by Roberto Arlt
Leafing through a dirty notebook he would read out the long list of orders he had made, and opening his whale’s mouth he would laugh until you could see the red back of his throat and two rows of protruding teeth.
In order to pretend that he was so happy that his stomach hurt, he would grasp it with both hands.
Sitting above the desk drawers, Monti would look at us with an ironic smile. He would pinch his wide forehead in one hand, he would rub his eyes as if trying to get rid of things that worried him, and then he would say:
‘There’s no need to get downcast, dammit. You want to be an inventor and you don’t know how to sell a kilo of paper.’ Then he would continue, ‘You just have to keep at it. All businesses are like that. They won’t deal with you until they know you. They tell you that they’ve already got everything they need. It doesn’t matter, you just keep coming back until the owner gets used to you and ends up buying something. And always be gentile, because that’s how things have to be.’ And then he would change the subject and add: ‘Come and have coffee with me this afternoon. We’ll have a chat.’
One night I went into a pharmacy in Rojas Street. The pharmacist, a bilious man covered in pockmarks, looked at my wares, then he spoke, and seemed to me an angel:
‘Send me five kilos of silk paper, a selection, twenty kilos of extra-smooth paper and make me twenty thousand envelopes that say “Boric Acid”, “Calcinated Magnesium”, “Cream of Tartar”, “Logwood Soap”: five thousand of each. The paper needs to be here first thing on Monday morning.’
Overcome by joy I took note of the order, bowed to the seraphic pharmacist and got lost in the streets. This was my first sale. I had earned fifteen pesos commission.
I went into the Caballito Market, that market that always reminded me of the markets in the novels of Carolina Invernizio. An obese sausage-seller with a cow’s face, whom I had bothered on past occasions but always without success, shouted out to me as he brandished his knife over a block of pig fat.
‘Che, send me two hundred kilos of special cut, first thing tomorrow, no fail, at thirty-one.’
I had earned four pesos, even though I had taken the price down by one centavo a kilo.
Infinite joy, an unreal Dionysiac joy, lifted my spirit up to the heavens… and then, comparing my drunkenness with that of the heroes in the novels of D’Annunzio, those heroes whom my boss criticised for setting themselves up too high, I thought:
‘Monti is an idiot.’
Suddenly I felt someone touch my arm; I turned round quickly and found myself face to face with Lucio, that same distinguished Lucio who had been a member of The Club of the Midnight Gentlemen.
We greeted each other warmly. I hadn’t seen him since that hazardous night, and now here he was in front of me, smiling and looking all over the place as was his habit. I saw that he was well-dressed, with better shoes and better accoutred: there were false gold rings on his fingers and a pale stone in his tiepin.
He had grown, he was a robust layabout disguised as a dandy. The complement to this figure of a scrubbed-up braggart was a felt hat, which he wore pulled ridiculously low over his forehead, down to his eyebrows. He affected an amber cigarette holder, and, acting like a man who knows how to treat his friends, he invited me after our first greetings were over, to come and have a bock with him in a nearby beerhall.
When we had sat, and after Lucio had drunk his beer in a single gulp, my friend said in his hoarse voice:
‘So what do you do?’
‘What about you?… I see you’ve become a dandy, a real character.’
His mouth twisted in a smile.
‘I… I’ve made some changes.’
‘So things are going well for you… you’ve moved on a lot… But I haven’t had your luck, I’m a paperboy… I sell paper.’
‘Oh, you sell paper for any firm in particular?’
‘Yes, a guy called Monti, who lives in Flores.’
‘Do you earn a lot?’
‘Not a lot, no, but enough to live on.’
‘So you’ve changed your way of doing things?’
‘Of course.’
‘I’m also working.’
‘So you do work!’
‘Yes, I work, can you guess what I do?’
‘No, I don’t know.’
‘I’m a cop, an investigator.’
‘You… an investigator? You!’
‘Yes, what’s so weird about that?’
‘No, nothing. So, you’re an investigator?’
‘Why does it seem so strange?’
‘No… no reason… you always had your little ways… ever since you were a kid…’
‘Ranún… but think about it, che, Silvio, you always have to make yourself over again; that’s life, the struggle for life that Darwin talks about…’
‘Oh, you’re smart now! Does it pay the bills?’
‘I know what I’m talking about, che, it’s the sort of thing anarchists say; anyway, so you’ve changed, you’re working, things are going okay for you.’
‘Can’t complain, like the man says. I sell paper.’
‘So you have changed?’
‘That’s what it looks like.’
‘Good. Waiter! Bring me another half… sorry, two more halves, I meant to say, sorry, che.’
‘And what’s this work like, as an investigator?’
‘Don’t ask me, che, Silvio; professional secrets, you get me? But anyway, now we’re talking about the old days, do you remember Enrique?’
‘Enrique Irzubeta?’
‘Yes.’
‘I only know about him that after we broke up, you remember…?’
‘How couldn’t I remember!’
‘After we broke up I know that Grenuillet managed to get the family evicted and they went to live in Villa del Parque, but I haven’t seen Enrique since.’
‘Right. Enrique went to work in a car factory in Azul. Do you know where he is now?’
‘In Azul, right?’
‘No, he’s not in Azul; he’s in prison.’
‘In prison?’
‘Sure as I’m sitting here, he’s in prison…’
‘What did he do?’
‘Nothing, che, the struggle for life… the struggle for life, it’s a term I picked up from a Spanish baker who liked to make explosives. Do you make explosives? Don’t get all het up; you used to be keen on dynamite…’
Annoyed by his wheedling questions I looked him straight in the eye.
‘Are you going to take me down to the station?’
‘No, man, why? Can’t you take a joke?’
‘It’s like you’re trying to get something out of me.’
‘Wow… you’re a weirdo, you are. Didn’t you change, you said?’
‘Right, anyway, you were telling me about Enrique.’
‘I’ll tell you all about it: between you and me, it was really glorious, an impressive stunt. Anyway, I can’t remember if it was in the Chevrolet dealership or the Buick one that Enrique was working, where he’d been taken into the owner’s confidence… He was always the king of getting under people’s wings. He was working in the office, I don’t know how, but he stole a cheque and filled it in for 5,953 pesos. That’s how things are! The morning he was going to cash it the owner of the dealership gave him 2,100 pesos to pay into the same bank. So this crazy guy puts the money in his pocket, goes to the garage, takes a car, goes calmly up to the bank and hands over the cheque. Now comes the really crazy bit: the bank cashed the cheque.’
‘They cashed it!’
‘That’s right, it’s amazing how good a forger he was. Well, he’d always had a knack for it. Do you remember when he did the Nicaraguan flag?’
‘Yes, he was good even when he was a kid… But carry on.’
‘Anyway, they paid him… But now think how nervous he was: he goes off in the car, two blocks away from the market he goes straight over a crossroads and ploughs right into a sulky-cart… and he was lucky, the shaft of the cart
just broke his arm, a little further to the left and he’d have been spiked through the breast. He fainted. They took him to a hospital, and the owner of the dealership heard about the accident and came running. The man asked for Enrique’s clothes, because there’d have to be either the money or a deposit slip in his pockets… imagine how surprised the guy was… Instead of the deposit slip he finds 8,053 pesos. As soon as Enrique showed signs of life, the guy asked him where these thousands of pesos came from, and Enrique didn’t know what to say; then off they go to the bank and everything comes out there.’
‘Wow.’
‘It’s incredible. I read all about it in The Citizen, one of the papers they publish over there.’
‘And now he’s in prison?’
‘In the dark, as he used to say… But guess how long his sentence actually is. He’s a minor, and his family knows people with influence.’
‘It’s strange: I can see Enrique having a great future.’
‘Yes. They didn’t call him The Faker for nothing.’
We fell silent. I remembered Enrique. In my mind I was back there with him, in the shack with the puppets. A sunbeam illuminated his thin, proud, adolescent profile.
In a hoarse voice, Lucio continued:
‘The struggle for life, che, some people change and some fall by the wayside; that’s life… But I’d better be off, my shift’s about to start… If you want to meet up, here’s my address.’ And he gave me a card.
When, after an extended goodbye, I found myself a long way away, alone in the brightly lit streets, I could still hear his hoarse voice ringing in my ears:
‘The struggle for life, che… some people change and some fall by the wayside… That’s life!’
Now I could approach the tradesmen with the air of an expert salesman, and with the certainty that my time of frustration was now over, because I had now ‘made a sale’; I quickly had a modest clientele made up of stallholders from the fair, pharmacists with whom I could talk about picric acid and suchlike, booksellers and two or three grocers, who were the least profitable and most given to haggling.
In order not to waste too much of my time I divided the areas of Caballito, Flores, Vélez Sarsfield and Villa Crespo into zones which I covered systematically once a week.
I got up extremely early and went to the predetermined area with large strides. From those days I remember a huge bright sky over horizons of small whitewashed houses, factories with red walls and, at the edges of the zones, greenery, cypresses and fruit trees round the white domes of the cemetery.
Of those flat suburban streets, miserable and dirty, sunstruck, with rubbish bins at the gates, with fat women, dirty and with their hair uncombed, chatting in doorways and every now and then calling out to their children and their dogs under the arch of the clearest, cleanest sky, I retain a cool, tall and beautiful memory.
My eyes avidly drank in the infinite, ecstatic serenity in that blue space.
Burning flames of hope and illusion wrapped my spirit and the happy inspiration towards honesty that sprouted within me was so great that I was unable to put it into words.
And the more captivated I was by the dome of the heavens, the more vile were the places where I did business. I remember…
Those suburban grocers’ shops, those butchers!
In the darkness a ray of sun lit up the red-black carcasses hanging from hooks and ropes near the tin-topped counters. The floor was covered with sawdust and there was a smell of lard in the air; whole black colonies of flies boiled on pieces of yellow fat, and the impassive butcher would saw at bones or tenderise chops with the back of his knife… and outside… outside was the morning sky, calm and exquisite, dropping from its blueness the infinite sweetness of spring.
As I walked around the only thing that concerned me was space, smooth as a piece of porcelain within its blue parameters, intensifying to a deep-sea colour at the zenith, the colour of a high placid sea, where my eyes imagined they could see little islands, ports, marble cities set in green woods and ships with flowering masts that slipped between the songs the sirens sang, out towards the furious cities of joy.
I walked around like this, affected by a delightful violence.
It was as if I heard the noise of some night-time party; fireworks above my head let down their green cascades of stars, the pot-bellied genii of the world laughed down on earth and monkeys juggled as goddesses laughed to hear the sound of a toad playing the flute.
With these strange noises playing in my ears, with such visions dancing before my eyes, I covered great distances without noticing.
I went into markets and spoke to the stall-keepers, I sold them more produce or argued with people who were unhappy with what they had got. They would take strips of paper that would have made good streamers out from under their counters and say:
‘What do you expect me to do with these little strips?’
I would reply:
‘Oh, the cut isn’t always going to be as large as a sail. There’s a bit of everything in the Lord’s vineyard.’
These specious explanations did not tend to satisfy the merchants, who would call their fellow tradesmen as witnesses and swear that they would not buy a kilo more of paper from me.
Then I would pretend to be extremely indignant, would let slip a few unchristian words and rush behind the counter and go through the pile of paper until I came up with pieces of paper that could with a little bit of imagination be used to make a shroud for a cow.
‘And this?… Why don’t you show me this? Do you think I’m going to pick out every sheet of paper by hand? Why don’t you buy special cut if it’s so important?’
This was how I argued with the butchers and the citizen fishmongers, crude, dull people who liked to have a good argument.
On spring mornings I also liked to wander through the tram-riven streets bedecked with the awnings of merchants. I liked the department stores with their dark interiors, the cheese shops that were like farms with enormous piles of butter on the shelves, the shops with multi-coloured vitrines and women seated next to the display cabinets looking at bright rolls of fabrics; the smell of paint in the ironmongers, and the smell of petroleum in the general stores, these mixed in my senses like the fragrant aroma of an extraordinary happiness, of a universal and perfumed party, of which I was destined to be the future narrator.
On the glorious October mornings I felt powerful, as all-encompassing as a god.
If I was tired and went into a milkbar to have a drink, the shadows and the décor would make me dream of an ineffable Alhambra and the enclosed gardens of distant Andalusia, I would see little fields at the foot of the sierra, and in the bottom of valleys the silver ribbon of little streams. A woman singing, accompanying herself with a guitar, and in my memory the old Andalusian cobbler would appear once again, saying:
‘Jothe, he wath more beautiful than a rothe.’
Love, piety, gratitude towards life, towards books, towards the world would zap the blue nerve of my soul.
It was not me, but the god within me, a god made from fragments of mountain, of woods, of sky and of memory.
When I had sold enough paper I would head back, and because the distance grew longer as I walked back across it, I kept myself happy by dreaming of absurd things, like inheriting seventy million pesos, things like that. My fantasies would evaporate when Monti would address me indignantly when I went into the office:
‘The butcher in Remedios Street has sent back the paper.’
‘Why?’
‘How should I know! He said he didn’t like it.’
‘I hope he gets struck by lightning.’
It is impossible to describe the sense of failure that this bundle of dirty paper generated, abandoned as it was in the dark patio, with the ties retied, covered with mud on the edges, spotted with blood and fat because the butcher had turned it over pitilessly in his greasy hands.
This type of return happened with too great a frequency.
Learning
from previous incidences I would advise the buyer:
‘Look, this cut is the leftovers from cutting paper to shape. If you want I can send you the special cut, it’s eight centavos per kilo more expensive, but you can use all of it.’
‘It doesn’t matter, che,’ the butcher would say, ‘send the cheaper cut.’
But when the paper was delivered, they would insist that the price was lowered by a few centavos per kilo, or else would send back the pieces that were most badly torn, which when it got up to as much as two or three kilos meant that my profit completely evaporated; or else he didn’t pay at all, which meant a total loss…
There were occasional truly ridiculous setbacks that Monti and I laughed about so as not to weep with rage.
One of our clients was a pork butcher who insisted that we deliver the bundles of paper to his house on a set day and at a set time, something that was impossible; there was another man who sent everything back and insulted the delivery driver if he didn’t provide a properly drawn up legal receipt, which wasn’t a requirement; there was another one who wouldn’t pay for the paper until he had been using it for a week.
And let’s not even talk about the way in which the Turks from the fair behaved.
If I went to ask for Al Motamid, they didn’t understand me or else shrugged and went back to cutting a piece of lung for a gossipy relative’s cat.
And selling them anything meant losing the entire morning, and all for being able eventually to send a miserable package of twenty-five kilos immense distances down the streets of unknown suburbs, in order to earn seventy-five centavos.
The delivery driver, a taciturn man with a dirty face, when he came back in the evening with his tired horse and the paper that he hadn’t delivered, would say:
‘Couldn’t deliver this,’ as he threw the bundle grumpily down to the ground. ‘The butcher was in the slaughterhouse, his wife said she didn’t know anything and wouldn’t take anything. This other one was the wrong address, it’s a shoe factory. Nobody could tell me where this street was.’
