Felipe Alfau - Chromos

Julieta had given birth to a boy, Ricardo, and then to another, Jacinto.

Life was filling its vacancies.

“What shall we do now?”

“Nothing. One last drink and then to bed,” yawned Paco.

“Since you are a deputy, you are keeping most respectable and regular hours. To bed at dawn and up at sunset.”

“Regularity means success, La Torre. But tomorrow I have to be up frightfully early.”

“That’s right. You have to feed us in the middle of the day. Poor Serrano!”

“And what shall it be now?” La Torre turned to a young man who was in their company and looked at them with undisguised admiration. “What would you like?”

“Anything you do,” the young man answered with all the fervor of a tot playing follow the leader.

They decided on a round of manzanilla. The waiter placed a tray on their table with about a dozen tall thin glasses full of the pale liquid. Manzanilla must be consumed in this manner: in commercial quantities, slowly but without intermissions to refill the glasses. They began to sip silently, ritually, isochronously.

Paco then stepped to another table where a very low type man with all the earmarks of a chulo was sitting with two girls and began to talk to them with familiarity. The young man nudged La Torre and whispered:

“I am invited also for tomorrow. I think he is very exacting about fashion. What do you advise me to wear?”

“I can see you don’t know Serrano well enough yet. Wear anything you like. Come in your nightshirt for all he will care.”

The young man looked genuinely amazed: “But I want to create a good impression!”

“Then you might add a top hat. Listen: you have created enough of an impression already. Serrano likes you very much and he thinks you are a very smart young man.”

“He does?” The fellow’s eyes were almost watering: “I think he is the smartest chap in all Madrid.”

“The second smartest,” La Torre corrected.

“And a real and perfect caballero.”

“That. of course.”

When they left the place, the young man insisted on paying for everything.

The next day, when they were all sitting around the table, the young man was not wearing his nightshirt. On the contrary, he was very carefully dressed according to the latest fashion and wore a tremendous white flower in his lapel. He looked at Julieta and at Paco with an admiration that was all but drooling superstition.

There were two other ladies: Madame Gerard, whose husband was connected with the French Embassy at Madrid and had been unable to appear, or perhaps ordered out of sight by his enterprising wife, and her daughter, a somewhat common-looking brunette who wore everything that should go about her neck hanging on her back from her arms and who moved her shoulders as if their supersensitiveness registered all her impressions. She also walked with an air intended to make her ankles seem too weak to support her weight.

At that moment, however, she was not taxing her weak ankles. She was sitting next to Paco and all her energy was concentrated in her responsive shoulders which went up and down at every syllable that Paco uttered.

Her mother, fat, yet with wrinkled complexion made up as if for the stage, was melting under the gallantries of La Torre who looked intently at Julieta and was obviously telling the old lady all the things he dare not tell his beautiful hostess.

Intermittently the Madame looked at her daughter and made a covert sign and the Mademoiselle immediately changed her pose. She was perfectly trained.

“Oh! Señor La Torre. I think you are terrible.”

“Exactly as you expect me to be, Madame. I could not disappoint you.”

“But my husband has heard of you and he says that you are very bad, very, very bad.” In a stage voice. Undoubtedly Madame Gerard had been an actress sometime in the dim past.

“And after telling you that, he lets you come without him! Did he know I was going to be here?”

“Everybody knows where you are going to be, Señor La Torre.”

“You are as charming as your husband is foolhardy.”

“Ah! but he trusts Señor Serrano and knows he will protect me from you.”

“He will not have to, Madame Gerard. I am going to behave today. Besides, I am on a diet.”

“You are horrible, Señor La Torre!” she screamed.

Julieta spoke little. She had complained of a slight headache and listened with a set smile to the stupidities of the young man who was doing his best to create an impression. She looked at Paco and Mademoiselle Gerard and frowned on one or two occasions. Paco had laid his knife and fork down and bent closer to the sensitive shoulders. The rest of the people did not exist for him until after the repast ended.

Madame Gerard had said that she liked Spanish shawls and Julieta offered to show her and her daughter some she had. They all rose:

“Julieta. Join us in the shooting gallery. We will be there. Perhaps the ladies will like a little noise after dinner.”

The ladies went with Julieta and the gentlemen remained chatting over their liqueur and cigars.

“Don’t you think she is good-looking, La Torre?”

“Yes, quite, but she will be the dead image of her mother when she grows old. A mother like that can ruin any girl’s chances. She is a terrible old hen.”

“An old hen makes good broth, as they say.”

“Possibly. I am not particularly fond of that kind of broth. I once had it and, as a matter of fact, lived on it for one year. It turned into good meals, rent, clothes and spending money. It is a miraculous kind of broth, but now — well, I don’t need it and it is hard to swallow.”

Paco laughed. The young man did not understand and looked on blankly.

Julieta’s suite was furnished in the Empire style. It looked very light after the austere old Spanish dining room. The walls of her boudoir were completely draped with Spanish shawls, a bizarre amalgamation of bright colors which should prove strenuous and tiring after a time. They were all draped symmetrically and caught together in the center of the ceiling, all their exuberant colors clashing and melting into the dazzling cut crystal chandelier.

The Madame and her daughter looked somewhat superciliously about. Julieta walked around the room pointing out the shawls.

“This one is very good. The fringe alone weighs I don’t know how much. That is why I think they are better on the walls. One has to be an athlete to wear these things.”

“But they are beautiful. I think I must take some shawls back to Paris with me when I return.”

“I don’t think you will have much use for shawls in France, except as a decoration. The only place where people can wear shawls properly is at a bullfight or a verbena and that as a concession and tribute to an old Spanish tradition. Only the working girls wear them at other places, but then they are black and that would be too mournful for you.” The sarcasm could not be missed.

“Don’t be silly, my child. We shall wear ours at the Opera in Paris and they will be the flashiest ones we can find in Spain, the ones that are too gay to wear in the country of the Inquisition.”

Julieta burst out laughing. It was the same clear, beautiful laugh which had called Paco’s attention the first night he saw her. Madame Gerard and her daughter looked a bit annoyed and finally Julieta calmed down.

“Excuse me, Madame Gerard, but a person going to the Opera with a shawl. It is comical.”

“That is because you Spaniards respect traditions very much and this is a royalist country, but France is a republic, a free country where everyone can do as he pleases.”

With unexpected, probably unintentional tact, the Mademoiselle exclaimed: “Look, mother! Look at this one. How quaint!”