Felipe Alfau - Chromos

“We want lunch!” Jerry shouted brutally, but with elegiac overtones.

“And in a hurry!” Angie completed with even worse manners and heart-rending harmonics.

Their mother withered them with a well-planted look: “I don’t know what has come over these children since we came to this country. They were never like this in Spain. They have changed so!” In Spain they were half their present age, and never left home.

The children had sat at the kitchen table with drooping mouths and heads humbly to one side, to eat the lunch that Vicenta was preparing for them.

“Mama, can we have some money for carfare?”

“Yes, teacher is taking us to the Museum of Natural History and each one is supposed to provide his own carfare.”

“Now you want money for carfare. When it is not one thing, it is the other. In that school they are constantly demanding money. We are poor and can’t afford it.”

“Oh, Mama! All the other children are going. Must we always be thus humiliated before others?” Their chins quivered, their voices shook effectively.

“Yes, I know. You have begun to suffer privations early, but you must be resigned. Being poor is no shame when one is honest. You go back to school and tell that teacher that your father cannot afford these luxuries like the rich parents of other children, but that you don’t mind, that your father is a respectable notario and that in our poverty we base our pride.” Her voice was decidedly damp.

“But Mama, you know they won’t understand all that.” They appeared to have given up melancholic displays as useless.

“Well, they should. It is high time someone woke them up to the fact that this life is not a novel. In this country they have no consideration. All they think of is money and good times, always telling one to be gay and keep smiling.” She made an effective pause. “Smiling! Yes, while the procession goes on inside. These women teachers here never marry, never have children, they don’t know what suffering is, what privation, what life is.”

“All right, Mama, but can we have the money?”

“Go on now,” Vicenta stepped in: “You have enough museum pieces with those bespectacled old hens who teach you—”

“Miss Finch is not an old hen and she does not wear spectacles,” Angie charged.

“Never mind that. You go back there and tell them that you did not get the money. Come on! Finish that omelet. You have appetites like millionaires. We can’t be throwing food away in this house. Your father—” Vicenta checked herself. This pessimism was contagious. “Go ahead now, hurry! Run along and take an umbrella. It is raining.”

And so it was and at this time, under another umbrella, Mr. Robinson was fatefully walking toward their house.

No sooner had the children left than Doña Dolores resumed her interrupted litany: “I suppose I should also laugh at the question of the cream puffs. I should be very cheerful about it.”

“There you go talking about that again,” Vicenta said while looking into the icebox and kitchen closets to see what was needed. She knew the incident by memory. For some reason it was one of the selected tear-jerking, bitter-smile-squeezer pieces in Doña Dolores’s repertoire.

It seems that a friend, knowing Don Hilarión’s precarious financial condition, had given him some matter to investigate concerning Spanish law. It turned out to be a very simple matter and Don Hilarión felt that it detracted from his importance as a notario to do a piece of work that could have been attended to by any law apprentice, any law office amanuensis. However, when he was paid, he made his grand gesture. He went to a pastry shop run by another Spaniard in the neighborhood and bought some cream puffs.

“To sweeten the bitterness left by this humiliating job,” he said as he laid them on the table before his wife.

That night they had dinner accompanied by the usual lamentations all around. When time for dessert arrived, the children greeted the appearance of the cream puffs with vociferous sadness.

“You must be grateful for this little luxury, my dears. It has cost your father very trying moments, but do not be common. Poverty is no excuse for bad manners.”

Angie was the first one to make the nefarious discovery. She held up the puff she had opened, under the overhanging lamp, for all to see: “This pastry is bad. Look, it is green inside.”

Doña Dolores looked, they all looked. Vicenta had appeared at the dining-room door and also looked. This was a real crisis and Doña Dolores rose to it:

“Rotten!” she exclaimed in piercing tones. “Even that! Poor people must be given rotten things, because they have no money to buy at the right places—” She was beside herself. “That is too much. We may be poor, but too proud to permit such insolence!” The children’s mouths were already drooping and trembling at the corners. “Take them back immediately, Hilarión!” Angie began to bawl shamelessly, a true Desdemona, and her brother bit his lip and cast his eyes down, a little man in distress. Doña Dolores fell prone upon the table, wiping aside the guilty puff: “Mockery, Hilarión — rotten mockery!” she wailed prostrate by the shock.

Vicenta surveyed the scene in perplexity. Don Hilarión gathered the offending puffs back into their box of shame and left like one walking to his doom, muttering between his teeth: “How long, my Lord, how long?” He returned the pastry, got his money back, and bought himself some cigars instead.

That incident had been one of the high, cherished moments of the Coello family.

“Just when poor Hilarión, happy at having earned some money, wanted to celebrate by giving his children something sweet, which they so seldom have.” Doña Dolores concluded: “I am supposed to dance a fandango for sheer happiness.”

At that moment the doorbell rang. Mr. Robinson had arrived.

Vicenta walked the length of the corridor wiping her hands on her apron and opened the door. Mr. Robinson introduced himself and in that roundabout manner which every salesman considers deceptive and enticing, he hinted at the purpose of his call. Such linguistic subtleties were beyond Vicenta’s neglected knowledge of English and she called her mistress:

“Doña Dolores, please come and see what this man wants.”

Doña Dolores was slightly more successful than her servant and understanding that the man had something good for her husband, she led Mr. Robinson, who had not removed his derby, into her husband’s office: “Hilarión, this gentleman has come to see you.”

Don Hilarión removed his gold-rimmed spectacles and regarded the gentleman. He assumed his most important manner, meanwhile trying to rise unsuccessfully: “Please have a seat, sir. In what can I serve you? Forgive me for not rising, but as you see, this furniture—”

“Don’t bother. It’s perfectly all right,” said Mr. Robinson, squeezing past some furniture and into a chair. “My name is Robinson of the —” he gave the name of some insurance company, and with that he opened his briefcase and spread his subject’s literature before the prospective client, right over the newspaper that the latter was reading. Then in a speech not too short to be unimpressive and not too long to be wearisome, he stated his case, being careful to make himself clear to this foreigner.

Don Hilarión and his wife, who stood in the doorway, listened, the former pompously, the latter politely. Then when Don Hilarión thought naively enough that Mr. Robinson had finished, he cleared his throat and began: “You see, Mr. Robinson, I do not believe in life insurance policies, I—”

The other took ready advantage of Don Hilarión’s halting English to lunge confidently onto well-trod ground: “What do you mean you don’t believe? I don’t care how rich you are. No one can afford to be without this protection. What about your wife, your children? Suppose you die one of these days. If you have the policy I have been speaking of, your wife won’t have the added expense of your funeral, and she will get some money besides—”