The Mad Toy (7 page)

As he sniffed out bargains he would mingle with the cleaners and the servants to get involved in things that should have held no interest for him, he behaved like a mountebank, a barker, and
when he got close to the tin counters of the fish stalls he would examine the gills on the hake and the pejerreys,
17
he would eat prawns, and all this without even buying a single shrimp, he’d go on to the tripe sellers, then the chicken sellers, and before buying anything he would smell the merchandise and smell it
mistrustfully
. If the stallholders got annoyed, he’d shout at them that he didn’t want to be cheated, that he knew very well that they were thieves, but that they were much mistaken if they thought that he was a fool just because he was such a simple person.

His simplicity was an act, his stupidity hid a really active cunning.

This is how it went:

He would choose a cabbage or a cauliflower with a truly
exasperating
patience. He would be ready to pay the price that was asked him, but suddenly would discover another one that looked larger or tastier, and this was enough for an argument to brew between Don Gaetano and the stallholder, each of them trying to rob the other, to cheat their fellow man, even if it was only of as much as a single centavo.

His bad faith was astonishing. He never paid what was asked, only what he offered. Once I had put the produce into the basket, Don Gaetano would step away from the stall, sink his thumbs into the pockets of his jacket, take out the money, count it, count it and recount it, and then throw it down onto the counter as if he were doing the stallholder a favour, and then move quickly away.

If the owner shouted after him, he would reply:

‘
Estate buono.
’
18

He had the urge to keep moving, he was a glutton for looking at things, he went into ecstasies when he saw all the produce because of the money it represented.

He would go up to the pork sellers and ask them the price of their sausages, he would look carefully at the rosy pig-heads,
turn them over in his hands slowly under the bland gaze of the bulky owners in their white aprons, scratch his ear, look with lust at the ribs hanging from their hooks, the pillars of sliced fatty bacon, and then, as if he were resolving a problem that had been tormenting his mind, would head off to another stall to snaffle a slice of cheese or count how many asparagus there were in a bunch, to get his hands dirty with artichokes and turnips, to eat pumpkin seeds or hold eggs up to the light and rejoice in the heaps of wet butter, solid, yellow, still smelling of whey.

We ate at around two in the afternoon. Don Miguel with his plate balanced on top of a kerosene flask, I standing at one corner of a table covered in books, the fat woman in the kitchen and Don Gaetano at the counter.

We left the cave at eleven p.m.

Don Miguel and the fat woman walked in the middle of the well-lit street, carrying the basket in which the coffee-making equipment banged around; Don Gaetano, his hands buried in his pockets, his hat on the crown of his head and a curl of hair hanging over his forehead, and I went after them, thinking how long my first day had been.

We went up to the house and when we got to the corridor Don Gaetano asked me:

‘Brought a mattress, did you?’

‘No. Why?’

‘There’s a bed, but no mattress.’

‘And there’s nothing to cover myself with?’

Don Gaetano looked around, then opened the door to the dining room; there was a heavy furry green cloth on the table.

Doña María had already gone into the bedroom when Don Gaetano grabbed the cloth at one end and threw it in a
bad-tempered
way over my shoulder, and said:

‘
Estate buono
.’ Without replying to my goodnight, he shut the door in my face.

I was disconcerted, standing in front of the old man, who showed his indignation with a dirty blasphemy (‘Ah! Stinking God!’) and then walked off with me following.

The garret where lived the scrawny old man, whom from that moment onwards I called Stinking God, was an absurd triangle under the roof, with a little round window that gave onto Esmerelda Street and its electric lighting. The glass in the bulls-eye was broken, and gusts of wind entered through the gap, causing the yellow tongue of a candle to dance in the saint’s alcove in the wall.

There was a scissor-bed against the wall: two crossed sticks with a canvas nailed to it.

Stinking God left to urinate on the terrace, then sat down on a box, took his hat and his boots off, wrapped his scarf round his neck and, prepared to face the cold of the night, got carefully into the scissor-bed, covering himself up to the chin with the covers, which were in fact sacks filled with worn-out rags.

The fading light of the candle illuminated his profile, his large red nose, his flat brow with its wrinkles, and his shaved head with a few remnants of grey hair over the ears. Because the draught annoyed him, Stinking God stuck a hand out, took his hat and pulled it down over his ears, then he took the butt-end of a cigar out of his pocket, lit it, threw out large mouthfuls of smoke and, with his hands behind his head, looked at me sombrely.

I started to examine my bed. Many people must have suffered in it, so bad was its state. The points of the springs had pierced the mattress, and they stayed sticking up in the air like fantastic corkscrews, and the staples that were supposed to hold the sides together had been replaced by pieces of wire.

But it was obvious that I wasn’t going to spend the night in ecstasy, and after testing its stability, I took off my boots in
imitation of Stinking God, then wrapped them in a
newspaper
to serve as my pillow, then wrapped myself in the green cloth, lay down on the treacherous bed and resolved to sleep.

It was indisputably a bed for the extremely poor, a bad joke, the grumpiest bed I have ever known.

The springs sank into my back: it was as if the points wanted to drill through the flesh between my ribs; the steel mesh that was rigid in one spot sunk down inconsiderately in another, just as, by the miracle of elasticity, it lifted up in a third point; with every movement you made the bed would yelp, screech with amazing noises, like an unoiled gearbox. Furthermore, I couldn’t find a comfortable position, the stiff knap of the cloth scratched against my throat, the edges of the boots were making my neck lose all sensation, the spirals of the bent springs were pinching my flesh. So:

‘Hey, Stinking God!’

Like a tortoise, the old man stuck his little head out into the air from its sackcloth shell.

‘What is it, Don Silvio?’

‘How come they haven’t thrown this horrible bed out?’

The venerable old man, rolling his eyes, replied with a deep sigh, calling on God to witness all the iniquities of which
mankind
was capable.

‘Tell me, Stinking God, isn’t there any other bed…? It’s impossible to sleep on this one…’

‘This house is hell, Don Silvio… a pit of hell.’ Lowering his voice, afraid of being overheard: ‘It’s… the wife… the food… Oh Stinking God, what a terrible house this is!’

The old man put out the light and I thought:

‘I am indeed going from bad to worse.’

Now I heard the noise of rain on the zinc roof of the attic.

Suddenly I heard a muffled sobbing. It was the old man who was crying, crying out of misery and hunger. And this was my first day.

Sometimes, at night, there are faces that appear, faces of women who wound you with the sword of sweetness. We move apart, and our soul remains shadowy and alone, as happens after a party.

Unusual apparitions… they disappear and we never hear of them again, but even so they accompany us at night, their eyes fixed on our own fixed eyes… and we are wounded with the sword of sweetness, and imagine how the love of these women will be, these faces that enter into your own flesh. An anguished desert of the spirit, a transient luxury that is both harsh and demanding.

We think how each one would bend her head towards us, to have her half-open lips pointing towards the sky, how she would allow herself to faint from desire without spoiling for a moment her face throughout this ideal moment; we think how her own hands would tear at the laces of her corset…

Faces… faces of young women ready for joyous torments, faces which cause a sudden faintness to burn in one’s entrails, faces in which desire does not spoil the ideal nature of the moment. How do they come to occupy our nights?

I have spent hours on end chasing after, in my mind, a woman who during the day left the desire for love in my bones.

I would consider her charms slowly, charms that were ashamed of being so adorable: her mouth made for nothing other than lengthy kisses; I imagined her willing body holding tight to the flesh of another person, flesh that called for her to abandon herself, and imagined her insisting that she would enjoy her abandonment; I saw the magnificent smallness of her vulnerable parts, my vision filled with her face, with her body that was so young for torment and for motherhood; I would
stretch out an arm to my own poor flesh: in punishing it, I allowed it to attain pleasure.

At this moment Don Gaetano came in from the street and headed towards the kitchen. He looked at me with furrowed brows, but did not say anything, and I leant over the jar of paste I was using to repair a book, thinking: there’s going to be a storm here.

It was the case that, with brief bright periods, the couple fought.

The pale woman, immobile, her elbows on the counter, her hands buried in the folds of her green shawl, followed her
husband’s
movements with cruel eyes.

Don Miguel, in the little kitchen, was washing the plates in a greasy basin. The tips of his scarf touched the edges of the vessel and a red and blue checked apron tied to his belt with twine protected him from splashes.

‘What a house this is, Stinking God!’

I should explain that the kitchen, the site of our meetings, was in front of a stinking latrine, a corner of the cave behind the bookshelves.

On top of a dirty table, stacked next to leftover vegetables, were little pieces of meat and potatoes, which Don Miguel used to make the meagre pittance that was the midday meal. What was spared our voraciousness was served again at night-time as an outlandish stew. And Stinking God was the genius and the wizard of this repugnant alcove. We would go there to curse our luck; sometimes Don Gaetano would hide there to meditate on the discomforts of matrimony.

The hatred that brewed in the woman’s breast always ended up by exploding.

Some insignificant motive was enough, any little nothing.

Suddenly, swollen by a dull fury, the woman would leave the counter and, with her slippers dragging on the tiles, wringing her
hands underneath the scarf, with her lips set and her eyes wide open, would look for her husband.

I remember the particular scene of that day:

As was his custom, that morning Don Gaetano had pretended not to see her, even though he was only a step away from her. I saw the man bend his head towards a book and pretend to read the title.

When she stopped, the pale woman stayed stock-still. Only her lips trembled, like leaves.

Then she said in a voice that was a terrible monotone:

‘I was beautiful. What have you done to my life?’

The hair that hung over her forehead trembled as if in a breeze.

Don Gaetano shuddered.

With a despair that caused her throat to close up, she threw the following words at her husband, heavy words, words like gunpowder:

‘I raised you up… Who was your mother…? Just a
bagazza
who went around with all the men? What have you done with my life…?’

‘María, shut up!’ Don Gaetano replied in a cavernous voice.

‘Yes, who was it who fed you and clothed you…? Me,
strunzo
… I fed you.’ The woman’s hand lifted as if she wished to strike her husband’s cheek.

Don Gaetano retreated, trembling.

She said, with a bitterness that trembled on the edge of sobbing, heavy gunpowder-like sobbing:

‘What have you done to my life… pig? I was happy in my house like a poppy in a pot, and I didn’t need to marry you,
strunzo
…’

The woman’s lips moved convulsively, as if she were chewing on some sticky, terrible hatred.

I went out to chase the curious bystanders away from the front of the shop.

‘Leave them, Silvio,’ she ordered me in a shout. ‘Let them hear who this scoundrel really is.’ Her green eyes were wide, making it seem as if her face were drawing ever nearer, like an image painted on the background of a screen, and she
continued
speaking, ever more pale:

‘If I were a different person, if I got around more, then I’d have a better life… I’d be a long way away from a hog like you.’

She stopped talking and rested.

Now Don Gaetano was looking after a gentleman in an
overcoat
, with big gold spectacles riding on a narrow cold-reddened nose.

Aroused by his indifference, because the husband must have been used to these scenes and must have preferred to be insulted to losing his benefits, the woman called out:

‘Don’t listen to him, señor, don’t you see that he’s just a thief from Napoli?’

The old gentleman turned round in astonishment to look at this fury, and she continued:

‘He’ll ask you twenty pesos for a book that cost four.’ As Don Gaetano did not turn round, she screamed until her face filled with blood: ‘Yes, you’re a thief, a thief!’ And she spat out her spite, her disgust.

The old gentleman said, fixing his glasses more firmly on his nose:

‘I’ll come back some other day.’ And he left indignantly.

Then Doña María took a book and threw it suddenly at Don Gaetano’s head, and then another one, and another one.

Don Gaetano seemed to be drowning in rage. Suddenly he grasped at his neck, took the black tie and threw it at his wife’s face; then he stopped still for a moment as if he had been given a blow to the temple, and then he started running, he ran out into the street, his eyes sticking out of their sockets, and,
stopping
in the middle of the pavement, shaking his bare shaved
head, waving like a madman to the passers-by, his arms held out, he shouted in a voice that rage had made unnatural: