Felipe Alfau - Chromos

No sooner was he gone than the dark sleeve of the Moor closed over my shoulders like the cloak of Satan, propelling me along to my doom, and he renewed his assault. I was endeavoring to think up objections and I knew there were plenty, but I was confused. Vaguely I thought that the task he proposed was well beyond my ability, that to choose representative characters from the imposing array of what he called the Americaniards and to put them on paper was as much above my head and meager stock of diligence as the building toward which we were walking, but I’d swear that the sly Moor was reading my mind. The master promoter of intellectual pranks was in full command.

“Don’t worry about that. You do not have to use new ones. Use any old ones you may have about. In fact, you must have smuggled some already without the immigration authorities being the wiser — on paper. Know what I mean?” He held me at arm’s length without interrupting our syncopated walk, “And I know where we can find them and you too know the place.” I was dizzy and was sure that I was walking in my sleep and dreaming. The monotonous beating of the bare end of his shillelagh against the pavement must have been instrumental in the hypnosis. “We will go back there, but after dark. First we go up and look and wait, and then when night falls, we go down back there. The prophecies say that your little smug intellectual crime must be thus perpetrated, without attenuating circumstances, thus it will be lower, more revolting, more dastardly and — more fascinating.” So help me, he actually hissed the last words loudly, with bestial mockery.

Never a match for him, I was lost. Staggering drunkenly under my opprobrium, I blubbered hopelessly, inaudibly: “Haven’t got a typewriter,” but I knew that all resistance was useless and this last gesture as pitiful as trying to save oneself from a conflagration by spitting on it.

“I’ll get you one, if I have to get your own out of hock—” and on he swept me.

Entering the elevator had a quality of sepulchral irrevocability, of being walled alive, of the catafalque, and I knew that I was at his mercy, in his mental grip and certain that he was thinking through me, but that he must have found me a very crude tool. The momentary increase in weight in this minimum of space equated the sensation of motion to zero, or compensated it by creating the feeling of moving in opposite directions simultaneously. All the time that we were going up, we were falling with constant acceleration and this made one think of the misleading and pitiful attempts at propagandizing relativity. Then the slight pressure in the ears brought anticipation reflecting in the future, childhood reminiscences of Verne, Wells and Flammarion and when finally one emerged, it was like coming out of a long anesthetic, with a gasp and a vertigo at the explosion of the view which reached dangerously near the confines of pleasure.

Don Pedro ambled about and took his position here and there, frowning his contemplation almost truculently and when he stopped, hunched, holding his stick in both hands, he looked like a bird of prey, perched, poised, ready to dive, but then he only waved his arm downward like a readying dark wing and pointed in silence. Thus we stood and looked, never uttering a word, and then night began to arch and close over us like a dome from the East.

Manhattan looked like a quarry. The conglomeration of buildings seemed to point, to call and appeal and crowd about this leader for guidance, their sharp outlines reaching vainly, and with nightfall the quarry was a mine shining with gold that increased in profusion and brightness and gradually overflowed and ran in rivers to the hazy horizons. Under the crescent moon glowing like the lamp of Aladdin, one could not help thinking of it as the gold mine which has lured and swallowed so many, and the buildings continued to call and appeal temptingly and dangerously, until nothing but the lights could be seen. Down on the prism of the sidewalks, they were diffused reflection of livid dancing polarization, the streets spectral bands. This was the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York and as each star appeared above, it found its reflection below, until the city had become a multiplying mirror of the sky.

And at last, to wake up from the dream or sink further into it, his fateful words: “Time to go.”

If the building had become a medieval castle and he had descended clinging to the outside walls. but we went down by way of the elevator with the sinking sensation that often startles and makes one jump in bed when falling asleep.

Everything was foreordained and all inevitable. The old but well-kept Hispano-Suiza that slid to a stop before us, quietly, dark and foreboding like a hearse. The uncanny timing, everything suggested Satanism and witchcraft, the dragnet of Lucifer.

No doubt his Cuban boy was at the wheel as usual and this was one reassuring contact with friendly reality. He was a simpático fellow in perennial good humor and with a well-developed incapacity to take anything seriously. Probably well-trained in his native and tough school of voodoo and the evil eye, he was hardened by his association with the Moor and could keep his equanimity under the most trying circumstances. But I could only guess that he was there because the dividing curtain was drawn and we might as well have been driven by a ghost. I ventured to suggest meekly that the place might have been torn down, but the Moor answered in cryptic jest that we were returning to the past by the fourth perpendicular and I would find everything as I had left it. Nothing more was said and the drive across town and then down the West Side was swift and deliberate with all the ephemeral finality of a blackout.

One block from our destination we got out and before I had time to look into the driver’s compartment, the car drove away. We walked along the dark street and I tried to lag behind, to find one last desperate excuse, but the Moor took hold of my arm and marched me until we were in front of the old basement. Then came the blinding flash of hope:

“But the key. I am sure I don’t have it.”

“Seek and thou shall find; haa—”

Inserting one’s hand in one’s pocket and finding it empty is conceded to create the deepest consternation, but this was worse; the key was there and I was crushed.

“But suppose that someone has moved in since.”

“Don’t worry. It is empty all right.” And I knew that he was right, that he was master and this was destiny, that there was no escape: “Go and get it over with. It won’t take long.”

“Aren’t you coming in?”

“No. I’ll wait for you out here and act as a lookout” The shameless conspiracy of it, the insulting confabulatory implication: “But give me a cigarette. I am all out of them.” The crowning insult.

I gave him the cigarette and lighted it for him endeavoring to postpone things — the nadir of abjection — but then the conviction that I was dreaming decided me to sleep the thing through to certain awakening and calmly I inserted a key which I had never expected to use again. As I did this, the last hopeful and irrelevant memory of the Moor’s ancestor returning to Granada ran through my mind, but the door opened easily and swung inward without a squeak.

The street outside had been dark enough, but the room was pitch-black. I still held the matches in my hand and lit one. There was no furniture, and as I advanced toward the far wall, I felt my shadow creeping and growing behind me and bending with the ceiling as if to pounce.

Ever since I had entered the former neighborhood and as we approached this house, the tense anticipation had been growing at a rate suggesting the law of the inverse square which I had often heard Don Pedro mention, and on entering the room, it exploded with the full force of memories that were overpowering as the present multiplied by their distance.