Felipe Alfau - Chromos

“Let me tell you about this family in Spain,” Garcia says to him. “It is like a novel and for that matter, I am making one of it. It could only have happened in Spain.”

I thought that many people are always saying that a thing could only happen in a certain place. Why? And I told him so.

Now episodes of Garcia’s soapy novel of the Sandovals, a multigenerational saga and a low Hispanic Buddenbrooks much like what can be seen on Telemundo, twine with the present-time action in which the Moor and the narrator converse, drink and spin their theories, along with the Ramos screenplay already mentioned. The very fragility of these narratives nestled one within the other somehow proves the point Garcia is trying to make about the immutability of national characteristics, just as Garcia’s fatal love affair in New York happens to one of the Sandovals in Spain, allegedly “the only place” in which it could have occurred. We note the coincidence of his mental breakdown and the madness of one of his own characters, and we see a literary conceit — Madrid as “an empty city or a place which no one can ever leave”—begin to draw real blood from the somehow fascinating Sandovals and the hysterically homesick Don Pedro, and sawdust from the unlucky Don Hilarión. (Garcia’s two manuscripts, about the Sandovals and the Ramoses, comprise easily a third of the book; and although only the latter approaches the level of Alfau’s writing, they both work — even when we and the narrator catch Garcia fudging character for the sake of melodrama.)

The Moor allows himself the comforting fantasy of a “reconquest” of America, much like the one his putative ancestor undertook in Spain during the exile proclaimed by King Alfonso VI in 1081 A.D. But Alfau, born of a colonial family four years into the reign of another King Alfonso, the XIIInth, and exiled with them to their former colony, refuses such specious balm. By the light of a match lit in the old Café Telescopio (so named by the Moor because Spaniards in public always drink from the bottle, making them resemble astronomers sighting along their telescopes) on page 21, Alfau via his fictional narrator looks at the cheap print images that are the visual equivalent of Don Pedro’s elaborate theories or Garcia’s characters: “a man with. [a] short jacket serenading a young lady with high comb and very black, mournful eyes;. a chapel with a recumbent bullfighter dying on a couch with a beshawled woman, her head buried in his bloody chest and all around the austere, stoic, classical countenances of the loyal members of his cuadrilla and a tearful old lady staring her reproach at the altar. [,] chromos that had once been brilliantly bursting with color and drama, but were now faded and desecrated by fly stains; chromos in disrepute.”

We can see how the Moor’s Mephistophelean gambit — his bid for immortality on his own literary terms — is simultaneously considered, accepted (everything between page 23 and 345 compose these disreputable chromos, which comprise the Moor’s theories and Garcia’s stories more or less mediated by the narrator’s skepticism) and then, at the end of the book, declined as the match burns the narrator’s fingers and goes out, and he decides that the book we have just read requires “a pen much better than mine, mightier than the swords” of the conquistadores who, for that matter, may have been less than heroic. “Contrary to space, time”—which is what it takes to cross space—“increases the proportions of such events, but like the enlargement of a picture, what they gain in size, they lose in sharpness until they are so vague as to seem boundless”—i.e., garbage in, garbage out.

To quote Cioran again, I hope I have introduced some new readers to a book that is a great deal more than “an accumulation of confusions, an inflation of horrors, of frissons that date.” The last thing Chromos does is date, as one final annotation may illustrate: In a passage beginning on page 49, the narrator and his writer friend Garcia have just attended a very bad performance of Don Juan Tenorio (see Glossary) at the Spanish Theater, a fiasco made all the more execrable by the incompetent actress for whom the theater actually exists having amended the text to give herself more lines. “ ‘if we were speaking English,’ ” the narrator tells Garcia, “ ‘I could say that the drama was not ghostly but ghastly.’ ” A page or so later, they see a newspaper story describing the mysterious death of a millionaire Spanish immigrant, Julio Ramos, and Garcia immediately begins improvising what I have called the “Ramos screenplay” and inscribes it with an untranslated sentence in Latin that he says he saw on an abandoned sundial: “Humbra fugit velox et sic fugens denotat horas,” which could be rendered: Swiftly flies the shadow and, thus flying, marks out the (fleeing) hours (of our lives). Throughout Chromos , as well as Locos , the reader will find the musical leitmotif of shadows being cast by Alfau’s most ontologically challenged characters, haunting them like ghosts of both the past and future. It’s somehow tonic to think of the diminutive, all-but-forgotten, near-centenarian Alfau serenely watching television in a retirement home and casting a giant shadow into our millennial present via the books he now claims to find unreadable.

JOSEPH COATES

JUNE, 1998

END NOTES:

1Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Univ. Press, 1957), 309. “The Menippean satire deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes. Pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusiasts, rapacious and incompetent professional men of all kinds, are handled in terms of their occupational approach to life as distinct from their social behavior. A constant theme in the tradition is the ridicule of the philosophas gloriosus . The novelist sees evil and folly as social diseases, but the Menippean satirist sees them as diseases of the intellect, as a kind of maddened pedantry which the philosophus gloriosus at once symbolizes and defines.” The paradigmatic Menippean satires Frye cites are Apuleius’s The Golden Ass and The Satyricon by Petronius. The term will be a little less daunting if we remember that E Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise is at least partly a Menippean satire, as is The Great Gatsby , which he wanted to call Trimalchio in West Egg after the millionaire party-giver in The Satyricon —and that footnotes like this one, or those of Kinbote in Nabokov’s Pale Fire , qualify one as targets for Menippean satire. Enough said.

2Ilan Stavans, “Anonymity: An Interview with Felipe Alfau,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 1 (1993).

3E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist (New York: Seaver Books, 1986), 76.

4Mary McCarthy, in her afterword to Locos , tentatively thought that Carmen, Sister Carmela and Lunarito were all the same person; but this couldn’t be right because two of them appear simultaneously on page 7 of Locos , where Sister Carmela reprimands El Cogote for pinching the waitress Lunarito.

Of course, all this confusion is resolved in advance in the author’s prologue to Locos , where he points out that the knowledge of reality possessed by his characters is “vague and imprecise. Sometimes I have given a character the part of a brother or a son, and in the middle of the action he begins to make love to his sister or his mother, because he has heard that men sometimes make love to women.”

An Incomplete Glossary for Chromos :

Algoracid:a proper name that is a coinage defined early in this introduction.

brachistological:(pronounced with a hard “g”) coinage from the Greek brachisto - (short), plus logical (adjective for word); or brachyology = literally, short-speaking; in context, laconic, or given to stereotypical labeling, used to describe terse Spanish machos as opposed to effete and verbose Anglophones, including Spanish immigrants who ape Anglo ways.