Roberto Arlt - The Mad Toy

As I listened to him, I was astonished.

Who was this poor human being who could say such terrible and novel things? Who asked for nothing more than a little love?

I got up to stroke his forehead.

‘Don’t touch me!’ he cried out. ‘Don’t touch me. My heart is breaking. Go.’

Now I was in my bed, motionless, afraid of making any noise that would startle him to death.

Time passed slowly, and my conscience that was displaced by strangeness and fatigue gathered in this one space the silent pain of our species.

I still thought that I could hear his words… There was an anguished visage somehow inside his black and twisted face, and with his feverishly dry mouth he cried out into the darkness:

‘And I wouldn’t care about getting knocked up and cleaning his clothes, as long as he loved me and went out to work for me.’

To get ‘knocked up’! The words came so smoothly to his lips!

‘Get knocked up.’

His whole miserable body would become deformed, but ‘she’, made glorious by being loved so deeply, would walk among the crowd and not notice it, only seeing the face of the one to whom she had so happily subjugated herself.

The trials of being a human! How many sad words did we still keep hidden in our guts!

The noise of a door being violently slammed woke me up. I quickly turned the lamp on. The young man had disappeared, and there was no trace that anyone had even slept in his bed.

Laid out on the edge of the bedside table were two five-peso bills. I took them eagerly. My pale face was reflected in the mirror, the white threaded with red veins, and my hair hanging down over my forehead.

In a low voice, a woman was imploring someone in the corridor:

‘Hurry up, for the love of God… if they find out…’

An electric bell rang distinctly.

I opened the window that gave onto the patio. A gust of wet air made me shiver. It was still dark, but down in the patio two servants were busy at a lighted doorway.

I went out.

My enervation began to dissipate once I reached the street. I went into a milkbar and ordered a coffee. The tables were all filled with taxi drivers and newspaper vendors. The clock hanging over a childishly painted rustic scene struck five.

I suddenly remembered that everyone here had a home to go to, I saw my sister’s face in my mind’s eye, and I went in desperation out into the street.

The trials of life came flooding once again into my spirit, the images I did not wish to see or to remember. And with my teeth clenched I walked down the dark alleys, past streets where the shops were protected by metal shutters and wooden boards.

There was money behind these doors, the owners of these shops were peacefully asleep in their rich bedrooms, and I was wandering the city like a dog.

I was filled with hatred, I smoked a cigarette and maliciously threw the butt onto some human bundle that was hunched in a shop doorway; a small flame danced among the rags, suddenly the wretch sat up as shapeless as a shadow and I started running, threatened by his gigantic fist.

In a second-hand shop on the Paseo de Julio, I bought a revolver, loaded it with five bullets and then hopped on a tram and headed to the docks.

Attempting to realise my desire of going to Europe, I ran up the hanging gangways of the transatlantic liners and offered myself for any task at all to any officer I saw. I went through passageways, into little rooms crammed with luggage and with sextants hanging on the walls, I spoke to men in uniform, who turned round sharply when I spoke to them and who seemed scarcely to understand my query and who waved me away ill-humouredly.

Over the walkways I saw the sea touching the horizon and the sails of extremely distant boats.

I walked in a daze, dulled by the bustle, by the screech of the cranes, the whistles and the voices of the porters unloading large bundles.

I felt a long way from my home; so far that even were I to change my mind about what I had resolved to do I would never be able to go home.

Then I stopped to talk with the bargees, who laughed at my offers, sometimes coming out of smoky kitchens to answer me, their faces set in brutish expressions, so that I left without waiting for an answer, and I walked along the edge of the docks with my eyes fixed on the oily violet waters that licked the granite with a guttural noise. I was tired. The vision of the enormous slanting ships’ chimneys, the movement of the chains, the shouts of the dockworkers, the loneliness of the slender masts, the attention now divided between a face that appeared at a porthole and a heavy piece of piping suspended over my head by a winch, all that movement composed of a mashing-together of all the voices, whistles, blows and knocks — all of this revealed me to be so small when faced with life that I no longer dared to have any hope.

The air along the shoreline was riven with a metallic shiver.

From the shaded streets formed by the high walls of the warehouses I passed out into the terrible clarity of the sun; I was jostled on all sides; the bright flags of the ships rippled in the wind; further down, between a black wall and the red side of a transatlantic vessel, men were incessantly beating the boat with hammers: this huge demonstration of power and wealth, piles of merchandise and animals kicking as they hung in the air, struck at me with anguish.

And I came to the inevitable conclusion:

‘It’s useless, I’ll have to kill myself.’

I’d had a vague presentiment of this.

Already I had been seduced by the theatrical glamour that accompanied the idea of mourning at a suicide’s wake.

I envied the corpses around whose coffins wept beautiful women, and my masculinity was painfully intimidated when I saw them bent over at the side of a coffin.

I would have liked to have occupied a dead man’s sumptuous bed; like dead men I would have liked to be adorned with flowers and made beautiful by the gentle light of candles, to receive into my eyes and onto my forehead the tears poured out by young ladies in mourning.

This was not the first time I had had this thought, but at this moment I was touched by its certainty.

‘I do not have to die… but I must kill myself,’ and before I could react, the singular nature of this absurd idea took hungry possession of my will.

‘I do not have to die, no… I cannot die… but I have to kill myself.’

Where did this illogical certainty come from, which has since that moment guided my whole life?

My mind freed itself of secondary sensations; I was only a heartbeat and a clear-sighted eye open to interior serenity.

‘I do not have to die, but I have to kill myself.’

I went up to a zinc warehouse. Nearby a group of young men was unloading bags from a truck, and the ground was covered by a yellow carpet of corn.

I thought:

‘It must be here,’ and realised, as I took the revolver from my pocket, ‘not through the temples, because it’ll make me ugly, but in the heart.’

Some unshakeable certainty guided my arm.

I asked myself:

‘Where is my heart?’

The dull blows coming from inside me revealed its position.

I looked at the cylinder. I had loaded five bullets. Then I pressed the barrel of the revolver against my jacket.

A sudden lightness made my knees tremble and I leant against the wall of the warehouse.

My eyes fixed on the yellow carpet of corn, and I pulled the trigger, slowly, thinking:

‘I don’t have to die,’ and the hammer fell… But in that very brief instant that separated the blow of the hammer from the action of the fulminant, I felt my spirit spreading out into a shadowy space.

I fell to the ground.

When I woke up in bed in my room, a ray of sunlight was tracing the outline of the curtains onto the white wall.