Felipe Alfau - Chromos

I remember that Garcia was also there and that later I was conscious of the presence of the Señor Olózaga, but cannot recall when he came in. I remember that the Moor was playing a section from a scherzo by Chopin which ended with four grand broken chords. He played them alternating: two strong, clearly defined; the other two soft and blurry, like an echo. He had turned to face us: “Not the way it is written but one should take one’s liberties when playing for one’s own enjoyment, and I don’t think Chopin would have minded. The business of romanticism is breaking rules. It is loyal to the spirit if not the letter of the music.” Then he was up again, his inseparable shillelagh in hand, and he began playing with another strange machine. Wound about two spools that could be turned at will, there was some black material with translucent lines of different shapes and colors illuminated from below which appeared as brightly colored points moving when seen through the narrow slit of a frame adjusted on top. It was perplexing and ridiculous. The little points moved with gathering acceleration, or stood still, or split into two or more and changed colors only to come together again, to oscillate back and forth with increasing rapidity until they were but a blurred vibration.

“See? There is a parabola.” He pointed at a curve and down came the frame: “There goes the dot, like an object falling freely. And there is a sine curve.” The frame dropped again: “And of course, it becomes a vibration and the colors change — like so many things. Understand what I mean?” He limped back to the piano: “But everything was spread out there for you to see, if only you could lift the frame: simply cinematographic.”

It was a theory about time being a fourth dimension and motion only an illusion created by extensions more or less inclined to our space. I had heard or read something about such things but did not know that it was to be taken literally as he claimed it should be. This made it, for some reason, a bit dreadful. I began to play with the little machine and ask some questions, and the Moor took from a desk some folded sheets and handed them to me saying that if interested, I could look through them when I had time. I sensed the net cast by someone sold on a pet theory which he hopes will settle all the difficulties of life, the proselytism which is ever ready to sign up anyone who unwittingly offers the faintest lead, but I was curious.

I unfolded the sheets and glanced quickly through them. They were typewritten hastily and interspaced with hand-penned equations and formulas and geometrical diagrams which took considerably more room than the text. They ranged from the very simple, which even I could understand, to the formidable and on whose merits I had no preparation to pass judgment. The text was obviously written hurriedly without much attention to order and apparently only as notes to be worked out later. The Moor said to disregard the mathematical formulas which I found difficult, that some of them were rather complicated and looked even more so, that this was a monograph he was preparing for some scientific society, and that in its final form he expected to present it in very simple terms that any high school boy could understand provided he had enough imagination: “All those complicated formulas are nothing but a roundabout way of stating something one has not seen quite clearly yet— Impressive, you know, but not as convincing to intuition as a simple graph. The complexities dissolve once the principle and the generalization are understood. If something cannot be presented in very elementary form, it is often of doubtful merit — the old demagogic stand. This question that these things can only be expressed in higher mathematics is only a bit of propaganda nonsense. First one would have to determine where mathematics begins to be high.” He pointed at the papers in my hand: “Don’t let it frighten you.”

I was to learn later that he had composed and published several such papers and even delivered lectures which, considering his style of talking, must have been something, and it was also later that, on my remarking about his diverse talents, he spoke of himself as a well of worthless information and unmarketable achievements with the exception of his bandleading.

He was sitting again and improvised a short melody followed by several chords remotely connected by suspensions as if to round up his demonstration: “One likes to leave these remnants of music about when in the vein. They get lost among the cushions and the drapes and under furniture and perhaps even in that little machine, and then, in moments devoid of inspiration, one can rummage about, finding a chord here, a piece of melody there, no end. Have found it very useful in making arrangements for my band — a little musical reserve fund, eh, Chink?”

It was then, I think, that I realized that the Chink was there. Old, corpulent, with his marked Oriental look, he moved his head up and down slowly in grave assent as the Moor went on:

“You ought to understand — remarkable, this Chink.” He was speaking to the rest of us now: “Long, long ago, like all Oriental things, this fellow used to throw change around his rooms when he was in funds, so as to find it when he was broke. You remember, Dr. Jesucristo.” He meant de los Rios, of course.

Next thing he was pointing at the machine with his stick: “A clever little gadget this, a better time machine than any clock for impractical purposes. The slit differentiates, gives the derivative, and lifting the frame is equivalent to integrating, but it is also a rather misleading analogy and very inconsistent. It reduces our capacity for dimensionality instead of increasing it, and the lines were moving behind the scenes when the whole idea is the denial of all motion as such. Very sly and sophistic these little lines and they don’t fool anybody, but we’ll let them get away with it for purposes of illustration.”

His Cuban boy moved about quietly. At any rate I don’t remember hearing him and all I recall is his bright smiling teeth. He glided unobtrusively, filling our glasses, placing percebes, thick slices of chorizos, sobreasada on squares of Spanish bread, which they call Sicilian here; all in small dishes.

“Oh, tapitas! Come, Dr. Jesucristo, Chink, everybody. Help yourselves to tapitas. Very castizo, like the cheap taverns of our land. Let’s see what we have here — aha, aha — what! No shrimps?” And the shrimps appeared as if by enchantment and, of course, the olives. No true tapita without olives.

Then he was addressing himself to de los Rios while the rest of us tried to follow and he was expounding his favorite theory of knowledge. One can learn only what he already knows. Man knows everything he will ever learn, but must have it pointed out by study, given the tools to measure it, the magnifying mirror in which to see himself. That is why all learning must begin by fundamental assumptions which we accept because we know them to be true within ourselves and in the end everything is referred back to us as the ultimate judge. Thus proceeds all logic, all method. Impossible to learn what one cannot conceive. Our capacity for learning is limited only by our wisdom.

But to everything he gave an air of esoteric necromancy and exalted mysticism, presenting the miraculous as the result of logical understanding. With an understanding of the structure of matter, to walk upon the water should not appear impossible, but only uncommon and perhaps unexpected, like rising from the dead. Passing right through a wall, only highly improbable, only a matter of statistics. His was the habit of inflating a point of logic into a balloon of occultism and sending it aloft beyond the reach of anyone who could explode it.

Sucking on a percebe like a cigar butt, he concluded the first part of Schumann’s Carnaval in the grand manner, only to remove the percebe and resume his talk: