Felipe Alfau - Chromos

calañes:a hat with a turned-up brim.

castizo:pure, traditional.

chulo:a street person; pimp.

el Cid:an eleventh-century military leader, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, possibly of partly Moorish ancestry, who led the Reconquest and in doing so became the emblem of the Spanish national character; the title is from the Arabic Sayyidi , meaning “My Lord.”

cursi:an adjective meaning something like poshlust in Russian: sentimental, pretentious and corny.

Don Juan Tenorio:a nineteenth-century play by José Zorrilla y Moral, quoted by Don Pedro in an argument on page 150: “Son plâticas de familia de las que nunca hice caso” (There are sermons on the family from people who never made one).

juerga:a binge, or a symposium; drinking party.

the Moors:Arabs who invaded Iberia in 711 A.D. from North Africa, not to be confused with the Moops in Seinfeld .

the Reconquest:a long period in Spanish history beginning just after the time of the first Moorish incursion into the Iberian Peninsula in 711 A.D. and ending with the conquest of Granada in 1492. According to the Poem of the Cid (translated by Paul Blackburn, University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), in it we find almost all of the most important themes of Spanish literature: “honor, justice, loyalty, treachery, and jealousy.”

tauromaquia:bullfighting.

The moment one learns English, complications set in. Try as one may, one cannot elude this conclusion, one must inevitably come back to it. This applies to all persons, including those born to the language and, at times, even more so to Latins, including Spaniards. It manifests itself in an awareness of implications and intricacies to which one had never given a thought; it afflicts one with that officiousness of philosophy which, having no business of its own, gets in everybody’s way and, in the case of Latins, they lose that racial characteristic of taking things for granted and leaving them to their own devices without inquiring into causes, motives or ends, to meddle indiscreetly into reasons which are none of one’s affair and to become not only self-conscious, but conscious of other things which never gave a damn for one’s existence.

In the words of my friend Don Pedro, of whom more later, this could never happen to a Spaniard who speaks only Spanish. We are more direct but, according to him, when we enter the English-speaking world, we find the most elementary things questioned, growing in complexity without bounds; we experience, see or hear about problems which either did not exist for us or were disposed of in what he calls that brachistological fashion of which we are masters: nervous breakdowns, social equality, marital maladjustment and beholding Oedipus in an unfavorable light, friendships with those women intellectualoids whom Don Pedro has baptized perfect examples of feminine putritude, psycho-neuroses, anal hallucinations, etc., leading one gently but forcibly from a happy world of reflexes of which one was never aware, to a world of analytical reasoning of which one is continuously aware, which closes in like a vise of missionary tenacity and culminates in such a collapse of the simple as questioning the meaning of meaning.

According to Don Pedro, a Spaniard speaking English is indeed a most incongruous phenomenon and the acquisition of this other language, far from increasing his understanding of life, if this were possible, only renders it hopelessly muddled and obscure. He finds himself encumbered with too much equipment for what had been, after all, a process as plain as living and while perhaps becoming glib and searching if oblique and indirect, in discussing culturesque fads and interrelated topics of doubtful value even in the English market, he gradually loses his capacity to see and think straight until he emerges with all other English-speaking persons in complete incapacity to understand the obvious. It is disconcerting.

Dr. de los Rios does not agree with Don Pedro and suggests that complications generally set in whenever one learns anything, but I want to believe that this argument is churlish, eclectic and inconvenient to the purpose of my reasoning.

Rather I am inclined to side with Don Pedro who, being among other things an authority on tauromachia and therefore often expressing himself in such terms, announces that de los Rios belongs to that very castizo class of Spaniards who always neutralize the charge of extremism with a philosophical veronica and whose lemma should be: to tame the enraged bull of radicalism with the cool cape of tolerance.

But perhaps here one should abandon such considerations to say something about these two individuals.

Dr. Jose de los Rios was an old friend. I had known him since Spain where he had gained good fame as a general physician. Then he had begun to specialize in things of the nerves and the mind; he published several technical books that were very successful outside Spain; he lectured in various countries and was at present one of the leading neurologists in the world. It was as such that he had come to this country where we had resumed a friendship which to me, considering his eminent position in the world of science, was a source of great pride and an honor as undeserved as unquestioned. Through him I had met Don Pedro here, but the two of them seemed to have known each other for centuries.

Don Pedro Guzman O’Moore Algoracid was his very full name, at once sonorous, lofty and unconvincing. The Guzman part very Castilian, the other requires no explanation for the English reader and the last starkly Moorish. Of somber countenance and attire, with Mephistophelian suggestions of a clowning Dracula flashing out of the night in a Spanish cloak he favored, weather permitting, he boasted of pure unadulterated Irish and Moorish blood and ancestry which, according to his genealogical chemistry, made him the most castizo Spaniard.

Due to an accident in his youth interpreted as the agent which had changed the course of his life, he enjoyed a marked limp, thus justifying his other prop and inseparable companion: a formidable walking stick with all the disquieting protuberances of a shillelagh. I understood in a general way that in Spain he had been a very promising musician and possibly that the accident had had something to do with his abandoning all serious thoughts of music, but what I knew was that at present he was the best-known Spanish bandleader in these parts, often referred to as the Emperor of Latin American music and the Svengali of Swing. In the rendering of tangos, conducted like all his music, through justifiable affectation, with his shillelagh, he was peerless and he played them all with such an exaggerated rhythm that, in his own words, they all sounded like someone sawing a heavy log.

With a liberal education proudly shared between the University of Dublin and Salamanca’s Colegio de Nobles Irlandeses, his multiple personality was at present divided into two main hemispheres: one, that of an eccentric and temperamental bandleader intended for his well-paying public; the other, that of a character of recondite and esoteric accomplishments, reserved for his Spanish friends. A familiar figure in those sections of New York referred to for expediency’s sake as Broadway and Harlem and the widely scattered Spanish quarters in the city, such as Cherry and Columbia streets, radio announcers, commentators and feature writers, with blissful disregard for Castilian dignity, had shortened his name to Pete Guz, which had stuck and as such he was known to the American public and there was nothing anyone could do about it, though Dr. de los Rios had cleverly amalgamated his name and personality into the nickname of the Moor and this is what most of his Spanish friends always called him, with the exception of some who, because of his biting comments, referred to him as Don Pedro el Cruel. He was changeable and he was complicated and, in his manner of speaking, it would have been interesting to trace the wanderings of this complex variable over the subconscious plane and evaluate the integral of his real conclusions. To me, he was an absurd combination of a slightly daffy Irish-Moorish Don Quixote with sinister overtones of Beelzebub and the only Irishman I ever heard speak English with an Andalusian brogue.