Felipe Alfau - Chromos

Upon first arriving in New York, Ramos roomed in a house on Batavia Street patronized by Spanish laborers. His funds were low, he did not speak English, he felt lost, and although the place was worse than his last pensión, he had to clutch at it like a drowning man. There were many Spaniards in that neighborhood and Spanish cafés and restaurants. There was one of the latter with stairs running up one side of the building where he ate regularly. The streets looked worn out, the houses old, and at that time New York was not what it is now. To Ramos, his surroundings were not very different from neighborhoods he had seen in his native place, but he was alone. Not many people like him lived in that neighborhood. The Spaniards he met were not his kind, nor the American laborers around there for that matter. This was a rough neighborhood where his ignorance of the land had cast him.

Every day and night there were wrangles and fights at most of the saloons and in the streets, and one afternoon he saw in front of a tavern on Water Street a man being beaten half to death. A small section of the pavement was being repaired and there was a patch of sand. Ramos saw the man fall there and the blood first sucked up by the sand and then congealing over it. His thoughts reverted to Spain, but there was no real regret or nostalgia. He had come to the wrong place, or the wrong people, and that was no reason for turning back. He wanted to find a section of the town and of its people more in harmony with himself. He realized that it was more important to find one’s class of compatriots than one’s country compatriots, but his ignorance of the language deterred him.

With English grammar and dictionary in hand, Ramos sat in his room as he did in Valencia, night after night, making superhuman efforts to learn, but time passed and his progress was insignificant. His funds had given out and he was working on the docks of the Spanish line, a type of labor he had never done before, for which he was not suited, labor that took every ounce of energy out of his small supply. It was necessary to speak English in order to obtain work at the offices of the line.

And then impatience made its presence known once more. He wished to get away from there in a hurry and wished to speak English with uncontrollable desire. He had almost forgotten how he got to New York, but only almost, and a wave of fear came to stay the wave of impatience. He reasoned with himself that the previous experience had been but a hallucination. No one could really have the power to skip conscious time. The other time he probably had lost his memory of previous actions. He had read that such things happened to people, but still he feared. What if he really had that power? He might want to reach a certain point in the future and between now and then, something might be waiting for him, something perhaps terrible, to snatch him, to crush him, some unsuspected trap into which he might fall to even end his life in his flight to an assumed, hypothetical future.

But then, one afternoon impatience won. He was in a saloon in the Bowery at the corner of Doyer Street, not frequented by his countrymen. He had grown tired of their company, of their presence, and he thought that perhaps hearing English spoken, he might learn it sooner. He was leaning against the bar, an untouched drink in front of him, still debating with himself the subject uppermost in his mind.

A group of men were drinking near him and the one nearest took Ramos’s drink and drank it, winking at the bartender. Ramos awoke from his thoughts and tried to protest, but could not find the words. He stammered, he gulped, and a stream of Spanish escaped him. The man and his companions laughed loudly and answered back in words which Ramos could not understand. He knew that they were English and suspected that they were mocking, possibly insulting, but he could not make them out. Madly groping in his mind for the few phrases he knew, he blurted out one or two inadequate words, surrounded, lost, neutralized by those violent gestures with which people have always expected to be understood anywhere. His display only increased the general mirth and the whole saloon joined in the joke at his expense. In despair he turned appealingly to the bartender, but the latter also laughed and with bowing politeness removed Ramos’s empty glass, refilled it, and with a flourish placed it upon the bar.

Ramos was dizzy with exasperation. In impotent rage, he shut his eyes and his clenched fists pounded the bar. Oh! How he wished he could speak!

There was a sudden hush in his ears and a rapid tapping sound that came from about him. He heard his own voice speaking and then opened his eyes. He did not fall because he was leaning on a desk, in a large room where several girls were typing, and he was protesting in very fluent English to the general manager of a very large business concern specializing in the manufacture of sewing machines, and the man appeared quite convinced, quite conquered.

Ramos halted, his back to me, regarding me over his shoulder. Again he pointed at me almost accusingly. He had the manner of one who sees the inner man in his interlocutor and talks to it. He pointed as if accusing one of having so transparent a soul. He held that pose well into his talk:

“Yes, that is right,” he answered my mind. “I also had this time a dull memory of things lived between both moments of consciousness. It was like awakening and knowing one has dreamed, but being unable to remember the dream, except for some dim flashes. Some of the visions took definite aspects but always like objects sensed in the dark, or seen in very poor light.” He relaxed, his hand dropped, and turning fully, he resumed his restless pacing.

“I saw myself laboring at the docks and there is a clear picture of a classroom, probably some night school I attended. Then I saw myself scrubbing floors at some railroad station under artificial light and again saw a classroom by daylight. I heard insisting, screaming whistles which made me grow taut, intent, alert, or made me relax and sigh with relief. I found myself speaking another language, surrounded by new acquaintances, but I did not know when I had learned one single phrase, where I had met any one of those people. At times they referred to things which had happened before, and sometimes they brought back a swift memory and sometimes they brought back nothing. They must have thought me strange.”

And strange he was, this man Ramos, I thought. I offered him a cigarette and lighted it for him. When the match went out, the growing darkness of the room was more apparent. We smoked a while without talking, Ramos leaning against the wall. He looked right through the smoke, at something very distant. Perhaps he had tired of looking into my soul and was looking into his own.

“That experience was repeated. I did not want. ”

“Before I forget,” Garcia interrupted himself, “now you see why I think this would be better as a moving picture. It could show the shifts and changes of scenery and action much better: close-ups, fade-ins, fade-outs, you know. Much more elastic than any other medium.”

I said that I agreed with him there, but that even at the risk of dampening his enthusiasm, I must remind him that things for the moving pictures had to be written in a special way, scenarios or something like that, with technical indications, in which case he should not be writing his story the way he was doing it because much of his literary points and style would be wasted anyway, as in pictures one only heard dialogue or noises made by actors or other things like on the legitimate stage — that is, unless he intended to have a narrator, which, I thought unreservedly, would be very silly. I concluded that moving pictures might be very flexible indeed but perhaps for that reason they were also very difficult and one should not be carried away by ease of scene-shifting.