Felipe Alfau - Chromos

But it is not until after Fulano has forfeited to another his official identity that the narrator politely but firmly confronts him with the fact that he had not really been using it and in fact deserved to lose it — that simple existence in the world is not enough to establish identity: “ ‘No, Fulano, do not deceive yourself. You would never have attained that success if you had remained Fulano. The [thief] must possess the personality which you lack and he has made the name famous. Really, in a way you should be grateful to him.’ ”

It is Dr. de los Rios, guardian of the Styx, who points out to Fulano that his identity now is that of a dead man: “ ‘There are no loose identities in this world which you can seize in order to regain your footing in life. There is only one superfluous identity as superfluous as yourself, and that identity is under the river Tajo. That soul upon the bed of the Tajo is craving for a body as much as you crave a soul. Go join it and end your mutual absurdity. After that I am sure that my friend will try to revive you in a story and to make a character out of you.’ ” When Fulano returns to the bridge “to look for an identity in the same place where he had gone to lose one,” he once more feels “Toledo covering its hill like a petrified forest of centuries. It was absurd. [T]he city sat there like a dead emperor upon his wrecked throne, yet greater in his downfall than in his glory. Fulano looked down and then knew fate and greatness;. with resolution he jumped. And in order to fulfill my promise to that most unfortunate and most unimportant of all men, I have written this story. [W]hether he will enjoy this poor revival I do not know.”

Fulano never does come back to life, at least by name, in Locos , but he does on page 131 of Chromos , where he even looks like Lazarus: His complexion is “putty-like with violet shadows,” and he acts with the servility “of a bad student who has been punished”—as indeed he is and has, having learned nothing from his two deaths in Locos . And, as predicted, he fails to enjoy this resurrection either and is consigned to a very literal hell, at his own request. Only a Spaniard, the narrator notes, could so complicate life for God, who in Alfau is only a minor character.

I have quoted at some length Fulano’s anti-apotheosis because it will help the new reader deal with what otherwise would have been one of the most baffling characters in Chromos ; a minor difficulty, which exists only for those who have read Locos , is that the (apparently same) narrator who created Fulano in the first book, then killed him officially, and then killed him actually, now, in the second book, shows no sign of recognizing him or other characters from the first book whom the reader encounters with him here: There are the two Bejarano brothers and their mother, Doña Felisa, one of them an idle bullfighter with whom “the Señor Olózaga” hopes to establish tauromania in the land of the SPCA, the other paired with his lover and sister, Lunarito, in a wildly successful dance team. But there is also the former Sister Carmela, now Carmen, who ran off with her brother, also a Bejarano, in Locos . New readers who can bring rested eyes to this ménage and to both books can perhaps tell me whether there has been some kind of mitotic replication of Bejaranos or whether this is a triangle; or, alternatively, whether the schoolboy Garcia who reported the nun’s elopement in Locos misunderstood what had actually happened. The Bejaranos had first names, Gaston and Pepe, in the first book, but maybe Alfau has deliberately omitted them here in the interest of an interesting ambiguity — or just for the hell of it. 4Since he has said that he reads nothing but books of mathematics and physics, he is fully capable of positing a pair of parallel and complementary universes.

Garcia, at the end of Locos , died of sheer terror — not terror of death, but of the endless life and eternal return implied by the decomposition that follows death, the fact that “spring always comes.” Dr. de los Rios in the first book could successfully prescribe suicide as a panacea for both Fulano and Doña Micaela, the lady so enamored with death that she enjoyed several little deaths a year; but against the horrifying restless eternity perceived by Garcia, the only defense, arrived at in Chromos , is Don Pedro’s cosmic and historical theories, which prove time to be an illusion and space to be motionless — theories the narrator finds congenial to his own inertia: If nothing can be done, nothing needs doing.

Both of Alfau’s major works (there is a book of children’s stories and some poetry as well) are masterpieces of morbidity and male hysteria, but in Chromos we can also see the despair behind the hectic mythopoeia of novelists and musicians creating worlds they can comprehend intellectually, at least, if not emotionally either in America or Spain; there are no castles either here or there. Anna Shapiro, reviewing the reissued Locos in the New Yorker , found “beneath the comedy and the surrealistic effects. something more personal, modest, or melancholy than the customary grandeur of modernist fiction;. its formalism is like a whispered secret, a shy way for an ingenious author to gesture to his public from his side of the peculiar one-way mirror that is reflexive art.”

Like Harold Brodkey, Alfau seems to equate writing with living; but unlike Brodkey, he seems also to suffer a kind of Promethean guilt at having written novels in which his friends, family and most deeply held beliefs become copy; there is a distinct sense that for him the clock of life is running only when he writes. In the Prologue to Locos the author quotes his narrator, who describes how his “‘[c]haracters have visions of true life — they dream reality and then they are lost.’ ” Alfau continues:

I should add: the author is lost. And even as I write this prologue, I realize how true this is, for I can find no connection with that individual and official author of this book who once while in the mad, fantastic city of Toledo wandered one day with his friend, Dr. José de los Rios, into the Café de los Locos (the Café of the Crazy) where he witnessed things and saw people which in his playful imagination took the shape of this book, who with the lack of conscience typical of an author advised an acquaintance there to trade his insignificant, though real life in this world for the still less significant and not at all real existence in these pages, who at the end of a chapter flung a window open and let in real life to take the stuffy and fictional life of the one character who was his childhood friend and who in a persistent confabulation with the characters found in that Toledo café, is the abstract, but nevertheless real, perpetrator of this experiment.

Like the difficult syntax of this passage, both books bristle eloquently with their own resistance to being written. Alfau seems to believe that in the journey from life to the page, as in the corresponding one from Spain to America, there is a shrinkage so radical as to constitute virtually an annihilation, yet to believe also that each book is a gesture that must be made. Don Pedro sees that “unquestionably there is sadness in the final surrender of any nationality that has come to less, which is most. But what makes the case of the Spaniard especially sad and poignant [is that] they were the discoverers of this new world” at whose door they now timidly knock. In defense, he dictates his theories to his friend, the chastely unprofessional narrator who, unlike Garcia, can be depended upon not to commercialize or distort their message. In his Mephistophelean mode, the Moor commissions his book of the Americaniard using the temptations of money (taking him to the top of the Empire State Building where he can see for himself El Dorado, New York’s rivers of gold) and of sentiment (taking him later to the ruined premises of the Café Telescopio, once the center of a now deliquescent Spanish community, still papered with the magazine rotogravures of a calendar of Spain that never existed and which at this point cinematically dissolve into a dialogue between the narrator and the writer Garcia, to whom he tacitly delegates his commission from the Moor):