Felipe Alfau - Chromos

But then, the present surroundings began to assert themselves, the visions began to fade, the waves to abate, and as I crossed Park Row, another memory insinuated itself: the strains of the dusky, doleful waltz: “The Bowery, the Bowery — I’ll never go there anymore.”

Was this intuition of fate, a threat of destiny, or an evident conclusion? I lit the last cigarette of the night.

The flame biting into my fingers made me shake off the match and the dark walls closed in on me again. Blindly I rushed out of that room, leaving behind an empty space in a bookcase, like an open mouth, more eloquent than all the volumes around it and, on the floor, exhumed, a book like an open grave.

Outside the Moor was leaning against the iron railing still smoking the cigarette I had given him. A stiff breeze had come up and I saw the sparks fly away like constellations carried by the wind of time.

“You see? Now it is all done and it did not take long. One knows these things — one knows—” He held me when I turned to close the door: “Leave it open, man; that way they can escape more easily, come out into the open, mix with the other Americaniards. Get me?”

We started walking and then heard the door banging in the wind as we went.

A few days later — Sunday afternoon it was — Dr. de los Rios and I walked down to the park, went around the 59th Street Plaza, and then down to Radio City and wandered around there looking at shop windows, the people and the flower displays. We had little to talk about and nothing to do and were, as they say, following our own noses, wondering how to pass the time. Clouds were beginning to obscure the sun and with it drive away the last vestiges of desire to do anything. As we emerged again onto Fifth Avenue, we beheld a well-known figure.

The Moor was leaning on his shillelagh and against the wall. He appeared to be looking at the passing throngs, but his head was cocked to one side and anyone could see that his ear was glued to the radio set of a couple of boys, listening to a tune he had made popular. He saw us and signaled to us not to interrupt and we stood there waiting until the song ended. Only then did he open his arms and limp forward:

“Oh, amiable youths—” he recited. “Walking on Fifth Avenue like the elegants— That’s the Spaniard for you. Always adaptable, going where others go, becoming one of them and then, meeting others like themselves. Here we are: three Americaniards.” He spoke to me: “You are in very good company, you know?” His hand moved, imply-ing in nice detail how good the company was: “But you both look bored, not mutually complementary, but understandable. You needed a third one. You were lost because two straight lines can enclose no space. Three is the minimum, although some hyper-modern foreign geometers, totally incapable of understanding the obvious, might argue the point.”

We admitted that we were at a loss for what to do.

“Well, let’s walk down and wonder together. Something will occur—”

“We have walked enough and I was thinking—” With extended arm, Dr. de los Rios swept an invitation across the avenue to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. “What about it? Let’s go in and sit awhile. Meditation is good.”

“Oh, no! Today is Sunday, a day of rest, and I have meditated enough in my life—”

“But not in the right places, you infidel Moor.”

“—besides, if we are going to church, we might as well go to a Spanish church, and I don’t know of any in this neighborhood. A church in English has never seemed quite right to me. Catholicism is a heritage with us. We made it famous. We understand it. The others don’t know what it’s all about— We are living contradictions. I boast Moorish blood and then claim priority to the religion that banished my people from my country.”

He went on like that and, still arguing, we crossed Fifth Avenue. The day had become overcast. Ominous darkness hung over the downtown section. We stopped before the cathedral and, with the day suddenly gone dark, the glow that came from within was more noticeable.

“Nonsense! By the same token I maintain that any Catholic church is Spanish in essence. You yourself have insisted that God is from Madrid or Sevilla and a Roman Catholic, and when a Spaniard enters any Catholic church or any country in the Americas, he does so as if it were his own house by divine right. Agreed? Furthermore, this place is named after the patron of the Irish.” As he ascended the steps, de los Rios beckoned to us: “Come on in. This is growing complicated.”

“No, not today. A Spaniard is a Catholic without having to go into a church to pray. It is of the potence and the essence, but not of the presence. He is that way as his eyes are light or dark, but he does not have to pray in church. His whole life is a prayer and an expiation. He is inevitably a mystic.”

Dr. de los Rios looked long at him in his inimitable wide way: “Yes, and we do not have to work at it all the time. Sometimes we can rest at it, sit in there and rest.” He indicated the street: “One gets tired of this.”

Don Pedro addressed me again: “This Dr. Jesucristo, always trying to save souls painlessly— He is a castizo. Just like him to go in there— and why not, if he wants to? You let him go and come with me. We’ll go down and find something to do.”

“Not this time. Don’t let that infidel Moor tempt you. Let him go alone to his own perdition— Oh, come on, Moor.” De los Rios’s hat was already in his hand.

“No, not yet. Perhaps some other time — you know—” He turned away: “I am going down there. So long.” His somber figure limped down the avenue which was strangely silent and empty, and we heard the syncopated rhythm of his steps and his stick on the pavement as he went down into the darkening distance. Only then did I notice the fateful Hispano-Suiza following slowly.

Dr. de los Rios had turned to enter the church, and I also saw his back outlined against the glow coming from the door and fancied that it formed a more concentrated halo around his head. I stood on the steps undecided, possibly hesitating more between emotions than between thoughts, not knowing what to think and even less knowing what to do, and suddenly I hesitated no more. I almost shouted: “Wait for me!”

Sitting there next to Dr. de los Rios, I felt confidently safe and looked at the surroundings in the candlelight and, considering the other things I had seen from the heights in the light of day and in the lights of night and the other things I had remembered or imagined in the depths by the light of a match turned into an Aladdin’s lamp, decided that I could do nothing about it I had seen only a kaleidoscope of fancies materialized by forgotten chromos, dirty, discolored chromos. This is what the possible visions of greatness suggested by the conquistadores had finally come to: rhapsodic, nomadic incidents with hanging tarnished threads of past splendor out of time and out of place. Chromos in disrepute.

To express this in my own language would be superfluous. To attempt to describe it in another’s, impossible. In Spanish I don’t have to explain my nation or countrymen. In English, I can’t. It is the question of the synthetic method as opposed to the analytical. In Spanish one sees and things remain unquestioned and clear. In English, one studies and uncovers meanings that one does not understand. It is then that, as I said in the beginning, complications set in.

But were those things from other times and other places really as great as they seemed now? Contrary to space, time increases the proportions of such events, but like the enlargment of a picture, what they gain in size, they lose in sharpness until they are so vague as to seem boundless. In either case it was for someone else to bring back their true colors, to integrate and then exhibit them in the primitive and complete equation of their significance, a job for a pen much better than mine, which is rusty, not so much for lack of use but because it is no feather from a soaring wing, work for a pen mightier than the swords of those same conquerors, to span the years and distances, to elucidate the vaster meaning of these things and in the longer view of history, from the heights of the present, to decide whether my ancestors were but immigrants disguised as conquerors, or whether all other aliens are but conquerors disguised as immigrants.