Felipe Alfau - Chromos

I fought the desire to look for him through some common acquaintance. I had heard that the only Spaniard who had seen him was our erstwhile friend Don Laureano, who held court in the parts Garcia frequented and who probably lent a helping hand to him and must have piloted him expertly in the new existence that Garcia had chosen, and I also suspected the Moor of having found some means of helping Garcia without offending his racial type of delicacy and formalism. But if I had sought him out in this direct and open manner, it would have been the unforgivable sin. I know that this type of loyalty in reverse is difficult to put across; the closer one is, the more outrageous such liberty becomes.

The case of Garcia was, according to the Moor, a complex one and should be allowed to play itself and straighten itself out. He had an intricate theory that when a Spaniard takes to drinking and bumming in this land, it is due to an Anglo-Saxon psychosis. He has absorbed too much of his environment, is saturated with it and requires the native, domestic antidote — must take the cure that has been perfected for this condition. Although Garcia could not speak English well at all, the barrier of the language in his case, as in that of many others, had acted only as an osmotic membrane: the words had not gone through, but the fundamental ideas and feelings had, and he was suffering from an Anglo-Saxon psychosis. The Moor concluded, with his habit of generalization, that every new language one learns, or every new environment one joins, stimulates new centers of the mind and new emotions, creates new associations of ideas, new viewpoints, and therefore produces an additional psychosis.

Nevertheless, I hoped for a chance meeting which could be brought about accidentally on purpose. This would create a scene that was sure to delight Garcia, if I knew him as I thought I did, and once in an unguarded moment while passing the time with the Moor, I suggested that we go down to the Bowery where at the moment it appeared the most natural thing in the world that we should run into Garcia. The Moor, who liked to encourage all such absurdities and acts of illogical futility, agreed readily. We were luxuriously transported in his dark Hispano-Suiza as far as Cooper Square, where we left it. Then, fortified with some ale drunk from china mugs at a very old barroom on a side street that deserved the Moor’s endorsement and with true Spartan resolution, we walked the whole length of the Bowery as far as the Manhattan Bridge and, of course, never met Garcia. We met several bodies on the sidewalk and in doorways but only examined closely two of them because of the long white hair. The second of the two was in a particularly dark spot and I walked around him bending and peering without being absolutely sure because his face was hidden in his arms. Finally the Moor grew impatient and told me to turn him over, that he would not mind, but to be careful not to hold the match too close to him — the usual sally. I felt sure that the Moor knew readily how to find Garcia if he had wanted to, but he was letting me be the victim of my own folly. We walked on and ended drinking doubleheaders of unashamed bar whiskey at Chatham Square in a bar where the Moor and the bartender appeared to be bosom friends. The Moor gave him tickets for his broadcast.

Those drinks made us hungry and the Moor took me to a Chinese place on Pell Street where we found the Señor Olózaga at a table talking to the owner of the place in his native language. This was one more piece in the jigsaw puzzle picture I had of him. He greeted us affably and we sat at the same table. They immediately began to speak Spanish. The owner of the place, who seemed to know the Moor quite well, spoke it fluently but with the same padded silkiness as the Señor Olózaga. The Moor did not seem at all surprised to find the Chink, as he called him, there and the vague feeling I had had since the beginning of that evening began to take concrete shape in terms of a cat playing with a mouse, just for the fun of it.

While the Moor and I disposed of a dinner for four, the conversation around the table might as well have been in Chinese for all I understood of it. They spoke in mock mysterious sentences, a frequent habit with the Moor but which seemed contagious on that occasion, and I suspected that I was being the subject of some kind of mild practical joke that concerned my quest for Garcia, particularly when the Moor said something about Spanish gestures and the national system. I felt distinctly outclassed and to regain my poise, drank considerably of some exotic wine that the Señor Olózaga was planning to market and which he praised lavishly both by word of mouth and elbow action. Everything was very polite and tranquil and the dreamlike quality that had palled the whole evening like a fog became denser and soothing so that when we left the place, I was not surprised to find the fateful Hispano-Suiza with the Cuban boy all smiles waiting to drive us home. I did not care whether I had been foolish in looking for Garcia, but on being dropped in style at my very door, decided not to look for him again.

Enough time passed after that for spring to arrive.

Then, one day I was in that section where the quiet, though gradually surrendering dignity of Brooklyn Heights is ignominiously crowded by commercialism down a steep hill to meet the lugubrious Furman ravine at the foot of Fulton Street, when I saw Garcia, the fallen bard, as he would have put it, and he was truly a bad sight. He was lying near the curb in front of a bar which might have seen younger if not better days, and he was in a state of complete inebriation: his clothes dusty and torn, his face blackened by soot and unshaven, a patch of caked blood matting his white hair. It was the regulation uniform and he would have passed the inspection of the king of bums with flying colors. He was the wounded soldier of misfortune and paladin of the scum. Next to him, and but one shade less of miserable glory, was another fellow, still upright from the waist up, who kept on shaking Garcia with that characteristic truculent yet affectionate persistence, calling to him to “get up, you. ” followed by some foul epithet. There was a dog nosing about Garcia. Probably belonged to the other man.

Garcia only rolled from one side to another and groaned his contemptuous disregard for the whole damn respectable world, while the man continued to push and pull ineffectually. There was something about the man and the animal, the suggestion of the loyal watchdog, something in this sinister scene, in the common bond of degradation uniting two outcasts, that sent a wave of pity through me that washed all revulsion away. Even at this point, Garcia, who had always aroused the protective instinct in anyone who knew him, had found someone to sit by him and try to pull him up to his slightly higher level of indignity.

I rushed to Garcia and managed to bring him up to a sitting position, but his head rolled and if he recognized me, he may not have been able to distinguish the situation from a dream. The other man smiled his cockeyed recognition of our mutual interest and patted Garcia on the back with a manner that said: “Good boy — good boy—”

Talking to Garcia and trying to make him understand was a useless task and I did not know how to take him in his condition to better surroundings, so, as usual under the circumstances, I thought of Dr. de los Rios and decided to call him up and ask him to come down and help me.

I left Garcia to the thankless ministrations of his companion and entered the barroom and there put a call to de los Rios. This was his hour of consultation, but nevertheless he said that he would be right down and to stand by Garcia, so I sat at the bar from where I could watch him, feeling quite confident that he would not run away and that the indifference of the city would let him lie there where he was, and ordered a drink and then another while waiting, and although Dr. de los Rios arrived with miraculous speed, I was feeling pretty good myself by the time he arrived. He stopped the car right in front of Garcia, and when I came out to meet him, he was already by his side. I lent him a hand and between the two of us we got him to his feet. Then despite his groans and protests, we propelled him forward and into the car. Garcia drooped in the back seat like a sack of flour. Before taking his seat, de los Rios looked around and what I saw in his face, I could not describe.