Felipe Alfau - Chromos

They remained there watching the car drive away. Inside the car Fernando turned to his wife: “We shouldn’t have let them stay in that house alone.”

“The servants are there and Rojelia too.”

“The servants are all idiotic and Rojelia will be locked up in her room all day long. I know her.”

“But they are not so young anymore.”

“Precisely.”

Here followed a scene between brother and sister over which I pass hastily. Their strange relationship had been hinted at clearly enough without having to throw the details in the reader’s teeth. It ended somewhat lamely with what Garcia must have thought the palliative of an artistic tableau:

“I am going to pick some of those cherries.” She ran toward a group of cherry trees with Jorge in pursuit. She stopped under the cooling shade: “They are higher than I thought — the ones I like.”

“I will lift you.” Jorge bent down and, embracing her knees, lifted her up until her dark plump hands touched the coveted fruit. Then she looked down and began to laugh again, her black mane covering her face like a dark wave. They formed a beautiful group.

Upstairs, in her room, Rojelia lay asleep and held a poem in her hand entitled “La del cabello rojo,” and she was dreaming of who knows what.

In the garden, under the cherry trees, Jorge held Lolita in his arms and she picked cherries and ate them and put some in his mouth and she was laughing, laughing—

Enrique went straight to his girl’s room, a sordid room unworthy of a detailed description. She was still in bed when he arrived. She was half sitting, half reclining, covered with a torn nightgown. On a table near her there was a tin of biscuits, a dish with mojama and a bottle of aguardiente. When Enrique entered she looked him over in surprise: “Where have you been? You must have found someone more accomplished than I am. How much did you pay for that?”

“If that is what you think, you are wrong. It was a man this time and I sent him to the infirmary. I did not kill him because his friends interfered.”

“Sit down and tell me all about it.”

Enrique dropped into an upholstered chair, raising a cloud of dust: “There is nothing to say about it. A poor fellow who wanted a passport to the other world and nearly got it.”

“You might have let me know that you were handing out passports last night. I waited for you and lost a good engagement.”

“What do you mean, engagement? I am buying all your time, do you hear?”

“Buying all my time! With what? For what you have given me, you couldn’t find anybody else to do half the crazy things I am doing. Did you bring me that money today?”

“And did you take a bath?”

“Wait a moment, wait a moment. Do you think I am going to sit here in this filth and not wash myseIf because of your queer ideas when I don’t even know if you are coming? I am fed up with this. Do you hear? Fed up! With all this dirt, having to wear dirty, torn clothes to please you. You can go and give your perros chicos to some cheap puta. I am too good for you and I know someone who will pay what I am worth and let me live in a clean, decent place and bathe all I want and be glad to get me.”

Enrique had stood up in a mixture of fury and excitement. He came close to her and tried to embrace her: “When you talk of other men and treat me like that, I don’t know what happens to me.”

“I know.” She repulsed him.

“Yes you know, you know!” He was like a cat with valerian. “And I need you and you know that too. You are the only one who understands me.”

She shrank close to the wall: “You act like a maniac when you are like this and I don’t like it. If you don’t have the money, get out!”

He had one knee on the bed and reached for her with a clammy, quivering hand. He was disfigured: “Tell me that you were with another man last night, with a better man. God! Tell me that you were with the man who beat me up and you don’t want me today. I love that!” He rushed to the dresser and returned with something in his hands. It was a whip, a hideous-looking weapon of dark, resilient woven leather. He thrust it in her hands and fell to his knees: “Go ahead, go ahead, I am waiting.”

She took the whip and hurled it to a corner of the room. Her lower lip curled as she looked down on the trembling figure before her: “I am not acting today. I mean it this time, understand? No money, no whipping.”

He lifted his head: “I have given you all I can. I can’t get any more out of them. I have given you plenty.”

She said slowly: “Get out and don’t come back without the money.”

He rose with difficulty. In one of his hands he held one of her shoes that had been lying under the bed: “I hope you don’t mind if I take this. It is one of your old shoes and you won’t need it as much as I will.”

“Oh Christ! You turn my stomach. Get out!”

He slunk away like a beaten dog ashamed of his beating, or perhaps relishing it: “All right — you command.”

And there you have it. I have transcribed this scene almost literally so that the reader may judge for himself and not accuse me of unfairness. It bears its own and most damning condemnation, evidencing an amateurishness which should only help to increase the sentence. It is obvious that Garcia wanted very much to be the literary enfant terrible with delusions of being classified as one who submerges boldly into the depths of the human soul, behavior and depravity, startling revelations of the abnormal, lurid passages resolving into profound conclusions which are never disclosed and all such things which no one takes seriously and have long been out of date. I could not help saying all this to Garcia but will not report on our ensuing argument because it was only a repetition of previous ones and I have already made my views quite unequivocal. Instead I will go on with his story, which after this becomes less reprehensible, if not from a literary standpoint, at least in content:

Summer soon ended and autumn descended slowly upon Madrid.

Rojelia had not heard from Urcola since the night of the costume ball and this had proven a real disappointment to her. At first she only blamed her family and for some time almost treated them all as strangers. After that she considered other possibilities.

As she always did when unhappiness seized her, she had retired within herself, with a cool dignity, and tried to put the whole episode out of her thoughts.

Things had not gone well with the family. The jewelry shop did not produce as much as it should. Ledesma worked until all hours and looked older, if possible, and worn out. Enrique drew large sums from the store and on several occasions took jewels also.

Fernando limited himself to shouting at him and engaging in loud disputes which led nowhere. He also let himself be carried away by stupid ostentation and the business suffered all the more for this. Several lawsuits were pending against the business and the future of the family was, as they say, on the ropes.

But outside the Sandoval family, those were balmy, calm, still days. Madrid was beginning to bustle with the approach of the winter season, and the Retiro was more poetic than ever. Old people sitting on benches, storing the last heat from the sun for the coming winter. Nurses with children playing around them while they chatted with a sunburnt soldier wearing some decorations. Lonely young men with long hair and dreamy expressions. The faint rattle of the wheel on the red cans of the barquilleros.

Rojelia and Trini were riding in a victoria along the Paseo de Coches. There were scarcely any carriages and very few people in that most beautiful avenue. The great mass of trees bordering it covered all the autumnal polychromy, from deep red, passing through rich gold, to light yellow — and then the disorder of the dry leaves swirling along the way and flying about the carriage like bewildered butterflies.