The Beasts

Roberto Arlt, Sergio Waisman

The Massachusetts Review, Volume 59, Number 1, Spring 2018, pp. 45-56
(Article)

Published by Massachusetts Review, Inc.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mar.2018.0007

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/688494

Access provided at 26 Jul 2019 22:51 GMT from University of Sydney Library
robe rto ar lt

The Beasts
Translated from Spanish by Sergio Waisman

I ’ll never be able to tell you how I sunk lower and lower, day by day,
among other lost men — thieves and murderers and women whose
faces are rougher than cracked limestone. Sometimes, when I reassess the
low latitude I have reached, I feel great canvases of shadows falling upon
my brain, I stumble along like a sleepwalker and it’s as if the process of
my decomposition were mounted into the architecture of a dream that
never occurred.
It’s been a long time, though, that I’ve been lost. I lack the strength
that would be needed to escape the gears of indolence, which through
succeeding nights sink me lower and lower in the depths of a corner
of a whorehouse. Here, other wretches as bored as me hold an array of
playing cards unfolded in one hand, indifferently moving black or green
chips with the other, as time drips like water down the dirty well bucket
of our souls.
I have never spoken to any of my companions about you, to what end?
The only one who knows of your existence is Tacuara. Clutching a
roll of bills in her pocket, she enters the room after four a.m. Tacuara’s
hair is straight and pitch black; her eyes slanted and pampas green; her
face round, as if coal-dusted, and her nose flat. Tacuara has one weakness:
she likes to read the magazine Social Life; and one virtue — her taste for
longshoremen from the San Fernando riverbank.
She prepares the maté while I lie on the bed, sprawled out, thinking
about you, whom I have lost forever.
What’s difficult is explaining to you how I sunk lower and lower day
by day.
As the years go by, a heavy slab of inertia and the repetition of habits
keep falling upon my life. The most despicable of attitudes and the most
repugnant of situations seem natural and acceptable to me. I am no lon-
ger shocked by my own memory of the prison walls where I have so
often slept.
But despite the fact that I have mixed with those from the lower depths,

45
T HE MASSACH US ET T S REV I EW

never has a man lived as isolated among these wild beasts as I. I have not as
of yet been able to fully join them, and yet this doesn’t prevent me from
smiling when one of these beasts beats to a pulp one of the wretched
women who supports him, or commits some pointless savage deed, just
so he can brag about it later.
Many are the times that your name has sprung to my lips. I recall the
afternoon we spent together, in the church in the town of Nueva Pom-
peya. I remember too the sacristan’s hound. His snout held high, his lazy
steps as he paced sluggishly across the mosaics of the church, between the
rows of pews . . . . But so many hundreds of days have passed since then,
it now feels as if I were living in a very deep city, infinitely below sea
level. A mist of coal floats permanently in this hollow of subhumanity,
and from time to time we hear the crack of the firing of an automatic
pistol.Then everyone goes back to whatever we were doing, as if nothing
had happened.
And I have changed my name, so even if you were to ask for me here,
no one would know who you were asking about.
And yet we both live here, in the same city, under the same stars.
With the difference, of course, that I run a prostitute, have a record,
and will die with my back riddled with bullets, while you will one day
marry a bank employee or some reserve second lieutenant.
And if to this day I keep your memory deep inside me, it is because it
represents the possibilities of a life that I shall never actually live. It’s ter-
rible, but signed and sealed by certain declivities of existence, one does
not choose. One accepts.
Your memory broke through one night, when I lay shivering, fever-
ish in a corner of some jail cell. I wasn’t injured, but I had been beaten
repeatedly with a rubber hose, and the high fever played landscapes of
ruination across my eyes.
Grayish like a fragment from a movie, I could see the memory of the
first trip that I made to a provincial brothel, with Tacuara. It was one in
the afternoon and a rickety old car was taking us down a gloomy alley,
covered in dust. The sun shimmered against the brothel’s red front, and
next to the sheet-metal door in the brick wall, there was a swamp of
urine and a post to tie one’s horse. The blowing wind made an oil lamp
creak on its stand.
I will never forget it. The Jewish pimp gave me an advance of fifty
chips for a week’s worth of my woman’s work, and I headed off to have
a little conversation with the head politician and the chief of police . . . .

46
 Roberto Arlt

These iniquities played in my mind while I lay on the cement floor of

the prison cell. There were times I thought I would die. I’d open my
eyes halfway and make out walls surrounded by other walls, subterranean
rooms dug under the cement floors of other subterranean rooms, and for
a minute my life would last the span of a century at the bottom of the
prison. Other men, like me, had their ribs pounded by the rubber hose. A
wedge of great pain split my head and beyond all our ferocity, oppressed
or oppressors, beyond the hardness of the gray square stones, I saw your
pale countenance and your almond-shaped olive-colored eyes.
It was a blow to my sensitivity. I have never been able to picture your
face with the same sharpness, while awake, than that with which I was
able to bring its contours into focus in the vortex of my delirium, after
the obsessive punishment and the cruelty of the interrogation. They had
questioned and beat me about the murder of a woman about whom I
knew nothing.
Then I got out. Later I was detained again.
In the shadows I had your memory to keep me company. Tacuara! Is
there anywhere I have not gone with Tacuara?
Thanks to her I have gotten to know the disgusting boredom mixed
with the smell of rice powder in the provincial bordellos, the madam in
flip-flops minding a brazier dropping ashes in the hall, the maté circling
slowly around the hands of ten bleary-eyed prostitutes, the wind rattling
the wooden shutters because the windows are broken and the glass has
been replaced with wire mesh, while the sporadic noise of a cart with
gigantic wheels can be heard from outside, loaded with a pyramid of
bags filled with corn, and the whip cracks at the ears of the eight horses
covered in large clouds of yellow dirt.
Thanks to Tacuara I have gotten to know the most hideous provincial
brothels. Where the rooms have no beds but a cornhusk mattress laid
out on the hard floor, and women with lips pierced by syphilitic sores.
I have eaten locro stew and I have danced tangos more sinister than the
throes of death in sitting rooms as large as army barracks. There were
rough wooden benches there that had not been sanded down and in the
corners young dark women held newborns up to their breast in one arm
while, without wasting any time, they undid the pants of some lustful
drunkard with their free hand.
Is there anywhere that I have not gone with Tacuara!
In her company I have covered the entire southern region of the
province of Buenos Aires, Bahía Blanca, Marcos Juárez, and Azul, then

47
T HE MASSACH US ET T S REV I EW

we spent time in Rosario de Santa Fe, Córdoba, Río Cuarto,Villa María,

and Bell Ville.
Under the auspices of local politicians, I was a gambler at times and at
others I served grilled chitterlins and parrilla criolla in large taverns out-
side the establishments where my only love worked all the men inside.
We traveled by water.
I have been to Paraná, Corrientes, Misiones. I went to Santa Ana do
Livramento, Río Grande do Sul, São Pablo. In São Pablo, when the cops
threw me out of the city, I was dumped into a cargo train and I broke
three ribs. From there we went to Río de Janeiro, and Tacuara signed on
at a brothel in Laranjeiras. The stone house had a mosaic with the Virgin
and the Child on the façade, and under the mosaic an electric lamp illu-
minated a small open cabin in the wall with interlocked perpendicular
iron bars that came up to the waist. In this alcove in the wall, stiff as a
statue, Tacuara would be assigned five-hour shifts to stand at attention.
Through the bars, men who fancied her could feel her flesh to confirm
its firmness. In that neighborhood of a thousand prostitutes, decorated
with palm leaves and candles for Easter, a squad of police officers, armed
with rifles, kept the peace so the mulattos and the sailors wouldn’t go at
each other with their knives.
We went back to Buenos Aires.
I missed my street, Ave. Corrientes, and she her room near the San
Fernando crossing gate, with its smell of oranges and the sweet monoto-
nous buzzing of the mountains of fruit in stacked boxes from the Delta.
And that’s how I sunk lower and lower, day by day, until I finally
ended up in this corner between worlds: Ambos Mundos.This is where we
gather, Cyprian, Little Guillermo the Thief, Gold Fingernail, the Watch-
maker, and the Cabbage Kid.
At night they arrive nonchalantly at the table by the front window,
they take a seat, greet the young woman at the phonograph with a side-
ways glance, order a coffee, and stay for hours and hours wherever they’ve
plopped down, looking shamelessly through the window at the people
who walk by.
A gray fog hovers at the bottom of the eyes of these former men. Each
of them sees an inexplicable mystery inside themselves, an as-of-yet unclas-
sified nerve with a broken mechanism at the root of their will.This makes
of them puppets with slack cords, and this relaxed posture translates into
the silence we all keep. No one has mentioned it, but there are days when
we barely utter twenty words between the four of us.

48
 Roberto Arlt

In one way or another we have all stolen; some have undoubtedly

committed crimes; all, without exception, have destroyed the life of a
woman; and silence has become the communicating vessel through
which our nightmare of boredom and anguish travels from one dark-
stained soul to the other.This feeling of grim annihilation, along with the
unconscious grimaces that accompany despicable memories, leaves masks
of cynical and pained ugliness on our faces.
And what kind of friends are they? Such stories they have to tell! For
example . . . the black Cyprian:
There was a time when he worked as a cook in a brothel. He recounts,
and proudly at that, that he used to dress in white and serve seasoned
conger eel on silver platters to a select gathering of hoodlums and pimps.
Even if he doesn’t come out and say it, he gets emotional whenever he
evokes those rosy landscapes.
His eyes fill with tears and are flooded with little blood vessels; and it is
easy to understand: he is nostalgic for the time when he was the confidant
of the madam. Her breasts spilling out of the lace edging of her dressing
gown, this woman prostituted minors under fourteen, served them up to
the voracity of terrible magistrates and old tycoons. Then she’d whisper
with Cyprian about how much she’d made, and the black man was happy,
for he knew he was the trusted man of the house.You do not reach such
heights with impunity. With drooping chocolate-brown eyelids and his
jawbone resting on his fists, Cyprian reviews his fantastic memories with
his yellowed eyes like an alligator dreaming of a swamp, the parties with
the Polish and Marseillan traffickers, the hoodlums greasy as bundles of
blubber and implacable as executioners.
The skin on these men’s napes was redder than a turkey’s wattle, with
golden tufts sprouting from their nostrils and ears.
They scorned the country where they prospered deeply, they spit in
the face of lower-level police officers, and bought political bosses with
checks signed while winking sarcastically.
Cyprian knows many things, and when he is pressed, he will confess
there is nothing that pleases him more than raping a young boy, or lying
with a sailor from Martinique.
And still he smiles with the innocence of a jolly monster.
No one who looks at him would think that he, the cook of the brothel,
was also in charge of snapping a whip to brand purple lines on the but-
tocks of the disobedient prostitutes. When he recalls the women that
he punished, he smiles with the sweetness of a hippopotamus, grunting

49
T HE MASSACH US ET T S REV I EW

water and mud among the reeds of a swamp.

And his smile reveals even more good-natured sweetness when he
recalls the minors he raped, prison-cell dramas, a boy held down by five
thieves on the floor, covering his mouth, then that broken, gut-wrench-
ing scream that shakes the pinned body like a high-voltage discharge . . .
and the line of men awaiting their turn, holding their pants with one
hand, while the body of the boy drilled by a terrible pain arches back and
then falls lifeless.
And if someone asks him, to make fun, if he prefers a young girl or a
little male thief, Cyprian, who boasts of having “dropped big ones,”
squints his eyes and grinds his teeth. Like a crocodile dozing in the mud
he fancies filth, and it is only when he is very happy that he will say a few
words in his sweet Martinique French. Other than that he’s a good Catho-
lic and every time he passes a church he respectfully removes his hat.
Coughing heavily we are sometimes joined, at the table, by Angelito
the Little Colt, a tubercular petty thief.
He’s thirty years of age, of which he’s spent ten in the fifth block, tired
of always repeating the same nonexistent offense: “possession of arms.”
He’s been ruined by sketchy places.
When he gets mad he stutters. The brim of his cap pulled down over
his eyes, he dives into intricate chess problems and boasts of being a cham-
pion at checkers, and although this might be true, he uses rather absurd
means to express his ideas. For example, of the Jap, a dark and ferocious
thief who always finds a laudable excuse to unsheath his blade: “He’s like
a little girl.”
Undoubtedly, it turns out to be quite difficult to understand what
Angelito the Little Colt means by “a little girl.”
When Angelito’s health is good and he’s not in jail, he disappears from
the city for stretches of time in the company of the Jap. They travel the
interior exploiting the story of the “beggared suitor” and other cons
more or less subtle than that, since Angelito the Little Colt is not one
of those rakes who practice only their own specialty; he is more one of
those who “gives it a mopping as well as a sweeping.”
For the present Angelito is very weak and is not traveling anymore.
He spends hours and hours with his forehead against the window, look-
ing out at the street, and the undercovers who come by know that he is
sick, that he cannot go out and steal anymore, and they do not detain
him. Some even wave as they go by, and Angelito turns his hollowed
frown into a smile. He says it’s a consolation to know that he’s going to

50
 Roberto Arlt

die surrounded by the esteem of proper society. I cannot tell you how
far I have sunk lower and lower day by day!
And now we carry, each of us, a terrible memory that’s a pigswill of
sadness.
Yesterday . . . today . . . tomorrow . . .
How to explain this phenomenon that leaves one’s intelligence free,
while filth-smeared feelings continue to crush us in utter renunciation
of light. That’s why a bad word is always on the tip of our tongues, and
why every time we see a girl’s pretty face we raise a hand, poised with
the temptation to give her a smack, because we do not have, at our side,
the one woman, the loveliest of them all, who destroyed our life at a
crossroads of a time gone by. Why bother with words, when everything
is said by the silence of the shadows that cloud the yellowed bar, where
all heads are bowed in terrestrial hopelessness? Caged beasts, we remain
behind the bars of our residue-strewn thoughts; and that’s why we are so
hard-pressed to wipe the despicable smiles off our faces, stuck as they are
in the rictus of the dog days of boredom.
The days are black, the nights more boxed-in than a prison cell.
Sometimes your memory crosses my mind like a seven-pointed star;
and Tacuara, seemingly guessing that a heavenly motion had crossed my
life, looks me up and down and says, as if speaking to an equal: “What’s
wrong with you? Does your heart ache?”
Her right eye nearly squinting shut, she stretches her neck, purses her
thin lips and, halfbent as if she had been disfigured by a stroke, asks: “Are
you remembering her, my sweet?”
I cannot tell you how far I have sunk lower and lower day by day. Perhaps
it happened after the horrible sin.The truth is that I have ended up isolated.
I’d walk the streets like before, I’d look at the objects in the store
windows, and I’d even stop in surprise at certain ingenuities of modern
industry, but truth be told I was horribly alone. Then the night and its
dark thoughts would fall upon me and I’d spend much time immersed in
a dusk no longer of this world, as those whom medicine classifies by the
name of deep idiocy must know.
Every now and then I’d feel a cold brush upon my cheek from a soul
seeking me out with its poor shackled thoughts here on earth. A shiver
would then shoot through the space between my vertebrae.
I arrived thus through continual descents to the misery of this silent
friendship, from which Gold Fingernail, the Cabbage Kid, and the Watch-
maker are never absent.

51
T HE MASSACH US ET T S REV I EW

The Watchmaker never speaks. At most he smiles wistfully. Every once

in a while he delivers a brutal beating to his “lady,” and if Little Guillermo
the Thief asks him why he hits her, the Watchmaker shrugs his shoulders,
smiles in distress, and after pondering a good little while gives his response:
“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose it’s because I’m bored.”
Little Guillermo stays in shape, sports a gold watch on his wrist, applies
poultices to his face, and takes ultraviolet rays, but on his forehead he has
the trace of a slight wrinkle, a frayed nerve anticipating the motion of
bringing his hand to his waist to draw his gun and settle some matter of
life or death. He has never stolen anything in the city, and he’s always talk-
ing about opening a gambling den. He aspires, like I did at other times, to
be the owner of a country place with a criolla grill, but he doesn’t have the
necessary capital as of yet and his political opinions couldn’t be dumber:
He supports Yrigoyen and democracy.
Gold Fingernail seduces “little fairies” with his hawkish silhouette and
his transparent greenish eyes and the feline cruelty of his jawbone, the
curve of his temples drawn up toward his pointed ears. When he is tired
he places his arms on the table, rests his head, and falls asleep in the
middle of the rabble of the café, snoring ferociously.
Must I describe these plain, bestial, primitive things?
We communicate through silence. A silence fired in a glance or in
the inflection of lips while responding with a monosyllable to another
monosyllable. Each of us is submerged in a dark past, where our eyes,
from having gazed so intently, have become frozen, like a cretin’s staring
absurdly at a filthy corner.
What do we look at?
I could not say. I know that wherever I have gone I have remembered
you and that I have reached incredibly sad depths. Right now . . . I close
my eyes, like Gold Fingernail, I rest the weight of my head on the back of
my hands . . . but I am not asleep. I am thinking that it is sad not knowing
whom to kill next.
Suddenly the crash of the cup with the dice bursts in my ears like the
rap of a gun, and I raise my head, stirring venomous saliva. Life goes on
always the same inside and out, and this silence is a truth, a break before
the arrival of some bad news, since it must always be expected, expected
always in the stranger who walks unannounced into the café or in the
startling ring of the telephone.
Playing cards or dominoes, throwing dice or tossing coins, pretending
to forget it all, a nervous tension persists, a kind of “stay alert,” an un-

52
 Roberto Arlt

conscious vigilance, an imperceptible fright that keeps eyelids and pupils

moving constantly, in sinister dodginess. No stranger who walks into
the café can escape this examination, spread across an invisible fanning
of ninety degrees, over the circle of the cards or the black-and-white
geometries of the dominoes.
When there’s no game on, chins rest on the palms of our hands. Ciga-
rettes burn slowly, hanging from the corner of mouths . . . and then . . .
when one least expects it, the dull affliction reappears, a kind of nostalgia
in the gut not knowing what it wants, a crease of the forehead, ah! Can
such desperation be explained? We rush out to the streets, we head to
the sections where there’s never a lack of tramps to lie with, to drool
away some of this pain in a bad dream, the origin and purpose of which
remain unknown. And the thing is that we all carry a horrible boredom
inside, a bad word held back, a blow that doesn’t know where to land;
and if the Watchmaker kicks and tears his woman apart it’s because in the
filthy night of his room, his soul contains an agony that’s like an irritated
nerve on a rotten tooth.
And when this pain, for which they do not have the words to name,
bursts inside the heart, the man who had before remained silent now
mumbles an insult, and the others reply as well, as if to echo him, and
all of a sudden the table that until that moment had resembled a circle
of sleeping men comes alive with terrible insults and senseless hatreds;
and before long, old affronts and forgotten offenses have resurfaced. If it
doesn’t come to blows it’s because there’s always someone who inter-
venes in time, blowing a blast of sickly sweet hot air to remind everyone
of the consequences of the ruckus.
A party with no money to pay for it opens the way to the arrival
of new strangers and the welcoming of lost friends to the table. They
come from the interior of the country. They have been stealing in the
provinces. Or doing a spell in jail. Or thieving on trains. Yet it doesn’t
matter whether their heads are shaved or shaggy: their stories and their
money are well worth the welcome they receive; and then for a minute
the waiter blushes. Such a variety of drinks are ordered by the different
gullets. A terrible joy bursts inside each beast; and following the impulse
of an unexplainable vanity, of a demonic pride, the talking starts . . . . If
there’s talk, it’s about hunting for women in the heart of the city, and
the chase through backstreets into the secret allies where they hide; if
there’s talk, it’s about quarrels with enemy groups who have ripped them
off, about assaults, ambushes, thefts, about scaling walls and fractures. If

53
T HE MASSACH US ET T S REV I EW

there’s talk, it’s about traveling on national freight cars to “the country”;
if there’s talk, it’s about prison, about endless nights in the “doughnut” (a
triangular cell where the detained cannot lie or sit down); if there’s talk,
it’s about judicial proceedings, about the politicians who’ve been bought,
about the detectives and their brutalities, about interrogations, face-offs,
investigations, and reconstructions; if there’s talk, it’s about punishment,
pain, torture, blows to the face, punches in the stomach, the wringing of
testicles, kicks to the shinbones, smashed fingers, gnarled hands, whip-
pings with a rubber hose, blows with the butt of a revolver . . . if there’s
talk, it’s about women murdered, stolen, run away, winnowed . . .
Always the same topics: crime, venality, punishment, betrayal, fierce-
ness. Slowly the cigars smolder. Everyone’s forehead winces with a bad
memory. At a distance. Then silence ensues. The strangers leave with the
same pal who introduced them.
Then their eyes look over the tables nearby, they stop on the young girl
who’s working the gramophone, a brief and cruel comment erupts like a
firecracker, a cold smile curls on someone’s lips, and you can already tell
who the unfortunate girl is about to fall to, and the one prowling for her
has even already anticipated the number of beatings he’ll give her, and a
match crackles as it alights between two fingers and the bluish smoke
rises slowly toward the plafond.
Oh! How many — how very many things are told with only a few
words in these endless black nights!
Sometimes it is Little Guillermo, others it’s Gold Fingernail. Gold
Fingernail, for example, recounts how he once stuck a letter opener
through the palm of a woman’s hand. She wanted to move in with him,
and Fingernail asked her if she was prepared to offer him some proof of
her love, and when the harlot asked him what such proof would consist
of, he told her: to let him stick a knife through her hand, and since she
acquiesced, he stabbed her hand to the tabletop.
Stories of this kind are frequent, but what’s the point of criticizing the
useless savagery? We are all in agreement that at some point in our lives,
be it from boredom or anguish, we are all capable of committing an act
infinitely more vicious than the one we condemn. Truth be told, our
consciences are stamped by an implacable leaden feeling, which might
just be the same ferocious will that causes the hair of the meat-eating
beasts in their dens in the forests and mountains to stand on end.
Further, we know many sorrows that even the playing cards cannot
dissolve, an ennui like a straightjacket tightening around our intestines till

54
 Roberto Arlt

the day we are dropped by an enemy’s knife, or a bullet from someone

who’s long been waiting for us in the darkness. Because someone is wait-
ing for each one of us.
After having lived this way, it is logical to be filled to the rim with a
silence so sullen, the dumbness of the beast to whom life has given only
a mean strength, of use only in the lowlands of evil.
Now at the table in the café, under the yellow, white, and blue lights,
the silence constitutes a break of sorts. We are in need of a little rest, so
our unspoken despicabilities, our weak crimes, can settle down.
The music upholsters our boredom.
An old tango reminds some of us of being in jail, others of finding a
woman, others of a terrible time when we were in a bad way.
If the tango gets rough, a spasm makes our soul writhe. One remem-
bers then the red, terrible pleasure of beating a woman’s face to a pulp,
or the joy of dancing entwined with some elusive female in a murderous
milonga, or the first money we received from the woman who turned
us out, a ten-peso bill she took from her garter which we grabbed with
trembling happiness, for she had earned that money by sleeping with
other men.
Wailing accordions that dishevel us in sweet memories, the first bit-
tersweet feelings of a pimp’s life: a woman walking down the street with
a man; a woman laughing at a table with three men, a rushing feeling
of insolence; a woman making the rounds at night, parading through the
café and the room on the arm of the clients, an emotion satisfying the
expectations raised by a few words mumbled surreptitiously: “Hold on,
my dear, you’re next.”
The tango feathers our souls with the memory of primeval joys: the
woman who belongs to everyone, parading about with whoever’s paying,
people looking at us as we walk by, fools startled by the pornographic
content of the conversation, the conversations in the lady’s room, the
formal introductions: “May I introduce you to my husband?”
Rainy afternoons dissipated in long sessions of drinking maté, the
gramophone playing in a corner, the pastry tray discarded among jars of
brilliantine. If the woman works the streets, the obligatory farewell at four,
the “See you later, my dear,” the “Watch out for the pigs, girl,” and the
woman always with a strange expression when she says goodbye, almost
painful at the start of the profession from which, through an effort of will,
she manages to recover by reshaping her face into a mask of impassiveness,
instantly becoming someone else, matching her sluggish strumpet step to

55
T HE MASSACH US ET T S REV I EW

blend in with the pedestrians. Immediately the thought that crosses one’s
mind: “Today is the day that she’ll get thrown in the can,” or: “Will today
be the last time I ever see her?”
That’s why, when the telephone rings in the middle of the silence
as we sit around the table at the café, our heads jolt, startled, and if it’s
not for us, Gold Fingernail and Little Guillermo the Thief mutter some
slur under the white, auburn, or blue lights, and a darkness fills our eyes
which is not found even in the deepest mud of the darkest streets, while
on the other side of the thick windows, decent women walk arm-in-arm
with upstanding men.

56