Felipe Alfau - Chromos

This whole thing had made me forget what I had come to this neighborhood for, and I went along for the ride and to see whether I could be of some help. I wanted to be near Garcia as much as possible after not seeing him for such a long time. We crossed over the bridge and then rode up to de los Rios’s house. There he called an attendant and I decided that I was not needed and took my leave.

A few days after this incident Garcia arrived at my place looking like a new man: new clothes, clean shaven, well-combed silky white mane and, although he had never been the picture of health, he looked much better than I had ever seen him. He made no reference to the past happenings, and even though I had not seen him for about a year, since our last recent meeting did not count, he tried to act as if we had been together the day before and nothing had happened. He was the least bit shy and I could not help quoting from Fray Luis de León: “As we were saying yesterday—”

He gave me a smile and then said that he wanted to gather his papers and things and that he had already imposed enough on me. I showed him where they were piled up and he began to rummage among them, and then I said that the occasion called for a drink and went to fix a couple, but he was too absorbed in his work and I don’t think he heard me. I handed him his drink and he took a sip absently, set it down on the desk and promptly forgot all about it. This was the old Garcia. He was drinking again like a Spaniard.

He was holding some papers in his hand and there was the enthusiasm of the inveterate writer in his face. He said that he had to get busy and work on his stories. The past experiences he considered, I am sure, a contribution to furnishing what he would operatically call his nest of memories, and he was raring to go. I could already see myself involved with translations and manuscripts and subject to litanical readings. He certainly was the same old Garcia. One can’t keep a good man down.

During the days that followed, Garcia busied himself with his writings and in particular with the second part of his novel about the family, and at that time he had not finished the first part yet to my knowledge, for he did not read the end of it to me until sometime later following a meal at the Bejaranos’ which the Moor prepared and I have recorded already. But this was the way he worked. He assaulted a story from every angle at the same time; it was a general offensive all along the front. Where a sector yielded, his forces concentrated on the attack. If a particular section of his work suited the mood of his inspiration, he labored on that, finished with it and then lay it aside to be fitted subsequently in its proper place — well, not always.

This may serve as a justification for the disorder I have allowed to invade my narrative. In order to preserve the sequence of Garcia’s stories, I have sacrificed my own. It is a good excuse anyway.

One of the first things Garcia completed was the draft for his moving picture story and immediately began to cast his eye around for someone who could make a scenario from it and to pester me with entreaties to make at least a rough translation. He wanted to ascertain up to what point I remembered the story and I told him that during his absence I had reread many of his writings because having no one to loaf with, I had more time to myself, and then he reproached me for not having translated some of his work with all that time on my hands, but I countered that one could not embark on a task like that without even knowing whether one was ever going to finish it.

“You should know better than that,” he said acidly. “Now sit tight because you are going to listen to the end of the moving picture story and after that you are going to get busy with the translation.”

If he had changed at all, it had been for the worse, but even so, having Garcia back was good. I had really missed him, and realizing that everything has its price, I listened:

He found himself living in Chelsea and, to all appearances, quite prosperous. He had fleeting recollections of arguments and more arguments with Jenny and of having a Charlie held up before him as a paragon of practical success. Then blanks and more blanks and more brief visions of working and again scheming and eventually owning the company for which he worked and of Jenny always coaxing, goading him with relentless ambition.

Those were hectic days of his rise to prosperity. He was associated with Charlie, an association born from a contract which he never remembered having signed, but now Ramos never bothered to question his past actions. He had found himself during his life with so many things, in so many positions which he could not explain, that scarcely anything surprised him anymore. Besides, with time, Charlie had grown softer, he was no longer the potential and never-proven forcible character he had been assumed to be, and he was now in the subordinate role. Ramos had proven the stronger of the two by a wide margin, almost a revengeful margin.

He and Jenny had then a short and belated honeymoon trip. She had insisted on arranging it even as she had insisted on delaying it. All he remembered from it was a vertiginous amount of water falling before his astonished eyes with a deafening roar.

Upon his return he had to face a delegation of South American businessmen who, in a tumultuous meeting, accused him of monopolizing the Latin American market, flooding it with American products. They spoke of unethical business methods. One of them was particularly offensive. He threatened cutthroat competition, a formidable boycott:

“My group is large. We shall fight you with your own weapons. We will fight you for years if necessary. You will have to give in.”

“You think?” queried Ramos, already in the grip of impatience.

“I know. You will give in. You cannot afford to wait that long.”

Ramos knew the man was right, that this would be a long, wearisome war, intolerably long. The tone of the man’s voice, its challenge, irritated him beyond proportion. He could not wait. He forgot himself. With fists pushing against the conference table, he rose, he closed his eyes.

The noisy voices subsided, the irate Spanish words turned to polite English words. Julio opened his eyes. He stood at the head of the same table, or one very much like it, and he was bringing to a close a very successful conference with a group of American bankers in which a very profitable loan for all concerned had been negotiated with a Latin American republic.

He remembered then portentous days in Wall Street, unnecessary days of trouble, of multitudes of people losing all they owned, of absurd panic, and from all this turbulent crisis he had been one of the few who had emerged successful. He saw like one sees from a fast-moving train his financial position extending to cover other fields, his business connections growing to a dominant position.

When the bankers filed out majestically, Ramos sat down again and regarded the span of the long empty table before him. He sat that way alone in the conference room for a long time and finally came to with a start. This time he had skipped a long time, he had cast a handful of years aside, a good handful. He could not go on like this or death would be upon him in no time at all. What if he should close his eyes, never to open them again? He rose slowly and leaned on the table. The glass top sent back his reflection, clear enough to show deep changes. It seemed like only yesterday that he had seen it like this in the mirror of the old pensión.

“Listen, Garcia,” I interrupted. “With scenes like the ones you describe, it ought to be a cinch and you will not have to bother about a scenario. They probably have made them thousands of times and all they would have to do is to clip them off old pictures. You have it down pat.”