Felipe Alfau - Chromos

They discovered that all the furniture had accumulated an alarming amount of dust, as had Don Hilarión. They considered the matter at length and finally arrived at the conclusion that everything had to be dusted, including the old notario.

“I thought it might be disrespectful,” said Vicenta, “but what can one do?”

“It is more respectful to clean him, to perform that duty instead of allowing him to accumulate dirt. After all, Vicenta, cleanliness is next to holiness.”

They left the room and Vicenta returned to it with duster and broom. She swept the floor as well as the furniture permitted and then dusted every piece with expert hand. When she came to Don Hilarión, she remained a while, duster in hand poised in midair, and then with a shrug of the shoulders, she began vigorously.

At the first stroke the duster caught the gold-rimmed spectacles and sent them crashing against the desk, one of the lenses breaking.

“Now I’ve done it!” poor Vicenta said in distress. She picked up the spectacles and with some effort she managed to balance them upon Don Hilarión’s nose, which seemed to have shrunk. Indeed, the whole figure appeared slightly shrunk and distorted out of position, and then she also noticed Don Hilarión’s face. It had also changed, for it seems that time passes even for the dead. His lips had receded somewhat and began to expose his teeth, with the suggestion of a macabre smile. The frown in his forehead was a bit accentuated. The whole face and hands looked much darker. Vicenta studied the whole thing for a while shaking her head and then left the room closing the door.

When the anniversary arrived Doña Dolores invited a few friends. They arrived endeavoring to cover their curiosity with an air of great reverence and when Doña Dolores opened the door of the sanctuary, they all crowded in with almost abject hurry.

Doña Dolores was about to deliver the speech she had prepared for the occasion when she caught sight as well as all the others of the expression on her late husband’s face. The lips now fully exposed the teeth in a decided broad smile and the frown had become marked to the point of ferocity. The contrast was, to say the least, disconcerting.

Doña Dolores approached the sitting figure and eyed it. She overheard snickers and giggles and even a remark or two from a couple of American guests about the skeleton in the family closet. They all seemed nervous, fidgety. A young lady became hysterical.

And then Doña Dolores’s eye fell upon the broken spectacles: “What is the meaning of this? Vicenta, come here. Explain!”

The dejected servant advanced twisting her apron in embarrassment: “Well, madam, the duster caught on the spectacles and they fell and—” She broke down and rushed from the room crying, her apron already a sausage in her hands, to seek refuge in the kitchen.

Doña Dolores looked at her husband’s face again and mused: “I wonder what chemicals that Zacatecas used?”

The guests seemed unable to restrain their risibilities. Their rampant fear had created a nervousness which found only this outlet. They gulped, inflated their cheeks, coughed applying their handkerchiefs to their faces, and grew purple.

Doña Dolores turned upon them, the livid image of righteous indignation: “Shooo, imbeciles!” she emitted with all her might.

And this was too much for the guests. With howls and roars, they stampeded out of the house, convulsed by loud, open, ribald laughter.

The ceremony had ended.

The second year went by even faster than the first. The family activities had progressively invaded the room. There were things there which had to be used. At first Doña Dolores or Vicenta entered on tiptoe and left silently, but later they hurried and forgot to close the door on their way out and the door was open most of the time. The children appeared to have lost their fear. They played in the corridor and once when their ball rolled into Don Hilarión’s office, Jerry walked in boldy, retrieved it, and as he was leaving, he stopped to study his father.

“Come over here,” he called to his sister and when she came: “ ‘S funny, but doesn’t he remind you of someone, with that mustache and all?”

Angie looked carefully, her head to one side: “That’s right! That portrait in the principal’s office in the school.”

“Doesn’t it though?” They both laughed and then, forgetting all about it, resumed their play right in there.

Doña Dolores, who saw them as she came in from shopping, scolded them that time, but the scene was repeated often later and she minded it less each time and eventually noticed it no more. She was going through that critical age in which women sometimes become slightly stupefied.

Vicenta dusted Don Hilarión regularly like another piece of furniture. Once while thus occupied, she noticed that the pen had fallen from his hand. She tried to replace it but the fingers had contracted or separated and wouldn’t hold it. She tried to press them together and one of them came off in her hand. Vicenta contemplated this minor disaster stoically. She remained undecided with the finger in her hand looking for an adequate place to deposit the relic. At last she dropped it in the wastebasket. When Doña Dolores eventually spotted the missing finger, she simply sighed and said: “That Zacatecas — that Vicenta—!”

More time passed and one day when Doña Dolores had to use the desk, she discovered that her husband was in the way: “Come over, Vicenta, help me with this.”

Together they shoved Don Hilarión and chair and when Doña Dolores finished whatever she had to do at the desk, they forgot to replace the throne and master, and he remained in that position, on the side of the desk, like one applying for something to an invisible provider.

The family moved and lived about that corpse as if it were but an object, one more useless object which Vicenta had to attend to protestingly. One could often see Doña Dolores sitting there writing a letter or one of the children doing homework, with the vigilant, immobile figure next to them, frown, spectacles, mustache, smile, teeth and all.

The third anniversary passed unnoticed and when Doña Dolores remembered, she realized that it would have been an anticlimax to open a door which had been open already for such a long time. Besides, her friends were already completely familiarized with the presence of Don Hilarión. He had been very often included in their visits and two friends left the house once talking like this:

“But how is it that the authorities have not found out about this irregularity? Or if they have found out, why have they done nothing?”

“Well, you know. These foreign families can live in New York in their own colony, completely isolated from the rest of the town, like in an independent state. As long as they do not bother the rest, the city does not bother to find out. The thing remains among the group, but if anyone outside their circle has learned of it, it has been probably discarded as an old Spanish custom.”

This explanation was as good as any, and as for the children, they were entering that age in which they felt ashamed of being connected with anything different from the rest and they did not mention it. Perhaps they did not give it enough importance anymore.

Don Hilarión was still holding together in spots, but on the whole, he looked quite bad and threatened to disintegrate completely at any moment. Every time he was moved, one could feel something snap, crush and roll down to accumulate in the folds of his clothes, in small particles, like crumbled fragments of old cork that sometimes found their way to the floor and had to be swept up.

One day Vicenta said to her mistress: “You know, Doña Dolores? This thing is falling apart, and it is only in the way here. I think we could put it in a trunk and send it down to the basement. Then we will have more room and we certainly need it with all this heavy furniture.”