The Mad Toy (3 page)

‘Just you wait, I hope I don’t ever get my hands on him, because it’d be worse for him than if a train ran him over.’

This is what Hipólito’s mother said, a fat woman with an extremely white face who was always pregnant, as she grasped the butcher’s arm:

‘I advise you, Don Segundo, not to trust them an inch. They’ve squeezed so much out of us I can’t tell you.’

‘Don’t worry, don’t worry,’ the brawny man would grumble sternly, fencing with his enormous knife in and out of a lung.

Ah! And how happy the Irzubetas were. Ask the baker who had the cheek to complain about how far his creditors were in arrears; ask him to say it isn’t so.

This baker was complaining to one of the girls when he had the bad luck to be overheard by the police officer, who happened to be passing by the house.

The police officer, accustomed to settle all problems by
judicious
blows and knocks, and irritated by the insolence displayed in the fact that the baker wanted to be paid what he was owed, beat the man out of the house with his own fists. This was a salutary lesson in manners, and many people preferred not to demand payment. And so, this family’s life was cheerier than a one-act farce.

The maidens of the family, past twenty-six and not a boyfriend between them, enjoyed themselves with Chateaubriand, sank back into Lamartine and Cherbuliez. This led them to entertain the conviction that they were part of an intellectual ‘elite’, and it was this that in its turn led them to refer to poor people as riffraff.

The grocer who tried to get payment for his beans was riffraff; the shopkeeper from whom they had beggingly coaxed a few metres of lace was riffraff; riffraff too was the butcher who lost it when the ladies unwillingly called through his shutters that ‘next month we’ll pay you for sure’.

The three brothers, hairy and thin, tramps in all their glory, sunbathed throughout the day and when it got dark put on their suits and went off to cultivate love affairs among the dissolute women in the slum districts of town.

The two blessed and discontented old women squabbled at any moment over trifles, or, sitting with their daughters in the
ancient hall, would spy on people through the curtains, or else they gossiped; as they were descended from an official who had served in Napoleon I’s army, I often heard them, from the penumbra that idealised those bloodless faces, dreaming their imperialist myths, evoking the stale splendours of nobility, while on the lonely pavement the lamplighter with his pole crowned by a violet flame lit the green gas lamp.

As they had no way to keep a maid, and also as no servant would have been able to support the goatish vigour of the three hairy louts and the bad humour of the irritable maidens and the whims of the toothy old witches, Enrique was the
intermediary
needed for the right functioning of that lame economic machinery, and so accustomed was he to ask for credit that his shamelessness was both unheard-of and exemplary. One can say in his praise that a bronze statue would show
embarrassment
more easily than his refined features.

Irzubeta would spend his long hours of free time in
sketching
, a skill at which he did not lack either invention or delicacy, which is a fine argument to show that there have always been good-for-nothings with aesthetic ability. As I had nothing to do, I was often in his house, a circumstance that did not please the old women, about whom I didn’t give a damn.

From my union with Enrique, from the long conversations we had about bandits and thieves, we developed a strange
predisposition
to commit acts of mischief ourselves, and an infinite desire to gain immortality as delinquents.

Enrique once said to me, apropos of the expulsion of some bandits, some ‘apaches’ who had emigrated from France to Buenos Aires, and whose case had been reported by Soiza Reilly in an article accompanied by eloquent photographs:

‘The President of the Republic has four “apaches” for his bodyguards.’

I laughed.

‘Stop pulling my leg.’

‘It’s true, I’m telling you, and they’re like
this
.’ And he opened his arms like a crucified man to give me some idea of the thoracic capacity of these dyed-in-the-wool thugs.

I don’t remember how, by what subtleties and casuistry, we managed to convince ourselves that robbery was a meritorious and beautiful act; but I do know that it was by mutual
agreement
that we decided to organise a gang of thieves, whose initial membership was ourselves alone.

Later we would see… And in order to kick off our activities in a befitting manner we decided to begin by ransacking
abandoned
houses. This is how we did it:

After lunch, when the streets were deserted, we would go out discreetly dressed to roam the streets of Flores or Caballito.

Our tools were:

A little monkey wrench, a screwdriver and some newspapers to wrap up the pickings.

Where a poster announced a property for rent, we would go and ask about it, with our manners perfect and our faces composed. We looked like Cacus’s altar-boys.
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Once we’d got the keys, ostensibly so that we could find out whether the houses were habitable or not, we would spring into action.

I have not yet forgotten the joy we felt upon opening the doors. We would rush in violently; eager for booty, we would rush through the rooms assessing with rapid glances the amount of stealable material.

If there was electric light installed, we would tear out the cables, the light fittings and the doorbells, the bulbs and the switches, the chandeliers, the glass lampshades and the
batteries
; we took the taps from the bathroom because they were nickel-plated; we took the taps from the kitchen sink because
they were made of bronze, and we only didn’t take doors and windows to stop ourselves from looking like removal men.

We would work inspired by a certain kind of painful joy, a knot of anxiety held still in our throats, and moving as fast as quick-change artists, laughing with no cause, shuddering at imagined sounds.

The cables hung in rags from the ceilings which were ripped up by the vigour of our efforts; chunks of plaster and mortar stained the dusty floors; in the kitchen the lead pipes would release an endless trickle of water, and in very few seconds we were able to get the house in good shape for a costly repair-job.

Then Irzubeta and I would hand back the keys and with rapid steps disappear.

The meeting-point was always the backroom of a plumber’s shop; the plumber was like a collector’s card version of Cacaseno:
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moonfaced, getting on in years, with a large gut and horns, because it was well known that he tolerated the infidelities of his wife with the patience of a Franciscan friar.

Whenever his situation was indirectly hinted at, he would reply with lamblike meekness that his wife suffered from nerves, and in the face of such a solidly scientific argument there was no possible reply apart from silence.

However, he was an eagle where his own interests were concerned.

This knock-kneed man would meticulously examine our haul, weigh the cables, test the bulbs to see if the filaments were burnt out, sniff the pipes and with an aggravating patience would calculate and recalculate his sums until he ended up offering us a tenth of the cost price of what we had stolen.

If we argued or got annoyed, this good man would lift up his cowlike eyes, his face would fill with an ironic smile, and,
without
letting us speak further, and giving us cheery slaps on the
back, he would show us to the door with all the charm in the world and leave us with the money in our hands.

But don’t think that we limited our exploits to uninhabited houses. Nobody could compare to us as snappers-up of
unconsidered
trifles.

We were constantly aware of other people’s property. In our hands there was a fabulous dexterity, in our eyes the speed of a bird of prey. Without hurrying, but with the speed of a gyrfalcon falling down on an innocent dove, we fell upon those things that did not belong to us.

If we went into a café and there was a piece of cutlery or a sugar bowl forgotten on a table and the waiter was distracted, then we would lift them both; we would find, in the kitchen display cabinets or any other hidey-hole, whatever we
considered
necessary for our common benefit.

We spared neither cup nor plate, knife nor billiard ball, and I remember well that on one rainy night, in a busy café, Enrique very neatly purloined an overcoat, and on another night I got a gold-headed cane.

Our eyes would spin in their orbits or open as wide as saucers while we were looking for things to turn to our advantage, and as soon as we saw what we wanted, there we were, smiling, care free and free-speaking, our fingers ready and our eyes alert for everything, so as not to blow it like minor-league grafters.

In shops we would exercise this same pure art, and you had to see it to believe it how we took in the kids who worked the counters while their bosses were sleeping their siesta.

Using some pretext, Enrique would take the kid outside to look at the shop window, so that he could get the price of certain objects, and if there was no one in the office then I would quickly open a display case and fill my pockets with boxes of pencils, artistic inkstands; once we were able to snaffle money out of a cashbox that had no alarm, and another time, in a gun
shop, we got a box with a dozen penknives made of gold-plated steel with mother of pearl handles.

When we went through a day without being able to get our hands on anything we were crestfallen, sad at our
incompetence
, disappointed about our future.

Then we would go around in a bad mood until something came along to cheer us up.

However, when business was on the up and coins were replaced by delectable peso bills, we would wait for a rainy afternoon and go out for a ride in a hired car with a driver. How delicious then to be driven through curtains of rain along the city streets! We would lie back on the soft cushions, light a cigarette, leaving the busy people behind us in the rain, and imagine that we lived in Paris, or foggy London town. We would dream in silence, a smile balanced on our condescending lips.

Later, in a high-class cake shop, we would drink chocolate with vanilla, and go home sated on the afternoon train, our energies doubled by the satisfaction our blowout had given our voluptuous bodies, by the dynamism in everything around us that shouted with its iron voices in our ears:

Forwards, forwards!

Said I to Enrique one fine day:

‘We need to form a secret society, a real society, for smart kids.’

‘The difficulty is that there aren’t that many of us around,’ Enrique argued.

‘Yes, you’re right; but there can’t be none of them.’

A few weeks after saying this, Enrique’s efforts turned up a certain Lucio who joined our group; he was a fool, short in stature and livid from too much masturbation, with a face that was so shameless that it made anyone who saw it want to laugh.

He lived under the protection of some pious old women who cared little or nothing for him. This nincompoop had one
favourite occupation, which was telling people the most
ordinary
things as if they were immense secrets. This he did by
looking
all around him and moving his arms like certain film actors did when they played petty suburban crooks.

‘This nutcase won’t be any use to us,’ I said to Enrique; but as he brought a newcomer’s enthusiasm to the recently formed brotherhood, his keen decisiveness, together with his bizarre arm movements, gave us hope.

It was impossible for us to do without a meeting-point, and we called it, at Lucio’s suggestion, unanimously accepted,
The Club of the Midnight Gentlemen
.

The club held its meetings round the back of Enrique’s house, in a narrow room of dusty wood with large spider-webs hanging from the roof beams, facing a filthy-walled and decrepit latrine. There were lots of broken and faded puppets in the corners, the legacy of a failed puppeteer who had been a friend of the Irzubetas, as well as boxes filled with horrifically mutilated lead soldiers, rank bundles of dirty clothes and boxes overflowing with old newspapers and magazines.

The door to the hovel opened onto a dark patio covered in cracked bricks, which became muddy on rainy days.

‘Nobody here,
che?
’

Enrique closed the shabby casement through the broken panes of which were visible huge roiling tin clouds.

‘They’re inside, chatting.’

We made ourselves as comfortable as possible. Lucio offered us Egyptian cigarettes, a formidable novelty for us, and smoothly lit a match on the sole of his shoe. Then he said:

‘We are going to read the Minutes.’

So that there would be nothing lacking in this
aforementioned
club, there was a Book of Minutes where all the associates’ projects were entered, and there was also a stamp,
a rectangular stamp that Enrique had made out of a cork and which displayed the emotive spectacle of a heart pierced by three daggers.

The Minutes were kept by each of us in turn; the end of each set of Minutes was signed; each new topic was given its stamp.

The Minutes contained such things as the following:

Lucio’s Proposal
– In the future in order to rob without needing locksmith’s tools, we should make wax models of the keys of all the houses we visit.

Enrique’s Proposal
– We should also make a plan of each house where we get the keys from. These plans will be kept secret with the documents of the Order and must be sure to mention all peculiarities of the building for the greater
convenience
of the person who will be sent to operate there.

General Agreement of the Order
– Associate Enrique is hereby named the Club’s official forger and draughtsman.

Silvio’s Proposal
– To introduce nitro-glycerine into a fortified zone, take an egg, empty it of the yolk and the white and inject the explosive using a syringe.