Felipe Alfau - Chromos

Enrique retreated with eyes strangely alive. Trini slapped him again and he retreated further. She was in a frozen paroxysm and continued to slap him with scorn. His eyes gleamed and he only retreated step by step, without any attempt to defend himself.

Lolita looked at them in amazement, while holding her father’s head. She saw them disappear thus into the dark corridor and continued to hear the sound of the slaps and of his panting until the whole thing faded into a back room.

“Did you see, Lolita? How bad Ledesma is! How he treated me!”

Lolita knew that this was a horrible injustice, but why explain?

“Yes, Father. Here.” She gave him something out of the package and he began to eat it right on the floor where he was. Lolita looked again into the shadows of the corridor and smiled a wry smile.

But since that day, Enrique remained in the house, and although they all continued to quarrel, he behaved better and was calmer. He and Jorge went out to ask everyone they knew for money. It was all the work they were capable of doing, but what they got they brought home. People began to fear them and avoid them.

People in Madrid were puzzled by the fall of this family and no one knew where they lived. When people passed the site of the jewelry shop, they saw a brand-new pastry shop. They inquired about the Sandovals and then left according to their temperaments, sometimes smiling, sometimes frowning. Only once a very old lady was crying when she left.

Enrique and Jorge continued to ask for money although their field became very reduced. Lolita also left the house and came back with more than her two brothers had been able to collect.

They all regarded her bitterly, especially Jorge, but she had to live.

One night, as they surrounded the dinner table, Jorge said to Lolita: “You might as well stay away and live better.”

“No. I wouldn’t be happy. I want to do this for all of you as you are all trying to do your best for all of us. Let us feel that there is still something that will make us stand together to the end.”

“Yes,” Trini said. “The wreck has brought many things to the surface, many unsuspected things—” and they all looked at Fernando, who bent over his food and did not even seem to hear them.

Jorge turned to his sister with an appealing look. He seemed very young and very tired.

“But I can’t bear to see you live this life, Lolita; I can’t—” He broke down and cried. Lolita went over to Jorge and he embraced her tightly. She led him to the other end of the room where it was darker and sat down with him. It was a gloomy scene as all those people stood there in that flickering candlelight. After a while and right on his sister’s shoulder, Jorge fell asleep.

Two days after that, Jorge went out and later they found a note from him containing a little money and saying:

This is the last money I could get. Do not think I am forsaking you. I am worthless and what is worthless cannot forsake. Some day I may return, when I have outgrown my sorrow.

Although my flesh tells me that I will die, I know that I will come back some day. Now I want to leave and forget this scene, where things have happened that I could not continue to see.

They all saw the note and they all knew that the flesh seldom deceives, but as usual, they were all silent. They were already used to tragedy, they were callous.

Here the story shifted to the farm where Rojelia and Albarran were rudely awakened from their seraphic existence and brought down to earth from their lofty heights by a letter from Lolita telling them of all the calamities which had overtaken the Sandovals. The letter said that her father was at death’s door and that in his moments of lucidity he always called for Rojelia.

Albarran, noble, stout fellow that he was, and his incomparable wife decided to forgive such lesser souls and fly to their side — if not to help them, since they were beyond redemption, at least to lend them some comfort in their last hours of struggle against the merciless attacks of Garcia’s plot.

Garcia was not very satisfied with this part. The descriptions of the mental and physical activities on the health farm turned out to be reiterations of things which had already been told to the point of exhaustion, and after he had spent considerable time composing the letter for Lolita in the style which he thought a girl like her would use, he discovered that it only repeated what he had already described in his story during the many times it shifted to Madrid. He decided to shelve that part for a while and then went on to the end of his novel, from the moment that Rojelia and Albarran arrived in Madrid:

When they arrived at that house, the impression they received was disastrous. Rojelia leaned on her husband’s arm, closing her eyes, and thus he led her in.

Fernando was in bed and looked at them with a long, fixed look. Rojelia said something.

“He cannot hear,” Trini said. She was like the picture of madness: very erect, her white hair in disorder. Her whole countenance seemed to cry out: “I am right, I am right!” But for no reason at all.

Rojelia fell embracing her father in an outburst of all the love she had withheld. He had a moment of lucidity and laid a trembling hand upon her head, and against it, it looked very pale, almost greenish:

“Rojelia — my pride — Rojelia!”

Albarran said very loudly as if to reach that lonely mind: “And how are you feeling, Don Fernando?”

Fernando smiled at him: “Yes—!”

Albarran looked down and his jaws tightened. He stepped out into the corridor hurriedly.

Lolita was huddled up in a chair in a corner. Rojelia had slipped to her knees and cried with her head on the bed. Fernando said to no one in particular: “There is nothing I can do about it,” and went back to his stupor.

“Where is Enrique?” Rojelia demanded. “Is he still carrying on the same way during these moments?”

“No, Rojelia. He has been different lately. He has changed. He only went out to get some money.”

Albarran had reentered the room and his eyes were red. He went close to Trini and put an arm about her: “Mother, when he returns, tell him not to worry. We are here now. He does not have to resort to strangers when he has a family.”

That evening Fernando fell into a coma and thus submerged into death. No one could ascertain the exact time.

The family of the deceased assumes an undue importance. They consider sorrow a great honor and will fight for its supremacy and control upon the corpse, like vultures for a prey.

They want to monopolize sadness. All through the night they cry loud and long in mournful and fantastic serenade, so that their tragedy may not pass unnoticed and that everyone may know that they are being consumed by the fires of sorrow which renders them exceptional, superior, unique, which renders them so pure.

When in front of witnesses, they fall upon the corpse and embrace him and kiss him and maul him, so that everyone will see how familiar they are with corpses. And then they praise him shamelessly and tell astounding lies because, as they all know that pride is the last thing to die in a corpse, they are sure that he will not stand up to call them liars. And they promise impossible things, because everyone knows in his heart that death is impotent and that no dead one ever comes back to collect.

The neighbors gather in the street and see the procession emerge, furrowing the mob, disappearing like a snake in a forest of petrified people.

The priest sneaks away from the house like a thief, pressing something he hides against his breast. He grows in importance. He has been nearest the dead one. He has just killed a conscience by delivering it from remorse, the thing that keeps it alive. He knows everything and in exchange for a wafer has robbed death of its own secret.