Felipe Alfau - Chromos

“I will if you don’t work anymore, Ledesma. I don’t want to see you working anymore. I want you to have more time for me. I am happy with you.” Two tears rolled from her eyes and shone upon the glass counter.

“Rojelia, this has been my life. When it ends, I shall end also. Then I will rest.”

“Wait, Garcia! Let me finish it for you.” I recited: “And the two tears sparkled among the gathering shadows like the best gems in the store.”

Believe it or not, that is exactly the way he had it written down. Garcia was amazed, stumped. For once I had scored a bull’s-eye, made my point convincingly clear by implication, and won a smashing victory. One does what one can.

After this I did not mind what followed of Garcia’s novel, which was a jumble of notes with references and more references, sheets with small slips of paper pinned to them as intended insertions, with red penciled marks and much of “this goes here and this there.” I watched him as he tried to assemble all this rough work and make some sense out of it. Most of it he told me and some he read.

The next chapter introduced the character who was destined to become Rojelia’s husband. He was an officer in the Spanish colonial army in Morocco, and it was against this background that Garcia attempted to present him in a full chapter. Garcia lacked all the necessary preparation and equipment to handle the task. All he knew about war was to lay down a barrage of clichés that would have discouraged the most desperate offensive of foolhardy readers and listeners. The thing contained every known situation of swashbuckling heroics, men who talk and act tough, tyrannical discipline dished out with aching heart and unwavering hand, disillusion in the great cause and in the chosen career degenerating into hard professional militarism salvaged in the nick of time by the sporting gesture, and everything generously sprinkled with foul words.

This has been done by masters of the trade and Garcia had taken in every stock situation with amazing powers of retention, but he had not put things together right and had used extraordinary discernment in not adding one single touch of originality.

These were the most specific defects; the others were of a more general and intangible nature. This fellow, whose name by the way was Albarran, in case one has to refer to him again, was intended as a contrast to the carefree, unpredictable poet who had caused our heroine so much sorrow and disappointment. He was supposed to offer her a sense of stability, of security, to represent her change of course from the foolishly sublime to the wise and soundly prosaic, but as he appeared cast in the role of a soldier and in a manner more or less consciously copied by Garcia from moving pictures and romantic popular yarns, the fellow was inevitably surrounded by an atmosphere of adventure which destroyed the proposed contrast with the other one. It was a meaningless change from devil-may-care to devil-should-worry. I suspect that Garcia considered the military career as something very dependable, which in some ways it is, with regular promotions, increases of salary and eventual pensions, but his logotypes had led him astray and his thesis suffered from inconsistency. In order to maintain a measure of contrast in the face of these essential obstacles and against all odds, Garcia described his hero as matter-of-fact, even somewhat unimaginative and inordinately healthy both in spirit and in body, thus disclosing unintentionally that Garcia, for reasons of his own, considered poets unhealthy in every respect. All this was in direct contradiction with the thoughts and actions of Captain Albarran who, immediately after, is shown as continuously harrassed by dreams of his farm back in Spain, because it seems that everywhere the background of a farm is a guarantee of normality, and who toward the end of the chapter tells his colonel that his soul is sick, that he is tired of the African campaign and wants to return to Spain.

Garcia had intended to make this character healthy and normal and a regular guy, but he had only succeeded in making him vulgar and rampant and unconvincing. In short, a fraud.

But the worst of it, what worried Garcia, was that his character had not turned out simpático. We argued the matter profusely, endeavoring to extricate Garcia from the literary traps to which he had fallen prey, and especially this last one, whose spring was so vague as to defy detection. No matter how much Garcia deleted and inserted, the man would not turn out simpático. Garcia was ready to rewrite the whole thing, and I suggested that perhaps everything emanated from the fundamental inconsistency of his thesis and its presentation and that it would be better not to make his hero a soldier in the African wars, but perhaps a merchant on the peninsula, some kind of a salesman, or even a farmer who goes occasionally to Madrid. I was only trying to help.

“But how many times do I have to tell you that this is a true story?” Garcia was quite exasperated by now: “I met the fellow myself in Madrid when I was a boy. He was already married to Rojelia whom I also met, in case you are interested. He was a captain then, tropa class, you know, had never been to a military academy, but I tell you he was a captain.”

“Well?”

“He was very antipático.”

After this there was no point in arguing the matter in hand further and we became involved in generalizations and a discussion about the merits of reality versus literature and Garcia quoted from a thinker something to the effect that art is more discriminating than nature and more concerned with arrangement and harmony, and we talked of several things like that which did not help Garcia’s problem, and then he went back to his novel.

Toward the end of this chapter Garcia considered the matter of fairness in peoples at war. He told me that many years ago he had been very badly impressed by the comments in the Spanish press about the campaign in Africa. If the Spaniards made a stubborn stand against great odds and died to the last man defending a position, they were praised as heroes, but when the Moors did the same thing, they were criticized as fanatics. He felt that this was not fair and that one should always give the devil his due. He presented this theory in a conversation between Captain Albarran and his colonel. I said that this happened not only in Spain but everywhere, and he said that this was precisely the point he was trying to make indirectly and once more repeated that generalization was one of the great virtues of literature.

“If this thing is going to be published in English, I must give the reader something of general interest. Can’t keep it so Spanish that he cannot find the point.”

The chapter ended with Captain Albarran finally getting his wish and sailing back to Spain, which is a short sail from where he was. I quote a small section:

And so it came to pass that Captain Albarran sailed from the coast of Africa where he had spent so much of his life, on his way to Spain.

It was a splendid day and when he saw the red and yellow flag against the blue sky, he felt something he had not felt since he first had left Spain, and when he turned and beheld the receding coast, he thought almost aloud:

“Look at me well, as I look at you in the hazy horizon, across the afternoon and the distance, because it is sad to part, perhaps forever, and not have looked at one another enough.”

Some loud thoughts for a prosaic character!

Next we find the hero in Madrid for the Jura de la Bandera, which is when the new recruits are inducted I think, and it was thus that he eventually met Rojelia. Garcia had this part written more in full and read sections of it without too much difficulty or hunting for the continuation of some particular paragraph. This is some of it: