Felipe Alfau - Chromos

Since that day, Lolita decided that she would never allow love to go deeper than the flesh.

Here I remarked that this was a big decision not only for such a little girl to make but even for a writer to make for her, and I also inquired whether Garcia had intentionally made both heroes come in and out of the girls’ lives in a ship and looking at the horizon, but Garcia paid no attention and continued to struggle with his papers.

It was a good thing that all this part of the novel was in a tentative stage because the plot again became objectionable. It was not the Peeping Tom kind of pornography, the sicalipsis which had marred it on other occasions, because the subject was dealt with in a more serious, almost tragic vein, but it could scarcely be recommended nevertheless.

Lolita had turned in despair once more to her brother Jorge, and if their very strange relationship had been suggested quite frankly before, it now became an openly acknowledged incestuous situation. The novel at this point became sordid, sinister. It seems that Garcia was intent upon showing in no uncertain terms the downhill path of this family, its complete degradation leading to ultimate material and moral collapse, and he was assiduously heaping every disgrace upon them. I remonstrated with him, but again he repeated that his story was true to life and that what he described had become common knowledge to all Madrid. Seeing that he was dealing with the subject in such earnestness I could not attack his work in this case as being unnecessarily ugly and had to let it pass, but I did tell him that many things sounded in English much more crude than in Spanish, as I believe I had already said before, and that a translation under the circumstances might prove exceedingly difficult and requiring a finesse well beyond my capabilities, so that perhaps he had better count me out.

Garcia only said that his work was still in a very embryonic stage and that he might be able to shorten that section or subdue it somewhat, but that he could not see how he could eliminate it and at the same time save his literary integrity. He added that we would see and with that went on to another section.

This one covered a good deal of ground. The main idea was to show the gradual deterioration of the family and the jewelry business. Here Garcia intended to document himself properly. He wanted to describe in detail how a jewelry business crumbles notwithstanding the skillful efforts of an administrator of the caliber of good old Ledesma, but Garcia had no knowledge of business whatsoever and confessed that he was in a quandry as to whom he should consult. I suggested the Señor Olózaga.

This part of the book was also to deal with the courtship of Rojelia by Captain Albarran and their eventual marriage. This was strenuously opposed by her family because her suitor had no titles or fortune. A series of quarrels took place and the question wound up with their elopement, just before the crash, when she was saved, with but little time to spare, from the general financial ruin by his captain’s pay. All through this section Garcia expected to describe minutely the progressive abulia of Fernando Sandoval induced by some kind of disease, which had not been decided upon, in combination with excessive drinking. The specific ailment was something which Garcia’s mother had apparently neglected to tell him. She had told him of the symptoms, however: growing irritability, distraction, weakening of willpower and a complete breakdown of the spirit which ended in idiocy and incapacity to recognize people. Armed with these symptoms gathered on such heresay, Garcia intended to accost Dr. de los Rios and obtain a complete diagnosis. I agreed to the plan because I supposed that de los Rios in the end would pick out some disease for Garcia, give him the proper symptoms so that they would fit the general plot, and thus deliver him from his difficulties.

Right through this whole part, of course, and while everyone and everything was going to the dogs, Rojelia and Ledesma stood like two towers of strength, two regal examples of serenity and wisdom, seeing things falling all about them and unable to do anything; but with the entrance of Captain Albarran into the scene, they had another ally in their superiority and nobility of character even if in the end it did not seem to do anybody much good. Rojelia and her husband went to live on his farm in order to get away from all these terrible things. On the farm the reader would meet the captain’s mother: an old, wise peasant, a kindly though silent woman — one of those wonderful Spanish peasant types, in Garcia’s own words — and the younger brother, a fine upstanding lad, portraying the modern trends in country gentry, who listens to serious music and reads books, who in less ponderous moments, and quoting again from Garcia, could show his youthfulness by indulging in wholesome, clean fun. For this part Garcia had ambitious plans: everybody engaging in philosophical discussions, discussions of music which Garcia undoubtedly expected the Moor to edit, and discussions of books, which he, considering himself an authority on the subject, would handle all by himself. A sort of working-out section.

I felt that aside from the very popular idea that cities are sources of evil and the country the site of virtue, Garcia was leaning heavily on concepts gathered well outside of Spain. All this about wise old peasants and progressive youth on a milk farm where people go to take the cure is nothing but a shameless commercial that anyone can recognize and unmask. I made this clear to Garcia and said that he was on his way to becoming an imitation hack writer and that obviously he had in mind foreign consumption, as he had already confessed once before. We argued the matter animatedly until we got sidetracked from the main issue and reached the irrelevant point where I asserted without proofs and simply because it came into my head at the moment that one cannot get any good milk on farms because the best is sold to the cities where they pay well for it. Garcia was no better informed than I and therefore in no position to challenge my baseless denunciation. He stated for the record, however, that at no time had he said that it was a milk farm and went back to his book.

Here Garcia would have an opportunity to liven up his narrative by jumping back and forth from the country farm to the city dwelling, confront the reader with abrupt contrasts between a place in the sun that bathes our body and soul and the sordid lair of a clan living in discordant greed, lust and ignominy, between mind-and muscle-nourishing walks, discussing topics of intellectual interest among exuberant meadows in which everyone on the farm joined except the old lady who, on their return, greeted them with sagacious twinkling eyes to ask whether they had solved all the problems of the world, and humiliating quarrels over the last material remains of a fortune squandered in evil stupidity, where a brother and a sister lived in sin and their mother was too disillusioned and their father too weak-minded to interfere or even take notice. A blasting contrast between pastoral spiritual meanderings of succulent peripetetics and gloomy retribution of debasing rapacity.

I shook my head in dismay, but Garcia went on elaborating his grandiose plans. It was here that he expected to use what he claimed was a stroke of inspiration. On the farm, Rojelia had her first baby— subsequently Garcia never mentioned a second one — and he had conceived the daring project in those days of shocking stories of describing minutely the last stages of pregnancy and the complete delivery of the child, with country doctor blissfully devoid of newfangled ideas, the captain as attending nurse because the good doctor with unerring bucolic criterion had concluded that a husband should always be present at his children’s births and thus acquire respect for motherhood with accruing interests to his wife, and last but not least, the understanding old lady, a veteran of many such battles — she only had the captain and his brother to show for it — talking sententiously about life.