Felipe Alfau - Chromos

He heard a transparent, silvery laugh behind him. It was so vivid that he almost turned around. It was a mocking laugh, the same laugh he had often heard since his wife’s death— Yes, what was he now? Perhaps still a caballero, a gentleman in the Spanish sense of the word. His hands were fine, his fingers long, although his nails were broken and dirty. He was a caballero, but not graceful. He was a disgraced caballero.

Now, in the intermission between dances, they were playing the “Jota de los Ratas.” It pierced through his ears like a jesting deadly gimlet of persistent sarcasm. Was he a caballero? Perhaps, but he was this now: a rata, a petty thief, a crook. It was not the shame of it, it was the failure it represented that wounded him; to be a rata, hiding from the light. In a few moments the music had framed his life, had brought a realization of things upon him, of the wretchedness that was his. It was a cruel parody of his truth. It had happened as if carefully prepared, as if it were a sentimental snare, a trap where he had been caught like the rat he was.

The music had changed. They were playing a well-known tango. He had heard it in Paris a few nights ago, where the whole city swayed to its rhythm with the tango fad above and below street level. His present rose before him. He threw the cigarette in the fireplace and buried his face in his hands until another flood of music filled the room. He lifted his head. In the door stood Laura and Jacinto.

Paco rose slowly. Father and son looked at one another for some moments, the son with superficial curiosity, the father probingly:

“Jacinto.”

“Father.”

They embraced tightly.

“Jacinto— Jacintito— It has been a long time. I suppose you did not even remember your father?”

Jacinto leaned his head on his father’s shoulder and played with the dirty lapel. Paco looked down and frowned slightly. There was an incipient smile on the lips of Laura worthy of the Gioconda. She said: “I must go back to my guests now. I will leave you two alone. You must have a great deal to talk about — and Jacinto, don’t keep your Marquis waiting too long.” Her laugh was drowned by the music.

Paco had disengaged himself from his son and his eyes narrowed and seemed to stretch as if to grasp the whole scene, its meaning and the meaning of this entangled world. His look was abstract. Then he said to his son: “Jacinto, I gather that you have managed to keep ahead of the times — but one has to live.”

“Possibly. And I notice that you have remained behind the times — but one must not die.”

“Very probably,” and Paco’s face grew horribly cynical. “Perhaps we can get together and synchronize ourselves to life in the happy medium of convenience.”

And so they did. The last that was heard from them is that together they were leading the same outlaw existence and that the father was speculating on the eccentricities of the son.

Then they say that they joined the famous band of Bonnot, and that in the last raid on this band, they died fighting like fiends to the last.

La Torre, who was fond of making round sentences, used to say that Paco Serrano as a caballero had proved to be a regular bandit, but that as a bandit he had behaved like a true caballero.

Some other people said that it was only Paco who died in that raid and that his son Jacinto escaped, and during the war of 1914 he was raided with other apaches in Paris, that he joined the army and died on the field of battle.

Whether he died bravely or not, no one says, and since one has accepted so many novelistic touches, shall one give him the benefit of a glorious ending?

Garcia pocketed his papers satisfied, and I stretched and shifted my position on the sofa.

The women had not returned since they went to the kitchen. El Cogote had turned on the radio some time before, which was the signal for the Moor to leave, carrying Dr. de los Rios with him without bothering to say good-bye. It had also awakened Bejarano, who sat up while Garcia finished, again frowning but not listening. It was not his professional frown, it was the ferocious scowl of bad temper, of one gathering his wits after a heavy sleep. I thought he must have had a nightmare which shattered all his good intentions of being a polite host, but later I learned that he always woke up in a terrible mood. He mumbled something about having to get ready for his show and we left.

On our way out Garcia confided: “I think I will leave it the Merry Widow waltz. It must have been at the height of its popularity about the time of these happenings.”

But all this happened the last time I had been at the Bejaranos’. On this particular occasion and what I began to say is that the Moor and I went to see Bejarano at another and smaller apartment he kept for himself, where he could entertain his lady friends under more auspicious circumstances.

When we rang the bell, there was some commotion inside and the unmistakable sounds of hasty preparations. The Moor began to laugh without making a sound.

The door opened and there stood Bejarano holding a broom and dust rag, an expectant smile on his dusky face: “Oh! It is you— I thought—” He motioned us to come in.

“Yes, it is only us and not the Department of Sanitation with skirts. You can relax now and put those things away.”

Bejarano laid the broom and dust rag within easy reach and went to the kitchenette, and while he was gathering bottles and glasses, Don Pedro decided to banish my wonderment at the mysterious greetings and elucidated:

The arrangement was this: Bejarano could not manage to have a cleaning woman come to fix the place. For one thing, he never knew much in advance when he would be there and even if he did, he would not go there only for the express purpose of letting her in. There were two objections to giving a cleaning woman a key. One was that she might arrive at an inopportune moment, because Bejarano never had any set hours for his gallant life; the other and perhaps the strongest reason was his gypsy nature which made him suspicious of servants and their respect for the property of others, although he did not keep anything of much value there — but that is the way he felt and consequently he had developed a subtle system. He could not come out and ask one of his lady friends to clean up things for him, but he could hint. When one of them arrived, if the place needed cleaning, he would receive her with broom and dust rag, or with a mop in hand, and the scene developed something like this:

“What on earth are you up to, darling?”

“Only trying to tidy things up a little before you came. This place gets so messy — but you caught me before I finished.” This looking ashamed.

“Now you give me those and let me do it. Why, it looks as if you had not even begun.”

“Oh no, I couldn’t think of letting you—”

“Come on. You look foolish with that apron on. You men are all alike, so helpless— A woman can do this in a jiffy. Here, let me show you.”

And the thing was done. As simple as that. Sometimes, he would be found with thread and needle, or at an ironing board he had procured: “Nothing, only this button— The laundry, you know—” or: “Ran out of shirts and I thought—” It never failed.

The Moor said that once one of his girlfriends was late and he fell asleep, still clutching the broom just in case, and he forgot the electric iron on the board. When the girl arrived and rang without getting an answer, she used the emergency key that was left under the doormat — the key he always took inside with him if he had feminine company — and she went in. She found the place full of smoke and Bejarano sleeping placidly holding the broom. She got a good fright thinking that the place was on fire and the fellow choked to death. She ran to throw the windows open, discovered the source of the smoke and disconnected the iron. Then her pity knew no limits: the poor boy asleep, exhausted from working so hard to make his apartment presentable for her and the place still looking so dirty and untidy! Bejarano, who had awakened with a start, also got a good fright that time but even this failed to cure him. It was a good system.