Felipe Alfau - Chromos

) has brought about “the Latinamericanization of the United States. [by playing] popular torrid music, twice-imported Afro-Antillean tempos and tropical concoctions. with such an exaggerated rhythm that. they all sounded like someone sawing a heavy log.” Think Desi Arnaz, Xavier Cugat and Carmen Miranda, “Besame Mucho.” Don Pedro has the grace to be ashamed of such stuff and the intellectual capacity to theorize about its influence as “a pacific penetration” of the dominant Anglo culture, and he engages in a more or less continuous meditation on the comic repetitions of history, or rather, of history first as tragedy, then as farce (Alfau wanted to subtitle Chromos “a parody”): “Is this the new conquest of the Americas, by the Americas and for the Americas? This mutual transcontinental, translinguistic, transracial osmosis? If so, it is a far cry from the conquistadores to these frightened hybrids, from those who knocked down the door of a new world, to those who knock at the door of a richer world, to trade their machete for a dishrag, or if more fortunate, though less radical, to. adjust their guitar and castanets asymptotically to the afrodisiacuban rattle of the maracas. It is a far, heartrending cry from those Spaniards to these Americaniards.”

Early on in the book there are echoes of the late 1940s that younger readers might not recognize: Don Pedro sardonically mentions “the good neighbor policy,” which was a term of solidarity with nations south of the Rio Grande promulgated by the last administration of FDR to counter the perceived tendency of such Latin strongmen as Juan Peron to support the fascist powers before and during World War II; and when Alfau’s flaneurs walk on “the former Sixth Avenue” they are on the thoroughfare that was renamed “Avenue of the Americas” as part of that policy.

At the same time, this text that is now half a century old will seem uncannily prescient of the current debates about bilingualism in the schools, immigration and multiculturism in American society generally, and so hospitable to anyone on any particular side of these issues; but politically correct readers should perhaps know that Alfau is ideologically a fascist who supported Franco in the Spanish Civil War and takes Machiavelli’s dim view of democracy, though there is little evidence of such beliefs in Chromos . In spots, his prose voice sounds remarkably like that of his compatriot and fellow right-winger Camilo José Cela.

The reader may not notice on a first reading (I did not) that the “I” narrator — who has precisely the same detached but pervasive presence in Locos — neatly stands on its head the invisibility experienced by the immigrant or the otherwise marginalized, and does so four years before Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man . One of the eeriest effects of this book comes from the fact that the narrator registers the existence of no more than, by my count, three Americans, as distinct from the Americaniards themselves and “other foreigners”: there is a “Mr. Robinson” who almost gets hit by a car and then fails (luckily) to sell life insurance to Don Hilarión Coello (and unwittingly kills him in the process); another is the unnamed vocalist girlfriend of “Pete Guz,” as Don Pedro is called by an American public in “blissful disregard for Castilian dignity.” Finally, there is Jenny, the “vulgar young woman” who is a creation of Garcia, a writer friend of the narrator’s who deals with the agonies of exile by transmuting them into manuscripts that he reads to or thrusts upon the narrator, who has no choice but to read them to us. In Garcia’s screenplay Jenny is the mismatched wife of Ramos, a Faustian Spanish immigrant who has obtained by supernatural agency the ability to leapfrog unconsciously and at will through the most painful parts of his life, an activity which becomes an involuntary form of segmented or chronic suicide, so to speak, to which he becomes addicted even while realizing how drastically he is shortening his life. Alfau seems to be avenging his own alienation by emptying New York of everyone who is NOT alien to it.

Now that I think of it, one of the spookiest effects of both books is an atmosphere of floodlit or moonlit irreality in which a small group of characters interact with one another in cities — Toledo, Madrid, New York — that are almost physically palpable but also strangely depopulated: huge, empty mausolea like stage sets for Don Giovanni , which might well be one of Alfau’s tributaries along with the Poem of the Cid, Don Quixote and Tirso de Molina’s The Libertine of Seville and the Stone Guest , another avatar of the Don Juan story; in which case Don Pedro plays the libertine and Dr. de los Rios, guardian of the Styx, whose beard Don Pedro tweaks verbally throughout Chromos , is the statue who accepts the rake’s hospitality and returns it by inviting him to banquet at his tomb — the climactic party near the end of the book — where he pulls him down to the underworld. Although it is the Moor who throws the party in Chromos , everything else fits, including the final (but kinder, gentler) repudiation of the Dracula-like Don Pedro by both the narrator and Dr. de los Rios.

The brio of these Joycean parallelisms and adaptations (if I am right in thinking they exist) bring to mind another passage from the text of the exiled Rumanian philosopher E. M. Cioran that I have used as an epigraph: “In whatever form it happens to take, and whatever its cause, exile — at its start — is an academy of intoxication. And it is not given to everyone to be intoxicated. Is it not a favor to be transported to that state straight off, without the detours of a discipline, by no more than the benevolence of fatality?. It is not easy to be nowhere , when no external condition obliges you to do so. To extricate oneself from the world — what a labor of abolition! The exile achieves it without turning a hair, by the cooperation — i.e., the hostility — of history.” 3

Trips to the underworld, as punishment for one’s failure to establish or to maintain identity, recur throughout Alfau’s work. There are at least three of them here, but to avoid compromising the reader’s enjoyment of Chromos we are better off looking at their classic, and funniest, paradigm in “Identity,” the first story of Locos , in which all three characters are present at the Café de los Locos (which we could call the Loony Tunes Lounge). Here we meet Fulano, a wretched wraith who has doubts about his existence that become a brutal certainty after he has followed the advice of Dr. de los Rios to commit an “ ‘official suicide’ ” by leaving his clothes, credentials and a note on the bridge of the Alcántara, after which he can go to Madrid, and “ ‘there we can try to make a character out of you. Toledo, the Tajo, and the bridge of Alcántara have historical background and that will lend color to your action.’ ” The central conceit of Locos , stated in the Prologue, is that literary characters have independent and rebellious natures that want to “become real beings. They often steal into persons I have met and assume the most extraordinary attitudes according to what they think true life is. For them reality is what fiction is to real people; they simply love it and make for it against my most heroic opposition.”

Accordingly, in “Identity,” Fulano tries to carry out the doctor’s plan, which soon goes awry when an escaped criminal takes Fulano’s ID and goes with it and with Fulano’s wife to Madrid, where he prospers exceedingly and becomes famous. When Fulano complains to the narrator and the doctor about this turn of events, the former points out that he lacked the power to do more than observe it; and a closer look at Fulano’s nocturnal walk to the river reveals that he had already become nonexistent by succumbing to the obliterative forces of time, history, and the genius loci the city embodied: “Toledo comes to life every night. It is a city of silence, but not a city of peace; at night. it becomes a city of horror, of fearful dreams of the past, of dreadful historical nightmares. At the turn of a street, this impression hit Fulano with such force that it nailed him to the spot, as if turned into one more stony specter [emphasis mine]. He could sense. the deadly breath of the Inquisition. Fulano knew he had been swallowed by this maelstrom of the past, that he had sunk back centuries in history and had already lost his identity of present existence. He was choking from this overwhelming feeling of condensed time.”

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