The Mad Toy (10 page)

‘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.

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-Halske
21
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!”’

Señora Naidath sighed deeply.

I found the woman’s tribulations diverting. While I tied my tie, I smiled to imagine her gigantic husband, a salt-and-
pepper-haired
Pole, with a cockatoo’s nose, shouting at Doña Rebeca.

Señor Josias Naidath was a Jew more generous than a Sobieski-era
hetman
.
23
A strange man. He hated Jews so much it made him sick, and his grotesque anti-Semitism displayed itself in an elaborately obscene vocabulary. Of course, this was a
generalised
hatred rather than a dislike of anyone in particular.

Friends trying to get one over on him had cheated him many times before, but he didn’t want to believe this and in his house, to the despair of Señora Rebeca, one could always find fat
badly-turned-out
German immigrant adventurers, who stuffed
themselves
at his table with sauerkraut and sausages, and who laughed slobbery great laughs, rolling their inexpressive blue eyes.

The Jew looked after them until they found work, making use of the contacts he had as a painter and a freemason. Sometimes they robbed him; there was one scoundrel who disappeared over night from a house they were renovating, taking with him ladders, planks and cans of paint.

When Señor Naidath found out that the night watchman, his protégé, had run off like this, his cries reached up to heaven. He was like Thor in a fury… but he didn’t do anything.

His wife was the prototype of the sordid, avaricious Jewess.

I remember that when my sister was younger, she went to visit them in their house one day. She openly admired a beautiful heavily laden plum-tree and, understandably enough, wanted to taste its fruit, and asked shyly if she could have a plum.

And Señora Naidath reproached her:

‘
Hijita
… If you want to eat plums, you can buy all the plums you want in the market.’

‘Pour yourself some tea, Señora Naidath.’

The Jewess carried on with her lamenting narrative:

‘Then he shouted at me, and all the neighbours heard, Frau, he shouted at me: “You daughter of a Jewish butcher, Jewish pig, protecting your son all the time.” As if he weren’t Jewish, as if Maximito wasn’t his son too.’

But actually, Señora Naidath and her doltish son Maximito worked well together to cheat the Freemason and get money from him that they then spent on fripperies; theirs was a con game that Señor Naidath knew about and which it was enough merely to mention to get him to blow his top.

Maximito, the cause of these ridiculous quarrels, was a twenty-eight-year-old rogue, who was ashamed of being Jewish and of being a painter.

In order to hide his shameful condition, that of being a
working
man, he dressed himself up as a gentleman, wore spectacles and each night before going to bed rubbed glycerine into his hands.

I knew some juicy stories about his mischievous tricks.

Once he secretly collected some money a bar-owner owed his father. He was twenty years old and thought that he had a flair for music, so he spent the total on a magnificent gilded harp. Maximito explained, on his mother’s urging, that he had won some pesos as a part share in a lottery ticket, and Señor Naidath said nothing, but looked suspiciously at the harp, and the guilty couple trembled like Adam and Eve in Paradise under the gaze of Jehovah.

The days went by. Maximito played the harp and the old Jewess rejoiced. These things happen. Señora Rebeca told her friends that Maximito was a very promising harpist, and people, when they saw the harp in the corner of the dining room, agreed.

However, despite his generosity, Josias was at times a
prudent
man, and soon realised the scam by which magnanimous Maximito had become the owner of the harp.

And so, Señor Naidath, who was extremely strong, got on top of the situation and, as the Psalmist recommends, spoke little and did much.

It was Saturday, but Señor Josias didn’t give a damn for the precepts of Moses; by way of a prologue he gave his wife two kicks up the backside, then he grabbed Maximito by the
shirt-collar
and, after giving him a dusting-off, took him out into the street; as for the neighbours who had come out of doors in shirtsleeves and who were having a wonderful time with the
ruckus, Señor Naidath threw the harp at their heads from an upstairs window.

This made life much happier for all concerned, and that’s why people said of the Jew that ‘Señor Naidath… he’s a good man.’

I finished sprucing myself up, and went out.

‘Well, goodbye, Frau, say hello to your husband and to Maximito from me.’

‘Aren’t you going to say thank you?’ my mother interrupted.

‘I already said it.’

The Hebrew woman raised her envious little eyes from the slices of buttered bread and weakly held out her hands. I could see that she was already wishing me failure in my venture.

I got to Palomar as it was getting dark.

When I asked the way, an old man who was sitting smoking on a bundle under the green light of the station, indicated to me, with an admirable economy of gesture, a way through the shadows.

I realised that I was dealing with a completely indifferent man; I didn’t want to abuse his reticence, so, knowing almost as much as before I’d asked his help, I said thank you and set off.

The old man called after me:

‘Hey, kid, you got ten centavos?’

I thought about not giving him anything, but I thought that if God existed then he could help me in my task if I helped the old man, and so, not without a certain hidden pain, I went over to give him a coin.

The raggedy man then became more explicit. He got up from his bundle and signalled a point in the darkness with a
trembling
arm:

‘Look, kid… Carry on, straight on and then the officers’ club is on the left.’

And so I walked.

The wind moved the dry leaves of the eucalyptus, and, striking the tree trunks and the high telegraph wires, whistled howlingly.

Crossing the muddy road, feeling my way along a wire fence, and moving as quickly as the terrain allowed, I reached the building which the old man had pointed out as the Club.

Uncertain, I stopped. Should I call? There was no soldier on guard duty in front of the door, behind the railings.

I went up three steps and then bravely, or so I thought, entered a narrow wooden corridor – the whole building was made out of wood – and stopped in front of the doorway of an oblong room with a table in the middle.

Around the table, three officers, one of them lying on a sofa by the sideboard, another with his elbows on the table, and a third with his feet up in the air, leaning his seatback against a wall, were making desultory conversation in front of five bottles of different colours.

‘What do you want?’

‘I’m here because of the advertisement, sir.’

‘The vacancies have been filled.’

I shot back, absolutely tranquil, filled with the serenity that comes after a piece of bad luck:

‘Goodness, that’s a shame, because I’m an inventor myself, I’d have been right at home here.’

‘And what have you invented? Come in, sit down,’ a captain said, sitting up on the sofa.

I replied calmly:

‘An automatic meteor signalling device, and a machine that prints what you dictate to it. I have a letter of congratulation here from Ricaldoni the physicist.’

This aroused the curiosity of the three bored officers, and I realised I had got their attention.

‘All right, sit down,’ one of the lieutenants said, looking me over from head to toe. ‘Explain your famous inventions to us. What were they, again?’

‘An automatic meteor signalling device, sir.’

I leant against the table, supporting myself with my arms, and looked with what I thought was an investigative gaze at the faces with their hard lines and inquisitive eyes, three weather-beaten faces belonging to men used to dominate other men, faces that looked at me with half-curious, half-ironic expressions. And in that moment, just before I began to speak, I thought about the heroes of my favourite books, especially Rocambole: Rocambole with his rubber-visored cap and the rogue’s smile on his twisted lips passed in front of my eyes, pushing me onwards to be
confid
ent and strike a heroic pose.

Comforted, sure that I would make no mistakes, I said:

‘Sirs: you know that selenium is a conductor when it is exposed to light, and an insulator in the dark. The signalling device is nothing more than a selenium cell connected to an
electromagnet
. When the meteor passes over the selenium element, it would trigger a signal, the light of the meteor, concentrated via a concave lens, would turn the selenium into a conductor.’

‘Very good. And the writing machine?’

‘The theory is as follows. In a telephone, sound is converted into an electromagnetic wave. If we use a tangent galvanometer to measure the electrical intensity of each vowel and consonant, then we can calculate the number of ampere-turns needed to make an electronic keyboard that would respond to the
electrical
intensity of each sound.’

The lieutenant’s frown deepened.

‘It’s not a bad idea, but you aren’t taking into account the difficulty of creating electromagnets that would respond to such small electric variations, and that’s even before you start to think about the different types of voice that there are, or else
residual magnetism; another problem, even more serious, the worst, perhaps, is how you make each individual current travel to the correct electromagnet. But have you got Ricaldoni’s letter there?’