By Roberto Arlt, translation by me
The other night a friend Feilberg, a collector of unusual tales, said to me:
“Have you ever found your eyes drifting toward illuminated windows at three in the morning? Look, there you have a plot for a curious story.”
And immediately he got into the stretches of an account which would not have discredited the likes of Villers de L’Isle Adam, or Barbey d’Aurevilly, or even the bearded Horacio Quiroga; a magnificent narrative of the witching hour and a window lit-up.
Naturally, thinking afterwards on my friend’s words, I arrived at the conclusion that he was right, and I would not be surprised if Ramón Goméz de la Serna had used this story for one of his brilliant greguerias.
Certainly, there is nothing more striking in the black box of the night than that high-hanging, yellow-lighted rectangle situated between wondrous slanted chimneys and the clouds passing through the interior of the city swept by a cursed wind.
What is happening there? How many crimes could have been avoided if in this moment when the window lit up, someone had gone up to investigate?
Who are they, inside there? Players, thieves, suicidal maniacs, the ill? Is someone dying or giving birth in that place?
In the black box of night, the lit-up window, eye-like, guards the rooftops, and causes night-prowlers to raise their heads and linger, gazing at it with an intrigue which overpowers their quotidian fatigue.
Because it is the window of an attic, one of these wooden sun-damaged windows, that curtained iron window between the lace and its blinds that lets some rays of light glimpse the street beneath. And later in the darkness, the watchman who strolls below, the irritable men who pass by it thinking of the troubles they must mend with their respectable wives, meanwhile the illuminated window, a misleading façade, offers a temporary refuge, hinting at a hiding place over the city, away from those creaky, delayed train cars.
Often these aspects are an integral part of a boarding-house, and nonetheless neither murderers nor suicidal maniacs meet up in them; only fine boys who pass the time conversing while heating up water to make mate.
Every man out past one in the morning considers the night so lost already that it is better to pass it on foot, chatting with a good friend after rounds of coffee in a murky café. And together they set out for a room in the boarding house, where, inevitably, whoever does not pay for the room reclines on his friend’s bed, while the paying one sluggishly lights the heater’s flame to boil the water for mate.
And while they slurp; they talk. The endless talks of three in the morning, the conversations of weary-bodied men who analyze the events of the day with a kind of lucid, heatless fever in which sleeplessness leaves a certain delirious clarity in their ideas.
And silence rises from the street, making words slower, deeper, more desired.
That is a friendly window which the corner officer watches from the street knowing that those who occupy it are two eternal students resolving the metaphysical problem of love, or remembering in confidence the events which could not be digested all night.
There is another window as gentle as the hostel’s, the wide window of a Tyrolean bar. In all Bavarian style bars, a humorous and clever painter has painted a few scenes of Tyrolean or Swiss villages. In each of these murals, cities appear with tiled-roofs, rafters, and towers which line twisted streets with lanterns whose bases writhe like snakes, embraced by fantastic Alpine natives wearing their verdant tights and jovial little hats, topped off with that indispensable, iconic feather. Kind drunks, from whose pockets bottlenecks escape as they stroll, look with a tearful glance at an obese woman leaning against the window above in an extravagant nightgown with a white cap, hoisting a tremendous stick.
The obese madame of the three-in-the-morning window resembles a butcher, while her husband with wire legs re-twisted around a lamppost, tries to sweeten his barely kind “frau.”
But his “frau” is as implacable as a bedouin. She will give her husband a beating.
The tragic window of three in the morning is the window of the poor man, the window of those three-story tenements, which abruptly lights up, launching its glory into the night like a groan of anguish, a cry for help. After its sudden intensity, without knowing why, it makes itself visible to a man who jumps terrified out of his bed, to a mother who doubles over, tormented by a dream about a crib; it makes itself felt like that unexpected toothache that has emerged out of the middle of a dream, and will drive a poor devil crazy until the sun rises behind the worn-out, threadbare curtains.
An illuminated window at three in the morning. If one could write everything that it hides behind its beveled or broken glass, it would be the most agonizing poem known to humanity. Inventors, thieves, poets, players, the dying, the victors who cannot sleep from happiness. Each illuminated window in the deep night is a story which has not yet been written.
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