Felipe Alfau - Chromos

“Very well, Señor Zacatecas. Please hurry and do your best.”

“Oh, don’t you worry about that. I will do my best. Now I am going for lunch and to my office to get some things and will be right back.”

The Señor Zacatecas having left, Doña Dolores walked up and down the corridor several times, an unfathomable and resolute smile upon her lips.

When the Señor Zacatecas returned as promised with a large black case, she ushered him again into her husband’s office and left him there behind the closed door. After that she had to perform what she called the painful duty of taking some nourishment to remain alive for the children’s sake and then she sat surrounded by friends and acquaintances like a queen on a throne to bask in their admiring sympathy and discuss and comment at length with undisputed authority upon the exemplary past actions and never well-praised virtues of the illustrious and important defunct, while some black-attired guest summed up matters with a deep remark such as: “The real trouble with life is death.”

Time passed and a few close and dejected friends sat at her sadly regal, if materially poor table to “do something for life, since one can do nothing for death” by eating a hasty supper prepared and served by Vicenta with red swollen eyes and unsteady hands.

The children sat through all this together, their thin faces paler than ever, Angie crying intermittently under the protective arm of her brother.

“Vicenta, please see that the children eat something.”

“Yes — Doña Dolores,” she said shakily and she went to the children and, holding them tightly with trembling arms, she disappeared with them into the kitchen, sobbing.

The mournful gathering remained repeating the same words, singing the same praises until well into the night. The children also remained up, Doña Dolores affecting an adequate disregard for anything not connected with her bereavement.

And then the Señor Zacatecas emerged from Don Hilarión’s office where he had been all that time and called Doña Dolores, who responded immediately, reentering the room with him.

They remained there mysteriously with door closed quite a while and then she reappeared, followed by the Señor Zacatecas and closing the door carefully behind. Then she summoned everybody.

All the guests walked in single file along the corridor, Vicenta and the children bringing up the rear. They arrived as the Señor Zacatecas was taking his leave noiselessly like a shadow, and standing in front of the closed room, they met Doña Dolores, arms folded, beaming upon them her despair, her tragedy:

“I have summoned you all to witness the proof of my devotion.” She quoted the old saying cryptically: “Things you will see of the Cid, that will cause the stones to speak.” And she flung the door open.

The grief-stricken gathering crowded in the doorway and gasped.

Don Hilarión was sitting at his desk, in typical pose, pen in hand resting on a sheet of foolscap, his gold-rimmed spectacles balanced on his nose. There was even a frown clouding his noble brow as if it were laden with the problems and responsibilities of justice. The Señor Zacatecas had done a good job.

The wall behind his chair displayed a Spanish flag, adding to the sad arrangement a touch of glorious brilliance. It was a perfect picture of dignity, sacrifice and important futility. Doña Dolores had risen to unsuspected heights of genius to meet the challenge of the occasion:

“From now on,” she said throatily but with appropriate self-control and an edge of fatigue in her voice, “this will be his shrine, his sanctuary. He will sit among his legal books and papers, in the atmosphere that was his life.” She grew stern with the assurance of the cruelly wounded person before an appreciative, almost envious audience: “They shall not take him away from me. He was our only and most precious possession in our poverty. He was all we had. His exemplary life, his important achievements, no longer appreciated in these materialistic days, shall guide us in our dark hours of sorrow. He was a notario as you all know and he will remain one. Indeed death is the common leveler and all dead notarios are equal. In the new fields he is conquering, his well-justified ignorance of a vulgarly modern language will no longer stand in his path to glory. Here you behold Don Hilarión Coello, Notario.”

“Doña Dolores—” came from every mouth like a murmur in response to her funeral oration. It sounded like “ora pro nobis,” and involved an admiring recognition that was worth living for. The children hung on to Vicenta’s apron, their faces a deathly white, their eyes like saucers. Doña Dolores raised a hand in the classic mob-stilling gesture:

“I propose to pay him homage once a year on the anniversary of his departure. He shall remain here, where he can be respected and honored as he deserves, but I appeal to your honorable sense of secrecy to keep this from misunderstanding outsiders as it would be very sad to have him who was a respected and important man of law involved in legal complications.” There was a strange leer on her face as she lighted two candles which had been placed on the desk and knelt in front of it.

“Doña Dolores—” The murmur rose again, and again it sounded like “ora pro nobis,” which smoothly turned to general prayer trailing among the kneeling figures along the corridor. Then Doña Dolores rose, and all, knowing that the audience was over, filed out silently, still crossing themselves with reverent fear.

When they had all departed, Doña Dolores put out the candles and locked the door of the shrine. Vicenta was standing in front of her, the children still grasping her apron. They looked like a petrified group and Vicenta said hollowly:

“I wouldn’t do that, Doña Dolores. It does not seem right.”

“Let anyone try and take him away,” Doña Dolores responded with threatening finality as she pocketed the key.

The next two days Doña Dolores spent several hours enclosed with her dead husband. On the third day she only stayed a few minutes and when she came out she telephoned the Señor Zacatecas to come immediately.

As soon as he arrived she took him into the room: “Look here, Señor Zacatecas. There seems to be something wrong with your work. There is a strong smell and then also stains in the face and hands. I have not looked further because I did not want to disarrange anything until you got here. Come and look for yourself. Don’t you notice the smell?”

They struggled past the furniture. The Señor Zacatecas bent close to the figure, he looked, he sniffed, he finally straightened up: “That cannot be helped, Madame, the job is good. I worked for hours on him. If you had called me sooner it would have been easier, but when you called me, he was already in pretty bad shape and it was hard work to get him in the position you see him now. I had to use special chemicals and after a while they react that way. But this is nothing. You keep the windows open for a while and it will wear off. I really don’t want to know any more about this affair. I may get in trouble. I only did it because we are both Spanish and must stand together, but I want no more of it” The Señor Zacatecas departed.

Doña Dolores opened the window and looked into the pallid abyss of the court. Her gaze then remained suspended in space for a long time and then she also left the room.

That first year went by slowly at first and then it gathered speed uneventfully. In the beginning Doña Dolores’s visits to her husband were frequent and the children lived in constant fear, stayed away from the house as much as possible and at night insisted that Vicenta sleep with them. Then after a few months the visits of Doña Dolores grew more scarce. She seemed to prefer to pour her eternal lamentations enriched by this magnificent new addition into the faithful, though inattentive ears of her servant. Then a few days before the anniversary, it was decided to pay a call on Don Hilarión to see that everything was as it should be.