The Mad Toy Read Free Page A

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

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 theodd 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