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!”’