Felipe Alfau - Chromos

The face before me suffered a frightful transfiguration from despair to insane panic and frantic appeal that met me with brutal arresting force. I had not witnessed his emotions in such a tempest until now. Then the thick lenses seemed to expand and spin like two all-powerful maelstroms that swallowed me. As I sank I heard the limerick in the distance:

“There was a young man called Dave—”

He saw her the first time in a window of a second-rate shop where she did not even occupy a prominent position. It was like a short circuit. Even before he looked, he had seen her and the recognition struck him like a blast. She was the composite picture of all the qualities he had wanted most in all the women he had desired and those he had conjured in his daydreams. She was his secret perfection, the undivulged mistress of his innermost self, and what had been irritatingly elusive in his thoughts took in this visible composition a power that swept him like a cyclone.

He stood like a living volcano, the blood rushing hot to his head, then ebbing like crawling sparks through his nerves, turning him into a human anthill.

To avoid attracting attention, he went by, but shaken, dizzy like a drunkard, until very gradually he composed himself. Then he turned to pass the window again and have another look.

She had everything he wanted, including, he thought in confusion, that she was not alive and therefore could live only for him. From her elevated position she averted his eyes with heavy, provocative demureness. She had the confident proud carriage, the ease and yielding assurance that comes from possessing that irresistible carnal attraction of something which is not human flesh: her densely creamy complexion, the thickness that only artificial lashes can possess, the indescribable, exasperating suggestiveness of a final reward that could never be granted. He knew that whoever had fashioned her had his twin soul and must have adored her as he adored her but that she had rebuffed his love as improper, acknowledging all the time that it was inevitable. His thoughts overtook each other tumultuously.

They must have been mad not to place her in the most exalted position, not to know that she was the queen of all mannequins, of all women, real or artificial, dead or alive. Or perhaps they were also ashamed of having their feelings discovered. It would have killed him if anyone had known what his feelings were.

He observed her guardedly. She would be the only one who would ever know it and the fire of his love would break her pride and indifference because with her, he could abandon himself to the limit, and although she would despise whoever loved her, she could never throw his love back in his face, she would have to submit and he would conquer her in the end. His life, despicable as it might be, was a life and would be communicated to her. She would collapse from her superiority and sink to the most degrading depths of passion, then come alive, wake up with shrieks of joy to wallow in subjugation to their common depravity.

He stood at the curb facing the building, to one side of the shop as if waiting for somebody, but her face and body pulled at his eyes. He looked from one person to another with the air of someone whose time is valuable but has a good reason for standing where he stands, frowning with concentration on all those small incidents which constitute an active sidewalk, self-consciousness mounting, crowding, choking him, shame oozing out of him in cold perspiration. All those people must have been as blind to him as he was blind to them. How could they miss his inner agitation, not to see that he worshiped her?

And the phrase continued to burn him. The fire of his love would melt her insulting pride which had brought his desire excruciatingly alive, like the blow of a lash. The fire of his love— What did she want to keep herself for? Not even the worms, but the fire of his love.

Then a man and a woman came into the window and he turned away in horror, not wanting to see. He walked away fast at first and then more slowly and then he became calm and finally the spell was broken.

He must have been momentarily mad and this was a hallucination. No one could fall in love so suddenly — certainly not with a mannequin — but perhaps one could thus fall in love if one had begun to love an ideal since his childhood and had nursed that passion into maturity and then come face to face with the embodiment of his ideal, its perfect realization. He decided to put this out of his mind and cautiously never to come near that window again. Such things could easily become an obsession.

And it did become an obsession which he could not cast off and he returned the next day and the next and stood as he had stood the first time, and in the end he knew that he was lost, that she had won and drawn him with a power he was unable to resist, with that power of her inner emptiness, the power of the vacuum, of nothingness, which is an appeal to all things. It was no more his decision than to say of a falling man that he has decided to hit the ground. He had to get her and she was the type who, contemptuous and mocking of the humble lover, could nevertheless be bought.

Then began the scheming. He had to be as careful as any lover who wants to attain the forbidden object of his love, and he made his plan.

He entered the store with trepidation. He explained apologetically to the same man he had seen entering the window that he was a foreign businessman who had a store in his native country and was here on a pleasure trip but always with an alert eye for profits. He could easily combine business with pleasure. The figure in the window had caught his fancy and not knowing his way about, he was ready to buy it as it was, to dress up his own shop. He knew that his elaboration was stupid but he could not help himself. He remembered that interview with painful lucidity.

The man listened, at first puzzled as one whose routine is subject to an unexpected approach, and then, as he gained comprehension, with that set courtesy which every merchant shows to any other merchant engaged in his or a similar line, and then he explained.

He knew and understood very well that business was conducted in a very different way in other countries and he was very happy to have a window display which deserved the approval of other professionals, but he was afraid that he could not be of much help. The boss, the real boss, was not there and, of course, he could do nothing on his own initiative, but he was sure that they could not spare any of the dummies. Anyway, the logical thing to do was to go to one of the concerns that supplied them. There were some, he was certain, in the upper Thirties on the West Side, where he could find all the mannequins he wanted.

How could he explain to the man that he wanted that particular one, only that one and no other, that there was no substitute for a love such as his? How could he insist without giving himself away, without laying bare for all to laugh or feel revulsion the horror of his mad passion?

The two salesgirls in the store had been looking on, but then a woman customer walked in and caught their attention. That was a relief and even offered a very farfetched point of departure. The man continued politely to be helpful, meanwhile explaining that he could not help. The real boss took care of all such things and, if he cared to return when he was there— He was polite, but still puzzled, possibly even quizzical. Could he help noticing the tenseness, the glow of combined embarrassment and elation at being in the place where she lived, breathing the same— Oh, no! The hopelessness of it! The man had to be blind, incapable of conceiving such things, not to see and understand his despair.

He felt his heart pumping, the blood ascending like the tide, and went out mumbling that he would look up the suppliers, that he would return.