The Mad Toy (6 page)

‘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 Borelli
14
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.

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:

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:

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.