Felipe Alfau - Chromos

Perhaps in this case one tends to particularize and many of these things which one claims typically Spanish are perhaps Latin, or even European, but to return to the loitering of Garcia: he could only indulge in it here with one or two of us as a rule, and usually me, because I lived nearest him.

From this, it is easy to see that Garcia did not like to work at anything regular. He would do so only in desperation. He lived with his landlady, an imposingly domestic German woman who held him in sublime worship and awesome respect for what she termed his intellectual pursuits. This took care of his room and board, but the humiliation he felt and her plebeian manners and the secrecy in which he considered he must keep this relationship, only revealed to his closest friends, was to him an exorbitant price to pay and grated his temper. His attempts at extracting a living from writing in this country, battling the set ideas, preferences and patterns of the literary world, had left him as frustrated as a woodpecker in the petrified forest. But still he wrote most of the time and occasionally sold to lesser Latin American reviews an article invariably about New York, a short story invariably about Spain, or a poem invariably about himself. This could be construed by those faithful to him into a semblance of independence and a flicking caress to self-respect, but the irritation was there and this precipitated bitter quarrels in which his pride rose to soaring heights of despair and he decided to go to work. This he attained with the help of a fellow roomer.

This was the only other roomer in the house. All the others had fled soon after moving there and the reason was simple. During the day they could scarcely move about without the handle of a broom banking under their feet or the hefty knuckles of the landlady rapping imperiously on their door and demanding sepulchral silence because the master was working or resting and any noise disturbed him and, when night came, they could not sleep because that was when inspiration often assaulted Garcia and he would punish the typewriter mercilessly. More maladjustment and more quarreling.

But this one roomer did not mind. He was a fellow who worked as a dishwasher mostly at night and slept during the day and when the order was reversed, he could sleep through anything anyway. He was a carefree and perennially happy individual without much sense of responsibility and a nature that permitted him to disregard all the minor annoyances of life. He had even let Garcia read to him and like most Latin Americans felt dutybound to enjoy poetry and consider it the one justification for any man to reside on the surface of the earth, and he liked it there because it was one of the few places where he was permitted to bring a girl now and then, provided he was not too shameless about it. When he was tired of a restaurant, he quit and went to work in another. If he managed to accumulate a little money, which his nature made very infrequent, he quit altogether until he needed some more. This then was the chap who could always get Garcia a job as a dishwasher whenever Garcia suffered an attack of pride and decided to leave the house with phrases such as “pride is more pressing than hunger.”

Of course, Garcia would only work a few days until the attack subsided and then returned swearing that work of that nature destroyed his spirit and would lead him to suicide, and the landlady must have timed his returns chronometrically because she always had ready a gallon of Rhine wine and a good-sized sauerbraten and I understand that it takes over two days to prepare this dish. Then Garcia ate, drank and held forth about the social system.

During his absences from the landlady, he stayed either with Dr. de los Rios or Don Pedro Guzman in brilliant and luxurious surroundings, or with me who only disposed of a room with an extra cot. In either place he could find a typewriter and paper and these were things he could not be without. If his pride had not been too badly mangled, he only made believe that he was going to wash dishes and spent his time in one of our places writing or reading when we were not there, but if there was any remark about his imposing on his friends, which the poor woman threw as a last desperate obstacle to his departure, he sallied forth with his own portable typewriter and a bundle of paper, his only traveling array — and as Don Pedro called it, his intellectual paraphernalia — to render the accusation unjust and lend his exit an element of finality.

It was during one of these absences from his home, when it was my turn to be honored with his company, that we were loitering in Central Park. The quarrel was due this time, I believe, to the irritability induced by the season of the year. Spring in New York was the despair of Garcia. He could not stand cold and had a pet theory that any temperature below thirty-seven degrees centigrade, the approximate temperature of human blood in circulation, must be necessarily unpleasant. Anything above this only increased the joy of living up to certain limits, such as the boiling point of water as he used it in his bathtub. All winter he had to carry on his loitering indoors with lightning-fast dashes between one place and another, bundled up to his eyes, and when spring arrived officially and still no warm weather, he felt cheated by the malevolent forces of nature and became impatient, lugubrious and unbearable. One day the sun would shine brightly and the day would be warm, filled with glittering humidity, like a harbinger of the spring, and Garcia was optimistic and talked lyrically of hearing in his mind the thunder of ice breaking and being carried along by the irresistible force of the season, roaring in its streams again like sap through thawing lands. The next day the temperature dropped, the skies were overcast, it might rain or even snow, and his hopes were ruthlessly dashed to the icy ground by buffeting cold cruel winds whispering like needles in one’s ear that winter was still in command. Then he was seized by a fit of depression, swearing that the warm weather was never coming and one might as well be resigned to spend the rest of one’s life in this climate hibernating, or else pack up and flee to any place on the equator. He could not understand why all the biggest and most important business centers should be built in climates capable of discouraging the hardiest and he frequently exclaimed at such times:

“What diabolical stubbornness got into them that they did not move south after the first winter? With all the coastline from Hudson Bay to Patagonia, they had to pick this godforsaken locality.”

All the minor annoyances of the cold weather accumulated and grew in his mind to the proportions of a conspiracy directed against him, the running nose, the overactivity of the kidneys when out of doors, conniving with the scarcity of comfort stations.

He could never forget the occasion when driven by the cold and an even more pressing need, he went into a barroom and with a drink, bought himself some heat and an admission to the washroom, but soon after he left the place, he was in the same peremptory situation, perhaps stimulated by the drink. He dove into a subway station and found the lavatory locked with a sign giving two remote, unheard-of choices of one station uptown and another downtown. Then he knew despair. Damn it all! To take a subway ride every time one has to do that — if one can last that long. He bolted out of the station, ready to ask the first policeman to do something, anything, like holding his hat for him. Then into another barroom, only to have to repeat the operation again and again because he was far from home. He had never been so drunk for the benefit of the sewers and did not remember how he got home at last, but he was dizzy and developed an irritation either from the alcohol or from the cold washrooms that kept him up a good part of the night.