Felipe Alfau - Chromos

He was certainly warming up to his story fast. It was a fantastic story about a fellow with a time-famished impatience, who would rather risk anything than wait, and how this had affected his life. Garcia declaimed again thoughtfully the Latin phrase.

It was the inscription which he had read upon the face of the discarded sundial while on his way to Julio Ramos. The dial lay upon the grass at the margin of the little cemetery for Spanish Jews in the New Bowery. Its position was such that the shadow of the indicator did not fall upon the dial but somewhere else where time, if it passed, was not marked.

Here Garcia shifted his point abruptly as if in afterthought to explain why he was on his way to Ramos. Even though he was making up this story to me face to face, he was employing second-rate literary tricks.

At the time he met this individual Garcia was working for the Sociedad Española de Socorro. Word was received that this fellow Ramos, a Spanish citizen living in New York, was in a very bad way both in health and finances and threatened the colony with the humiliation of becoming a public charge in a foreign land. To come forth to the aid of such cases, in the name of charity and patriotism and racial pride, was precisely the business of the Sociedad and Garcia was sent to investigate the case.

He found his man in a room in a dilapidated building on Cherry Street, a section abounding in the Spanish element, the man living in a condition of misery whose description would challenge and defeat the best that Garcia’s prose and imagination had to give, and it was there that the remarkable tale was unfolded to Garcia, or so he insisted with wide-eyed, stubborn innocence.

“Imagine a young man living in one of those capitals of a province in Spain, Valencia I believe he told me, leading a life of monotonous poverty and frustration, deprived of the smallest pleasures so important in youth. Only his inconsequential job with a navigation company and his small room in a pensión, with scarcely any money left over for the barest necessities, to frequent some café and, as they say, mingle with others.”

I’ll drop the quotation marks because I don’t remember exactly Garcia’s words.

One can imagine this young man, who is of course Ramos, burning with desire for all the sensuous pleasures and luxuries of an eventful and brilliant life while before him extends an endless, dismal vista of dreary privation. Then his feelings precipitate into abhorrence of his environment, which he blames for his fate, and perhaps because he works for a navigation company, his hopes combine with his feelings in an overpowering wish to escape and in those days, escape usually meant going to the Americas.

Then he begins the thankless, almost superhuman task of saving his pennies, of attaining his one goal which is to go to America at any cost. In his heart he knows it is hopeless but it gives his life a purpose, while at the same time it renders it more difficult, it makes his impecuniousness all the more acute. He grows haggard, anemic and desperate. Meanwhile his impatience is mounting, it grows into a frenzy, he cannot wait. At the rate he is saving, it would take a lifetime. One night he counts his savings and although knowing what to expect, the smallness of the amount is like a slap in the face. In a fever of rage at his own impotence, he hurls the few pesetas from him and staggers to the dresser and contemplates his aging face in the mirror. Impatience invading him like a hurricane, he shuts his eyes and pounds his fists. When he looks again he sees, where his reflection should be, a strange man who says:

“From now on you will do this many times. You will wish for something very much, you will shut your eyes in impatience and when you open them, the time will have passed and you will find yourself at the moment you wish for. You are impatient, Ramos. You want to attain things as soon as you desire them, without waiting, at any cost. I will give you the power to skip time at will, but I will not promise that you will get what you want. You will only get what is coming to you, but without waiting. Sometimes it may be good and sometimes bad. I will give you the power to remove from your path a section as long as you desire or is left of the road ahead. All you have to do is to shut your eyes and wish. Every supernatural power must have its ritual. But beware of turns in the road because you do not know what may be patiently waiting for you who do not want to wait.”

This is a rather lengthy speech, but according to Garcia, young Ramos is spared by sinking to the floor where he lies unconscious, perhaps sleeping for the first time in many nights and this is a dead giveaway, as Garcia must have concocted at least part of the speech, but anyway, I will let him go on with his improvisation.

The next day he was sure that all had been but a hallucination, but still there was uneasiness. On his way home from work he went by way of the piers. There was a ship docked there and he could well visualize its itinerary: Barcelona, Valencia, Malaga, Cádiz and then the Atlantic to America, to New York. Unable to resist its attraction, he ascended the gangplank and went aboard. No one questioned his presence which was familiar from the many times he had come to deliver documents to this and other ships like it. He walked to the railing on the other side.

Standing there he imagined himself a passenger on his way to America. If he could only accelerate time, eliminate the long, almost hopeless wait that lay before him. The ship swayed ever so faintly. The motion would have been imperceptible to anyone, but the eager senses of Ramos detected it immediately, enlarged it to a time-conquering rolling motion over Atlantic waves. And suddenly his desire, his impatience burst upon him like a bombshell. Instinctively he closed his eyes as if to shut out his hateful present, he clenched his fists in threatening fury against his fortune and he wished, he wished as he had never wished before.

The sound of ships’ sirens, of boat whistles, of hurried people and sharp voices, of words not spoken in Spanish, crowded in his ears and brought him to. Ramos opened his eyes and his knees sagged as his heart pulled him on its way down. The bay of New York was closing up on him.

Garcia waved his arms forward like an orchestra conductor. I looked in front and all I saw were our perspiring images reflected in the barroom mirror. This was the second thirst-quenching stop we had made to lay a foundation for the promised brandy at Garcia’s. He had been so fired by his narrative that he had infected me and during the last part, leaning there against the bar, the impression had been as vivid as was the letdown now. We left there and walked on, Garcia still talking with the same enthusiasm. We made only one more stop with him pounding on the bar to drive his point home and reaffirm the veracity of his experience with the fellow Ramos and by the time we got to his place all the fight was out of me and he had his story or moving picture or whatever it was considerably well planned out.

Garcia went up to his rooms turning around to talk to me all the way up the stairs. He was quite winded when we reached his place. His lights were on. He never failed to leave his lights on, or have them turned on for him. Did not like to walk into a dark room.

We discarded our coats and I flopped on an easy chair by the open windows. Garcia moved to his desk, which was well littered with papers, a typewriter, and of all things an old slipper which I later learned he used to slap flies with. There was a sheet of paper inserted in the typewriter. He bent over to read it, then pulled it out and threw it crumpled into the wastebasket. It bounced to the floor to join other scraps of paper. The basket was overflowing already.

“What about that drink,” I reminded him.