Free The Mad Toy by Roberto Arlt

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