Free The Mad Toy by Roberto Arlt Page A

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sticking up in the air like fantastic corkscrews, and the staples that were supposed to hold the sides together had been replaced by pieces of wire.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 inimitation 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 wouldstretch 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