Roberto Arlt was eight years old when he was expelled from elementary school.
He never returned to a classroom. His home was that of a poor immigrant family, with a stern, austere Prussian father, where German was spoken. What school did not give him, neighborhood public libraries did, with their cheap translations, along with a city changing at breakneck speed. He worked as a bookstore clerk, tinsmith’s apprentice, painter, mechanic, and dockworker before a newspaper hired him.
In September 1928, in his column in the newspaper El Mundo, he wrote: “I have learned that the most useful school for understanding is the school of the street, a harsh school that leaves a bittersweet pleasure on the palate and teaches everything books never say”. And he ended with a provocation: “Because, unfortunately, books are written by poets or fools”.
Those were the words of someone who had made himself, without degrees or a distinguished family name. While the literary elite looked toward Paris, Arlt looked at Corrientes Street, the tenements, and the streetcars of a Buenos Aires that no book could contain. His chronicles, the Buenos Aires Etchings, were read every morning throughout the city.
He died at 42. He left behind The Mad Toy and The Seven Madmen, and an idea that still holds true: sometimes the best school is the street—living and experiencing the real world.
