‘But this is unfair, sir.’
The man frowned and said to me in a low voice:
‘What do you want me to do about it? Of course it’s not right… I think… no, no, I don’t know… I think there’s someone the captain has to fit in somehow… that’s what they told me, I don’t know if it’s true, but because you lot haven’t signed contracts yet, of course they can get rid of whoever they want, and put in whoever they want too. If there was a signed contract then they wouldn’t be able to do anything, but because there’s nothing on paper, then you need to put up with it.’
I said in supplication:
‘What about you, sir, can’t you do anything?’
‘What do you want me to do, buddy? What do you want me to do? I’m in the same boat as you; this is what goes on here.’
The man felt pity for me.
I said thank you and walked away with tears in my eyes.
‘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 girclass="underline" 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?’