by Roberto Arlt
‘Are you tired, Silvio?’ Her smile would ease my shame; it was almost a caress that cheered my heart after the spectacle of her cruelty. ‘Are you tired, Silvio?’
‘No, Señora.’ The woman, turning away from me with a smile that reminded me of Enrique Irzubeta’s smile when he escaped from the police, continued her angry way.
Now we were going down lonely streets, scarcely lit, with burgeoning plantains by the pavements, tall buildings with beautiful façades and windows covered with opulent curtains.
We went past an open balcony.
A young man and a young woman were talking in the shadows; the sound of a piano came from the orange-lit room.
My heart contracted with envy and sadness.
I thought.
I thought that I would never be like them… I would never live in a beautiful house and have an aristocratic girlfriend.
My heart contracted with envy and sadness.
‘We’re nearly there,’ said the woman.
A deep sigh swelled our chests.
When Don Gaetano saw us coming back into the cave, he shouted, raising his arms cheerfully to the sky:
‘Let’s go and eat in the hotel, guys!… Hey, you’d like that, Don Miguel? We’ll go there later. Shut the door, shut the door, strunzo.’
A marvellously childish smile altered Stinking God’s face.
Sometimes at night I would think of the beauty with which poets made the world shake, and my heart would flood with pain, like a mouth filling with a scream.
I thought of the parties they went to, the parties in the city, the parties in the city parks lit with torches bright as the sun in the flowering gardens, and my poverty fell from my hands.
I do not have words, I cannot find words, to ask for mercy.
My soul is desolate and ugly as a bare knee.
I am looking for a poem I cannot find, the poem sung by a body that has suddenly been peopled by despair, been given a thousand vast mouths, two thousand shouting lips.
Distant voices reach my ears, resplendent pyrotechnics, but I am here alone, as if held down to my world of misery by nine stakes.
Third floor, apartment 4, Charcas 1600. That was the address where I had to deliver the package of books.
These luxurious apartment blocks are strange and unique.
From the outside, with their harmonious lines of friezes that emphasise the sumptuousness of the proud and complicated cornices, with their wide windows protected by bent glass, they make the poor devils who look at them believe in similar refinements of luxury and power; on the inside, the polar darkness of their deep and lonely halls cools the spirits of anyone who loves wide open skies covered with cloudy Valhallas.
I stopped in front of the porter, an athletic fellow in a blue uniform who was reading a newspaper with an air of self-sufficiency.
He looked me over from head to toe like the guardian of some dread portal; then, happy to have reached the hypothetical conclusion that I was no thief, he allowed me to come in, with the sort of indulgence that could only have arisen from his proud blue cap with its gold frogging over the visor. All he said was:
‘The lift, over to the left.’
When I came out of the iron cage I found myself in a dark corridor with a low ceiling.
A polished lamp spread its dying light over the polished tiles.
The door to the apartment was a single unglassed panel, and its little round bronze lock made it look like the door to some gigantic steel safe.
I rang the bell, and a maid in a black uniform with a white apron showed me into a room papered in blue, with livid golden lilies.
Through the glass that was covered in moiré gauze came a clear blue light like that of a hospital. A piano, girlish touches, bronzes, vases: I looked at everything. Suddenly a most delicate perfume announced her presence: a side door opened and I found myself confronted by a woman with a childish face, thin ringlets hanging down her cheeks, and a generous décolleté. A cherry-coloured velveteen robe did not cover her little white-and-gold slippers.
‘Qu’y a t-il, Fanny?’
‘Quelques livres pour Monsieur…’
‘Do we need to pay?’
‘They have been paid for.’
‘Qui…’
‘C’est bien. Donne le pourboire au garçon.’
The maid took a few coins from a tray to give to me, and I said:
‘I don’t take tips from anybody.’
The maid angrily withdrew her hand, and the courtesan understood my gesture. I believe she did, at any rate, because she said:
‘Très bien, très bien, et tu ne reçois pas ceci?’
And before I could avoid her, or rather, before I could ready myself to receive it fully, the laughing woman kissed me full on the lips, and I saw her disappear, laughing like a little girl, through the hidden door.
Stinking God has woken up and is starting to get dressed, that is to say, to put his boots on. Sitting on the edge of the cot, dirty and unshaven, he looks around him with a bored expression. He stretches out one arm and takes his hat, pulling it over his head down to his ears; then he looks at his feet in their baggy red socks, and then, burying his little finger deep into his ear, he twists it rapidly, producing an unpleasant sound. Then he pulls himself together and puts his boots on; and then, bent over, he walks to the door of the little room, turns round, looks at the floor, finds a cigar butt and picks it up, blows the dust off it and lights it. He leaves.
I hear him dragging his feet on the terrace tiles. I relax. I think, no, I don’t think, I rather receive into my interior some sweet nostalgia, a suffering that is sweeter than a lover’s uncertainty. And I remember the woman who gave me a kiss as a tip.
I am overwhelmed with vague desires, vague as mist, which fill my whole being, make it almost airy, impersonal, winged. For a few moments the memory of a scent, of a white breast, pierce me, and I know that if I am ever at her side again I will faint from love; I think that it will not matter to me to think that she has been possessed by many men before me and that if I found myself next to her once more, in that same blue room, I would fall on my knees on the carpet and put my head in her lap, and for the joy of possessing her and loving her I would do the most shameful things and the sweetest things.
And as my desire develops, I reconstruct in my mind the clothes the courtesan would wear to beautify herself, the well-proportioned hats she uses to cover herself and make herself even more seductive, and I imagine her next to her bed, in a state of semi-nakedness more terrible than complete nudity.
And as my desire for this woman, for any woman, grows slowly within me, I go again and again through my actions and imagine how happy a love of this kind would make me, with its riches and its glory; I imagine the sensations that will fill my body if from one day to the next, having become a wealthy man, I should awaken in that bedroom with my young semi-naked beloved putting on her stockings next to the bed, as I have on occasion seen in dirty magazines.
And suddenly my whole body, my poor man’s body, calls out to the Lord of Heaven:
‘And I, I, my Lord, will never have a lover as beautiful as the ones from the dirty magazines!’
A feeling of disgust began to irritate my life as I spent time in that cavern, surrounded by people who vomited forth nothing more than words of greed and fury. I was contaminated by the hatred that ran across their ugly mugs and there were moments when I perceived inside the box of my skull a slow-moving red mist.
A terrible tiredness crushed my arms. There were times when I wanted to sleep straight through two days and two nights. I had the sensation that my spirit was becoming filthy, that the skin of my spirit was tainted by the leprosy that accompanied these people; a leprosy that cut dark caves into my spirit. I went to sleep half-wild; I woke up silent. Despair swelled my veins, and I felt, growing between my bones and my skin, a force that I had never before sensed. I spent hours with my bitterness, sunk in painful abstractions. One night, Doña María ordered me in a
rage to clean the toilet because it was disgusting. I obeyed in silence. I believe I was looking for motives to lead me to some obscure conclusion.
Another night, Don Gaetano, for a joke, put one hand on my stomach and another on my chest when I wanted to leave, just to make sure I wasn’t stealing books, keeping them hidden close to my body. I couldn’t smile or get angry. This was how things had to be, yes, just like this; it was necessary that my life, that life nurtured for nine months in sorrow in a woman’s belly, should suffer all these excesses, all these humiliations, all this anguish.
I started to go deaf at this point. For a few months I lost the ability to perceive sounds. A sharpened silence – silence can even take the shape of a knife – cut at the voices in my ears.
I did not think. My understanding was nothing more than a bowl-shaped pit of grievance that grew deeper and thicker each day. This was how my grievance began to build up.
They gave me a bell, a cowbell. How funny it was – praise be! – to see a lummox of my size performing such a menial task. They set me at the door to the cavern during the hours when there were most people in the street and I rang the cowbell to call people’s attention, to make people turn their heads and look at me, to make people know that this was a place that sold books, beautiful books… and that the noble stories and tales of famous beauties could be purchased from the sly-looking man or the fat, pale woman. And I rang the cowbell.
Many eyes stripped me slowly. I saw faces of women that I would never forget. I saw smiles that still ring in my eyes like jeers…
Ah! The truth is I was tired… but isn’t it written that ‘you will earn your bread by the sweat of your brow’?
And I mopped the floor, asking beautiful women to move their delicate little feet so that I could wipe the spot where they had been standing, and I went shopping with an enormous basket; I was an errand-boy… I suppose that if they had spat in my face then I might have peacefully wiped it away with the back of my hand.
A darkness fell over me, growing ever thicker. My memory began to lose the shapes of faces that I had loved with tearful affection; I began to imagine that my days were separated by wide tracts of time… and my eyes were too dry to cry.
Then I repeated the words that had until now only had a vague meaning in my life.
‘You will suffer,’ I said to myself, ‘you will suffer… you will suffer… you will suffer…
‘You will suffer… you will suffer…
‘You will suffer…’ My words faded away.
This is how I grew more mature during that hellish winter.
One night, in July, just as Don Gaetano was pulling the metal shutter over the door, Doña María remembered that she had left a bundle of clothes that had been brought from the laundry that afternoon. So she said:
‘Che, Silvio, come on, we’ll get it.’
While Don Gaetano turned the lights back on, I accompanied her. I remember it exactly.
The bundle was in the centre of the kitchen, on a chair. Doña María, her back to me, grabbed the bundle by its topknot. As I looked around, I saw some coals still glowing in a brazier. And in that briefest of instants I thought:
‘Here we go…’ And without hesitation, grabbing a coal, I threw it into a pile of papers that were next to a heavily laden bookcase, while Doña María began walking away.
Then Don Gaetano turned the key in the fusebox, and we were out in the street.
Doña María looked up at the starry sky.
‘Pretty night… it’s going to freeze…’ I too looked up to the sky.
‘Yes, it’s a pretty night.’
While Stinking God slept, I sat up in my pseudo-bed, looking at the white circle of light that came through the bull’s eye from the street and planted itself on the wall.
In the darkness I smiled at my freedom… free… definitely free, because of the sense of manliness my action had given me. I thought of, or rather, I collected moments of delight.
‘Now is the time for cocottes.’
A friendliness, as fresh as a glass of wine, made me fraternise with the whole world in these midnight hours. It said:
‘This is the hour of little girls… of poets… but how ridiculous I am… even so, I would still kiss your feet. Life, Life, how pretty you are, Life… ah! But don’t you remember? I am the delivery boy… the servant… yes, Don Gaetano’s… and even so I love all the most beautiful things of the Earth… I want to be handsome and witty… to wear a bright uniform… to stay silent… Life, how pretty you are, Life… how pretty… Lord, how pretty you are.’
There was a pleasure to be found in smiling slowly. I passed my middle and index fingers over my cheeks. The croaking of car horns that could be heard down there, on Esmeralda Street, was like a hoarse announcement of joy.
Then I leant my head onto my shoulder and shut my eyes, thinking:
‘Which painter could paint the portrait of the sleeping servant, the one who smiles in his sleep because he has set his master’s den alight?’
Then, slowly, my drunken excitement subsided. An irrational seriousness took its place, a serious attitude of the kind that it is a mark of good taste to display in public. And I felt like laughing at this ridiculous, paternalistic seriousness. But because seriousness is hypocrisy, and because ‘conscience’ needs to be acted out in private, I said to myself:
‘You are accused… you are a scoundrel… an incendiary. You have enough remorse for a whole lifetime. You will be interrogated by the police and by the courts and by the devil… prisoner in the dock, this is no joke… you don’t understand that you need to be serious… you’re going to be thrown headfirst into the clink.’
But my attempt at seriousness did not convince me. It sounded empty, like an empty can. No, I couldn’t take this mystification seriously. And now I was a free man, and what did society have to do with this freedom? And now I was free I could do whatever I liked… kill myself if I wanted… but that was a bit ridiculous… and I… I needed to do something beautifully serious, perfectly serious: to love Life. And I repeated:
‘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.
Chapter 3
The Mad Toy
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.’
