Felipe Alfau - Chromos

Nothing could dampen his ardor or admiration for the cinematograph. He lunged into a discourse praising it. The actors could concentrate in one capital performance to be recorded permanently for all to admire, the human element reduced to a minimum. He declaimed that it was not only the most flexible and efficient way of presenting a story but the most flexible way of absorbing it. He lauded the cheaper prices, continuous performances which permitted the public to arrive when it pleased, the fact that one could smoke during the picture, take any seat available and then change it for a better one if the opportunity presented itself, instead of being assigned to one place like a schoolboy. He gestured again in the direction of the river. Nature was its stage, real cities, real buildings, mountains, woods, prairies and rivers. That was the real legitimate stage and not the other which was not only illegitimate but inadequate as well, and he embarked on a tirade against the theater proper, accusing it of cramping the author and cramping the audience, and when he got through with it, all the playwrights in history from the Greeks, or whoever were the first, to the most recent ones, who had gone to join them in condemnation, would have turned over in their graves to hide their faces and all the movie magnates would have joined hands and broken forth in a fandango for sheer joy.

Now he told me! I wish he had felt that way the night he took me to the Spanish Theater of Tia Mariquita.

Having thus delivered himself, Garcia looked for his place on the page and resumed his reading:

“That experience was repeated. I did not want it, but I could not help it. I would endeavor not to wish, but sometimes I wished before I had time to think. You see? It was always a very strong wish, almost a paroxysm of desire that did it, and that always darkens one’s reason. The experience was repeated as I say and although still fearing, I was more familiarized with it. The amount of time skipped was on occasions negligibly short and on occasions dangerously long. Sometimes there would linger an almost aching sensation of fear that rose to the surface from unknown recesses, and then I knew that I had been in imminent danger and come close to my doom. A shadow of impending disaster hovered over me. I did however exercise the utmost degree of self-control that I could muster and even succeeded in developing some discipline. It was arduous, hard work. The conquest of oneself is always the most difficult because one sympathizes so with one’s foe. But it was the only near salvation. I saw myself growing old in what to me was but the space of a few days, a few conscious scattered days. My life was not my own. I was feeding huge chunks of it to the gaping jaws of my impatience, endeavoring to appease its constant hunger.”

Ramos recalled his gaze from distant regions and entrusted it to the smoke of his cigarette.

“I heard things which sounded familiar or found myself in places where I must have been before and then by checking up on such things, although without definite recollections, I would come to the conclusion that they had been squeezed some place between the moments of lucidity, or been displaced into some other dimension, some latitude of time.” He shuddered: “At times it was horrible.” He grew restful once more, his eyes always following the smoke: “But there must have also been happy experiences during those moments, because at times there was a feeling of elation and at times of regret. They must have been few, but very happy. Out of that turmoil of vague memories, a beautiful vision emerged, condensed. I found myself with a woman, a woman I must have loved or wanted very much.”

Those were probably the happiest days in Ramos’s life. He was quite adapted to his surroundings, to a different country and different people. He could go to the theater or to music halls and laugh at jokes on the stage with the rest of the audience. Man must laugh in company. This is his happiest communion with his fellow men. A man may laugh alone, but this is at most bitter for him and sadder for the rest of the world. A man may feel superior when he laughs with the minority at the majority, but he is happier when he laughs with the many at the few. Then his laughter is not a misleading aspect of despair, but a true expression of well-being.

This, nevertheless, did not last long. Ramos felt intimately alone. It was the question of love. While several women had already passed through his life, that was the trouble: they had passed. He wanted something more stable. He took to walking and sitting in the park by himself. He was alone but for a strange company. He knew that his impatience had found him again, that it had singled him out once more from the world with which he had already almost blended. As he walked he felt it following behind, gradually overtaking him. If he stopped or sat, he knew it stood there, on constant guard, and every time nearer, always approaching, closer and closer.

Then it overtook him. He was sitting on a bench in the park and he felt it next to him. He sensed the heavy grip of its iron arm about his shoulders and its hot breath searing through his ears, setting his soul aflame. He almost screamed. He shut his eyes.

The clear laughter of a woman cooled his ears like a cascade. He opened his eyes and for a few moments there was untold relief. He was sitting on the same bench, the surroundings, the day, were the same, a very clear and reassuring day. He thought that at last he was free from that thing. He felt impatience drained from his whole being and then he noticed the strange laughing woman sitting on the same bench, looking at him, and there was something familiar about her that set the old fear scraping at his very marrow. He stiffened and stared at her for a long time. Her laughter died out and he saw her grow puzzled and then heard her voice, which something within him began to suggest as a little vulgar:

“Gee, Julio, but sometimes you are funny!”

A part of his mind was trying to compose him, to smooth surprise away from his countenance, and he heard himself saying mechanically:

“You know, Jenny darling? I sat on this very bench one day before I met you and I wanted so much to meet a girl like you! That was the reason why I wanted to sit here again today, at the same hour with you.”

“Are Spaniards always so romantic? I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.” He sat without uttering a word, trying to remember, to find some opening, no matter how small, in the wall which separated him from his memory of the particular contributing circumstances to this moment.

Two young blades went by leisurely, one of them, bowler hat carelessly and miraculously hanging from the back of his head, his thumbs thrust in the armholes of his fancy waistcoat He was singing:

“While strolling in the park one day

In the merry merry month of May. ”

The stare faded from Julio’s eyes which began to crease at the corners, the growing light of a smile illuminating them like sunrise.

“That’s better, honey,” Jenny said.

Garcia stopped and for a mute moment we looked at one another blankly, he because he was perhaps still turning things over in his mind and I because I had not been paying very close attention and could offer no critical comment. Maybe Garcia felt that he was wasting his time on me because he said he thought that was enough for the time being and that he would perhaps continue later. The afternoon was nearing that horizontal hour of long recumbent shadows that bind one’s path to sleep like a striped caterpillar, or lash it into lively action like a bolting zebra and when the sun reflected in windows, beats the budding electric lights into hopeless inadequacy.

After a while Garcia suggested that we go to the Armenian district for supper. His partiality to Oriental or semi-Oriental food matched his fondness for street lamps and was involved with poetic misconceptions and ascetic dreams complicated by a rebellion against his practical surroundings of sauerbraten, knockwurst and kraut which cried out for a purifying bath with a jug of wine, a loaf of bread, unleavened, and anything else on the side that aroused gastronomical curiosity. I remember his consternation when Don Pedro informed him that Omar Khayyám was also a mathematician; Garcia, for whom mathematics was absolutely unknown territory and who with the sublime authority of ignorance damned it as the ultimate distillate of the prosaic, had been shocked, disconcerted and unbelieving, considering the revelation a gross slander, and I think it was from that day that he baptized our friend Don Pedro el Cruel.