Felipe Alfau - Chromos

After that began the constant pelting with minor humiliations. He had been seen panhandling in the streets, there were those veiled and unveiled paragraphs from a couple of columnists. He had made his head- and sleeping quarters on the Bowery where he had soon gathered a good following and connections and where his foreign methods, albeit mastered and worn threadbare after a lifetime of practice, had in the new surroundings a certain novelty and freshness that were greatly admired and had earned him a comfortable popularity.

But this had not broken the relationship entirely. Every so often the old reprobate slipped back on his promise and caused them untold embarrassment at stage doors, their house, holding forth when in his cups about his daughter’s talent, and on one occasion he spied on a restaurant they frequented after their show with friends and admirers and came in to beg and had the affrontery to beg at their table.

This caused another and more violent row. When the manager summoned the police, Don Laureano stood tragic, crucified, his beard agitated by a wind of fury; a veritable King Lear, his wineskin held protectively against his heart like a badge or a threatened baby, and he thundered:

“That’s it. First thrown out of your house, now throw me to the bloodhounds. From the height of your opulence, not an extended hand, not a crumb, but a slap, a stone — that’s it; trample regally over the prostrate remains of your own father on your way to happiness.”

In the end the filial affection of Lunarito won and she and Bejarano pleaded in their broken English with the police to let the man go free. In embarrassed haste, they whisked him away in their car and dropped him someplace along the way, but that scene made the front pages and gave the tabloids just the necessary injection to carry them through a slack season.

The conversation had dwindled around the table but there was still an aftermath of little rumbles, sharp remarks crossed between Bejarano and his brother, like receding thunder after a storm. The Moor looked ostensibly at the ceiling and quoted from Don Juan Tenorio : “Son pláticas de familia de las que nunca hice caso.”

This seemed to touch the spark again and the argument revived stronger than ever with references to intimate family matters that reached the most indelicate limits. It went on endlessly with lamentations of the past and dark predictions for the future until it appeared that it should never end, but then it began to abate and subside and gradually everyone’s attention centered on the Moor, who was engaged in some little game of his.

He had caught a fly with surprising skill and now held it prisoner under an inverted glass. Then from a cork he cut two slices, ceremoniously filled a dish with wine, and pushed his sleeves a little up his arms. After that he carefully floated both slices of cork on the wine. On one he placed two matches and on the other some sugar dampened with wine. With great care he lifted the glass and recaptured the fly which seemed to be hypnotized: “Watch now carefully. This is the most difficult part of the trick.” With infinite gentleness he placed the fly on the wine-soaked sugar: “Quiet, everybody.” He struck a match and picked up the glass again. Then with smooth adroitness he lit the matches on the cork and brought the glass down over the whole thing without a tremor: “Behold! The raft and the lighthouse. A tragedy in the red sea.” The wine rose slowly in the glass and the fly flew inside momentarily and then alighted on the sugar once more and lay still while the matches went out and the glass filled with smoke.

Lunarito screamed and looked away; El Cogote moved farther into the room and craned his neck; Bejarano was leaning forward, his argument forgotten, watching fascinated; the woman called Carmen remained calm. She looked on puffing at her cigarette and only one of her eyebrows went up. The meek man with the thick lenses murmured: “This maestro, this maestro!” But Garcia protested loudly:

“No wonder I call you Don Pedro el Cruel. Why torment the poor fly? Let her go.”

Don Pedro bided his time unmoved and then lifted the glass slowly to let the liquid seek its level without too much disturbance, and the miniature rafts remained right side up. The fly lay on the sugar, still and apparently dead. He leered at all of us: “The Aspca, remember? What about flypaper?”

“Poor little fly,” whimpered Lunarito. “She choked to death. You killed her.”

El Cogote said that perhaps the fly was only drunk from the wine, but everyone showed consternation as if some minor tragedy had occurred that affected all personally, and the silence was tense.

Then Dr. de los Rios waved his hand over the plate. The fly flew away and straight for the ceiling. Everyone heaved a sigh of relief.

“This Dr. Jesucristo always to the rescue, but the fly is dead. That is only her soul that has gone to the ceiling, which is the heaven of all flies.”

With that we began to adjourn to the more comfortable if also more punished furniture of the next room, and due to some of those associations of ideas that always seem mysterious, Lunarito exclaimed: “The soup! I forgot the soup and I had a large bowl full of gazpacho in the refrigerator.”

“Gazpacho. Oh Lord! These people continue to live in Spanish territory and to be gradually conquered by the pacific penetration of the refrigerator.”

“It does make fixing the gazpacho more easy with all those ice cubes.”

“Easy, that’s it, easy. Ease is what brings about the downfall of a country.” The Moor collapsed on the chair that had recently played the part of a bull and pointed his shillelagh at Lunarito: “It is little things like that which are dangerous. First a refrigerator — easy. Then flat shoes — easy. Then after that, the vanishing paella and you forget your language, you forget yourself—” The shillelagh fell dejectedly across his knees “—and you are nothing, but then the refrigerator also vanishes and everything comes to nothing.”

Lunarito and the woman called Carmen began to clear the table and carry things back to the kitchen, Lunarito doing most of the work. The fellow with the thick lenses excused himself saying that he was going to see someone who had promised him a job. I watched him go, walking gently on the bias, his head slightly to one side, his back a picture of clandestine humility.

I was still thinking about my experience with him, questioning it as much as its alternative dictated, while his footsteps faded in the corridor, and after an interval, I heard the front door close. Although I did not know it then, that supernatural experience was to be repeated. I looked at Dr. de los Rios. He was pacing calmly back and forth, conversing with the Moor, the personification of peripatetic post-prandial innocence.

The bullfighter, after a soulful look at his trastos on the sideboard, had gone back to his newspaper. That left Bejarano and myself sitting on the large sofa with Garcia who was, of course, closest to the window.

With feline smoothness Garcia reached, and I threatened: “If you read to me, I’ll read to you.”

“Please, gentlemen,” came from Dr. de los Rios, “sheathe your respective literary weapons. I am sure that everything can be settled amicably.”

“Be a good fellow,” Garcia was saying. “This is the end of the first part of my novel and it is almost ready for final correction. I want you to hear it.”

“But you are imposing on Bejarano also. He has just fed you and this is no way to show your gratitude.”

“Nothing of the kind.” Bejarano was politeness itself again: “I like listening to literature.” And immediately he frowned and his face assumed a look of attentive concentration which he must have thought fitting to the circumstances and to his interest in cultural things.