Felipe Alfau - Chromos

He laid what to me appeared ridiculous claims to his past, but for that matter he always spoke of everything in the most fantastic manner. He told of remarkable exploits of his ancestors in Ireland and often told of a grandfather who had returned to Spain from Africa with a monumentally archaic and rusty key to reopen the house of his ancestors in Granada only to find that the lock had since been changed, whence he climbed in through an open window, and he also referred to the year 1492 as that fateful dark day when Spain had committed its two greatest strategical errors: the expulsion of the Moors and the discovery of the Americas. In the beginning I had taken all this phantasmagoria with reservations mixed with that suspiciousness which most Spaniards feel for one another when they meet outside of Spain which makes us think that any Spaniard claiming to be so must be an imposter, particularly if he claims to come from Madrid, to the point that we never believe that anyone comes from there, as if it were an empty city or a place which no one can ever leave. It seems that to be from Spain is quite a claim, but to come from Madrid is unbelievable. I have been doubted so much that now I say that I am a Latin American and save myself a good deal of trouble. This is something that we frequently do when abroad, so that one has the strange situation of two Spaniards posing before each other as Latin Americans and both being surprised at their accent and suspecting that after all the parents of both were gallegos. I think this is very foolish and take this opportunity to advise all my countrymen who read this to carry their passports with them at all times and thus squelch any doubts as to their nationality and if they come from Madrid, to run to the nearest consulate and there have the fact stated in bold type.

However, Dr. de los Rios’s attitude gradually conquered my misgivings. He who had always impressed me with his affable skepticism listened to the Moor’s tales without batting an eye and with a manner that tended to lend credence to them and I began to think that perhaps the Moor was a true living legend and not something on the other side of the footlights.

They were very different, these two men, and they represented two fundamental types of Spaniards. It has been said many times that Cervantes portrayed the two main types of Spaniards with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, but speaking in the manner of de los Rios, one ventures to believe that this is somewhat specious because one can find two such main types in any other country and they really divide humanity into two classes, which fact possibly constitutes their greatness, but in the case of these two contemporary men, the division was part of the national history and structure. It was ethnological and racial within the same country, one showing the Visigoth and the other the Moorish influences.

Yet these two different men shared one national characteristic: neither one showed even remotely his real age. Although I do not think they would much mind, I will not divulge it but will content myself with our classical and noncommittal saying: they were younger than God. They belonged to a class common in our country which is ageless and eons of time can only succeed in mummifying. Dr. de los Rios had not changed physically since I first met him, except for a few white hairs lost in his blond mane, mustache and goatee. Spiritually is another thing. While I remember him many years ago in Spain alive with an adventuresome scientific outlook and eager for risky and modern experimentalism often fired into whimsicalities by a tremendous imagination and moral courage that easily overcame medical conventionalities and politics, he had settled — not materially, mind you, but morally — into a cold realism which under a mist of indifference was vaster and relentless as destiny in its heuristic approach to all problems. As for the Moor, I believe he had been born with the same thick iron gray hair which he wore cut very short and brushed forward like the schoolboys of my childhood, or like that of an anachronic bootblack who had just offered to polish our shoes and got a tip from de los Rios for not doing it.

We were in Bryant Park and Dr. de los Rios spoke of his inability to allow anyone to polish his shoes and Don Pedro instantly seized on the subject to elaborate and generalize. Typical of the two men was that the virtuous implication which in Dr. de los Rios had become the modest description of an individual case of personal failing, grew with the Moor to transcendental proportions of social and national attitudes surging into patriotic boastfulness embodied in himself, even if done with careful indirectness. No matter what he spoke about, and that was many things, he sounded as if he were talking of himself. It seemed as though his personality and viewpoint approached a subject, elbowed their way into its midst and then exploded in vociferous and violent altercation, dispersing everything to remain there alone, with nothing to say, the enemy ignominiously routed in a battle which it had never fought.

From this it was but a step to his favorite subject of assault: an obsession with the position of the Spaniard in the world, with more assurance in Spain and with more complications in foreign lands — all right, in this country. His bad foot resting lightly on the bench where de los Rios and I sat, his shillelagh hovered above us like the sword of Damocles and he spoke down on us in a way all his own. It was intimate and kidding and disconcerting and it bounced along on hypnotic expressions and necromantic gestures, presenting the obvious as an incantation, his sentences disconnected and frequently unfinished, bifurcating, darting from one thing to another, like a school of herringbones which have not stopped swimming and the whole interrupted almost rhythmically by a stroke of laughter with a rising inflection ending in a protracted cough. He held and shook before us like a marionette his straw man: the “Americaniard.”

This, a word of his own composition, he had begun originally to employ when referring to Spaniards in the Americas and at one time might have included Latin Americans, but he had gradually varied the meaning until at present it applied to Spaniards in New York and then by association even to other foreigners, especially of Latin origin, in the same circumstances. It implied a certain attitude and behavior of the emigrant, incapable of standing up under the pressure of a majority, and referred more to physical and spiritual deportment than to a condition. Knowing the Moor as I imagined I did, I don’t think that it was flattering.

“He is a queer bird, the Americaniard; yes sir, very queer— while adaptability was a natural virtue, he overdoes it to the point of being chameleonic, but the expert eye can detect — and what an ape— His health never suffered when he was at home, but the moment he learns a little English, he begins to consult the directory for physicians and psychoanalysts. You ought to know.,” he addressed the placid Dr. de los Rios, “. yes, he is quick to seize upon all types of unheard-of ailments to use them as so many alibis for his traditional laziness which he imagines, naively enough, to be reprehensible in his new surroundings, wants to be a regular guy, and in the end finds himself prostrate in the recumbent company of the conquering majority. He is a beaten individual with delusions of mediocrity whose defeat has gone to his head and he has no match when playing the ingratiating role of repentant foreigner— He is unique, this Americaniard. He learns to be good-naturedly patronizing toward animals, minorities and foreigners in general, provided they are not his countrymen; speaks of cooperation, and dispensing advice freely to anyone who wants it or not fills him with overflowing well-being and kindly superiority. His childhood having been nursed with wine, he nevertheless learns to backslap and shake hands at the slightest alcoholic provocation. He becomes a freethinker and a liberal, but eats fish on Fridays served with the excuse that it is fresher, and he quotes the Bible. I tell you — the pharisee. Trying to run away from himself, he is always running into mirrors and endeavoring to make the best of his imagined prison. Doesn’t know what it’s all about—”