Felipe Alfau - Chromos

It may well be that this was only a blind to hide greater activities, but it is also possible that the Señor Olózaga may have been one of the most ill-judged of men. The Moor had described him in his chromathematical style as a polynomial in x of degree n , all whose terms but one have zero coefficients.

I remember the time I had seen him last before this day. I had gone with Dr. de los Rios to the Museum of Natural History and we met the Señor Olózaga engrossed in the study of the butterfly collection there. He commented that he would have liked to have been an entomologist but the rushing activities of life— It was astonishing and touching. Then we walked along Central Park West, and he and Dr. de los Rios must have known each other long and well because they held an animated conversation about old days in which they mentioned the Philippines, but I did not follow the conversation because I was considering the manner of our meeting and I will always remember him like that — a man with an aura of adventure, looking at dead butterflies.

And now he was sitting at a table, smoking a cigar, drinking rum and talking expansively to La Colombina, and she listened detached, with unfathomable smile, her gestures deliberate, clean-cut, like tiles in a mosaic of circumspection, like a witch casting her spell all around her, but very careful to avoid contamination. This was good: Buddha and the Witch.

Then I looked at the man at the opposite end of the room from La Colombina. He was standing, leaning against something, I don’t remember what, close to the wall. He was tall, slender, with a beautiful build. Very fair and pale, with cold gray eyes and an unaffectedly patronizing manner, he was all romantic arrogance. This was Miguel Pinto, also considered the greatest classical dancer in Spain, whose rivalry with La Colombina was well known. Unlike her, his life was public property and a continuous chain of furious and spectacular love affairs, but like her, he kept his distance and the chasm of their professional jealousy had grown with their fame. It is a sure thing that their meeting in New York was accidental and a source of mutual consternation and their presence at El Telescopio an imposition played by some irresponsible prankster. I thought of the Moor and the Chink.

Dr. Jose de los Rios appeared, acknowledging greetings right and left, and it was obvious that the gathering was now complete. As he passed our table, Don Pedro said: “Hola, Jesucristo,” and de los Rios answered: “Hola, you infidel Moor,” and he moved to the other end of the room where he engaged an elderly couple in conversation.

“Look at him,” Don Pedro was saying. “Every day he looks more like Jesus Christ, with that clean air about him, those blue eyes and light hair and well-kept beard. I used to think that he was Saint Joseph, you know? because of the José, but now I know that the name only threw me off and that he is Jesus son of Mary — if he only wore his hair longer — and as castizo as they come — but who else but a Spaniard? Why, the very Almighty is a Roman Catholic from the albaicín and as castizo and cañi as the next one.” He continued to look in the direction of Dr. de los Rios with fond approval: “Look at him — too bad he does not like me better — and of course, the first one he talks to is the head of the Sociedad Española de Socorro — I tell you: Jesus Christ.”

“The head of the Sociedad — why, Garcia,” I said, “that is your former boss. Remember the story about the impatient fellow?” Garcia was gesturing covertly but desperately for me to shut up, but Don Pedro had heard and was off:

“What, another story? This fellow Garcia is implacable. I tell you, my countrymen — and considering that this one seems more Latin American than Spanish with all this obsession for writing. You know, man?” He pointed at Garcia across the table: “You’ll never go back to Spain or even heaven unless you stop this nonsense. What you have to do is to throw away all your intellectual paraphernalia, build yourself up and lead a clean life. That’s all, my friend.” He looked at Garcia with mock ferocity: “Otherwise I will bring you personally by the ear into the presence of Satan.”

“All right, all right,” Garcia was saying helplessly. “I guess you are right I have often felt like doing that very thing. I mean, get rid of the intellectual paraphernalia, whatever it is you mean by that. All right, you win, but all I ask is that you spare—” he finished in an unintelligible babbling that was all but inaudible, but Don Pedro was not paying attention. With his usual volubility he had resumed his previous subject:

“The funny thing is, you know, that the only people here who know everybody else are Dr. Jesucristo and myself — well, maybe the Chink also, but the point is — of course you know, everything has a point and the point or points in this case are the foci. You see? What I say is that we hold the gathering together. You understand, this gathering is an ellipse and Dr. Jesucristo and myself are the foci, sitting at opposite ends, and hold it together. The sum of the tensions we produce on each individual here is always constant. This could only happen with our countrymen — they don’t know what it’s all about, but nevertheless ours is the only people who constantly realize a neat mathematical formula of life. That is what makes the pretty picture, the stage setting that foreigners consider as romantic as a play — but it is the national formula—” His voice faded into high pitch and he slapped his neighbor familiarly on the back: “Don’t worry, man, don’t worry. It’s quite all right.”

The Moor often expressed himself in mathematical terms, contrary, as he pointed out, to many modern scientists who like to speak of mathematics in humanistic language, and here I want to make a digression regarding things which impressed me enough to make me attempt to record them, however imperfectly, and which I fear may only throw more darkness on the complex personality of the Moor. I will always remember the first time I had an opportunity of observing this personality in its own lair. Then I concluded that if it had been difficult to know this man at first, I would only know him less as time went on.

The Moor lived atop a high building in the East Sixties. The apartment was all done up in Moorish Spanish style and there was the strangest Moorish garden with a fountain in the middle and covered by a huge glass dome which illuminated it sadly like an overcast sky. This transplantation, abducted from its natural down-to-earth and sunny habitat to be perched in this cloudy day atmosphere, was a melancholy contradiction, a strange symbiosis, like the master of the house.

And it was in these dreamy surroundings that the Moor fascinated us on that occasion with his wonderful music and also brought upon us a sort of jesting consternation with his great pseudology and strange theories about a rigid or solid universe, and where for once he also spoke directly about himself. As in that Moorish garden of his, the occasion was sadly illuminating.

Everything that time was confused and imprecise. His conversation alternated or combined with his music and burst dazzling like a Roman candle in every direction at the same time. One moment the rooms were filled with the strange elegance of Chopin, the cosmopolitan sophistication of Schumann, and the next permeated with his views on the fourth perpendicular and the nonexistence of motion.

The Moor oscillated between the two pieces of furniture which dominated his study: one, a concert grand piano; the other, a tremendously long blackboard before which he occasionally hobbled with the aid of his stick, rapidly tracing symbols and formulas more for the appreciation of Dr. de los Rios than for the rest of us mortals to whom he only gave the polite attention of a passing self-deprecatory remark. Now and then de los Rios stepped up to the blackboard and would add or change something and then they both laughed. What humor they could have derived from that, I don’t know, but there are many levels of humor and theirs must have been different from ours.