by Roberto Arlt
‘Shall we play some three-hand tute?’7
‘Lay off your tute, man.’
‘It looks like it’s raining.’
‘All the better,’ said Enrique. ‘This is the sort of night that Montparnasse and Thénardier liked. Thénardier said: “Jean Jacques Rousseau did worse than me.” He was a ranún, Thénardier was; I love that gypsy word.’8
‘Is it still raining?’
I looked out onto the small square.
The water was falling at a slant, and between two rows of trees the wind moved it in a grey curtain.
Looking at the greenness of the branches and foliage lit up in the silver clarity of the arc lamps, I had a vision of parks shaken on a summer night by the noise of popular festivals, and the red rockets exploding in the blue sky. This unconscious evocation made me sad.
I have a clear memory of that last eventful night.
The musicians set free another song, one that on the blackboard was given the English name Kiss-me.
In this downbeat atmosphere, the melody swayed in a distant and tragic rhythm. I would have said that it was the voice of a chorus of poor emigrants on the deck of a transatlantic ferry, singing as the sun drowned in the heavy green waters.
I remember how my attention was drawn to the head of a violinist, Socratic and resplendently bald. There were smoked-glass spectacles balanced on his nose and you could tell how much his covered eyes had to work by the way in which his neck stuck out over the music stand.
Lucio asked me:
‘Are you still with Eleonora?’
‘No, we broke up already. She didn’t want to be my girlfriend any more.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because.’
Her image, united with the long sobs of the violins, penetrated me violently. It was a summons from my other voice, to look on her serene and sweet face. Oh! How her now distant smile had filled me with a painful ecstasy, and from the table, in words of the spirit, I spoke to her as follows, while I enjoyed a bitterness that had more savour than any voluptuous pleasure:
‘Ah! If only I could have told you how much I loved you, with the music of Kiss-me as our accompaniment… to use this song to keep you from going… then perhaps… but she had loved me too… is it not true that you loved me, Eleonora?’
‘It’s stopped raining… Let’s go.’
‘Let’s go.’
Enrique threw a few coins on the table. He asked me:
‘Do you have the revolver?’
‘Yes.’
‘It won’t get stuck?’
‘I tried it out the other day. The bullet went through two builders’ planks.’
Irzubeta added:
‘If this goes well I’ll buy myself a Browning; but just in case I’ve brought my knuckle-dusters.’
‘Are they sharpened?’
‘Pointy as anything.’
A policeman walked towards us across the lawn in the middle of the square.
Lucio called out in a loud voice, loud enough for the cop to hear him:
‘The geography teacher’s out to get me, che, really has it in for me!’
Once we’d crossed the square diagonally, we found ourselves in front of the school walls, and when we got there we noticed that it was beginning to rain again.
There was a line of bushy plane trees around the corner of the building, which made the darkness in that triangle extremely thick. The rain made its own music on the foliage.
A tall fence bared its sharp teeth as it tied the two tall and sombre school buildings together.
Walking slowly we scrutinised the darkness; then without saying a word I climbed up the bars, put a foot in one of the rings that linked every pair of railings and jumped right down into the patio, staying for a few seconds in the position I had fallen into, that is, crouching down, my eyes immobile, touching the wet tiles with my fingertips.
‘No one’s here, che,’ whispered Enrique, who had just followed me down.
‘It doesn’t look like it, but why’s Lucio not coming?’
We heard the regular beat of horseshoes on the cobbles in the street, and then another horse passing by, and the noise gradually died away in the shadows.
Lucio stuck his head over the iron lances. He put his foot into a crosspiece and then fell with such skill that the tiles scarcely crunched under the sole of his shoe.
‘Who was it, che?’
‘A policeman and then a watchman. I made it look like I was waiting for the bondi.’9
‘Let’s put our gloves on, che.’
‘Sure, I forgot in the excitement.’
‘And now where do we go? It’s darker than…’
‘This way.’
Lucio was our guide; I unholstered my revolver and the three of us headed towards the patio that was covered by the second-floor terrace.
In the darkness it was possible almost to make out a colonnade.
Suddenly I became bitingly conscious of such superiority over my fellow humans that I grasped Enrique’s arm in a brotherly fashion and said:
‘We’re going very slowly.’
And I incautiously abandoned my measured slow pace and made the noise of my steps ring out.
From the edge of the buildings the footsteps came back multiplied.
The certainty of our absolute impunity infected my comrades with an absolute optimism, and we laughed with such strident guffaws that from the dark street a stray dog barked at us three times.
Happy that we could slap danger in the face with such courage, we would have liked to have been accompanied by the bright sounds of a fanfare and the joyful clatter of a drum-band, we would have liked to wake everyone up, to show them the joy that fills one’s soul when you tear up the lawbooks and head smiling into sin.
Lucio, who was at our head, turned round:
‘I move that we attack the National Bank in a few days. Silvio, you can open the strongboxes with your arclamps.’
‘Bonnot must be applauding us from hell,’ Enrique said.
‘Long live the apaches Lacombe10 and Valet,’ I exclaimed.
‘Eureka,’ Lucio shouted.
‘What’s up?’
The young man replied:
‘That’s it… didn’t I tell you, Lucio? They’ll have to put up a statue to you… that’s it, you know what?’
We gathered round him.
‘Have you noticed? Did you notice, Enrique, that there’s a jewellery shop next to the Electra Cinema…? I’m serious, che, don’t laugh. There’s no roof on the cinema toilet… I remember that well; we can get onto the jewellery shop roof from there. We buy some tickets and we’re in and out before the show’s over. We can put chloroform through the keyhole with an eye dropper.’
‘Sure, you know what, Lucio? It would be a great score. And who’d suspect a bunch of kids. It’s really worth thinking about.’
He lit a cigarette, and the glow of the match revealed a marble staircase.
We headed up.
When we got to the hallway Lucio lit up the space with his electric lantern, a tight parallelogram with a dark little passage running off one side. Nailed to the wooden doorframe was an enamelled plate that said, devoutly, ‘Library’.
We went to have a closer look. The door was old and its tall panels, painted green, left a space of about an inch between the jambs and the floor.
You could lift the door off its hinges with a crowbar.
‘Let’s go to the terrace first,’ Enrique said. ‘The cornices are full of light bulbs.’
We found a door in the corridor that led to the second-floor terrace. We went out. The water was splashing on the tiles on the patio, and next to a tall tarred wall, a bright flash of lightning revealed a little wooden shack, its door half open.
From time to time the sudden clarity of a lightning flash would show us a distant uneven violet sky filled with bell towers and roofs. In its sinister way the tall tarred wall, looking like something out of a prison, cut strips out of the horizon.
There were bags of sawdust piled up in the corners of the little room, and rags, and brushes and new brooms. The centre of the room was occupied by a large wicker basket.
‘What have we here?’ Lucio lifted the lid.
‘Light bulbs.’
‘Let’s have a look.’
We moved, covetous, into the wheel of light that the lantern projected. In the sawdust lay the crystalline spheres of filament light bulbs.
‘They’re not blown?’
‘No, they’d have thrown them away,’ but in order to be sure I examined the setting of the filaments. They were intact.
We were robbing avidly in silence, filling our pockets, and when that didn’t seem enough for us we grabbed a cloth bag which we also filled with bulbs. To stop them clinking, Lucio put sawdust into the gaps.
There was an enormous protuberance in Irzubeta’s trousers round his stomach, he had so many light bulbs hidden there.
‘Look at Enrique, he’s pregnant.’
The remark made us laugh.
We withdrew prudently. The crystal pears tinkled like little bells sounding in the distance.
When we stopped in front of the library, Enrique extended an invitation:
‘We should go in and look for books.’
‘And what are we going to use to open the door?’
‘I saw an iron bar in the shed.’
‘You know what we should do? We’ll pack up the light bulbs and because Lucio’s house is the closest he can take them there.’
The rascal muttered:
‘Shit! I’m not going alone… I don’t want to end up in the clink.’
Behold the sinful outlines of a rascal! His collar button had come undone and his green tie was halfway down his torn shirtfront. Add to this a hat with the brim facing backwards, his face dirty and pale, his cuffs folded down over his gloves, and there you have the impudent image of this cheery masturbator attempting to reinvent himself as a house-breaker.
Enrique, who had finished organising his light bulbs, went off to find the iron bar.
Lucio grumbled:
‘Enrique’s a clever guy, right? Sending me out as bait all by myself.’
‘Don’t make stuff up. It’s only three blocks from here to your house. You can get there and back in five minutes.’
‘I don’t like it.’
‘I know what you don’t like… it’s no news that you’re too easily excited.’
‘And what if I do run into a cop?’
‘You beat it; what are your legs for?’
Shaking himself like a wet dog, Enrique came in, holding the iron bar.
‘What now?’
‘Give it to me, you’ll see.’
I wrapped the end of the iron bar in a handkerchief, then stuck it into the crack under the door, and then saw that instead of pushing towards the floor I should push in the other direction.
The door creaked and I stopped.
‘Push a bit harder,’ breathed Enrique.
I pushed harder and the alarming creaking noise sounded again.
‘Let me do it.’
Enrique’s push was so energetic that the simple creaking noise broke into a dry crack.
Enrique stopped and we all froze… stupefied.
‘What a brute!’ Lucio protested.
We could hear our terrified breathing. Lucio involuntarily turned the lantern off and this, added to the initial fear, returned us to our initial watchful state, without daring to move, our hands stretched out and trembling.
Eyes bored into the darkness; they seemed to be listening, gathering all the insignificant sounds that roamed the space. A sharp hyperaesthesia seemed to expand our hearing too, and we stood like statues, our lips parted, waiting.
‘What shall we do?’ Lucio murmured.
The fear broke.
I don’t know what inspiration made me say to Lucio:
‘Take the revolver and go and watch the stairs, down below. We’ll get to work.’
‘And who’ll wrap up the light bulbs?’
‘So now you care about the bulbs? Go on, don’t worry about them.’
And the charming rake disappeared after throwing the revolver into the air and catching it with the air of a cinematic apache.
Enrique cautiously opened the door to the library.
The atmosphere became filled with the smell of old paper, and by the light of the lantern we saw a spider running away over the waxed floor.
Tall bookcases varnished red reached the ceiling, and the conic wheel of light moved over the dark bookcases, showing shelves laden with books.
Majestic glass display cases added a severe solemnity to the sombreness, and past the glass, on spines of books bound in leather, paper and cloth, there shone out arabesque endpapers and gilded catalogue marks.
Irzubeta went up to the glass.
The reflected light illuminated him obliquely and his sunken-cheeked profile was like a bas relief, with his eyes immobile and his black hair harmoniously surrounding his head and losing itself in the hollow of the tendons of his neck.
When he turned his eyes back to me, he said with a smile:
‘You know, there’s some good books here.’
‘Yeah, and easy to sell.’
‘How long have we been here?’
‘About half an hour.’
I sat down at the corner of a desk a few steps away from the door, in the middle of the library, and Enrique imitated me. We were tired. The silence of the dark hall penetrated into our spirits, opening them up to great spaces of memory and uncertainty.
‘Say, why did you break up with Eleonora?’
‘I dunno. Do you remember? She gave me flowers.’
‘And?’
‘And then she wrote me some letters. It was weird. When two people fall in love it’s like they can guess each other’s thoughts. One Sunday afternoon she went out to walk round the block. I don’t know why I did it, but I went out too, only in the opposite direction and when we met each other, without looking at me she held out her arm and handed me a letter. She was wearing a tea-rose dress, and I remember that there were a lot of birds singing in the greenery.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Simple things. To wait… You get it? To wait until we were older.’
‘Modest.’
‘And so serious, Enrique, che! If you only knew. I was there, leaning against the iron fence. It was getting dark. She stopped talking… sometimes she looked at me in such a way… and I felt like crying… and we didn’t say anything… What could we say?’
‘That’s life,’ Enrique said. ‘Let’s go and look at the books. What about Lucio, eh? Sometimes he really pisses me off. What a goon!’
‘Where are the keys?’
‘They must be in the drawer.’
We rummaged through the desk, and we found them in a box of pens.
A lock squealed and then we started to investigate.
As we took each book out we leafed through it, and Enrique, who knew something about prices, would say, ‘Not worth anything’ or ‘Worth something.’
‘The Mountains of Gold.’
‘It’s out of print. You’ll get ten pesos for it anywhere.’
‘The Evolution of Matter by Le Bon. It’s got photographs.’
‘I’ll keep that for myself,’ Enrique said.
‘Rouquette. Organic and Inorganic Chemistry.’
‘Put it here with the others.’
‘Infinitesimal Calculus.’
‘That’s higher mathematics. It must be expensive.’
‘This one?’
‘What’s it called?’
‘Charles Baudelaire: His Life.’
‘Let’s have a look.’
‘It looks like a biography. Not worth anything.’
I opened the book at random.
‘It’s poems.’
‘What do they say?’
I read out
loud:
I adore you as much as I adore the vault of night
Oh, glass of sorrows, taciturn white lady!
Eleonora, I thought. Eleonora.
And let us attack, let us,
Like a chorus of gypsies faced by a corpse.11
‘Che, you know that’s beautiful? I’ll take it home.’
‘Look, while I pack up the books, you sort out the light bulbs.’
‘What about the light?’
‘Bring it here.’
I went where Enrique pointed. We carried things back and forth in silence, and our gigantic shadows moved across the ceiling and across the floor, distorted by the other shadows that lay in the corners of the room. Accustomed to the danger, no worries affected my movement.
Enrique sat at the desk sorting out the books and flicking through their pages. I had just finished wrapping the bulbs when we recognised the sound of Lucio’s feet in the passage.
He came in with his face twisted, fat drops of sweat made pearls on his forehead.
‘There’s a man coming… He’s just come in… turn out the light…’
Enrique looked at him in shock and mechanically turned out the light; in terror I picked up the iron bar that someone, I can’t remember who, had left by the desk. An icy cilice fastened round my forehead in the darkness.
The unknown man climbed the stairs with uncertain steps.
Suddenly the fear peaked and I was transformed.
I stopped being an adventurous boy; my nerves readied themselves, my body was a cruel statue filled with criminal instincts, a statue poised on tense limbs, aware of danger.
‘Who can it be?’ Enrique whispered.
Lucio nudged him.
Now we heard him closer, and his footsteps beat in my ears, a rhythm attuned to the trembling blood in my body.
Standing up straight, I held the bar with both hands over my head, ready for anything, ready to strike… and as I listened, my senses discerned with a marvellous promptness the nature of every sound I heard, following them all to their origin, understanding the psychological activity of the person who was making them.
