The Mad Toy (12 page)

‘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:

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: