two iron bedsteads covered with blue mattresses with little white tassels, a varnished iron washbowl and an imitation mahogany table. In one corner the mirror in the wardrobe reflected the door that was more like a plank.

Sharp perfume floated in the air that was kept prisoner between these four white walls.

I turned my face to the wall. A previous guest had drawn an obscene picture on it in pencil.

I thought:

‘Tomorrow I may go to Europe…’ And covering my head with the pillow, I fell to sleep, exhausted. It was an extremely heavy sleep, into which there slipped the following hallucination:

On an asphalt plain, violet stains of oil shone sadly under a reddish-brown sky. At the zenith there was a piece of sky that was the purest blue. Cement cubes were scattered everywhere, pointing up to the sky without any order.

Some were as small as dice, others as large and voluminous as skyscrapers. Suddenly an arm, horridly thin, stretched up from the horizon towards the zenith. It was yellow as a broomstick and its squared-off fingers were held together and extended.

I backed off in fear, but the horridly thin arm grew larger, and I, in trying to escape from it, grew smaller, I bumped against the cubes of cement, I hid behind them; to see what was happening I peered out from behind the edge of a cube, and the arm as thin as a broomstick was there, with its stiff fingers, over my head, touching the zenith.

The light had faded at the horizon, and was now as fine as the edge of a sword.

And there’s where the face appeared.

It was a giant bulbous forehead, a hairy eyebrow and a piece of jaw. The eye, the mad eye, was under the wrinkled lid. The cornea was immense, the pupil round and wandering. It winked at me sadly…

‘Sir, hey, sir…’

I sat up with a start.

‘You’ve slept in your clothes, sir.’

I looked sternly at my interlocutor.

‘Yes, that’s right.’

The boy took a couple of paces backwards.

‘I thought I should wake you up because we’re going to share this room tonight. Are you upset?’

‘No, why?’ And after rubbing my eyes I swung my feet off the bed and sat on the edge. I looked at him.

The brim of a black derby hat shaded his forehead and his eyes. His gaze was false, and its velvety sheen was only skin-deep. He had a scar next to his lower lip, by his chin, and his full, too-red lips smiled in his white face. His overcoat was tailored too tight and showed off the shape of his little body.

I spoke to him brusquely:

‘What’s the time?’

‘Quarter to eleven.’

I stayed where I was, sleepy. I looked unhappily at my dull shoes, at the point where a few stitches had come loose after a repair, allowing one to see a patch of sock through the hole.

The young man meanwhile hung his hat on a hook and threw his leather gloves down onto a chair with a tired gesture. I went back to looking at him sidelong, but looked away because he saw me observing him.

He was well-dressed, and from his rigid starched collar all the way down to his patent leather boots with their cream-coloured spats, one could recognise him as a wealthy figure.

However, I don’t know why it occurred to me to think:

‘He must have dirty feet.’

Smiling a lying smile he turned his head and a lock of his carefully arranged hair fell down to one side, far enough to cover his earlobe. In a gentle voice, giving me a heavy sidelong glance, he said:

‘You seem tired, no?’

‘Yes, a little.’

He took off his overcoat, whose silk lining was rubbed shiny at the creases. A certain greasy smell came from his black clothes and I considered him with sudden unease; then, without thinking about what I was doing, I asked him:

‘Are your clothes dirty, then?’

He understood me immediately, but he answered tangentially:

‘Did I hurt you, waking you up like that?’

‘No, why would it hurt me?’

‘Well, kiddo. Some people get hurt like that. I had a friend in boarding school who had an epileptic fit if you woke him suddenly.’

‘Too sensitive.’

‘As sensitive as a woman, wouldn’t you say, kiddo, is that it?’

‘So you had a friend who was over-sensitive? Look, che , do me a favour and open the door, I’m suffocating in here. Let a bit of air in. It smells of dirty clothes in here.’

The intruder frowned a little… He went towards the door, but before he got there a number of postcards fell to the floor from his pocket.

He hurriedly bent down to pick them up, and I approached him.

Then I saw: they were all photographs of men and women, copulating in various positions.

The unknown man’s face was purple. He babbled:

‘I don’t know how they got there, they’re not mine, a friend…’

I didn’t reply.

Standing next to him, I was looking with terrible fixity at one of the group. He said something, I don’t know what. I wasn’t listening. I looked in shock at a terrible photograph. A woman lying prostrate before a rough man dressed as a porter, wearing only a cap with a rubber visor and a black band round his stomach.

I turned back to the degenerate.

He was pale now, with his eager pupils extremely dilated, and a tear shining at his blackened eyelids. His hand fell on my arm.