Felipe Alfau - Chromos

“And say, how is the jewelry business coming along?”

“Not so well. If it had not been for old Ledesma, who is the only one who uses his head, it would have gone long ago. I advised Fernando in some deals, but he did not want to heed my advice.”

“I don’t blame him.”

“At any rate, we have not been on speaking terms for some time, and that is something good. It happened since I compelled Julieta to take and realize her share in the business.”

“Naturally.”

“Certainly. I did not want the poor innocent girl to lose all her money and. ”

Clotilde seemed to have passed out completely under Paco’s ministrations. La Torre drank another glass of brandy, stood up and said: “I am going into the next room.”

“You don’t have to leave.”

“It so happens that I have to dress for dinner. Otherwise I always like to observe a good seduction. Live and learn, you know.”

When La Torre emerged from his room, dressed, shaven and perfumed, Clotilde was putting on her clothes and talking with no affectation in her voice to Paco who answered distractedly.

“Children, we are ready. I am taking both of you to Botin to help me eat a roasted suckling and celebrate your engagement.”

“You know I can’t go,” she adjusted her hat. “I am quite late as it is.”

“I had forgotten that the bearded ox is back and you still have to comply with your marital duties. We two will go then and oblige Botin.”

While she finished dabbing at her face, La Torre pulled Paco gently to him: “You know, I could have very easily killed you, but why spoil a good situation?”

“Why indeed?”

They chuckled and La Torre filled two more glasses: “To a happy affair.” La Torre sighed and enveloped Clotilde in a sidelong glance. Paco was drinking his brandy with relish that banished any other consideration. “Not bad, eh, Serrano?”

Paco interrupted his operation long enough to answer: “No, excellent brandy.”

La Torre’s thoughtful expression evaporated: “So that’s all you like now?” and Paco answered with the glass still to his mouth: “Aha.”

Garcia looked up: “I can see that you don’t care too much for it Do you?”

“How can you see? You were not looking at me.”

“But I could hear your fingers on the table. Go on, admit it”

“No — it isn’t that — it is that the whole scene could have been handled more expediently by saying that Serrano was a scoundrel.” I waved aside an objection: “All right, and if you want to give an example, you could have said that he went one afternoon to see a friend who was a painter and there seduced his model who had a trusting, if ridiculous, husband, and his friend, who was a very unscrupulous fellow, did not mind, and to make matters worse, they reveled in their sinful ways and celebrated afterwards.”

“Oh, well! If we come to that, we could reduce everything to saying that the world was created, then it lasted for a long time and then ended. That would take care of all happenings and stories, what the devil!”

“Now. Don’t exaggerate. ”

“You are the one who exaggerates. ”

“Look,” I said patiently. “What I mean is all this dialogue. I feel that when there is too much dialogue, it is disguising something that without it would boil down to very little or might not be so easy to swallow. Like coating a pill. I feel that the whole thing — this and much of what you have read to me before — has too much dialogue. Takes too much paper.”

He was in a temporizing mood. He said that he agreed in principle but that he had done it intentionally as part of the presentation, in keeping with the times when the action took place. Stereotyped style, situations, phrases. You know: cursi, and he reminded me that this was not the final draft and that he expected to improve it.

We would have commented and discussed at greater lengths, but there were unmistakable signs of closing the place for the night and the cashier seemed impatient to call it a day. In these semi-biblical surroundings, Garcia had assumed the leadership of a missionary and, although I knew that his funds were low, he insisted on paying the check and leaving a handsomely posthumous donation to a long departed waiter.

We left the tabernacle and walked slowly, passing a free theater on the way, where we had been once before. In this proverbially commercialized city, it was a contrast. It cost nothing to see a performance there, like listening to Garcia’s stories. The same artistic, unprofitable level, but by a natural association of ideas, it made me think of the theater of Tia Mariquita and I was glad that it was too late to go in. We strolled back to Madison Square where we sat on the bench closest to a street lamp that Garcia’s practiced eye could select. We spoke of things not worthy of recollection and then Garcia mentioned a person no less than the American writer O. Henry. Every time he is about to read or discuss his own stuff, Garcia always prefaces things with comments on great writers, thus creating an unfavorable contrast.

I tried to keep the conversation on this auspicious level, to hold it there, deferring the inevitable beyond the limits of our negligible knowledge of American letters, but in the end he won handily as usual. The man goes about armed and carries more paper with him than a newsboy. I have tried to retaliate, carrying something about with me, advertisements, tracts, news clippings, any kind of equalizer that will give me a chance to fight back, but when my resistance has been stubborn, Garcia becomes adroit with: “Shut up and listen,” and the net result is that he reads and I listen.

Garcia said that he thought I had had enough of the other story for a day — very generous of him — and that he would read what he had left of his moving picture story which, I learned with dismay, was not yet finished:

Ramos dropped the cigarette butt and ground it with his foot on the bare floor with distracted determination and for a long time.

“You know?” he said: “Those were happy days.”

To speak of happiness in our surroundings was so incongruous that he must have noticed my expression.

“Yes, they were happy, but for one thing. I could not remember my courtship. Mind you, the girl was not worth a damn, as I found out later, much later unfortunately, but that is beside the point. A courtship is one of the happiest moments of love, or so we have been taught to think, and I had missed its charm. A man fears to miss happiness almost more than to encounter trouble. Otherwise men would never seek adventure or take a risk. I regretted having missed the only part of the affair that was any good. For the first time I began to think of all the happy moments I must have missed during those dark hours. Like diving from the day into a great cavern full of wonderful sights and rushing through in complete darkness, seeing nothing, to come out at the other end into the light. If I had only brought along the torch of consciousness. Did I love the girl? Considering the fantastic manner in which she entered my life and what my life had been, this is one of those things I cannot answer. It is something which you may debate in your mind as you please. Some people may opine that one only thinks one is in love. I am old now after all these wasted years and it seems to me that love is not to be discussed, but to be felt. It is for the emotions, for action, not for meditation or reasoning. I don’t know whether I loved her, but I feel I loved her, at least at one time.” Ramos half raised both hands in a deprecating gesture which held infinite tiredness.

But at that time Ramos was younger, less tired, and he questioned such things. He could not understand why he was in love with the girl. Indeed, he doubted very much that either one was in love with the other. Yet they remained together. The reasons for this, at least his own, must have been strongly planted during those unconscious moments when he supposedly met her and undoubtedly loved her. He could feel the aftermath of a profound passion in his whole person. As for her reasons to remain with him, very early in life Ramos had concluded that women did not usually employ what one might call reasons for their actions and he looked for none. They did not precisely quarrel, but there was a perennial smoldering disagreement between them. To her he was introspective, “dull” and “gloomy” she called it. According to that girl, smiling and laughing were something at which people should always be exercising regardless of motives. Hers was an insane obsession with laughter. But after all, he must appear puzzling to her. There was something very definite which prevented him from having a normal relationship with others: these periods of time which he skipped. She called it absentmindedness, but perhaps she already suspected something else she did not dare or could not formulate.