The Mad Toy Read Free

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 againsthis 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-roundedportrait 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