Toys of the Trade

Sebastian Segura Espinel

Impossible Object 02

Sunday started like any other. The fresh air and the first timid rays of light harmonized with the clacking of tumbling bottles and glasses left behind by the low-cost tourists, lured into the city by a promise of pocket-friendly prices—an economic fantasy that had ceased to be a reality years ago. Some of them could still be seen stumbling around like zombies, fueled only by Żubrówka and Big Macs. However, these characters, who a few hours earlier had acted like the loud lead roles in their own stories, were now reduced to mere passing shadows. It was time for the morning people.

The morning people were no less decadent. They were not motivated by the instinct to spend money but rather by the need to make it. In front of the towers of the church, on a main square that had witnessed almost every imaginable tragedy but now seemed to have finally lost its splendor to capitalism, the merchants opened their stands. Some pinched petals to refresh flowers, others stacked salted, hard rock rings of dough, and even the pigeons seemed busy chasing leftovers of kebab. Among these merchants, however, the most despicable hung plushies, keychains, bottle openers, and toys—all manufactured at the other end of the Silk Road and with labels to prove it: Made in the PRC.

These townsfolk, too consumed by their daily grind, didn’t notice a stranger among them. Pulling a metal cart, a somber figure arrived. He turned a few knobs, slid some doors open, unrolled a couple of dusty rugs, and placed some boxes on the floor—all performed with the grace that infinitely repeating a gesture grants. For the second act of this performance, he arranged a multiplicity of items in those containers.

These artifacts, made from the finest materials as well as from otherwise worthless trash, would not have been out of place in the rooms of Rudolf II nor in the hut of a shaman from an uncontacted tribe.

Some had prisms that reflected beams of impossible colors; others reacted with multiple moving parts when lightly pushed. Mechanical animals seemed to move as if operated by invisible strings of either divine or demonic origin; others whistled with harmonies of no clear source. Some could only be described as miniature Gesamtkunstwerke, complete with ticking sounds and all.

He continued unpacking object after object as though drawing them from a bottomless container: a metallic eye with a mechanical lid that winked playfully, a little heart-shaped pin that, when fastened to the lapel of a jacket, gently flapped its wings like a butterfly. There was a clock whose hands sped up or slowed down depending on how much fun you were having, an old tea box pierced with tiny holes that echoed the exact opposite of whatever was whispered into it, and a smooth metal ball that, no matter the surrounding temperature, always held the warmth of the Nile’s waters.

All these gizmos had little in common apart from their capacity to escape clear definition. What were those items? What were they for? Certainly, nothing productive could come out of them—nothing could be calculated, produced, or made simpler by using them. And yet, they were created as tools for the hardest of tasks: to play, to create amusement and joy, and occasionally to confuse people. In other words, they were toys.

Impossible Object 01

Another mystery hiding behind these pieces was their creator. This mysterious man, who by his language and clothes clearly came from a faraway land—perhaps an entirely different time—and who seemed familiar with the secrets of the magi, who had met the shape-shifting wizards of the great plains and even rubbed shoulders with angels and demons alike, had decided not to apply himself to the philosopher’s stone or turning scraps into gold, but rather to a craft that, on many occasions, brought him nothing but hunger—a reality he accepted with grace and abnegation for the most part.

When he finished setting up his cart, he waited, as he always did, until the square began to look like the center of the buzzing metropolis that it was. The booths around him soon started to gather a large clientele: flowers were bought, the rings of dough consumed, and even the hideous souvenirs found a home.

By the time the trumpet-interruptus played, the river of people reached his stand. But the same inertia that brought them took them away. His objects were too strange, too idiosyncratic, and his salesmanship lacked the histrionic performance of his neighbors. He believed in the capacity of objects to seduce by themselves, and his only marketing was to allow the passersby to play—to see for themselves the value of what he offered.

Impossible Object 03

A child got dangerously close to convincing her parents to buy her a spinning top that made the sound of a Guinean bird when it turned. But in the end, they decided otherwise. The girl’s enthusiasm motivated him to give the toy away for free. There wasn’t much of a difference for him, since the effort of production far surpassed any economic return, and the fact that it was not possible to pay him with a plastic card served as the last nail in the coffin of his personal economy.

The hours passed, and he killed time with a local invention: copper wire, which he bent and combined with an old champagne cork. When he finished, he had created a small tarantula that was, in fact, able to walk—though too shy to venture outside the toolbox where the pliers were housed.

So what if nobody bought anything? he thought. These locals were infamous for how tight they kept their purse strings. Plus The very idea of seeing those objects go was hard to swallow. It wasn’t easy for him to put his soul into them only to see them exchanged for an embarrassingly low amount of money.

When the time came, the square emptied with the dropping temperature of the night. Once again, you could hear the clanking of bottles, though this time they were half-full. It was time to wrap it up. With the same efficiency of gestures he had displayed in the morning, he packed his toys, this time being careful not to crush the tarantula with his pliers. He rolled the carpets, collected the boxes, closed the doors, turned the knobs, and began pushing—off to the next destination, to the next place to show his inventions. He was, in many ways, an automaton himself.
 

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