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-rounded portrait 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 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
The Mad Toy
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 the odd 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 warning: