The Mad Toy (11 page)

The lieutenant bent over it; afterwards he handed it to the other officers and spoke to me:

‘Have you seen it? The problems I noticed have been picked up by Ricaldoni as well. But your idea in principle is very interesting. I know Ricaldoni. He was my teacher. He’s a clever man.’

‘Yes, short and fat, pretty fat.’

‘Would you like to pour yourself a vermouth?’ the captain offered with a smile.

‘Thank you, sir. I don’t drink.’

‘Do you know anything about mechanics?’

‘A bit. Kinematics… dynamics… steam engines and
combustion
engines; crude oil engines as well. I’ve studied chemistry and explosives too, which is an interesting topic.’

‘Yes it is. What do you know about explosives?’

‘Ask me anything,’ I replied with a smile.

‘Okay, well then, what are fulminates?’

This was beginning to look like an exam, and I replied with an air of wisdom:

‘Captain Cundill, in his
Dictionary of Explosives
, says that fulminates are the metallic salts of a hypothetical acid called hydrogen fulminate. They can be simple or double.’

‘All right, all right, give me an example of a double
fulminate
.’

‘Copper fulminate, which forms as green crystals produced when mercury fulminate, a simple fulminate, is boiled with water and copper.’

‘He knows a lot, this kid. How old are you?’

‘Sixteen, sir.’

‘Sixteen?’

‘Are you listening to this, captain? This kid’s got a great future ahead of him. How about we talk to Captain Márquez? It’d be a shame if we couldn’t accept him.’

‘It would indeed.’ The officer from the engineer corps turned to me.

‘Where the devil have you studied all of this?’

‘All over, sir. I don’t know, I go out into the street and I see a machine I don’t know anything about in a workshop
somewhere
. I stop, and say to myself as I look at the different parts that this bit must work like
this
, and this bit must do
that
. And after I’ve made my deductions I go into the shop and ask, and believe me, I’m very rarely wrong. Also, I’ve got a pretty good library, and if I’m not studying mechanics then I study literature.’

‘What?’ The captain interrupted. ‘Literature as well?’

‘Yes, sir, and I’ve got the best authors: Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Baroja.’

‘
Che
, he’s not an anarchist, is he?’

‘No, sir. I am not an anarchist. But I like to study and to read.’

‘And what does your father think about all of this?’

‘My father killed himself when I was very young.’

They fell suddenly quiet. The three officers looked at me and at each other.

The wind outside whistled, and my brow furrowed even more.

The captain stood up and so did I.

‘Look, buddy, congratulations, come by tomorrow. I’ll try to speak to Captain Márquez tonight, because you deserve a shot. This is what the Argentinian army needs. Kids who want to study.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Tomorrow, if you want to come by, I’ll be happy to see you. Ask for Captain Bossi.’

Heavy with so much happiness, I took my leave.

Now I walked through the shadows, leapt over the fences, with a resonant feeling of courage within me.

Now more than ever I felt that I was to use my existence to fulfil some grand destiny. I could be an engineer like Edison, a general like Napoleon, a poet like Baudelaire, a demon like Rocambole.

I was in the seventh heaven. Because I had won the praise of grown men, I spent nights so overcome with joy that my blood beat against my heart for happiness, and I thought that I was being carried across the world on the shoulders of my
happiness
, like a symbol of youth.

I think they chose thirty apprentices to study aviation mechanics out of two hundred applicants.

It was a grey morning. The rough field stretched out into the distance. A nameless punishment oozed from its grey-green monotony.

We passed by the closed hangars accompanied by a sergeant, and got into our overalls in the barracks.

It was drizzling, but despite the drizzle we were taken to do exercises on a patch of scrubland behind the canteen.

It wasn’t difficult. As I obeyed the commands given by the voice I allowed the indifferent expanse of the plain to enter into me. This hypnotised my body, letting all the difficult work happen independent of me.

I thought:

‘If she could see me now, what would she think?’

Sweetly, like a shadow on a moonlit wall, I went back over everything to do with her, and in a distant dusk I saw the
implor
ing image of the girl, motionless next to the poplar tree.

‘Let’s see some movement, recruit,’ the corporal shouted at me.

When it was time to eat, splashing through the mud, we went up to the stinking mess-pots. Green firewood was smoking under the pots. We stood close together and held out our tin plates to the cook.

The man dipped his ladle into the swill and stuck a fork into the other pot, then we stood to one side to gobble down our food.

While I ate I remembered Don Gaetano and the cruel woman. And although they did not exist, I perceived huge expanses of time between my silent yesterday and my quavering present.

I thought:

‘Now that everything has changed, who am I in this too-large uniform?’

Sitting next to the barracks, I saw the rain falling
sporadically
, and with the plate on my knees I couldn’t take my eyes off the horizon, which appeared to be broken in places, but which was smooth as a band of metal in others and which was so
pitilessly
excited that its cool height where it fell away cut through to my bones.

Some of the apprentices sitting on the stairs laughed, and others, bent over a water-trough, were washing their feet.

I said to myself:

‘Life’s like this, always complaining about what has
happened
. The threads of water fall so slowly.’ That was how life was. I left the plate on the ground in order to allow my thoughts free rein.

Would I ever escape from my terrible social condition, would I ever be able to become a gentleman, to stop being someone who went for any job going?

A lieutenant came past and I stood to attention… Then I fell into a corner and the food I had eaten made me feel even heavier.

In the future, would I be one of those men with dirty collars and darned shirts, with a reddish suit and gigantic shoes, with
blisters and calluses on my feet from walking so much, from going door to door asking for work?

My soul trembled, what should I do, what could I do to succeed, to earn money, a lot of money? I wasn’t going to find a wallet with ten thousand pesos in it in the street. What to do then? And I didn’t know if I could kill anyone, I wished I at least had a rich relative to kill and inherit from, but I understood that I would never become resigned to the penurious life that the majority of men put up with naturally.

Suddenly it became so clear to me, to my conscience, that this desire for distinction would accompany me throughout the world, that I said to myself:

‘I won’t care if I never have a suit, never have any money, never have anything,’ I confessed to myself almost shamefully. ‘What I want is to be admired by others, praised by others. What do I care if I’m a rake? I don’t care at all… But this
mediocre
life… To be forgotten when you die, that’s horrible. Oh, if my inventions could only have some success! But I will die one day, and the trains will keep on running, and people will go to the theatre like they always did, and I’ll be dead, good and dead… dead for life.’

A shudder made the hair on my arms rise up. Faced by a horizon on which the clouds moved like ships, the conviction of an eternal death filled me with horror. Overwhelmed, holding my plate, I went to the trough.

Oh, if only I could find a way never to die, to live even for only five hundred years!

The corporal who was putting us through our paces called me over:

‘Drodman, Captain Márquez wants to see you.’

‘Right away, Corporal.’

During the exercises I had asked permission via a sergeant to speak with Captain Márquez, to ask him about a trench mortar
that I had thought up, which would shoot projectiles that would destroy more men than traditional explosive shrapnel.

Aware of my vocation, Captain Márquez was used to hearing me out, and while I spoke and drew on his blackboard he would look at me through his glasses with a smile that was part
curiosity
, part mockery and part indulgence.

I left the plate in the washing-up bowl and rapidly went over to the officer’s quarters.

I was in his room. Next to the wall, a camp bed, a bookcase with journals in it and textbooks on military science, and nailed to the wall a blackboard with its chalk-box nailed next to it at an angle.

The captain said to me:

‘Okay, let’s see what this trench cannon is like. Draw it.’

I took a piece of chalk and made a sketch.

I began my spiel.

‘You know that the large calibre weapons have two main inconveniences, captain: their weight and their size.’

‘Yes, and…’

‘So, what I’ve thought up is a cannon of the following kind: the large calibre projectile has a hole made in it through the centre, and instead of being placed in a tube, the cannon, it will be put onto a metal bar, like a ring onto a finger, and slide down to the part where the explosive charge is placed. The advantage of my system is that without making the cannon any heavier you will be able to increase enormously the calibre of projectile and the explosive charge it can carry.’

‘I get you… It’s all right… But you need to remember this: the thickness of the cannon, its diameter and length, is calculated based upon the calibre of the projectiles it’s going to fire, the weight of the projectiles and the quality of the powder used to fire them. What I mean is that depending on the way in which the powder ignites, the projectile will move in a certain way
inside the barrel of the cannon, propelled by the gases of the explosion, so that when the projectile reaches the mouth of the cannon it will have obtained maximum propulsive force from the explosive. Your invention is the exact opposite of this. The explosion takes place and the projectile slides up the bar and the gases, instead of impelling the projectile, will dissipate into the air, which means that if the explosion needs to remain controlled for a whole second, what you will do is reduce this period of control to a tenth of a second, or a thousandth of a second. It’s all topsy-turvy. The bigger the diameter of the
projectile
, the more resistance it has to overcome, unless you’ve discovered a new form of ballistics, which would be a difficult thing to do.’

He finished by saying:

‘You have to study, study a great deal, if you want to be anything.’

And I thought, although without daring to say it out loud:

‘How am I going to study if I need to learn a trade to earn my living?’

He continued speaking:

‘You’ve studied a lot of maths; what you lack is a base, you should discipline your thought, apply yourself to the study of little practical things, and then maybe you’ll start to be more successful in your ideas.’

‘Do you really think so, sir?’

‘Yes, Astier. You have undeniable potential, but you have to study, you think that just because you can dream something up then that’s all the work done already, and thinking is only ever the start of something.’

And I left the room, filled with gratitude towards this man who was serious and melancholic and who was kind enough to encourage me, in spite of military discipline.

It was two o’clock in the afternoon of my fourth day in the Military Aviation Academy.

I was drinking
mate
with a red-haired boy called Walter, who was telling me with an affecting enthusiasm about a small farm his father, a German, had on the outskirts of Azul.

The redhead said with his mouth full of bread:

‘We butcher three hogs every winter for the house. We sell the rest. So one afternoon when it was cold I went into the house and cut myself a chunk of bread, then I went out in the Ford to…’

‘Drodman, come here,’ the sergeant shouted to me.

He was in front of the barracks and was looking at me with an unaccustomed seriousness.

‘Sir.’

‘Get dressed in your civvies and hand in your uniform. You’re out of here.’

I looked at him carefully.

‘Out?’

‘Yes, you’re out.’

‘Out, sir?’ My voice trembled.

The officer looked at me pityingly. He was a well-mannered provincial and had only got his wings a few days previously.

‘But I haven’t done anything wrong, sir, you know that.’

‘Of course I do… But what can I do about it… Captain Márquez gave the order…’

‘Captain Márquez? But that’s crazy… Captain Márquez can’t have given the order… Isn’t there some kind of a mistake?’

‘They told me Silvio Drodman Astier… There’s no one called Drodman Astier here apart from you, I don’t think, is there? So it’s got to be you, there’s no other way of looking at it.’

‘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.