The Humpback and The Beasts

We have chosen El humpback and Las fieras for the volume dedicated to Roberto Arlt in our series Dos relatos. In it we have been publishing short books always composed of two narratives.
In El jorobadito (1933), his first book of short stories, Roberto Arlt deals with dark themes. Here we speak of crime, betrayal, hypocrisy and criticism of bourgeois morality.
The narrator is locked in a dungeon for having strangled Rigoletto, the humpback that gives the text its title. Society sees his crime as the consequence of his madness and locks him up in jail.
The confession about strangulation, written in prison, attempts to justify murder as a kind of social hygiene. The wickedness of the hunchback and the perverse family relations of the murderer are the reasons used by the narrator-murderer to justify his moral turpitude.

“The various and exaggerated rumors spread on the occasion of the conduct I observed in the company of Rigoletto, the humpback, in the house of Mrs. X, separated in their time many people from my side.
However, my singularities did not bring me major misfortunes, if I did not perfect them by strangling Rigoletto.
Twisting the neck of the humpback has been on my part an act more ruinous and reckless for my interests, than to attempt against the existence of a benefactor of humanity.
The police, the judges and the newspapers have been thrown on me. And this is the hour when I still wonder (considering the rigors of justice) whether Rigoletto was not called to be a captain of men, a genius, or a philanthropist. Otherwise the cruelties of the law to avenge the privileges of a distinguished lice are not explained, to whom, to pay for his insolence, all the kicks that could be supplied to him in the butt, a brigade of well-born people would be insufficient. “

In The Beasts, Robert Arlt explores another territory. It is closer to the noir genre with more intensity. Through a long monologue before the ghost of his deceased wife. To whom to explain the process of debasement and degeneration into which it has been falling.
The humpback and the beasts have an element in common. They are told by the same idealized criminal, who is always responsible for all his own malevolent acts. Thus these narratives are intimate confessions that perhaps try to redeem the criminal, through social hygiene or the memory of a lost love.