Felipe Alfau - Chromos

He came back from the kitchenette and placed two bottles and glasses on a coffee table. He had been listening to the explanations of Don Pedro with pride:

“Clever, don’t you think? It saves money too, and you know us gypsies. ”

“But, Bejarano,” I interrupted, “I should think that this method would occupy most of the time allocated for a gallant occasion and tire the girl out”

“Nonsense,” said the Moor. “Have you forgotten the spirit of Don Juan? You know — the conquest for its own sake — never the realization, the foregone conclusion. Not the concrete, but the algebraic viewpoint, and the Moors developed the science and we are all half Moors. It is the national system. The assignation is a ritual, a formality, a tribute of good manners to masculinity, as when we say to someone who admires any of our possessions that it is at his disposal; yet he would never dream of availing himself of it. The Spaniard is fundamentally ascetic, almost frigid, and never in a hurry for sex, food or money. He likes the full table, the abundant wine, yet he is frugal. If he attains power, he disdains to use it; he upholds the theory of the harem but his heart is only with one woman while his body sleeps in the serrallo, because being mystically concerned with the spirit only, he knows that no place in his anatomy is the site of his fidelity, that only the soul can be faithless. Indeed he appears boastful of his masculinity and militant for the privileges of pornocracy, but only because he is modest and practices what others should at least know: that one must not boast of one’s virtues but belittle them, be almost ashamed of them— It is Calderónian, but the national system.”

Bejarano was basking in all this and taking it as a personal eulogy. He had even assumed the air of one long misunderstood and at last redeemed. His was the manner of one who has long known the truth but prefers to let his actions and, if fortunate, others more articulate, speak for him. His smile had that smug repression one seldom sees except in the faces of cripples, which is supposed to reflect their inner satisfaction and conviction in their own indomitable courage, the only thing left to help them navigate the storms of destiny.

I could not hide my derision and the Moor, sensing that he had enlisted the undying gratitude and unconditional support of Bejarano, put on the pressure: “It is quite simple. The combination of the Moor and the Christian, and I concede that my own example might lead you to doubt, but don’t forget that I am more Moor than Spanish. I don’t think that you, or many others for that matter, understand a man like Bejarano. He is castizo. He is Spanish.”

I’d swear that Bejarano was ready to break down and sob shamelessly. He gulped his wine and choked on it but not as much as I hoped in my impotent indignation at this farce. Had the Moor been standing instead of sprawling, Bejarano would have embraced him: At last a kindred soul, redeemed at last, at last cleared, the outcast once more welcome, paradise regained!

We stayed there the length of two or three drinks and Don Pedro invited me to an early broadcast he had and then to dine with him and Dr. de los Rios. Bejarano usually had a nap at this time unless he had something he considered much better to do, and as a rule he never ate until after his show.

It was after the broadcast and while dining with de los Rios and the Moor that they decided to call on the Coello family and asked me to come along. All this happened — oh, quite some time ago, and since then I saw that extraordinary family several times and learned a few things about them. Dr. de los Rios had attended to them professionally and also as a friend, because although they were very poor and his fees very steep, he always forgot to send bills to his poor patients, especially those of the Spanish colony. It saved his conscience and bookkeeping. The Moor, who had met them through de los Rios, considered this one of the most castizo families, after their own fashion, that he had met outside of Spain, something that according to him only a Spaniard could appreciate, and he liked to drop in on them occasionally to chew the humble rag.

But this family deserves to be considered especially, and emulating Garcia, who for some remarkable reason has not written about them, I might tell their story and preface my narrative with the erudite and ominous lemma:

“Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.”

A family like that of Coello would be inconceivable except in two places: Spain, where they came from, and New York, where anything goes. This is not intended as a play on words but as a preparation for the incidents preceding the demolition of a building in Harlem, where this family lived, incidents which some members of the Spanish colony in that neighborhood considered incredible, while others considered highly significant and which, not having taken the trouble to doubt, I pass along to those enjoying the same lazy distaste for systematic disbelief.

The story might open on the day when Mr. Robinson called on the Coello family with the unselfish and civilizing purpose of illuminating the darkness in which this foreign family undoubtedly existed, of preaching to them some good modern sense, of rescuing them from their foolishness and of rendering them an invaluable service by, incidentally, selling to Don Hilarión Coello a life insurance policy.

Mr. Robinson did not know that day when he took derby, umbrella and briefcase and departed on his way to the Coellos, that his visit would be fateful and the starting point of events which he never suspected and never learned. He walked in one of those New York spring showers that last all week. As he crossed Lenox Avenue, the wind blowing caused him to lower his umbrella, blocking his view of traffic and he nearly walked in the path of a fast-moving taxicab and came close to putting an abrupt ending to many subsequent events. He heard the noise of brakes forcibly applied and of English forcibly used, all of which he disregarded with professional philosophy.

He turned into 123rd Street where Don Hilarión Coello lived.

The Coellos were a very proud and very mournful family. They lived in one of those apartments with an endless narrow corridor onto which small rooms open like cells and one cannot walk through without instinctively accelerating one’s steps for fear that something may be lurking in one of the treacherous rooms, ready to spring, to snatch, as one passes.

If Don Hilarión called out authoritatively from one end of the house to his wife at the other end, she would have to journey that long corridor looking into every room repeating: “Where are you? where are you?” and she always grew a little afraid.

It was sad to look that way for a person, it was like one of those melancholy fairy tales or a dream, and yet it was an everyday affair.

That apartment, with all windows overlooking a court that was in itself a nightmare, could have turned the happiest person into the most helpless hypochondriac, let alone a family with the propensities of this one.

Black garment encased, somberly proud families like the Coellos, whose poverty has gone to their heads and are intoxicated with failure, were common in Spain and this was the paradox of the Coello family as of so many others. Unable as they would have been to remain themselves under changed conditions in a country of which they were a typical, if old product, they could be unmolested in New York and even contribute to its typically heterogeneous population. Here they could mourn the glad tidings about their country brought by the newspapers, they could wail and deplore to their hearts’ content, remain in their pure unadulterated state, like calamares in their own black sauce, with all their militant, though aesthetically justified defensive chastity, worshiping traditions which dictate to cover the greatest possible area of human bodies. Don Hilarión Coello sported an abdomen like a balloon, and his wife one like an apron which would have permitted her to remain chaste even in a nudist camp.