Roberto Arlt

The Mad Toy

Foreword

There is a particular edge to the novels and stories written in countries which lacked a stable middle class or a clear sense of social continuity. It is as though the spirit of uncertainty in these countries made its way into the very structure of the fiction which writers produced. This fiction is filled with strange choices and odd chances; the way of handling incident is rich with risk and mystery. In his book on Nathaniel Hawthorne, written in 1879, Henry James attempted to identify what novelists in New England did not have at their disposal, thus making their fiction different from that being created in Europe. His famous list was as follows: ‘No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentleman, no palaces, no castles, nor manor, nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools — no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class — no Epsom nor Ascot.’

It is easy to imagine the Argentine novelist Robert Arlt (1900–1942) looking at this list and smiling in full recognition. The Argentine writer had the city of Buenos Aires and the army, perhaps, but beyond that only a sense of isolation. The Argentine writer had the port and the pampas, but beyond them merely a heightened sense of desolation. Like Henry James, Arlt would have understood, however, that not having a thousand years of slow progress at your disposal, as the English and French novelist did, might be gift as much as an impediment. ‘The American knows,’ Henry James wrote, having given his list, ‘that a good deal remains.’ Seven years earlier in a letter to an American friend, James had suggested that the richness of Europe was something perhaps the American novelist did not even need: ‘It’s a complex fate being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.’

In New England such a struggle against ‘the superstitious valuation of Europe’ gave us nineteenth-century novels with stark imagery and memorable drama such as Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter or Melville’s Moby Dick, which attempted to create a world more vivid and filled with plenitude than the world outside its pages. In countries such as Ireland, Brazil and Argentina, places where poverty, social disruption and fragile institutions reigned, where form and continuity were sorely missing, the novel also took on a new and strange shape.

In an essay written in 1932 called ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’, Jorge Luis Borges suggested that this lack of social continuity and this sense of being on the periphery of literary culture could be seen as a gift, or a new way of nourishing that very culture. The South American writer, he wrote, by virtue of being close and distant to the centre of Western culture had more ‘rights’ to Western culture than anyone in any Western nation. He compared this enriching sense of proximity and distance with the position of Jewish and Irish writers. ‘It was enough,’ he wrote, ‘the fact of feeling Irish, different, to become innovators within English culture. I believe that Argentine writers, and South American writers in general, are in an analogous situation; we can handle all the European themes, handle them without superstition, but with an irreverence which can have, and does have, fortunate consequences.’

The years when Roberto Arlt was beginning to write were years of stress and change in Argentine society. A massive wave of Italian immigration had radically transformed the city of Buenos Aires and created a distance between the city and the pampa. Increased wealth also meant that books and ideas from outside began to matter to young Argentine writers, as the novels of Dostoevsky would matter to Roberto Arlt. Even as early as 1872 when Jose Fernandez published his great poem ‘Martin Fierro’, the theme of the solitary outsider became central to the Argentine imagination. The intensity of the immigration created a sense of rootlessness and dislocation, the sheer size of pampa and the teeming chaos of the city made their way into images of personal anguish and hostility to the social world. Images of the sad figure alone in Buenos Aires, a half-made man in a half-made place, with no society to distract him, and no possibility of any drama other than the dark, jagged drama that occurs within the alienated self, became central in Argentine literature.

In the fiction of Borges and Bioy Casares, in the novels of Arlt, in the later work of writers such as Ernesto Sabato and Julio Cortazar, the idea of playfulness was also central. These writers believed, as did Machado de Assis in Brazil and James Joyce in Ireland, that the real world could not be reflected in the pages of a book, but rather it could be re-made there, or made more strangely real there. The world could thus reflect the book. Their novels experimented with form and structure, played with ideas of character and tone. They did not dramatize moral questions, or deal with society and the individual. They did not allow domestic harmony to occur at any point in the stories they told. Their stories were fractured and irrational; their characters were happier on the street than at home, and happier, or more exquisitely unhappy, alone, than with families or associates; their narratives were more content if nothing in them could be easily tied into neat plots.

This did not mean that Borges (1899–1986), Bioy Casares (1914–1999) and Arlt operated as a group. In ‘Borges’, the massive volume, published after the death of Bioy Casares, in which Bioy wrote down all the conversations he had with Borges about writers and writing, there are many disparaging references to Arlt, as there are indeed to Ernesto Sabato (1911–2011). The fact that Arlt had very little formal education and that both of his parents were poor immigrants would not have been lost on Borges and Bioy, whose roots were deep in both cosmopolitan literary culture and nineteenth-century Argentina. Also, the literary world of Buenos Aires in the years when Arlt wrote, and in the years after his early death, was one of factions where the divisions could be based on political allegiance as much as social class. None of Arlt’s work, for example, appeared in the great Argentine literary magazine Sur — to which Borges and Bioy had close connections — which began publication in 1931.

Arlt’s novels were published between 1926 and 1932. Although he continued to write short stories and pieces for the newspapers, between then and his death he mainly worked as a journalist and a playwright. Because he was sent out to work when he was young, he developed an intimate outsider’s knowledge of the centre of Buenos Aires, streets such as Florida and Lavalle, which were elegant in these years when Buenos Aires was one of the richest cities in the world. He invokes Lavalle in The Mad Toy: ‘It was seven o’clock in the evening and Lavalle Street was showing off its most Babylonian splendour. Through the plate-glass windows you could see that cafés were crammed with customers; carefree dandies gathered in the entrances of the theatres and cinemas; and the windows of the clothes shops — which displayed legs in sheer stockings hanging from nickel-plate bars — and those of jewellery stores and orthopaedic stores all showed by their opulence the cunning of the businessmen who used their spiffy goods to flatter the voluptuousness of the wealthy.’

Arlt also knew the more miserable suburbs where the newer immigrants lived. His relationship with his father was always difficult, his childhood was seriously unhappy. When he was fifteen, he found work in a bookshop in Calle Lavalle; soon he met a number of Argentine writers. The following year he published his first story. When he was seventeen he left home for good and began to look after himself.

Although writers and intellectuals in Buenos Aires in the 1920s felt distant from both Europe and from South America itself, Buenos Aires was a cosmopolitan place where small magazines and new ideas flourished and where there was much debate about what sort of literature this new and hybrid country should produce. Although Arlt was never close to Borges, he did know another writer who came from a cultured family, the novelist Ricardo Guiraldes; he was published in Guiraldes’s magazine Proa, as was Borges. Guiraldes (1886–1927) had travelled widely, especially in France, and was opposed to the use of stilted, literary language in novels and stories.

This suited Arlt. He loved the streets of the city and its slang and had much to say about them in his novels and in the column he began writing for the newspaper El Mundo in 1928. In the 1930s he travelled widely as a journalist for El Mundo. His two best known books are the novels The Mad Toy (1926) and The Seven Madmen (1929). In these two books he attempted to find fictional form, using a mixture of the picaresque and a tone which was haunted and alienated, to capture his hero, a young man filled with a mixture of guilt and innocence, curiosity and knowingness, as he progresses from place to place.

It is possible that the first chapter of the book was written some years before the other ones, as Arlt sought to isolate his errant hero further, remove him from any group or circle, thus making his adventures all the more strange and alienating. The scene in the early pages of the book where Silvio and his companions ‘imagine that we lived in Paris, or foggy London town. We would dream in silence, a smile balanced on our condescending lips’ belongs to that world of literary young men feeling marooned in Buenos Aires, imagining the world of Europe as the real one, and locked into Argentina as though it were some kind of cage.

The only relief from life then was literature. In this world a book becomes a lethal weapon or a way of saving, or further staining, your soul which nothing else offered. Thus, even to this day, there is a something holy about a bookshop in Buenos Aires; the browsers and those who work in the shop give the impression that they are involved in some sacred ritual. A bookshop, then, is a natural place for Silvio to find and unfind himself in The Mad Toy. Baudelaire will be invoked as much as books about science and mathematics. ‘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.’

Arlt, the low priest of the modern, was fascinated by machinery as he was by literature and by magic and by sex. The scene with the man wearing women’s clothes would have been dynamite in the Buenos Aires of the 1920, as it remains deeply powerful to this day.

In this world only the hero is sane; much else is weird or monstrous. The day is filled with cruelty and ugliness; there are useless tasks to perform and many irritations. As in the world created by Borges, the night is more real, as is the world of dreams. The night, as invoked by words, can take on a stunning beauty, playing here a great game between shadow and substance, whose tone is quintessential to the book and endemic to its spirit:

Sometimes, at night, there are faces that appear, faces of women who wound you with the sword of sweetness. We move apart, and our soul remains shadowy and alone, as happens after a party.

Unusual apparitions… they disappear and we never hear of them again, but even so they accompany us at night, their eyes fixed on our own fixed eyes…. and we are wounded with the sword of sweetness, and imagine how the love of these women will be, these faces that enter into your own flesh. An anguished desert of the spirit, a transient luxury that is both harsh and demanding.

— Colm Tóibín, 2013

Introduction

There’s a point in the middle of the third chapter of The Mad Toy at which the reader is given for the first time the narrator’s full name: Silvio Drodman Astier. When I first read the novel, my initial reaction was to wonder if it was an anagram of the author’s real name. Of course it isn’t (no ‘B’, for starters, which is a problem if the name you’re looking for happens to be ‘Roberto’), but the impulse was excusable: one of the most immediately appealing things about Arlt’s novel is the sense it gives of being a record of events that we feel must actually have happened.

Where does this immediacy come from? In part it must derive from the way in which The Mad Toy, as is also the case with Arlt’s other novels, pins itself down firmly to a particular time and a particular place. If you take the time to look up on a map of Buenos Aires the street names Arlt mentions, you will see that most of the action of the novel takes place in a fairly small segment of a large city, the central districts of Caballito, Flores and Vélez Sársfield (where Arlt himself was born), with a couple of brief excursions to the docks and the Colegio Militar in El Palomar. For all his dreams of escape to London or Paris, dreams that are eventually only fulfilled to the extent that Silvio is offered a post in Comodoro, about 1,000 miles to the south of Buenos Aires, The Mad Toy is a local novel, alert to the detail of Silvio’s neighbourhood, the walls and alleyways, the cul-de-sacs, the milkbars, the green street lamps.

But the apparent realism of The Mad Toy serves to reveal the skill of the journalist, the professional observer of life. It is possible to be taken in by Arlt’s artistry to the extent of believing that Silvio must be an alter ego, but it is to do Arlt a disservice to think that Silvio is simply copied from life: the seemingly shapeless, picaresque nature of The Mad Toy is a grimy mask for an extremely carefully developed and formally patterned novel, in which the superficial story of Silvio’s adventures is also a detailed psychological portrait of Silvio himself. Of course, to a certain extent Silvio is inspired by Arlt: what first novel isn’t autobiographical to at least some degree? But it is more correct to say that Arlt managed to dissociate himself from the adolescent he had been, and created, with the benefit of hindsight, a fantastic version of his youth.

Arlt was born in Buenos Aires in 1900. He was the son of immigrants: his father was a Prussian, and so strict as to be perceived as unnecessarily cruel by his son; Arlt’s mother was from Trieste. Arlt had two sisters: one of them died in infancy; the other in 1936; both from tuberculosis. At the age of eight, Arlt was expelled from school, and his formal education ended. He worked at a number of jobs: he was employed for a while in a bookshop, but he was also a housepainter, a mechanic, a dock worker, a factory hand… Eventually the newspaper El Mundo employed him to write a column: his so-called Aguafuertes (‘Etchings’) of contemporary Buenos Aires formed a witty commentary on the city’s low-life. He also worked as secretary to the novelist Ricardo Güiraldes. His first novel, El juguete rabioso (The Mad Toy) was published in 1926, and was followed by Los siete locos (The Seven Madmen, 1929), Los lanzallamas (The Flamethrowers, 1931) and El amor brujo (Bewitching Love, 1932). In the 1930s Arlt began to write for the theatre, and by the end of his life was more or less exclusively a playwright. He died of a heart attack in 1942. Pieces of this biography crop up in The Mad Toy: Silvio’s sister is also called Lila and Silvio works in a bookshop for a while, but direct connections between Silvio and Roberto Arlt are few. However, there are a great number of subtextual connections, points at which Silvio can be seen as a projection of Arlt’s desires. Perhaps most significantly, as an act of revenge against his sadistic father, Arlt chooses to have Silvio’s father commit suicide: ‘my father killed himself when I was very young.’

Rather than being noticeable for its fidelity to real life, one of the most striking things about The Mad Toy is the occasional irruption of fantasy into the realist texture of Arlt’s prose. This is visible on certain obvious occasions, for example the disturbing dream sequence in chapter three: Silvio pursued across an asphalt plain by a gigantic bony arm. However, there is also an admixture of fantasy into supposedly realistic scenes. Following this nightmare, once Silvio wakes up, the prose deliberately treads the line between reality and fantasy. His encounter in the hotel room with the young man who tries to seduce him, although full of realistic details (the dirty clothing, the sordid environment of the hotel where the meeting takes place), is extremely oneiric: the description of the homosexual’s neck with its ‘triangle of black hair’ is an obvious sexual metonymy, and the shouts of the invisible guests fighting outside add to the dreamlike nature of the meeting. During the night, Silvio observes the homosexual and feels ‘a horror’ that gradually turns into ‘conformity’. One of the details Silvio notices about the homosexual is how a ‘lock of his carefully-arranged hair fell down’ when he turned his head. The next morning when Silvio wakes up, the bed where the homosexual had been is empty: more than that, ‘there was no trace that anyone had even slept in his bed’, and Silvio notices that his own hair is hanging down over his forehead.

It would be possible, and not too far-fetched, to read the whole sequence as a dream, a manifestation of Silvio’s buried desires (see also his homoerotic relationship with Enrique Irzubeta in chapter one, a chapter which climaxes with a naked Silvio hugging Irzubeta as both of them hide from the police). What is beyond a doubt is that Arlt uses, as few Latin American writers before him had done, the fantastic and the dreamlike as keys to a heightened realism, ways to give us a fully-rounded portrait of Silvio Astier. Silvio, with his love/hate relationship with Europe, his conviction that he is cut out for great things, his essential confusion and his frustration, is one of the first iterations of the modern Buenos Aires archetype, but in The Mad Toy the archetype is new, and Silvio is impressively individual.

Arlt is often celebrated as a writer who brought the language of the street into Argentinian letters, but this is not to suggest that he is an extremely colloquial writer: rather, he is a reporter who doesn’t soften the edges of the events he observes. Perhaps the closest comparison in English is with the early work of William S. Burroughs (Junkie, Queer), which presents low-life scenes in neutral prose, and reserves its linguistic innovation for the direct reporting of dialogue. Arlt’s dialogue is sparkily accurate, and stands slightly at odds with the occasionally clumsy soul-searching of Silvio’s conscience-stricken inner monologue. (The reader will have to decide if this clumsiness is authentically adolescent, or just… clumsy: I vote for the first option.)

One of the great things about Arlt’s accuracy in transcribing dialogue is that he is able to give the flavour of a particular character without resorting to stereotype or linguistic cliché. Think for example of the long complaint by Rebeca Naidath, which manages to capture a particularly Jewish style of narration without resorting to clichéd interpolations of Yiddish: ‘schleps’ or ‘schnozzes’ or ‘oy veys’. Of course, this makes Arlt tricky to translate: I should like to note here a major debt to my wife Marian Womack for going through the translation with me several times, on occasions word by word, always to its benefit. Mistakes and infelicities that remain are all mine, of course.

Finally, a note on the title. The original Spanish title of Arlt’s novel is El juguete rabioso. ‘Rabioso’ normally means ‘angry’, or ‘wild’: my choice of ‘mad’ has here to be taken in the sense of ‘that drives me mad’, or ‘don’t it just make you mad?’ — annoyance rather than insanity. I understand Arlt’s title as suggesting something of the dehumanising fatalism of Gloucester’s ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods’: one can be as angry as one wishes, but our lives are controlled by forces we are unable to dominate. Certainly, the description of Silvio’s career, with its highs and lows, moments of great fortune and periods of despair, gives an overarching impression of an individual being shuttled helplessly from event to event.

— James Womack, 2013

The Mad Toy

Chapter 1. The Thieves

When I was fourteen an old Andalusian cobbler, who had his shop next to an ironmonger’s with a green and white façade, in the archway of an old house in Avenida Rivadavia between South America and Bolivia Streets, initiated me into the delights and thrills of outlaw literature.

The front of the hovel was decorated with polychrome covers of pulp books that told the adventures of Montbars the Pirate and Wenongo the Mohican. On our way back from school, we kids took great pleasure in looking at the prints that hung, discoloured by the sun, on the door.

Sometimes we’d go in to buy half a pack of Barriletes, and the man would grumble about having to leave his bench to come and deal with us.

He was slump-shouldered, sunken-cheeked and bearded, and fairly lame as well, with a strange limp, his foot round like a mule’s hoof, with the heel pointing outwards.

Whenever I saw him I would remember a proverb my mother used a lot: ‘Beware the people marked by God.’

Normally he’d toss a few phrases my way; and as he looked for some particular half of a boot among the mess of shoetrees and rolls of leather, he would introduce me, with the bitterness of a born failure, to the stories of the most famous bandits of Spain, or else would recite a eulogy for a lavish customer whose boots he had polished and who had given him twenty centavos as a tip.

As he was a covetous man, he smiled to recall this client, and his filthy smile that didn’t succeed in filling out his cheeks would wrinkle his lip over his blackened teeth.

Although he was bearish he took a liking to me and for the odd five centavos he’d rent me out the serial novels he had collected over long subscriptions.

And so, as he gave me the story of Diego Corrientes, he’d say:

‘Boy, thith guy… what a guy! He were more beautiful than a rothe and the milithia killed him…’

The artisan’s voice trembled hoarsely:

‘More beautiful than a rothe… but he wath born under an unlucky thtar…’

Then he would recapitulate:

‘Jutht you imagine… he give the poor wha’ he took from the rich… he had a woman at every farm in the mountainth… he were more beautiful than a rothe…’

In this lean-to that stank of paste and leather, his voice would awaken a dream of green mountains. There were gypsies dancing in the ravines… a mountainous and sensual land appeared before my eyes as he evoked it.

‘He were more beautiful than a rothe,’ and then this lame man would vent his sadness by tenderising a sole with his hammer, beating it against an iron plate which he supported on his knees.

Then, shrugging his shoulders as if to rid himself of an unwelcome idea, he would spit through his teeth into a corner, sharpening his awl on the whetstone with quick movements.

Later he would add:

‘You’ll thee, there’th a beautiful bit when you get to Doña Inethita and Uncle Clodfoot’th inn,’ and, seeing that I was taking the book with me, he’d shout a warning:

‘Careful, lad, it cothtth money,’ and turning back to his work he’d lower his head, the mouse-coloured cap pulled down over his ears, rummage in a box with his fingers all dirty from glue and, filling his mouth with nails, would carry on with his hammer, tap… tap… tap…

These books, which I would devour in their numerous ‘batches’, were stories of José María, the Lightning Bolt of Andalusia, or of the adventures of Don Jaime the Bearded and other rogues, more or less authentic and picturesque, as could be seen from the prints that showed them as follows:

Horsemen on stupendously saddled colts, with extra-black side burns on their ruddy faces, their bullfighter’s ponytail covered by an extremely shiny cordobés hat, and a blunderbuss mounted in the saddletree. They would usually be offering, with a magnanimous gesture, a yellow bag of money to a widow standing at the foot of a little green hill with a babe in her arms.

Back then I dreamt of being a bandit and of strangling libidinous senior magistrates; I would right wrongs and protect widows, and I would be loved by exceptional maidens.

I needed a comrade for my youthful adventures, and this comrade was Enrique Irzubeta.

Enrique was a layabout who was always known by the edifying nickname of ‘The Faker’.

His story shows how one can establish a reputation; and how fame, once won, can nurture all those who wish to study the laudable art of leading the ignorant up the garden path.

Enrique was fourteen when he cheated the owner of a sweet factory, which is clear proof that the gods had decided what the destiny of our friend Enrique would be. But because the gods are crafty at heart, I am not surprised, as I write my memoirs, to discover that Enrique is now being put up in one of those hotels that the State provides for hooligans and rascals.

The truth is this:

A certain factory owner, in order to stimulate the sale of his products, announced a competition, with prizes for those who could put together a complete set of the flags of South America which he had had printed on the underside of each sweet wrapper.

The difficulty lay in finding the wrapper with the flag of Nicaragua, given its extreme scarcity.

These absurd contests, as you know, excite young boys, who, under the banner of a common interest, add up every day the results of their searches and the development of their patient investigations.

And so Enrique promised his neighbourhood friends, the carpenter’s apprentices and the dairyman’s sons, that he would fake the Nicaraguan flag if someone brought him a copy.

The lads were doubtful… they vacillated, knowing Irzubeta’s reputation, even though Enrique magnanimously offered as hostage two volumes of the History of France, written by M. Guizot, so that his probity would not be called into question.

And so the bargain was struck on the pavement in a cul-de-sac, with green-painted streetlights on the street corners, with few houses and tall brick walls. The blue curve of the sky sat atop the distant brushwood-topped walls, and the street was made all the more sad by the monotonous murmur of endless sawing and the cows mooing in the dairy.

Later I found out that Enrique, using Indian ink and blood, had reproduced the Nicaraguan flag so convincingly that it was impossible to tell the original from the copy.

A few days later Irzubeta showed off a brand new airgun that he later sold to a second-hand clothes dealer in Reconquista Street. This happened while brave Bonnot and valiant Valet were terrorising Paris.1

I had already read the forty-odd volumes that the Viscount of Ponson du Terrail had written about Mother Fipart’s adopted son, the admirable Rocambole, and I aspired to become a bandit in the high style.

Well, one summer day, in the sordid neighbourhood grocery shop, I met Irzubeta.

The hot siesta hour weighed on the streets, and there was I, sitting on a cask of yerba,2 chatting to Hipólito, who took advantage of his father’s being asleep to make bamboo-framework aeroplanes. Hipólito wanted to be a pilot, ‘but first he had to solve the problem of natural stability’. At other times he was preoccupied with perpetual motion and would ask me about the possible implications of his musing.

Hipólito, with his elbows on a lard-stained newspaper, between the cheese counter and the red levers on the till, listened to my suggestions with the utmost attention:

‘A clock mechanism is no use for the propeller. Give it a tiny little electric motor and put the dry batteries in the fuselage.’

‘You mean like in submarines…’

‘Submarines? What submarines? The only danger is that the current could burn out the motor, but the plane’ll go much more smoothly and you’ll have a while before the batteries die.’

‘Che, couldn’t we make the motor work via a wireless telegraph? You’ll have to see how that might work. It’d be great, wouldn’t it?’

At this moment Enrique came in.

‘Che, Hipólito, my mum says do you want to give me half a kilo of sugar on tick.’

‘I can’t, che; the old man says that until you sort out your bill…’

Enrique frowned slightly.

‘I’m surprised to hear it, Hipólito.’

Hipólito added, conciliatory:

‘If it was down to me, you know… but it’s the old man, che.’ And he pointed at me, happy to be able to change the subject, and said to Enrique:

‘Che, don’t you know Silvio? He made the cannon.’

Irzubeta’s face lit up respectfully.

‘Oh, was that you? Well done. The guy who mucks out the dairy said it fired like a Krupp…’

While he was talking, I observed him.

He was tall and skinny. Over his rounded forehead, stippled with freckles, lustrous black hair waved in a lordly fashion. His eyes were the colour of tobacco, slightly slanted, and he wore a brown suit that had been fitted to his figure by hands unskilled in the couturier’s art.

He leant on the edge of the counter, balancing his chin on the palm of his hand. He seemed to be reflecting on something.

The adventure of my cannon was a resonant one, and pleasant to remember.

I bought an iron tube and several pounds of lead from some workers at the electricity company. With these elements I fabricated what I called a culverin or ‘bombard’. The manufacture went as follows:

Into a hexagonal wooden mould, lined on the inside with mud, I inserted the iron tube. The space between the two interior faces was filled with molten lead. After breaking the covering, I smoothed the underside with a thick file, and then used tin hoops to fix the cannon onto a carriage made out of the thickest planks from a box that had been used to store kerosene.

My culverin was a handsome object. It could be loaded with projectiles two inches in diameter, the charge for which I placed in powder-filled rough cotton bags.

As I stroked my little monster, I thought:

‘This cannon can kill, this cannon can destroy.’ And the conviction that I had created a danger both mortal and obedient filled me with a mad joy.

The neighbourhood kids examined it with admiration; it showed them my intellectual superiority, which from that moment prevailed whenever we went on expeditions to steal fruit or else discover buried treasure in the abandoned territories beyond the Maldonado, the stream that divided us from the parish of San José de Flores.

The day we fired the cannon was legendary. It was in the middle of a clump of Jerusalem thorn, itself in the middle of an enormous patch of waste ground in Avellaneda Street, before you got to San Eduardo, that we made the experiment. A circle of kids stood round me while I, my imagination much excited, loaded the mouth of the culverin. Then, in order to test its ballistic capacities, we aimed it at the zinc tank that was fixed to the wall of a nearby carpenter’s and provided it with water.

Filled with emotion I touched a match to the fuse; a little dark flame leapt under the sun and suddenly a terrible report enveloped us in a nauseating cloud of white smoke. For an instant we were stricken dumb with wonder: it seemed that in that moment we had discovered a new continent, or had by sorcery been translated into the masters of the earth. Suddenly someone shouted:

‘Scram! The fuzz!’

There was not sufficient time to make a dignified retreat. Two policemen were coming towards us at full pelt, we hesitated… and suddenly with great leaps and bounds we fled, abandoning the bombard to the enemy.

Enrique’s parting words:

‘Che, if you need any scientific data, then I’ve got a collection of Around the World magazine at home and I can lend them to you.’

From that day forth up until the night of our greatest jeopardy, our friendship was like the friendship of Orestes and Pylades.3

Such a new picturesque world I discovered in the Irzubeta house!

Unforgettable people! Three men and two women, and the house governed by the mother, a woman the colour of salt and pepper, with small fish eyes and a large inquisitional nose, and the grandmother bent double, deaf, and blackened like a tree-trunk burnt in a fire.

With the exception of one absentee, who was the police officer, in that quiet cave everybody lay around unused, in sweet idleness, passing in their leisure time from the novels of Dumas to the comforting sleep of the siesta, and thence to amiable twilight gossip.

Their worries would spring up at the beginning of the month. At this point they would have to deter their creditors, sweet-talk the ‘Spanish bastards’,4 calming the excesses of the plebeians who tactlessly came right up to the outer door and shouted, asking to be paid for the goods which they had ingenuously handed over on credit.

The owner of the cave was a fat Alsatian, called Grenuillet. Rheumatic, neurasthenic and in his seventies, he eventually got used to the irregularities of the Irzubetas, who paid him his rent every now and then. Previously he had tried unsuccessfully to evict them, but the Irzubetas were related to long-established judges and other people of that type from the conservative party, which was how they knew themselves to be immoveable.

The Alsatian eventually resigned himself to waiting for regime change, and the flagrant shamelessness of these idlers reached the point where they would send Enrique to ask the landlord for free tickets to the Casino; his son worked there as a porter.

Ah! And what well-spiced remarks, what Christian reflections could be heard from the local gossips, who held their conclave in the neighbourhood butcher’s shop, and commented devoutly on their neighbours’ lives.

This is what the mother of an extremely ugly girl said in reference to one of the young Irzubetas, who had, in a fit of lust, displayed his private parts to the maiden:

‘Just you wait, I hope I don’t ever get my hands on him, because it’d be worse for him than if a train ran him over.’

This is what Hipólito’s mother said, a fat woman with an extremely white face who was always pregnant, as she grasped the butcher’s arm:

‘I advise you, Don Segundo, not to trust them an inch. They’ve squeezed so much out of us I can’t tell you.’

‘Don’t worry, don’t worry,’ the brawny man would grumble sternly, fencing with his enormous knife in and out of a lung.

Ah! And how happy the Irzubetas were. Ask the baker who had the cheek to complain about how far his creditors were in arrears; ask him to say it isn’t so.

This baker was complaining to one of the girls when he had the bad luck to be overheard by the police officer, who happened to be passing by the house.

The police officer, accustomed to settle all problems by judicious blows and knocks, and irritated by the insolence displayed in the fact that the baker wanted to be paid what he was owed, beat the man out of the house with his own fists. This was a salutary lesson in manners, and many people preferred not to demand payment. And so, this family’s life was cheerier than a one-act farce.

The maidens of the family, past twenty-six and not a boyfriend between them, enjoyed themselves with Chateaubriand, sank back into Lamartine and Cherbuliez. This led them to entertain the conviction that they were part of an intellectual ‘elite’, and it was this that in its turn led them to refer to poor people as riffraff.

The grocer who tried to get payment for his beans was riffraff; the shopkeeper from whom they had beggingly coaxed a few metres of lace was riffraff; riffraff too was the butcher who lost it when the ladies unwillingly called through his shutters that ‘next month we’ll pay you for sure’.

The three brothers, hairy and thin, tramps in all their glory, sunbathed throughout the day and when it got dark put on their suits and went off to cultivate love affairs among the dissolute women in the slum districts of town.

The two blessed and discontented old women squabbled at any moment over trifles, or, sitting with their daughters in the ancient hall, would spy on people through the curtains, or else they gossiped; as they were descended from an official who had served in Napoleon I’s army, I often heard them, from the penumbra that idealised those bloodless faces, dreaming their imperialist myths, evoking the stale splendours of nobility, while on the lonely pavement the lamplighter with his pole crowned by a violet flame lit the green gas lamp.

As they had no way to keep a maid, and also as no servant would have been able to support the goatish vigour of the three hairy louts and the bad humour of the irritable maidens and the whims of the toothy old witches, Enrique was the intermediary needed for the right functioning of that lame economic machinery, and so accustomed was he to ask for credit that his shamelessness was both unheard-of and exemplary. One can say in his praise that a bronze statue would show embarrassment more easily than his refined features.

Irzubeta would spend his long hours of free time in sketching, a skill at which he did not lack either invention or delicacy, which is a fine argument to show that there have always been good-for-nothings with aesthetic ability. As I had nothing to do, I was often in his house, a circumstance that did not please the old women, about whom I didn’t give a damn.

From my union with Enrique, from the long conversations we had about bandits and thieves, we developed a strange predisposition to commit acts of mischief ourselves, and an infinite desire to gain immortality as delinquents.

Enrique once said to me, apropos of the expulsion of some bandits, some ‘apaches’ who had emigrated from France to Buenos Aires, and whose case had been reported by Soiza Reilly in an article accompanied by eloquent photographs:

‘The President of the Republic has four “apaches” for his bodyguards.’

I laughed.

‘Stop pulling my leg.’

‘It’s true, I’m telling you, and they’re like this.’ And he opened his arms like a crucified man to give me some idea of the thoracic capacity of these dyed-in-the-wool thugs.

I don’t remember how, by what subtleties and casuistry, we managed to convince ourselves that robbery was a meritorious and beautiful act; but I do know that it was by mutual agreement that we decided to organise a gang of thieves, whose initial membership was ourselves alone.

Later we would see… And in order to kick off our activities in a befitting manner we decided to begin by ransacking abandoned houses. This is how we did it:

After lunch, when the streets were deserted, we would go out discreetly dressed to roam the streets of Flores or Caballito.

Our tools were:

A little monkey wrench, a screwdriver and some newspapers to wrap up the pickings.

Where a poster announced a property for rent, we would go and ask about it, with our manners perfect and our faces composed. We looked like Cacus’s altar-boys.5

Once we’d got the keys, ostensibly so that we could find out whether the houses were habitable or not, we would spring into action.

I have not yet forgotten the joy we felt upon opening the doors. We would rush in violently; eager for booty, we would rush through the rooms assessing with rapid glances the amount of stealable material.

If there was electric light installed, we would tear out the cables, the light fittings and the doorbells, the bulbs and the switches, the chandeliers, the glass lampshades and the batteries; we took the taps from the bathroom because they were nickel-plated; we took the taps from the kitchen sink because they were made of bronze, and we only didn’t take doors and windows to stop ourselves from looking like removal men.

We would work inspired by a certain kind of painful joy, a knot of anxiety held still in our throats, and moving as fast as quick-change artists, laughing with no cause, shuddering at imagined sounds.

The cables hung in rags from the ceilings which were ripped up by the vigour of our efforts; chunks of plaster and mortar stained the dusty floors; in the kitchen the lead pipes would release an endless trickle of water, and in very few seconds we were able to get the house in good shape for a costly repair-job.

Then Irzubeta and I would hand back the keys and with rapid steps disappear.

The meeting-point was always the backroom of a plumber’s shop; the plumber was like a collector’s card version of Cacaseno:6 moonfaced, getting on in years, with a large gut and horns, because it was well known that he tolerated the infidelities of his wife with the patience of a Franciscan friar.

Whenever his situation was indirectly hinted at, he would reply with lamblike meekness that his wife suffered from nerves, and in the face of such a solidly scientific argument there was no possible reply apart from silence.

However, he was an eagle where his own interests were concerned.

This knock-kneed man would meticulously examine our haul, weigh the cables, test the bulbs to see if the filaments were burnt out, sniff the pipes and with an aggravating patience would calculate and recalculate his sums until he ended up offering us a tenth of the cost price of what we had stolen.

If we argued or got annoyed, this good man would lift up his cowlike eyes, his face would fill with an ironic smile, and, without letting us speak further, and giving us cheery slaps on the back, he would show us to the door with all the charm in the world and leave us with the money in our hands.

But don’t think that we limited our exploits to uninhabited houses. Nobody could compare to us as snappers-up of unconsidered trifles.

We were constantly aware of other people’s property. In our hands there was a fabulous dexterity, in our eyes the speed of a bird of prey. Without hurrying, but with the speed of a gyrfalcon falling down on an innocent dove, we fell upon those things that did not belong to us.

If we went into a café and there was a piece of cutlery or a sugar bowl forgotten on a table and the waiter was distracted, then we would lift them both; we would find, in the kitchen display cabinets or any other hidey-hole, whatever we considered necessary for our common benefit.

We spared neither cup nor plate, knife nor billiard ball, and I remember well that on one rainy night, in a busy café, Enrique very neatly purloined an overcoat, and on another night I got a gold-headed cane.

Our eyes would spin in their orbits or open as wide as saucers while we were looking for things to turn to our advantage, and as soon as we saw what we wanted, there we were, smiling, care free and free-speaking, our fingers ready and our eyes alert for everything, so as not to blow it like minor-league grafters.

In shops we would exercise this same pure art, and you had to see it to believe it how we took in the kids who worked the counters while their bosses were sleeping their siesta.

Using some pretext, Enrique would take the kid outside to look at the shop window, so that he could get the price of certain objects, and if there was no one in the office then I would quickly open a display case and fill my pockets with boxes of pencils, artistic inkstands; once we were able to snaffle money out of a cashbox that had no alarm, and another time, in a gun shop, we got a box with a dozen penknives made of gold-plated steel with mother of pearl handles.

When we went through a day without being able to get our hands on anything we were crestfallen, sad at our incompetence, disappointed about our future.

Then we would go around in a bad mood until something came along to cheer us up.

However, when business was on the up and coins were replaced by delectable peso bills, we would wait for a rainy afternoon and go out for a ride in a hired car with a driver. How delicious then to be driven through curtains of rain along the city streets! We would lie back on the soft cushions, light a cigarette, leaving the busy people behind us in the rain, and imagine that we lived in Paris, or foggy London town. We would dream in silence, a smile balanced on our condescending lips.

Later, in a high-class cake shop, we would drink chocolate with vanilla, and go home sated on the afternoon train, our energies doubled by the satisfaction our blowout had given our voluptuous bodies, by the dynamism in everything around us that shouted with its iron voices in our ears:

Forwards, forwards!

Said I to Enrique one fine day:

‘We need to form a secret society, a real society, for smart kids.’

‘The difficulty is that there aren’t that many of us around,’ Enrique argued.

‘Yes, you’re right; but there can’t be none of them.’

A few weeks after saying this, Enrique’s efforts turned up a certain Lucio who joined our group; he was a fool, short in stature and livid from too much masturbation, with a face that was so shameless that it made anyone who saw it want to laugh.

He lived under the protection of some pious old women who cared little or nothing for him. This nincompoop had one favourite occupation, which was telling people the most ordinary things as if they were immense secrets. This he did by looking all around him and moving his arms like certain film actors did when they played petty suburban crooks.

‘This nutcase won’t be any use to us,’ I said to Enrique; but as he brought a newcomer’s enthusiasm to the recently formed brotherhood, his keen decisiveness, together with his bizarre arm movements, gave us hope.

It was impossible for us to do without a meeting-point, and we called it, at Lucio’s suggestion, unanimously accepted, The Club of the Midnight Gentlemen.

The club held its meetings round the back of Enrique’s house, in a narrow room of dusty wood with large spider-webs hanging from the roof beams, facing a filthy-walled and decrepit latrine. There were lots of broken and faded puppets in the corners, the legacy of a failed puppeteer who had been a friend of the Irzubetas, as well as boxes filled with horrifically mutilated lead soldiers, rank bundles of dirty clothes and boxes overflowing with old newspapers and magazines.

The door to the hovel opened onto a dark patio covered in cracked bricks, which became muddy on rainy days.

‘Nobody here, che?’

Enrique closed the shabby casement through the broken panes of which were visible huge roiling tin clouds.

‘They’re inside, chatting.’

We made ourselves as comfortable as possible. Lucio offered us Egyptian cigarettes, a formidable novelty for us, and smoothly lit a match on the sole of his shoe. Then he said:

‘We are going to read the Minutes.’

So that there would be nothing lacking in this aforementioned club, there was a Book of Minutes where all the associates’ projects were entered, and there was also a stamp, a rectangular stamp that Enrique had made out of a cork and which displayed the emotive spectacle of a heart pierced by three daggers.

The Minutes were kept by each of us in turn; the end of each set of Minutes was signed; each new topic was given its stamp.

The Minutes contained such things as the following:

Lucio’s Proposal — In the future in order to rob without needing locksmith’s tools, we should make wax models of the keys of all the houses we visit.

Enrique’s Proposal — We should also make a plan of each house where we get the keys from. These plans will be kept secret with the documents of the Order and must be sure to mention all peculiarities of the building for the greater convenience of the person who will be sent to operate there.

General Agreement of the Order — Associate Enrique is hereby named the Club’s official forger and draughtsman.

Silvio’s Proposal — To introduce nitro-glycerine into a fortified zone, take an egg, empty it of the yolk and the white and inject the explosive using a syringe.

If the acids in the nitro-glycerine destroy the eggshell, make it a sheath out of gun cotton. Nobody will suspect that the harmless-looking sheath hides an explosive charge.

Enrique’s Proposal — The Club should have a library of scientific works in order for its associates to be certain that they are robbing and killing according to the most modern industrial procedures. Also, after being a member of the Club for three months, each associate will be obliged to own a Browning pistol, a pair of rubber gloves and 100 grams of chloroform. The Club’s official chemist will be Associate Silvio.

Lucio’s Proposal — All bullets should be poisoned with prussic acid and its toxic power should be tested by shooting a dog’s tail off with a single shot. The dog has to die in ten minutes.

‘Che, Silvio.’

‘What?’ Enrique said.

‘I was just thinking. We should organise clubs in every town in the Republic.’

‘No, the important thing,’ I interrupted, ‘is to practise for what we’re doing tomorrow. There’s no point concerning ourselves with trifles now.’

Lucio pulled up a bundle of dirty clothes that he was using as an ottoman. I continued:

‘Training as thieves has one key advantage: it makes you cold-blooded, which is the most important thing for the job. Also, experiencing danger makes you prudent.’

Enrique said:

‘Let’s cut all this speechifying and get down to something interesting. Here in the alley behind the butcher’s shop — the wall of Irzubeta’s house gave onto this alley — there’s a gringo who parks his car every night and then goes off to sleep in a room he rents in one of those big old houses in Zamudio Street. What about it Silvio, if we make his magneto and his horn… disappear?’

‘You know that’s a serious job?’

‘There’s no danger, che. We jump over the wall. The butcher sleeps like the dead. Yeah, we’ll have to wear gloves, I guess.’

‘And the dog?’

‘And why should I care? I’m friends with the dog.’

‘I just think he’s going to go off on one.’

‘What do you think, Silvio?’

‘And don’t forget that we’ll make more than a hundred for the magneto.’

‘It’s a good job, but slippery.’

‘Lucio, are you up for it?’

‘Trying to strong-arm me?… sure… I’ll put on my old trousers so I don’t rip my Sunday best…’

‘And you, Silvio?’

‘I’ll get out as soon as the old lady’s asleep.’

‘When should we meet up?’

‘Look, che, Enrique. I don’t like the job.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t like it. They’re going to suspect us. The alley… The dog that didn’t bark in the night-time… if we can get there so easily we’re bound to leave traces… I don’t like it. You know I’m up for anything, but I don’t like it. It’s too close and the pigs are too nosy.’

‘Well we won’t do it then.’

We smiled as if we had just escaped from danger.

And so we lived days of unparalleled emotion, enjoying the money we had made from our robberies, money that had a special value for us and even seemed to speak to us in its own lively idiom.

The banknotes with their coloured pictures seemed to us to be the most meaningful, the nickel coins jangled merrily as we juggled them in our palms. Yes, money that we acquired through our scams seemed much more worthy and subtle, seemed to have some kind of maximum value, seemed to whisper in our ears with smiling praise and enticing mischief. It wasn’t the vile and odious money that is hated because it needs to be earned by hard work, but rather it was supple money, a silver sphere with two goblin legs and a dwarfish beard, jocular money, dancing money whose smell, like good wine, intoxicated us.

Our eyes were untroubled; I would dare say that our foreheads were haloed with a nimbus of pride and daring. Pride in knowing that if our actions had become public we would have been taken before a judge.

Sitting round a café table, we sometimes spoke about this:

‘What would you do with the Judge in the Criminal Court?’

‘I,’ Enrique replied, ‘I would speak to him about Darwin and Le Dantec.’ (Enrique was an atheist.)

‘And you, Silvio?’

‘I wouldn’t tell them anything, even if they cut my throat.’

‘And what about the rubber?’

We would look at each other in fright. We were terrified of the ‘rubber’, that truncheon that left no visible marks on its victim’s flesh; the rubber truncheon that is used to punish the bodies of thieves in the Police Department when they are slow in confessing their crimes.

With scarcely repressed rage, I replied:

‘They will never break me. They’ll have to kill me first.’

Whenever one of us would say this word, kill, the nerves in our faces would quiver, our eyes would remain fixed and open, looking at an illusory and distant scene of butchery, and our nostrils would flare as we breathed in the smell of gunpowder and blood.

‘That’s why we need to poison the bullets,’ Lucio insisted.

‘And make bombs,’ I continued. ‘No mercy. We have to blow them up, terrorize the fuzz. When their guard is down, bullets… send bombs to the judges through the post.’

This was how we spoke around the café table, solemn and enjoying our impunity before all other people, all the people who did not know that we were thieves, and a delicious fear gripped our hearts as we thought about the way in which these unknown girls who were passing by would look at us if they only knew that we, so young and so well-dressed, were thieves… Thieves!

A few days later, I met with Enrique and Lucio in a café at midnight to finalise the details of a robbery we were planning to commit.

Choosing the most solitary corner, we sat down at a table next to the window.

A thin rain tapped on the glass as the orchestra unleashed the dying climax of a jailhouse tango.

‘Are you sure, Lucio, that there are no guards?’

‘Positive. It’s holiday time and everyone’s gone away.’

We were discussing nothing less than taking down a school library.

Enrique, thoughtful, supported his cheek with one hand. The peak of his cap shaded his eyes.

I was worried.

Lucio was looking around with the satisfaction of someone on whom life smiles. In order to convince me that there was no danger he screwed up his forehead and spoke to me confidentially for the tenth time:

‘I know the route. What are you worried about? All you have to do is jump over the fence that goes from the street to the patio. The porters sleep in a separate room on the third floor. The library is on the second floor on the other side of the building.’

‘It’s an easy job, it’s in the bag,’ Enrique said. ‘It’d be a great job if we could get away with the Encyclopaedic Dictionary.’

‘And how are we going to carry twenty-eight volumes? You’re mad… unless you order a removal van.’

Some cars drove past with their tops down and the brightness of their arc lights, falling on the trees, threw long trembling stains on the ground. The waiter brought us coffee. The tables around us were still empty, up on the stage the musicians were chatting, and the sound of heels stamping on the ground came from the billiard room, where enthusiasts were applauding a particularly complicated cannon.

‘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.

We went into the shed. Lucio turned his lantern on again.

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.

I analysed them all with an unconscious vertigo:

‘He’s getting closer… he’s not thinking… if he were thinking, he wouldn’t walk like that… he’s dragging his feet… if he thought something was up then he wouldn’t drag his heel on the ground… he’d match his body to his thoughts… he’d follow the impulse of his ears searching for noises and his eyes looking for intruders, he’d walk on tiptoe… he knows it… he’s relaxed…’

Suddenly, a hoarse voice, singing down below, with the melancholy of all drunks:

Cursed is the day I met you,

ay macarena, ay macarena

The sleepy song broke off suddenly.

‘He suspects something… no… but yes… no… maybe.’ And I thought that my heart would spring a leak, it was pushing the blood so forcefully through my veins.

When he reached the passage, the unknown man grumbled again:

ay macarena, ay macarena

‘Enrique,’ I whispered. ‘Enrique.’

No one replied.

Along with a sour stink of wine, the wind brought the sound of a belch.

‘It’s a drunk,’ Enrique whispered in my ear. ‘If he comes, we’ll shut him up.’

The uninvited guest wandered off dragging his feet, and disappeared at the end of the corridor. He stopped where it turned and we heard him fumbling with the latch of a door that he closed loudly behind him.

‘That was close!’

‘And you, Lucio… Why are you so quiet?’

‘Happiness, brother, out of happiness.’

‘How did you see him?’

‘I was sitting on the steps; right here. Then bang, I heard a noise, I got up and saw the iron door opening. Voglio dire.12 What a panic!’

‘Imagine if he’d started a fight.’

‘I’d have cooled him off,’ Enrique said.

‘What do we do now?’

‘What should we do? Go, it’s time to be off.’

We went downstairs on tiptoe, smiling. Lucio carried the bundle with the light bulbs. Enrique and I carried two heavy packets of books. I don’t know why, but on the dark staircase I thought about how bright the sun was, and I gave a slow laugh.

‘What are you laughing at?’ Enrique asked grumpily.

‘I don’t know.’

‘We’re not going to meet any cops?’

‘No, there’s none between here and my house.’

‘You said that before.’

‘Anyway, just look at the rain!’

‘Hey!’

‘What’s up, che Enrique?’

‘I forgot to shut the library door. Give me the lantern.’

I gave it to him and with big steps Irzubeta disappeared.

Waiting for him, we sat down on a marble step.

I shivered with cold in the darkness. The water smashed wildly against the patio tiles. My eyelids shut involuntarily and my spirit was invaded, in a distant twilight, by a vision of the imploring face of my dear beloved girl, motionless, next to the black poplar. And my interior voice insisted stubbornly:

‘I have loved you so, Eleonora! Oh, if you only knew how much I have loved you!’

When Enrique came back, he had some volumes under his arm.

‘What’s this?’

‘It’s Malte-Brun’s Geography. I’m keeping it for me.’

‘Did you shut the door properly?’

‘As well as I could.’

‘Is it safe?’

‘No one knows about any of it.’

‘Che, what about the pisshead? Do you think he’s locked the street door?’

Enrique’s question was sensible. The main door was half open and we left through it.

A torrent of water, sputtering, ran between the two pavements, and with its fury contained, the rain fell fine, compact, obstinate.

In spite of all we were carrying, prudence and fear increased the rhythm of our feet.

‘Nice job.’

‘Yeah, good one.’

‘What do you think Lucio, should we leave this in your house?’

‘Don’t be silly, we’ll shift it all tomorrow.’

‘How many bulbs have we got?’

‘Thirty.’

‘Nice job,’ Lucio repeated. ‘What about books?’

‘I reckon more or less seventy pesos,’ Enrique said.

‘What’s the time, Lucio?’

‘It’s got to be at least three.’

No, it wasn’t late, but the tiredness and worry and clouds and silence, the trees dropping water onto our frozen backs, all of these had combined to make the night seem eternal, and Enrique said sadly:

‘Yes, it’s too late.’

We were shivering from the cold and from tiredness when we got to Lucio’s house.

‘Slow, che, don’t wake the olds.’

‘And where should we keep this?’

‘Wait.’

Slowly the door swivelled on its hinges. Lucio went into the room and turned the switch on the interruptor.

‘Come in, che, this is my pad.’13

The wardrobe in one corner, a little white wooden table, and a bed. A Black Christ stretched his pious twisted arms out over the bedstead, and in a frame, in an extremely tragic attitude, a picture of Lyda Borelli14 looked up to the sky.

Exhausted we let ourselves fall onto the bed.

In our sleep-struck faces, tiredness accentuated the dark shadows under our eyes. Our motionless pupils stayed fixed on the white walls which were now close, now far away, like in the fantastic hallucinations of a fever.

Lucio hid the packages in the wardrobe and then sat pensively on the edge of the table, grasping a knee in both hands.

‘What about the Geography? Where is it?’

The silence weighed down on our sodden spirits, on our livid faces, on our half-open bruised hands.

I got up solemnly, without taking my eyes off the white wall.

‘Give me the revolver, I’ll go.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Irzubeta said as he sat up in the bed, and in the darkness we headed out into the streets without saying a word, with hard faces and slumped shoulders.

I had finished undressing when three frantic blows sounded out on the street door, three urgent blows that made my hair stand on end.

I thought in a panic:

‘The police have followed me… the police… the police…’ My soul panted.

The howling blows were repeated another three times, more anxiously, more furiously, more urgently.

I took the revolver and ran naked to the door.

I had scarcely opened the door when Enrique exploded through it into my arms. Some books fell onto the pavement.

‘Shut the door, shut the door, they’re following me; shut the door, Silvio,’ Irzubeta said in a hoarse voice.

I pulled him in under the balcony that ran round the patio.

‘What is it, Silvio, what’s happening?’ My mother shouted fearfully from her room.

‘Nothing, calm down… a policeman running after Enrique for a fight.’

In the silence of the night, the silence that fear turned into an accomplice of the forces of law and order, a cop’s whistle ran out, and a horse ran at a gallop past the top of the road. And again this terrible sound, multiplied, was repeated at various points in the neighbourhood.

Like streamers, the shrill calls of the policemen crossed the air.

A neighbour opened his street door, we heard people talking, and Enrique and I, in the darkness of the balcony, held tight to one another, trembling. The menacing whistles came from all sides, so many of them; as well as this part of the sinister manhunt, we heard the noise of horses’ harnesses, frantic galloping, sudden pauses on the slippery pavements, the sound of the police men retreating. And I held the quarry in my arms, his body trembling in fear against me, and an infinite compassion pulled me towards this ruined boy.

I dragged him towards my den. His teeth were chattering. Quivering with fear, he fell into a chair and his excited and wide-open fearful eyes fixed on the rosy lampshade.

Once again a horse crossed the street, but so slowly that I thought it would stop in front of my house. Then the policeman geed up his horse and the whistles, which had been becoming ever less frequent, stopped completely.

‘Water, give me water.’

I passed him a bottle and he drank eagerly. The water sang in his throat. A large sigh caused his chest to deflate.

Then, without turning his eyes away from the lampshade, he smiled with the strange and uncertain smile of someone awakening from a hallucinatory fear.

He said:

‘Thank you, Silvio,’ and he carried on smiling, his soul infinitely expansive with the unexpected prodigy that was his salvation.

‘But tell me, how did it happen?’

‘I was walking down the street. There wasn’t anyone around. I turned the corner of South America, and realised that there was a cop looking at me from under a streetlamp. I stopped instinctively and he shouted at me: “What have you got there?” I don’t need to tell you that I ran like the devil. He ran after me, but because he was wearing his waterproof cape he couldn’t catch up with me… I left him in my wake… and then I heard another one coming in the distance on horseback… and all the whistling… the guy running after me was blowing his whistle. So I made an effort and got here.’

‘You see… And all for not leaving the books at Lucio’s house! What if they’d caught you!’

‘They’d have taken us all to the pen.’

‘And what about the books? You didn’t leave the books in the street?’

‘No, they fell here in the corridor.’

When we went to look for them, I had to explain things to my mother:

‘It’s nothing bad. Enrique was playing billiards with another guy and accidentally ripped the felt. The owner wanted to charge him for it and because he didn’t have any money there was a big row.’

We are in Enrique’s house.

A red lightning bolt passes through the little window of the puppet hovel.

In his corner Enrique sits and thinks, and a wrinkle divides his brow from the hairline to his eyebrows. Lucio is smoking, reclined on a heap of dirty clothing, and the smoke from the cigarette fogs over his pale face. Over the latrine, from a neighbouring house, comes the melody of a waltz being picked out slowly on a piano.

I am sitting on the floor. A soldier with no legs, red and green, looks at me from his crumpled cardboard house. Enrique’s sisters are arguing outside in their disagreeable voices.

‘So…?’

Enrique lifts his noble head and looks at Lucio.

‘So?’

I look at Enrique.

‘What do you think, Silvio?’ Lucio continues.

‘We don’t need to do it, we should stop mucking around, if we don’t we’re going to get caught.’

‘The night before last we nearly got nabbed twice.’

‘Yes, it couldn’t be clearer.’ And for the tenth time Lucio reads out an extract from some newspaper: ‘Today at three o’clock in the morning, Officer Manuel Carlés, patrolling Avellaneda and South America Streets, surprised an individual of suspicious appearance carrying a package under one arm. Upon being asked to halt, the unknown individual ran off, disappearing into one of the many patches of waste ground in the environs. The commissioner of Section 38 has taken control of the case.”’

‘So the club is to be disbanded?’ Enrique says.

‘No. Its activities will be halted for an indefinite period,’ Lucio replies. ‘It makes no sense to carry out more jobs now that the police suspect something.’

‘Yes, that would be dumb.’

‘What about the books?’

‘How many are there?’

‘Twenty-seven.’

‘Nine books each… we’ll have to be careful about erasing the stamps from the School Board.’

‘And the light bulbs?’

Lucio replies quickly.

‘Look, che, I don’t want to hear anything more about the light bulbs. I’d rather throw them in the toilet than try to fence them.’

‘Yes, sure, it’s a bit dangerous now.’

Irzubeta is silent.

‘Are you sad, che Enrique?’

A strange smile twists his mouth; shrugging his shoulders, vehemently, sticking his chest out, he says:

‘You’re stopping, right, it’s not a game for everyone, but me, even if I’m on my own, I’m going to continue.’

On the wall of the puppet hovel, the red lightning bolt illuminates the adolescent’s sunken profile.

Chapter 2. Works and Days

Because the landlord was going to raise the rent, we moved out of the neighbourhood, switching to a large and creepy house on Cuenca Street, in the depths of Floresta.

I stopped seeing Lucio and Enrique, and a bitter shade of misery ruled over my days.

When I turned fifteen, one evening my mother said to me:

‘Silvio, you need to work.’

I was reading a book at the table and lifted my eyes to look at her with resentment. I thought: work, always work. But I didn’t answer.

She was standing in front of the window. The clear bluish twilight affected her white hair and her yellowish forehead, struck across with wrinkles, and she looked at me sidelong, half ashamed and half pitying and I avoided her eyes.

She carried on, understanding the aggression in my silence.

‘You have to work, do you understand? You didn’t want to study. I can’t support you. You need to work.’

When she spoke she barely moved her lips, which were as thin as two splints. She hid her hands in the folds of the black shawl that lay over her little sagging bust.

‘You have to work, Silvio.’

‘Work, work doing what? For God’s sake… What do you want me to do? Invent a job? You know very well that I’ve looked for a job.’

I spoke and shook with emotion; resentment at her tough words, hatred at the world’s indifference, at the numbing misery of daily life, and at the same time I was affected by an unnameable pain: the certainty of my own uselessness.

But she insisted as if these were the only words she had.

‘Work at what? Tell me, at what?’

She went mechanically to the window, and smoothed out the wrinkles in the curtain with a nervous motion. As if it was difficult for her to say:

‘They’re always looking for people in La Prensa…’

‘Yes, they want potboys, drones… You want me to be a potboy?’

‘No, but you have to work. The little we’ve got left will last until Lila finishes at school. No more. What do you want me to do?’

From below the hem of her skirt she showed me a worn little boot and said:

‘Look at these boots. Lila has to go to the library every day so as not to spend money on books. What do you want me to do, son?’

Now her voice was troubled. A dark groove cut her forehead in half from her brow to her hairline, and her lips were almost trembling.

‘All right, mama, I’ll go to work.’

So much discontent. The clear blue light showed my soul our life in all its monotony, and my soul wavered, stinking and silent.

From outside came the sad song of children in a circle:

Watchmen on the tower.

Watchmen on the tower.

I want to conquer it.

I gave a low sigh.

‘I wish you were able to study.’

‘That’s not worth anything.’

‘The day that Lila graduates…’

Her voice was weak, tired out with suffering.

She had sat down by the sewing machine, and in her profile, under the line of her brow, her eye was a dark cavern containing a sad white spark. Her poor bent back, and the clear blue light on her hair, gave her an iceberg clarity.

‘When I think…’ she murmured.

‘Are you sad, mama?’

‘No,’ she answered.

And then:

‘Do you want me to speak to Señor Naidath? You could learn how to be an interior decorator. Don’t you like that for a job?’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Well, you’d earn a lot of money…’

I felt an impulse to stand up, to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, shouting in her ear:

‘Don’t talk about money, mama, please…! Don’t speak… Shut up…!’

But we were there, immobile in our pain. Outside the circle of children was still singing its sad song:

Watchmen on the tower.

Watchmen on the tower.

I want to conquer it.

I thought:

‘And this is what life is like, and when I’m older and have a son, I’ll tell him “You have to work. I can’t keep you any longer.” That’s what life is like.’ A cold shudder took hold of me as I sat in the chair.

Now, looking at her, observing her ever-so-tiny body, my heart was filled with compassion.

I thought that I saw her outside of time and space, in a dry landscape, the ground dark and the sky metallic from being so blue. I was so small that I couldn’t even walk, and she was flogged by the shadows, was in anguish, and she walked by the edge of the road, carrying me in her arms, warming my knees with her breast, stretching my whole small body against her thin body, and begging for me, and she gave me her breast, a hot sob dried her mouth, and she took the bread from her own hungering mouth and put it in my mouth, and took the sleep from her night to deal with my complaints, and with shining eyes, with her body dressed in its wretched rags, so small and so sad, she opened herself up like a veil to give cover to my sleep.

Poor mother! I would have liked to embrace her, to lay her white head on my breast, to ask her pardon for my harsh words, and suddenly, into the long silence that we both were keeping, I said in a trembling voice:

‘Yes, I’ll go to work, mama.’

Stolidly:

‘That’s good, son, that’s good…’ And again a deep pain sealed our lips.

Outside, over the rosy crest of a wall, a musical stave flashed silver against the blue sky.

Don Gaetano’s bookshop, or rather, his used book store, in Lavalle Street, Number 800, a huge room, stuffed to the ceiling with books.

It was larger and darker than Trophonius’s cave.15

Wherever you looked were books: books on tables made out of planks on sawhorses, books in display cases, in the corners, under the tables and in the basement.

A large door showed passers-by what the cavern contained, and out on the street there hung volumes of stories for vulgar imaginations, Geneviève de Brabant and The Adventures of Musolino. Across the street, just as in a beehive, people buzzed around the entrance to a cinema, where the bell rang incessantly.

At the counter next to the door, Don Gaetano’s wife attended customers: she was a fat and pale woman with chestnut hair and eyes that were admirable for their expression of green cruelty.

‘Is Don Gaetano in?’

The woman pointed out a large man in shirtsleeves, who was in the doorway watching people come and go. He had a black tie round his naked neck, and the hair that hung uncontrolled over his forehead allowed the points of his ears to show through its ringlets. He was a good-looking man, vigorous and with dark skin, but under his long eyelashes his large watery eyes did not inspire confidence.

The man took the letter that recommended me, and read it; then, giving it to his wife, he started to examine me.

A large wrinkle crossed his forehead, and by his spying, ingratiating attitude you could see that he was a naturally suspicious and devious man who was also sickly-sweet, who faked his sugared kindness and who was falsely indulgent in his loud laughter.

‘So you already worked in a bookshop?’

‘Yes, boss.’

‘And the other bookshop did lots of business?’

‘Enough.’

‘But it didn’t have as much books as here, eh?’

‘Not even one-tenth as much.’

Then he spoke to his wife:

‘And His Worship won’t come to work no more?’

His wife said in a bitter voice:

‘These lousy bums are all the same. When they’ve had enough to eat and learnt how to work then they go.’

She said this, and then she leant her chin into the palm of her hand, showing a strip of naked arm under the sleeve of her blue blouse. Her cruel eyes were fixed on the bustling street. The cinema bell kept on ringing, and a sunbeam came down between two high walls to light the dark front of Dardo Rocha’s building.16

‘What do you want to earn?’

‘I don’t know… You tell me, boss.’

‘Okay, look… I’ll give you a peso and a half, plus room and board, you’ll live like a king here, that’s for sure.’ The man bowed his unruly head. ‘There’s no timetable here… the busiest hours are from eight p.m. to eleven…’

‘What, eleven o’clock at night?’

‘What do you care, a kid like you’s up till eleven anyway watching the girls go by. And in the morning we get up at ten.’

Remembering the positive opinion Don Gaetano had of the person who recommended me, I said:

‘That’s fine, but because I need the money you’ll have to pay me every week.’

‘What, you don’t trust us?’

‘No, señora, but because we need things in our house and we’re poor… You understand…’

The woman turned her aggressive gaze back to the street.

‘Okay,’ Don Gaetano continued, ‘come to my house at ten tomorrow; we live in Esmerelda Street.’ And he wrote the address down on a piece of paper and gave it to me.

The woman didn’t respond to my farewell. Motionless, with her cheek on the palm of her hand and her naked arm pressing down on the spines of some books, with her eyes staring at the front of Dardo Rocha’s house, she seemed the dark genius of the book-cave.

At nine o’clock in the morning I stopped outside the house where the bookseller lived. After I had rung the bell, to hide from the rain I hid myself in the porch.

An old man with a beard, with his neck smothered in a green scarf and his cap hanging down to his ears, came out to meet me.

‘What do you want?’

‘I’m the new employee.’

‘Come up.’

I climbed the stairwell with its dirty uppers.

When we got to the corridor, the man said:

‘Please wait.’

Through the glass panes of the street window that looked out onto the balcony, one could see the chocolate-coloured iron sign of a shop. The rain flowed slowly down its varnished convexities. In the distance, a chimney between two water tanks threw out great canvases of smoke into the space that was being stitched up by needles of rain.

The nervous sound of the tram bell was repeated regularly, and there were violet sparks jumping between the trolley and the shuddering cables; the croaking crow of a rooster came from I don’t know where.

A sudden sadness overcame me as I faced the house and its neglect.

The glass in the doors was unshaded, the shutters were closed.

In a corner of the hall, on the dusty floor, someone had abandoned a crust of dry bread, and in the air there hung the smell of sour paste: the stink of long-wet dirt.

‘Miguel,’ the woman’s disagreeable voice came from inside.

‘Coming, señora.’

The old man lifted his arms into the air and with his fists clenched went to the kitchen that lay across a wet patio. I heard the voices of Don Gaetano and his wife.

‘Miguel.’

‘Señora.’

‘Where are the shirts that Eusebia brought?’

‘In the small trunk, señora.’

‘Don Miguel,’ the man said sarcastically.

‘Yes, Don Gaetano.’

‘How are things with you, Don Gaetano?’

The old man moved his head from side to side, raising his disconsolate eyes to the heavens.

He was thin, tall, with a long face and a three-day beard on his flaccid cheeks and the sad expression of an abandoned dog in his unfocused eyes.

‘Don Miguel.’

‘Yes, Don Gaetano.’

‘Go and buy me an Avanti.’

The old man set off.

‘Miguel.’

‘Señora.’

‘Bring a half kilo of sugar cubes, and make sure they weigh them right.’

A door opened, and Don Gaetano came out, holding his trousers up with both hands and with a broken-off piece of comb suspended in his curly hair over his forehead.

‘What’s the time?’

‘I don’t know.’

He looked out at the patio.

‘Bloody weather,’ he muttered, and started to comb his hair.

When Don Miguel came back with the sugar and the cigars, Don Gaetano said:

‘Bring me the basket, then you take the coffee to the shop,’ and, putting on a greasy felt hat, he took the basket the old man brought him and then passed it on to me, saying:

‘Let’s go to the market.’

‘The market?’

He picked up on what I said.

‘A piece of advice, che Silvio. I don’t like saying things twice. Anyway, buying in the market you know what you eat.’

I came sadly after him with the basket, a ridiculously large basket, which chittered as it banged against my knees and made the disgrace of being poor all the deeper, all the more grotesque.

‘Is the market far away?’

‘No, kid, here in Carlos Pellegrini,’ and then seeing me down in the mouth he said:

‘It’s like you were ashamed to carry the basket. An honest man shouldn’t be ashamed of nothing, as long as it’s work.’

A dandy whom I nudged with the basket gave me a furious glare, a rubicund porter who had been wearing his uniform with its magnificent livery and gold trim all morning looked at me ironically, and a little urchin who was passing by, as if by accident, gave the bottom of the basket a kick, and the radish-red basket, ridiculously large, made me the focus of all the world’s ridicule.

‘Oh the irony! I, who had dreamed of being a bandit as great as Rocambole, and a poet with the genius of Baudelaire!’

I was thinking:

‘Do you need to suffer this much to live…? All of this… to walk with a basket in front of splendid shopfronts…’

We spent almost the entire morning walking through the Mercado del Plata.

Truly, Don Gaetano was a great man!

To buy a cabbage, or a slice of pumpkin or a handful of lettuce, he would go through all the stalls arguing, having intense and bitter arguments with the grocers over five centavos, trading insults in a dialect I did not understand.

What a man! He behaved like a cunning peasant, a con-artist who pretends to be dumb and who makes a joke of it when he realises that he can’t cheat someone.

As he sniffed out bargains he would mingle with the cleaners and the servants to get involved in things that should have held no interest for him, he behaved like a mountebank, a barker, and when he got close to the tin counters of the fish stalls he would examine the gills on the hake and the pejerreys,17 he would eat prawns, and all this without even buying a single shrimp, he’d go on to the tripe sellers, then the chicken sellers, and before buying anything he would smell the merchandise and smell it mistrustfully. If the stallholders got annoyed, he’d shout at them that he didn’t want to be cheated, that he knew very well that they were thieves, but that they were much mistaken if they thought that he was a fool just because he was such a simple person.

His simplicity was an act, his stupidity hid a really active cunning.

This is how it went:

He would choose a cabbage or a cauliflower with a truly exasperating patience. He would be ready to pay the price that was asked him, but suddenly would discover another one that looked larger or tastier, and this was enough for an argument to brew between Don Gaetano and the stallholder, each of them trying to rob the other, to cheat their fellow man, even if it was only of as much as a single centavo.

His bad faith was astonishing. He never paid what was asked, only what he offered. Once I had put the produce into the basket, Don Gaetano would step away from the stall, sink his thumbs into the pockets of his jacket, take out the money, count it, count it and recount it, and then throw it down onto the counter as if he were doing the stallholder a favour, and then move quickly away.

If the owner shouted after him, he would reply:

‘Estate buono.’18

He had the urge to keep moving, he was a glutton for looking at things, he went into ecstasies when he saw all the produce because of the money it represented.

He would go up to the pork sellers and ask them the price of their sausages, he would look carefully at the rosy pig-heads, turn them over in his hands slowly under the bland gaze of the bulky owners in their white aprons, scratch his ear, look with lust at the ribs hanging from their hooks, the pillars of sliced fatty bacon, and then, as if he were resolving a problem that had been tormenting his mind, would head off to another stall to snaffle a slice of cheese or count how many asparagus there were in a bunch, to get his hands dirty with artichokes and turnips, to eat pumpkin seeds or hold eggs up to the light and rejoice in the heaps of wet butter, solid, yellow, still smelling of whey.

We ate at around two in the afternoon. Don Miguel with his plate balanced on top of a kerosene flask, I standing at one corner of a table covered in books, the fat woman in the kitchen and Don Gaetano at the counter.

We left the cave at eleven p.m.

Don Miguel and the fat woman walked in the middle of the well-lit street, carrying the basket in which the coffee-making equipment banged around; Don Gaetano, his hands buried in his pockets, his hat on the crown of his head and a curl of hair hanging over his forehead, and I went after them, thinking how long my first day had been.

We went up to the house and when we got to the corridor Don Gaetano asked me:

‘Brought a mattress, did you?’

‘No. Why?’

‘There’s a bed, but no mattress.’

‘And there’s nothing to cover myself with?’

Don Gaetano looked around, then opened the door to the dining room; there was a heavy furry green cloth on the table.

Doña María had already gone into the bedroom when Don Gaetano grabbed the cloth at one end and threw it in a bad-tempered way over my shoulder, and said:

‘Estate buono.’ Without replying to my goodnight, he shut the door in my face.

I was disconcerted, standing in front of the old man, who showed his indignation with a dirty blasphemy (‘Ah! Stinking God!’) and then walked off with me following.

The garret where lived the scrawny old man, whom from that moment onwards I called Stinking God, was an absurd triangle under the roof, with a little round window that gave onto Esmerelda Street and its electric lighting. The glass in the bulls-eye was broken, and gusts of wind entered through the gap, causing the yellow tongue of a candle to dance in the saint’s alcove in the wall.

There was a scissor-bed against the wall: two crossed sticks with a canvas nailed to it.

Stinking God left to urinate on the terrace, then sat down on a box, took his hat and his boots off, wrapped his scarf round his neck and, prepared to face the cold of the night, got carefully into the scissor-bed, covering himself up to the chin with the covers, which were in fact sacks filled with worn-out rags.

The fading light of the candle illuminated his profile, his large red nose, his flat brow with its wrinkles, and his shaved head with a few remnants of grey hair over the ears. Because the draught annoyed him, Stinking God stuck a hand out, took his hat and pulled it down over his ears, then he took the butt-end of a cigar out of his pocket, lit it, threw out large mouthfuls of smoke and, with his hands behind his head, looked at me sombrely.

I started to examine my bed. Many people must have suffered in it, so bad was its state. The points of the springs had pierced the mattress, and they stayed sticking up in the air like fantastic corkscrews, and the staples that were supposed to hold the sides together had been replaced by pieces of wire.

But it was obvious that I wasn’t going to spend the night in ecstasy, and after testing its stability, I took off my boots in imitation of Stinking God, then wrapped them in a newspaper to serve as my pillow, then wrapped myself in the green cloth, lay down on the treacherous bed and resolved to sleep.

It was indisputably a bed for the extremely poor, a bad joke, the grumpiest bed I have ever known.

The springs sank into my back: it was as if the points wanted to drill through the flesh between my ribs; the steel mesh that was rigid in one spot sunk down inconsiderately in another, just as, by the miracle of elasticity, it lifted up in a third point; with every movement you made the bed would yelp, screech with amazing noises, like an unoiled gearbox. Furthermore, I couldn’t find a comfortable position, the stiff knap of the cloth scratched against my throat, the edges of the boots were making my neck lose all sensation, the spirals of the bent springs were pinching my flesh. So:

‘Hey, Stinking God!’

Like a tortoise, the old man stuck his little head out into the air from its sackcloth shell.

‘What is it, Don Silvio?’

‘How come they haven’t thrown this horrible bed out?’

The venerable old man, rolling his eyes, replied with a deep sigh, calling on God to witness all the iniquities of which mankind was capable.

‘Tell me, Stinking God, isn’t there any other bed…? It’s impossible to sleep on this one…’

‘This house is hell, Don Silvio… a pit of hell.’ Lowering his voice, afraid of being overheard: ‘It’s… the wife… the food… Oh Stinking God, what a terrible house this is!’

The old man put out the light and I thought:

‘I am indeed going from bad to worse.’

Now I heard the noise of rain on the zinc roof of the attic.

Suddenly I heard a muffled sobbing. It was the old man who was crying, crying out of misery and hunger. And this was my first day.

Sometimes, at night, there are faces that appear, faces of women who wound you with the sword of sweetness. We move apart, and our soul remains shadowy and alone, as happens after a party.

Unusual apparitions… they disappear and we never hear of them again, but even so they accompany us at night, their eyes fixed on our own fixed eyes… and we are wounded with the sword of sweetness, and imagine how the love of these women will be, these faces that enter into your own flesh. An anguished desert of the spirit, a transient luxury that is both harsh and demanding.

We think how each one would bend her head towards us, to have her half-open lips pointing towards the sky, how she would allow herself to faint from desire without spoiling for a moment her face throughout this ideal moment; we think how her own hands would tear at the laces of her corset…

Faces… faces of young women ready for joyous torments, faces which cause a sudden faintness to burn in one’s entrails, faces in which desire does not spoil the ideal nature of the moment. How do they come to occupy our nights?

I have spent hours on end chasing after, in my mind, a woman who during the day left the desire for love in my bones.

I would consider her charms slowly, charms that were ashamed of being so adorable: her mouth made for nothing other than lengthy kisses; I imagined her willing body holding tight to the flesh of another person, flesh that called for her to abandon herself, and imagined her insisting that she would enjoy her abandonment; I saw the magnificent smallness of her vulnerable parts, my vision filled with her face, with her body that was so young for torment and for motherhood; I would stretch out an arm to my own poor flesh: in punishing it, I allowed it to attain pleasure.

At this moment Don Gaetano came in from the street and headed towards the kitchen. He looked at me with furrowed brows, but did not say anything, and I leant over the jar of paste I was using to repair a book, thinking: there’s going to be a storm here.

It was the case that, with brief bright periods, the couple fought.

The pale woman, immobile, her elbows on the counter, her hands buried in the folds of her green shawl, followed her husband’s movements with cruel eyes.

Don Miguel, in the little kitchen, was washing the plates in a greasy basin. The tips of his scarf touched the edges of the vessel and a red and blue checked apron tied to his belt with twine protected him from splashes.

‘What a house this is, Stinking God!’

I should explain that the kitchen, the site of our meetings, was in front of a stinking latrine, a corner of the cave behind the bookshelves.

On top of a dirty table, stacked next to leftover vegetables, were little pieces of meat and potatoes, which Don Miguel used to make the meagre pittance that was the midday meal. What was spared our voraciousness was served again at night-time as an outlandish stew. And Stinking God was the genius and the wizard of this repugnant alcove. We would go there to curse our luck; sometimes Don Gaetano would hide there to meditate on the discomforts of matrimony.

The hatred that brewed in the woman’s breast always ended up by exploding.

Some insignificant motive was enough, any little nothing.

Suddenly, swollen by a dull fury, the woman would leave the counter and, with her slippers dragging on the tiles, wringing her hands underneath the scarf, with her lips set and her eyes wide open, would look for her husband.

I remember the particular scene of that day:

As was his custom, that morning Don Gaetano had pretended not to see her, even though he was only a step away from her. I saw the man bend his head towards a book and pretend to read the title.

When she stopped, the pale woman stayed stock-still. Only her lips trembled, like leaves.

Then she said in a voice that was a terrible monotone:

‘I was beautiful. What have you done to my life?’

The hair that hung over her forehead trembled as if in a breeze.

Don Gaetano shuddered.

With a despair that caused her throat to close up, she threw the following words at her husband, heavy words, words like gunpowder:

‘I raised you up… Who was your mother…? Just a bagazza who went around with all the men? What have you done with my life…?’

‘María, shut up!’ Don Gaetano replied in a cavernous voice.

‘Yes, who was it who fed you and clothed you…? Me, strunzo… I fed you.’ The woman’s hand lifted as if she wished to strike her husband’s cheek.

Don Gaetano retreated, trembling.

She said, with a bitterness that trembled on the edge of sobbing, heavy gunpowder-like sobbing:

‘What have you done to my life… pig? I was happy in my house like a poppy in a pot, and I didn’t need to marry you, strunzo…’

The woman’s lips moved convulsively, as if she were chewing on some sticky, terrible hatred.

I went out to chase the curious bystanders away from the front of the shop.

‘Leave them, Silvio,’ she ordered me in a shout. ‘Let them hear who this scoundrel really is.’ Her green eyes were wide, making it seem as if her face were drawing ever nearer, like an image painted on the background of a screen, and she continued speaking, ever more pale:

‘If I were a different person, if I got around more, then I’d have a better life… I’d be a long way away from a hog like you.’

She stopped talking and rested.

Now Don Gaetano was looking after a gentleman in an overcoat, with big gold spectacles riding on a narrow cold-reddened nose.

Aroused by his indifference, because the husband must have been used to these scenes and must have preferred to be insulted to losing his benefits, the woman called out:

‘Don’t listen to him, señor, don’t you see that he’s just a thief from Napoli?’

The old gentleman turned round in astonishment to look at this fury, and she continued:

‘He’ll ask you twenty pesos for a book that cost four.’ As Don Gaetano did not turn round, she screamed until her face filled with blood: ‘Yes, you’re a thief, a thief!’ And she spat out her spite, her disgust.

The old gentleman said, fixing his glasses more firmly on his nose:

‘I’ll come back some other day.’ And he left indignantly.

Then Doña María took a book and threw it suddenly at Don Gaetano’s head, and then another one, and another one.

Don Gaetano seemed to be drowning in rage. Suddenly he grasped at his neck, took the black tie and threw it at his wife’s face; then he stopped still for a moment as if he had been given a blow to the temple, and then he started running, he ran out into the street, his eyes sticking out of their sockets, and, stopping in the middle of the pavement, shaking his bare shaved head, waving like a madman to the passers-by, his arms held out, he shouted in a voice that rage had made unnatural:

‘Beast… beast… animal!’

With satisfaction, she turned to me:

‘You see what he’s like? Worthless… scum! I’m telling you, sometimes I feel like leaving him.’ Turning to the counter she crossed her arms, still sunk in abstractions, her cruel gaze fixed on the street.

Suddenly:

‘Silvio.’

‘Señora.’

‘How many days does he owe you for?’

‘Three including today, señora.’

‘Here you go.’ Passing me the money, she added: ‘Don’t trust him, he’s a con-artist… He cheated an Insurance Company; if I wanted, I could get him sent to jail.’

I went to the kitchen.

‘What do you think, Miguel?’

‘Hell, Don Silvio. What a life! Stinking God!’

And the old man, threatening heaven with his fist, sighed and then bent his head over the basin and carried on peeling potatoes.

‘But where do these explosions come from?’

‘I don’t know… they don’t have kids… he can’t perform…’

‘Miguel.’

‘Yes, señora.’

The strident voice ordered:

‘Don’t make any food; we’re not going to eat today. Anyone who doesn’t like it can move out.’

This was the coup de grâce. A few tears flowed down the ruined face of the starving old man.

A few moments went by.

‘Silvio.’

‘Señora.’

‘Here you go, here’s fifty centavos. You go and find something to eat round here.’ Wrapping her arms in the folds of the green scarf, she took up her normal wild pose. On her livid cheeks two tears flowed slowly down to the corners of her mouth.

Feeling moved, I murmured:

‘Señora…’

She looked at me, and without moving her mouth, smiling with a strangely convulsive smile, she said:

‘Run along, and be back at five.’

Taking advantage of my free afternoon I decided to go to see Señor Vicente Timoteo Souza, a man who dedicated himself to occult sciences and other theosophic studies, and to whom I had been recommended by a third party.

I rang the bell and stayed looking at the marble staircase, on which the red carpet held in place by bronze stair-rods soaked up the sun that came through the glass of the heavy iron door.

The porter, dressed in black, came down with perfect calm.

‘What do you want?’

‘Is Señor Souza in?’

‘Who are you?’

‘Astier.’

‘As…’

‘Yes, Astier. Silvio Astier.’

‘Wait here, I’ll go and see.’ After looking me over from head to toe he disappeared through the door to the receiving room, covered with long pale yellow curtains.

I waited impatiently, anxiously, knowing that the decision that this grand gentleman Vicente Timoteo Souza took could change the whole destiny of my unfortunate adolescence.

The heavy door opened again halfway, and the porter said to me solemnly:

‘Señor Souza says that you should return in half an hour.’

‘Thank you… thank you… goodbye.’ I went away, pale.

I went into a nearby milkbar, and sat down by the table and ordered a coffee from the waiter.

‘Indubitably,’ I thought, ‘if Señor Souza agrees to see me then he’ll give me the job he promised.

‘No,’ I continued, ‘there’s no reason to think badly of Souza… Think of all the reasons he could have given not to receive me, how busy he is…’

Oh, Señor Timoteo Souza!

I had been presented to him one winter morning by Demetrio the theosophist, who was trying to improve my situation.

Sitting in the hall around a twistingly carved table, Señor Souza, his close-shaven cheeks and his bright pupils behind his round glasses shining brightly, had led the conversation. I remember he had been wearing a velvet déshabillé with mother-of-pearl buttons and beaver cuffs, all elements that added to his role as rastaquouère, a person who could give himself the freedom to talk to some poor devil simply to amuse himself.

We were talking, and with reference to my possible psychological make-up, he said:

‘A double crown, an uncontrollable temper… head flat in the occiput, a rational temperament… a rapid pulse, romantic leanings…’

Turning to the impassive theosophist, Señor Souza said:

‘I’m going to make this rat study medicine. What do you think, Demetrio?’

The theosophist, without reacting:

‘Very well… although any human being can be useful to humanity as a whole, however insignificant his social position.’

‘Ha ha; you’re always a philosopher.’ Señor Souza, turning towards me, said:

‘Well… Astier, my friend, write down what occurs to you at this very moment.’

I hesitated, then I wrote down with the expensive golden propelling pencil that the man had offered me, almost deferentially:

Limestone boils when it is made wet.

‘An anarchist, eh? Look after your brain, my friend… look after it well, because you’ll have a surmenage at some point between the ages of twenty and twenty-two.’

Because I did not know what he meant, I asked him:

‘What’s a surmenage?’

He turned pale. I still get embarrassed when I remember it.

‘It’s just a phrase,’ he said. ‘It’s important for us to control all of our feelings.’ And then he carried on:

‘Our friend Demetrio tells me that you have invented all kinds of things.’

A great amount of sunlight came in through the windows, and a sudden memory of my misery made me so sad that I took a while to answer, but eventually I did, in a bitter voice:

‘Yes, a few things… A signal flare, an automatic star counter…’

‘Theory… dreams…’ He interrupted me, rubbing his hands. ‘I know Ricaldoni,19 and for all his inventions he is still a simple physics teacher. The person who wants to get rich has to invent practical things, simple things.’

I felt like I was covered with a layer of misery.

He continued:

‘The guy who invented the diabolo, do you know who he was…? A Swiss student, bored in his room one winter. He earned a huge amount of money, just like that other guy, the North American, who invented the pencil with the rubber on the end.’

He stopped talking, took out a gold cigarette case with a bouquet of rubies on the back, and offered us cigarettes made with blond tobacco.

The theosophist refused with a small movement of the head, I accepted. Señor Souza continued:

‘Speaking of other things. From what our friend here has told me, you need a job.’

‘Yes, señor, a job where I can advance, because where I am at the moment…’

‘Yes… yes… I know, with the Neapolitan… I know… he’s a character. Very good, very good… I don’t think there should be a problem. Write me a letter that sets out all the peculiarities of your character, completely frankly, and I’m sure I’ll be able to help you. And when I make a promise, I keep it.’

And now he was negligently getting up from his chair:

‘Demetrio, my friend… a real pleasure… Come and see me soon, I want to show you some paintings. Astier, my dear young man, I will await your letter.’ With a smile, he added:

‘Careful not to try to fool me.’

Once we were in the street, I said to the theosophist with enthusiasm:

‘What a good man Señor Souza is… and all because of you… thank you so much.’

‘We’ll see… we’ll see…’

I stopped daydreaming so that I could ask the waiter in the milkbar what the time was.

‘Ten to two.’

What would Señor Souza have decided?

Over the past two months I had written to him frequently, insisting on the precariousness of my situation, and after long silences, and brief notes which were typewritten and unsigned, the wealthy man deigned to receive me.

‘Yes, it must be to give me a job, either in the municipal administration or in the government. If that’s the case, what a surprise for mother!’ And when I remembered her, in that milkbar with its swarms of flies flying around the pyramids of alfajores and pan de leche,20 a sudden tenderness brought tears to my eyes.

I stubbed out my cigarette and after paying I went off to Souza’s house.

My veins were throbbing when I rang the bell.

I immediately pulled my finger off the doorbell, thinking:

‘I hope he won’t think that I’m impatient for him to see me and that that upsets him.’

How much timidity was in that single ring on the bell! It was as if I wanted to say, by ringing the bell:

‘I’m sorry for bothering you, Señor Souza… but I need a job…’

The door opened.

‘I’m here… the master…’ I babbled.

‘Come in.’

I climbed the stairs on tiptoe after the flunky. Although the streets were dry, I had rubbed my feet on the doormat as I came in so as not to make anything dirty.

We stopped in the vestibule. It was dark.

Standing by the table, the servant arranged some flowers in their crystal vase.

A door opened, and Señor Souza appeared dressed for the street, his eyes sparkling behind the lenses of his little round glasses.

‘Who are you?’ he called to me harshly.

Disconcerted, I replied:

‘But señor, I am Astier…’

‘I do not know you, sir; don’t bother me any more with your impertinent letters. Juan, show this gentleman to the door.’

Then, turning to go, he shut the door firmly behind my back.

And once again, even more sad, under the sun, I took the road back to the cave.

One afternoon, after they had insulted each other until they were hoarse, Don Gaetano’s wife, realising that her husband wouldn’t leave the shop as he had done on previous occasions, made up her mind to leave herself.

She went out to Esmeralda Street and came back carrying a white bundle. Then, in order to hurt her husband, who was insultingly singing a couplet at the door to the cave, she went to the kitchen and called Stinking God and me to her. Pale with fury, she gave me orders:

‘Take this table out, Silvio.’ Her eyes were greener than ever and there were two crimson patches on her cheeks. Without caring that the hem of her skirt would get dirty in the damp hovel, she bent over to gather the goods she would take with her.

Trying not to get stained with grease, I took the table — a board with four rotten legs — out of the room. This was where the wretched Stinking God prepared his witches’ brews.

The woman said:

‘Put it with the legs pointing upwards.’

I understood what she was thinking. She wanted to turn it into a barrow.

I was not wrong.

Stinking God used the broom to sweep a lot of cobwebs from the bottom of the table. And after wiping it clean with a cloth, the woman put down on the table a white bundle, the casseroles filled with plates, knives and forks, she tied the Primus stove to one leg of the table with a wire and, reddened by her efforts, said, as she surveyed the job nearly done:

‘That dog can go and eat in a hash joint.’

After he had finished arranging the packages, Stinking God, bent over the table, looked like a quadruped in a cap, and I, with my hands on my hips, was wondering where Don Gaetano was going to find our petty wages.

‘You, take the front.’

Stinking God, resigned, took hold of the board and so did I.

‘Go slow,’ the woman cried out cruelly.

We knocked over a pile of books as we walked past Don Gaetano.

‘Go on, you pig… go on,’ he said.

She gritted her teeth in fury.

‘Thief!.. The judge will come tomorrow.’ We went away in the pause between two threatening gestures.

It was seven o’clock in the evening and Lavalle Street was showing off its most Babylonian splendour. Through the plate-glass windows you could see that the cafés were crammed with customers; carefree dandies gathered in the entrances of the theatres and cinemas; and the windows of clothes shops — which displayed legs in sheer stockings hanging from nickel-plated bars — and those of jewellery stores and orthopaedic stores all showed by their opulence the cunning of the businessmen who used their spiffy goods to flatter the voluptuousness of the wealthy.

The crowd parted as we came by, as they did not want us to stain them with the dirt we were carrying.

Ashamed, I thought about the ridiculous figure I must be presenting; to crown my unfortunate situation, the plates and cutlery were making a scandalous noise, as if announcing my ignominy. People stopped to watch us go past, enjoying the spectacle. I didn’t look at anyone, I felt so humiliated, and, like the cruel fat woman who walked ahead of us and slowed us down, I endured the jokes that our appearance provoked.

Various cabs escorted us, their drivers offering us their services, but Doña María, deaf to them all, walked in front of the table, whose legs caught the light that came from the shop windows. In the end, the drivers gave up their pursuit.

Every now and then Stinking God would lift his bearded face towards me over his green scarf. Thick drops of sweat ran down his dirty cheeks, and in his sad eyes there shone a doglike despair.

We rested in Lavalle Plaza. Doña María made us put the improvised barrow down on the ground and scrupulously examined its load, reorganised the bundle and settled the casseroles, whose lids she secured in place with the four corners of a dishcloth.

Bootblacks and newspaper boys had surrounded us. The prudent presence of a policeman helped us avoid possible complications, and we went on our way again. Doña María was going to the house of one of her sisters who lived at Callao and Viamonte.

Sometimes she would turn her pale face, look at me, with a slight smile twisting her colourless lips, and say:

‘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.’

‘Yes, you should go today, Silvio, it would be better,’ my mother said, smiling hopefully. ‘Put the blue tie on. I’ve ironed it and mended the lining.’

With a single bound I was back in my room, and as I got dressed in my suit I listened to the Jew describing, lamenting, a quarrel she’d had with her husband.

‘Oh, what a to-do, Frau Drodman! He comes back drunk, pretty well drunk. Maximito wasn’t there; he’d gone to Quilmes to see about a painting job. I’m in the kitchen, I come out, and he says to me, shaking his fist like that: “Food, pronto… And why didn’t that swine of a son of yours come to work?” What a life, Frau, what a life… So I go into the kitchen and put the gas on, sharpish. I thought that if Maximito came along then there’d be a real row, and I was scared, Frau. Dios mio! So I bring him the frying pan quick with the liver and the eggs fried in butter. Because he doesn’t like oil. And you should have seen him, Frau, he opens his eyes wide open and screws up his nose and says: “Bitch, this is rotten,” and the eggs fresh that morning. What a life, Frau, what a life!.. Even the nice soup tureen, do you remember, Frau? Even the nice soup tureen got smashed. I was scared and I left, and he comes after me, bom bom bom, beating his chest with his fists… How horrible, and he was shouting things at me that he’s never said before, Frau: “Pig, I want to wash my hands in your blood!”’

Señora Naidath sighed deeply.

I found the woman’s tribulations diverting. While I tied my tie, I smiled to imagine her gigantic husband, a salt-and-pepper-haired Pole, with a cockatoo’s nose, shouting at Doña Rebeca.

Señor Josias Naidath was a Jew more generous than a Sobieski-era hetman.23 A strange man. He hated Jews so much it made him sick, and his grotesque anti-Semitism displayed itself in an elaborately obscene vocabulary. Of course, this was a generalised hatred rather than a dislike of anyone in particular.

Friends trying to get one over on him had cheated him many times before, but he didn’t want to believe this and in his house, to the despair of Señora Rebeca, one could always find fat badly-turned-out German immigrant adventurers, who stuffed themselves at his table with sauerkraut and sausages, and who laughed slobbery great laughs, rolling their inexpressive blue eyes.

The Jew looked after them until they found work, making use of the contacts he had as a painter and a freemason. Sometimes they robbed him; there was one scoundrel who disappeared over night from a house they were renovating, taking with him ladders, planks and cans of paint.

When Señor Naidath found out that the night watchman, his protégé, had run off like this, his cries reached up to heaven. He was like Thor in a fury… but he didn’t do anything.

His wife was the prototype of the sordid, avaricious Jewess.

I remember that when my sister was younger, she went to visit them in their house one day. She openly admired a beautiful heavily laden plum-tree and, understandably enough, wanted to taste its fruit, and asked shyly if she could have a plum.

And Señora Naidath reproached her:

‘Hijita… If you want to eat plums, you can buy all the plums you want in the market.’

‘Pour yourself some tea, Señora Naidath.’

The Jewess carried on with her lamenting narrative:

‘Then he shouted at me, and all the neighbours heard, Frau, he shouted at me: “You daughter of a Jewish butcher, Jewish pig, protecting your son all the time.” As if he weren’t Jewish, as if Maximito wasn’t his son too.’

But actually, Señora Naidath and her doltish son Maximito worked well together to cheat the Freemason and get money from him that they then spent on fripperies; theirs was a con game that Señor Naidath knew about and which it was enough merely to mention to get him to blow his top.

Maximito, the cause of these ridiculous quarrels, was a twenty-eight-year-old rogue, who was ashamed of being Jewish and of being a painter.

In order to hide his shameful condition, that of being a working man, he dressed himself up as a gentleman, wore spectacles and each night before going to bed rubbed glycerine into his hands.

I knew some juicy stories about his mischievous tricks.

Once he secretly collected some money a bar-owner owed his father. He was twenty years old and thought that he had a flair for music, so he spent the total on a magnificent gilded harp. Maximito explained, on his mother’s urging, that he had won some pesos as a part share in a lottery ticket, and Señor Naidath said nothing, but looked suspiciously at the harp, and the guilty couple trembled like Adam and Eve in Paradise under the gaze of Jehovah.

The days went by. Maximito played the harp and the old Jewess rejoiced. These things happen. Señora Rebeca told her friends that Maximito was a very promising harpist, and people, when they saw the harp in the corner of the dining room, agreed.

However, despite his generosity, Josias was at times a prudent man, and soon realised the scam by which magnanimous Maximito had become the owner of the harp.

And so, Señor Naidath, who was extremely strong, got on top of the situation and, as the Psalmist recommends, spoke little and did much.

It was Saturday, but Señor Josias didn’t give a damn for the precepts of Moses; by way of a prologue he gave his wife two kicks up the backside, then he grabbed Maximito by the shirt-collar and, after giving him a dusting-off, took him out into the street; as for the neighbours who had come out of doors in shirtsleeves and who were having a wonderful time with the ruckus, Señor Naidath threw the harp at their heads from an upstairs window.

This made life much happier for all concerned, and that’s why people said of the Jew that ‘Señor Naidath… he’s a good man.’

I finished sprucing myself up, and went out.

‘Well, goodbye, Frau, say hello to your husband and to Maximito from me.’

‘Aren’t you going to say thank you?’ my mother interrupted.

‘I already said it.’

The Hebrew woman raised her envious little eyes from the slices of buttered bread and weakly held out her hands. I could see that she was already wishing me failure in my venture.

I got to Palomar as it was getting dark.

When I asked the way, an old man who was sitting smoking on a bundle under the green light of the station, indicated to me, with an admirable economy of gesture, a way through the shadows.

I realised that I was dealing with a completely indifferent man; I didn’t want to abuse his reticence, so, knowing almost as much as before I’d asked his help, I said thank you and set off.

The old man called after me:

‘Hey, kid, you got ten centavos?’

I thought about not giving him anything, but I thought that if God existed then he could help me in my task if I helped the old man, and so, not without a certain hidden pain, I went over to give him a coin.

The raggedy man then became more explicit. He got up from his bundle and signalled a point in the darkness with a trembling arm:

‘Look, kid… Carry on, straight on and then the officers’ club is on the left.’

And so I walked.

The wind moved the dry leaves of the eucalyptus, and, striking the tree trunks and the high telegraph wires, whistled howlingly.

Crossing the muddy road, feeling my way along a wire fence, and moving as quickly as the terrain allowed, I reached the building which the old man had pointed out as the Club.

Uncertain, I stopped. Should I call? There was no soldier on guard duty in front of the door, behind the railings.

I went up three steps and then bravely, or so I thought, entered a narrow wooden corridor — the whole building was made out of wood — and stopped in front of the doorway of an oblong room with a table in the middle.

Around the table, three officers, one of them lying on a sofa by the sideboard, another with his elbows on the table, and a third with his feet up in the air, leaning his seatback against a wall, were making desultory conversation in front of five bottles of different colours.

‘What do you want?’

‘I’m here because of the advertisement, sir.’

‘The vacancies have been filled.’

I shot back, absolutely tranquil, filled with the serenity that comes after a piece of bad luck:

‘Goodness, that’s a shame, because I’m an inventor myself, I’d have been right at home here.’

‘And what have you invented? Come in, sit down,’ a captain said, sitting up on the sofa.

I replied calmly:

‘An automatic meteor signalling device, and a machine that prints what you dictate to it. I have a letter of congratulation here from Ricaldoni the physicist.’

This aroused the curiosity of the three bored officers, and I realised I had got their attention.

‘All right, sit down,’ one of the lieutenants said, looking me over from head to toe. ‘Explain your famous inventions to us. What were they, again?’

‘An automatic meteor signalling device, sir.’

I leant against the table, supporting myself with my arms, and looked with what I thought was an investigative gaze at the faces with their hard lines and inquisitive eyes, three weather-beaten faces belonging to men used to dominate other men, faces that looked at me with half-curious, half-ironic expressions. And in that moment, just before I began to speak, I thought about the heroes of my favourite books, especially Rocambole: Rocambole with his rubber-visored cap and the rogue’s smile on his twisted lips passed in front of my eyes, pushing me onwards to be confident and strike a heroic pose.

Comforted, sure that I would make no mistakes, I said:

‘Sirs: you know that selenium is a conductor when it is exposed to light, and an insulator in the dark. The signalling device is nothing more than a selenium cell connected to an electromagnet. When the meteor passes over the selenium element, it would trigger a signal, the light of the meteor, concentrated via a concave lens, would turn the selenium into a conductor.’

‘Very good. And the writing machine?’

‘The theory is as follows. In a telephone, sound is converted into an electromagnetic wave. If we use a tangent galvanometer to measure the electrical intensity of each vowel and consonant, then we can calculate the number of ampere-turns needed to make an electronic keyboard that would respond to the electrical intensity of each sound.’

The lieutenant’s frown deepened.

‘It’s not a bad idea, but you aren’t taking into account the difficulty of creating electromagnets that would respond to such small electric variations, and that’s even before you start to think about the different types of voice that there are, or else residual magnetism; another problem, even more serious, the worst, perhaps, is how you make each individual current travel to the correct electromagnet. But have you got Ricaldoni’s letter there?’

The lieutenant bent over it; afterwards he handed it to the other officers and spoke to me:

‘Have you seen it? The problems I noticed have been picked up by Ricaldoni as well. But your idea in principle is very interesting. I know Ricaldoni. He was my teacher. He’s a clever man.’

‘Yes, short and fat, pretty fat.’

‘Would you like to pour yourself a vermouth?’ the captain offered with a smile.

‘Thank you, sir. I don’t drink.’

‘Do you know anything about mechanics?’

‘A bit. Kinematics… dynamics… steam engines and combustion engines; crude oil engines as well. I’ve studied chemistry and explosives too, which is an interesting topic.’

‘Yes it is. What do you know about explosives?’

‘Ask me anything,’ I replied with a smile.

‘Okay, well then, what are fulminates?’

This was beginning to look like an exam, and I replied with an air of wisdom:

‘Captain Cundill, in his Dictionary of Explosives, says that fulminates are the metallic salts of a hypothetical acid called hydrogen fulminate. They can be simple or double.’

‘All right, all right, give me an example of a double fulminate.’

‘Copper fulminate, which forms as green crystals produced when mercury fulminate, a simple fulminate, is boiled with water and copper.’

‘He knows a lot, this kid. How old are you?’

‘Sixteen, sir.’

‘Sixteen?’

‘Are you listening to this, captain? This kid’s got a great future ahead of him. How about we talk to Captain Márquez? It’d be a shame if we couldn’t accept him.’

‘It would indeed.’ The officer from the engineer corps turned to me.

‘Where the devil have you studied all of this?’

‘All over, sir. I don’t know, I go out into the street and I see a machine I don’t know anything about in a workshop somewhere. I stop, and say to myself as I look at the different parts that this bit must work like this, and this bit must do that. And after I’ve made my deductions I go into the shop and ask, and believe me, I’m very rarely wrong. Also, I’ve got a pretty good library, and if I’m not studying mechanics then I study literature.’

‘What?’ The captain interrupted. ‘Literature as well?’

‘Yes, sir, and I’ve got the best authors: Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Baroja.’

‘Che, he’s not an anarchist, is he?’

‘No, sir. I am not an anarchist. But I like to study and to read.’

‘And what does your father think about all of this?’

‘My father killed himself when I was very young.’

They fell suddenly quiet. The three officers looked at me and at each other.

The wind outside whistled, and my brow furrowed even more.

The captain stood up and so did I.

‘Look, buddy, congratulations, come by tomorrow. I’ll try to speak to Captain Márquez tonight, because you deserve a shot. This is what the Argentinian army needs. Kids who want to study.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Tomorrow, if you want to come by, I’ll be happy to see you. Ask for Captain Bossi.’

Heavy with so much happiness, I took my leave.

Now I walked through the shadows, leapt over the fences, with a resonant feeling of courage within me.

Now more than ever I felt that I was to use my existence to fulfil some grand destiny. I could be an engineer like Edison, a general like Napoleon, a poet like Baudelaire, a demon like Rocambole.

I was in the seventh heaven. Because I had won the praise of grown men, I spent nights so overcome with joy that my blood beat against my heart for happiness, and I thought that I was being carried across the world on the shoulders of my happiness, like a symbol of youth.

I think they chose thirty apprentices to study aviation mechanics out of two hundred applicants.

It was a grey morning. The rough field stretched out into the distance. A nameless punishment oozed from its grey-green monotony.

We passed by the closed hangars accompanied by a sergeant, and got into our overalls in the barracks.

It was drizzling, but despite the drizzle we were taken to do exercises on a patch of scrubland behind the canteen.

It wasn’t difficult. As I obeyed the commands given by the voice I allowed the indifferent expanse of the plain to enter into me. This hypnotised my body, letting all the difficult work happen independent of me.

I thought:

‘If she could see me now, what would she think?’

Sweetly, like a shadow on a moonlit wall, I went back over everything to do with her, and in a distant dusk I saw the imploring image of the girl, motionless next to the poplar tree.

‘Let’s see some movement, recruit,’ the corporal shouted at me.

When it was time to eat, splashing through the mud, we went up to the stinking mess-pots. Green firewood was smoking under the pots. We stood close together and held out our tin plates to the cook.

The man dipped his ladle into the swill and stuck a fork into the other pot, then we stood to one side to gobble down our food.

While I ate I remembered Don Gaetano and the cruel woman. And although they did not exist, I perceived huge expanses of time between my silent yesterday and my quavering present.

I thought:

‘Now that everything has changed, who am I in this too-large uniform?’

Sitting next to the barracks, I saw the rain falling sporadically, and with the plate on my knees I couldn’t take my eyes off the horizon, which appeared to be broken in places, but which was smooth as a band of metal in others and which was so pitilessly excited that its cool height where it fell away cut through to my bones.

Some of the apprentices sitting on the stairs laughed, and others, bent over a water-trough, were washing their feet.

I said to myself:

‘Life’s like this, always complaining about what has happened. The threads of water fall so slowly.’ That was how life was. I left the plate on the ground in order to allow my thoughts free rein.

Would I ever escape from my terrible social condition, would I ever be able to become a gentleman, to stop being someone who went for any job going?

A lieutenant came past and I stood to attention… Then I fell into a corner and the food I had eaten made me feel even heavier.

In the future, would I be one of those men with dirty collars and darned shirts, with a reddish suit and gigantic shoes, with blisters and calluses on my feet from walking so much, from going door to door asking for work?

My soul trembled, what should I do, what could I do to succeed, to earn money, a lot of money? I wasn’t going to find a wallet with ten thousand pesos in it in the street. What to do then? And I didn’t know if I could kill anyone, I wished I at least had a rich relative to kill and inherit from, but I understood that I would never become resigned to the penurious life that the majority of men put up with naturally.

Suddenly it became so clear to me, to my conscience, that this desire for distinction would accompany me throughout the world, that I said to myself:

‘I won’t care if I never have a suit, never have any money, never have anything,’ I confessed to myself almost shamefully. ‘What I want is to be admired by others, praised by others. What do I care if I’m a rake? I don’t care at all… But this mediocre life… To be forgotten when you die, that’s horrible. Oh, if my inventions could only have some success! But I will die one day, and the trains will keep on running, and people will go to the theatre like they always did, and I’ll be dead, good and dead… dead for life.’

A shudder made the hair on my arms rise up. Faced by a horizon on which the clouds moved like ships, the conviction of an eternal death filled me with horror. Overwhelmed, holding my plate, I went to the trough.

Oh, if only I could find a way never to die, to live even for only five hundred years!

The corporal who was putting us through our paces called me over:

‘Drodman, Captain Márquez wants to see you.’

‘Right away, Corporal.’

During the exercises I had asked permission via a sergeant to speak with Captain Márquez, to ask him about a trench mortar that I had thought up, which would shoot projectiles that would destroy more men than traditional explosive shrapnel.

Aware of my vocation, Captain Márquez was used to hearing me out, and while I spoke and drew on his blackboard he would look at me through his glasses with a smile that was part curiosity, part mockery and part indulgence.

I left the plate in the washing-up bowl and rapidly went over to the officer’s quarters.

I was in his room. Next to the wall, a camp bed, a bookcase with journals in it and textbooks on military science, and nailed to the wall a blackboard with its chalk-box nailed next to it at an angle.

The captain said to me:

‘Okay, let’s see what this trench cannon is like. Draw it.’

I took a piece of chalk and made a sketch.

I began my spiel.

‘You know that the large calibre weapons have two main inconveniences, captain: their weight and their size.’

‘Yes, and…’

‘So, what I’ve thought up is a cannon of the following kind: the large calibre projectile has a hole made in it through the centre, and instead of being placed in a tube, the cannon, it will be put onto a metal bar, like a ring onto a finger, and slide down to the part where the explosive charge is placed. The advantage of my system is that without making the cannon any heavier you will be able to increase enormously the calibre of projectile and the explosive charge it can carry.’

‘I get you… It’s all right… But you need to remember this: the thickness of the cannon, its diameter and length, is calculated based upon the calibre of the projectiles it’s going to fire, the weight of the projectiles and the quality of the powder used to fire them. What I mean is that depending on the way in which the powder ignites, the projectile will move in a certain way inside the barrel of the cannon, propelled by the gases of the explosion, so that when the projectile reaches the mouth of the cannon it will have obtained maximum propulsive force from the explosive. Your invention is the exact opposite of this. The explosion takes place and the projectile slides up the bar and the gases, instead of impelling the projectile, will dissipate into the air, which means that if the explosion needs to remain controlled for a whole second, what you will do is reduce this period of control to a tenth of a second, or a thousandth of a second. It’s all topsy-turvy. The bigger the diameter of the projectile, the more resistance it has to overcome, unless you’ve discovered a new form of ballistics, which would be a difficult thing to do.’

He finished by saying:

‘You have to study, study a great deal, if you want to be anything.’

And I thought, although without daring to say it out loud:

‘How am I going to study if I need to learn a trade to earn my living?’

He continued speaking:

‘You’ve studied a lot of maths; what you lack is a base, you should discipline your thought, apply yourself to the study of little practical things, and then maybe you’ll start to be more successful in your ideas.’

‘Do you really think so, sir?’

‘Yes, Astier. You have undeniable potential, but you have to study, you think that just because you can dream something up then that’s all the work done already, and thinking is only ever the start of something.’

And I left the room, filled with gratitude towards this man who was serious and melancholic and who was kind enough to encourage me, in spite of military discipline.

It was two o’clock in the afternoon of my fourth day in the Military Aviation Academy.

I was drinking mate with a red-haired boy called Walter, who was telling me with an affecting enthusiasm about a small farm his father, a German, had on the outskirts of Azul.

The redhead said with his mouth full of bread:

‘We butcher three hogs every winter for the house. We sell the rest. So one afternoon when it was cold I went into the house and cut myself a chunk of bread, then I went out in the Ford to…’

‘Drodman, come here,’ the sergeant shouted to me.

He was in front of the barracks and was looking at me with an unaccustomed seriousness.

‘Sir.’

‘Get dressed in your civvies and hand in your uniform. You’re out of here.’

I looked at him carefully.

‘Out?’

‘Yes, you’re out.’

‘Out, sir?’ My voice trembled.

The officer looked at me pityingly. He was a well-mannered provincial and had only got his wings a few days previously.

‘But I haven’t done anything wrong, sir, you know that.’

‘Of course I do… But what can I do about it… Captain Márquez gave the order…’

‘Captain Márquez? But that’s crazy… Captain Márquez can’t have given the order… Isn’t there some kind of a mistake?’

‘They told me Silvio Drodman Astier… There’s no one called Drodman Astier here apart from you, I don’t think, is there? So it’s got to be you, there’s no other way of looking at it.’

‘But this is unfair, sir.’

The man frowned and said to me in a low voice:

‘What do you want me to do about it? Of course it’s not right… I think… no, no, I don’t know… I think there’s someone the captain has to fit in somehow… that’s what they told me, I don’t know if it’s true, but because you lot haven’t signed contracts yet, of course they can get rid of whoever they want, and put in whoever they want too. If there was a signed contract then they wouldn’t be able to do anything, but because there’s nothing on paper, then you need to put up with it.’

I said in supplication:

‘What about you, sir, can’t you do anything?’

‘What do you want me to do, buddy? What do you want me to do? I’m in the same boat as you; this is what goes on here.’

The man felt pity for me.

I said thank you and walked away with tears in my eyes.

‘The order comes from Captain Márquez.’

‘And it’s impossible to see him?’

‘The captain isn’t in.’

‘And Captain Bossi?’

‘Captain Bossi isn’t in.’

On the road, the winter sun dyed the trunks of the eucalyptus trees a melancholy red.

I was walking back to the station.

Suddenly I caught sight of the Director of the School on the path.

He was a chubby man, with plump cheeks that were red like a farm labourer’s. The wind blew his cape over his shoulders, and he was leafing through papers and giving brief instructions to the group of officers that surrounded him.

Someone must have told him what had happened, because the lieutenant colonel lifted his head from his papers, looked around for me, and when he had me in his sights, shouted at me in annoyance:

‘Listen, pal, Captain Márquez told me about you. You should be in a technical institute. We don’t need intelligent people here, just brutes for the work.’

Now I was crossing the streets of Buenos Aires with that shout echoing in my soul.

‘And when mother finds out!’ I involuntarily imagined her saying in her tired voice:

‘Silvio… have some mercy on us… you don’t work… you don’t want to do anything. Look at the boots I’m wearing, look at Lila’s dresses, all of them patched all over, what are you thinking, Silvio, by not working?’

My temples felt feverishly hot; I smelt my sweat, I felt that my face was twisted in grief, deformed by grief, a deep clamorous grief.

I walked around in an abstracted mood, without knowing where I was going. Sometimes anger struck at my veins, I wanted to shout, to fight the frightening deaf city… And suddenly everything would break within me, everything would announce to me my absolute uselessness.

‘What will become of me?’

At this moment my body weighed down on my soul like a suit that was sodden and too big for it.

Now, when I go home, maybe mama won’t say anything to me. She’ll open the yellow trunk with a gesture of resignation, take the mattress out of it, put clean sheets on the bed and she won’t say anything. Lila, in silence, will look at me reproachfully.

‘What have you done, Silvio?’ And she won’t say anything else.

‘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.

‘Let me stay, don’t throw me out.’

‘So you… you’re a…’

He dragged me to the edge of the bed and threw himself at my feet.

‘Yes, I’m one of them, at times.’

His hand fell on my knee.

‘At times.’

The boy’s voice was deep and bitter.

‘Yes, I’m one of them… at times.’ A fearful pain trembled in his voice. Then his hand took my hand and pulled it to his throat so that he could lean his chin on it. He spoke in a very low voice, almost like a sob.

‘Oh, if I’d only been born a woman! Why does life have to be like this?’

The veins in my temples throbbed terribly.

He spoke to me:

‘What’s your name?’

‘Silvio.’

‘Tell me, Silvio, don’t you despise me…? but no… you don’t have that kind of face… How old are you?’

I answered hoarsely:

‘Sixteen… But, are you trembling?’

‘Yes… it’s what you want… come on…’

Suddenly I saw him, yes, I saw him… His lips were smiling in his flushed face… his eyes were also smiling madly… and suddenly, as his clothes fell away rapidly, I saw the hanging tail of a dirty shirt cover the band of flesh which the women’s stockings he was wearing left exposed.

Slowly, as if it were a pattern displayed on a wall that the moon made white, I saw the image of the imploring girl next to the black fence pass before my eyes. A cold idea — if she knew what was happening to me at this precise moment — passed across my life.

I would remember this instant for ever.

I stepped back shyly and, looking directly at him, said slowly:

‘Go.’

‘What?’

I repeated in an even lower voice:

‘Go.’

‘But…’

‘Go, get out, you beast. What have you done with your life? What have you done with your life…’

‘No… don’t be like that…’

‘You beast… What have you done with your life?’ But I couldn’t bring myself in that moment to tell him all the significant things, all the precious and noble things I had in me, things that instinctively rejected this canker.

The degenerate stepped back. He drew back his lips to show his fangs, then dived into the bed, and while I climbed fully dressed into my bed he put his hands behind his head and began to sing:

Rice pudding, rice pudding

There’s going to be a wedding.

I looked at him sidelong and then, without any anger, but with a calm that surprised even me, said:

‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll break your nose.’

‘What?’

‘I’ll break your nose.’

Then he turned his face to the wall. A horrible awkward stress weighed down the trapped air. I felt the intensity with which his horrible thoughts made their way across the space between us. All I could see of him was the triangle of black hair that lay on his nape, and then his round, white, untempting neck.

He did not move, but I was crushed by the intensity of his thoughts… he was following my lead… and I stayed still, feeling a horror that was gradually turning into conformity. And every now and then I looked at him out of the corner of my eye.

Suddenly his blanket slipped away and I saw his shoulders, his milk-white shoulders that rose above the neatly sewn arc that the neckline of his shirt described over his clavicles…

A woman’s begging cry burst out in the corridor outside the room:

‘No… no… please…’ and the dull shock of a body being thrown against a wall made my soul arch from some primal fear, I hesitated a second, then leapt from my bed and opened the door at the exact moment that the door of the opposite room was closed.

I leant on the doorframe. No noise came from the room. I turned and, leaving the door open and, without looking at the other man, turned out the light and got into bed.

I now felt sure of myself. I lit a cigarette and asked my companion:

‘Che, who taught you this filthy stuff?’

‘I don’t want to talk to you… You’re not nice…’

I burst out laughing, then carried on speaking more seriously:

‘Seriously, che, you know you’re a weirdo? You’re really weird! What do they say about you in your family? And this place? Have you looked at this place?’

‘You’re not nice.’

‘You’re a saint, right?’

‘No, but this is how I’m fated to be… I wasn’t like this earlier, you know? I wasn’t like this at all…’

‘Who made you like this, then?’

‘My tutor, because my father is rich. After I got through the fourth year of secondary school, they found me a tutor to prepare me for the National School. He seemed a serious enough guy. He had a beard, a pointy blond beard and glasses. His eyes were blue, almost green. I’m telling you all this because…’

‘And?’

‘And I wasn’t like this before… but he made me like this… Then, when he left, I went to find him in his house. I was fourteen. He lived in an apartment in Juncal Street. He was a smart guy. He had a library as big as this room. He was a demon, but how he loved me! I went to his house, the houseboy showed me into his bedroom… He bought me all these silk clothes and knickknacks. I dressed as a woman.’

‘What was he called?’

‘Why do you want to know his name… He taught in two departments in the National School and hung himself…’

‘Hung himself?’

‘Yes, he hung himself in a café toilet… Oh, you’re so gullible!.. Ha, ha… don’t believe a word I say… It’s all lies… Isn’t it a lovely story?’

Annoyed, I said to him:

‘Come on, che, leave me alone; I’m going to sleep.’

‘Don’t be mean, listen up… you’re really moody… you’re not going to believe a word I’ve just said… I told you the truth… all is true… my tutor was called Próspero…’

‘And you’ve been like this ever since?’

‘What could I do?’

‘What do you mean, “What could I do?”… you could have gone to a doctor… some specialist in nervous diseases? Anyway, why are you so dirty?’

‘It’s the fashion, lots of guys like dirty clothes.’

‘You’re a degenerate.’

‘Yes, you’re right… I’m crazy… but what would you have me do? Look… sometimes I’m in my bedroom, it’s night, you have to believe me, it’s like a wave comes over me… I get the smell of rented rooms in my nostrils… I see the light is on and I can’t… It’s like the wind drags me out… I go to see the people who live in those rented rooms.’

‘The owners, why?’

‘All this searching is pretty sad; us girls have an arrangement with two or three of the guys who have rooms to rent and they give us a ring if some kid turns up who looks worthwhile.’

After a long pause, his voice became lower and more serious. You might have thought he was talking to himself, venting his troubles.

‘Why wasn’t I born a woman?… instead of being a degenerate… yes, a degenerate… I could have been the young mistress of my house, I’d have married a good man and looked after him… and I’d have loved him… instead… like this… bedhopping, shame… guys in white overcoats and patent leather shoes who recognise you for what you are and follow you… and steal everything you’ve got, down as far as your stockings. Oh! If only I could find someone who’d love me for ever, for ever.’

‘But you’re crazy! Can you really still dream about such things?’

‘What do you know about it! I’ve got a friend who’s been living with a guy who works at the Savings and Loan Bank for three years now… how he loves him…’

‘That’s obscene…’

‘What do you know? If I could, I’d give all my money to be a woman… a poor little woman… 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…’

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.

Sitting on the edge of the bed was my mother.

She bent her head over me. Her eyelashes were wet, and her sucked-in cheeks seemed dug out of a wrinkled block of tormented marble.

Her voice trembled:

‘Why did you do it?… oh, why didn’t you tell me everything? Why did you do it, Silvio?’

I looked at her. I met a face that was a terrible image of pity and remorse.

‘Why didn’t you come?… I wouldn’t have said anything. It’s fate, Silvio. What would have become of me if the revolver had fired properly? You’d be here now, with your poor little cold face… Oh, Silvio, Silvio!’ And a heavy tear flowed down the red bag under her eye.

I felt night falling in my spirit and I leant my head on her lap, as I thought I would wake up in a police cell: in the fog of my memory I saw a circle of uniformed men waving their arms above me.

Chapter 4. Judas Iscariot

Monti was an active and a noble man, as excitable as a swashbuckling soldier of fortune, skinny as an impoverished gentleman. His penetrating gaze did not invalidate the ironic smile that curved his thin lips, lips that had the silky threads of his black moustache to overshadow them. When he got angry his cheeks would redden and his lower lip would tremble down as far as his sunken chin.

The office and paper store of his business consisted of three rooms that he rented from a Jewish furrier, and was separated from the Hebrew’s stinking storeroom by a corridor that was always filled with dirty red-headed kids.

The first room was something along the lines of an office-cum-fine paper display room. Its windows let onto Rivadavia Street and the passers-by could see, neatly lined up in a pine display case, reams of salmon-coloured paper, green paper, blue and red paper, rolls of impermeable stiff marbled paper, blocks of silk paper and what was called ‘butter’ paper, cubes of labels with multi-coloured flowers on them, sheaves of rough-surfaced paper with flowers and a watermark in the form of a pale vase.

On the off-blue wall a print of the Gulf of Naples showed the lacquered blue sea and the dark coast sown with little white squares: the houses.

In this room, when he was in a good mood, Monti would sing in his clear and tuneful voice.

I liked hearing him. He sang with feeling; it was clear that by singing he called up the spaces and daydreams of his homeland.

When Monti hired me on commission, giving me a set of samples of paper classified by quality and price, he said:

‘Okay, time to sell. Each kilo of paper gets you three centavos commission.’

Hard beginnings!

I remember that for a whole week I spent six hours per day walking pointlessly. It was unreal. I didn’t sell a single kilo of paper after walking forty-five leagues. In desperation I went into greengrocers’ shops, into stores and warehouses, I went round the markets, I stood outside butchers and pharmacies, but all in vain.

Sometimes people, extremely politely, would send me to the devil, others would tell me to come back next week, others would claim that ‘I’ve already got a salesman who’s been serving me for a while’, others would refuse to see me, some would say that my merchandise was far too expensive, a few would say that it wasn’t of a good enough quality, and some strange people that the quality was too high.

At midday, when I got back to Monti’s office, I would collapse onto a column made of stacked reams and say nothing, dulled by fatigue and disappointment.

Mario, another salesman, a sixteen-year-old slacker, tall as a poplar, all arms and legs, laughed at my useless travails.

How shameless Mario was! He looked like a telegraph pole with a tiny head on top, and a fabulous forest of curly hair on top of the head. He walked with huge strides, with a red leather briefcase under one arm. When he got to the office he would throw the briefcase into a corner and take off his hat, a round derby that was so greasy you could use it to lubricate the axle of a cart. He was a devil for selling and was always happy.

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.’

We talked ourselves to a standstill complaining about these crooks who wouldn’t recognise formalities or agreements of any kind.

Sometimes Mario and I would both get an order from the same person, and when it was sent to him he would reject it, saying he had got the merchandise from a third person at a better price. Some people were shameless enough to claim they hadn’t ordered anything, and if they didn’t have an excuse they weren’t slow to invent one.

When I thought I had earned sixty pesos in a week I ended up with only twenty-five or thirty.

Oh, the riffraff! The tradesmen, the shopkeepers and the pharmacists! How petty, wanting information and free samples!

In order for them to buy something insignificant like a thousand envelopes that said ‘Magnesia’ or ‘Boric Acid’, there was no option other than to go to see them regularly, bring them samples of paper in advance, show them different examples of type, and all for them to say:

‘We’ll see, come back next week.’

I’ve often thought that it would be possible to write a phylogeny and a psychology of the tradesman, of that man who wears a cap behind the counter, who has a pale face and eyes cold as sheet steel.

It is not enough to show one’s wares!

You have to display a truly mercurial subtlety if you are to sell, you have to choose your words and think your ideas through, to flatter circumspectly, to converse on matters about which you know nothing and in which you do not believe, to become enthusiastic about a trifle, to score a point with a sorrowful gesture, to be vividly interested in things you truly do not give a damn about, to be multiple, flexible and witty, to accept the smallest crumb with gratitude, to refuse to become disconcerted or take the matter personally when someone makes a crude remark, and to suffer, you have to suffer patiently your wasted time, sour and grumpy faces, rude and irritating replies, you have to suffer in order to earn a few centavos, because ‘that’s life’.

And if one were the only person engaged in this… but you also need to understand that on exactly the same spot where we stand and expatiate upon the advantages of entering into business with us have stood many other salesmen offering the same produce under slightly different conditions, something which hands the advantage even further to the purchaser.

How to explain why a man chooses another man from among many for their mutual benefit?

It is no exaggeration to say that material and spiritual relations have been established between the individual and the sales man, an unconscious or simulated relationship based on economic, political, religious and even social ideas, and any sale, even of a packet of needles, except in cases of overwhelming need, presents more difficulties than the expansion of one of Newton’s binomials.

If only that were all!

You also have to learn how to control yourself, how to put up with all the insolence of the petty bourgeois.

In general tradesmen are cunning but dumb, low-class people, people who have made themselves rich by dint of most painful sacrifice, by petty larcenies beyond the reach of the law, by waterings-down that either nobody notices or else everyone tolerates.

The habit of lying has put down roots among this riffraff, people accustomed to dealing with capital in large or small quantities and who are made noble by having taken out loans, something that gives them a veneer of respectability and which therefore generates in them some kind of military spirit, that is to say, makes them accustomed to address their inferiors without respect, in the same way as they talk to strangers who need to deal with them in order to do business.

Oh! How painful they are, the despotic gestures of these moneyed hustlers, who take inexorable note of their earnings behind the Judas windows of their offices; how their ignoble muzzles twitch with murderous instinct as they say:

‘Lay off it, man, we only buy from important companies.’

But you tolerate it, you smile and shake hands… because ‘that’s life’.

Sometimes, when I had finished my round, and if I wanted to stay out for a while, I would go to have a chat with the cart attendant at the Flores fair.

It was a fair like many others.

At the end of the street with whitewashed houses, covered by an ocean of sun, the fair would suddenly appear.

The wind brought a sour smell of vegetables, and the awnings of the stalls shaded the tin counters set up parallel with the pavement in the centre of the street.

I can still see this picture in my mind’s eye.

The fair is two rows of stalls.

One row is made up of butchers, pork butchers, egg sellers and cheesemongers, and the other is made up of people selling vegetables. The column stretches out, shoutingly bright, churrigueresque with colours, with bearded men in shirtsleeves next to the baskets full of vegetables.

The line begins with the fishmongers’ stalls, with the ochre baskets stained by the red of prawns, the blue of the pejerreys, the chocolate colour of the bivalves, the bright lead colour of the winkles, the zinc white of the hake.

Dogs patrol, on the lookout for discarded offal, and the salesmen with their hairy naked arms and an apron covering their chest reach out and take the fish their customers ask for by the tail, open its stomach with a single movement of the knife, sink their fingers into its back to pull out the guts and then cut it in half with a sharp blow.

Further along, the tripe sellers clean tripe on their tin counters, or hang immense red livers on hooks.

Ten monotonous cries are continuously repeated:

‘Fresh pejerrey… it’s fresh, lady.’

Another voice:

‘Here… the good stuff’s here. Come and see.’

Pieces of ice covered in red sawdust melt slowly in the shade over the backs of boxed fish.

When I went in, I would ask at the first stall:

‘Where’s The Crip?’

Hands on hips, dirty aprons billowing over their stomachs, the vendors would shout out in their nasal or shrill voices:

‘Crip! Come on, Crip!’ And because they liked him, they laughed richly as they called his name, and The Crip, recognising me at a distance, would walk slowly in order to enjoy his popularity, limping slightly as he came. When he saw a maid he knew standing by one of the stalls he would touch the brim of his hat to her with the tip of his riding crop.

He paused to chat and smiled as he talked, showing his twisted teeth in his perennial roguish smile; then he would move on, winking slantwise at the butcher boys who were making obscene gestures at him.

‘Crip… che, Crip… over’ere,’ they called from the other side.

The layabout would turn his angular face to one side, tell us to wait, and elbow his way through the women who crowded in front of the stalls, and the females who did not recognise him, the grumbling avaricious old women and the bilious and greedy young women and the pretentious and lymphatic little girls all looked with bitter suspicion, with a disgust that they made small effort to disguise, at this triangular, sun-reddened, brazen face.

He was an idle fellow who liked to fondle the backsides of the huddled-together women.

‘Crip… Over’ere, Crip’

The Crip was popular. Also, like all historical figures, he liked having friends, saying hello to his female neighbours, bathing in that atmosphere of carnival and crudeness that is immediately established between a low-class tradesman and a greasy housewife.

When he talked about dirty things, his red face would shine as if it had been freshly larded, and the circle of tripe sellers, vegetable sellers and egg sellers would revel in the dirt with which this scoundrel’s jokes spattered them.

They called him:

‘Crip… Over’ere, Crip.’ And the burly butchers, the robust children of Neapolitans, all the bearded dirty folk who earn their living in an impoverished traffic in poor goods, all the riffraff, people both thin and fat, corrupt and merely greedy, the fishmongers and the vegetable sellers, the butchers and the buttermen, all of the grasping scum-of-the-earth would rejoice in The Crip’s tomfooleries, in The Crip’s shamelessness, and The Olympian Crip, insolent and gossipy, the market’s mascot, would walk with his hips swaying along the passage strewn with greens and stems and orange-peel, his favourite obscene song on his lips:

And it’s great to get some for free.

He was a worthy scoundrel. He had joined the noble profession of cart attendant ever since the day when he had been lamed by a horse. He always wore the same uniform, that is, green flannel trousers and a jacket that looked like a bullfighter’s.

The part of his neck that was left uncovered by the jacket collar he adorned with a red handkerchief. A greasy wide-brimmed hat shaded his forehead and instead of boots he wore straw-soled shoes with violet canvas uppers decorated with pink arabesques.

He would hobble from one end to the other of the row of carts with his riding crop, which was permanently in his hand, calming the horses that bit each other ferociously for amusement.

The Crip was a cart attendant, but he was also a thief, a pimp by vocation and a gambler by habit. All in all he was a particularly friendly rogue, who would gladly do you any favour or play any trick on you.

He said that he had trained to be a jockey, and had been lamed in his leg because his comrades had enviously caused his horse to shy, but I don’t believe he had ever got beyond shovelling shit in a stable.

He did, it is true, know more names and qualities of horses than a churchgoer knows about martyrs. His memory was an Almanach de Gotha of equine nobility. If he spoke about minutes and seconds you would imagine that you were hearing an astronomer, and when he spoke about himself and the loss that the country had suffered in losing a jockey such as him, then you would be drawn close to tears.

‘What an idler!’

If I went to see him, then he would leave off talking to the women of his stable and, taking me by the arm would start off by saying:

‘Give me a gasper, eh…’ and we would walk up to the line of carts, get up into the one that had the best canopy and sit down for a long chat.

He’d say:

‘Hey, I really got one over on Salomon the Turk. He forgot a leg of lamb in his cart, so I called Little Guy’ — one of his protégés — ‘and said to him: “Get this up to the room, chop-chop”.’

He’d say:

‘The other day an old woman showed up. She wanted to move some stuff, nothing to it… And I didn’t have nothing, nothing at all… It’ll be a peso, I say to her and grab the fishmonger’s cart. Oh, I let the horse have it! When I got back it was nine fifteen and the nag was sweating so much I got frightened. I tied her up and dried her off, but the spic must have realised something because yesterday and today he’s come a bunch of times to see if the cart was there. Next time I’ll have to use the tripe-woman’s horse.’ When he saw my smile, he added:

‘You’ve got to earn a living, che, think about it: ten pesos for the room, Sunday I put a three-way down on His Majesty, Vasquito and Blessed… and His Majesty let me down royally.’ But just then he saw two tramps who were sneaking round the back of a cart at the end of the row, and he shouted after them at the top of his voice:

‘Hey, motherfuckers, what the fuck you doing over there?’ And brandishing the riding crop above his head he ran to the cart. After checking the harnesses carefully he came back grumbling:

‘I’m really fixed up if they steal a backboard or some reins.’

On rainy days I was accustomed to spend mornings with him.

Under a cart’s cover, The Crip would improvise amazing armchairs out of bags and boxes. You could tell where he was because clouds of smoke would come out of the arc of the cart’s hood. For fun, The Crip would hold the handle of his crop as if it were a guitar, half-close his eyes, suck the cigarette with vigour and with a horrible voice that was sometimes swollen with anger and at others painfully lusty, he would sing:

I’ve got an extra bedroom, mack,

where it’s always time for fun

and that I rented out to her

and that I rented out to her

so she could grind for herself.

With his hat over one ear, the cigarette burning right under his nostrils, and his shirt half open to his suntanned chest, The Crip really looked the part of a thief, and sometimes he’d say to me:

‘Ain’t it the case, Blondy, that I look just like a finger-man?’

Or else he would tell me in a low voice, in a cloud of cigarette smoke, stories from the slum where he was brought up, his childhood in Caballito.

They were memories of assaults and rapes, daylight robbery, and the names of Garlic Head, the Englishman and the two Arévalo brothers were always cropping up in his stories.

The Crip would say with melancholy:

‘Yes, I remember! I was just a kid. They were always on the corner of Méndez de Andés and Bella Vista, leaning on the window of this Spaniard’s grocery shop. He wasn’t what you’d call a brain, this spic. His wife slept around and he had two daughters on the game. Yes, I remember! They were always there, taking the sun and making fun of the guys as came past. Some farmhands from the sticks would come past and one of the Arévalos would say: “Who ate all the pies?” And then his brother would say: “One of these guys.” Yes, they were really funny! And if you got at all pissed off, they’d let you have it. I remember. It was one o’clock in the morning. This Turk comes along. I was with a girl in this dive some French guy owned just across from the bar. It all happened at once, like. This Turkish guy’s hat flies into the middle of the street, he tries to pull out his gun, and then bam! The Englishman knocks him down with one punch. Arévalo gets his bag and Garlic Head gets the wallet. When the fuzz turned up, there was just the hat and the Turk, who was crying with his nose smeared across his face. The older Arévalo was the worst. He was tall, dark and blind in one eye. He had some dead people to his name. The last one he got was a corporal. There was a warrant out for him already. They got him one night along with lots of other guys in the pimping business in a café that there used to be in San Eduardo. They searched him and he didn’t have any weapons on him. A corporal puts the cuffs on him and leads him off. Before they got to Bogotá Street, in the darkness, Arévalo whips out a flick-knife that he’s got hidden under his shirt, and wrapped up in tissue paper, and he sticks it in this guy’s heart right up to the handle. The corporal falls down dead and Arévalo beats it; he went to hide in his sister’s house, she took in ironing, but they got him the next day. They say he died of consumption, caused by being beaten so much with the “rubber”.’

The Crip’s stories were all like this, monotonous, dark and bloody. If he finished talking before it was time for the fair to shut up shop, The Crip would invite me to go with him:

‘Hey, Blondy, what you say we go and gather some scraps?’

‘Okay.’

With his bag over his shoulder, The Crip would go from counter to counter and stallholder to stallholder, and without needing to ask they’d shout out:

‘Hey, Crip, take this.’ He’d collect fat, greasy bones; from the vegetable sellers he’d get potatoes or onions from the ones who didn’t give him cabbage; the egg sellers would give him some butter, the tripe sellers a bit of liver, and The Crip would, with his hat over one ear and his riding crop over his shoulder, the bag in his hand, walk before the vendors like a king, and even the greediest and most disgusting of them didn’t dare refuse him anything, because they knew that he could harm them in various ways.

When he’d finished, he’d say:

‘Come and eat with me.’

‘No, they’re waiting for me at home.’

‘Come on, don’t be a sucker, we’ll have steak and fried potatoes. And then you can play the viola and there’s wine, San Juan wine that does its job real fast. I bought a demijohn, because if you don’t spend your cash then the horses always eat it.’

I knew why The Crip insisted on my having lunch with him. He needed to ask me about his inventions — yes, it’s true — for all his slackness The Crip had a yen to be an inventor; The Crip, who by his own account had grown up ‘with the horses, under their hooves’, spent the siesta hour developing mechanisms and inventions to help him separate his fellow man from his money. I remember that one day, when I explained the marvels of electroplating to him, The Crip was so impressed that for several days afterwards he tried to persuade me to go into business with him counterfeiting money. When I asked him where he’d get the money from to set the business up, he said:

‘I know a guy who’s got money. If you want I’ll introduce you and we’ll sort something out. So… we going or not?’

‘Okay.’

Suddenly The Crip would stare around him, then shout out in a disconcertingly loud voice:

‘Little Guy!’

Little Guy, who was fighting with some other kids of his type, reappeared.

He wasn’t yet ten years old, and he was less than four feet tall, but misery and all the experience of homelessness had carved indelible wrinkles into his rhomboidal Mongol face.

His nose was snub, his lips were puffy, and he had a huge amount of hair, so woolly and curly that his ears disappeared into its shaggy depths. This picture of dirty aboriginality was completed by trousers that only reached as far as his ankles, and a Basque milkman’s black blouse.

The Crip gave him a brusque order:

‘Take this.’

Little Guy threw the bag over his shoulder and headed off quickly.

He was The Crip’s houseboy, cook, servant and helper. The Crip had picked him up like one would pick up a dog in the street, and in return for his services he kept him dressed and fed; and Little Guy was the most faithful servant of his master.

‘Look,’ The Crip told me, ‘the other day, when a woman at one of the counters opened her wallet, five pesos fell out of it. Little Guy put his foot over them and then picks them up. We go home and there’s not even a lump of coal. “Go on, see if they’ll give you some on tick.” “No need,” the crazy little guy says, and he takes out the fiver.’

‘Wow, that’s not bad.’

‘Next stop: mugging. You know what else he does?’

‘Tell me.’

‘Think about it! One day I see him going out. “Where you off to?” I say. “To church,” he says. “Balls,” I say, “really, to church?” “Yup,” he says, and he starts to tell me about the box he’d seen in the wall by the entrance, for the alms and how he’d seen the end of a peso sticking out of it. So he squeezed up to the box and used a pin to get the peso out. And then he’d made a hook out of another pin to go and fish out all the pesos that were there. Can you believe it?’

The Crip laughed, and though I wasn’t sure that Little Guy had invented that trick, I was sure that he would be keen to be the fisherman, but I didn’t say anything else, and instead, patting him on the back, said:

‘Oh, Crip, Crip, Crip!’

And The Crip laughed in such a way as to twist his lips up over his teeth.

Sometimes in the night.

Mercy, have mercy upon us.

Who on this earth will have mercy on us. Wretches, we have no God to bow down before and to bemoan our miserable lives.

Whom shall I bow down before, whom shall I speak to about my spines and hard thorns, about this pain that appears during the burning afternoon, and which is still in me?

How small we are, and mother earth does not want to hold us in her arms and here we are, bitter and dismantled by our impotence.

Why do we know nothing of our God?

Oh, if He would only come one evening and hold us, with his hands cradling our temples.

What more could we ask? We would walk away with His smile still in our eyes and with tears hanging from our lashes.

One day, Thursday, at two in the afternoon, my sister told me that there was an individual at the door waiting for me.

I went out and was surprised to see The Crip, who was better dressed than normal, for he had replaced his red handkerchief with a modest cotton collar, and the florid sandals with a show-off pair of boots.

‘Hello, what are you doing here?’

‘Are you free, Blondy?’

‘Yes, why?’

‘Come on out, we need to talk.’

‘Of course, just give me a minute,’ and I went into the house and rapidly put my collar on, took my hat, and left. I should say that I was immediately suspicious, and although I couldn’t imagine what the purpose of The Crip’s visit might be, I resolved to keep on my guard.

Once we were in the street I realised by looking at his face that he had something important to tell me, because he kept on glancing at me and then looking away again, but I kept my curiosity in hand, saying only:

‘And…?’

‘You haven’t been to the fair for days,’ he said.

‘Yes… I’ve been busy… What about you?’

The Crip turned to look at me. Because we were walking on the shady side of the street he started to talk about the temperature, then about poverty, then about the difficulties inherent in his daily tasks; he also told me that in the last week someone had stolen a pair of reins and then, once he’d exhausted all possible topics of conversation, he stopped me in the middle of the pavement and, taking hold of my arm, said ex abrupto:

‘Tell me, che Blondy, can I trust you or not?’

‘And you’ve dragged me out here to ask me that?’

‘But can I trust you or not?’

‘Look, Crip, tell me, do you believe in me?’

‘Yes… I’ve got faith… but tell me, can I talk to you?’

‘Of course.’

‘Look, let’s go in here then, we’ll have a drink.’ The Crip walked to the drinks counter in a grocery, asked for a bottle of beer from the potboy, sat us down at a table in the darkest corner of the room, and after drinking, The Crip said, as if he were getting a great weight off his shoulders:

‘I’ve got to ask your advice, Blondy. You’re really scientific. But, please, che… look, Blondy…’

I interrupted him:

‘Look, Crip, hold on a second. I don’t know what you’ve got to tell me, but let me say that I know how to keep a secret. I won’t ask you anything and I won’t tell anything to anyone else.’

The Crip put his hat on the chair. He was still vacillating, and in his hawkish profile his mental indecision was gently reflected in the movement of the muscles over his jaws. There was a raging fire in his eyes, then he looked at me closely and explained himself:

‘It’s a masterplan, Blondy. Ten thousand pesos at least.’

I looked at him coldly, with the coldness that comes from having discovered a secret that can prove extremely beneficial, and I replied in such a way as to inspire him to confide in me.

‘I don’t know what this is about, but it’s not a lot.’

The Crip’s mouth opened slowly.

‘Not. A. Lot. At least ten thousand pesos, Blondy… At least.’

‘There’s two of us,’ I insisted.

‘Three,’ he replied.

‘Worse and worse.’

‘But the third one’s my woman.’ Without further explanation he took a key, a little flattened key, out of his pocket and put it on the table, leaving it there. I didn’t touch it.

I looked into his eyes, he smiled as if a mad joy had filled his soul, he turned momentarily pale; he drank two glasses of beer one after another, wiped his lips with the back of his hand and said in a voice that did not seem his own:

‘Life is beautiful!’

‘Yes, Crip, life is beautiful. It’s beautiful. Think about it, the wide-open fields, imagine the cities on the other side of the sea. The women who’ll follow us; we’ll be sugar daddies in the cities across the sea.’

‘Do you know how to dance, Blondy?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘They say that over there guys who can dance the tango get married to lady millionaires… And I’m going to go there, Blondy, I’m going to get there.’

‘What’s the score?’

He looked at me hard, and then joy opened his face, and a great kindness filled his hawkish visage.

‘If you only knew how I’ve worked, Blondy. You see this key? It’s the key to a strongbox.’ He put his hand into his pocket and pulled out another larger key. ‘This is the key to the room where they keep the strongbox. I got it made in a night, Blondy, filing all the time. I worked like a black.’

‘She brought them to you?’

‘Yes, the first one I’ve had made for a month, the second one I made the day before yesterday. Then I went to wait for you at the fair, and you didn’t turn up.’

‘And now?’

‘You want to help me? We’ll go halves. It’s ten thousand pesos, Blondy. They put them in the strongbox yesterday.’

‘How do you know?’

‘He went to the Bank. He brought back a big heap. She saw it and she says that they’re all big, bright notes.’

‘And you’ll give me half of it?’

‘Yes, we’ll go halves, are you up for it?’

I sat up quickly in the chair, pretending to be extremely enthusiastic.

‘Congratulations Crip, it’s a great plan.’

‘You really think so, Blondy?’

‘Not even a pro could have planned this better than you. No jemmying, no need to force the lock. All clean as a whistle.’

‘Right, eh…?’

‘Clean as a whistle. We’ll hide the woman.’

‘No need, I’ve got a flat with a basement that I’m renting; I’ll stash her away for the first few days there. Then with her got up as a man, I’ll take her to the North.’

‘Shall we go, Crip?’

‘Okay, let’s go.’

The canopy of the plane trees protected us from the worst of the sun. The Crip, thoughtful, let his cigarette smoke away between his lips.

‘Who’s the owner of the house?’ I asked him.

‘An engineer.’

‘Oh, an engineer?’

‘Yes, but let’s have it, Blondy, are you up for it?’

‘Why not… okay, man… I’m bored of walking around selling paper. Always the same life, breaking yourself down for nothing. Tell me, Crip, does life have a meaning? We work to eat and eat so we can work. A bit of fun, a few crappy parties, and every day the same, Crip. It’s boring already.’

‘Yeah, Blondy, you’re right… So you’re up for it?’

‘Yes.’

‘So we’ll do the job tonight.’

‘So soon?’

‘Yeah, he goes out every night. He goes to the club.’

‘Is he married?’

‘No, he lives alone.’

‘How far is it?’

‘Not far, the block before Nazca, in Bogotá Street. If you want we can go and see the house.’

‘How many floors has it got?’

‘It’s not a tall house, it’s got a garden at the front. All of the doors lead out to the porch. There’s a strip of land that goes all the way along the front.’

‘And what about her?’

‘She’s the maid.’

‘Who cooks?’

‘The cook.’

‘So he’s rich.’

‘You have to see the house! The furniture!’

‘And when are we going to go tonight?’

‘Eleven.’

‘And she’ll be there alone?’

‘Yes, the cook goes home as soon as she’s done cooking.’

‘Is it safe?’

‘It’s safe. The nearest streetlight’s half a block away, she’s going to leave the door open, we’ll go in and go straight to the office, take the loot, divide it up right there, and then I’ll take her off to the hiding place.’

‘And the cops?’

‘The cops… the cops go for guys with a record. I work as a cart attendant, and anyway, we’ll wear gloves.’

‘You want my advice, Crip?’

‘Advise away.’

‘Okay, listen to me. The first thing we have to do is not be seen there today. Some neighbour could notice us and turn us over. And there’s no point if you know the house already. Right. Next: when does the engineer leave the house?’

‘Nine-thirty, ten, but we can watch out for him.’

‘It’s only ten minutes to open the box.’

‘Not even that, the key’s already been tried.’

‘Well done, very thoughtful… So we can go straight there at eleven.’

‘Yes.’

‘And where shall we meet?’

‘Anywhere.’

‘No, we need to be careful. I’ll be in Las Orquideas at ten-thirty. You come in, but don’t say hello or anything. Sit down at another table, and we’ll both leave at eleven, I’ll follow you, you go into the house and then I’ll go, and then we each leave separately.’

‘That’s less suspicious. Good thinking… Have you got a revolver?’

‘No.’

Suddenly a weapon shone in his hand, and before I could stop him he slid it into my pocket.

‘I’ve got another one.’

‘No need.’

‘You never know what might happen.’

‘You’d kill someone?’

‘I… what a question, of course I would!’

‘Wow.’

Some passers-by made us shut up. A happiness came down from the blue sky and transformed itself to sadness in my guilty soul. I remembered something I had meant to ask, and said:

‘How will she know that we’re coming tonight?’

‘I’ll call her.’

‘And the engineer isn’t in the house during the day?’

‘No, if you want I can call her now.’

‘Where from?’

‘This store.’

The Crip went in to buy an aspirin and came out shortly afterwards. He had spoken to his woman.

I feared a set-up, and I asked for clarification:

‘You were banking on me to do this, weren’t you?’

‘Yes, Blondy.’

‘Why?’

‘Because.’

‘Everything’s ready.’

‘Everything.’

‘Have you got gloves?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll put some stockings over my hands, it’s the same thing.’

We fell silent.

All afternoon we walked at random, lost in thought, both of us overwhelmed by our separate, and very different, ideas.

I remember we went to a boules court.

We had a drink there, but life rolled around us like the world spins round in a drunk man’s eyes.

Images that had slept for a long time, images like clouds, raised themselves in my conscience, the solar glare hurt my eyes, a great tiredness weighed down on my senses and every now and then I would say something rapidly without making any sense.

The Crip looked at me abstractedly.

Suddenly a subtle idea split in two within my spirit, and I felt it heading down to my warm guts, it was as cold as a thread of water and it touched my heart.

‘What if I handed him in?’

Scared that he might be able to read my thoughts I looked at The Crip in alarm, but he was sitting in the shade of a tree, looking with sleepy eyes at the bowling area, where the balls lay scattered about.

It was a sombre place, the right place to think up fierce ideas.

Broad Nazca Street got lost in the distance. Next to the tarred wall of a tall building, the groundsman’s lean-to was made of green-painted wood, and all over the rest of the area were positioned the parallel sandy strips.

Iron tables were laid out in various positions.

Once again I thought:

‘What if I handed him in?’

With his chin on his chest and his hat pulled down over his forehead, The Crip had gone to sleep. A sunbeam fell on one leg, on his trousers stained with patches of grease.

Then a great disgust took hold of my spirit and I grabbed him roughly by one arm and shouted:

‘Crip.’

‘Eh… eh… what?’

‘Come on, Crip.’

‘Where?’

‘Home. I need to pack. We do the job tonight and tomorrow we get out of here.’

‘Okay, let’s go.’

Once I was alone, various fears rose up in my mind. I saw my existence spent among mankind. Infamy pulled my life this way and that in their lives and everyone could touch me with a finger. And as for me, I never belonged to myself again.

I said to myself:

‘Because if I do this I’ll ruin the life of the noblest man I’ve ever known. If I do this I will be eternally condemned. And I will be alone, as lonely as Judas Iscariot. I’ll be in pain for the rest of my life. I’ll be in pain for the rest of my days.’ And I saw myself move through the spaces of my inner life, like a pain that was shameful even to me.

It would be useless to try to mingle with the anonymous crowd. Memory, like a rotten tooth, would be within me, and its stench would make all the perfumes of the earth seem rotten to me, but the more I tried to push this deed away from myself, the more my perverseness found infamy attractive.

Why not? I would have a secret, a salty repugnant secret, one that would make me investigate the origins of my dark roots. And if I have nothing to do, when I’m feeling sad, I’ll think about The Crip and ask myself ‘Why was I such a bastard?’ and I will not know the answer, and in my searching I will find curious spiritual horizons opening before me. Also, this could be profitable for me. ‘The truth,’ I said to myself, ‘the truth is that I’m a crazy man with elements of the scoundrel about him; but Rocambole was the same: he committed murder… I won’t kill anyone. For a few francs he bore false witness against Papa Nicolo and got him hanged. He strangled and killed the old woman Fipart who loved him like a mother… he killed Captain Williams, who was the reason he became a marquis and got all his millions. Whom didn’t he betray?’

Suddenly I remembered with surprising clarity this passage from the work:

Rocambole forgot for a moment his physical pain. The prisoner, whose back was covered with weals dealt out by the Overseer’s stick, was in a daze: he thought to see before him like a confusing whirlpool Paris, Les Champs Elysées, the Boulevard des Italiens, the whole of that dazzling and deafening world in the bosom of which he had lived previously.

I thought:

‘And I… Will I be like that? Will I have as bright a life as Rocambole?’ And the words which I had said to The Crip before sounded once again in my ears, but as if they were being said by someone else:

‘Yes, life is beautiful, Crip… It’s beautiful. Think about it, the wide-open fields, imagine the cities on the other side of the sea. The women who’ll follow us; we’ll be sugar daddies in the cities across the sea.’

Slowly another voice grew louder in my ears:

‘A bastard… you’re a bastard.’

My mouth twisted. I remembered an idiot who lived next to my house and who was always saying in a nasal voice:

‘It’s not my fault.’

‘Bastard… you’re a bastard….’

‘It’s not my fault.’

‘Oh! Bastard… bastard…’

‘I don’t care… and I will be beautiful as Judas Iscariot. I will be in pain for the rest of my life… pain… Anguish will open vast spiritual horizons to my eyes… Why make such a fuss! Don’t I have the right…? Have I…? I will be beautiful as Judas Iscariot… and I will be in pain for the rest of my life… but… ah! Life is beautiful, Crip… it’s beautiful… and I… I will destroy you, I’ll cut your throat… I’ll let you down royally… yes, you… so clever… so cunning… I’ll sink you… yes, Crip, I’ll sink you… and then… then I’ll be beautiful as Judas Iscariot… and I’ll have a pain… pain… You pig!’

Huge golden stains carpeted the horizon, from which there arose storm clouds in tin plumes, surrounded by whirling orange veils.

I raised my head and near the zenith, among sheets of cloud, I saw a star shining weakly. It was like a spatter of water trembling in a crack made of blue porcelain.

I was in the suburb that The Crip worked.

The pavements were shaded by the thick foliage of acacia and privet. The street was calm, bourgeois in a romantic fashion, with painted fences protecting the gardens, little sleeping fountains among the bushes and a few damaged plaster statues. A piano could be heard in the dusky twilight, and I felt suspended among the sounds, like a drop of dew on the stem of a plant. So strong a gust of perfume came from an unseen rosebush that my knees shook as I was reading a brass plaque on one of the houses:

ARSENIO VITRI — Engineer

It was the only sign in three blocks that announced someone of that profession.

Like the other houses in the area, the flowering garden spread out in front of the living room, and stopped at the tiled path that led up to the sliding glass door; then it carried on to form an angle and cover the whole of the side wall of the house. A crystal canopy protected the upper floor from the rain.

I stopped and rang the bell.

The sliding door opened and in the doorway I saw a mono-browed mulatto woman with wicked eyes who asked me rudely what it was I wanted.

When I asked her if the engineer was in, she replied that she would go and see, and in her turn asked me who I was and what it was I wanted. Without getting annoyed I said that I was called Fernán González and that I was a draughtsman.

The mulatto came back and let me in, more friendly this time. We went through several shuttered rooms, then she suddenly opened the door into a study, and at a desk to the left with a green-shaded lamp on the top I saw a bent grey head; the man looked at me, I said hello and he signed for me to come in. Then he said:

‘A moment, señor, and I will be at your service.’

I looked at him. He was young despite his hair.

There was an expression of fatigue and melancholy in his face. He had deep worry-lines on his forehead, the bags under his eyes formed a triangle with his eyelids, and the ends of his lightly drooping lips mimicked the posture of that head, which he now held supported in the palm of his hand as he bent over a paper.

The walls of the room were covered with plans and designs of luxury buildings; I looked at a bookcase that was filled with volumes, and had managed to read one of the titles, Water Legislation, when Señor Vitri spoke to me:

‘How may I help you, señor?’

In a low voice I replied:

‘Excuse me, sir; first of all, are we alone?’

‘I would imagine so.’

‘May I ask what might seem an indiscreet question? You are not married, are you?’

‘No.’

Now he was looking at me seriously, and his narrow face gradually, so to speak, dropped its expression of grave contemplation and replaced it with one even more grave.

Leaning back in his chair, he had thrown his head back; his grey eyes looked sternly at me, at one moment they stared at the knot of my tie, then they paused at my own eyes and seemed, so immobile in their sockets, to be waiting to surprise something out of the ordinary in me.

I understood that I should stop beating around the bush.

‘Sir, I’ve come to tell you that they are planning to rob you tonight.’

I was expecting to surprise him, but I was mistaken.

‘Right, yes… and how do you know about this?’

‘I’ve been invited to be in on the theft by the thief. I know that you have taken a large sum of money out of the Bank and that you’ve put it in your strongbox here.’

‘That’s true…’

‘The thief has the keys, the key to the strongbox and the key to this room.’

‘Have you seen them yourself?’ He took a keyring out of his pocket and showed me a key with an over-large guard.

‘Is it this one?’

‘No, it’s this other one.’ I picked out one that was identical to the key The Crip had shown me.

‘Who are the thieves?’

‘The organiser is a cart attendant called The Crip, and your servant is his accomplice. She took your keys away at night and The Crip copied them very fast.’

‘And what was your role in this business?’

‘I… I was invited to the party as someone The Crip knew. He came to my house and asked me to be his accomplice.’

‘When did he see you last?’

‘At about midday today.’

‘And before that, did you know what this guy was planning?’

‘Not what he was planning, no. I know The Crip; we got to know each other because I sold paper to people at the fair he worked at.’

‘So you were his friend… it’s the sort of thing you only tell your friends.’

I blushed.

‘He wasn’t really my friend, no… But I was always interested in his psychology.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘No, why?’

‘I would say… But when were you meant to come tonight?’

‘We were going to wait for you to leave for your club, then the mulatto was going to open the door for us.’

‘It’s a good plan. Where does the guy you call The Crip live?’

‘Condarco 1375.’

‘Okay, it’ll all get sorted out. And where do you live?’

‘Caracas 824.’

‘Okay, come round tonight at about ten. Everything will be well guarded by then. Your name is Fernán González.’

‘No, I gave a false name just in case the mulatto knew via The Crip about my participation in this business. My name is Silvio Astier.’

The engineer rang an electric bell and looked around; a few moments later the maid appeared.

Arsenio Vitri’s face was immobile.

‘Gabriela, this gentleman will come tomorrow morning to pick up this roll of plans,’ — he pointed to a sheaf of papers abandoned on a chair — ‘give them to him even if I am not here.’

Then he stood up and held out his hand to me coldly and I left accompanied by the maid.

The Crip was arrested at nine-thirty that night. He lived in a wooden attic, in a house owned by some poor people. The agents who were waiting for him had found out from Little Guy that The Crip had come home, ‘gone through his stuff and left’. As they didn’t know where he usually went, they appeared unannounced to the lady of the house, made it clear that they were police agents and then went up the steep staircase to The Crip’s room. It looked at first as if there was nothing there worth the trouble of examining. However, and this was an inexplicable and strange thing, they found the two keys, the strongbox key and the office key, hanging on a nail in full view of anyone who came in. In a kerosene tin, alongside some old rags, they found a revolver, and hidden away almost at the bottom of the tin, some newspaper cuttings. They referred to a robbery whose perpetrators had never been identified by the police.

Because they were all articles about the same crime, they assumed with reason that The Crip must have something to do with it, and they formally arrested Little Guy on suspicion of being somehow involved as well: that is, they sent him with an agent down to the local police station.

There was also a white pine table in the attic, with a drawer. They found a lathe and a set of fine files in the drawer. Some of them showed signs of recent use.

With all the evidence gathered and bagged up, the landlady was again called for.

She was a little old lady, rude and greedy; she wrapped up her head with a black kerchief that knotted under her chin. White curls dropped over her forehead, and her jaw swung wide when she spoke. What she had to say shed little light on The Crip’s movements. She had known him for three months. He paid her punctually and worked in the mornings.

When asked about the visits that the thief had received, she gave vague details; however she did remember that ‘last Sunday a black woman came by at three in the afternoon and left at six along with Antonio.’

Deciding that there was no possibility of her being complicit in these events, they ordered her to maintain complete discretion, something which the old woman promised for fear of later complications, and the two agents went back up to the attic to wait for The Crip, because the engineer had explicitly said that The Crip should be arrested at his own house, in order to lighten the punishment he would receive. Maybe he also thought that I was closer to The Crip than I had implied.

The agents thought that he wouldn’t come; he might have dinner in some restaurant in the suburbs, and get drunk to build up enough courage, but they were wrong.

The Crip had won some money with his three-way bets. After he had left me he’d gone back to the attic to go out later to a brothel he knew. When it was almost shop closing time he went to one that sold luggage and bought some luggage.

Then he went back to his room, very far from being aware of what awaited him. He went up the stairs humming a tango, emphasising the beat by bumping his suitcase against the steps.

When he opened the door he put the suitcase down on the floor.

Then he put his hand in his pocket to get out his box of matches and at that moment a heavy blow on his chest caused him to take a step backwards, just as another policeman caught hold of his arm.

It’s clear that The Crip must have understood what all this was about, because with a desperate effort he tore himself free.

The policemen, trying to follow him, tripped over the suitcase and one of them fell down the stairs, and as he fell his revolver fell out of his pocket and went off.

The noise filled the denizens of the house with terror, and they wrongly attributed the shot to The Crip, who had not yet managed to get through the street door.

Then a terrible thing happened.

The old woman’s son, a butcher, having found out from his mother what was going on, took his stick and went off after The Crip.

He caught up with him after thirty paces. The Crip ran dragging his useless leg, the stick hit him on the arm, he turned his head and the stick hit his cranium.

Dazed by the blow, he tried to defend himself with a single hand, but a policeman who had just arrived tripped him up, and another blow to his shoulder knocked him down. When they put the cuffs on him, The Crip let out a great shout of pain:

‘Ay, mamita!’ But another blow made him shut up and he disappeared into the dark street with his wrists chained together and being led by other chains which the agents marching at his shoulders twisted vindictively.

When I got to the house of Arsenio Vitri, Gabriela was not there.

She had been arrested a few minutes after I had left.

A police officer who had been called in accused her in the presence of the engineer. The mulatto denied everything to begin with, but when they lied and told her that The Crip had been arrested, she began to cry.

Those people who witnessed this scene will never forget it.

The dark woman, cornered, with her eyes shining brightly looked all around her, like a wild beast preparing to spring.

She shuddered incredibly strongly; but when they repeated that the Crip had been arrested and that he was going to suffer because of her, then she softly began to weep; they were such delicate tears that the people around her frowned all the more… suddenly she raised her arms, her fingers came to a halt in the knot of her hair, she pulled out a comb that she wore there and shook her hair out over her back, then she said, putting her hands together, and looking madly at the people present:

‘Yes, it’s right… it’s right… let’s go… let’s go find Antonio…’

They took her to the police station in a wagon.

Arsenio Vitri received me in his office. He was pale and he didn’t look at me as he spoke:

‘Sit down.’

Unexpectedly he asked me in a harsh voice:

‘How much do I owe you?’

‘What?’

‘Yes, how much do I owe you…? Your type can only be paid.’

I understood the contempt that he threw in my face.

I stood up, growing pale.

‘Yes, I see, you can only pay me. Keep your money, I haven’t asked for it. Goodbye.’

‘No, come on, sit down… Tell me, why did you do this?’

‘Why?’

‘Yes, why did you betray your friend? For no reason. Aren’t you ashamed to have so little dignity at your age?’

Blushing to the roots of my hair, I replied:

‘It’s right… There are moments in our lives when we need to be scum, to make ourselves dirty even on the inside, to do something infamous, I don’t know… to destroy a man’s life for ever… and after doing this then we can walk with our heads held high again.’

Vitri didn’t look at my face. His eyes were fixed on the knot of my tie and his face dropped its serious expression and replaced it with one even more serious.

I continued:

‘You have insulted me, but it doesn’t matter.’

‘I could have helped you,’ he murmured.

‘You could have paid me, and now you can’t even do that, because I feel, in spite of all my scandalous behaviour, I feel superior to you.’ And growing suddenly angry I shouted at him:

‘Who are you? It still feels like a dream that I handed The Crip in.’

With a smooth voice he replied:

‘And why are you like this?’

A heavy tiredness fell quickly upon me and I let myself collapse into the chair.

‘Why? God only knows. Even if I live a thousand years I’ll never forget The Crip’s face. What will happen to him? God only knows; but the memory of The Crip will always be in my life, will be in my spirit like the memory of losing a child. He could come and spit in my face and I wouldn’t say anything.’

An enormous sadness passed over my life. I would always remember this moment.

‘If that’s how it is,’ the engineer babbled, and suddenly he got up with his bright eyes fixed on the knot in my tie, and he murmured as if in a dream: ‘You’ve said it. It’s like that. You obey this brutal law that you have within yourself. That’s how it is. That’s how it is. You obey the fierce law. That’s how it is; but who told you that this law exists? Where did you learn it?’

I replied:

‘It’s like there’s a world that will soon fall upon us.’

‘But did you ever imagine that one day you’d become like Judas?’

‘No, but I am calm now. I will go through life as if I were a dead man. I see life like that, like a great yellow desert.’

‘Doesn’t that worry you?’

‘Why? Life is so large. A moment ago it seemed to me that what I did was preordained ten thousand years ago; then I thought that the world split in two, that everything became a far purer colour and that mankind was not ruined.

A boyish smile appeared on Vitri’s face. He said:

‘Is that how it appears to you?’

‘Yes, that will happen one day… it will happen and people will go through the streets asking each other: “Is it right, is this true?”’

‘Tell me, have you ever been ill?’

I understood what he thought and I continued with a smile:

‘No… I know what you’re thinking… But listen to me… I’m not mad. There is a truth, yes… and it is that life will always be extraordinarily beautiful to me. I don’t know if people will sense the life-force as I sense it, but there is a joy in me, a sort of joy-filled unconsciousness.’ A sudden lucidity allowed me to see the motives behind my previous actions and I continued: ‘I’m not perverted, I am curious about this vast force that there is within me…’

‘Go on, go on.’

‘Everything takes me by surprise. Sometimes I feel that I only came to the earth an hour ago and that everything is new, fresh, beautiful. Then I would be able to embrace people in the street, to stop in the middle of the pavement to ask them: “Why do you walk with such sad faces? Life is beautiful, beautiful…” Don’t you think so?’

‘Yes…’

‘And knowing that life is beautiful makes me happy, because everything is filled with flowers… You want to go down on your knees and give thanks to God for allowing us to be born.’

‘And do you believe in God?’

‘I believe that God is the joy there is in life. If you only knew! Sometimes it seems to me that my soul is as large as Flores cathedral… and I want to laugh, to go out into the street and give people friendly punches…’

‘Go on…’

‘Aren’t you bored?’

‘No, go on.’

‘The thing is, that you can’t tell people these things. They think you’re mad. And I ask myself: what do I do with this life there is in me? And I would like to give it away… to give it as a present… to get close to people and tell them: “You have to be happy!” You get me? “You have to play at pirates… you have to build marble cities… you have to laugh… you have to make fireworks…”’

Arsenio Vitri stood up and said with a smile:

‘That’s all very well, but you have to work. How can I help you?’

I thought for a second, then said:

‘Look; I wanted to go to the South… to Neuquén… where there is ice and clouds… and tall mountains… I wanted to see the mountain…’

‘Perfect; I’ll help you get a job in Comodoro; but go now because I have to work. I’ll write to you soon… Oh! And don’t lose your joy; your joy is very beautiful…’

And his hand squeezed mine firmly. I tripped over a chair… and left.

Biographical note

The son of immigrant parents from Germany and Italy, Roberto Arlt was born in Buenos Aires on 2 April 1900.

Following a startlingly brief and difficult school education, Arlt tried to turn his hand to many different careers (from mechanic and painter to dockworker and member of the armed forces) before lighting on journalism. The fruits of his columns were his ‘Aguafuertes’ (Etchings) in which he documented everyday life in Buenos Aires and for which he is still best remembered and celebrated.

In 1926, Arlt published his first novel El juguete rabioso (The Mad Toy). He would go on to write a number of other novels as well as short stories and plays. In 1935, Arlt travelled through Spain and Africa as a correspondent, hoping that it would lead to a career as a North-American correspondent.

Arlt died in July 1942 following a stroke.

James Womack was born in Cambridge in 1979. He studied Russian and English Literature at university, and has lived in Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Reykjavík. In 2008 he moved to Madrid with his wife, the Spanish writer Marian Womack, where they run Nevsky Prospects, a publishing house producing Spanish translations of Russian literature. He has published translations from Russian and Spanish. His first book of poems, Misprint, was published in 2012.

Notes

1. Jules Bonnot (1876–1912): French anarchist robber; André Valet (1890–1912): French anarchist robber, founder member of what came to be called the Bonnot Gang (la Bande à Bonnot)

2. Yerba: plant used to make mate tea.

3. Orestes and Pylades: figures from Greek mythology, famous for their strong, possibly homoerotic, friendship.

4. In the original, the phrase is gallegos de mierda (‘Galician bastards’). Because of the extensive emigration to Argentina of Spaniards from the northwestern region of Galicia, gallego became used in Argentina to refer to anyone of Spanish extraction.

5. Cacus: in Graeco-Roman mythology, a cannibalistic fire-breathing giant and thief, killed by Hercules.

6. Cacaseno: a famous simpleton; protagonist of the story Cacaseno (1620) by Adriano Banchieri (1568–1634).

7. Tute: trick-taking card game, originally from Italy.

8. Montparnasse and Thénardier: criminal characters from the novel Les Misérables (1862) by Victor Hugo (1802–85); ranún: slang for ‘a cunning person’, derived from rana, ‘frog’, and the Genoan diminutive — ún, which implies frivolity and mischief.

9. Bondi: tram. The term bondi comes into Argentinian Spanish via Brazilian Portuguese and, ultimately, via the English ‘bond’, referring to the bond issues which funded the public transport system.

10. Lacombe (18??–19??): French anarchist robber, arrested in 1913.

11. Misquotation of lines 1–2 and 7–8 from an untitled poem (poem 22 in the first edition) from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857). The original French runs as follows: ‘Je t’adore à l’égal de la voûte nocturne, / O vase de tristesse, ô grande taciturne […] Je m’avance à l’attaque, et je grimpe aux assauts, / Comme après un cadavre un choeur de vermisseaux’.

12. Voglio dire: more or less, ‘I’m telling you’ (Italian).

13. The word Arlt uses, bulín, is a slang term that implies a room used for sexual activity.

14. Lyda Borelli (1884–1959): Italian film and theatre actress, star of films such as La donna nuda (1914).

15. Trophonius: in Greek mythology, a famous architect, one of the designers, along with his brother Agamedes, of the cavern where King Hyrieus kept his treasure.

16. Dardo Rocha (1838–1921): Argentinian statesman and naval officer, founder of the city of La Plata.

17. Pejerrey: Pacific fish, similar to mackerel.

18. Estate buono: ‘Calm down’ (lit. ‘Be good’, Italian).

19. Ricaldoni: Teobaldo Jorge Ricaldoni (1861–1922), famous inventor, born in Uruguay, he took Argentinian citizenship early in his life. His major invention was a functioning submarine which he offered to the Argentinian navy and which they rejected.

20. Alfajores: sweet consisting of two biscuits joined together with a sweet filling, and coated with chocolate or icing sugar; pan de leche: sweet bread, sometimes with sugar on top.

21. Ferranti and Siemens-Halske: electrical engineering companies.

22. Tesla: Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), Serbian-American inventor.

23. Sobieski-era hetman: Jan III Sobieski (1629–96), King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania (1674–96). A hetman is the chief of a group of Cossacks.

About the Publisher

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Content

Roberto Arlt
The Mad Toy

Foreword

Introduction

The Mad Toy

Chapter 1. The Thieves

Chapter 2. Works and Days

Chapter 3. The Mad Toy

Chapter 4. Judas Iscariot

Biographical note

Notes

About the Publisher